Tutorial Record 2

Bridget Crone, 13/2/08

As this was the first opportunity that I had had to speak to Bridget after having presented my research topic last week in my seminar, I was keen to obtain some feedback from her on the ideas and approach that I discussed. We spoke about my intention to form a type of ‘meta-language’ with which to discuss my curatorial practice and contextualize both previous and forthcoming activities. Analogical processes can be used to extract information and identify findings, but the relationship that the analogical has with my practice can be seen as problematic as it is not my focus, but more a schema for observing and ordering information that is flowing from many other sources. We discussed how perhaps certain motifs keep cropping up in my work, and how lineages can be seen in my practice as an artist, writer, and curator. I have deliberately avoided explicit links with themes such as ‘burlesque’ and ‘theatre’ in the past, and have been guilty of forcing my practice into misshapen boxes in the hope that something may begin to ‘work’ laterally or haphazardly. The interrogation of method that analogy provides me with cannot be seen as primary in my concerns when generating new ideas and curating events. As a curator I run an idiosyncratic space far from the traditional white cube aesthetic, and it is in the slapdash plastering, grubby crevices, and curiously fluctuating ceiling heights that I place an importance; an identity, an ident, a modus operandi. Indeed when I first opened the space I went to an incredible amount of trouble to ensure that everything that was attached to the gallery in any way (flyers, posters, press releases) were all handmade, well handled, and rubber stamped manually as an act of authentification and actualisation. This grew to the point of fetish, and although it became untenable as the gallery expanded, the DIY philosophy has reemerged in different guises and scenarios, such as the recent conversion of a digital jpeg still of the gallery logo back to an analogue object in the form of a bespoke rubber stamp that an artist requested be made. As I spoke to Bridget about these processes of mimesis and process it became increasingly apparent that my work is concerned with site-specificity and memetic formations.

We discussed my interest in Situationism and concepts such as ‘Derive’, ‘Detournement’, the ‘Flaneur’, and ‘Psychogeography’, and Bridget recommended the text ‘Surveillance in the City’ by Nils Norman and the work of ‘irrational’, a Bristol based arts collective for deploying ideas ‘for the displaced and roaming’. I found the acts of curated ‘squatting’ that I did during my recent visit to Berlin for the Transmediale festival a liberating and exciting experience and intend to further explore possibilities for curated projects in both ‘concrete’ terms and in a viral or ‘jacked’ virtual format. The memetic and the viral offer exciting possibilities for innovative new forms of curation, as does the blogging format, as a way of placing and forming information. I am interested in notions of authenticity, sacrifice, authority, and communication in viral self organising/perpetuating systems and residual evidences in the form of vestiges, or even Trojans of intention. I intend to read widely in this area in the forthcoming weeks and resist my anxious urge to quickly form an umbrella question over the subsidiary propositions that are beginning to form in my research.