The Research Practice
❮
❯
The research has been phrased as a series of open-ended experiments in which different sculptures are put in front of different cameras to see what happens. It has been important that the practice be driven by an approach that is not overly systematic, and that the possibilities for the sculpture and camera be explored in an open-ended and not overly-determined manner; thus leaving space for entropy, chance and intuitive exploration. The aim has not been to provide an exhaustive or systematic overview, nor to seek a definitive knowledge of all types of camera/sculpture relations. This might too easily lead to a situation in which new possibilities are concealed in favour of making definitive claims or establishing models of ‘best’ practice, which might dictate and limit future ways of working.
To this end the testing has not followed standard laboratory rules: there have been no controlled tests, experiments have not been conducted in a formulaic of systematised way, nor have they been employed in order to prove or disprove particular suppositions. They embody instead the spirit of testing, aiming to uncover something previously unknown by bringing together elements, for example, a specific sculpture in front of a certain type of camera. The aim is a form of feedback or multiple testing process, allowing the elements themselves to dictate the progress of the experimentation and to be ready or poised to acknowledge and develop the things that take place.
The process can be broken into four broad stages: initial construction of a physical object, bringing it to be filmed, reviewing and editing (in the case of 16 mm processing), and presentation to an audience. In practice however, these tend not to happen in an entirely straightforward manner. Sculptures are often brought in front of the camera at the early stages of construction and then reworked before being filmed again. Reviewing and editing may prompt new types of formal construction. A single sculpture may be filmed by several different cameras over an extended period, placed alongside others and explored in different contexts. Likewise, presenting the work to an audience may prompt new ways of looking, options for editing and sequencing, and ideas for new or reformulated sculptures and types of filming. Films have been shown alone, or on split-screen, in exhibition contexts and in presentations and workshops. The aim has not been to find the best way for them to be presented, but rather to use the encounter with the viewer or workshop participant as a means to extend and uncover possibilities within the research material, and to present the work as always mutable, partial, complex and as an invitation to further engagement and questioning.
Nicholas Addison, in his essay ‘Developing Creative potential: Learning Through Embodied Practices’ (2010), describes a heuristic approach to art teaching which is remarkably close to that which I have articulated in relation to my own practical research. ‘The idea of a heuristic activity suggests a process of discovery, of not knowing the outcomes of an activity even though participants may have clear aims and goals; in other words, heurism is a process of finding out and coming to know, not being told.’(Addison 2010, p. 44) Something similar might be seen in Rebecca Fortnum’s understanding of the artist’s studio, ‘as a device, a technology if you will, that allows artists to dwell in their process and that this dwelling [is] important because it is only over time that an artist comes to understand why and how they do what they do as well as what it is they have done [...] a sense of not knowing quite what is being done urges the artist on.’ (Fortnum 2009) In this sense, uncertainty within defined parameters is the driver of creative exploration, the studio allowing space and time in which the artist can dwell amongst, and come to know, what it is they are making.... Citing Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Addison describes learning as ‘a social process through which people make meaning from experience’. (Addison 2010 p. 48) In contrast to an understanding of learning based on knowledge transfer, Addison describes how, ‘the learner is recognised as the maker of meaning and the teacher as the person who constructs learning situations to make this process possible.’ (ibid) Learning environments are therefore created that both, ‘provide opportunity and encourage students to think and behave differently to the ways they have done before. (ibid, p. 49)
This description of the learning environment maps usefully onto the research which happens in the film studio or filming situation, where the encounter with the camera is constructed as a means of investigating, analysing and thinking differently with the sculptures placed in front of them. It is the artist as researcher who facilitates situations (for themselves) in which learning can take place and knowledge can be created. Knowledge which is not discrete or abstracted, but contextualised and embodied within a process that is not directed, for example, towards puzzling out a particular aspect of the object but rather one which enters into a dialogue with the sculptures made to be filmed and has the potential to impact upon and reconfigure our constructions, preconceptions and understandings of the world more generally.
