Experimental Process

Manifestos

From the explosion of avant-garde art manifestos in the early twentieth-century to today, there is a tradition of artists and artist groups framing their work politically, personally, culturally or aesthetically through a manifesto - a statement of views/intents/motives around their cultural production. Could this be a way of asserting and proclaiming your views around your own responsibilities of production?

Different Methods of Dissemination

Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964) includes a series of event-scores that a person may choose to enact in order to experience the work. These scores replace the traditional concept of the physical work. These event scores have since been re enacted by many artists and non-artists since the book was first produced.

"Instruction painting separates painting into two different functions: the instructions and the realization. The work becomes a reality only when others realize the work. Instructions can be realized by different people in many different ways. This allows infinite transformation of the work that the artist himself cannot foresee, and brings the concept of "time" into painting. It immediately eliminates the usual emphasis put on the original painting, and art comes down from the pedestal.

Instruction painting makes it possible to explore the invisible, the world beyond the concept of time and space. And then, sometimes later, the instructions themselves will disappear and be properly forgotten.”

Artist-run initiatives

Artist-run initiatives (ARIs) are projects, run by artists, that present artist’s work. They are often spaces that represent emerging artists, artists in the first years of practice. Some of them offer affordable or free gallery space, development programs, residencies and professional support and promotion. They are often the first place where artists exhibit their work.

Experimental work needs places to be shown and often communities develop around these spaces. With property demands in Sydney artists also struggle to keep such spaces open and thus the ARI landscape is constantly changing. This documentary looks at the landmark Sydney Artist-run space, Lanfranchi's Memorial Discotheque, that closed in 2007 after the landlords decision to develop the warehouse property in Chippendale. 

Some current Sydney ARIs:

ALASKA

Articulate

Slot

Marrickville Garage

airspace projects Firstdraft

SNO

107 Projects

55 Sydenham Rd

Red Rattler

MOP Gaffa

Sydney Guild

Underbelly

Safari

Electrofringe

Open source and DIY

It’s likely most of you have created something using someone else’s instructions online, perhaps via youtube or instructables, to create an animated gif, or turn a jpeg into a wav… Crediting these people in your work, by acknowledging this process of exchange is how the Open Source community thrives. Furthermore, maybe there is an idea or technique you have discovered that you would like to share with the community online. This exchange can be a meaningful way of disseminating your work with the WWW.

Some blogs that support this exchange: http://makezine.com and http://www.instructables.com/

Sydney-based jeweller Mark Vaarwerk makes objects from re-purposed everyday materials, especially focusing on experimentation with plastics to question ideas around value.

Week 13 - The Responsibility of Production 

This week we will be reflecting on cofa1001 by thinking about the ethical dimensions of being a creative practitioner in contemporary culture. What responsibilities do you have as a producer and consumer of culture? What standards and expectations will you put in place for yourself? How can you make sense of making work in a world marked by increasing global inequality and environmental instability? 

What is your philosophy of materials? How will you disseminate your work? What context and community of creators do you see yourself belonging to?

These are all big questions! And ones that you won't answer immediately. Yet part of maturing as a practitioner is not just developing your work, but also how you think about it. This is taking responsibility for your own production. Perhaps a good place to start is making a commitment not to make boring work!

Dorothy and Herbert Vogel led the sort of life that sounds like a New York legend: two state employees, living on less than fifty thousand dollars a year, manage to amass a collection of more than four thousand works of contemporary art. It’s hard to believe such a feat would be economically possible, but the Vogels were early enthusiasts who collected what was at first unpopular—inaccessible minimalist and conceptual works—and would now be worth millions. Not everyone in their collection was widely known, but many were: Richard Tuttle, Sol LeWitt, Jeanne-Claude and Christo.

via

 Patrick Pound, Gallery of Air, 2013

Patrick Pound’s unique work, The gallery of air, is a wunderkammer of diverse artworks and objects drawn from the NGV’s collection that holds an idea of air – such as, an exquisite painted fan, an ancient flute and a photograph of a woman sighing - augmented with objects and works from his own personal collection. As Pound has said, ‘by selecting these things according to an apparently arbitrary and poetic category, the way we read them will be temporarily reset’.

Living in the ruins of the twentieth century, curated by Holly Williams and Adam Jasper at UTS Gallery, 2013.

This exhibition has been talked about as an example of ‘post-disciplinary curating’ - this refers to a practice of bringing objects and ideas together across disciplines to draw out new connections and narratives.

For example, we see David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's Ozinal Ultra (bottom image) in context with an image of Buckminster Fuller’s dome (middle image) from which it draws influence.

Presenting a vision of the Twentieth Century as a history of false starts, obsolete technologies and unrealised utopias, Living in the Ruins is an archaeological dig into the material culture that shapes our present….Curators Adam Jasper and Holly Williams draw together objects from art, science and ethnography in an investigation of the ruins, remnants and ill-fated prototypes that defined a century already far enough in the past to be foreign to us, but close enough that we still have no fitting monuments for it. Living in the Ruins creates a contemporary Wunderkammer that traverses diverse themes from islands to explosions and giant spheres’.

via: http://livingintheruins.net/