Month: March 2018

Recently I’ve been reading more than looking at art works themselves, something that I’m aware of and will try to balance more successfully next term.

TRACEY ROSE – TKO
This piece comprises of a six-minute recording of the naked artist striking a punching bag with a camera attached to it with increasing force, slowing the footage down in certain parts before speeding it up again when impact occured. The physicality of the work was modulated by its subsequent projection onto a transparent scrim, which rippled and crumpled as if being physically affected by what was being projected onto it: a punching bag for the image.

(1)

According to ArtThrob.co.nz, “Recently, Rose’s work has become more abstract. The piece Rose refers to as “my masterpiece” is TKO (2000), which had its roots when Rose took up boxing and trained at a downtown Johannesburg gym for an extended period “because I wanted to beat up a curator who I thought put up an extremely crap show – I decided not to participate” Invited in 2000 to take up a residency at the prestigious ArtPace Institute in San Antonio, Texas, Rose proposed the piece which became TKO, in which the artist, unclothed, boxes a punching bag in an ever increasing crescendo of blows and cries, under the surveillance of four spy cameras, including one in the punching bag itself . “Monet’s waterlilies struck me – that commitment to the surface – my understanding of boxing was that it was an art, a passion, like dancing, and the intention was that each punch would be a mark, a gesture, building up to something”. The images are pale and shifting, the sounds urgent and guttural, and the artist/protagonist is both victim and aggressor, implicating the viewer in this complex visceral exchange.” (1)

RICHARD PRINCE – COWBOYS
I am not a fan of Richard Prince at all. He’s extremely problematic and I don’t believe that any his recent work does much to redeem himself as a white male artist with a considerable amount of power. However, I did find his 1989 piece Cowboys fairly interesting, in the sense of a male dominating a landscape in the name of advertising.
(2)
It reminded me of the tourism leaflets with the figure gazing across the Grand Canyon/New York City/A Norwegian Glacier etc.  that were talked about in Nick Kaye’s book on Site Specificity and Performance, which of course hark back to those romantic paintings of male figures standing over a sprawling landscape, displaying Caspar david Friedrich’s idea of the landscape being something to be both coveted and feared. I recently photoshopped the protagonist out of Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (as a pastiche of Paul Pfieffer), but I’m not sure if I’ll do anything with it.

PAUL PFEIFFER

The Pfeiffer work that I was recommended was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series, where the artist selected imagery from the NBA’s archive and ‘camouflaged’ critical contextual details of the scene, such as the basketball, players’ vest graphics, and even background players, leaving behind these eerie images of solitary figures lunging at nothing, followed by the wide eyes of a baying crowd.
These works were a follow up to an earlier series of work by the artist entitled 24 Landscapes, which at first do seem like ordinary seascapes, until you start to notice a sourceless shadow, or a set of tracks leading to the centre of the image before halting. These used to be images of Marilyn Monroe, but Pfeiffer edited her out of them, shifting the focus completely without giving the audience a choice.  This process of digitally ‘camouflaging’ is very interesting, and something I’d like to explore myself.

SHOWS (Painting)

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye/Cecily Brown @ ‘All Too Human’, Tate Britain

Michael Armitage @ SLG

Kaye Donachie @ Maureen Paley

(1) https://artthrob.co.za/01mar/artbio.html
(2) https://www.guggenheim.org/arts-curriculum/topic/cowboys
All other photos my own

I’m new to the idea of Affect, and it seems to be a tricky subject to breach. However, I think it could be useful when looking at the fictionalised physics of cartoon imagery and some of the other things I’m trying to understand within my work.
Below are a few branches of the theory, as summarised by Sean Owczarek. (This is for initial personal reference only: I will look into these further before accepting these brief explanations as accurate.)

”
Brian Massumi: Affect is a visceral, raw pre-feeling. Feelings are socially constructed distortions of affect. Affect is the manifestation of the body’s internalisation of an intensity. It cannot be rendered by language or any other kind of transmittable information. Affect is perpetually undulating and reforming. It is more bodily than cognitive. The body is integral to the understanding of affect. (***This is something else I’m looking into, with essays such as those in Carnal Thoughts exploring this***) Massumi describes the “walls” of the body as sensory receptors which allow for the intensity of an experience to be transmitted and internalised. The transmission of affect is not the exchange of affect from thing to body or body to body, it is the infolding and unfolding of intensities between the two bodies, which can be virtual or flesh. These intensities resonate apart from intended meaning of context.

Theresa Brennan: Teresa Brennan defines affect partially as, “any evaluative (positive or negative) orientation towards an object.” This idea identifies affect as a judgement rather than an emotion or an expression of an emotion. The parts of affect that can evaluate and judge will distinguish the physiological responses it evokes from those associated with influxes of passion or emotion. Brennan surmises that this is the important distinction between affect and emotion, as what one feels with and what one feels are two separate phenomena. She affirms that emotions correlate to pre-existing affective connections. However, she maintains that affects are physiological things. Emotions are forceful projections which are deposited or “dumped” after they are expressed, whereas affects can move more freely. Affects have the ability to intensify or weaken. Brennan defines the transmission of affect as the idea that our energies are not exclusively ours and that there is no distinction between the individual and their surroundings. Affects are continuously flowing in and out of both.