This understanding of my own solitary studio practice became clearer in relation to two workshops led by artist Lucy Cran, which I supported at Kingston School of Art and the University of Brighton in 2017. (Documentation from these workshops is available at https://performingsculpture.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: 5 September 2019)) In each case a group of students were asked to make sculptures which might perform or that they could perform with. They spent the morning designing and constructing objects, and in the afternoon brought them to the film studio in order to perform with them. What was striking about this afternoon session was the way in which the students interacted with the things they had made. Rather than ‘finished’ pieces being brought in front of the camera in order to show-case the students’ expectations, there was a sense in which they were learning the possibilities and significance of the objects they had made through physical exploration, and that this was as much a part of the making process as the earlier construction of the sculptures. This process was happening collaboratively and within a social context. To a certain extent, it was structured or enabled by the presence of the camera, which had produced an altered energy in the room. The students knew they were being recorded and this made their play more focused. When we were younger, Lucy Cran and I worked together in an experimental theatre company, and the students’ playful exploration reminded us of the methods we had used then to create performances: closing the doors, setting the camera rolling and improvising. Then too, it was the camera that gave the activity a sense of purpose: that it could be watched again later, but also that the camera acted as an outside eye, an audience which heightened our awareness of what we were doing. Improvisations can often be frustrating experiences punctuated with moments of excitement and flurries of creative energy. For the students in the workshop, it felt that they had a wealth of things to play with and explore, and whilst there was initial caution, once involved in the activity of playing with their sculptures together in front of the camera there was an ease and fluidity to their interactions and imaginative responses.
Perhaps we could see this activity in much the way Vygotsky (2004) discusses Newton’s great insight when seeing an apple fall from a tree. His argument is that were it not for Newton’s many years of work and research, the amassing of a body of experience, he would not have been placed to recognise what he saw and conceptualise it as gravity. Whilst on a smaller scale (hours rather than years) we could see that the work done by the students in advance of the improvisation, had primed them with ideas and experiences which allowed a free flow of imaginative possibilities to be explored. We could perhaps see this as an ideal scenario within the context of this research and the work that has happened predominately alone within the studio; a scenario which is aimed and prepared for, but which can never be guaranteed. Equally, the sculptures of this research share an unfinished or open quality, as with those made by the students. Like Franz West’s Passstücke (1979) they are intended to invite interaction, whether this be physically with the human body or through the lens of the camera, and this expectation creates different criteria when physically constructing the objects. Different materials, forms and attributes are included, developed or tried out, less for the way they look, or for internal compositional or spatial relationships, but rather for what these characteristics might afford or prompt within the highly particularised filmed encounter.
The focus of the research is therefore not on what cameras do to objects per se, although this is an important aspect of the enquiry. It is more a question of how the filming situation can augment the creative process and be used to create new understandings of sculpture: what kinds of sculptures are created when in anticipation of being filmed and how can they be activated by human intervention, enabled, inflected and recorded by the camera?
This might appear to diminish the importance of the images created, focusing attention instead upon the process itself, but this is not entirely the case. The films and moving images created are fundamental to the artist’s understanding of the activity in front of the camera. The films document these explorations, except that there is no sense in which these are activities that would happen without the presence of the camera. Film becomes the vehicle through which creative activity is undertaken and revealed both to an audience and to the artist, as it is often only after the fact, on reviewing the footage, that the artist discovers exactly what has been created.
Equally the sculptures made to be filmed are objects which only exist because of the camera. The two are inseparable. Consideration of one is consideration of the other. This is why the sculptures and films can be shown side by side within the gallery without any sense in which the presence of the ‘real’ objects makes the films redundant. The viewer’s grasping and consideration of these sculpture-objects is in relation to their film-ability. Seeing the objects in ‘real life’, albeit always alongside the films or with the invitation to make films, only serves to strengthen this relationship.
An important question then may be how these moments of discovery, of alchemy even, are recognised, when what one is engaged in aims, in the moment, for a non-analytic, intuitive state of mind in which physical exploration moves in a moment to moment responsive way.
Whilst certain trends can be identified in the research, among them the sculptures’ modernist aesthetic, a preference for images which remove the objects from any particular context, and the physical handling of, or interaction with sculptures in front of a locked-off camera. Rather than articulating and establishing these implicit rules as a fixed series or set which govern the work, it will be of more use to discuss the type of decision making at work, foregrounding artistic processes which are ‘used’ or set into play in order to generate creative work through intuitive and explorative conditions.
