wallspace

opening

skeleton

The textual elephant in the room (in the process)?

Nick and Gwenneth, you both raise a really valid point I think. Probably one of the main problems there seems to be with what i assumed when I began this is that everyone would be totally amenable to the way the process would be communicated. But making an assumption like that has proven pretty dangerous - as both you and Gwenneth point to; everyone has their own way of undertaking work and creation. The fact that someone creates a work that will be put into a public space does not imply an immediate opening of that work or of that creator. I think that my assumption extended into personal process; in that I expected there to be a place for observers and documentative mechanics. And these things, not usually in place in such a process probably compromise much of what is communicated. the challenge is managing to navigate around these things

do you believe in magic?

Thanks for the response Gwenneth. 

The line about "magic" is a joke. The rest is not. I really do believe in "tricks" . . .

Complex topic, no? Writing the previous post I spent some time staring at the screen thinking about the relationship between artist, artistic process and an audience - how an artists involvement in describing the work (concepts, process etc), and involvement in its dissemination, can be helpful and also a hindrance (often depending on who's involved of course). There is a Frank Zappa album called "Shut up and play your guitar". Often I feel that I should just stop talking. Or I could just endlessly talk about being silent with a satisfying sense of irony. 

In response to Nick's last post: I recognize things in there. It is quite something to reveal one's working method next to the actual or intended work. For me personally, it doesn't have much to do with a wish to keep 'magic' alive. I guess I try to incorporate process in the work itself in order to somehow undo the mystery. For instance by using rational systems which reveals the steps taken during the creation. To me it's crucial to scrutinize how this process becomes a mechanism of its own, a mechanism to which I can open a little hatch so everybody can see the parts moving.
But like Nick, I have some resistance in putting attention to the artist in relation to a work.

a reluctant image

I must admit, it's kinda funny being involved in a show about process when I'm also a little reluctant to reveal my own working method. Who wants to reveal their magic tricks? Or dirty laundry?

I have artistic dirty laundry. A pile of it: In the corner of my studio covered so no-one can see it - all the experiments that didn't work: paper aeroplanes that didn't fly, spinning tops that didn't spin, images that fell flat etc. 

For me, I consider the process of making an artwork only in relation to moving towards a finish. Not that I'm anti-process, far from it (I have exhibited a number of projects where a reflection upon process was integral to the work, such as the "Loose Ends" collaborations with Nick Mangan shown at RMIT Project Space/Spare Room in 2007) it's just that I consider the art-making process a way of eventually settling at a point where the artwork can communicate and resonate without me. In other words, what I aim for is a point where I leave the room and the work exists without me and my often misguided aims for its life. I want Frankenstein to develop a mind of its own, without the burden of dwelling too long on how it came to be (I certainly don't!).

the process-oriented relationship I am interested in is not so much artist to audience as artwork to audience.