Taco Stolk

Transmission

I am struggling to find a gap between theories, imagination and artwork. I can’t find, I can’t follow him in his impressive program. Plank time, numbers, elements of science leave me undisturbed. Words uttered like in a seminar for lost scientists make a loose connection in my wandering mind. I can’t get through these elements.

I wait the moment something will happen and take me beyond his explanation. Circles, red colour, geometric figures surround a map of New-York. I hardly listen to the explanation he gives. Plank time, Database, numbers. Einstein. The scientist’s words cover the artist’s imagination. How could we reinvent a system in harmony with the universe itself? New theory? Just words? No, Plank time!

Then come sounds on octaves, music theory, tic tac… Plank time, Plank length. Quantum frequencies in molecules. I loose track.

Images of South Holland, circles in which one can hear different sounds. Everything is related to Plank time and Plank length. Sound, sound approaching a harbour. I missed the first part of his presentation. My mind walks back and forth, to and fro. I quit, disconnected. I break loose…

Transmission review: Kate Davis Queen of Monotony (27th Jan 2010)

By Brook Davis

Kate Davis began is presentation by stating that the movie had been made a little rushed and had some technical problems, therefore would expect some failures

Well, who is honest deserves respect, but…

The movie started, a camera fixed on one side of a bridge, showing the other side in the darkness, the visibility was almost none, seeing only a few moving lights. Behind, a voice quite monotone, his own, reading a text about bridges and how they connected the people and how people were connected to each other, yet the prevailing thoughts throughout the text, was absences and a repetitive me, me and me. In fact that entire monotonous monologue spoke of misunderstandings and chance encounters, past somewhere behind, under or over bridges. Connections and disconnection all this over a day that would lighten the image, while a monotone voice continued to unwind the thread, but getting nowhere.

At the end, another excuse, I’m not a writer and this was my first text… Frankly, it was better to have been silent.

However behind all that blablabla something left that made worthwhile, a phrase resonating in my head: If a city is a body, the bridge is its spine.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission review: Juan Cruz the Translator in Person (02nd Dec 2009)



By Brook Davis

Juan Cruz is a Spanish living in England who decided to exploit their knowledge of culture and language, to become a translator, translating into English some interesting names of Spanish literature.

This presentation showed another interesting facet of Juan Cruz. From a conventional translator, became a translator in direct, making a piece of theatrical art, a live translation of Don Quixote. For the piece presented it was possible to attend the difficulty of such representation.

However, perhaps tired of translating books, he decided to produce a different kind of work and began to experiment different things.

Two books clamped together to a table, “Simplified Dictionary” and “Artists Artifacts”, theory and practice joined together or how to simplify the execution of art. However according to the author was an accidental artwork.

A video work about a normal day of his life, works at home, the musical education of their children, playing with them…

Anyway it was interesting, deserves a “worth it” for originality.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission review: Amanda Beech the Little Dictator (25th Nov 2009)

By Brook Davis

The Amanda’s Beech presentation was based on totalitarianism and some key statements:

Art is the process of difference and change.

Art is enlightenment, making us advance.

Materiality or Materialism?

Nazi art is not art.

Criticism is a bad habit.

Frankly, criticism is a bad habit? What she wanted to insinuate? And this after saying that criticism was important for students…

She basically denied the art developed under totalitarianism, sticking Nazi aesthetics and Soviet Realism under the same roof ignoring them and denying them as an art form.

Subsequently presents us with Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, a force of nature and a pre-political space. The state protects the freedom ensuring our security. It is about the torture of the community as art, the strange task of modernist and what art should and could do. The art should say something about our social relationships; relational aesthetics is equivalent to neo-conservatism. She is opposed to socialism believes in rationalism. She spokes of the power of language, transmits its force and vitality. The success of the image as an end…

After all we come to the conclusion that she speaks against Nazi art but is ideas are of a liberal fascist. In fact all of his speech was a great Salmagundi.