It may be useful at this point to consider Gregory Bateson’s description of a young child playing with building blocks. Unlike in a game where there are clear and pre-determined rules this play appears unstructured and exploratory. The rules, if they are to be considered as such, have something to do with the way in which blocks can be stacked, with gravity and balance.
‘[...] The blocks themselves make a sort of rules. They will balance in certain positions and they will not balance in other positions. And it would be a sort of cheating if the child used glue to make the blocks stand up in a position from which they would otherwise fall.’ (Bateson, 1987, p.28)
The play, which characterises the exploration of objects with the camera, operates under similar types of physical and natural conditions. The equipment poses certain restrictions and possibilities which are negotiated through the act of filming. Likewise, the objects being filmed have specific qualities, react in certain ways to lighting and camera angle, contrast and colour recognition. They offer ways of being handled, arranged and moved depending on their shape and size, weight and feel, their formal and aesthetic aspects.
Working through the myriad of tiny and often intuited decisions is beyond the scope of this piece of writing and of significantly less interest than understanding the ways in which this type of activity is undertaken. The child’s play with blocks is engaged and intuitive, rather than critical and rationalised. Bateson describes it as having something to do with gravity. His repeated use of the phrase ‘sort of’ hints at the dangers of specifying exactly what is happening, as if it were a definite and repeatable phenomenon. The play of the child is far more delicate and nuanced than that. It is a type of unspoken negotiation with objects and contexts, with physical and material conditions, that is of importance to both the artist and the child. Knowing the moment at which something sits ‘just right’ within the frame, or responding to a knobbly bit on the side of an object by gently running one’s fingers over it, slamming something down on a surface, or gently rotating it in one’s hands, these are decisions made without purpose beyond the immediate ebb and flow of careful physical engagement, negotiation and play. Decisions are therefore made within this spirit of intuitive engagement which is fostered throughout the making and presentation process. Editing and selecting footage is often done on the basis of surprise or based on the recollection of moments in which new or unexpected possibilities seemed to arise. What is hoped for is a sense of finding something out which could not have been predetermined. When the work has been exhibited, it is always with the invitation to continue thinking and manipulating the objects, or to see the films and sculptures side by side in order to experience them in different ways. The aim of this process, and to a certain extent of this research, is one of continuing dialogue and the maximising of possibilities.
It is also important to acknowledge the silent criteria by which practical art making moves forward, and the background from which the process itself arises. As in Vygotsky’s example of Newton, the background to discovery, in my case, would include my own experiences of the research thus far and more generally those of being an artist; my unconscious leaning toward certain aesthetics or ways of working and the social and cultural context - the types of sculpture and images which provide the larger context to the enquiry. A huge mass of factors are in play at any moment. Perhaps this could be a reason why some artists are drawn to intuitive forms of working. Physical and intuitive engagement and immersion in an activity can open onto, and allow for, an incredible complexity of physical, intellectual and emotional response, which could not be rationally arrived at. Attempts to marshal and account for all this contextual knowledge and experience could be overwhelming and lead either to undesired simplification or confusion.
It may also be worth mentioning at this point the importance of the ‘hand’ within the research, as an expression of the manual and human-centred focus of the research methodology. As becomes clear in references to the Pre- Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, and Matthew Crawford’s discussions of the physical and experiential nature of knowledge (2010), within the ‘Aphorisms’ text included in this submission, and in comments made by participants at a showing of work at Peer Session recorded below, the ‘hand’ is a consistent presence within much of the practical research, whether hovering at the edges of the frame or evidenced in the handmade qualities and textures of the objects themselves. The ‘hand’ is an actualisation and a metaphor for the type of embodied, heuristic and holistic art practice being put forward here as research; one which sees thinking and physical exploration as bound together, centred within a particular place and in a particular body.
