Review of the Emma Hedditch exhibition at Outpost Gallery, Norwich.

We were asked to jointly review this exhibition as part of the MA programme at NUA . I approached with some trepidation, not least because the artist’s work is for the most part performance-led, and the performance had occurred some days prior to my visit. What then, were we looking at? Would it be a trace or traces of the performance as embodied in a collection of works assembled in the gallery, or a body of works unrelated to the performance but which had been made to bridge the gap between the performance event and the month-long exhibit afforded to Hedditch?

It wasn’t clear on entering the gallery space which of the two options I was looking at. I have to also admit to being slightly underwhelmed by the work set out at first encounter. Had I just been visiting casually and not part of assignment project, I probably would’ve run round the gallery and left in under a minute. However, I was in some senses being forced to consider the exhibition and decided that the best method of doing this, was to literally anchor myself by taking a stool and sitting in the middle of the gallery space so that I could swivel round and consider the work.

The work comprised: eight roughly metre square pieces of hardboard which were resting against the walls on 2 sides, onto these were pinned shapes of fabrics which were clearly the unpicked sections of shirts: in the middle of the floor, sat a small shoebox with some glossy 6 x 4 photographs, inside the box was a roughly folded wad of writing paper: three tables placed around the room were covered in other disassembled objects, most notably, some airmail style envelopes: on the third wall were series of seven screen digital prints of enlarged images of female contraceptive pill packets.

This description of the exhibition’s contents has been assembled from my recollection only of what I saw, some two weeks from the date of viewing. It’s interesting to me now trying to recollect my thoughts and impressions of the exhibition, partly done because I didn’t want to commit my thoughts immediately afterwards, and partly, because a large part of my practice deals with issues around memory and recollection, and I wanted to test my recollected powers of an exhibition, and partly to let the dust settle and see whether my first impressions had changed.

Reviewing the scene, various themes began to emerge from the work as I sat and looked at it. The first thing that occurred to me was that there was a repeat symmetry of negative space shapes emerging from the unpicked pieces of shirt and the un-picked envelopes both of which had been arranged beside other bits of envelope or shirts. It occurred to me that the negative space element was asking the viewer to think about absence: absence of the whole; absence of the artist; absence of the performance; and the absence of the time taken to make the performance and resulting artwork, and the original objects, and possibly the absence of the time taken by the artist to find the original objects.

The disassembled objects fell largely into two groups in their display method–shirts on the vertical, envelopes, and other objects on horizontal planes– these were the most successful element of the exhibition because of the abstract shapes and compositional elements that they delivered. The pill container print’s seemed to float without connection and as I said in the discussion that took place that day in the gallery, appeared to be evidence of artistic excess–those occasions when we as artists, make work, or include work in an exhibition which has not been fully thought through or resolved. Whilst the seven prints probably represented the seven days of the week, they did not represent an obvious cycle i.e. one image per popped tablet per day–they also seemed to comprise a random sequence of bottoms and tops arranged in no particular order as far as I could see.

 

The discussion that followed was fairly testy–falling into the formalist tradition and not really getting to grips with the conceptual nature of the work. I almost felt compelled to defend it because I disliked the binary consensus emerging about whether it was good or bad art. This was ironic because for the most part, I didn’t like the exhibition, but I forced myself to try and consider it more dispassionately–this throws up all sorts of questions about initial responses to artworks–particularly ones like this, which had little or no text or exposition (titles, labels, wall panels) and so required quite a lot from the viewer. I have to declare an interest here, in as much as I prefer to give little away in my own artworks so that the viewer can bring their own thoughts and feelings and histories to bear on the pieces. I know this is a big ask, and many viewers do not look further than what they can immediately appraise. My rationale for either refusing to give too much away, or deliberately withholding, is that sometimes I don’t want my works to be too heavily mediated–whether that’s foolhardy, or dishonest, I’m not quite sure. I do like to tease and provoke, but, I also think that some works benefit from letting the viewer complete them, and thus denying some of the agency of the artist.

