The Practice Exchange: Imaging Experience

Date: Wednesday 6th June 2012, 14:00-17:00
Venue: The Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

Present: 42 MA students and PhD researchers including Deniz Akca, Sam Burford, Lee Campbell, Angela Hodgson-Teall, Catherine Long, Robert Luzar, Elizabeth Manchester, Sarah Rhodes, Pratap Rugani and Scott Schwager.

Robert Luzar introduced his presentation ‘Working with the Body under a Post-Phenomenological Methodology and Documentation of Performance’. The title of his thesis is ‘Drawing Upon Multiplicity: Body, Mark and a Trace of Thought’. It is about conceptual mark-making and he is presenting his methodology. The aim of this area is to describe the approach and outcomes of his research. It includes both a performance-based presentation of the body and notational mark-making. Through his mark-making performances, he is citing the body generally and he is also situating his physicality in specific places. His research does not take place within his normal drawing practice, but within his performances. It critically investigates the performer’s subjective state. He works with a video camera to explore the parameters of the performance with its documentation, and to question its meaning.

Using himself as the subject of his investigation into performing drawing he is also challenging a purely phenomenological approach to his research. He explores with his body while focusing on it as a problem. This raises the issue of individual experience versus a description of a universal essence. What might be universal states of being?  Is this a necessary question that guides the performance? Every experience he has performing a drawing goes through theoretical analysis. Research through action requires explicit reflection on that action. This might involve initiating actions as performance, recording the performance, analyzing the recording – at this point it becomes self-reflecting notes. Robert is considering how far it is possible to use the body as an irreducible entity.

Robert outlined the different factors that affect the nature of the drawing performance. He attempts to work with elements in the space – he improvises – he is not concerned with any kind of engendering. He is focused on the speculative quality generated by working attentively until he is unable to do so, at which point video recording and notational diagrams (notes, sketches, and images) are used. The body becomes present when it loses sensory sensitivity. He is exploring the boundaries between the body and the mind which non-sense might articulate. As Anthony Howell wrote: ‘a space and a time are ground as tangible as any caves’. Whereas Anthony is interested in an existential gap, Robert proposes that there does not need to be a way to theorize or to express an integral void from which to perform. This difference is crucial: Robert does not only perform but also mediates the live act to see what other ways of working can become possible. In other words, and with no contradiction, he starts working with the body but does not try to keep it as a primary tool.

Through changing poses/postures Robert causes effects in materials. He then uses the materials to help him find the next direction of the work. Sequences of actions tend to bring the work back to where it started. Employing video is essential to analyzing his actions. Some of the questions he is attempting to answer in dismantling his experiential actions are: how far are they spontaneous? How much do they need to be researched? What might he need to be doing differently?
For him the camera creates a mental view of the studio – it doubles the box of the studio space. As the body repeats movements it mimics the rhythm of machinery. The performer is integral to the scene by being abstracted from it.  The abstraction of his postures allows him to select and combine forms of marks.  He is interested in the ways that spaces can be setup with marks and postures to display the body that is immediate and thing-like – the opposite of being live and viscerally incorporeal. He selects frames from the video footage to repeat and develop these combinations. Robert showed a working drawing with video stills, diagrams and text describing the action that he had written on it. He uses marks like asterisks, periods and brackets as a private code. Drawings down the side of his images explain what the action was – how it developed over the course of the images. Most performances by Robert describe a task. Like an action, a task is significant because it cannot be described as expressing an idea or concept. Documentation helps to rectify this.

Robert’s main question is how it might be possible to put the phenomenological and the intellectual together. If the agency of corporeal gesture has been done away with, the body is in itself irreducible to a higher theoretical schema. Phenomenology demands immediacy of experience for results. For Robert, the artist-researcher is inherently dislocated.
Elizabeth Manchester asked about how Robert negotiates body memory when he is trying to be spontaneous. Also, how does he think about the divide between the conscious and the unconscious in relation to his performances? How can he be conscious but not purposeful?

Sam Burford asked Robert how the research is going forward. Robert answered that is currently writing up and has been talking about the work he has been developing since he began his PhD in 2009. Sam asked if his reflections have been changing since he began? RL replied no, he’s stuck! He feels that his contribution to knowledge through his PhD is like a slight detail in a field – but tiny changes make all the difference – slight nuance details have enormous impact.