Finally with his hand on the hip, as if it was a matron, she presented us a video with an overwhelming text impossible to read. The music was incredibly high and the images that have a fierce, almost dictatorial, imposing an idea with a brute force. The aim is to persuade, not to be persuaded.

In short, we are faced with an incongruous artist, openly anti-Marxist and anti-Nazi, but shows the capability to use the same techniques of persuasion used in those regimes and by absurd she criticizes the criticism. Machiavelli wouldn’t have been better. However if we believe in the words of Picasso who said that art needs to shock because if doesn’t shock isn’t art, we are in the presence of a great artist.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission review: Roderick Buchanan and his dreadful accent (21st Oct 2009)

By Brook Davis

Roderick Buchanan showed us a very interesting slide show, which supposedly represent is background.

Also presented a video of his latest work, which was notorious a separation between two musical bands of the same city because of its cultural past and, finally, finished the presenting with a summary of a exhibition he made on Thomas Muir (often known as Thomas Muir Younger of Huntershill) (25 August 1765 – 26 January 1799) and on their failures.

However, due to his dreadful accent, I understood little or nothing of the explanations of their work. The public liked it and I can only say this, after all, was interesting.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission review: Penny McCarthy and Tim Etchells, a work about “Absence” (14th Oct 2009)

By Brook Davis

Penny and Tim have provided us with one of those rare moments in art. The creation “in live” of an art work.

At the beginning of the presentation they captivated the audience by stating that before making it they would read some e-mails that were exchanged in order to prepare the presentation. After a few minutes, became obvious that the presentation was none other than the exchange of e-mails, were in the presence of the creation of an art work “in live”.

However, this was the only highlight of the presentation, as the reading of the alleged e-mail showed up boring and incipient, not for the content, but because the way the work was read.

In fact, the intonation given by Tim in his reading, demonstrated a rude unwillingness and imperious absence (subject that the text meant in its entirety) taking us almost thinking that their attitude would be part of the representation, but it was clear that that was not. It was clear the utter lack of willingness of the author to be there.

From Penny, perhaps by empathy, their intonation as the beginning was vibrant, became blurry and insignificant, following the flow.

They ended the presentation with a very quick view of Tim’s past victories (read past works). From the faded Penny, not even a line.

Honestly I expected more from these two authors who already accustomed us with better moments with his class and previous publications.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission rambling: My firth transmission day (07th Oct 2009)

By Xesko

Finally after three weeks of boredom, the MA began. In the first day, I attended a lecture by an artist couple, rather peculiar.

When I was informed that every week we would have these kind of shows my first thought was: ******* (it is better not to transcribe my thoughts). I was wrong, at least for this first one.

The beginning was a little bit desperate, so they had put a photograph of an in works storefront. I thought that would be a boring talk about that kind of contemporary art that only the artist understands and that no one else knows what is about, leaving the others persons out of the creative context, but… Something changed my idea. They have put a background music of Aphrodite’s Child, “Rain and Tears”, a group that happens I know very well because I was and somewhat still am, fam of Vangelis and Demis Roussos, two the founder members of the group.

From that point forward it was a parade of conceptual ideas, many of them based on the Pink Floyd albums, also a conceptual music group.

The main idea of the lecture was nothing more than recreations of the random day-to-day art. That is, capturing what the artist saw around him, recreating (plagiarizing it?) with artistic eye creating a single engagement with the public.

However after the presentation remains the idea that the common thread that is the driving force that moves this couple of artists, is none other than the great unknown/known, the ideas of the vastness of the universe as we know it, their misunderstanding and intimate links with the darker parts of our being, basically what makes us live and that we, in spite of knowing intimately, at the end of the day remains unknown.

In other words, most of the ideas are developed around our internal organs, healthy eating and the mystery of the universe and its best kept secret, the design of a living being.

Summarize it in one word. Liked.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission rambling: Monotone versus Monotonous (27th Jan 2010)

By Xesko

I do not know what to say, I hope that this first transmission of the quarter will not be an omen of what awaits me. The first one I attended last quarter, was an unexpected surprise as well as the past quarter, while this … Well as I said, I do not know what to say.

