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have a poem accepted in this show in Norwich

[francesannartist]

Taking Research on the Road

This has been an enlightening, sometimes humiliating and humbling experience. What with the tec, the flow and getting the preparation right. It has been a busy summer since teaching duties finished.  Wheelie suitcase at the ready, USB stick in hand I marched forth to meet the tide of conference season.

Weeks and weeks of finely honing my abstract and sending it out willy-nilly to all kinds of conferences and ‘call for abstracts’ call outs I was in a whirlwind of expectation and excitement. As the time grew closer the nerves built up. I sand in front of a class every day, standing up is what I do, and I really love teaching, formal lectures and passing on what I know. In addition to this standing up I also play in an Irish band and of course we are on stage front and centre standing up in front of crowds – entertaining. And one more this I dance in an amateur dance troupe, Indian and Persian dancing. So I do a lot of being at the front, speaking, playing and dancing. But the conference paper is a new thing for me and a nervy one.

Get Brother Technology on your side (load up the pres in the coffee break).

There are so many elements to think about. Brother technology, he is a mischievous one. The kind of questions I need to know a sensible answer to are as follows:-, is it on a USB stick? Is it on the desk top? Have you got the correct wire? Did you bring your own lap top? Just when you think it’s going to be ok, the programme is too old, the version I have saved my presentation is not compatible with the programme on the computer, the cable doesn’t fit, the microphone konks out, the bright heatwave sun overheats the projector. Luckily these didn’t happen all to me or all at the same time.

Getting in the flow.

What do I mean by that? I mean saying what I have to say, remembering all the right words and phrases so carefully researched and gathered together. My first conference – very first one ever in a Northern University, Brother Tech was not kind, being last mean I had plenty of time to work out who in the room could fix it and have a word with them before my presentation. They very kindly got the programme to work after only a small hitch. The room, full of hungry post grad students and professors, the last presentation before lunch, it looked like a hard crowd to please. I had my script but being dyslexic a script is more of a hindrance than a help and losing my place and trying to find it again is not the best. My style can be way ‘off piste’ if I’m not careful. I can spend many a regretful hour dissecting the moment  “why did I say that…”, “why did I say it in that way with that inflection…”. However these are lessons to learn for the next time.

 Be Prepared -practice.

Here we were in London for my next presentation of the summer. I had re tweaked the presentation, but it had taken me so long I had not the time to practice it (only a few days between the last one). I was happier with the order and had taken the brave (or foolhardy) decision to dump the script. After all I am used to standing for 3 hours playing the cannon of Irish favourites. At least 50 or more tunes on the fiddle - no music and drastic key changes moments before the performance, all by ear, no script. What was this a 15 minute talk, should be no problem. But wait, oh yes I’ve been playing Irish music since I was 11. I have the tunes but more importantly the muscle memory of the fingering shapes. The moves are not just in my brain, they are in my hand – I don’t even have to think about it, it flows. This presentation is a whole new concept and new neurological path has been walked in my brain and it is slow steps at first, awkward and without finesse or style. In the presentation I have a massive coughing fit mid flow and my nose runs and my eyes water and I feel a total idiot but carried on till the end. Lesson learnt – take a bottle of water up and a tissue, for all eventualities. Apart from the coughing it was a better presentation than the first one.

 The third presentation a Midlands University very regal building, everything was very well done here with a practices and organized hand, vast quantities of student ambassadors and team members abounded to direct and guide and fix stuff. Brother technology was on his best behaviour and kit was of a hugely high standard and new and worked. The presentation had to be 20 minutes and so I had re written and rejigged the order and flow of the slides and what I would say to each one,  - no scrip. It is best for me. It went amazingly well, I was very very pleased with it and had good feedback.

 Never too late to have a last check.

Last one in this marathon of conferences. An Oxbridge college. Very awe inspiring, the surrounding s were like a stage set, all quadrangles and spires and leafy corners and ancient taverns. Staying in student halls – what a luxury, participants scared each other with creepy ghost stories through the Gothic revival cloisters. Despite the lofty surroundings the conference was collegiate and supportive. My talk at this conference was for the last time very slightly reworked, just thinking about the past 3 papers and what did not flow as well as it could and just doing that final bit of adjusting. A really good paper, tec was fine, receptive audience, lots of good questions which could have gone on longer. Fist pump the air, yay last one done and dusted, and I was happy with it.

 All in all I have learned so much. About how I perform under pressure, about the honestly weird face I pull when I talking. About crafting an abstract and getting it in on time. Fine tuning and ruthlessly editing the presentation, making it relevant to each different conference and time constraint. Being comfy yet elegant. Being hydrated and having water. Don’t worry about the hiccoughs, just keep going till the end, everyone knows what its like to present and feel the nerves and they don’t mind a little bit of whoops a daisy – up to a point. I’m incredibly grateful to the ETF SUNCETT for sponsoring my attendance at some of these conferences. University of Sunderland customised MPhil in education. And to Leeds Arts University for allowing me to participate and supporting me in my studies and the conferences. It takes a village to bring up a child. And equally I think it takes the collegiality of universities and lecturers to bring on the next wave of research students, who will become the next teachers, practitioners, professors, policy makers, difference makers in education.

  https://talkingaboutartmphil.blogspot.com/2018/07/taking-research-on-road-this-has-been.html

[francesannartist]

