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Artist's Pages

Dance Writing (Artist Pages)

Dance Writing (Artist Pages)

Body inking: butoh: (a poetic narrative): ... artist pages

The writing becomes a limbed extension – a dance – inked on shore and paper by a body moving in these artist pages. The author poetically captures the process of engaging in the 22nd annual Kokoro Dance Theatre Society’s Wreck Beach Butoh Intensive: a nine-day in-studio period, followed by three outdoor performances: on the shores and in the waters of Vancouver, Canada’s Pacific Ocean. Preece captures the days in a poem, synthesizing felt experience with elements of the daily choreography and context, offering palpable, personal and sensual tellings of one woman moving through process, practice and performance. Although specific, the poems remain accessible – interpretable and relatable to the reader – as fresh offerings, as movements themselves.

Walking Library for a Wild City

‘The Walking Library’ is an ongoing practice-as-research project which explores the relationship between literature, environment and walking through a site-specific and peripatetic form of reading as performance. First commissioned in 2012 for the Sideways Festival of walking art (Belgium), the project has generated a number of subsequent commissioned events each original in conception and findings, including "The Walking Library for Women Walking” (2016) and “The Walking Library for a Wild City" (2018), the latter documented in the Artist Pages of this issue. The project asks how reading while walking through the landscape with others activates both the environment as well as the sociable, mobile and spatial endowments of the book that make it such a pliable media for the possibility of journeys and stories and places to converge.For each subsequent event this question is re-framed in response to the specific context of the new work and for the audiences who participate. Their responses are gathered through their suggestions for books, selections of readings and written experiences on the walks. ‘The Walking Library for a Wild City’ was commissioned as part of a collaboration with artist Alec Finlay by Glasgow Life/European Championship Festival Glasgow 2018 and involved a programme of eight walks across Glasgow, an exhibition at The Hidden Gardens and publication of a book documenting the walks. This edition of “The Walking Library” seeks to explore the natural environment in urban settings through reading together while walking. https://walkinglibraryproject.wordpress.com/

Drift World Map

In keeping with Situationist cartography, this artist pages contribution ‘Drift Map World’ represents a moment in the journal that attempts to tie together the disparate themes, practices and ideas that run through the issue as a whole. As well as mapping the intellectual drifts taken by the writers and artists who are part of ‘On Drifting’, this ‘map’ is best approached as a kind of drift in itself, a moment of intellectual errancy, a critical and creative dérive. It is a document that, on the one hand, moves through and borrows ideas, fragments and words from other articles in the issue, and, on the other, combines these with visuals taken from personal journals and sketchbooks of previous wanderings and creative processes. By navigating through a sea of words and visuals, and balancing past and present, this text and image piece exists as a sort of meta-map, a chart that pays attention to similarities whilst also stressing differences, an ambition which explains the lack of commas in the title. The gaps in the sentence are little voids that allow ideas to encounter each other in a relationship of departure.

Athens’ Shadows

This introductory essay attempts to communicate a sense of the articles and artist pages published in this Forum Kritika on Radical Cultural Responses to Crises in Urban Democracy, in the context of a symposium during which some of them were first argued. The contributors theorize relationships between art and protest, and the nature of performance, as well as critiquing interventionist performance projects, among dispatches from the front line of performance as public engagement. It also seeks to convey a sense of how culture—and especially performance—interacts, in Britain, with Project Austerity (2010-present). As culture and cultural workers, respond to neoliberalization, they are also increasingly shaped by its project of economizing public institutions, democratic processes, social services, and—some would argue—every social encounter. Influencing this critique is the mythos of Athens, as—across Europe—forces re-shape the democratic urban architecture which it has legitimised since the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century. It is in this context that artists struggle to conceptualize and enact a present public role.

Turning Back to Training

A response to a pervious Performance Research journal issue 'On Training' with artist's pages

Ancestral bodies dancing snow

Abstract This article with artist pages is a self-reflection on danced engagements with land and lineage. In performing with elemental nature and at historical sites, I met my own broken memories of colonized land and severed ties to ancestral lands. These pages feature images of two performance series taking place in and near Montréal city, a cosmopolitan hub of the French province of Québec, Canada. Wise words from storytellers, artists and scholars in the field of Indigenous knowledge (Sto:lo and Anishinaabe nations) guide my textual narrative, and issues of ethical ethnography compel its performative embodied inquiry.

