A face of a super artist?

How do you create the face of a super artist? "Cut and stick" of course. This is one that i regrettably ripped off goggle, but this can be utilized as a visual example.

CoExist: In the studio

2011

Burning Britain.

It starts with a meaningless flicker,

and ends with a meaningless future.

 

 

Seconds pass by.

A single flame breaks out.

 

The ticking of the clock has begun.

Within a blink of an eye, flames start ripping through dreams that were built on ideals.

 

Individuals become people. People become hordes. Standing pointlessly watching the reality of a common future unfold.

 

Heart wrenching sounds of falling walls and shattering memories encased behind glass, echo across Britain’s failed land.

 

This is not a question of faith, reason, or beliefs.

This is not a question at all.

 

 

Minutes pass by.

A single dwelling has been consumed.

 

Air begins to carry the smell of a burning life.

It hits the back of your throat.

You collapse to your knees breathless, as if a hand were clasped tightly around your throat.

 

Hot embers jump up from the ground and singe bare skin.

The instant pinch of pain is an indication that you are still alive.

 

 

Hours pass by.

A single country is left suspended.

 

The ticking of the clock has stopped with a deafening silence.

 

The weight of darkness overwhelms the once familiar surroundings.

 

Blood, sweat, and tears drip to the ground leaving a shallow imprint for barely a second, before being buried with ash.

 

Streets become rivers, reflecting the torment, washing away the heat and the fire. Veins in the land have opened, but there is only dust to flow through them.

 

What is there left to fight for in this pulverised country?

 

Is this our meaningless future?

This is after all our Burning Britain.

Billboard: Look Up

Alternative art schools: 2011

Alternative art schools

 In December 2010 student occupations mushroomed across the UK. On the arts front Arts Against Cuts hosted an action-planning Long Weekend at Goldsmiths Student Union and occupied Tate Britain during the Turner Prize award ceremony. Art students from the Slade School of Fine Art were served a legal injunction and taken to court by their university, following their sit-ins.

 The student uprising comes at a time when the art world is embracing the value of historical alternative art schools and their ideological successors. The Long Weekend, as a collaborative non-hierarchical educational experience, opens up scrutiny of the prevalent inequalities that permeate the arts and offers alternative ways of working with and around the establishment.

 The Alternative Art School model - epitomised by the progressive and experimental learning model of Black Mountain College in the 1930s and Joseph Beuys' democratisation of the art school in the sixties - has in the last decade taken the shape of both the self-organised groupings of the anti-capitalist movement and the convivial spaces of Relational Aesthetics.

 Increasingly, leading art world institutions are positioning themselves as alternative educational spaces and drawing on what Liam Gillick refers to as the increasing demand for  "post post graduate working situations"1.  This is in addition to the explosion of life from artist or student collectives and tutor-led extra-institutional endeavours.

 Which ideology?

 In the 1950s, French resistance fighter and economist turned Fluxus artist, Robert Filiou co-initiated an 'un-school' in France. Moving away from political provocation to pacifism he identified the societal importance of the artist in that "A great deal of artists' work has to do with un-learning, with anti-brainwashing"2.

In recent years there have been concerns about the dumbing down of art education, the over-reliance on assessment and the shift from student as learner to student as consumer. As a student activist in 1999 my concern was with this shift. Today's debates are about the survival of arts courses beyond a status of luxury service for the few, alongside ongoing social and artworld inequalities: issues of redistribution of wealth, tax avoidance and the over-dependence of our sector on unpaid internships. As with the Long Weekend events, the Independent Art School generated out of my own activities in 1999 and was premised on the importance of art education and the art school. Protest came first, followed quickly by a questioning of educational philosophies.

 There are numerous articles circulating in academia that discuss how the hidden curricula of art education systems create different types of artists. Artists David Sweet and Liam Gillick have written with differing perspectives about the ideological changes in art education since the sixties. David Sweet defines the prevalent educational model as one combining an ideas-based emphasis with an identification of - and placing oneself within - new trends3. Liam Gillick observes, more positively, that "it is expected that this critical framework be rigorously contemporary in order to ensure that even if the student-artist claims complete disinterest in the critical components of their practice, they still understand this apparent disinterest is merely a component of an earlier critical structure rather than a rejection of critical potential per se.4"

 Jan Verwoert implies the existence of an "international circuit of marginal artists and academy members"5, who are yet still central to the art world.

Tom Holert traces the current emphasis on theory and artistic research methodologies to the radical debates and discussions held during the 1968 Hornsey School of Art protests in North London. In particular he quotes a student calling for art education to redress its pre-occupation with genius through the integration of theory and practice in order to be "real training for work"6. Real training that provides the tools for artists to impact beyond the elitism of the art world.

 This leads me to ask what current forms of knowledge are produced through student protests? Is the art school a feeder institution for the art world or a place that re-defines its structures and processes?

 Professional developments in protest:

Alongside political and social insight the protests are a learning experience for art students, and ironically they could be seen as a form of professional development. During the 'Long Weekend' at Goldsmiths I sat in on a media-training session led by a journalist who writes for national broadsheets. The insights into newspaper deadlines and newsdesk strategies are things today's media-savvy activists are keen to learn about as a result of their confrontations with police kettles and the widespread misconceptions about protesters commonly presented in the press.