ETF teachers conference London

We were welcomed by Proff Maggie Gregson who opened the conference talking about expanding the horizons of FE research, added to by Dr Lawrence Nixon and the Education and Training Foundation who fund FE research at SUNCETT, ETF was introduced by Paul Kessell Holland and a talk from Dr Samantha Broadhead on her newly published book co authored with Proffessor Maggie Gregson, on teaching Access, Practical Wisdom and Democratic Education. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Wisdom-Democratic-Education-Non-traditional/dp/3319733109/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1530626474&sr=1-1&keywords=broadhead+and+gregson

 Later in the day was an address by the CEO of ETF, David Russell. Here is what he said. Our role as FE practitioners and researchers was to critique and extend current research and data in the sector often done by HE or ‘Big Data’ collectors. What we offer is a unique insight into the experience and knowledge of a practitioner on the chalk face. We have distinct narrative and he encourages us to “Go tell it”, criticise other narrative not taken from eye witness data, challenge that data and the findings.

Each of us from the MPhil – 18 practitioners on the PT and 9 on the FT, as well as the 23 students on the Research Development Fellowship short course MA has written a research project on what its like to teach, train and lead in our institutions. Where the gaps in the system are that we think could be bettered, developed and grown. And this all done from surveys, interviews, diaries, circles, case studies and critical incidence. New original data, never been captured before. Disseminate the research, tell how the investigation has changed practice, tell policy makers tell academic journals, tell conferences (and blog readers) . ETF want to develop change agents in us so we can change:-

·         Education policy

·         New FE research on learning, leading, practitioners and teaching

·         Create effective pedagogy

[francesannartist]

Tight with Grips

Dream Poem 101: Tight With Grips

 The pen has fallen between the twin-beds.

she rolls over and fishes her arm down between them

feeling for it.

 The sun is so bright through the window

Winter bright

Low

Far

Cold sun light.

 The beds are covered in a pale blue nylon counterpane

with a gauzy nylon flounce

very 1970’s.

 Her black hair has been swizzled up at the sides

Tight with grips.

Se has a ballet class to go to.

 In a shop looking for an outfit for ballet class

her clothes aren’t suitable.

Looking in the girl-teen section

children are eyeing her suspiciously.

 She has to go

But gets into an argument with a man on the way out.

He is a Show-Room car actor.

 From above the controller peers through one way mirrors

In the control room

observing groups of people

Down below

Power games

Factions.

 The rule is you must meet your girlfriend on school reunion day

Within the city limits of a Derbyshire village.

He is beaten for his transgressions

of having a girlfriend not from the village

not met on the right day.

“Yeah didn’t he know the rules?”

“Had it coming to him – he knew!”

https://francesodonnellpoetry.blogspot.com/2018/06/dream-poem-101-tight-with-grips-pen-has.html 

[francesannartist]

Poetry: Niagara in the 90′s

Niagara in the 90’s; After James Richards, Raking Light 2014, Digital Video with stereo sound.

 Safely seated in a small darkened space

In the 1990’s rooms of the Tate

Here to see Inventory’s DaDa reflection on social housing.

London trains and busses have exhausted me.

 Onscreen a series of obscure and abstract images

Until Niagara appears.

And now two films are running,

the one on screen

and the one in my memory.

 Niagara Falls in December,

the nineties have just begun like a new love affair.

Niagara Falls in deep love

Of crashing foam.

 A woman in a yellow trench coat

that her mother bought from a shop that doesn’t exist anymore,

Headscarf and red lipstick.

She waits at the top

for her photo to be taken.

Pose like Marilyn.

 But there are no colours

Everything is blank faced, locked up

Frozen solid, danger zone.

The petrified falls and thickly

Iced, icey, walk-ways are

A hazard

Impassable.

Like this fake marriage.

 Why does she persist?

Standing on the edge of

the Falls.

High Place Phenomenon in full force

Like falling off the Humber bridge or

down a deep nautilus spiral stairwell

or the Brink of Horseshoe Falls.

 Falling would be so easy on this treacherous day

Freefall

Dissolving into the sublime landscape

Evanescing into the tossing waves.

Just for a moment,

just to see what it feels like.

 Watching the tide this morning at Seaburn.

The steps go nowhere

Staircase and jetty are swamped by engulfing waters.

so one can only walk so far down

Before The Sea stops me

and makes me stand and stare at the awe and mighty power of the waves

set in bounds.

 Sham marriage,

there is only so far she can walk with him

Collins’ Sleeping Fool

Until the sea of misery, dissolution and desperation

Stops her in her tracks.

Brings her to a halt.

Some call it rock bottom.

Full of grit and dirt and hard painfulness.

 The steps leading nowhere,

It has something of a ruin about it.

There is a working of the imagination,

filling in of the gaps,

not spelling it out.

 Watching the sea smash up the steps

and fizzle down again

only to be laid waste by the next oncoming wave.

 What if I were engulfed in the next wave?

What if I am sucked into the swell?

it is a morbid fantasy,

I will not do it.

But I’m interested what it feels like.

Just a bit of dreadful curiosity,

while I watched and prayed by the banister this morning.

This must be a phenomen.

 The video rolls on, the spray,

and the deep curve of the lip of the Falls viewed from Goat Island.

I think she is frozen like the Falls themselves.

Immobile with horror,

Of what she has convinced herself into.

If only she could go down

Draw the curtain under the falls behind her

Then she would know

The secret hidden in the cave there

And she would understand

The meaning of the light

The ice

The bitter frozen storm

The leaden sky

The bloodless relationship

The years of neglect and disorder

The loneliness and heart break.