Sally Lightfoot Crab
A scuffle between two Nazca Boobies
A waterfall discovered on a hike in Otovalo
Pelican
Sally Lightfoot Crab
A scuffle between two Nazca Boobies
A waterfall discovered on a hike in Otovalo
Pelican
Sally Lightfoot Crab
A scuffle between two Nazca Boobies
A waterfall discovered on a hike in Otovalo
Pelican
Sally Lightfoot Crab
A scuffle between two Nazca Boobies
A waterfall discovered on a hike in Otovalo
The research has been phrased as a series of open-ended experiments in which different sculptures are put in front of different cameras to see what happens. It has been important that the practice be driven by an approach that is not overly systematic, and that the possibilities for the sculpture and camera be explored in an open-ended and not overly-determined manner; thus leaving space for entropy, chance and intuitive exploration. The aim has not been to provide an exhaustive or systematic overview, nor to seek a definitive knowledge of all types of camera/sculpture relations. This might too easily lead to a situation in which new possibilities are concealed in favour of making definitive claims or establishing models of ‘best’ practice, which might dictate and limit future ways of working.
To this end the testing has not followed standard laboratory rules: there have been no controlled tests, experiments have not been conducted in a formulaic of systematised way, nor have they been employed in order to prove or disprove particular suppositions. They embody instead the spirit of testing, aiming to uncover something previously unknown by bringing together elements, for example, a specific sculpture in front of a certain type of camera. The aim is a form of feedback or multiple testing process, allowing the elements themselves to dictate the progress of the experimentation and to be ready or poised to acknowledge and develop the things that take place.
The process can be broken into four broad stages: initial construction of a physical object, bringing it to be filmed, reviewing and editing (in the case of 16 mm processing), and presentation to an audience. In practice however, these tend not to happen in an entirely straightforward manner. Sculptures are often brought in front of the camera at the early stages of construction and then reworked before being filmed again. Reviewing and editing may prompt new types of formal construction. A single sculpture may be filmed by several different cameras over an extended period, placed alongside others and explored in different contexts. Likewise, presenting the work to an audience may prompt new ways of looking, options for editing and sequencing, and ideas for new or reformulated sculptures and types of filming. Films have been shown alone, or on split-screen, in exhibition contexts and in presentations and workshops. The aim has not been to find the best way for them to be presented, but rather to use the encounter with the viewer or workshop participant as a means to extend and uncover possibilities within the research material, and to present the work as always mutable, partial, complex and as an invitation to further engagement and questioning.
Nicholas Addison, in his essay ‘Developing Creative potential: Learning Through Embodied Practices’ (2010), describes a heuristic approach to art teaching which is remarkably close to that which I have articulated in relation to my own practical research. ‘The idea of a heuristic activity suggests a process of discovery, of not knowing the outcomes of an activity even though participants may have clear aims and goals; in other words, heurism is a process of finding out and coming to know, not being told.’(Addison 2010, p. 44) Something similar might be seen in Rebecca Fortnum’s understanding of the artist’s studio, ‘as a device, a technology if you will, that allows artists to dwell in their process and that this dwelling [is] important because it is only over time that an artist comes to understand why and how they do what they do as well as what it is they have done [...] a sense of not knowing quite what is being done urges the artist on.’ (Fortnum 2009) In this sense, uncertainty within defined parameters is the driver of creative exploration, the studio allowing space and time in which the artist can dwell amongst, and come to know, what it is they are making.... Citing Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Addison describes learning as ‘a social process through which people make meaning from experience’. (Addison 2010 p. 48) In contrast to an understanding of learning based on knowledge transfer, Addison describes how, ‘the learner is recognised as the maker of meaning and the teacher as the person who constructs learning situations to make this process possible.’ (ibid) Learning environments are therefore created that both, ‘provide opportunity and encourage students to think and behave differently to the ways they have done before. (ibid, p. 49)
This description of the learning environment maps usefully onto the research which happens in the film studio or filming situation, where the encounter with the camera is constructed as a means of investigating, analysing and thinking differently with the sculptures placed in front of them. It is the artist as researcher who facilitates situations (for themselves) in which learning can take place and knowledge can be created. Knowledge which is not discrete or abstracted, but contextualised and embodied within a process that is not directed, for example, towards puzzling out a particular aspect of the object but rather one which enters into a dialogue with the sculptures made to be filmed and has the potential to impact upon and reconfigure our constructions, preconceptions and understandings of the world more generally.