Patricia Clough (commenting on Massumi): Clough begins with Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as bodily responses which are removed from consciousness and arise instead from “visceral perception.” Massumi’s affect is about identifying the body as a hub of indeterminate responses. Affect is in a virtual space containing infinite potential. Massumi preserves the unconscious quality of affect by affirming that there is always a virtual “remainder” after emotion, language, and conscious perception. Consciousness is mundane in comparison as it reduces the complexity of affect. Massumi points to the emergence and potential of affect as it moves through a loop between virtual and actual. Clough specifies that Massumi’s idea of the body’s indeterminacy is not looking to the “pre-social” body. Massumi clarifies that affect is “open-endedly social.” In other words, that affect comes before the formation of distinctions between individuals. Affect exists in the temporality of emergence. This virtual temporality is the force that gives affect its autonomy from language, sensation, and emotion.

Sarah Ahmed: In contrast with Massumi, Ahmed doesn’t believe affect to be autonomous. Affect is a corresponding element of a preexisting object. She observes affect through how it relates to the experiential, and how our surrounding worlds effect us. Ahmed states, “Happiness remains about the contingency of what happens, but this ‘what’ becomes something good.” Happiness connects us to the objects we find pleasing, and we form profound bonds with these things. This pleasurable affect sustains itself through the comings and goings of the objects themselves. The ways in which our bodies relate to the things we find enjoyable also changes over time, as our impressions change as our bodies change. Affect arises through the evaluation of thing.

Megan Watkins: Affect has the ability to rouse people in one moment, and then move quickly away from the minds of the affected. Watkins questions whether or not there are residual effects of affect. She notes Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the force of the object catalyzing affect), and affectio (the impact of affectus). Affect has the ability to leave residual pieces behind which can then influence an individuals’ subjectivities and perceptions. This differs from Massumi, who believes affect to be a fleeting escape from confinement. The accumulation of information is seemingly reserved for phenomena such as memories, which then cause emotion. However, Watkins understands affect as having the capacity to collect over time as a bodily memory that can both effect cognition and move outside the parameters of one’s consciousness.

Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg: Seigworth and Gregg begin An Inventory of Shimmers by identifying affect’s “in-betweenness” (in this case, the in-between-ness to act and be acted upon). Their theory describes affect as both a movement within a state of relation between different things or people, and the exchange of intensities (as well as the duration of the movements between these intensities). Seigworth and Gregg view affects as forces that: exist on a guttural, Ur level; are removed from cognitive “knowingness”; and move beyond emotion. Affect spurs people to move, think, extend, and intensify. Seigworth and Gregg also note the problem with interchanging the word “force” with “affect,” considering affect is not necessarily forceful in every case. Affect is more of an event which occurs during exchanges and movements between intensities. Affect is created within an in-between space. This space exists between two or more intensities. Affect is the state that exists between the utterance of a word and the meaning of the word. It rises from in-between-ness and lives in a state of beside-ness.
”

I’ve started reading ‘Ordinary Affects’ by Kathleen Stewart, and there’s a section within the first chapter that seems to allude to Seigworth, Gregg, Ahmed and Massumi’s lines of thinking. This idea of Affect as something accumulating and moving between bodies, objects and places, never quite reachable through language or emotion, and, as described “at once abstract and concrete”. It’s this kind of constant shifting that I was to explore in relation to the imagery and ideas I’m looking at, as stated above.

Books and Essays still to read:

Jill Bennett – Practical Aesthetics
RARA Series
Kathleen Stewart – Ordinary Affect
Simon O’Sullivan – The Aesthetics of Affect

Through the consumption of many American coming of age films; American punk tour documentaries like 1991: The Year Punk Broke (Sonic Youth) and I Hate The Way You Love (The Kills); books like Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre and an endless stream of  VHS midwestern emo garage show recordings on YouTube, suburban and rural America (if a little romanticised) always intrigued me greatly throughout my teen years. There were so many parallels to growing up in rural England yet it seemed intangibly alien, and on a very trivial level, so much more exciting. It goes without saying that America is dealing with a lot of really terrible issues at the moment, and again, it goes without saying that it often doesn’t deal with them very well. These impacts often  with documentaries like Tracey Droz-Tragos-directed Rich Hill revealing this. I’m not sure what it is that’s so incomprehensible and exciting to me about the idea of growing up there – maybe it’s because as a destination it’s so much more expensive than Europe and so always seemed inaccessible, I don’t know.
Equally, the landscapes seem familiar yet more expansive, again more exciting, as if you could disappear into them and actually find something interesting. I grew up surrounded by fields but never really felt this, and of course don’t now that I live in London. There seem to be more in-between spaces to explore in America, which makes sense considering there are some towns and areas that can’t be traversed without a lengthy car drive. A few pieces come to mind when thinking of these American in-betweens, such as Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic. The artist took the bus from New York City to his birthplace of Passaic, new Jersey, taking with him “a note book, a camera, The New York Times and a science fiction novel by Brian W. Aldiss entitled Earthworks.” (1) What resulted was the aforementioned essay along with a selection of photos displaying the ‘holes’ that Smithson saw in Passaic, a place on the brink of death and birth simultaneously.
I also recently watched a documentary directed by Monteith McCollum about his grandfather and farmer in the Depression era, Milford Beeghly, who grew obsessed with developing a hybrid species of black and white corn, and how this impacted his family and, eventually, the whole midwestern farming system. Although a strange topic for a film, it was a beautiful study of pragmatic spiritual values and emotional inhibitions, as well as showing light, form and space in a surprisingly interesting way. The film featured many strange stop-start animations, for example. Dirt would begin to creep into frame and cover family photographs, and ears of corn would start dancing across work surfaces, jerkily revolving on their axises.
The film is beautifully shot, with many of the lingering landscapes and Bresson-esque close-ups of hands making a particular impression (see below):

Although not directly (or maybe not at all) related to my work, these strange American ‘slice of life’ movies always attract me, and makes me to make more films.