Comprehend it all.

 This relationship is in an eternity of free fall

Sartre’s vertigo of possibility, L’Appel du Vide.

Looking in the reflected blade of a knife

Holding a looking glass up to her own

Servitude

Loneliness

Sanctions.

 Nearby is a small stone cabin

Blank windows, shabby disagreeableness.

Barred against the storm.

 How she wishes to disappear

To melt into the icy drop

Absorbed like a water-colour in the rain

Atomise into cloud.

stills from James Richards Raking Light 2014

photos from Wiki Commons, early photography 1858 and 1893

[francesannartist]

The Tale of Laertes; Double Whammy.

The Tale of Laertes

Laertes is in his late twenties when he enrols on the Access course. He had been allowed to leave school at fourteen for several reasons, he doesn’t read well, he did not enjoy the patriarchal system at school, got into trouble and became a school refuser. Finally the school let him leave, and he went to help in his Dad’s plastering business.

 Endeavouring to acclimatise and enculturate him into the college milieu is a difficult task as he is not used to how to behave in an educational setting, this may be down to the bad experience and memories of school. He is good naturedly disruptive and constantly coming across our administrators for not conforming to ‘normal’ student protocols like arriving on time, staying the whole day and handing work in on time.

 The tale of Laertes is that of a non-traditional route into FE, and is one we are familiar with on the Access course. The collaborative work we do with students talking through their educational expectations, goals and how to achieve them through study or sometimes other means, takes time and the building of trust and relationship. The Access course is a place to come at the beginning of an educational journey and some students realize at the end of the first year of study that, either art is not for them, education and its stipulations is not the right fit or it is the wrong time of life (family commitments like looking after a suddenly sick relative or a new baby) or a wellness issue (a personal mental or physical health breakdown) stops them studying.  

 Laertes’ level of literacy was very low because of his historical patchy attendance at school and his refusal to sit any exams at GCSE. And yet his art practice was developing through the course to become good. The stumbling block was the written and critical elements of the course. As the weeks went on he became less engaged because of the need to complete critical annotations and art history and contextual studies sessions. In the end Laertes stopped coming to class and eventually dropped out, taking Juno a female student with him, after they had begun a relationship. He did not complete and by extension she did not complete either.  Double whammy.

 Biesta (2014) and Felding’s studies (2005) on Community of Inquiry show that there has to be a meeting in the middle, the opportunity to get involved is provided but the students who don’t engage for whatever reason, bad experience in the past and trust issues don’t benefit from a collaborative democratization of the classroom (Broadhead and Gregson 2017). Or is it that the seed has been sown? Ideas and new experiences of positive educational understandings mean that students like Laertes may try again. Access students who drop out mid-term will very often return next academic year to complete the qualification.

Bibliography

Biesta, G. J. J., (2014) The Beautiful Risk of Education, Oxon, Paradigm Books, Routledge.

Broadhead, S and Gregson, M (2017) Practical Wisdom and Democratic Education, Phronesis, Art and Non Traditional Students, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Fielding, M. et al (2005) Factors influencing the transfer of good practice, London: DfES, Research Brief No RB615.

http://www.et-foundation.co.uk/research/joint-practice-development/

[francesannartist]

Embodied Practice in the Pottery Workshop

Bobs Village Gallery in Wisdom, North Carolingan  is a production pottery. It is a small factory making craft pottery by hand. A craft industry, in this case it is run by Bob and his wife Molly. Ellen Dean and a few other employees take care of the duties in the gallery and the pottery workshop. Bob and Ellen work together six days a week, eight hours a day. That is the kind of dedication a craft practice takes. He had a pottery wheel, a Shimpo and sits in the workshop window throwing pots. It is a practice, a labour and it is really hard, dirty, cramp-inducing work. Ellen puts handles on, fires up the bisque kiln, loads the glaze kiln, tends the gas kiln, glazes pots for orders and helps in the gallery packing pots to ship out to galleries. See post https://talkingaboutartmphil.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/the-story-of-handle-man-why-practice.html for other stories about embodied practice.

This summer they have an apprentice, a woman called Andy. She is newly graduated from Green Mountain College and wants experience and to earn some money before her wedding in the fall. (She has her Mother’s 1660’s wedding gown and proudly shows it to Ellen in its tissue and vintage store box. What with the intensive and repetitive practice of throwing pots her forearms are so muscular she had to get the delicate voile sleeves widened.)

Andy is on piece work. She is on mugs, and throws them all day. Boards of 20 mugs stacked up around the studio. Bob can, on a good day throw 250 mugs all perfect, all almost exactly the same, that is the experience and skill of his practice. Andy has to learn Bob’s style, his mug shape, the correct thickness of clay at each part of the mug body. The correct foot, lip, waist and depth. Taking a 25kg bag of white stoneware clay and cutting it into exactly weighted cubes with a huge cheese wire. These are the skills of his practice that Bob passes on to her and she has to learn exactly.

Being on piece work means she had to be accurate, exact and fast. Bob at the end of the day walks round the boards of mugs she has thrown and randomly, slice them in half – this is the only true test to see if the mug has been correctly thrown. Of course whether it is or not, that mug is destroyed.

Practice. It is an art, an accumulation of experience, a judgement, getting your eye in, connoisseurship, expertise, deep physical knowledge, and knowing when it is enough, when it is just right, when to stop the process and how to avoid ruining a thing with overdoing it.

