to blog or not to blog

We started writing and I'm not sure if we were ready.  On the phone you said you were not sure about blogging as it wasn't writing, or not the kind of writing we need to start doing.  I thought about this and I think I probably agree.  Blogging is a kind of writing you can do when you find it difficult to do other sorts of writing.

I think sometimes when we write together we try and start to do a certain type of writing too early.  We have great conversations and big ideas and imagine an amazing book or articles but then we start to write it and it all sounds shit.  Then we find loads of literature that sort of say the same things we want to say and often say it better.

That's why I put the film of Jeremy Corbin in its from the Durham minors fair just after the 2017 sort of victory failure election when we thought anything was possible or at least the possibility of what was possible was very different to what had come before.

I think we have made a start which is good but we need to iron out some building blocks so we have some foundations of thought that we can build on.  Its then OK to argue about how we build the house and the extensions of the thought but we need to know something about the foundations and the lay of the land.  That is a good use for a blog like this that nobody else will probably ever read however clever we are.

“The whole is other than the sum of the parts.” — Kurt Koffka

I did a bit of reading about design and Gestalt ( which just means form in German)  but I thought this might be a good start as we haven't got around to really talking about what you mean by form we really just talk around it. As our 'proper' writing we have done so far really seems to talk about disciplines then it would be good in this more discursive space to talk about how form and discipline interconnect.

As a sculptor by training form used to mean the discernible edges of a material thing in space.  Look at a Brancusi or a Henry Moore and this is simple as the Form of the work ends often quite clearly at the boundary of an object.   We can look at this through different lenses and be speculative about the nature of matter and the levels of connections the viewer and the author intention and language - it is not difficult to complicate the idea of form or gestalt here but in simple terms the thing that draws our attention has clear edges and outside and an inside and can be perceived as an autonomous whole - a form that does not require anything but itself to be what it is- a sculpture.

Wrong People and Wrong Forms

I remember for many months you called the Odd Project Wrong Children and it nearly stuck.
One of the things on the projects that we struggled with was Wrong People.

This is what they did:

1. They assumed that everyone needed everything explaining to them: The Label Incident
2. They didn't understand that art had its own history and structure and the form of the art mattered. Kate Genever talked about the drawing pin moment.
3. They thought youth work was more important than art. I think this was fundamental in Taking Yourself Seriously.
4. They thought social science was the world and the flaky art world was not for them.
5. They thought the Floor was the world and the people who didn't get aesthetics were dull.

This is a bit negative but it makes me think about the importance of the Barthes quote, a new object that belongs to no one. it also helps me see how changing the form can be important.

Here is where the form changed for me:

1. When I sat with Marcus in a room trying to plan Language as Talisman and I was waiting for some young people to leave and then I realised they were part of the planning team.
2. When me and Patrick and the youth worker went to Bristol and changed our presentation on the train and the academics didn't want to look at how to stop young people dying of knife crime.
3. I will not mention the pebble incident.
4. When you said in the Museum in Barnsley about value being different for different people.
5. When Richard did his blog on fishing - it seemed to create a space for us all to come in and then it led to Hypertext which led to this book.

I think it would be good to make the form piece not just the usual 'intellectual ideas come in lots of forms' but something about moving through the form. The Holding Form might be a good place to start and also the Barthes quote. We could

work WITH form to discuss form.

Tilting at windmills

Tilting at windmills is an English idiom that means attacking imaginary enemies. The expression is derived from Don Quixote, and the word "tilt" in this context comes from jousting.
The phrase is sometimes used to describe either confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications. It may also connote an importune, unfounded, and vain effort against adversaries real or imagined.<sup>[53]  


I took the above image in ASSOS car park near Barnsley while doing a projection to support the NHS I had walked close to the building in 2011 when I was doing lots of walks with Richard and thinking slightly ironically about pysco - geography.  

When we did writing in the home and the street I don't think me and Richard were directly involved in the education work in the school.  It worked more in that we did some thinking walking and writing together as our part and you picked up some threads from this in the school and worked with some of the ideas with the kids.  I think this was quite a good way to work as it kept the art outside of the school and allowed bits to ebb and flow in and out without making tools plans or cookbooks.