This understanding of my own solitary studio practice became clearer in relation to two workshops led by artist Lucy Cran, which I supported at Kingston School of Art and the University of Brighton in 2017. (Documentation from these workshops is available at https://performingsculpture.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: 5 September 2019)) In each case a group of students were asked to make sculptures which might perform or that they could perform with. They spent the morning designing and constructing objects, and in the afternoon brought them to the film studio in order to perform with them. What was striking about this afternoon session was the way in which the students interacted with the things they had made. Rather than ‘finished’ pieces being brought in front of the camera in order to show-case the students’ expectations, there was a sense in which they were learning the possibilities and significance of the objects they had made through physical exploration, and that this was as much a part of the making process as the earlier construction of the sculptures. This process was happening collaboratively and within a social context. To a certain extent, it was structured or enabled by the presence of the camera, which had produced an altered energy in the room. The students knew they were being recorded and this made their play more focused. When we were younger, Lucy Cran and I worked together in an experimental theatre company, and the students’ playful exploration reminded us of the methods we had used then to create performances: closing the doors, setting the camera rolling and improvising. Then too, it was the camera that gave the activity a sense of purpose: that it could be watched again later, but also that the camera acted as an outside eye, an audience which heightened our awareness of what we were doing. Improvisations can often be frustrating experiences punctuated with moments of excitement and flurries of creative energy. For the students in the workshop, it felt that they had a wealth of things to play with and explore, and whilst there was initial caution, once involved in the activity of playing with their sculptures together in front of the camera there was an ease and fluidity to their interactions and imaginative responses.
Perhaps we could see this activity in much the way Vygotsky (2004) discusses Newton’s great insight when seeing an apple fall from a tree. His argument is that were it not for Newton’s many years of work and research, the amassing of a body of experience, he would not have been placed to recognise what he saw and conceptualise it as gravity. Whilst on a smaller scale (hours rather than years) we could see that the work done by the students in advance of the improvisation, had primed them with ideas and experiences which allowed a free flow of imaginative possibilities to be explored. We could perhaps see this as an ideal scenario within the context of this research and the work that has happened predominately alone within the studio; a scenario which is aimed and prepared for, but which can never be guaranteed. Equally, the sculptures of this research share an unfinished or open quality, as with those made by the students. Like Franz West’s Passstücke (1979) they are intended to invite interaction, whether this be physically with the human body or through the lens of the camera, and this expectation creates different criteria when physically constructing the objects. Different materials, forms and attributes are included, developed or tried out, less for the way they look, or for internal compositional or spatial relationships, but rather for what these characteristics might afford or prompt within the highly particularised filmed encounter.
The focus of the research is therefore not on what cameras do to objects per se, although this is an important aspect of the enquiry. It is more a question of how the filming situation can augment the creative process and be used to create new understandings of sculpture: what kinds of sculptures are created when in anticipation of being filmed and how can they be activated by human intervention, enabled, inflected and recorded by the camera?
This might appear to diminish the importance of the images created, focusing attention instead upon the process itself, but this is not entirely the case. The films and moving images created are fundamental to the artist’s understanding of the activity in front of the camera. The films document these explorations, except that there is no sense in which these are activities that would happen without the presence of the camera. Film becomes the vehicle through which creative activity is undertaken and revealed both to an audience and to the artist, as it is often only after the fact, on reviewing the footage, that the artist discovers exactly what has been created.
Equally the sculptures made to be filmed are objects which only exist because of the camera. The two are inseparable. Consideration of one is consideration of the other. This is why the sculptures and films can be shown side by side within the gallery without any sense in which the presence of the ‘real’ objects makes the films redundant. The viewer’s grasping and consideration of these sculpture-objects is in relation to their film-ability. Seeing the objects in ‘real life’, albeit always alongside the films or with the invitation to make films, only serves to strengthen this relationship.
An important question then may be how these moments of discovery, of alchemy even, are recognised, when what one is engaged in aims, in the moment, for a non-analytic, intuitive state of mind in which physical exploration moves in a moment to moment responsive way.