The sheep are black and white and they are not black and not white

Abstract These artist pages emerged from a performance presented at the third conference of Dance and Somatic Practices at Coventry University, during which we worked in the company of things, objects and materials. The photographs were taken by Christian Kipp and gave us a visual, outer perspective of our doing, additional to our felt and imaginative understanding of it. With these pages we try to merge both: a more external with a more internal view and let both find their own path of coming about. We understand our process of making to be an extension and part of our working relationship that now spans almost 20 years. The notion of ‘black and white sheep’ point for us to the continuing conundrum of how to be in the company of difference, also in the current conditions of increasing fragmentation, both within individuals and communities. The songs we sang during the performance nourished our sense of strength, youth, emotional involvement and connection to what we might call our cultural heritage.

Artist pages: A drawing that makes itself

Abstract

Translucent Surface / Quiet Body

These Artist pages operate as choreographic notes for the research project Translucent Surface/Quiet Body, developing in residency at L'Animal a L'esquena, Catalonia, Spain.Working with a large table-like construction, a performing body is documented simultaneously from above and below, while moving-and-drawing upon and over a glass table top. This construction offers two viewing perspectives (above and below) that act as a visual annotation of each other, each offering distinct information of the gravitational forces at play and the reciprocal touch between surfaces of paper-glass and body-skin. The project explores processes of pressing, printing, touching and capturing the impact of the surface on the body.These Artist pages lay out observations of the project in terms of 1.installing, 2. seeing/sensing and 3.drawing/documenting. Through text and still image the pages play with capacities of surface as support, receptor, membrane, skin, page and screen—and present a choreographics of forces, surfaces, body and documents.

The moon as my witness

Abstract full:new was a transnational score for a site-based Authentic Movement (AM) and ecopoetic writing practice, performed for the duration of a complete lunar phase: two women (one in Wales, the other in Canada) moving/writing authentically on their respective sites for 28 minutes every day, for 28 consecutive days. The process led to the creation of a collaborative, concrete poem: the length of each line waxing and waning daily with the moon. In an adaptation of the ‘classic’ form of AM, the moverwitness dyad was stretched into a virtual arc across the northern hemisphere, held within the witnessing circle of the moon’s cycle: ‘witnessing’ thus took the form of a remote, reciprocal commitment to self, site and other, through a strict adherence to the score. In these artist pages, we offer a reflective poetic-photographic documentation of this practice, with an accompanying written commentary on the role of AM within this process: how can the authentically moving body, transnationally witnessed, become a resonant organ both for sensing ecological relations and writing them into being?

Ant-ic actions

Abstract These Artist Pages describe the process of, and the ethical problems raised by my creative interaction with wood ants (Formica rufa) in a Kent forest (England) in 2014. I draw on Haraway, Massumi, Baker and Jevbratt to touch on questions around collaboration, rules, knowing and responsibility.

Wilding performance

Abstract These Artist Pages are a response to the question, ‘how can a performance practice be ecological?’ By critically reflecting on a recent performance project, Wild Life, I conceptualise a ‘wilding performance practice’. I suggest an ecological ethics arises by attending to performance as an ongoing entanglement of human and non-human wills and trajectories.

Artist pages (as footnotes to a collaborative project with Michaela Zuge-Bruton)

Abstract Martina Copley’s practice is a vagabond investigation in the place where language recites. There are some principles. Letting the work speak how it is made. Uncertainty in a dynamic puts everything at attention. Everything requires attention. Look at the change of things, what takes place, notated and not. Vantage includes the way in which objects come into question even as they come into view. Stutter and stumble are descriptions of flow that have their own flow. Beginning in the middle, what happens in the middle is itself, and new. All things are equal to world. Carried by an interest in attention, annotation and the processes of abstraction, I approach my practice as a kind of transcription. I use temporal elements in a material proposition like the stutter, loop, iteration and fugue, to unstructure anticipation and complicate the ‘view’. Things that normally exist in different registers or levels of abstraction are apprehended at different degrees of nearness and distance. The work creates its own order of things as an accumulation of things, each thing its own way of holding something in attention. It is not the content of the object or the material I choose to work with that counts but everything that lies beyond it.

