Transmission 17th March Jaspar Joseph-Lester presents Sound Threshold

(a) As we come in we see waiting for us on the big screen a large sweeping alpine image accompanied by soaring sounds. This will be the last of the hospitality. JJL presents curators, curating itself is an act of hospitality, it is an act of exchange. ST’s ongoing research project is about the relation between sight and sound. Threshold is used as an extended metaphor, they are interested in the boundaries, the areas at the threshold of another space. Cross discipline, off-site and outside of the gallery space. Performances of sound artists, musicians, installations. Thank-yous in strong accents. I have a headace, a cold and so I’m a bit fuzzy. They were already established before they came together. Daniella had worked with Chris Watson on a field recordings archive. This rather piques my interest, Watson has a Sheffield connection. Manifesta 7, an itinerant biennale. Regional, one could revisit her homeland. So the image of the screen is this region in Italy. D and I had been trying to figure it out. A game we play each week. Music and sound in the landscape. Archaeological site in a chestnut wood. Carmichael and Lief Elgrin The Kingdom..(familiar from Dream machines curated by SH), border territories, dream state borders. Sound waves, energies, transmissions. Friedrick Jurgenson, capturing the voices of the dead. A collection based upon a kingdom, stamps, flags, a ministry of shadows. (declare independence) The imagination has not been banished and if it has, artists are travelling to find it, reintergrate it back into society. Physical territories, mental ,hypnagogic. Transcience, annexing. Cemeteries. A national anthem, recording it. Sound is a state of transmission, transition. It conveys flows of energies, undercurrents. It can read the landscape and context around. It conveys emotional states. A convivial celebration, lots of different people who were associated with the archaeological site came together. Reading video (sound). A work in progress. Documentation, re-working. Stages. A complex text. The structure. Collected and re-worked on and around the site. Has someone taken their shoes off? Tu pu! I found their text inspirational, it opened up possibilities, it combines different things, poetically, fact, history, anecdote, interpretation, voices. Writing the project, Itself an outcome of writing which was a correspondance between them. Collecting stories about that landscape, they passed it all on to the artists. Lake Garda and the mountains. A walk, a sound walk, a pilgrimage. Such a beautiful region, I imagine being there, walking up to that site. How do you recreate a landscape or an experience of a landscape? A picture only shows us what it looks like. (I contradict this idea when I think of Poussin being looked at over and over). Parma violets. I want to write a beautiful text, rich like this, with references, meaning and purpose, with interesting facts, quotes from letters, descriptions of landscapes and colours, I don’t mind sounding naïve or even hopeful, it might happen. Many voices working together, live sound. Descriptions of dreams. They write so well in a second language. I’m glad to be shown this. Yesterday, stuck in doors with a cold, I watched the bourne trilogy, I might have done that today given the choice. I notice in the video that they are recording their sound walk. I feel a bit disappointed now I know what is going on. The monarch is a young child. Beuys, Kafka…my ear is blocked, and I cant stop yawning, self conscious about it. A displaced sense. They write, pass it on to the artist, the work is made, they write again, this leads to new work. Curating, writing and making art is overlapping. This is how we should work with the curating group. One defines the other, lake and mountain. As above so below. Between the high and the low. This was not a walk towards salvation, it was more a mapping, getting darker. There are so many ideas it is hard to make notes. The text is making the work seem richer than the video suggests. D has nodes off. Let private and personal thoughts wander. A way of freeing ourselves, crossing a threshold. ‘simply an artwork’, documentation as production. No objective documentation, they recreate the process of being inside the making of the work. Triggers for new work. They are playing out these ideas, image-text-sound here in the cinema. They bring the material to us and it will move on having been here. The video is described as material, in light of what we talked about with BS today, it has new meaning. An alchemical reference, displacement, sound and sight, how one acts on the other. Re-place, time and voices. Grain quality, displacement tied to the source. D speaks so well about this, clear and passionate. Place is the projection of history onto a landscape. A number of questions from drunk students, really cringeworthy but J handles it with humour.

(b) This was a very interesting talk given by the curators, Sound Threshold. They talked about, and literally involved us in their experimental approach to commissioning, if this is the right word, and curating works of art. The lecture was used as an opportunity to revisit a work in progress, looking and listening to video shot and words written about an experience of the Lake Garda region, in this new context will take its place in their creative processing of an idea, a place a dialogue. It was an inspiring and enjoyable presentation, an excellent note on which to end the series.

Transmission James Pyeman

Comic, newspapers, pop songs and underground culture of the seventies are the background of this artist. He drags his pencil in the industrial society, Mad magazines ( group of cartoons aware of American culture, Vietnam war, English music, David Bowie, T. Rex, blurring artefacts, psychedelic Genesis, Rock surrealism, mixes it with a complexical adaptation of cartoons (godfather, vampire) and finally articulate his drawing representation.

