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PHOTOGRAPHY’S NEW MATERIALITY (Sandra Plummer)

Transformations in digital technologies provokes anxiety about the status of the photograph as object - the immateriality and reproducibility of the digital image provoking questions into the photographic medium.

Materiality: the photograph as object and image: this understanding has slipped since the rise of the digital image - the retroactive construction of the oppositional analogue that it replaced have rendered the photographic object increasingly immaterial.

The abstract photograph is a representational image of a culture replete with abstractions, and it remains representational and telling of the culture in which it is produced.

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CITY AS ARCHIVE: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE (MICHAEL SHERINGHAM/RICHARD WENTWORTH)

The archive of clutter: anarchic, non-hierarchical disorder. Archives combine all sorts of matter - repetitions.

The archive as process - activities of compilation, preservation, juxtaposition, accumulation - city as archive: dynamic process, restless motion, multiple chronologies and levels of meaning. 

Everyday practices: whats all around us but invisible until we tune our antennae to pick up its vibe.

“I have an over developed sense of eventuality, and I suspect that made me strangely provocative. It’s as if people and objects are waiting round corners and it’s only a matter of time before I enter their lairs. The fact that I sometimes record these things gives them more archival weight, but I think of them more as a war memorial for all the experiences which are not recorded.” - Richard Wentworth

Wentworth is an artist working primarily with sculpture and photography. Since the late 60s his work has been concerned with material language and the ways humans cope with their environments. 

His work counters the post-war trend of gigantism - his sculpture and photography continually finding aesthetic value in modest events and things through the repurposing of everyday material, continuing the Duchampian language of the ready made.

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Danez Smith - Jumped! 

(Poem)

The poem – set out like prose – is a raging, calculated polemic that contains its own commentary. It builds quickly, turns emotion inside out, presents valediction as protest. 

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Ocean Vuong - Essay on Craft 

(Poem)

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Ocean Vuong On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Poem)

In his poems, he often explores transformation, desire, and violent loss.

“Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement, I see form as … an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be investigated even further. The way the poem moves through space, its enjambment or end-stopped line breaks, its utterances and stutters, all work in tangent with the poem’s conceit.” - Ocean Vuong

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Elena Damiani: Witnesses: A Catalog of Fragments,  An Assemblage of Remains

The artist expands the possibilities of collage as a medium for sculpture and installation, presenting a dialectical tension between the whole and its parts, where the composition of the works arranged in the space indicate the fragmentary nature of collage, through the segments and layers that are they couple presenting themselves as a new whole.

Hiatuses or gaps in geological time - are the points of critical interest, since they represent evidence of certain breaks, leaks and discordance, factors that subtly indicate the existence of a 'lost time'. 

Damiani’s work explores the idea that time is considered to help reveal the essence of things: the appearance of objects and surfaces who have been handled by a number of people, and the roughness of a stone are silent witnesses. In their material composition there lies a series of information layers that represent a transit of time. 

Dialectics of linearity, rupture and juxtaposition, of flat surface and volume, inside and outside; noting the potential of materials to retain and display information or allow it to filter through gaps in segmented surfaces.  

The work highlights the notorious intrusion of foreign elements among natural sediments. [!!!]

Damiani has developed a solid practice that collides the past with the present in order to make visible the fractures that underlie historical processes and the formulation of representational systems which still act upon the present. In spite of involving a long process of quasi-archeological archive research and collage of photographic materials, her works inhabit a zone of indeterminacy where document and fiction are juxtaposed.  

“I also make videos, but only occasionally. To me, making videos is like doing your tax return. During my research for each project I have to collect a lot of material, so these images are then used to create a sort of storyboard for the videos, which mark the end of this research but are also a process of clearing the brain before I embark in the next project.” - Elena Damiani

The pieces pictures above are made by making vertical incisions into blocks of travertine (rock), without breaking them apart: enabling the artist to insert glass sheets that trap collage between them. 

