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Rob Smith Lecture

| jonwhitbread

Screwing up the map  and chucking it i then had to include that map in the next map and the those in the next and so on. This suggested a third space  and voice as the map simplified and transferred its attention away from the furniture and towards a concept.

The 2 dimensions to screwed up 3d, back to 2, drawn onto,image tracing creases, is a useful way of visualising our place in the world and its place in us. Lines, sets, subsets, mesh.

Im interested in non-linear, non-dialectic possibilities at least as a mind game (eg in eternity everything occurs simultaneously? etc) and the screwed up ball is a useful symbol of this.

Just finished reading Dr Faustus (Thomas Mann), that has at its core a nasty case of toxoplasmosis, as metaphor for the creative process, where the Faust character is driven by his unconscious to contract syphilis which lends him the mad genius to compose extraordinary music, but at a terrible price.

Robs lecture was very good. His mad lime based art works smacked of Professor Brainstorm does Royal Academy Xmas Lecture.

His leaking pinhole camera photographing the instant water mixed with light makes contact with photo paper is wondrous. Like recording the moment electricity leaps across a synapse to contact the other side

Contextual Research: Plinth

| jonwhitbread

Plinth as altar for art object as sacrificial offering to be carved up by viewers

Plinth as dais for objects to be approached and worshipped in awe and wonder

Plinth as symbol of the act of generosity and emergence

Plinth for status, statue, standing

Plinth as soap box

Plinth as pulpit

Plinth to personify, lend identity, anthropomorphise

Plinth to raise object to convenient height to encourage interaction and motion

Plinth as obstacle

Plinth to involve, include

Plinth to ‘denigrate, ridicule, exclude’ (A. Rogers)

Plinth absented to involve, include (Gormsley)

Plinth as instrument to transform, elevate object into art

Plinth as art object (Brancusi’s Endless Column umbilically supporting sky from earth or earth from sky)

Plinth as masculine, penetrative symbol of power and control

Plinth as tool for negotiation

Plinth holding up object

Plinth transferring load to ground

Plinth as tabula rasa (4th Plinth Project co-opted as advertising platform for London)

Plinth left empty by torn down statues, awaiting the next tyrant, symbol of the repeated failure of utopian revolution

Plinth as stage

Plinth as sculpture

Plinth as subject of research

 

 

 

Making day

| jonwhitbread

Worked at home in basement.

Strong coffee.

Had to go out into the cold wet morning to buy pegs.

Then up and down stairs with various sculptures.

Tracing and rubbing each side with black oil pastel, sometimes carved into for texture and as a gesture to carved stone, onto 50gsm paper that has a lovely texture and sound.

Child-like sense of excitement.

Pleased with results. X-rays.

I’ve been making plinths For Found Objects.

They’re about how the unconscious and conscious communicate. I carve and sandblast the stone to create a stage for the story.

These drawings are a parody of scientific methodology searching for large and small objects as tho they might contain meaning.

They’re a parody of my own search for meaning.

They’re a comment on the impenetrability of contemporary art and its language and on the ‘scientificisation’ (necessarily ugly word) of art, how we are required to support our work with data, methodology and evidence.

They’re a rejection of making drawing for sculpture, instead making sculpture for drawing.

A probing of cause and effect, with plinth, drawing, sculpture and object all sharing equal and holistic status.

 

 

Research

| jonwhitbread

Im struggling with trying to come up with an area for my research essay/project.

I think its to do with the fact that my interests, what I make art about, are internal, rarely external.

Therefore I think i need to find an external subject to challenge myself.

Im aware that my practice is self-indulgent. Im aware that art is being kept alive, relevant and valid by artists that work in the political realm (small ‘p’ political)

eg yesterday I streamed a symposium #workingacrossdivides

with Alisdair Hudson (Middlesboro Institute of Modern art) and Barby Asante (artist) at the Goethe Institute

where a whole other world (real world) of art practice was described that takes place within communities, enabling marginalised people through art.

It makes me feel old fashioned and stuckist. However I am 52 and on my own journey and I am constantly challenging myself.

However here is an opportunity to research unfamiliar territory.

The plinth and the hierarchy of art presentation? (reflecting my current explorations)

Hamada pottery? (gesture, the unconscious, alchemy, art object)

Is all art (including political) illustration? When is art not illustration? (eg when it describes, explains or reflects it is illustration so all pre-religious art, religious art and much of modern art is illustration. Discuss)

How have artists sought to address antagonistic political movements? (thinking of the failure of humour and head-on resistance art to the rise of Neo-Populism in US and here) (quite like this one).

Id love to come up with an idiosyncratic Cabinet style area that is ‘alive, relevant and valid’.

Looking at Barbaras proposals im quite awed and intimidated!

 

 

Plinths For Found Objects

| jonwhitbread

I found these objects in stone that I tore apart, destroyed, replaced. These are salvage. I have polished their feet and found them a new home. On one level. A sort of anthropomorphic explanation. What really explains the history of this journey? Only the interplay of unconscious and conscious states. Despite being entirely unconnected in the material world, the male torso-like object fits inside the female objects.