From a photographic evocative of block of flat, images of British culture, Punk culture, design aesthetic and look, bands energy, he tries to give a new meaning.  Pulling things from the past, a consistency of how photography is made daily,  he engages himself, creates from these various sources ( work directly taken from comics, sources material taken from internet, combination of images, connecting each other), transcribing in a new language and producing something different (a process of translation).

Texts. Quoting. A style which is more an illustration of a text than a pure writing. It’s simply an illusion of text.  Pencil drawing, an artistic research without knowing anything about it, articulating from comics, pop culture, cartoons, seems emotionless, expressless. His technique (so simple and poor) is conditioned by a sticky memory to things. The primary sources are quite biographical (childhood, the seventies), a huge influence. Sometimes the narrative cartoons, the references are separated to their context.

I don’t wax enthusiastic before his drawings, the narrative of Dracula images or Pinocchio illustration but the whole work responds to the sense the artist wanted to give, a coherence, a distinct and personal style.

B

Transmission Lindsay Seers

Lindsay Seers agrees to speak about her artistic experiment but refuses to be recorded. She prefers to improvise, without notes, on stage. She communicates her own interrogations to which she tries to bring answers.

Much theory on photography (Barthes, Bergson on intuition, idea of connectivity). A constant worry of the method, much concerned about the structure (engrossing narratives). Explains how she constructs images, the choices she makes. How does photography change our concept of time, of culture, change of friendship, change our consciousness. Photography reports to death, to loss but also to having found joy, pleasure (images of the body distorted by the paper (experiment of distortion, ridiculous parody). Dramatizing (a photo as a past written by a vampire etc…)

Wishing to tell something, the past as a diagram:  ” Her memory was so perfected that she couldn’t see a difference between her inner world and the “real” world. As a consequence of this she lacked the ability to speak. When she at the age of seven for the first time saw a photograph of herself something happened and she gained the ability to speak but lost her eidetic memory. To  compessate her loss of  memory , Lindsay Seers started to capture images obsessively.”

The act of photography which is invisible haunts her. (objectivation of subject), it’s a historical account of her work. Series of self-portrait. The feeling the photo is falling in the mouth, parody.  (Embodied photograph process). Rather sexual all that. She plays about it, obviously. It is a play of hide-and-seek. I suspect she takes pleasure of performing while refusing to be recorded.

Another approach, a statue. What does it tell? Past, loss, absence, theatricality are part of her inventive approach of memoir (photo as a past written by a vampire).  A statue, a memory loss ? a place where something was, image produces history, looks historical narrative (Queen Christina of Sweden).

A physical need to always show off (series of portrait). Relation of the photo with her eye: In-out, narrative of inside and outside, from the outside inside) photo reports to another. (narrative performance)

A shift in her making process. Change of medium (camera, filmmaking). Setting up scenario.  Projected and moving images. She projects life out of her, refusing to being locked (narrative image of herself as a projecter). Really concerned with the method, She keeps on theorizing: photo is in the body, in the conscious, physical subject-object point of view. Being a camera, looking back her story teller in a performative way, thinking of metaphysics of trees, images of anthropomorphic film photographically deformed. Who speaks, who photographs, it doesn’t matter if I destroy history, distort objects, dolls,  if you get lost, an image has nothing to do with the truth.

It’s merely a process of looking and recording. (Recording?) Ritualisation, theatricality. I am a camera, I am a material, I am a projector, light comes out of my body . I am here, I am there, I perform, I take pleasure, I show you my mouth, my teeth, my anatomy, I can record images and distort them but I refuse to be recorded, to be filmed. Paradoxical

B

Transmission: Andre Stitt. Threads.

A voice from Northern Ireland. A journey to Belfast. A particular tone, soft and violent, troubling. André Stitt speaks about his creative activity, his native Ireland with passion. It is a family table blackened by unbearable events. They are personal, particular, strong memories.

He writes, paints, draws and produces music. An artist.

The child of the street that he was tells his experiments, his trauma, without losing his breath, all that crossed his life of young man now grown to full stature. What he lived in Belfast, he carries it everywhere, in London, in New York, in the world. When he stages his own life he raises questions, questions itself, questions our capacity to grasp events, analyse and try to understand them. The present faces the past. The artist is still entangled in delusion.

Interpretations of Trauma. One feels unease, out of his zone of control, sometimes taken of nausea but also of empathy when looking at certain images: Saintfield, a market of Belfast, vegetables, odours of urines, drinking, pubs. Personal records: Auntie Alice and Uncle Ted.