The Art bit of our work was not collaborative and it could maintain itself within its fragility.  The work we did was for itself and we were trying to work, think and author together - not work with young people as co-producers.  Looking back this project was the first project where I was working as an artist rather than facilitating arts activities.   I say this in a way that suggests that this was better or the best way of working yet I'm not sure it actually is, at least in terms of doing research and not just making art.

In some ways when I look back to this project it feels a little like I was a different person; or perhaps had different priorities.  To keep talking about form I think I had an idea of what art was - as  form and I was comfortable with my idea of this.  The academic work was project work, distinct from 'my own work" and was about finding paid work so I could carry on doing what I was doing.  Richard says he feels like he was a different person then, when we went on our walks and although his journey has been very different to mine in the last 6 years there is still something different in a fundamental way in how I approach or imagine what I'm trying to do, it feels different.  

I wonder then if within our book there is something about ideas developing and unfolding across the projects.  There are clear points where things started to make more sense and points where we move apart.  I see two forms of action the first is a genuine attempts to unfold living knowledge  in ways that speak of change.  I never really buy into this as I'm not sure the university is the place to start this as a genuine endeavor.  The second form  is more a subversion, to question from the inside the universities given position of power and place of knowing.  Both forms may be tilting at windmills and an attempt to find redemption or chivalry as a knight errant companion of the Guild of st George. I wonder if there is something old fashioned about the way we are thinking of form and if every form is in a state of collapse combination and renewal.</sup>


 

Forms 2

I am going to write an alternative history of forms and see where it goes, so that there is a difference but an entanglement between the blog posts. It feels funny to be blogging again. I still miss the Big Bid it was good as there was so much there that seeped into the projects but it was like Life writing and a diary. I liked the way you called it Dairy and Alice's picture was the header.

So here are some thoughts:

The Ghazal is one of the central forms in Arabic Poetry. It originated in Persia and Flourishes in Urdu (from the Little Book on Form Hass 2017: 41)

I think when I think about form I start with Writing in the Home and in the Street, and the way the girls wrote stories that were then re-storied as oral stories. Not just How to Drown a Blondie and Bloody Boots but the Magic Seeds. Traces of Twilight and the Oxford Reading Tree and Horror Movies. The form as something, like Fornite and Tic Toc, that floats in the sea of school.

I am happy today as I think our Odd article was good and it went in. The form of the article is something to reflect on - we needed the Hundreds in order to write our separate section and the children needed the film form to do their commentaries as research. I feel we did a really good job there to disentangle form and separate it out but also take it seriously.

In Writing in the Home and in the Street Richard talked alot about the East Herringthorpe walks he did with you. He didn't pay as much attention to the children's walks. I remember doing these with Robin and the teachers. Back then, Robin was saving Rotherham, now we are saving him. It is very satisfying to think he will join ESRI this year, it feels like we are growing.

I am going off. Language as Talisman was good for me as it solidified research-in-a-school and I got a Welsh Neon saying Keywords out of it although that was artists.
Some questions:
What happens when you muddle form?
is form important or is it secondary to meaning?
Do we never get rid of our primary forms (me poetry, you sculpture?
Is it about function and meaning (Kate Genever's question)

I put the Ghazal in as I was thinking of when I worked on Writing in the Home and in the Street one of the women in the study told me about her grandfather who wrote poetry about partition. She was interesting about the Ghazal as a form.

decoy pigeons

I thought that you might like to blog again- it's been about two years since we finished the last blog which we did for five years.  The blogs are like comments in a zoom meeting, they run alongside threads of thoughts , sometimes they require comment and at other times like robotic seals they just float.

it feels good to have the book to think about ; its like a shadow at the moment, a shadow on the x ray of the lungs of a smoker or the shadow of a figure when you are not sure where the light is coming from.  All this started with pigeons but also I think for both of us a desire to be other than what we are or were. 

When we talk about our work together it is strange as it is only really the talking and the thinking that could be seen as a form.  Unlike my work with polytechnic the work we do together does not really fit the form of critically engaged contemporary arts practice.  Below I sketch out my journey through form that ended up in building a pirate ship and fixing toilets.  I have moved to a point where the form of a work is unimportant but there is a critical attachment to what it does.  I bring this criticality to my academic work with you but not through art or objects or discourse. I bring what is required in the moment to collectively and gently ease a loose form into a practice.