Kate began with a series of excuses about the movie she had done and when the presentation started I realized why. In fact the movie was awful. It was too dark (should have used a night filter) only a few lights in the background when some cars and buses passed and, suddenly… An omnipresent voice echoed through the sound system of the showroom, a monotone voice reading a text.

The text in the beginning was interesting though it was highly personal and the word heard most often was me, which demonstrated a huge ego hidden in that little sad figure.

And in the midst of darkness began the monotony of at completely monotone text; bridges, me, connections, kiss, me, love, caresses, fluids, me, sex, zzzzzzzzzz.

That monotone monotony assisted with the darkness in the showroom caused me to asleep. Someone somewhere next to me gave me a shove and I woke for the day, not for a real day but on the movie, we already could see something and that voice still ubiquitous and monotonous, and finally a question by the author, the movie is over? I think so!

And so at last, ended the massacre of the bridge of the voice of the river and of the silence.

Summarize it in one word. Monotonous.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission rambling: A day to forget (14th Oct 2009)

By Xesko

Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring. Basically this is the only thing I have to say about what I saw.

In the beginning Penny McCarthy said that she had challenged his friend Tim Etchells, to make that presentation together and that he had shown first open to the idea and then reluctant.

Tim then, explained that this reluctance was due to being out of the country and therefore not having time to prepare for the conversation, so it had to be prepared by an exchange of e-mails that they would read.

??????????????? But where are we? In Big Brother? What we have to do with the preparation of the work and the exchange of personal e-mails?

Soon they began to read their e-mails that supposedly would have been exchanged during the preparation of the work, e-mails about the lack of time and lack of it and also about Penny’s paranoia about old things and about the past, and through absurd stories about misplaced conversations.

After some time we realize that the alleged e-mails were, in fact, the presentation, thereby demonstrating a rather interesting creativity and putting it to us (the public) before the creation “in live” of an art work.

However, the way Tim, clearly uncomfortable and showing a complete detachment and boredom read the same, became is hearing strangely boring, to the point to hear yawning in the room (apart from a constant clearing throats of the public).

To conclude the presentation, Tim showed some of his earlier work, including a theatrical piece of 6h that approached the absurd, since it was dedicated to the muted conversations, in other words, 6 boring hours based on stories in which the actors are interrupted each other thereby preventing any story comes to an end, supposedly to let the public imagination the completion of the unfinished conversations. Honestly? My opinion? If I had been invited to see that play, after 15 minutes I had get up and walked out the room. Oh! I just remember an important situation that I forgot to mention, supposedly this was expected because attend the play was open to that possibility. Therefore I wonder, what is the interest in this theatrical piece? Demonstrate an alleged erudition exclusive to few, assuming that the weak-minded that did not understand what was going on applaud it assuming that this is a unique work of theatre and, the most erudite, do not understanding the purpose cheer with a creation of a contemporary art work too advanced for them to understand? In my humble opinion, was merely a figure of speech without any specific target that was not the capacity to train those involved, with no need to slaughter the public and should never had passed the rehearsal.

Following the presentation, showed other studies, once again about the absence and of the spirit of her, anyway, nothing interesting worth mentioning. From Penny, completely overshadowed by Tim, absolutely nothing.

Summarize it in one word. Boring.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission 25th January 2010 Julie Westerman presents Kate Davies

(b) Julie Westerman worked with her guest, Kate Davies, to produce a video gift to the transmission audience. Combining footage of Sheffield’s Lady’s bridge with a live reading of a text piece made on a previous residency, on another bridge, host and guest sublimated years of chance meetings near water to create an alternative presentation. While the artists acknowledged that the piece was unfinished it was unable to function under such strenuous circumstances, both video and text needed a lot of editing. Opinion on the presentation was mixed. Some found it brave, revealing and inspiring, while others thought it was self indulgent and utterly exhausting. The introduction by JW along with the Q&A afterwards provided the insight and enthusiasm that the central performance lacked.

