Wednesday 6 October 2010: Performance Matters

Mark McGowan

Fig 1. The Practice Exchange 2: Performance Matters

Present: Elisa Alaluusua | Marsha Bradfield | Ian Brown | Sam Burford | Samantha Epps | Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre | Maria Kheirkhah| Scott Schwager | Tansy Spinks | Charlotte Webb

Apologies: Aaron McPeake | Angela Hodgson

Ana Laura introduces the seminar, with thanks to Mark McGowan for coming to present his practice.

Marsha reviews themes from the previous TPE Pilot seminar (see notes on the blog).

Fig 2. Samantha Epps, Scott Schwager, Elisa Alaluusua, Mark McGowan

Fig 3. Ian Brown, Tansy Spinks

Fig 4. Mark McGowan

Fig 5. Charlotte Webb, Samantha Epps

Fig 6. Marsha Bradfield, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre

Mark McGowan began his presentation with a video entitled ‘practice exchange’. It fuses projects in his practice, many of which are from reports by global press.

Mark is often asked to give artist talks - to speak about his work - and he counts himself lucky in this regard, because his practice is quite funny. It hits the main news, and gets whole pages in the Sun. So that’s attractive and quite simple. But his practice is actually quite complicated. To understand anything he does one would need to know something about his background. And, he very rarely talks about this past, which has an effect on his work. For example, there’s lots of rolling around and crawling.

One of the big questions about practice, Mark says, is your idea. So in your practice, your ideas are everything.

Also, you need to say, this is where I’m standing, this is the gallery you like, these are my friends, so, you take a position. So, he says, for this, he is kind of loathed by a lot of people. Even a close friend who strongly supports his work recently criticised his saying he’d vote conservative and work around that, which was, again, complex.

Mark works non-stop. He feels he can’t stop making things. Drawing, writing, making videos, posting on facebook. There’s no time to stop and think. He’s in the newspaper and hasn’t even done it yet.

There are ethics involved in the work as well. It’s all about language. He uses words like “re-enactment”. And, who pays for the work? How much does he get paid for a piece? Some work is Lottery funded – but how much? There is a selective interest in information (by the press).

Mark gets emotional with the work; sometimes, he gets yelled at. For example, he’s crawling through Elton and there’s “a load of guys yelling” at him “get up you …” Then they change mood to cheer him on. At the end of the day, he’s acting a lot.

The shame aspect is associated with life. Performance has a lot to do with shame.

‘Why is he doing it?’ is a question he asks himself a lot. He justifies his work with a view “they are amazing pieces of art” with really good producers, camera people and they are absolutely beautiful.

He has modelled himself after Robbie Williams.

When he gets a good article he sees it as a piece of art.

How do you assess the quality of the art? One aspect is it’s so layered. Mark’s performance is about taking risks. Most performance is shame-based he says.

What does his practice do for Mark? The main part of the work is the narrative. Before the event you can say anything you want. It’s brilliant. You could do a drawing, a set up photograph. The narrative during the event is changed - by alcoholics, children, the media asking “can you do this for us now?” Mark engages in it. He says he will do anything. Whatever you like. The narrative after the event is important. He has hundreds of films on YouTube. And these have hundreds of millions of viewers.

He loves making work. He can do a performance, make a video, put it on YouTube and finish within an hour. Practice is everything. Mark says, “I can’t stop… I want to make more.”

He likes the power of being the victim, or the scapegoat. “One of the problems is, I take their own bad faith [the press] and give it back to them.”

Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley. “They are my peers,” he says.

How do you get someone to look at something? How do you do that? How do you get an audience? You go and get it. “We are living in an era of ideas.” We are not living in an era of aesthetics, he reflects. Come up with something that will blow people away.

Wednesday 8 September 2010: Making Things Public

Marsha Bradfield, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, Scott Schawger

Fig 1. Aaron McPeake, Sam Venn, Ana Laura de la Lopez, Angela Hodgson, Scott Schwager

Fig 2. Aaron McPeake

Fig 3. Angela Hodgson and Scott Schwager

Fig 4. Scott Schwager

Fig 5. Sam Venn, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, Angela Hodgson

Fig 6. Aaron McPeake, Sam Venn

General Introduction:

• This pilot session aims to test the proposed structure of TPE - Presenters share their research through a 20 to 30 min session and this is followed by questions - so we're interested in sharing practice and exploring this sharing as being part of our practice - it's about disseminating practice.
  
• We wish to know what are peers are doing - it's part of PhD culture - DIY in the face of widespread cuts...
• Grow peer culture - invest in each other
  
• Ideally, TPE will cut across/sample from the various discussions occurring at different colleges
• Emphasis on practice - does it help us get away from institutional hierarchies? Our supervisors, for instance, may be more experienced researchers, but we we're all practitioners...
  

Marsha:

• A performative presentation that asked and (re)asked: "What does the practice of dialogic art entail?"
  
• Composed entirely of questions, this presentation teased at the difference between speaking about practice and doing it.
  
• The power dynamics that mark the presentation of research - What's shown and not shown...following Bourdieu: developing "a feel for the game" - What does this mean in the case of art research at the UAL, in the UK and beyond?

Ana Laura:

• Cultivating praxis - a good reason to do a PhD - practicing in a way that's more critical and considered - "rigour"
  
• Tension between "public" and "private" - not binaries so much as overlapping sets of assumptions - contrary to conventional thinking, "the private" may be a sphere that's less "free" - where much (conflict) is repressed...
• Relations between practicing "art" and practicing "research" - anxieties around practicing art too much - How to locate practice of art in research culture? Are they very different?
  