He says himself saved by his studies at Art school of Belfast, the influence of Beuys. The voice becomes softer when He begins to talk about amnesia. He cannot remember what occurred between 1983 and 1992, he cannot put words on them. Gone. There is no representation of the Trauma. It consists of association and evocation rather than representation. Investigating another level through Trauma, domestic violence, alcohol, drugs. The images ravel, without noise, they are violent, disturbing, disrupting.

When he tells his performances as an artist in Sheffield or elsewhere, his voice sticks to images of debauchery, the music is puzzling. But amnesia is there. Some images on the newspapers are strange for him, unknown. He discovers them. Performance Art drives him in very dark hole, like a think possessed. The body setting in abyss, it is like a diving in the still open wounds of the communal memories, the demon within. debauchery, uncontrolled drinking, sprinkling food. Opposition to modern consumerism. Exorcism, demon drink ghost, recovery.

Contemporary experiments of conflict. His work is much to do with what to be transformed and not the conflict itself. His art reflects to others personal experiments. Disorder in North Ireland made him what He is now. Telling his stories, his city, he memorialises the time he lived in Belfast (Catholic Culture, Public humiliation, conflict transformation). Archives.

The change is change, it is not accommodation.

A parallel in the suffering, the political struggle: the image of two black athletes raising the fist in Mexico City in 1968. Political conscience (Political Awakening).

Present tense.  He speaks of Dilemma as a guiding delusion of our time.

Life, Art, life as a natural consciousness. Every action as a performance of consciousness (Family and communal Trauma). Performing as a healing process. He projects and looks at them with delusion by investigating another level through Trauma, domestic violence, alcohol, drugs, political conflicts. He stages himself, He questions himself, his voice fades into deep softness. He says he has stopped drinking, He feels alleviated by putting his own experiments and seeing what and where the substance is, what the material of art is and trying to set a critical distance about his own emotions. Art as a work of attention of details. Today he has cured this deep suffering in alcohol used as a fuel, drugs and familial violence. Trauma. He has stopped drinking. But Belfast is in him forever. He measures the present in the past.

Now that the phantoms of the past disappear little by little, it is the time of contemplation, of silence. The time of recovery, of beauty and human celebration eventhough making Art has never shown him what is mean.

One cannot leave Stitt’s clinical experiments undisturbed. There is a palpable emotion in the room, a deep silence but much respect for his sincerity, honesty and his recovery. Minutes after his reading, I wanted to advance towards this man who faces his own demons with courage, to shake his hand and tell him my empathy, embrace him with my heart. I did not dare. I am still looking at this child on his street in Belfast, and his voice is stuck to me as a gentleness of ages. I look at him as a member of my family recovered after a long voyage in the abyss.

I saw you in the street when I was born.

B.

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 3rd February 2010 Col McCormack presents Taco Stolk

(a) Taco from Amsterdam and Jaspar is still flogging those chapbooks. Excessive crunching (Hello W!) and shouting.. it’s a bit like the cabbage throwing section of the globe theatre.

A big delay, no sound and then feedback. It’s the large shabby looking fellow I saw earlier on in the studios.

Lots of prestigious teaching. Conceptualist, mete-modernist (we’ll come back to this later.). CRINGE. (How much did it cost to get him over and how long will he stay.) Someone behind me clearly fancies him, I see why, there is a pop star quality about him.

THE WORK! Musical projects, composer. Nature, nurture, number. Categories appeal to me. Deliberately create things (?). Found poetry. Growing database. Collection. Logic. Logistics. Texts. Codes. These are the lowest form of text. They have one purpose and then are thrown away. (perhaps monkey should come along and save them). T thinks they are poetic. Poetry is found in things having more than one meaning, things that conjure ideas of other things in your mind. How can we find poetry in these codes when they have such specific meanings? They are esoteric, but I’m not sure about poetic. Poetry for robots. That kind of knowledge is needed.

Taco is imaginative in that way that scientifically bright people sometimes are, they produce conspiracy theories. Another set of ideas are being presented. Fields-rules-pitch. Something has just clicked, It is interesting but the ideas are not what I need, I want to know how it happens. Where he started. (this is what I liked about Amanda Beech’s presentation). I can flick through a book or catalogue and find the ideas of other artists. What could he bring to us that can only be brought in person? His presence is required. I can’t find him in the work but neither is he in this presentation. Having all the answers makes him appear smug. The questions don’t challenge him.

How is he funded? Where does research begin and art work end? Or vice-versa?