Comparative Monument (Palestine)

project commissioned by, and fi rst presented at, the 2012 Qalandiya International, as part of the exhibition Gestures in Time, curated by Lara Khaldi and Katya Garcia Anton, held in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and in various venues throughout the West Bank in November 2012. Photography is by Tristan Da Roza. The project could not have been realized without the generous support of Jack Persekian, Director of the Qalandiya International; Jumana Abboud, Tamara Tamimi, and the whole team at Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art; Lara Khaldi and Katya Garcia Anton; Denis Sobeh and Brad Haylock; and Clare Land. Tom Nicholson’s involvement in the Qalandiya International was supported by Monash Art Design and Architecture, where he is a Lecturer in Drawing. The artist pages are courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. COMPARATIVE MONUMENT (PALESTINE)

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000

RADICAL LIGHT: ALTERNATIVE FILM AND VIDEO IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, 1945-2000 Edited by Steve Anker, Kathy Gerite and Steve Seid Berkeley: University of California Press / University of California, Berkeley Museum / Pacific Film Archives, 2010, 351 pp. Reviewed by William C. Wees Since the 1950s the most active centres for experimental/avant-garde/alternative film and video in North America have been New York and San Francisco (or more precisely, the San Francisco Bay Area). In other urban areas - notably Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Vancouver- experimental film and video have also flourished, but none of those cities come close to matching the concentration of film and video artists, exhibition venues, distribution centres, publications, archives, and clued-in audiences to be found in New York and San Francisco. While this is understood by long-time observers of the alternative film and video scene, it has yet to be adequately documented. Nevertheless, San Francisco has fared better than New York thanks to the book under review and two that preceded it. In 2006 Scott MacDonald published in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Temple University Press), a documentary history of San Francisco's Art in series that ran froml946 to 1954. Next came MacDonald's Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (University of California Press, 2008) , a fatter and livelier book, thanks to the diversity of interviews, images and texts (published and unpublished) assembled by MacDonald for a history of the San Francisco-based Canyon Cinema Cooperative, one of the two major American distributors of experimental/avantgarde films - the other being the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York. Now we have Radical Light: Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-2000. (Much earlier, the San Francisco experimental film scene was the subject of a special issue of Wide Angle: A Quarterly Journal of Film History, Theory, Criticism and Practice [14:3-4, 1992].) A bit of pre-history precedes the five sections of Radical Light, each covering a little more or a little less than a decade between 1945 and 2000. Within that chronological structure the editors have attempted to produce what one of them calls a portrait that includes thoughts, reclaimed documents, backward glances, pointed scholarship, and rescued ephemera. More precisely, this handsome, large format book of 350 heavy-weight, glossy includes seven different kinds of material: historical, critical and descriptive essays written with varying degrees of scholarly rigour; brief, appreciative descriptions of and comments on specific films and videos (twenty-nine in all) ; autobiographical reminiscences; interviews; artist pages with drawings, photographs, collages, and other kinds of graphic and textual material provided by film and video artists; cutaways composed chiefly of ephemera such as posters, flyers, program notes, and newspaper clippings; and film stills, video grabs and other kinds of graphic and photographic illustrations. Further testifying to the editors' thoroughness and endless hours of labour, the final of the book include a Glossary of Technical Terms, an extensive index, three of acknowledgements, a lengthy list of credits, and brief introductions to the book's sixty-eight contributors, including the editors, each of whom contributed at least one substantial essay. Radical Light is, in short, the best available for discovering how and why the San Francisco Bay Area has nourished one of the most vibrant alternative film and video cultures in the world. I emphasize resource because as rich as it is in detailed information of many kinds, the book's collagelike structure works against synthesis and sustained analysis. An authoritative, integrated, and interpretive history of alternative film and video in the Bay Area remains to be written, but certainly Radical Light gives the reader a feel for what it is/was like to be part of the Bay Area alternative film and video scene. …