Kelly Large, Transmission Review Objective Voice

Throughout Kelly Large’s talk I had a sense of a highly intelligent, articulate, brave practitioner, able to challenge her collaborators, use stealth and cunning in her in engagements with institutions with a compulsion to put herself into the very situations that scare her most.  In short, Large’s work is ballsy and confident, even though I sense she has not hit her stride yet.

So, my question is, why the terminal self-deprecation?

A winced my way through Large’s chatty talk.  In spite of herself she came across as immensely likeable, but, she made me want to de-brief her in the pub and tell her not to put herself down in this context, audiences have a temptation to believe what they hear.  Of course, I am not suggesting that all I wish to sit through is male bravado and smarmy showing off each week, but Large’s talk made me wonder if is a female compulsion to talk themselves down in this type of arena.  Is it that Large is a woman that she feels unable to say, ‘I have a PhD and years of practice behind me, damn it!, I know what I am doing and I know who I am and  I’m ok’.  Instead, I heard her tell me she was nervous, she hates residencies and she does not like people.  She then started to list her skills, almost as though she had been challenged as a phoney; which she sees are administrative, social, analytical and critical.  The way she described the process of working through residencies she is offered made it sound as though she was a gun for hire, never able to choose a direction.  Oh Kelly!  Can I hire you to be a confident artist?