Image:Interior of the George E. Ohr pottery workshop, Biloxi, Mississippi

Image: Pottery workshop of Daniel Leș . Romania Maramureș County, Baia Sprie.

[francesannartist]

From Fishtown to Gimmerton, Education as a Social Mobility

or The Tale of Boreas, a case study.

Boreas is a young man, sensitive, quietly spoken and shy. One of our Non-Traditional students from a white working class broken home in coastal Fishtown, a depressed post-industrial area of the Northern coast line. There is high unemployment and few opportunities in Fishtown and so after an uneventful and unheroic schooling with few aspirations Boreas moved to Gimmerton. He is a softly spoken gentle soul that life ‘happens to’ rather than having any agency of his own, or that was the case at the beginning of the Access course. Boreas’ issues run deep, abandoned by his Dad, left in the care of a step parent, he drifted and turned to drink and recreational drugs.

 The cat’s eye glimmer in the road to change was community education and night classes in Gimmerton. Being in a new town away from detrimental influences he was able to switch paths. Without inspiration and encouragement from the community classes he may have gone farther down the road of dissolution. He may have drifted into homelessness and harder drugs and joined the hundreds of street people that line the shop doorways in sleeping bags and live in tents on the ring road embankments. Education can offer stability and structure, achievable life goals, increased job opportunities, and a readymade community of like-minded people to study with.

The community classes led him to the Access course, and going from strength to strength, he has increased in confidence in himself, seeing the success he is capable of in the course work. He is a participant in my Thinking Diary Project and comes to Art Discussion Group. He has surprised us all by speaking at length and fluently about the texts we have been studying. The texts are artist diaries and memoirs  from Grayson Perry, Virginia Woolf, Tracey Emin, Marjane Satrapi and Charlotte Salomon. Excerpt are chosen in various formats, not just written, but graphic novels, and video documentaries to see what engaged students most.

 Boreas could so easily have been a students who drifts in and slips away again without completing or gaining a qualification. I strongly believe this community of enquiry we have built together over the year has given participants an added reason to keep attending, to follow through on their original intention to complete the course, as well as to develop their critical thinking and by extension strongly informed writing. Boreas has recently been accepted on a BA hons course at Gimmerton University of the Arts and although he will always have issues, it is hoped now he has completed two years at college he will continue towards his goal of studying at HE level and graduating.

[francesannartist]

No more ring around the hussy, pocket full of posers.

[francesannartist]

The phone booth was skull-cracked,              and caulked with soggy directories. All the people              we’d never know. We stood about, like white teeth,              watching the morning split hairs in the shattered glass.              Every other boy was listening to hold music, every other boy was slipping dollars into the coin slot,              buying time with small change.

[francesannartist]

Now the mulch has come between us seven turns, I’ve grown dramatic, prone to existential snits. I wax funereal at lunch. I wear a little stain beneath my robe. The woman with the ostrich-leather harness, I am she. The coat-check tender chasing down the train. My mother says the feralness in me is unbecoming. She still puts everything in jars: wild honey, fruit preserves, the slurry of the heart. Come hear me talk! Advance in age beside me and this pine! Is yours, like mine, the edgeless kind of soft?

[francesannartist]

The large difficulty of mercy is that it’s full of people moving and sometimes you are not one of them. I say this to him. What I mean is there’s no interpretable order, no structure, no owner. No one, holding a flower, you can predict at your door.

[francesannartist]

‘…the writers we are willing to call master are those who seem to us finally to be saying what we feel we have long had on the tip of our tongue but have been ourselves quite unable to express, those who put into words what are for us only inchoate motions, tendencies, and impulses of the mind, then I am more than happy to acknowledge Wittgenstein as my master.’ Geertz, C. (2000).

[francesannartist]

Telling Tales part 2: Narrative Lives; Banned Stories

Themes in this post are, Narrative, stories, banned stories, the Magnificat, Rebel Irish songs, the Arab spring, so called ‘degenerate’ artists, Etty Hillesum diarist in hiding and Marshall Gregory’s ethical critique of narrative.

Stories are an integral part of our lives, from fairy tales to ancient Greek mythology and more localised folk tales, (Norton 1998, The Beast Within, comparing Celtic and Papua new Guinea mythologies.) In addition to stories we are told as children there are the stories we see on TV such as soap operas, also gaining popularity Netflix, the internet, social media and even adverts are mini stories, miniature narratives.

Gregory (2009) relates that in opposition to the story makers there are the story-deniers like the Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries. Some narratives were banned because they were deemed too subversive. For instance the Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55), Rich Lusk (2008) states that it is the song of rebels and subversives, revolutionaries and insurgents. It has been banned by monarchs in “Enlightenment” Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In more recent history it was suppressed in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s by petty dictators and in India by colonial viceroys. In Mary’s song she says “…he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly, the poor and hungry are filled with good things while the rich are turned away empty.” (Lk. 1:52). This is the kind of song-story that gives people hope, especially people who are enslaved, trafficked, starving, suppressed, laid low and bowed down by the power and greed of Governments, politics and Big Business corporations.

