Tools for thinking, - Contemporary art practice in context..

This lecture was ostensibly about the use of diagrams and academic references particularly with respect to writing about contemporary fine art and illustration.

We briefly discussed the week before and how we were given a recommendation to view the Tate Gallery interviews which are available on YouTube.  Or our own interviews which will be required within the next two weeks we will need to ask ourselves what kinds of questions were being asked of an interviewee in order for them to respond in such a way that the interviewer need not have been recorded.  This opens up a new question to help us define our own practice.

The question to pose against ourselves might be "how can we use images and visual references in order to communicate with the wider world".  For example the work done by Brooke Taylor in 1790.  Or Robert Smithson's in his work "heap of language" (1966), or more recently the artist Rachel Whiteread and her work "Ghost" (1990).

The use of diagrams in order to create rough sketch drawings such as those created by Matthew Barney at Yale university.  He does performance drawing and design, and formulated such things as "drawing restraint" (which is available on his webpage), and "Crew Master one, choreographic phase 3" (1995), and other works such as Juliet McDonald's Ph.D. dissertation and thesis.  Usually a doctoral thesis or a Ph.D. consists of approximately 30,000 words.

A simple diagram might be the word boundary encircled, with an arrow whose origin starts within the centre of the encircled space, and arrow outside, suggesting the crossing of the boundary.

So the questions could be asked such as;

what is a diagram
is it a line
is it a boundary
is it a separate
is it a connector
is it a transgression
is it relationship

consider the above subjects or objects with the shape of an arrow to ask the question what is an arrow.

Is it a direction
is it movement
is it a passage of time
is it a passage of distance
is it an argument such as "if, then" for example, - a logical dependence?

Losciapo, F, (2011) created the works "Along lines and contours, a polyphony in the making - drawing and the body, KG52, Stockholm.

He wrote "the creative quality of the diagram consists in the fact that, as an early drawing, it creates information for something to happen".

We then spent some time looking at an interview of Kiki Smith through the Tate Gallery Tate shots entitled drawing and the New York artists interview.  - In the late 1970s through to the 1990s Kiki Smith was generally concerned with drawing of the anatomical details of bodies particularly the internal organs.
She starts the interview, tasked by explaining who she is and where she is located, together with where she has come from.
Stage II of the interview describes what she does now and what influences her together with who she collaborates with.
Stage III of the interview narrows down onto some specific recent work and the processes to get to that point of the work.  She uses the phrase "I just do it and see what happens".
I find that phrase rather frustrating as I believe it is a copout and shows no intellectual thought whatsoever, nevertheless she is an artist and so, does not have too intellectually prove where her ideas or thoughts come from.

Ultimately the job of the interview is to synthesise what place we are in at the moment with respect to the whole world in cultural terms.

My favourite poem that should help me to think about my artists interview comes from Roger Kipling.

"I have six honest serving men they taught me all I know. They are who, what and when where and which and how."