David Bate, Transmission Review Stream of Consciousness

I don’t remember him, he’s not how I thought he looked, he’s got a different haircut.   A  slide of two dogs running together, smiling and grimacing at each other – love or competition in their eyes?  Michelle is speaking still.  She’s talking about a philosophy of friendship.  I know Matt is here because I can see his voice recorder on the table.  The cloth has fold creases, the table looks nice.  Michelle is saying that friends share similarities but have differences, we recognise the self in the other.  She says she wouldn’t want to go to the pub with herself because she knows what she’d be getting.  Does it make me narcissistic to say I think I would like to go to the pub with myself (I wonder how I move, I wonder what my body language looks like, my tics).  She’s handing over.  David has titled the talk ‘Not the Other’.  It is him, I recognise him as he moves, as he speaks.  He used to have a bob with a fringe, it was very androgynous.  I like bobs.  He’s talking about fascism and communism, about their essential differences in their relationship to history.  Fascism predicated itself on re-routing the past to take in purity.  Fascism returns to the past.  Communism must abolish the past, to rid itself of the aristocracy and the class system so that everyone can get on.  I like it.  He makes a link with art – Modernism must cut itself off from the past, and I miss the point, is he saying Post-Modernism returns to the past.  I am a Post-Modernism.  I am thinking about that.  He is showing work from 1992 called ‘European Letters’, it was a timely work, exploring relationships with our near neighbours, I like its use of text and image.  It reminds me of Victor Burgin.  I did not know that the Euro was initially called the Ecu.  He wanted to visualise the subjective moment of otherness.  He quotes Donald Rumsfeld “the known unknown”.  He speaks in phrases that make sense to me, I understand him.  It was early digital work, he was scanning in 8 x 10s.  There are lots of photos, we are seeing lots of slides.  I am looking at images and enjoying his voice.  He is in control, imperceptibly.  He has a generosity and lucidity.  He is a teacher, by name and by nature.  He is showing us his version of Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, the painting with the anemorphic skull.  A photo, early Photoshop, moving out of the orthadox photographic space.  He is saying that work on computers was becoming increasingly Baroque, I don’t know what he means.  He is saying that is never endless, there is no obvious point to stop.  In a darkroom, I plan my work around the amount of paper I can afford to nail a print.  He is saying he returned to video, he called it ‘The Politics of Friendship’, the title of a Derrida book.  He says he never fully grasped the book, I find his honesty endearing.  The video is made of still photographs he shot on 35 mm film, the sequence is shot, and silent, its of dogs in Barcelona sniffing wee.  He is saying he went from surreality to sequentiality.  He quotes Allan Sekula’s phrase “they tyranny of surreality”, I want to tell him about my relationship to Allan.  How I resolved it in the end.  His voice is serious with softness, there is a friendliness.    He was asked to set up a photo department in Tallin, he found dialogues difficult because of the hangover of the Soviet Union.  Tarkovsky’s The Stalker was filmed there, he used the text of the film as a common language, a shared experience to shape discussion, to form photographs that have an entrance point, in reaction to the film.  I like what he is saying, I understand his strategy.  We see a clip from Stalker, last time I saw a clip from Stalker was the last Transmission he spoke at.  The photos were fragments, he shot on 35 mm on fast film, he likes grain.  Presented in diptychs.  An alienated viewpoint.  Someone said to him, “Dave, your work’s great, shame you are not Estonian”.  Its interesting, identity politics tells us that we speak of our own identity, we speak of our own difference.  Is it linked with a cultural colonialism (Modernism?) to want to represent the other?  Is David a closet Modernist?  I don’t think I want to say that, that’s not helpful.  His work is very generous, he’s talking about wanting to connect with the other.  I think Allan Sekula would really like his work.  He mentions that he was a student of Victor Burgin.  I guessed it, I guessed it!  Oh, the founding fathers of theoretically engaged, text including, contemporary photography!  I love them dearly, but I am trying to move away from trying to please them.  I have to make my own way, I have to let go my impulse to re-make to re-cycle inherited strategies.  But I understand what David is saying, go on.  A paper he gave in Ireland on Globalisation (more Allan!)  led to a residency in Australia, he had to name a theme, he named Globalisation.  He shows us photographs that weren’t working, another act of generosity, perhaps self confidence.  He made triptychs with text in the centre panel, he brought the critical context into the frame of the work.  Outside it are nature/culture binaries.  The human exploitation of nature.  The relationship between text and image is really working.  In one the central panel is blank.  David is talking about his resistance to identity politics, its not just about collecting/recognising.  “Thank you for listening”.  The questions, he’s talking about self as a convenient fiction, we don’t know ourselves.  We see ourselves in the mirror not photos, a strange alienation of seeing yourself.  Photography allows space for reverie (compared to film which suppresses our creativity).  I want to ask a question, I wonder about his work based in Tallin, it seems like his relationship with his students is an element of work, how does that get transmitted?  As opposed to the critical context being within the work he made in Australia.  I ask the question!  He talks about the ‘anxiety panel’ by the door – the didactic text.  He’s talking about his anxiety at not having a signature style.  I’m in the bar and I wish I could talk to him, in a way that is not sycophantic, but I think his work has a coherency and weight that I really enjoy.  I speak to him, sum up my studies; I don’t do a good job.  I can’t quite articulate myself in a way that demonstrates the connections between our thinking.  I blurt out the anecdote he tells last time, I remind him of his slide carousel he left on the train.

Kelly Large, Transmission Review Stream of Consciousness

She went to Liverpool Uni with Becky. The cloth on the table is distractingly wrinkly. She’s talking about process and product. She admits she’s nervous. She says she hates residencies. She puts herself through the mill, New Art Gallery Wallsall. “I’m just going to take some water”. Fear of publicness. She doesn’t like people, she produces socially engaged practice but she’s antisocial. I wish I asked her about this, I think getting to her motivations would be very illuminating. Maybe her unconscious motivations.
She’s self deprecating, she is talking herself down. She’s talking about exposing positions and structures, art in residency situation versus art in the gallery. Work from residencies don’t make it into the gallery archives. She is telling us her skills, administrative, social, analytical and critical.
A residency in a school. New awareness of CCTV of being observed, for who they are in public. (In my head I think about the contrast between who they are in public and who they are online, young people are growing up with online social networking, they are going to have a very different conception of they public self). Does the video work make sense out of its context, she asks. I wondered if it could make the right sense in that context, to me obviously is more readable to an art audience. Who are the participants in the artwork? The children in the video – are they the audience? Or are they the props? Or the artwork itself? Or is the art the ideas and only us – an initiated audience – the only ‘correct’ viewers?
Unofficial artist in residence in the British Library. I am doing a project a collaborative project where we decided to be unofficial artists in residence. Pipped to the post.
She says St. Pancreas instead of St. Pancras which always makes me laugh.
I wonder if she is able to direct her flow of residencies. I wonder if she has a wish list of institutions she would like to work with. I wonder if she feels like a gun for hire sometimes. I wonder if her work in the British Library addresses this. I wonder about the agency of the artist. I don’t ask.
I typed Clare Short by mistake at the top of the page. Interesting confusion.