Scott:

• The boundaries of art research - what does or does not comprise art practice as research - Does this talk "count"?
• Collaboration involves working together - (the tools of) process - multiple dialogues - with other collaborators, with "viewers," with "peers"... Something is collaborative when you can't do it on your own...Flow
• Working in public as distinct from working with the public - also, what aspects of practice get shared - What about emails? Lots of business gets transacted in emails...
  

Themes and questions to take forward:

• How to narrate one's practice? Should this approach jive with the practice itself or is there a generic approach? Tendencies towards confession as a genre for sharing practice...
  
• Languaging - speaking to different groups
• What's research? A process of inquiry...perhaps cultivating this is more important than the outcome?
  

Ayman Mahmoud Saey - Presenter Biog

I started working with video in my early teenage years. Enthusiasm and a small amount of competence in my first project led to me getting a small paid job. This in turn led to another small job, and quite soon after I was registered as self employed and doing more small jobs.

While grateful for the experience that had seemingly landed on my lap, I began to get restless with the type of work I was doing. I didn’t necessarily care much for the subjects of my films and furthermore I didn’t find myself in any environments that would inspire me to develop as a filmmaker.

My next step was to go to university, which is where I am now. At university my films have been characterised by having elements of both documentary and fiction. I find myself more concerned with what I see as the essence of the film rather than subscribing to a particular form that it must be expressed in.

Also my films tend to be quite self reflexive despite usually have no intention for them to be so; in my short experience, the filmmaking process itself often strangely coincides with the intentions of the film in a way that makes it just as important a part of the film to be depicted/ referred to.

I’m not too sure what is next for me, but if I do continue to make films I would image I would still be concerned with finding ways of translating experience on to film. I prefer it when one gets a sense of something in a film rather than just intellectually derived conclusions.

Also I am interested in just showing things as they are. I believe that watching a film is a unique time in a persons life when all but what is seen and heard in the film is removed, allowing the viewer to connect with the subject in a way that may be much more difficult to within the abundance of ‘real life’. When we connect with a subject we are given the opportunity to comprehend it and with comprehension hopefully comes transcendence.

Film and Video BA, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

You can contact Ayman at a8hm@hotmail.com.

William Raban - Presenter Biog

Fig. 2 - Still from About Now MMX


Fig. 2 - William Raban

Born 1948, Fakenham. BA painting, Saint Martins School of Art 1971; MA (Fine Art) Reading University 1974. Manager of London Filmmakers Co-Op Workshop 1972-6. Published bi-monthly Filmmakers' Europe 1977-81. Part-time senior lecturer in Film at Saint Martin's School of Art 1976-89. Reader in Film at University of the Arts, London. Member of editorial board Vertigo film magazine.

William's Luxonline profile
Putney Debater's review of William's new film

Louis Henderson: Presenter Biog

Fig 1. Une Carte Postale à Marcel.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who lives and works in London. He has shown his work nationally and internationally, including Rotterdam International Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and EMAF Osnabrueck. Currently Louis is doing a practice-based PhD at London College of Communication supervised by William Raban and Dr Jonathan Dronsfield, working in film, photography and text. The research is led by the question “Can Film be a Future Archaeology?” and looks into the politics of institutional archives, the possibility of aesthetic communism and the place of art in the production and distribution of the common.

www.louishenderson.wordpress.com

You can contact Louis at henderson.louis@gmail.com

Fig.2 Eisenstein at Work

Ian Brown - Presenter Biog

Fig. 1 - Air/Fire; Screenprint / Etching (2011)

Ian Brown is the founder of Volcanic Editions Print Workshop in Brighton He studies at Canterbury College of Art and in 2009 completed a MA in Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art (MA Printmaking). He has exhibited his work widely both in the UK and abroad, and has received several awards in recognition of his printmaking work. His work is included in private and public collections, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Library Special Collections, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and in Tate Britain’s Artist Book Collection. Until 2010, he worked as Subject Leader at the FdA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice, University of Brighton, and as Pathway Leader Fine Art, at the BA (Hons) Art and Design Sussex, Coast College Hastings. He regularly contributes articles to specialist publications on printmaking, and wrote and edited the Silkscreen Chapter for Printmaking, Traditional and Contemporary Techniques by Anne d’Arcy Hughes and Hebe Vernon Morris, Chronicle Press, San Francisco (2008).

http://volcaniceditions.com

Marina Kassianidou - Presenter Biog

Fig.1 - Untitled (2008) Photo by Vassos Stylianou

Marina Kassianidou was born in Limassol. In 1998 she received a CASP/Fulbright scholarship to study in the USA. She graduated from Stanford University in 2002 with a BA in Studio Art (with Distinction) and a BS in Computer Science (with Distinction). Upon graduation, she was awarded the Arthur Giese Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting by the Stanford University Department of Art & Art History. In 2005, she obtained a Master in Fine Art degree at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London, UK. During that time she was invited to participate in XHIBIT05, an exhibition showcasing selected students of the University of the Arts. She has participated in group exhibitions in the UK, USA, Cyprus, Israel and Germany and she has had solo exhibitions in Nicosia, Cyprus (Gloria Gallery, 2006, 2008) and London, UK (Tenderpixel Gallery, 2009). Her last two solo shows were accompanied by publications containing essays on her work by herself and other artists. From 2005 to 2007 she was a contributor to ArtSEEN journal (Florence, London, New York), writing articles on her work and the work of other artists. In 2006 and 2007 she was shortlisted for the Cyprus Young Artists Awards, a competition organized by Brio Expressions Gallery. Her work is found in several private and public collections, including the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, UK.

http://www.marinaek.com