Rosalind Barker

2014   My notes taken during lecture underneath my  list of thoughts on my practice following the lecture: Paul Ryan TAG. Triadic analytic guide

 Flaubert ‘Put all your madness into your work and live a normal life’

My practice:

Installation

Drawing

Domestic

People/Figurative

Multidisciplinary

Multiples of small work to fill a big space

Faceless

Linked to writers

Conceptual

Emotional

Seeking connection

Female

English

Northern

Over half a century old

Medical

Mother

Open

Curious

Enjoy new experiences. Theatre Galleries Places Culture= Stimulation

Site specific

Dialogue

Participatory

Fragile

Clean or very dirty disgusting

Memory

Secrets

Fears

From old photographs mine and found

Texture

 No interest in working with Video or performance

 Faceless…

loss of the appearance of the dead from a persons memory. Only alive while those who know you live.

Old or aged

Altered

Invisible

Unknown

No face removes gender

 My work involves a narrative to do with memory where the personal, social and historical interweave.

* searching Credo reference   ‘face fillers’ gives you plastic surgery and food!

Reading Group 2 November 13th 2013

Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics by Claire Bishop

Good participatory study group discussion with Geraint Evans

Initially perplexed by this document, as I hadn’t read Nicholas Bourriaud ‘relational aesthetics’. It necessitated Internet research prior to reading Bishop and after I read Liam Gallic’s defensive response to the paper. I was curious why my knowledge of Relational Aesthetics was none existent when my practice is based in the public domain as an installation artist and this paper was posing many of the issues that I consider and reflect on. It reinforced the weak art history theory that had failed to materialize on my BA Fine Art Course leaving me independently to follow a focused path that never interacted with art theories and movements I didn’t accidently stumble on. I contacted one of my BA peer group who had a prior BA Art History Degree and was relieved to find her also unaware of relational aesthetics!

It is a very long paper and paragraphs responded and stimulated my interest in the function of the artist as catalyst and potentially experience curator. An artist constructed social experience that is in constant flux.

The arena for relational aesthetics is the1990’s. When society and culture was experiencing the beginnings of the Internet and instant communication. The rise of celebrity, instant fame for being someone as opposed to doing something The time frame for the origins of mass culture that has led to individually constructed self selected experiences via a screen. This jars with the very nature of relational aesthetics, gallery as laboratory for social exchange of ides and interactions.

Relational aesthetics appeared to combine conceptional and installation Art, the emphasis on the art being an interactive personal experience by the viewer.

While Bishop discussed the constructed experience of art making as a social interaction ie. Tiravanijas’ cooking a meal for social consumption in the gallery. I felt the opportunity for this social interaction appeared to be relevant to only the ‘preprogrammed’ viewer likely attend this event. P68 references Saltz who questions theoretically that anyone can come into a gallery. “How come they don’t? Somehow the art world seems to secrete an invisible enzyme that repels outsiders”

NB Remember the Invisible enzyme, a wonderful concept to provoke a body of work.

Gillick emphasizes this interest in the contingencies of a ‘relationship between’ the viewer rather than the ‘object’ itself- is a hallmark of his work and interest in the collaborative practice as a whole.

While Tiravanija gives out free meals in the gallery Sierra knows there is no such thing as a free lunch and every thing and every one has his price.

We had a long discussion about the morality of the artist being paid to solicit permanent body changes to the underclass in exchange for a tiny sum of money to prove the pessimistically obvious point that capitalism exploits. (Sierra tattooing peasants backs with a continuous line in Havana)

Bishop promotes the need for a work to disrupt the viewer, that this creates the transformative change necessary for the art to be considered successful.I have to question the rights we assume as artists to ‘disrupt’ a viewer or expect the viewer to afford the time for ‘contemplating. Gillick seeks that the viewer completes the work from his proposed open-ended resolutions. What would be our reaction to books with no final chapters! Hirschhorn asks only for thoughtful and reflective visitors. “I do not want to do an interactive work. To me, the most important activity that an artwork can provoke is the activity of thinking. Andy Warhols ‘Big Electric Chair’ (1967) makes me think, but it is a painting on a museum wall. An active work requires that I first give of myself’ (p76). The viewer is no longer coerced into fulfilling the artist’s interactive requirement.

Bishop asks p65 “Who is the public?” “How is culture made and who is it for?” Reflections for my practice from reading this paper are numerous, I have a strong interest in the artist /viewer relationship as an installation artist working mainly outside the gallery space with the general public.

Gillicks work promoted the question if I could create an archeology of the present by creating my distressed girls as wall designs in the manner of the Egyptian tomb paintings.