Reflections on my film Darkness Covers All, an animation

This film has taken 9 months of work, but has been over 20 years in gestation after I first acquired the audio for the radio documentary Searching the Ashes (1986).  I was deeply moved by this account of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in the words of members of the Sonderkommandos, the camp commandant and doctor.  My initial film lasted 50 minutes and was entitled Ashes, and used an edited version of the 90-minute audio with an animation I made of a black dot gradually expanding to fill the whole frame.  The idea for the animation came from my endless reflections on how I did not want to offer a filmic or naturalistic film to accompany the audio so as not to distract from its force or to endow it with any aesthetic beauty (see Adorno).  The idea also resulted from my interest in the line from Alexander Pope’s poem The Dunciad: ‘Thy hand great Dullness! lets the curtain fall,: And universal Darkness covers all’.

Still from the 2014 film Darkness Covers All, Gregory Hayman

 

The film was way too long so I edited it down to 25 minutes, sharpening the focus of the narrative and retitling it: We’re Normal People.  Feedback on this film also suggested it was too long and whilst I would like to show it in a controlled setting, I realised that I needed to make it more my own.

The final version entitled Darkness Covers All, is now a 5 minute film, using the same animation and now with my own sound track of industrial type sound and heart beat .. it is less didactic and I hope loses none of its power.  But, it has become something else – it is no longer as moving as the versions using the original radio audio..or edited version of them with additions,  and the message is not as explicit, but it does retain a forcefulness.

It was always going to be very difficult trying to do something with the Holocaust and I remain humbled by the task.  The film now needs an audience to provide feedback and for me to reflect upon.

 

Sara Lucas, is the best yet to come or is it behind her? From the Whitechapel Gallery, London

The retrospective of Lucas’s work was a pretty full on assault of the visual senses. It comprised the Lucas greatest hits and then a few more recent artworks. I hadn’t seen much of her work in the flesh, so to speak, before, just in reproductions in art books and online so I was maybe expecting too much from the show. I was struck by how dated much of the work appeared now as artistic sensibilities have moved on and the shock of phalluses, tits and vaginas has paled in the 20 or so years since she first presented them. Many of the works look like jokes or one-liners and you got them in one and deeper levels of meaning seem largely absent.

from The Sara Lucas show at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

The new work, mostly seemed to evidence a different artistic language and I didn’t find it terribly convincing. I was reminded of something a poet friend and publisher Chris Hamilton-Emery said to me recently, “that maybe some poets only have 5 or 6 good poems in them during their whole career, and you don’t always know if the best is already behind them”.

I wondered whether artists similarly only had a handful of great or good art works in them and everything else was pointless repetition of what they considered a winning formula, or attempts to innovate which just didn’t come off. I wonder what this says about my own practice and whether I’ve produced the best work I’m ever going to make, or whether the best is yet to come. And the  point now is to promote and show what already has been produced.  Of course I don’t believe that, and no artist would, otherwise they would quit producing.  Most believe, and I’m assured that’s true of writers and poets also, that they will produce better and continually strive to do so.

Nonetheless, I found Lucas’ latest work worrying given she’s about to up scale for Venice.

Finding a studio space

As I’m only a part-time MA student, I’m not entitled to a college studio space. Over the summer I’ve been looking for places to work preferrably close to home and hopefully with other artists.

The process of looking has made me reflect upon the uses of a studio and more importantly, how I will work in my first studio. Up to now, I’ve had my college studio spaces, but my practice to date has mostly meant that I made work in workshops, and only used my studio space for storage and display. Now, I want my studio to be my workspace I do need to think and reflect upon how that might impact upon my practice and my ways of working.

I know Daniel Buren’s thoughts on the studio and practice.   I have also visited other artists’ studios and seen how they use them and have been able to draw some inspiration as to how I may make mine work for me. But, I am under no illusion that my work is likely to change to respond to my new circumstances.

I have found an old shop in Cromer with 2 decent sized rooms and have found painter who is giving up her Outpost studio to take one of them, and I’m hoping Tracey Brock will share the other room with me. The other advantage of the old shop is that it would make a place to exhibit work both in the window, and also from time to time using the space for pop-up exhibitions, maybe inviting other artists to exhibit there too.

New studio space

 

 

Observations on Sluice Art Fair, London.

I attended the 2nd Sluice art fair in Bermondsey. It’s an alternative to the Frieze commercial art fair happening at the same time. It’s a collection of artist run galleries and spaces showing work of the artists they represent or work with. I had intended to spend just a couple of hours there but spent the whole day because I enjoyed the atmosphere and the opportunity to talk to some of the galleries and to help out on the Aid and Abet space.