Banned narrative ‘Rebel’ songs from Ireland, in the past were disallowed in England because of their inflammatory subtext and folk songs using words of uprising such as, Sean South of Garryowen, Foggy Dew and Grace. Why are these stories so popular and so powerful? Terry Moylan author of The Reluctant Muse (2016) a commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916 which includes Irish Rebel songs and poetry from over a century ago. He speaks in self-depreciation when he says of rebel songs, ‘Really it is a means of making somebody feel better when they haven’t managed to achieve their political or military objectives; they take refuge in self-consolation musically.’ But he conciliates the view saying that whilst some narratives within the song-stories are politically motivated aiming to stir up partisan feeling, others are linked to the song-cycles and myths of ancient Ireland and again others are lyrical driven by a love of the home land. As with many narratives the origin and intention is hidden and euphemistic, Moylan muses that, “It’s not a single complexion that they all have, there’s variety in them.’ And goes on to recommend the value in the songs for their musicality or story-telling, without having to subscribe to any one faction or platform. Being in an Irish band myself, I can vouch for the strong feeling some of these song-stories stir up, usually resulting rowdy sing-alongs and frenetic dancing but all in good cheer.

The internet was a channel of story-telling in Egypt and Turkey during the Arab Spring in 2010/11 where Hemple (2016) tells us, there is no free press,  as such activists were able to alert and mobilise protest through social media sites such as  Facebook and Twitter. Now governmental clampdown has put a stop to all activities and is in turn using social media for its own uses, “You can now create a narrative saying a democracy activist was a traitor and a paedophile,” says Anne Applebaum, an author who directs a program on radical political and economic change at the Legatum Institute in London, (Hempel, 2016).

During WW2 certain all Modernist artists were designated ‘degenerate’ by the Third Reich, their story of being Jewish, being Gay, Gypsy-Roma, non-Arian – their visual story, was destroyed, stolen, sold or hidden from the public. Emile Nolde (German Danish Pinter) is a problematic practitioner, in that, the dualism of his narrative throw our allegiances powerfully for and equally determinedly against. As a supporter of the Nazis, his work is tainted and abhorrent by association, and yet it is redeemed and applauded by his outcast ‘degenerate’ demarcation. Over one thousand of his art works were removed from German museums and he was not allowed to paint, even in private. Despite the ban, a good story is irrepressible, legendary and subversive, and he made some of his best work during this period, which he hid, and swapped for food, or just gave away. He called them the "Unpainted Pictures". Nolde’s life, practice and choices are complex, like the best stories.  

Jewish WW2 diarist from Holland, Etty Hilsum, created narrative in hiding, in concentration camps and in secret. Her story persisted, enlarging and illuminating her life and the lives of us who read it historically. The banned stories, the banned people, the murdered people. Stories are a way of saying the unsayable. Hillesum a woman in her twenties, wrote of the philosophical, political and sexual life she was leading, the increasing restrictions her life and the lives of her friends and family were put under. Her narrative has a contemporary feel to it, independent young woman, just beginning to understand her role in the world. A writer and a thinker influenced by Freud and Rilke, her practice included letters, poems and diaries.

“Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it all mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations that strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing.” (Hillesum, in Smelik 2002)

In folk takes and mythology, crimes like rape and murder are ameliorated by the protagonist being superhuman god, or half animal hybrids, the transformations in Ovid (2009) point to the aftermath of crimes  and result in women transforming into trees and rivers to escape or to assuage offence against them (Norton 1998). Transformation is one of my favourite Narrative tropes. A psychologist friend of mine says that in helping unravel the layered and changing stories of patients, she often asks them what their favourite story was at the age of eight was. This is a telling game, for her it was The Magic Faraway Tree (Blyton 1943) a fantasy getaway, mine was The Cabbage Princess (Le Cain 1969), a story of transformation, punishment and ultimate relearning, reassessing and redemption. Ask yourself what yours was and then think how this story has effected your life.

Gregory (2009) talks specifically about the ethical implication of stories and this is an important and fascinating link. He quotes Vicram Chandra in this epithet, ‘The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world’. Gregory asserts that humanity is obsessed by stories, and our lives are saturated with stories. He believes that often repeated and well love stories can in time and perception change the narrative. Stories exert an influence ethically over us after we finish telling it or after we have closed the book, some stories have a persistent effect on us some stories are different when we revisit them at a different time.

A viewer’s perceptions of an art work, a diary, a piece of literature can change over time, the personal critical and ethical influence of narrative extends beyond the telling, Gregory (2009) sees it as an ongoing interaction. Real responses to the plight of fictional characters in Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Atwood or Bronte, the laughter and tears fictional characters produce evince in me,  Gregory (2009) recommends that we the audience are hungry for a more generous, compassionate, humane, thoughtful, connected, nourishing life through fiction, through narrative and story.

I recognise the proposition Gregory (2009) is offering so insightfully. His childhood adversary was an authoritarian Father Figure, mine was an autistic father with little empathy, emotional intelligence or verbal articulation, that piece of his emotional psyche was missing or damaged. I was a silent child, more watching and listening than speaking and interacting. I learned how to socially interact, finding silence was not acceptable to teachers or peers. My teacher was the TV, Saturdays afternoon Film Noir and soap operas of the 1970’s and 80’s. Some school texts such as Kes (Hines, 1968) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Sillitoe, 1958) and a lot of American sitcoms – Cheers, Fame, the Cosbys, Dynasty, Hammer Horror and Coronation Street. These shows gave me a social register of appropriate behaviours, albeit melodramatic which I echoed and repeated and reciprocated to my peers which they were greatly entertained by. In addition to this I became a bit of an amateur school girl anthropologist, observing the families of my school friends. I made it a mission to be invited to as many different houses as possible to spend the night, this I regarded as an essential part of my education.