Franz West: to build a house you start with the roof, work 1972-2008

There is no easy way to define Franz West's art: it is fundamentally sculptural in its construction, veers frequently toward the biomorphic and prosthetic, mines the intellectualism of Freud and Wittgenstein, and possesses an awkward beauty that speaks with equal fluency to the tradition of painterly abstraction and the aesthetics of trash art. West's distinctive vision has resulted in one of the most remarkable bodies of work produced since the 1960s. This book, with more than 160 color images, offers a comprehensive look at West's work from the 1970s to the present. A unique blend of illustration, essays, interviews, and artist's pages, it accompanies a major retrospective organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, and includes a new piece created specifically for the exhibition. Emerging from Vienna's confrontational performance art scene led by the Actionists during the 1960s, West believed from the beginning that physical engagement is an essential function of the art experience. This is clear both in his Adaptives (Passstuck) series (begun in 1974), human-scaled sculptures made of plaster to be held and worn by museum visitors, and in his later installations incorporating cabinets, tables, and chairs. Interaction is no less a premise in West's more recent large-scale outdoor sculptures: a series of brightly painted aluminum works adorning public plazas throughout Europe and the United States. The book mixes intense visual content with critical commentary, an interview with the artist, a concentrated section on West's working methods, an artist's response to the work through words and images, and an extensive chronology and bibliography.

The Future of the Page (review)

Reviewed by: The Future of the Page Liz Jones Stoicheff, Peter and Andrew Taylor , eds. 2005. The Future of the Page. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. $75.00 hc. $19.95 sc. 330 pp. Professors of the humanities joined graphic artists and writers at the University of Saskatchewan for "The Future of the Page" conference in June of 2000; the resulting book includes twelve essays built around the premise [End Page 216] that physical materials shape our interpretations of literature, and that our understanding of literary history depends on the unit of the page. Michael Groden remarks upon the suspense created by turning a page in mid-sentence, while Jerome McGann argues: It is highly significant that readers of books move from recto to verso, that their field of awareness continually shifts from page to 'opening' (i.e., the space made by a facing verso / recto), and that the size of the book—length, breadth, and thickness—help to determine our reader's perceptions at every point. (Stoicheff and Taylor 2005, 153) Here, in the chapter "Visible and Invisible Books: Hermetic Images in N-Dimensional Space," McGann sums up the position maintained by several contributors: literature's habitation in books remains a crucial part of any interpretation of a work. William W.E. Slights even argues that the book remains the best tool for reading, even though the computer has become an extremely useful tool for analyzing texts (86). Only a fraction of essays in The Future of the Page speculate on the nature of forthcoming literature published in electronic formats. Instead, these scholars emphasize the importance of understanding neglected histories of the page, and how technology can provide new ways of examining existing literature. The dominance of the page throughout Canadian, British, and United States literary history motivates several of the scholars to critique the way the book has silenced non-print cultures. These essays, by John Dagenais, Slights, David R. Carlson, Marie Battiste, L.M. Findlay, and Lynne Bell, concern "decolonizing" the page. "Decolonizing the Medieval Page," by Dagenais, draws attention to medieval pages not well-preserved—pages that tell stories of "fragmentation, loss, and attempted recovery" (44). Instead of showcasing only the most beautifully-preserved works, or those containing a central text with "authoritative" commentary, scholars should attend to texts with doodles, lewd insults, personal reminders, and glosses. These annotations undermine the authority of the central text, but enable us to better understand medieval culture. Both Slights and Carlson focus on Renaissance print culture; Slights shows how Renaissance marginalia could serve as a model for the future of the page, while Carlson explains how the methods of Renaissance printer Nicholas Jenson influenced the notion of the text as "fixed." For these scholars, academic discourse has colonized certain historical periods by ignoring key components of literary culture. "Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page," an essay in two parts, calls attention to more literal colonizing forces, those that, as Battiste points out, saw the literacy of indigenous cultures as "art" or "religion" instead of "literature" or "science" (111). Instead of pages, these [End Page 217] cultures used notched sticks or wampum belts to record knowledge; such forms of writing have been obliterated by the insistence of colonizers that native North Americans enter print culture. Findlay expands on Battiste's argument in Part II by offering an analysis of some indigenous drawings (some made on cast-away ledger paper). Findlay and Battiste spent a portion of the last five years working in collaboration with Bell, an art/art history professor, on an indigenous education research project. Bell's chapter focuses on contemporary indigenous and minority artists who challenge print culture's politics through the genre of artist's pages in contemporary journals. By piling up images often taken from or inspired by the dominant culture, the artist forms a site of resistance: one vivid example includes a grotesquely made-up indigenous woman on the cover of "Cosmosquaw," which mocks the contemporary women's magazine (264). In "Virtually Human: The Electronic Page, the Archived Body, and Human Identity," Allison Muri writes of dominant culture's fallacies as well, though her critique applies to the intersection of literary and...

Artist's Pages

Artist's Pages