Projects and research. Creation. Deed. Maths. Aesthetic. Stylish design. Generate. Digits. Automatic. Forms. Relate. Universe. Potential. Points. Relationships. Lines. Find out. Presented. Level. Enter. Small numerical values. Larger scale. Periodical table. Elements. Chemistry. Numbers. Electrons. Protons. Neutrons. Numbers. Element. Scale. Visible. Results. Melting point. Colour. Results. Result. Numbers. Similar. Numbers. Dots. Lines. End up. Aesthetic. Nerd-o-tronic. Rudimentary. (Not leafy not creatures). Divide. Geometric. Architectonic. Mathematical. Difference. Results. Number values. Programmes. (Research for the sake of it?). Dull and heartless. So the sound was generated by…? How? To make what? And..? So…? Please! ‘I get it!’

What makes a piece of art impressive? Is it the difficulty involved in making the thing? Or in the difficulty in understanding how it was made? This makes it esoteric and akin to sorcery. With this kind of work it is difficult to apply your own thoughts or explanations onto it. Has he told us too much?  Just because the idea is clever it doesn’t follow that the work made will be good. (Bryan brings Sol Lewitt in later to make this point). The prime number grid paper works, I can see beyond the image, I can project my own anecdote. Yes, there is a problem when artists talk too much- giving FACTS. Conceptual work seems to go out of date quite quickly. Ironic isn’t it.

This work needs so much explanation that the viewer just gives in to it. We are happy to accept it because the point is not to ask questions of it or challenge it. When was the last time an ordinary person challenged a scientific ‘fact’? We are impressed by the sheer force of it, regardless of it being correct, accurate, right or wrong. Patrick Stewart didn’t have a clue what he was talking about when he played captain Pickard in Star Trek, but I still believed in him.

Taco reminds me of someone like Willy Wonka. He has the space to explore like a scientist and an artist. (I prefer Wonka’s work). I can also see him as a character in a JG Ballard story. Stolk is a brilliant scientist who’s work takes him to the edge of his own reason. David McNab assists him because he thinks what he is doing is emmancipatory, it will liberate them and create a fresh start for what is left of humanity. Stolk doesn’t care about this, he has re-written time and space, invented new notes, flavours, colours, altered the universe. He stops sleeping, he can only count…each second gets a tiny bit longer and finally his mind breaks into a thousand fragments. McNab is left alone in a brave new world…

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 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: Kate Davies

My damp skirt slaps against my legs. Her my, my me. Her highly personalised me. Her… ‘Voice’ over filmic new media. She presents from the stage. Centre. Left. Stood, stark ~ but not. Dark jeans and ‘T’, face in shadow half-light picks up the contours. Cups her peaks her trunk and thighs. Liminal. Half lit. Lectern. The affect of a ghostlike part presence. The narrative reading clearly emanates from the surround-sound-speaker-system around the walls than from, herself. Presence self negated the effect is a very close thing to be able to pick up on. She becomes not here. I would rather have ‘said’ not all there, but I cannot. Superego. Speaks to us from somewhere else. On, or around the bridge. Unseen. ‘A ghost in the machine’. A liminal being. Betwixt. Between. Present…~ation. Assist affect. The style. Materiality of present~ Of words. The  gaps – between… Posit. This idea [art]. Of the bridge. As spine. From. The solid, undeniable and objective, ‘concrete’ bridge ~ to ~ the body. Flesh. ‘Drift’. Fluid. Feel. Change. Unknown workings. Tacit knowledge. The supposed and philosophical space of duality. ‘From head. Down. To hole – below. The spine. The bridge.

The centre of the middle. Journeys are for ‘others’. Bridge is place. Bridge is host. Bridge transmits, from head to whole. My damp skirt slaps, against my legs. Feel. Evening. Turning, into. Night. Dusk, mid~point, liminal, dangerous. Limen. Threshold. Diapason. Busses as they gear away. Middle distance. Away. Away the end. Journeys are for others. Upon the bridge. Time. Dérive. The draw of water, through. Drift. Green tints. Brown clouds blow. Half light early a.m sky, lens of ora street lamps glow. Night comes damp to morn/ day slow. Black dark river, forces, through, below. Damp skirt slaps my [my not your ~ become, your ] legs. PISS, CUM, SPIT. Startled cack-laugh pan-mouth clacks. Cityscape lifeform. Mind. Separate. From. Body. Though still the same. Bridge – conduit – spine. From head, down, to hole below. Dérive. Body. Host. Open. Hole. Open body. Open share. Private[s]. Intimate[d]. Her mental space. This place. This host. This hole. Separate. Same. Shared. Both hers and yours. Damp skirt slaps against my legs. Again… again, yet not against. Analepsis.. The bridge was the last place I saw him. The bridge connects. Back. Leading down, from head to hole. The bridge. One side… the other. Camera. Pan. Scan. Across. Slow. Surveil. Scan. Time and time. Night to-day and back again. Abridged from here. Foreshort. Her non~place. Fort. Host. Bridge and omphalos. ‘ The now’ Bridge. Back to the city. Where he is? One leg through the first railing. [..] They brought me drinks. Talk, swallow, cry, piss. I swore if I ever walked again. Invalid. Rash. Rash.. Rush, water, head. From head. Down. To hole. Headwater, brush brow, trunk now, past bough, down to, dark, wet, open holes below. Dérive. Flow. Water. Through. Pull. Dérive…My damp skirt slaps against my legs. CUNT – SWEET CUM and VOMIT. The centre of the middle, in~between. Joins one. Joins ‘other’. Separate. Same. Now.