This session in media manipulation, a by-product of the raw and real desire for political change, reminded me of my own initiation into networking and professional development, which also came unintentionally from my involvement in student activism rather than from any career-orientated decisions. This was not professional development (in a planned sense), rather a series of spontaneous and reciprocal encounters that taught me the importance of making contact with others with shared ideals.

 Current student activism is bringing in the question of a sustained ethical code of practice for the visual arts to the forefront of art educational debate. Concurrently it is versing students in strategic thinking and providing forums to question established professional routes by encouraging an insider understanding that allows the graduate to make more informed and politically conscientious decisions. In contrast to the still pertinent un-learning of the 1950s, it may be an understanding of the current socio-economic climate that allows them to forge their own alternatives thereby instigating real innovation and change.

CoExist: Conversation

CoExist: Lydia

Two spaces, two artists, two specialisms.

What happens when the process is presented as the art work?

How can the two spaces be utilised to explore the working relationship between two artists and their specialisms?

Through documenting the decision making of production/installation/curation and presenting this to the public, how is the dialogue between viewer and artist opened up?

I am still interested in our initial idea of presenting a fictional archive of performative props that also function as sculptural objects but for the NewRed space i'd like to focus on the dialogue that occurs between us in the exploration of ideas. Is it possible to document parts of this conversation and have this in the space either through video, audio or text? Or do we go along the lines of the gun table where we show the process of producing the archive but not the archive itself?

 

CoExist: Elise

If we were to split the two situations apart, I would understand it that NewRed would be a space where ordinary forms of documentation like audio, film and text can be utilized to capture raw data from the collaboration. When this data is compiled in its varying forms we can then try and understand it as art or not and only till then can we start to understand how this may work. I would also like to see or even emphasise how this does not work as I sometimes feel that only until you become comfortable with this aspect of any practise can we truly begin to appreciate the thin boundaries.

The Arts Centre can be the space that we can exploit in testing certain theories or ideas that would have been conceived through the process. In this case I would see "props" as an active part of how we explore the various ideas that you have mentioned above; however I agree in a sense that there is more to be had within this investigation than the simple displaying of performance props as static white cube art. The props are there to encourage us to further explore the boundaries which will mean we will have to consider how we visualise these key aspects.

We are two artists, in two situations, with two very different styles. But it’s not so much about that and somehow it is. I am more interested in what our “love child” would be like. The work need to take on a life of its own in order to either prevent from become torn between both parents (you and I) or becoming a space that houses two very different agendas. I think we are at that stage where we may need to consider this as an interesting avenue, for example we may decide to create a “super” artist as our collective. Or it could be merely a project. By “super” artist I mean a purely fictional artist that we all aspire to become, with their own website, forum, political agendas and stands for things that you and I are a bit hesitant to commit to. But this fictional artist, our love child would take on the aspects that either one of us as individuals can barely think about let alone committing publicly.

The Freed Market

The Freed Market

The Freed Market is a long term project based within the Winchester markets. A hired market stall functions as a discussion space for the public. Taking place on a monthly basis various artists will work in collaboration with Affect Collective to offer people the chance to talk about the economy and alternative futures in a neutral setting. The format this takes will be largely dependent on the public, refreshments will be sold and any profit made will be used to fund projects or events that the public feels will benefit the community. It opens up this space for imagining and presents it to the public for them to take ownership of. It may not result in direct change initially but it empowers people to take charge of the future they want to inhabit, it doesn’t just try to create a social experience for arts sake, it is a social experience around very pressing civic issues that people feel powerless to control. It may only result in symbolic actions, in terms of any real impact it has on the local economy, but this may well be the first step required to counter the inertia towards realizing sustainable alternatives.

Barrier Project: Statment

The Barrier Project is an experimental performance conducted in two situations: the institute and a public space. The Barrier Project is a site specific performance that involves the installation of several temporary barriers within a given space. The barriers are installed by the artist and would require the audience to negotiate their way around them to move through the space. Although the work is site specific it can be adapted to any location and the materials adjusted to meet any given space or situation. The works intention was to compare the effectiveness and responses of the two opposing situations and their audiences.

Affect Collective. 2012

Performance: Left Overs. 2011

Hand Shake.

Shooting Range: Installation Sketch. 2013

Artical: Something to ponder.

Event 3. at Winchester Shool of Art 2012

Barrier in the snow. 2013

Winchester Cathedral Barrier Project 2012

Affect Collective is a collaborative project between Salisbury based artist Elise Darlow and Winchester based artist Lydia Keith. Central to our investigation is the relationship between sculpture and performance. Can the installation of a sculptural object be presented as a performative act? Can sculpture perform? Do the props used within performance take on object status when presented outside of their original context? And how are these questions heightened when the work exists outside of the gallery space? In our individual studio practices we have been researching these different disciplines respectively. By coming together to explore the seemingly incompatible emphasis on form and function, the richness of our investigation comes from mapping the territory between the two.

For coexist, we present a series of items and accompanying texts that attempt to address the questions outlined above. The status of these items, whether considered as props from performances or sculptural objects in their own right, remains undefined. The viewer is also left uncertain as to whether they refer to past works or those yet to be realized. By deliberately obscuring the purpose these items exist for, we ask the question of what happens when they attempt to coexist.

Affect Collective, 2013

Arts Centre Salisbury. 2013

"wrapping Winchester Cathedral in red cling film during this festive season, for me, symbolised the gifting of the church to the local area"

James Atwell, Dean of Winchester Cathedral 2012

Drop zone 2013.