Roderick Buchanan

Transmission

Robert Buchanan presents his personal work, almost intimate, full of affects. He directs his research towards a family lexical field, on his roots, his community, his rooting in time.

There is a share of true emotion on the evocation of all these family memories. The displacement from Scotland to Ireland. The starvation which struck Ireland. Ceaseless fights carried out to survive, facing the worst moments of History. An empathy animates me by listening to his singing accent, the bearing of “R”, a kind of shared, rare confidence.

Moments of happiness, of joy and sadness also, expressed by a band of local musicians, traditional, with their bagpipe, separated from another band by a wall of incomprehension, the wall of division, beliefs of another age. Loyal supporters versus the Republicans. The artist didn’t find any difficulty working with both.

Who to build a bridge between the communities? Perhaps the artist, in all his brittleness but in his courage, his clearness, his honesty, through his works…

Exhibited elsewhere in Europe, this project caused an adhesion, particularly in France. Now, I understand why. Looking at the video, the empathy is real, sensitive, palpable. Images does not leave indifferent. The historical evocation of Thomas Muir Help Desk supplements the rich table. I pay respect and consideration to the man, the artist, I will remember a long time Buchanan and his humanity, his accent…

Tim Mitchells- Penny McCarthy

As singular as this exercise can appear, let us greet the rather close and creative relation that these two friends establish during this hour of communication. Two distinct voices mix during a length and close friend exchanges e-mails. A Sheffield based artist and Penny McCarthy. The subjects seem little of interest; they are varied. They change according to the mood of each one, according to the contents of e-mail, displacement in space and time. . Fragments of friendship are displayed. Words of sympathy, deep closeness, are disclosed in a public conversation.

What lesson can we draw? An useless display of what could remain in the private sphere ?  There, a live-Art, a matter to be reflected. Any textual support leads to reflect, to think, to react. It is obvious.

Fragments of friendship are displayed. One can doubt the effectiveness or the need for such an exercise: a simple reading of e-mails. Is this art? How to get through? Since the question must be posed. I do not know where to locate truly this “live”performance. Yes, it is well a performance. It destabilizes, undoubtedly, anyway.

What kind of message they intend to share? The words around Borges produce little effect on me, they disconcert. The great writer is used as alibi with a manifest vacuity. The evocation of journeys by train, the displacement in space and time have a certain interest, New-York, the Mediterranean, the colours. However, it always brings back to the private sphere.

This kind of performance has as a principle, I suppose, to move away the spectator, to take him trapped as an hostage, while hoping to cause a later reaction. The reaction, with my direction, was rather mitigated, I noticed very little enthusiasm in the audience as well. Chatterings, distorts cough, sending of texts.

The exchange of kindness between the two friends obviously left cold.  One could say that there is a share of true emotion in this reading. Is it shared with the audience? Did they succeed in moving away the spectators while causing a kind of reaction, of rejection? I wonder well. They wanted to make a performance. It is successful. Does this enforced communication have any interest?  The question remains open.

Each one undoubtedly would find matter to be reflected. It is undoubtedly the goal of art, to cause, to cause reaction, good or bad. Let us not be sulky our pleasure. Let me greet the performance. As long as the conversation maintains protagonists in a certain distance, the emotion could be easily felt, imagined. When they speak closer to each other, in a public performance, the magic dulls. As for the true interest of this kind of exercise, it is another history…