Whilst there was a confusing array of different galleries and art spaces, the atmosphere felt more collegiate and less in-your-face than Frieze. I realize, that if you are serious about becoming a professional artist, then networking and courting galleries and dealers is an important part of career development. If you are quite shy and tentative about hustling yourself, then this was quite a safe environment to dip a toe in the water. It is interesting, that the most approachable galleries seemed to be the ones from the United States of America (Brooklyn’s Bushwick, and Williamsburg like Parallel Art Space; Theodore:art; et al projects; and Schema Projects, Galleries). I don’t know quite why that should be the case, but they seemed more open, more talkative, and easier to interact with. Maybe the British diffidence comes across as unwelcoming, or it may just mean that we are more reticent with our fellow countrymen.

I guess nothing is just going to appear or result from a handful of conversations, and that you must follow up with phone calls or e-mails. Still, it was a useful learning experience and I feel quite buoyed by it.

Me kneeling at Sluice – I know my place!

It was interesting too, to see 3 of my former tutors doing the rounds at the fair (Jo, Jenny, and Flora) so it seemed clear to me, the choice of Sluice was a good one for the more serious minded artist.

The difficulty of emotion and art.

“For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion – in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence.” Jeanette Winterson, (2009).

Winterson writes of the importance of emotion, yet within contemporary fine art, emotion is something of a dirty word. There are several questions I want to address in my research. The first is whether there can be a place in contemporary fine, and my practice in particular, for emotion. The second is what role emotion and memory, especially the memory of traumatic events, play within my work. There is a further question related to the second one, which I can only explore by experimenting with my artwork, and that is whether it is possible to represent traumatic events without bestowing on them a mimetic aesthetic as Theodor Adorno cautioned. (Adorno, 1965, 125-7).

Gregory Hayman, 2013, Darkness Covers All still

My method of working involves a deep immersion and contemplation of ideas, objects and materials. My work Darkness Covers All resulted from such an inquiry.   Or witness my recent interest in the film The Hours, an homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I’ve watched the movie many times, replaying sequences. I have read both books and listened to the soundtrack a hundred times. I have watched the DVD’s special features, read reviews and critiques of the film and books. This may result in an artwork but understanding my interest is no clearer; I therefore need a conceptual or theoretical underpinning for my inquiry.

Part one

In the first part of this report I look at some of the approaches to research and fine art practice. Gillian Rose (2007), discusses a range of methodologies for analysing artworks, images and visual material including; composition interpretation; content analysis; semiology; psychoanalysis; discourse analysis (including text, intertextuality, context, institutions and ways of seeing) audience studies; and anthropological approaches. I found her survey a useful overview, and want to focus on discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and content analysis.

Rose sums up the usefulness of discourse analysis thus: “(it) can be used to explore how images construct specific views in a social world, in which physiology is viewed as the topic of research, and the discourse analyst is interested in how images construct accounts of the social world. This type of discourse analysis pays careful attention to an image itself (as well as other sorts of evidence). (Rose, 2007, 146)

Rose also argues that discourse analysis addresses questions of power and knowledge, which of its very nature, pays careful attention to images and social production and effect. She cites Phillips and Hardy (2002) who claim that discourse analytic methods are inherently reflexive. Putting an opposing view, Rose cites Michel Foucault, who in his introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge derided autobiographical reflexology: “do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and police to see that our papers are in order” (Foucault 1972). So, whilst I find the possibility of reflexivity useful in addressing at least part of the questions I have posed, I am aware that there are shortcomings if I follow Foucault’s logic. Should I then turn to psychoanalysis for answers?

Kristeva looks at the psychoanalytic interest in the search for the ‘lost object’ or thing. She describes the mechanisms for dealing with mourning and this seems to echo the processes of memory that underpin elements of my practice: ‘art seems to point to a few devices that bypass complacency and, without simply turning mourning into mania, secure for the artist .. a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing’. (Kristeva, 1993: 203) However, even Freud had difficulty in understanding mourning describing it as a ‘great riddle’. For the purposes of my practice, (but not in this discussion), I need to devote more research to the psychoanalytic elements in the link between emotion and an artwork, both in its production and reception.