Anon.

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…

David Bate/ Michelle Atherton, Transmission

Transmission

18 November 2009

NOT THE OTHER.

David Bate. Host: Michelle Atherton.

I come in this transmission to learn more about the notion of difference, the title is attractive. David Bate is the name of the photographer, his lecture is on friendship, the notion of the OTHER. On the screen, an image of Gustave Courbet’s painting “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet.” The original is displayed in Montpellier’s Museum.

Michelle Atherton introduces the photographer as her best friend, then follow words ok kindness, generosity and… of true friendship.

Then the photographer starts by giving some explanations on what friends are, what friendship is, why one chooses to be with another. A friend is another. Being friend is sharing points of view, physical sensations of being together, recognizing sameness and difference. I can not help but agree with the presentation, because all my present work is based on otherness, relationship, friendship, questioning the Otherness…

He then extracts highlights of works which seem relevant, talks about some narrative background of 19th and 20th century : communism and fascism.

According to him, Fascism is linked to nostalgia, to returning to the past, to the purity of the past, the purity of the race. It is an idea of purification while communism is getting rid of the past, going forward.

Through his European Letters, a series of photos, he tries to explain the idea of “the Other” in what he calls a post-communism world. By exploring the strangeness, by manipulating the images with the computer, they become broke. What is familiar to us may become strange. Exploring the way to work, it’s experimental, the images become strange. (e.g how European families use and move in caravan)

It’s a subjective moment of otherness, the notion of known and unknown. Picture, motto and title, (images and text) altogether illustrate what he intend to do, he demonstrates how national identity and an attempt of homogeneity are not far from Xenophobia in different countries of Europe. Inclusion/ exclusion.

The second part of his lecture is called The Politics of Friendship. Through a video in Barcelona we see how narrative becomes important to the work. Seriality and sequentiality of photos explore the way human beings  and animal live together, the closeness between dogs (animals) and human beings.

He then talks about his experience in Estonia, while teaching photography. Students could speak English but they were a mile from a true understanding of the subject. Narrative/ problem of comprehension/ language…

In Zone 1, in reference to Andrei Tarkowski’s film, the Stalker (1979) he points out an allegory of what was happening in USSR. Aliens are contaminating the inhabitants of the Zone. Nobody knows what is really going on. The zone is a space where your unconscious desire will be fulfilled. Berlin was a zone where your desire would be a desire for capitalism, for the inhabitants of USSR.

In Zone 2 we see sixteen photos of the Zone (Tallin) in Estonia. The work is a dialogue between cultures, a kind of realism. Fragments become narrative. Realism and documentary : a fragmentary experience. The city has changed, it becomes strange, different, but it is still a city of soviet inheritance. A recipe of disaster things are not recognizable, everything is constantly changing. His work offers a picture of strangeness. Night-clubs and bars are like in the western world. It’s a kind of lost innocence…

The last work is an approach of what is similar within the western world. It’s a series of recent photos in Australians’ life titled Australia (09). The comfort of their apartments is like ours, the objects of the daily life, fridges, cups of tea, gardens, buildings, universities etc… Talking of friendship, If we think only in terms of likeness, sameness and togetherness we discard what makes us different each other, we are weakned. If we explore the boundaries between the sameness and the difference, we question our ability of living together.

The issue of is not in the recognition of the sameness, but in the division, a kind of split between public and private, their boundaries, nature and city, how we engage our implication. How we think urban space, nature, the cellular life and the possibility of thinking about globalization.

I have no doubt that together, considering our differences, we can rebuild a world different from this one, with a real sense of friendship, of otherness and togetherness, accepting the notion of strangeness as a whole, because in some way we are strangers to ourselves (Julia Kristeva). We will be working with our dreams, questioning our ability of finding solutions to our problems together…