Major Project - Thought Positions in Sculpture

I was lucky enough to be able to attend seminar today which had been curated by Dr Rowan Bailey. The symposium was designed to bring together different responses to the recent exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery entitled "thought positions in sculpture", which displays the work of 10 contemporary artists who have encountered the archive and relate it to their own art practice.

The original planning for this exhibition and symposium commenced in April 2014 at the Royal College of Art engagement entitled "archival interventions in sculpture". Dr Rowan explained the context of both the exhibition and this symposium, which explores

• What, as resources, can "the archive" offer?
• What histories in thinking and making can be explored?
• What are the various practitioners approaches to the archives?

All of these questions will provide a springboard for future thinking. Dr Rowan explained a triangulation informing responses as "an archive as a site of history", "practice led", "thought positions". These three areas provide the points of triangulation informing responses.

The work explores the new web-based archives of
1) National life stories website,-interviews with people in public life.
2) the Tate archives project,-an online collection of sketchbooks and interviews of various leading artists of the 20th century and the start of this millennium.
3) archives of the Henry Moore Institute based at Leeds Art Gallery, The Headrow, Leeds.

A major question to ask ourselves is "what might constitute a thought position in art practice?"
The answer to this is varied but includes our ability to read, to read a piece of art, to take time to understand, to linger, to absorb the wall wider and whole picture, to observe the Gesthalt.

In the words of the philosopher John Dewey "thinking is an art".

Whenever we think about arriving at a position in art, things don't always appear as they seem. Our neural pathways (our 'schemas' as I called it in a previous blog, or blueprints to our automatic cognitive way of thinking), influence our results. The need for us to individually pay attention to the collection of thoughts has been extensively written about by philosophers such as Heidegger and later the works of Jaques Derrida.

A lecture was then presented by Sheila Gaffney, Head of Art at the Leeds College of Art. This was entitled reflections on "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", and opened with the sound recording of the musical composition by Ennio Morreconi, which at the time of release in the 1960s, was in fact released before the film. It presented a brand-new way of creating a cinematic moment which was based on a number of sounds of 'quotidian objects' (i.e. everyday sounds from common things), and raw recorded passages that brought vivid images of the fictional environment.

In thinking about this piece of music, the philosopher Christopher Bollas provides an explanation of "the un-thought note".  He provides a description through psychoanalysis of the 'thought known'. In his book "The Shadow of the Object" he provides a psychic framework for embedded dreaming.

Dr Gaffney discussed the U.K.'s sculptural pedagogy which is built upon a position of "mothering"  to 'pre-form' a psychic frame of reference for making sculpture. She discussed the decorative, didactic, bombastic, mythological approach to the production of sculpture, based on the theatre of lived experience. She believes that much British pedagogy is inherited from the existing archive.

Consider a six-year-old observer of a piece of sculpture. Consider how they can provide an un-biased view of what a sculpture can mean. The signposting, created through a lifetime of lived experience completely changes our own output and feeling of any piece.

The next lecture was provided by Esther Reeve, of Sheffield Hallam University, entitled sculptural substance.

The lecture is based on a part poetic, part academic paper which will be published in the forthcoming weeks and is based on the exhibition "burning to speak" at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield.

In "sculptural substance" Esther is trying to relate to the expression of a creative force, not a material substance. The human "creature" (the word itself signifies creative), and our capacity to be carved by our philosophical and ethical beliefs is what is being explored here.
The notion of a substance, beginning with the Aristotelian definition, suggests that the duality of substance and matter to create form is subjective, in that in substance, we do not have control of it.

The social and public interface of art practice and the associated careers, is purely human paradigms.

"There was a tradition" is a piece of art that Esther Reeve takes inspiration from, - the story of Plato (which includes drawers and salt cellars) found in the book Hector. The artist uses sentences from that book which also references the Temple of the Rohner (which was secondary in importance only to the Oracle at Delphi) for example the sentence "Oak speaks truth" and "the speaker is and from what country the tale comes".

We take for granted that we are all living our own unique lives.... "the artist lives-long live the artist!". What this means is that what we set up in life actually has a bearing on our future life.

An example the artist uses again is one taken from Grey's Anatomy, - "a drawing of a larynx" and the possible metaphor of the genera, which is greater of the voice itself, which can be thought of as the 'grain' of voice. This takes its reference from "Now Garbo" and the book "sculpture carving and constructing in space" (1937, page 109). Within it, the author writes "shapes act, shapes influence our psyche, shapes our events and beings. Our perception of shapes is tied up with our perception of existence itself".