Sam commented that RL’s research/practice are very internalized – will RL use his drawings as a way of getting outside his self-reflection? Does he have to keep drawing? Or does he need to stop? RL said that his method of working with mark-making will make him feel he’s drawing differently. He is looking for critical intensity – theoretical sensitivity and intensity and fragility. Can thinking and doing at the same time work?  (Robert referenced a quotation from Alain Badiou, saying that drawing can show a kind of “intensity of fragility”; which for Robert is how thinking is ‘indicated’ as a question in the work – rather than a something ‘sensed’ within the mark or the performer.)

Lee Campbell asked about remembering as a phenomenology – because our bodies are trapped between past and present. He asked RL what the difference between performance and entertainment is for him. RL replied that entertainment provides a heightened experience for the audience. The most successful performance has an effect that is almost unnoticeable but provocational – a downplay of the visceral talk-based fluidity. This only works by removing experiential elements of initial performance – by paring it down.

Angela Hodgson-Teall asked about nonsense. RL replied that he is looking for intelligibility and nonsense simultaneously.

Robert Luzar is in the 3rd year of a practice-based PhD at Central Saint Martins College of Art. Entitled Drawing Upon Multiplicity... his research combines live-art and conceptual forms of drawing, and attempts to assess the role of a philosophical mode of critical reflection inherent in drawing. Multiplicity is a condition of thought implicit in working, particularly with bodily gestures and marks. It is a term that Robert is articulating artistically to locate the role of (re)-evaluating conditional elements that inform how gesture invokes an act of thought.
Robert’s artworks have been presented through a series of live art events and exhibitions in the UK and Europe, includingThe Open West (2009), and The Creekside Open (2011). Robert has been commissioned to create a durational performance-drawing at the Making Sense conference supported by Jean Luc Nancy (2009), and has participated in group exhibitions such as Can You Here It, curated by Franko B, Nunnery Gallery (2010), and London International, 2011 curated by Edward Lucie Smith (2011).

For the Practice Exchange, Pratap presented The Dance of Ethics in Documentary-Art, a paper exploring the unique power of actuality - what might be called the ‘lightning charge' of documentary and its indexical relationship to life, which raises practice-based ethical questions for the sometimes separate tribes of artists and documentarists. He addressed a vexed question: how to create documentary work where subjects are not physically able to give consent in a form that’s usually understood in academic and documentary contexts? 

Part 1 "The dance of ethics in documentary art"


Pratap is interested in bringing together artists and documentary film makers, who he referred to as separated 'tribes'. In framing his questions about the ethical responsibilities of both artists and documentary filmmakers, he pointed to a wariness amongst documentary film makers to refer to themselves as artists, and a correlative wariness amongst artists, who may worry about the label of documentary film making undermining their artistic freedom and authorship. For him this wariness is instructive - he noted that artistic techniques and framing conventions can be just as mannered as those present in documentary film making.
This tussle offers a way into some of the structural tensions between the 2 'tribes', but this division is eroding. Pratap referred to the film 'Man With a Movie Camera', 1928 which has an ambiguous status as both an art work and a documentary film.


One way the tribes do define themselves, however, is by their respective ethical norms - in some cases, the primacy of aesthetics can be seen as depoliticising. For Pratap, the strongest work inhabits a place where politics & art, ethics & aesthetics meet. He referred to Jacques Ranciere here, whose work speaks to the tension between and possibilities for politics and aesthetics.

Pratap gave several examples of artists such as Mona Hatoum who don't treat their subjects as 'objects'. He noted Isaac Julien's film 'Ten Thousand Waves', shown at Hayward Gallery, in which he displayed thermal imaging footage of cockle picking Chinese immigrant workers who drowned at Morecombe Bay. In this work, the raw records of a tragedy preface highly stylised sequences. He also referred to Amar Kanwar's 'The Lightning Testimonies', 2007, which reflects on a history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through experiences of sexual violence. These works all raise ethical considerations about how to document the unspeakable.
Susan Sontag's treatment of holocaust imagery raises a question about how much of the work risks re-victimising the victims, and Pratap noted her term'spectators of calamity'.
Some artists have interpreted the gallery as site to rethink the ethics of documentary film. For example, Phil Collins' work 'Shady Lane Productions', 2006, included in the Turner Prize was an installation which included a working film studio. He foregrounded the invisibility of production ethics and recast the ethics of documentary production as exhibition material in its own right.


