How it all began …

… collaborations are a practical way of reading the division of labor against the grain, and may turn out to be a way of swimming against the current of an enforced and blatantly absurd measurability of immaterial labor. Only in collaborative environments is it possible to embrace the infinitesimality of what is essentially beyond measure.

The outcome of a collaboration is rampant, unforeseeable, and always unexpected. Sometimes it may not turn out nicely, it may even be harsh, but one thing is for sure: it cannot be calculated, it has to be imagined.

Florian Schneider

Das Ende

And finally …

At The walking Encyclopaedia …

NOVEMBER etc

Here is the opening statement of this blog from February 2013:

The purpose of this forum is to consider issues relating to the curation of photographic exhibitions. This includes matters of ownership, location, space, identity, collaboration, presence, history, alt.practice, sound, movement, permanence, distance.

Examples, pointers, models, paradigms, precedents will be offered for criticism with a view to considering how new ground might be hoed.

The Crossing Lines Group will occupy The Greenwich Gallery on Saturday 2nd November 2013.

The Gallery may be used as an experimental space for the ‘presentation of presentation’.

The Crossing Lines Group will vacate The Greenwich Gallery on Saturday 16th November 2013.

A segment of the February Crossing Lines meeting will be devoted to the WINGS project which became almost a phantom project; dipping into conversations on curation and being created in the background. As an exercise of collaboration and curation I personally felt that it was successful; as a personal experience in putting work together for it I was moved by the sympathetic way that work was responded to. I also liked the late-arriving idea of adding to the exhibition by means of posting work to the gallery for inclusion. I felt too that the process of engaging with the pieces and working collectively without preconception with the space was an encounter worth repeating. The small  number within the WINGS project was an important contributing factor to the success of this piece.

The success of the Traverse was, for me personally and within the collective, in the doing of it. If all we had done at its end was to take it for itself as a mode of curating a space by walking it then no more need have been done — Process as Product.

But …

We had a commitment to The Greenwich Gallery that we needed to fulfil and time was short. Suppose that we’d had six more months to consider what might become of this fine, thoroughgoing, collection of individual pieces, what might we have come up with?

Whilst writing this I’m listening to Pierre Schaeffer’s Five Studies of Noises which he compiled in 1948. Also composed in that year was Poulenc’s sonata for cello sounding safely very like Poulenc and Myaskovsky’s cello sonata sounding comfortably like Brahms. Elliott Carter also wrote a sonata for cello that year and his sounds of his time. For Carter it was possible to write for an ancient instrument and express a response to a present moment. For Schaeffer it was possible to take a present moment and find a way of making a contemporary piece from contemporary noise.

I see the gallery as an ancient instrument — not redundant but available for alternative methods of use. I also see any space as a potential gallery for alternative uses of an image.

We discussed, briefly, the idea of re-purposing the Traverse images for the smaller space of The RPS Cave. How might we respond to our own images half a year later; how might we respond to each other’s? We might take the example of WINGS as a leaping-off point; another example might be that of Pierre Schaeffer — take the raw noise and process it into an alternative not-noise.

I believe that we should tread on new ground for the sake of doing it. Even if we sink. Waving not drowning. Whilst misquoting.

I also believe that we should tread on new ground as a political act. Try this from Gregory Sholette:

… a radical art scholarship and theory must by necessity seek to revise the very notion of artistic value as it is defined by bourgeois ideology. Besides finding new ways to account for collective artistic authorship it must also theorize the many occasions on which no object is produced or where the artistic practice is a form of creative engagement focused on the process of organization itself.

Or maybe (from Jan Verwoert):

… The decision to collaborate with others is not a moral but a practical choice. For instance, for a musician to play in a band is first of all a practical possibility rather than a moral issue.

Or if not a political act then a definitional one (from Maria Lind):

… Co-operation in art is by no means new (…) It extends from Rubens and other Baroque artists’ hierarchical large-scale studios, which were lucrative businesses, to surrealist group experiments, constructivist theatre projects, Fluxus games and Andy Warhol’s pseudo-industrial Factory. It has also been argued that collaboration was crucial in the transition from Modernism to Post-modernism, particularly since the advent of conceptualism in the late 1960s.During the following decade, redefinitions of art tended to go hand in hand with collaborative practices.

Or …

John Levett

The Phenomenology of Walking

phenomenon
noun (pl.phenomena)
1 a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question

The importance of the debate around Objects of Recognition is that it focuses on the act of walking and that act as a mode of interpreting an urban space. The act of walking is central to making sense of urban space as it is by walking that the users of urban space create meaning for themselves in that space, engender conflict within the space, build spaces of tranquility, make play space, fashion calm space, find space of possibility, constitute secure space and reconstitute walking space when space is appropriated. Walking can reconstitute past and imagine future space.

Walking can also confirm one’s expectations of space; to see what one expects to see; to seek out that which one wants to see. What walking can do is to act as a mode of comfort — stroll rather than tramp, stretch one’s legs rather than trek, promenade rather than advance — Sunday in the park rather than retreat from Moscow.