Although this could be read as if the work on our projects is lesser than the other work, secondary, coming after, drawing on, or following I do not think this is true, the work is just different.  The times my forms of critically engaged contemporary arts practice emerges are moments of complication.  There are not that many  so I will list them at some point but not today.

Within the Rotherham residency I was becoming artist again after 10 years off - I was making practise and you were doing ethnography, there was no real collaboration.  You liked the stuff I made because you thought it was cleverer than it should be. I was tackling the ethnographic collection head on and journeying to the heart of darkness the work was playful but also challenging, the work challenged everybody.

Then we did Artemis and you worked with me and Kate. We went to Boston and Kate impersonated you - we wrote a messy paper that got doctored so it could be published but it was shit.

Then I got you to come and work at Gooseachre and we secretly started to collaborate - do you remember me picking you up and driving you there and giving you the full run down of creative partnerships.   I wasn't the artist on this project I was the organiser - I did not bring an art form but I did more than admin.  I think we were like researchers but not in the academy- my role was conflicted but our writing became artful.

SPARKS was chaos a proper cross disciplinary dogs dinner but I think this is what most of these projects end up being - there were flashes of sparks in the imagine project. steep learning curves and disciplinary expertise

Writing in the home and the street was different as I was commissioned as an artist again and brought the form of my art which was messy.  Working with Richard was different more open and fewer expectations.  The work in East Herringthorpe school  making films with the children was like my creative partnerships work as a practitioner - I was doing a lot of this at the time as artist in residence for weeks and years, probably in 6 schools.

We then did dividing the draws, I think this was where I ruffled the form - challenged the writing  and really tried to think of outcomes as rhizomes - nothing was produced in its own right.

Portals to the past was extra  and it recycled another project I was working on for a gallery in Nottingham.  It never felt very comfortable but in retrospect it was good - our week in a catholic school making films - film making with young people is always on the edge I never see it as my practice unless its for projection.  The project used things I had made that I saw as my practice but they were repurposed - I had made the portals as a response to schools in Nottingham that were built by aircraft companies that used to make spitfires in the post war years. They were my secret practise of finding connections that were felt and aesthetic and linked to form in the way of how artists try to indirectly flow with a refrain of form.  I did this quite a lot and do it without any intention.  I thought everybody did but I wonder now how many of us do. Its not an artist thing but it is a thing.  I was concerned that this was lost when they got reused - not that anyone noticed it in the first place- perhaps the kids in the school felt it.

Language as Talisman  was like going backwards I was written in as a filmmaker to get funding and although this seemed like the only way to write me in it did impact on things.  There were other artists on this project like Cassie who worked in a familiar and sedimented way and everyone seemed happy with this. There is a laziness to cross disciplinary work and as it gets conflated with widening participation it becomes sloppy art and sloppy research. You like this project and you like working with poets you like having a resistant form to push against.  In the end though as an ethnographer you like to have anything to watch.  I respect this and learn from it.

Artists studio legacy project- I became a Co-eye then it seems to all fall away as the world of artistic research proper descends on us - we are not sure what we are doing but we are certainly doing it badly.

Then making representation differently and more falling from grace. Some gradual descent where I can't remember why it was so hard - men not listening is probably the problem though - an old one.

The DCLG housing one was nice - I felt respected and felt like I was liked - this was most like a residency in some ways I was the incidental person- nobody cared about the films - I leanrt a lot about localism and planning and we had trips and snacks.

Taking yourself seriously I think I went walkabout and built a pirate ship- it was the right thing to do.  We were trying to build something like we had had on earlier projects but somehow couldn't manage it.  I think you did build new reltionships in your school work and it was good I stepped out of that truama.

I think fishing was the best of it Johan is the kind of mind you need on these projects thoughts that are like glue that holds us together. Keri is a bit like this yet she doesn't suffer fools so sometimes she sinks the ships that are full of them.

I can't really talk about Imagine but it is running through all of this in the background- A five year residency that is underpinning my PhD. I cannot talk in detail about it as someone may take legal action against me in the libel courts.   But I think I managed to be the incidental person and looking back I am proud of my contribution.

Odd is still fresh and feels different - Have I forgotten any ?