Part 2 "Documentary and disability; a troubled history"
Pratap is currently working in collaboration with Gideon Koppel on a film whose subject who has an advanced neurological disorder, and is unable to give consent. He has not been able to find many artistic or documentary films engaging with this subject. He showed a clip from Luis Bunuel's 1933 film "Land without bread", the late sequences of which feature a community of people with mental disorders. The film demonstrates an acute alienation from its subjects, particularly in moments when they are referred to as 'village idiots' - hostile shots are calculated to distance audiences from any empathy with the subjects. Pratap asked whether the films' ridicule or contempt undercuts documentary conventions? Although at the time it was made it was banned by both left and right wing authorities, the approach was relatively conventional, and it was common for a lack of empathy to characterise early doc films. It would perhaps have been more shocking to find out how the land actually looked to the subjects. Films such as "Land Without Bread" have become documents of geographical and physical empire - revealing the colonialism of the able bodied aver the disabled. In Post War documentary there are more sympathetic examples, such as in the films of Werner Herzog.
Pratap continued to discuss this issue of consent, quoting the BBC guidelines, which state that consent giving is a 2 stage process, which should be followed both at the recording and the transmission phases of the making of a film.
Pratap introduced Project Artworks, described on their website as follows: 'Through responsive and collaborative practice, Project Art Works conducts a wide range of visual art based projects with people who have profound intellectual disability and multiple impairments. Its work is national, regional and local in its scope and reach.' http://www.projectartworks.org/index.htm The organization is artist led, and its programmes embrace and address the social, cultural and political forces that both enable and disable individuals affected by neurological impairment. It plays a leading role in driving forward inclusive collaborative practice, initiating exploratory approaches to diversity and excellence in mainstream visual arts.
Project Artworks' production process refines ideas of the ethics of consent by including notions of 'assent' and 'dissent'. Their films understand that a significant encounter means preparing the grounds for empathic communication. Kate Adams encourages engaging in a realm of 'not knowing' - exploring ethics frame by frame, and letting go of the idea of the omniscient authorial author. For her the 'other' may never be fully deciphered, but some responses may be approximated. Who is the artist here? How does art emerge through relationship?
Pratap finished by showing an excerpt from Gideon Koppel's 2011 short film "A Portrait of Eden". His approach was developed through being with Eden rather than adhering to pre-determined ethical principles. He is cautious about the way Academia approaches ethics - for him its about listening to 'transference dynamics' in the process. He was touched by Eden's sense of being alone in amongst the people helping her or telling her what to do. In response to this he filmed her putting on her slippers alone. 


Key ethical questions:

• Is there a problem if the potency of actuality becomes just another colour on the artists palette?
• What is the makers relationship and responsibility to their subjects?
• What rights and duties obtain as an artwork circulates or becomes a film?
• When there's a tension between artistic freedom and a subject's response to it, how is this resolved?

The group had a lively discussion following the presentation, with some of the main points outlined below:
Victoria Salmon commented that she had made a film which demanded a similar ethical rigour - in her case the subjects loved film she made, but their carers wanted it to be edited. It comes down to informed consent. Pratap noted that informed consent originates in Nuremberg trials. The BBC and other broadcasting organisations rely on consent forms, but when you move beyond norms to areas which are typically excluded, you have to ask whether a consent form as a tool is too blunt. Can we move to notions of assent and dissent?
Pratap was asked what the difference is between assent, consent, dissent. He said that this was his next paper! But, assent is about configuring relationships - developing a sense of what is ethical via spending time with the subjects.
Scott Schwager commented that the effects of the film may go beyond the immediate release, and asked if this is something Pratap has considered. Pratap noted that he would like to see more broadcast organisations taking a lead and training people to make films using assent and dissent. Scott asked how Pratap thinks the work will impact the subject in the long term - P isn't sure! He needs to stay in relationship and see, but be mindful of key impacts.
The ethical responsibility is to not know - both for the institution and the filmmaker.
Lee Campbell asked about the politics of form and questioned whether Pratap is privileging film, or if he feels there are any particular ethical imperatives which follow from the form? Pratap noted that actuality is a 'lightening rod to reality' - perhaps responsibility and connection flow from that? Lee mentioned Gill Gibbons' "Radical Witness", as a possible reference for Pratap.
Pratap Rughani is a documentary film director/producer whose work straddles artists' film practice and broadcast contexts, with commissions for the British Council,  Channel 4 and the BBC. His work is wide-ranging, from investigative to observational documentary film and photographic practices. He is interested in developing newer forms of inter-cultural documentary film and cultivating pluralized spaces through which deeper understandings of the relationship between 'self' and 'other' - of ethics and aesthetics - can evolve.  He is course director of MA Documentary Film at LCC. 