I turn now to the potential of content analysis. Using this methodology, it emerged that there are a range of devices used to manipulate an audience to promote an effect. Most emotionally charged art forms seem to have a combination of denial and sacrifice, some even have the death of one or more of the protagonists with which the viewer is made to feel sympathy or identify. With music, it seemed to be the use of minor keys and the combination of solo string instruments and the build towards a climax. I have looked at a wide range of material: from films like The Hours; A Brief Encounter; Casablanca; and The Third Man, and art films like Brontosaurus, and Viola’s films. I have also listened to operas like La Traviata and Aida; film scores; and read a large number of novels over the past months. The purpose was to try and identify whether there were any common ingredients, mechanisms or ways of positioning emotion or contributing to the production of an emotional response.

Still from Shed film Gregory Hayman 2014 after sequence from The Third Man

With all approaches to my enquiry I have engaged with a wide range of critical writing. Jennifer Doyle’s: Hold it Against Me – difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, attempts to explore some of the terrain for difficulty and emotion in performance art, painting and photography. Doyle singles out the film by Linda Montano entitled Mitchell’s Death (1978), which deals with intense grief where the subject appears to be literally and metaphorically numb to it: “Mitchells Death emerges as a black hole, an absence that organizes the space around it. When Montano’s voice and image fade, they seem to recede into the void.” (Doyle 2013, xi) To be sure, Doyle sets herself an ambitious project: ‘to dismantle the mechanisms through which emotion is produced and consumed.” (Doyle 2013, xi)

Linda Montano, still from Mitchell’s Death (1978)

However, there is a problem with Doyle’s methodology in that she collapses the terms ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’, and ‘affect’ whilst admitting, that she uses all three rather loosely: “I resist the identification of categorical differences between these terms. In my view, such efforts belie the complexity of the experiences I am describing – or, at least, a typography clearly delineating one from the other would not forward the kind of conversation I am staging… ” (Doyle, 2013, 146). This failure to try and distinguish between the three terms is emblematic of the reluctance by critical thinkers to address emotion in the arts. To be fair, Doyle struggles with her own response to some other work she discusses. She begins by looking at ‘difficulty’ and this skews and defines her developing thinking on the subject. It is quite easy to find works that are difficult or that deal with difficult subjects, but it’s not the same as looking at works that deal with emotion or provoke an emotional response. Clearly, sometimes they overlap but they are quite different. Equally, it is possible to argue that both are historically and culturally specific in as much as say abortion can be. On the other hand, grief and loss are universal, whether individuals and societies choose to ritualize their responses to them differently. In other words, they may be historically and culturally specific, but they nonetheless try to organize and give voice to a similar emotional response.

I do not want to deal with difficult subjects specifically in my artwork or my research, although sometimes I may touch upon them. I am more interested in trying to unravel whether emotions can be rendered possible in contemporary fine art. What Doyle correctly identifies is a type of artwork that turns the viewer into a witness or even a participant. This interpolation of an audience makes people feel uncomfortable and provokes a response that Doyle says can be distinctly personal. (Doyle 2013 xvii). Doyle’s thinking about emotion and art centres on the nature of expression that she says is inextricably linked to questions of identity, which she says, actually “dissolve in emotion”. She continues: “emotion can make our experience of art harder, but it also makes its experience more interesting. It may make things harder because the work provokes unpleasant or painful feelings. It may also make things more complicated; and artwork might provoke contradictory feelings, and it may provoke in the viewer feelings that are at odds with the effective culture of its context. Emotions themselves are very complicated. They can be impossible to stabilize. For example, none of the following questions is easy to answer: does a feeling come from inside the spectator or from the artwork? Does an artwork represent feeling? Whose: the artist’s or the viewer’s? Does a work make feelings? How?” (Doyle, 2013, 4).

Part two

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” Virginia Woolf, 1939.

Woolf suggests that emotion only reveals itself with time. My art practice is concerned with memory and how artist’s attempt to memorialize traumatic events. My undergraduate dissertation looked at how artistic responses to traumatic events, like the Holocaust and 911, change over time. I used the Five Stages of Grief model to account for how artistic responses are linked to time and Woolf suggests that consideration of time is paramount, as the grief model indicates.

