Its an interesting proposition, to use Morton's advice for writing a Phd as a model for constructing an artistic practice. At the same time, I think I am a little unclear on what the direct analogues between archives and methods within an artistic practice are.
There's a part where he talks about not second guessing the Other, which I guess is his way of saying not to anticipate every possible critique of your work and then counter it within the work itself because it seems to lead down a rabbit warren of endless parsing, much like Xeno's paradox. I think we've talked about this before, that you don't need to go through the agonizing process of over analyzing your own work as that leaves no room for, or should actually be the province of the critic, audience, curator etc. So I definitely overthink works, to the point where it interferes with the formal expression of it, and I think it's a problem. But I also think that your have to have a certain amount of over-self-reflexivity in order for the work to be valid, but it's a matter of 'holding the thought', or leaving it a little unresolved in the minds eye and then giving it up to the world to reorganizing the unique proposition you've proffered.
The way I've constructed this in my work seems now to be through process of reading and thinking, building the archive and then, using the formal frameworks of anthropological 'fieldwork' and artistic 'social practice' as a methodology to mediate, correct and contradict that archive. At that point, you engage in rebuilding the archive as an artistic work, where the conceits of the original archive of interests, theory and research are tempered and beaten into shape in the forge of Hephaistos which we might call reality and lived experience which you then use to transmute and sublimate a new archive which one might call an artwork but which is also an index of a universe you've created.
If you go to a traditional artschool, you'll get talk after talk about methods and techniques-and though it may seem superficial, it is worth considering the analogy between how Morton uses the term 'methods' and how it is used in art history to determine the efficacy of it as a productive comparison or model. A 'method' in art practice I think is understood as a haptic and sensorial control of ones body and certain tools, the pressure of a brush against canvas, the weight of a thumb in a piece of clay, and it is the product of the manipulation of form by the body as a subject which is read as a correlative and consequential analogue between thought, sense, action and form which is what we call artistic method. The method 's' are the various and manifold codifications of these practices over history and I feel like, if we break artistic methods down into purely phenomenological phenomena then, a individual using his tools and instruments to effect 'living as form' then we can understand art in an expanded field and Beuy's 'social sculpture' and emergent discourses of social practice, relationailty etc.. Within this constellation, what is the analogue of the archive in artistic practice? Presumably 'content' and 'personal mythology' over form. I guess another question for me is, what is the relationship between the archive and the self-ie. Do you need to have a Chinese mother from Africa to take the Chinese in Africa as your archive? And, if we go back to the academic context, I don't believe anyone questions the legitimacy of Brautigan's interest in the subject despite a lack of a personal mythology attached to the subject. So the question becomes, 'how to choose ones archive?' and 'must the archive be a personal archive?'
No comments:
Post a Comment