Screening Memories

Deniz Akca: Practice Re-constructed
Dr. Mark Ingham: 120 Days and Nights of STAGGERING + STAMMERING
Date: Wednesday 2nd May 2012, 2-4pm
Venue: Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

Present: Deniz Acka, Lee Campbell, Lorrice Douglas, Mark Ingham, Maria Kheirkah,Ope Lori,  Elizabeth Manchester, Charlotte Webb

Deniz Acka, Night Map 2012

Deniz Akca is a full-time research student at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Her practice-led research uses cinematic and animated film to map representations of female identity. She draws on film and architectural space as representations for cultural and sexual identity. Her case study is Istiklal Avenue, one of Istanbul's most famous avenues, surrounded by majestic Ottoman buildings in a range of architectural styles. It is also the historic home to Istanbul's most important cinemas. For the case study she investigates and analyses the photographic and filmic representations of women in this place. Her practice involves transforming her case study into animated image. For this presentation she will talk about how this particular urban space shaped the beginnings of her research practice during her initial training as an architect in Istanbul.


For the Practice Exchange Deniz introduced her research project which entails the mapping of female identity through Turkish film and architecture. The practice of mapping has been influenced by Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, by Giuliana Bruno as well as the psycho-geographical mapping present in the work of Peter Greenaway.

The site for Deniz's research is Istiklal Avenue, a street in the historic Pera region of Istanbul. Deniz gave some historical background about the development of the regions of Pera & Gerata where Istiklal avenue resides, and which form the borders of her research. She described the development of Ottoman social relations to non-Muslim people living the area, and noted that different social and cultural conventions were played out amongst different social groups. 

The foundations of Turkish cinema were formed close to Istiklal Avenue, and cinema was culturally significant in this area, with the first cinema opening there in 1938. Although Turkish cinema became prominent during the 1950s, Deniz is focusing on films from 1990 to the present. She showed a key photograph from the 1970s, depicting a group of actresses, actors and directors who took to the streets to celebrate the birth of Turkish cinema. 

Deniz is particularly interested in the representation of Istiklal Avenue in the 1993 film Whistle If You Come Back by Orhan Oğuz, which she first saw when she was 9 years old. Whistle if you come back is about the painful lives and struggles of two nameless protagonists - a transvestite and a dwarf who are referred to as 'This and That'. Scenes of exchange between them are shot inside a flat on Istiklal Avenue, the landlady of which is 'Madame Lena', a rich Greek lady from a non-Muslim community. Madame Lena's character is important with regard to the representation of the female identity of Istiklal Avenue. She is isolated from society in the film, and in a real-life reflection of this, Deniz noted that the actresses name was never listed in the cast list of the film. The rights of film belong to ministry of culture of Turkey. 

Madame Lena's identity is unexplored in the film, which provided a space for Deniz to interpret her identity imaginatively in her first animation, a reconstruction of the interior of Madame Lena's flat. Deniz thought of Madame Lena's bedroom as a museum where memories are collected. The architectural space and her objects are used as a representation of her cultural identity.

Films provide the main source material for her research, but Deniz also goes to Istanbul as much as possible to gather images from second-hand book shops and to take her own photographs. She noted that this is not archival research. 

Deniz showed her latest animation, 'Night Map', which she referred to as documentation of 'memory spaces' in Istiklal Avenue. Certain details of the architecture were reconstructed from Deniz's own materials and photographic collections. The animation depicts a fragmented architectural space in which the streets' inhabitants appear and disappear. There is an evocative sound track which comprises sounds of the comings and goings of people and traffic on Istiklal Avenue.

DISCUSSION

In relation to the Night Map work, Mark was reminded of Deleuze's concept of the crystal image because of how it deals with time and space. As in Deniz's animation, in the crystal image time, space and sound become something we don't expect…

Maria noted that, going back and forth from Iran, she is always struck by sounds and how different they are from sounds in the UK. She commented that the sound performs an important function in Deniz's work. 

Maria asked if there a sense in which Deniz's work represents her own feelings of isolation from Turkey. Deniz doesn't see herself as an outsider, having lived in Istanbul from 2001 - 2007. She described her presence there in the past as an almost disappeared architectural layer - now she is here in the UK, removed from the city, she can look at the city as a research object.

Maria also noted that there seemed to be an element of voyeurism or exoticisation present in the work, though it was noted that it might not be possible to avoid an element of voyeurism.

There was a discussion of the question of absence in Deniz's work - in her first animation she wanted to refer to the absence of the non-Muslim women in Istiklal Avenue, and the absence of Madame Lena's character in the film. In the later work, images of women are used. There was a discussion about how images of women might be utilised by Deniz and what the potential problems are with this - particularly ethical issues surrounding the use of found images of women whose relatives may still be alive. Charlotte noted that the floating ghostly quality of the figures in the Night Map work underlined this sense of disembodiment - of separation from the representation of women from the reality of their lives?