 Gregory (2009) stresses that we should not to dwell on petty paybacks for hurts of the past. The value of learning from narrative is an ethical imitation, an invitation to deepen our understanding of the past and the present and to acquire a different ethos from the victim persona I could have become (or was already becoming).A child of tyranny tends to respond too needily, too emphatically uncritically to any crumb of praise of support or sympathy, seeing a fictional relationship helps me ‘place’ a personal relationship, “as a an object to be apprehended and thought about, not just felt”, childish resentments and childish tendency to exaggerate and extend the extent and reach of the Father’s power and authority over me and others is only one ending to the story. My penchant for the transformative tale may not have me growing branches for arms but instead (more usefully) I have transformed my position in my own mind, and changed my stance about the past to accept, understand, let go and move on.

 Brennan, M., (2016) Ireland’s Songs of Rebellion, https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsfilmtv/irelands-songs-of-rebellion-389291.html , accessed 1 April 2018.

Evans, M., (2014)

Etty Hillesum: an intellectual woman ahead of her time,

Times Educational Supplement,

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/culture/etty-hillesum-an-intellectual-woman-ahead-of-her-time/2011570.article, accessed 2 April 2018.

Gregory, M., (2009) Shaped by Stories, the Ethical Power of Narratives, Indiana, University of Notre Dame.

Hempel, J., (2016) Social Media Made the Arab Spring but Could Not Save it, https://www.wired.com/2016/01/social-media-made-the-arab-spring-but-couldnt-save-it/, accessed 25 February 2018.

Hillesum, E., (1999) An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum. Preface by Eva Hoffman, London: Persephone Books.

Knubben, Thomas. Emil Nolde: Unpainted Pictures. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Kantz Publishers, 2000. 

Lusk, R., (2008) Mary’s Son, Mary’s Song: Implications of the Incarnation. http://trinity-pres.net/audio/08-12-07sermonnotes.pdf, accessed 1 Aril 2018.

Moylan, T, (2016)

The Indignant Muse: Poetry and Songs of the Irish Revolution,

Dublin, The Lilliput Press

.

Myers, S., ed (2009) Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Gregory, H., London, Penguin, Signet Classics.

Norton, F., (1998) The Beast Within. MA thesis University of Cardiff Institute Cardiff.

Smelik, C. A. D., Ed. (2002) Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941–1943., translation by Arnold J. Pomerans. Ottawa, Ontario: Novalis Saint Paul University – William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Tate (2018a) Narrative, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/narrative, accessed 8th February 2018.

 Image: Emile Nolde, evening landscape, North Fresia, 1940’s – one of the ‘unpainted’ pictures.

Image: Magnificat, Icon of the Visitation, 14th-century wall painting of the Visitation from Timios Stavros Church in Pelendi, Cyprus.

Image: the crowd at a rebel song singalong, Dublin 1980s Derek Warfield.

Image: The Sea at Dusk, Emile Nolde, 1940s

Image: Etty Hillsum and her diaries

Image: cover of ‘the Cabbage Princess’ by Erol Le Cain 1969.

Image David Bradley in Ken Loache’s, Kes, 1969.

[francesannartist]

Inside the Red Cube

Rothko’s Seagram Paintings,

a case study of obsessive practice.

Response to The artist studio exhibition, Tate Modern 2018. (Visited 220318).

This post considers: Practice through historical research - The role of contextualising practice in the Laurentian Library and Rothko’s Seagram Mural Project, practice through performance  - the staging of the ‘room’ with scaffolding to get the space right, practice through communication - link with White Cube Thinking article, How to Exhibit Practice? The Narrative continues, new stories about the paintings.

 Continuing from the post ‘White Cube Thinking’, Rothko in his Seagram commission, was absorbed by and wanted to express the feeling of being in (time, space, memory, time-based, Decartian body in space, in the Ingold taskscape of the library) Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library (1525) – a Medici quattrocento building next to il Duomo in Florence. This library was purpose built for study, academia, grandeur and awe; it seems to me, built on the same grand scale as the high alter by Bernini at the Vatican. The size of them dwarfs the faithful by their giant proportions, just as the dimension of the Seagram Mural is oversized, immersive is a word Rothko a Russian (now part of Latvia) born American Painter from the Abstract expressionist movement.

The whole idea of blocking up the windows, as O’ Doherty (2000) comments on the white cube contemporary gallery space, is to create a rarefied atmosphere of the intelligencia, academia and preservation. In this arena by which to communicate practice, natural light is denied just as in the Laurentian Library, and this is one of the themes Rothko was trying to portray in this series of paintings.

The Laurentian Library is a veneration of the past, a cathedral to wealth and power in the form of the written word and books (privileging type, expensive education and literacy). Rothko’s paintings echo the emphasis of feeling, the Seagram Building a Modernist Medici monument. This was a new American temple to commerce, capitalism, new money, grand families, and idea of immortality. Interestingly Rothko never completed the commission, he made the paintings and then changed his mind and did not give them over to Seagram, Johnson or van de Rohe. Wonder what happened? Instead they were donated to the Tate.