Prompts for those seeking new practice here:

The Walking Encyclopaedia is at AirSpace in Stoke from February 7th to March 15th.

Operations of Recognition finale?

Back at the beginning of December we published the current documents in the debate on Christian von Wissel’s article Operations of Recognition. Below is attached the final catalogue with Barry Cole’s reply-to-the-reply recently received. These documents, along with the evening of Crossing Lines that focused on Christian’s original paper have given rise to a flow of informal debate & comment which, whether or not one accepts the original Robert Smithson position, highlights modes of walking within the urban sphere & associated interpretations of it. Whatever one’s stance regarding apprehending the urban realm, hitting off from one proposal in order to find one’s preferred way of proceeding is a useful way of going engaging in a critical practice of walking.

Here is the full set of docs:

01 Operations of Recognition

02 Barry Cole response

03 Wissel-Perceiving_and_Knowing-Response_to_Barry_Cole

04 Barry Cole re-response

RE-PURPOSING (WITH CELLO)

This might be of some interest: Mitch Epstein’s American Power series is fairly well-known but its theatrical presentation is not. Details to be found on http://places.designobserver.com/feature/mitch-epstein-american-power/38217/

Peter Luck

For the record

A Loose Traverse: original installation.

WINGS in The Cave

The WINGS Group of Crossing Lines completed the first part of their curation of the project last Saturday.

The curation is continuing with mail postings each day from members of the group to the gallery for continuing inclusion in the work.

A Finissage will be held on Thursday 12th December from 6pm onwards to discuss what the project has achieved in terms of content and, importantly, about collaborative curation.

The WINGS Group are: Judith Jones, John Levett, Ingrid Newton, Claudia Pilsl, Nick Scammell, Krystina Stimakovits, Sabes Sugunasabesan.

 

All images by Ingrid Newton

Perceiving & knowing :: Operations of Recognition revisited

A response to Barry Cole’s “Walking and Looking”, October 6th, 2013, on Crossing Lines’s November blog.

On the morning of October 7th, at long last, the time had come: I received the first response to my article on Robert Smithson’s and my own operations of recognition in urbanising landscapes since its publication about one year ago. Therefore, before responding to Barry Cole’s valuable comments, I would like to thank him for his engaged and critical readership – this is where my heart beats higher: a vivid dialogue and well-informed dispute on a topic of shared interest; Barry Cole’s remarks give me the welcome opportunity to clarify my points and to push them even further.

01 Operations of Recognition

02 Barry Cole response

03 Wissel-Perceiving_and_Knowing-Response_to_Barry_Cole

Christian von Wissel

A Loose Traverse installed

No hay caminos, hay que caminar.

There is no path, only walking. There had been within the Crossing Lines Group a lot of discussion of ways of walking in the urban field, of the role of walking in coming to terms with urban space, of various practices one might collectively dub the ‘art walk’, and of the virtues of staying still and watching the changes in a space and its usage. Out of this I made a proposal that we undertake a walking project which could lead perhaps to some insight into these things (except the staying still) and perhaps also (in hope), to an enhanced understanding of the condition of London. This was to be exploratory both of method and of territory.

A game-plan was adopted: we would commence with one person’s walk which would be recorded in photographs which would be kept out of sight while a map prepared by that first person was passed to a second person who would walk a little of the first walk before branching off on their own and then repeating the hand-over process to the next walker until all had walked. There would then be a sharing of images and experiences and a working towards showing the traverse and perhaps its lessons. In the event, twenty-six people took part.

The way from here to there lies through somewhere else

A statement of the obvious and also, perhaps, of the essence of a traverse which is inherently directional and between points. Our traverse was to be loose in the sense that it would be improvised from a succession of independent walks, and so the totality of the path walked would not be pre-determined even if some individual walks were so. With very rapid handovers pitching the walkers into an area with no time for preparatory research, we relied instead on previous knowledge and personal responses to guide our path and our images. We are all guided more or less consciously by such promptings and the project was in part dedicated to uncovering  their range and their capacity to reveal the city.

That range is clearly evident in the work shown here. Each of us has curated our own small space, representing our part of the traverse. If the variety of response is very evident, the spatial continuity of the traverse is less so, and the lessons remain to be drawn. The project now might appear as a celebration of the variety of its participants but that is only part of the story. Pressure of time has meant that the last stage is yet to come: learning from each others’ responses and drawing out some critique of the means of coming to terms with urban space and trying for that elusive enhanced understanding of the condition of London. There are (at the very least) some simple questions: why did we spend so long in the East End? Why no move outside zones 1 and 2? Why almost no industry, no governance, no housing of the wealthy, no river, and no suburbia at all? Is the urban simply an image-mine, or do we photograph to understand?

And yet. We have here the raw materials. They are worthy of your time. The debate will continue.

Peter Luck