This raises the question of why some elements of an artwork or some artworks appear meaningful and others not? Is this where a consideration of time kicks in, or where time intersects with the part memory plays? It could just be that the things that appear significant are the things that are memorable and that they are memorable because they are what we choose to remember or it could be because they touch some other internal subjective chord which develops over time.On the other hand, memory could be constructed and so too could our emotional response. Patrick Fuery argues that meaning in film is based on a kind of madness or delusion: “madness operates as the otherness to meaning, interpretation, knowledge, and so on.” (Fuery, 2004, 154). But Fuery also believes that this part of the meaning structure actually derives from the cinematic apparatus. According to him, everything from cuts, sounds, camera angles, lighting are all meaning producing systems because they have meaning beyond the film (Fuery, 2004, 157). This does not quite answer the time based elements, but might answer the nostalgic pleasure derived from repeat viewings.

Conclusions

“The fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them.” Marcel Proust, (1913, 231)

I have tried to analyse some of the methodologies for researching visual materials like compositional interpretation; content analysis–counting what you think you can see; semiology; psychoanalysis; discourse analysis–intertextuality and, text; and audience studies. A problem I became aware of was that by listing these methodologies, a process of ranking them began to emerge. I am not clear whether I want to rank them, or whether I am implicitly ranking them and if so, what significance one methodology has over another. It is possible that they might be interacting or are co-dependent.

I am aware that the question about emotion I set myself was slightly bloody-minded in that I like to tilt at orthodoxies and don’t like subjects that are out of bounds. My approach to questions and research underpinning my practice might actually be unconventional in this respect. Smith and Dean locate the problem of conventional definitions of research: “at the basis of the relationship between creative practice and research is the problematic nature of conventional definitions of ‘research’… That research is a process which generates knowledge, but takes knowledge as being an understood given.” (Smith and Dean 2010, 2-3). They point to the notion that knowledge is often regarded as both transferable and general and also presuppose the works can embody knowledge with these attributes. I tend to agree with them that research is not monolithic but as an activity “which can appear in a variety of guises across the spectrum of practice.” And the same must apply to orthodoxies.

Smith and Dean also talk about practice-led research and research-led practice, which sums up the iterative and circular nature of research and practice – how one feeds the other, I do feel that sometimes I am caught on a hamster wheel and that might not be such a bad thing. It might even be inevitable.

In summary, I have attempted to scrutinize my practice by posing questions concerning emotion and memory and to give thought, as Proust suggests, to the way in which emotion might be expressed. What I have found is I may have to unravel emotion from notions of knowledge and meaning. Furthermore, I may need to research how viewers respond to technical forms of artistic language. Above all, I am now committed to an on-going enquiry involving research and practice.

Bibliography

 

 

Adorno, T. (1965) Engagement. In Noten Zur Literatur, vol. 3. Frankfurt. Suhrkamp Verlag.

Bennett, J (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford. Stanford University Press

Blatter J and Milton S (1981) Art of the Holocaust. The Rutledge Press.

Cassiman, B. (1993) The Sublime Void. On the Memory of the Imagination. Antwerp. Ludion.

Collins H (2010) Creative Research. The theory and practice of research for the creative industries. Ava Switzerland.

Doyle J. (2013) Hold It Against Me–difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, Duke University Press, Durham and London,.

Gray C and Malins J (2004) Visualising Research: A guide to the research process in art and design. Ashgate, London 2004.

Ksisteva, J. (1993) in The Sublime Void. On the Memory of the Imagination. Antwerp. Ludion.

Proust M (1913) The Guermantes Way Vol. 3 of Remembrance of Things Past Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Adelaide Books, Adelaide.

Rose G. (2007) Visual Methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials (2nd edition) Sage Publications, Los Angeles London New Delhi Singapore.

Saltzman, L (2006) Making Memory Matter – Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. Chicago & London. University of Chicago Press.

Smith H. and Dean R. T. (editors) (2010) Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh (reprint).

Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York. Pearson.

Sullivan G. (2005) Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. Sage, Thousand Oaks, London, Delhi.

Winterson J. (2009) The Stone Gods, Mariner Books, London.

Woolf, (1939) A Sketch of the Past, from Moments of Being, published posthumously.

 

Working collaboratively.

I’ve been thinking more and more about working collaboratively with other artists. I’ve had some experience with the salon I established the group of fellow students during my undergraduate years in Norwich. We produced several pieces based upon instructions and exchange of objects, artifacts and artworks. Perhaps the most successful collaboration was with Jellis Artist, and the film that resulted in the instructions I sent her in New Zealand. The resulting work, ‘I love you like salt’, we uploaded onto Vimeo and has now had over 2500 views.