Dr. Mark Ingham, Marilyn Henry and Me 1956-2011

Dr. Mark Ingham is PhD Director of Studies/Supervisor at Wimbledon College of Art, and Principal Lecturer (Masters Programme Leader) in the Communication Media for Design Department at the School of Architecture & Construction, University of Greenwich. For the Practice Exchange, Mark will begin by presenting a short film:

"The young man at the beginning of Andrei Tarkovsky's ‘The Mirror’ stammers and stutters, and then learns not to. My grandmother, Rose-Marie, staggers out of The China Hall Public House, The White Horse Tavern, The Crystal Tavern, The Eagle and never learns. In the icy wastes of the French Alps she dives into freezing lakes. Followed by my grandfather, without a St. Bernard dog for company. ‘Ice, No Brandy’. The very, very, late night Troy Bar in Soho always clings. However far I try and get away from ‘Grey Gardens’ it still tugs me back to 'Tea for Two'. ‘Just tea for two and two for tea Just me for you Just tea for two and two for tea Just me for you.’ Our lives are smeared throughout the world, recalled through disparate, dissolute, fragmentary images, sounds and memories. This becoming can be a start of a conversation."


For the Practice Exchange, Mark began by showing a slideshow of images in order to introduce himself to the audience. This comprised images of his own work in relation to fragments of text from A Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Mark became enamoured with Deleuze & Guattari when doing his PhD at Goldsmiths. In his work, he is trying to unravel the idea of the rhizome. For TPE he wanted to unpick the first passage in A Thousand Plateaus where the rhizome is described. 

One of the things that appeals to Mark about Deleuze is that he tries to question what thinking is. (Deleuze's PhD included a chapter called 'The Image of Thought'). Deleuze and Guattari want to go against the idea that knowledge is rooted or fixed. They want everything to be connected - they don't want us to be separated - Mark is attempting to reflect on whether he can or has become rhizomatic in his work. It was noted that an attempt to engage an audience by way of metaphor (such as the rhizome) is problematic, because it's easy to start focusing on the images being which can, paradoxically, fix or obstruct the broader conceptual terrain…

Mark showed a series of early works from his BA and MA ranging from large scale wooden structures, to an installation of hanging chairs which he saw as ghosts, to a bin full of garlic, shown at Camberwell college, which made a gallery visitor vomit several times. He mentioned that at this time, he took up contemporary ballet.

He talked about a Henry Moore fellowship undertaken from 1985-1986, during which he was putting objects in trees, and described a desire to escape his own 'artschoolness'. He wanted to avoid making things that looked too conspicuously like 'art', and to resist art's imperative for signification.

In a later series of work, he started to trace his genealogy through his grandfather's slide collection, tracing over many overlayered slides to create densely layered drawings.

Mark's presentation can be seen in full here: http://markingham.org/stories/becoming-rhizomatic/

Mark then showed a more recent work: '120 days and nights of STAGGERING and STAMMERING', a video work which can be seen here: http://mark27ingham.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/120-days-and-nights-of-staggering-and-stammering-bam/ 

DISCUSSION

Mark said he feels trapped by making art - though this is not necessarily a bad thing, as making art can be truly liberating. There was a connection between Deleuze's desire to resist signification and Mark's desire to resist the conventions of art production.

Deniz was interested that Mark talked about education - she is from an architectural background, and expected that art would be a 'free space'! That it is seen as so bound by conventions and aesthetic boundaries was a surprise to her.

Charlotte felt that her life as an artist is also characterised by the feeling of being trapped - again, she does not feel this is necessarily completely negative, but rather provides something to push away from in developing her practice. 

There was significant discussion of the computer generated voiceover in the film, which is created using a read out loud text to speech tool in Adobe Acrobat. The voice had a quality of chanting or incantation, and it was sometimes difficult or impossible to understand what was being said. Mark said that he wanted to avoid having a conventional narrative, using his own voice. There was a simultaneous desire to articulate a practice and be voiceless…

Lorrice was struck by the performative nature of the work, and saw Mark's practice as trying to perform Deleuze, or embody a Deleuzian approach.

Charlotte enjoyed the fact that the temporal status of 120 days and nights of STAGGERING and STAMMERING was difficult to pin down - was it documentation of a show, was it a proposal for a show, did it look into the past or future? There were seen to be similarities between Mark and Deniz's work in this regard.


Elizabeth liked the fact that in the first part of the presentation, there were some linguistic slippages between the texts on the screen and the way Mark read them - this was pertinent to the idea of stammering...