Sitting in the Rothko room I am in a different white cube space, a deliberately ‘compact and oppressive space’, the blurb on the wall reminds us (the wall which by the way is cadmium yellow). The specific dimensions create a suffocating presence. The original nine paintings on every wall in the room, huge in scale and dimension, Rothko wanted the viewer to have an immersive experience. The reds and maroons redolent of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete where the hot scarlet walls are a backdrop for live and roiling botanical frescos coupled with acrobatic bull dancers and bare chested snake grappling priestesses. Religious ecstasy, and a collision with the sublime in a hypnagogic state, is this what Rothko was trying to induce? Intriguing triangles of connection drawn in my head. Some with dotted lines some with coloured lines, solid lines, intersecting connecting subjects and images and place and thoughts. Some of them golden.

Paintings imaginatively named, Maroon on Black, Red on Maroon, all executed in 1958-9.  On the cusp of post modernism, on the cusp of the decade, on the cusp of prosperity in a post war era, American dominance globally, monetarily, was paramount, the power had shifted from ‘old’ broken post war Europe to the New World Order.

The paintings in oxblood, maroon and blood red. Making the viewer feel, as the information puts it ‘trapped’ – imprisoned by art, by the visual, arrested, calling the colour ‘brick’ and using the phrase ‘bricked up’,  “all they can do is butt their heads against the wall forever” Rothko states, the muted lighting and closed eyelid red give a feeling of being buried alive. The four Seasons restaurant in the 1950s Seagram building on Park Avenue where the paintings were originally destined for, was the antithesis of the white cube or the feeling of being ‘bricked up’. All glass and light and plants, airy high ceilings, open plan booths.

Paintings imaginatively named, Maroon on Black, Red on Maroon, all executed in 1958-9.  On the cusp of post modernism, on the cusp of the decade, on the cusp of prosperity in a post war era, American dominance globally, monetarily, was paramount, the power had shifted from ‘old’ broken post war Europe to the New World Order.

The paintings in oxblood, maroon and blood red. Making the viewer feel, as the information puts it ‘trapped’ – imprisoned by art, by the visual, arrested, calling the colour ‘brick’ and using the phrase ‘bricked up’,  “all they can do is butt their heads against the wall forever” Rothko states, the muted lighting and closed eyelid red give a feeling of being buried alive. The four Seasons restaurant in the 1950s Seagram building on Park Avenue where the paintings were originally destined for, was the antithesis of the white cube or the feeling of being ‘bricked up’. All glass and light and plants, airy high ceilings, open plan booths.

Paintings imaginatively named, Maroon on Black, Red on Maroon, all executed in 1958-9.  On the cusp of post modernism, on the cusp of the decade, on the cusp of prosperity in a post war era, American dominance globally, monetarily, was paramount, the power had shifted from ‘old’ broken post war Europe to the New World Order.

The paintings in oxblood, maroon and blood red. Making the viewer feel, as the information puts it ‘trapped’ – imprisoned by art, by the visual, arrested, calling the colour ‘brick’ and using the phrase ‘bricked up’,  “all they can do is butt their heads against the wall forever” Rothko states, the muted lighting and closed eyelid red give a feeling of being buried alive. The four Seasons restaurant in the 1950s Seagram building on Park Avenue where the paintings were originally destined for, was the antithesis of the white cube or the feeling of being ‘bricked up’. All glass and light and plants, airy high ceilings, open plan booths.

Rothko’s painting practice can be contextualised linking his 1958 Seagram Murals to a Florentine Renaissance. He emulates the feeling of being in a library, the windows closed and blinds pulled down against the sun. Each painting in the series is a vertical or horizontal, soft edged rectangle, light diffusing from under and round the edge of blinds creating dark silhouettes and tonally analogous colours in a hot palate.  The images would not exist without this contextualisation, this research into a historical building and all it may mean politically, psychologically and emotionally. Rothko has a vison of the library room and decides to recreate the feeling of space and memory so that the paintings are arranged like a stage set, echoing the feeling of being in Florence at the Laurentian.

An interesting addendum is the addition Vladimir Umanets gave to Black on Maroon 1958. In 2015 he casually went up to the painting on display in the Tate and wrote with black ink in the corner of the painting. It said “A potential piece of yellowism.” Thinking about narrativity, this act is now part of the story of the canvas. Paintings even very abstract ones like the Seagram Murals have an implied narrative content, the deep pools of red and maroon also invite the viewer to project something of their own story onto the reflective, dream-like surface of the painting. The image also contains the memory and history of the artist, their intention, who bought it, where was it hung, who was it passed to. During communist rule post WW2 the people of Albania were not allowed to go to church, synagogue or Orthodox Church. Whilst in Albania doing aid-work I met a man who had buried pictures and statues from the Catholic Church under his house to avoid them being destroyed, if he had been caught he would certainly have been arrested. These items now replaced in the partially destroyed church have layers of narrative attached to them. Just like the Rothko canvas, the Yellowism incident adds to its value, adds to its public interest, and it is now a collaborative work. The practice of a dead painter is responded to by a contemporary artist. There is a precedent for this kind of work, Robert Rauschenberg in 1953 bought a Willem De Kooning drawing and rubbed it out with an eraser. Ai WeiWei bought ancient Chinese vases and filmed himself smashing and destroying it or dunking it in candy coloured paint. Unfortunately Umanets did not own the Rothko he was ‘collaborating’ on and so ended up with a two year prison sentence, which is another element of the story of ‘Black on Maroon’ 1958.