Recently, I have also collaborated with the artist David Kefford, a director at Aid and Abet, the artist run space in Cambridge. Together, he and I made an intervention piece in the chapel at Jesus College Cambridge. We have also collaborated on number of sculptural pieces and a short film and thinking about further collaborative works.

I have seen work produced collaboratively by artists such as Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Townley and Bradbury. All these artists collaborations seem to work in different ways, but they seem to share something in common being either siblings, married partners, or lifelong soul-mates (collaboratively speaking).

What then marks a successful collaborative arrangement?  Certainly a sublimation of ego is necessary.  When I showed interventions recently made by the artist Tracy Brock with several of my artworks I deemed ‘collaborations’ and exhibited them on my studio walls.  A fellow artist was appalled that I was happy with my work being interfered with.  I regarded it as a compliment that a fellow artist wanted to interact with my work and felt no loss of authorship.

Review of Rebecca Kemp’s exhibition at Yallop’s Gallery, Norwich

Kemp’s show brings together elements of her most recent work, in a single room. It’s a curious mix of exterior and interior worlds. The room at Yallop’s, with its antique colour and fixed domestic picture rail are enhanced by Kemp’s installation and hang.

The centre of the room is dominated by a cast-iron bed on which sits an old mattress. The mattress however has been hollowed out and springing from it are  a range of sods of earth, some sprouting living grasses and plants, some sprouting ripened ears of corn and some with dead plants. In the corner of the room, is a low armchair, not dissimilar, from a nursing chair. The room in fact, takes on an air of the nursery (sic) in every sense of the word, or perhaps the setting for a deathbed scene. It exudes a sense of life beginning or perhaps ending, and is made more palpable by the quiet presence of the artist sitting in the armchair contemplating her charge.

On the walls, were arranged a series of sepia tinted prints of landscapes each containing the same wooden box. These prints are carefully framed and hang from a single picture hook attached to the picture rail, a triangle above them made from the cat-gut thread. No single print is spot lit; instead, all sit like an audience keeping watch along with the nurse, on the bed in the center of the room. The atmosphere is uneasy, yet calm, in one sense foreboding and another, pregnant with anticipation.

Kemp’s language is complex yet not didactic. She doesn’t labour the connections between the bed and its contents and the prints on the walls.  However, connections are there to be made – each location, in a print, is manifest in one of the sods on the bed. What is more, each print, is made from the distilled soil from each individual sod of earth. Kemp brilliantly brings the exterior in land and nature into the interior suggesting place, belonging, life and death, fecundity and excess.

No detail is overlooked, even down to the colour of Kemp’s clothing, which blends with the armchair and echoes the foliage mattress.  Even the knot in the wire from the ceiling-rose to the lamp shade above the bed suggests a tied umbilical chord.

This is a bold complex, multilayered exhibition, which exudes both confidence and restraint. Kemp’s vision provides a lasting and memorable encounter.

 

Gregory Hayman

 

Manifesto Gregory Hayman, December 2013

Art with out emotion is empty and unfulfilling like a kiss without love,

Emotion with out art is manipulative without leading to action,

Manipulation without a purpose is like politics without a goal,

A purpose without politics is like belief in an afterlife,

A belief without reason is like trying to raise a plant in the dark,

Reason without honesty is like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted,

Shutting without opening is like having a house without a door,

A door without something beyond is like an idea that is never discussed,

An idea without reflection is like a meal without salt,

A reflection without a viewer is like art without an idea,

And art without an idea is not art at all.

Gregory Hayman

Richard Wentworth thoughts

Jo Addison reminded me of Richard Wentworth’s work with chairs (Seige) at Tate Modern.  I had forgotten the piece and thought it was worthwhile reacquainting myself.  What is clear is that my piece work no 502 draws on Wentworth’s chair with 2 balls hanging below it.  His interest in the everyday chimes with me.  Also his use of chairs in particular.  Whilst the image below seems to have a sexual undertone, it also implies coupling and then I have to question the title of the work ‘Seige’ with all its hostile overtones and potential persecution.  But then there is the word play on the french word for seat Siege – the first two letters are inverted.. and so there is a play with meaning and definition a la Joseph Kosuth.

Seige 1983/4

False Ceiling 1995