Whilst certain trends can be identified in the research, among them the sculptures’ modernist aesthetic, a preference for images which remove the objects from any particular context, and the physical handling of, or interaction with sculptures in front of a locked-off camera. Rather than articulating and establishing these implicit rules as a fixed series or set which govern the work, it will be of more use to discuss the type of decision making at work, foregrounding artistic processes which are ‘used’ or set into play in order to generate creative work through intuitive and explorative conditions.
It may be useful at this point to consider Gregory Bateson’s description of a young child playing with building blocks. Unlike in a game where there are clear and pre-determined rules this play appears unstructured and exploratory. The rules, if they are to be considered as such, have something to do with the way in which blocks can be stacked, with gravity and balance.
‘[...] The blocks themselves make a sort of rules. They will balance in certain positions and they will not balance in other positions. And it would be a sort of cheating if the child used glue to make the blocks stand up in a position from which they would otherwise fall.’ (Bateson, 1987, p.28)
The play, which characterises the exploration of objects with the camera, operates under similar types of physical and natural conditions. The equipment poses certain restrictions and possibilities which are negotiated through the act of filming. Likewise, the objects being filmed have specific qualities, react in certain ways to lighting and camera angle, contrast and colour recognition. They offer ways of being handled, arranged and moved depending on their shape and size, weight and feel, their formal and aesthetic aspects.
Working through the myriad of tiny and often intuited decisions is beyond the scope of this piece of writing and of significantly less interest than understanding the ways in which this type of activity is undertaken. The child’s play with blocks is engaged and intuitive, rather than critical and rationalised. Bateson describes it as having something to do with gravity. His repeated use of the phrase ‘sort of’ hints at the dangers of specifying exactly what is happening, as if it were a definite and repeatable phenomenon. The play of the child is far more delicate and nuanced than that. It is a type of unspoken negotiation with objects and contexts, with physical and material conditions, that is of importance to both the artist and the child. Knowing the moment at which something sits ‘just right’ within the frame, or responding to a knobbly bit on the side of an object by gently running one’s fingers over it, slamming something down on a surface, or gently rotating it in one’s hands, these are decisions made without purpose beyond the immediate ebb and flow of careful physical engagement, negotiation and play. Decisions are therefore made within this spirit of intuitive engagement which is fostered throughout the making and presentation process. Editing and selecting footage is often done on the basis of surprise or based on the recollection of moments in which new or unexpected possibilities seemed to arise. What is hoped for is a sense of finding something out which could not have been predetermined. When the work has been exhibited, it is always with the invitation to continue thinking and manipulating the objects, or to see the films and sculptures side by side in order to experience them in different ways. The aim of this process, and to a certain extent of this research, is one of continuing dialogue and the maximising of possibilities.
It is also important to acknowledge the silent criteria by which practical art making moves forward, and the background from which the process itself arises. As in Vygotsky’s example of Newton, the background to discovery, in my case, would include my own experiences of the research thus far and more generally those of being an artist; my unconscious leaning toward certain aesthetics or ways of working and the social and cultural context - the types of sculpture and images which provide the larger context to the enquiry. A huge mass of factors are in play at any moment. Perhaps this could be a reason why some artists are drawn to intuitive forms of working. Physical and intuitive engagement and immersion in an activity can open onto, and allow for, an incredible complexity of physical, intellectual and emotional response, which could not be rationally arrived at. Attempts to marshal and account for all this contextual knowledge and experience could be overwhelming and lead either to undesired simplification or confusion.
It may also be worth mentioning at this point the importance of the ‘hand’ within the research, as an expression of the manual and human-centred focus of the research methodology. As becomes clear in references to the Pre- Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, and Matthew Crawford’s discussions of the physical and experiential nature of knowledge (2010), within the ‘Aphorisms’ text included in this submission, and in comments made by participants at a showing of work at Peer Session recorded below, the ‘hand’ is a consistent presence within much of the practical research, whether hovering at the edges of the frame or evidenced in the handmade qualities and textures of the objects themselves. The ‘hand’ is an actualisation and a metaphor for the type of embodied, heuristic and holistic art practice being put forward here as research; one which sees thinking and physical exploration as bound together, centred within a particular place and in a particular body.