  O’Doherty, B., (2000) 

Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Expanded Edition, 

London, University of California Press.

http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/in-the-studio/mark-rothko accessed 24/03/18

exhibition seen 22/03/18, Curated by Helen Sainsbury

https://4wallsblg.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/restoring-the-graffitied-rothko-in-conversation-with-dr-bronwyn-ormsby-conservation-scientist-tate/, Restoring the Graffitied Rothko: In Conversation with Dr. Bronwyn Ormsby, Conservation Scientist, Tate. JANUARY 14, 2015 ~ 4WALLSBLG, accessed 24 March 2018.

Bernstien, F. A., 2013, Design Doyenne, WM Magazine, May 1, 2013 12:00 am

Keyes, B., (2015) EXPLORING THE TENSION BETWEEN COMMERCE AND CREATION, ‘RED’ OPENS FRIDAY AT PORTLAND STAGE,

https://www.wmagazine.com/story/phyllis-lambert-seagram-building, accessed 31 March 2018.

Maine Today online magazine, Posted: March 25, 2015,  http://mainetoday.com/theater/exploring-the-tension-between-commerce-and-creation-red-opens-friday-at-portland-stage/, accessed 31 March 2018

image: seagram murals Tate Modern. 

[francesannartist]

Narrative art

Narratology: thinking about art, narrative inquiry – telling tales about art education pt 1

Narrative Art

Pre- Modern

A narrative is simply a story (Tate, 2018a) and narrative art practice is art and design work that tells a story. Much of Western art until the twentieth century has been narrative, depicting stories from religion, myth and legend, history and literature. Audiences were assumed to be familiar with the stories in question.

A good example of this is the life of St Francis depicted in the Basilica San Francesco, Assisi by Giotto 1300. Prior to the advent of literacy most narrative art was done in a simultaneous narrative style with very little overarching organization. Once literacy developed in different parts of the world pictures began to be organized along register lines, like lines on a page that helped define the direction of the narrative.

Modern Narrative art

The Modern era in art is generally taken to begin around 1860 to 1960. Beginning with Manet’s Olympia, depicting a nude with frank outward gaze, meeting the eye of the viewer and her unashamed nakedness and wealth, "only the precautions taken by the administration prevented the painting being punctured and torn" by offended viewers (Neret, 2003) and encompassing mostly European and American art ‘isms’ many of which are familiar to the casual art gallery goer; impressionism, cubism, Russian Constructivism to name but a few (handy book …Isms, Little, 2004). In Modern art, formalist ideas have resulted in narrative being frowned upon (Tate 2018a). This is circumnavigated by the use of coded references to political or social issues. These abstractions such as Picassos Guernica 1937 are effectively modern allegories and generally require information from the artist to be fully understood. To the downfall and end of Modernism, a grey area of disputed times and finish dates, but around about the fruition of Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ opened in 1962 and the emergence of Pop Art. Modernism, around 100 years of intense artistic transformation and global renewal, politically, industrially and psychologically in the post war years.

Post Modern narrative in Art Practice

This led directly onto Postmodernism, again debatable but around 1960’s to 1980’s. The Tate (2018b) writes that Postmodernism defies explanation or definition but it definitely circumscribes changes and challenges to Modernist art practice. It goes further, delineating the underpinnings of Po-Mo art practice as drawing on philosophy of the mid to late twentieth century and advocating ‘individual experience was more concrete than abstract principles’ (Cindy Sherman, Film Stills) as well as inquiry into process and concept, and themes such as minimalism, feminist art practice and land art.

 Altermodern Neo Narrative

We are well past that time and almost forty years seems an improbably long time ago (when it feels like yesterday). Many critics call this era ‘Contemporary Art’ period, but there are always new ideas and an alternative modernity is being posited by critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud (1998). Postmodernism, he suggests, is at an end, to be replaced by a still-evolving successor, the Altermodern. A time and an art practice that explores the bonds between; text and image, time and space, and how they weave between themselves. This all takes place within a global art community that previous, western-centric art movements lacked. Stories and narrational formats in this Altermodern world are gathered from various sources of cultural production in support of fictional drive: songs; newspaper reports; advertising slogans (such as Jenny Holzer); quotations and onomatopoeiac 'sound effects' are all used to illustrate, expand and sustain storyline.

 Neo-narration Brannon (2009) says, marks a new phase of artistic exploration, exploring cultural history, story-telling and the human condition as a rich source of reference. The Altermodern also embraces Relational Aesthetics, (Bourriaud 1998) art based on, or inspired by, human relations and their social context. Bourriaud describes it as a set of artistic practices ‘which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. E.g. Gillian Wearing, telling stories of people.’

There are stories in art and then there is Neo-Narration, new stories in art and this is just a wander around the question of practice in post-Post-modernity for artists and designers, making a virtual time line from the intrinsic notion of narrative in pre Modern art, to its antithesis in Modernism all fragmentation and cubist geometries – anti narration, to Postmodernism with its ironic negativities, against Modernism, against narrative, against taste. And now Altermodern, a whole new relational space for art practitioners to tell their collective story.  

 Bourriaud, N., (1998) Relational Aesthetics, Paris, Les Presse Du Reel.

Brennan, M, (2009), Neo-narration: stories of art http://www.modernedition.com/art-articles/neo-narration/narrative-art-strategies.html accessed 8th February 2018.

Little, S., (2004) ...isms: Understanding Art, New York, Universe Publishing.

Neret, G (2003). Manet. London, Taschen. p. 22.

Tate (2018a) Narrative, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/narrative, accessed 8th February 2018.

Tate, (2018b) Postmodernism, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism, accessed 25 march 2018.

[francesannartist]

Manchester art gallery, the Whitworth