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THE POETICS OF ROBERT MONTGOMERY

The poems he composes suggest a steady faith that humanity can heal the ecological and emotional trauma of our times, with a lyricism that recalls poets like Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath. He breathes a calm, steady hum into the verse–a haunting effect that’s inherently intimate.

Montgomery did not come to poetry through formal education (like myself): 

“They’ve kind of recently been adopted by this poetry world. I’m really happy to be adopted by the poetry community, but I didn’t set out to do that. What I set out to do kind of was to make work in a post-conceptual tradition–text-art that comes from people like Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Wiener–but then just try to make the tone one step closer to poetry.” - Robert Montgomery

He writes a lot about landscape in the city, and the way that when you’re in the city you can still feel the land. The exercise of remembering the magic of a city and trying to uncover that sense of the sacred and the everyday, or a sense of God in the mundane.

Montgomery’s work takes a poetic look at beauty, loss, hypocrisy and the feeling of longing for a deeper connection to the world around us.

The work of Robert Montgomery follows a post-Situationist view of conceptual text art, combined with installation. Taking the written word to physical and public spaces, the artist’s aim is to give voice to the state of our society and our innermost feelings:

“I want the words to appear almost like statements from the collective unconscious, in a sense,” he says. “They are quite subtle ideas, and poetic ones; sometimes political points mixed with poetic allusions. The words can be complex, so I want them to look as straightforward as possible.” -Robery Montgomery

“To encounter his work is to have your body filled with a sad thunder and your head filled with a sad light. He is a complete artist and works in language, light, paper, space. He engages completely with the urban world with a translucent poetry. His work arrives at us through a kind of lucid social violence. No one has blended language, form and light in such a direct way.” -  Dane Weatherman,  Black & Blue Literary Journal  

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Robert Montgomery [Poems]

THE MOUNTAINS MUST HAVE IMAGINED THE CITY IN THEIR ECHO 

AND THEY DREW IT IN THE SKY FOR US / AND THE SEA BIRDS 

CARRIED MESSAFES FROM THE WATER TO THE MOUNTAIN BIRDS

AS THE SEA ROCKS WALKED HERE SLOWLY 

_______________

IN THE SILENCE OF YOUR BONES AND EYES

FORGOTTEN MAGIC SITS AND WAITS FOR ME

_______________

THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE BECOMES GHOSTS INSIDE 

OF YOUR AND LIKE THIS YOU KEEP THEM ALIVE

_______________

PEACE IS THE DREAM OF A SHARED HUMAN SOUL 

THAT WE BUILD EVERYDAY WITH FORGIVENESS 

AND KINDNESS AND HOPE

______________

THE LAND MUST HAVE DREAMED THE CITY

THEN WE SUNG IT INTO BEING LIKE A CHOIR

INVENTS A GOD / AS THE TREES MUST HAVE

DREAMED THE FIELDS 

______________

THE SPECTACLE OF ADVERTISING CREATES IMAGES

OF FALSE BEAUTY SO SUAVE AND SO IMPOSSIBLE

TO ATTAIN THAT YOU WILL HURT INSIDE AND NEVER EVEN

KNOW WHERE THE HURT COMES FROM, AND IN ALL 

PICTURES NOW THE FAMOUS PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY 

BEGUN TO LOOK LOST AND LONELY 

_____________

THE CITY IS WILDER THAN YOU THINK AND KINDER 

THAN YOU THINK IT IS A VALLEY AND YOU ARE  A

HORSE IN IT IT IS A HOUSE AND YOU ARE A CHILD 

IN IT SAFE AND WARM HERE IN THE FIRE OF EACH OTHER

_____________

THIS IS THE BEST WAY

WE HAVE FOUND

TO LIVE 

AND   WE MAKE

EVERYONE IN THIS WORLD OF

NEW PRIVILEGE SLAVES 

TO FALSE IDEAS OF GOD

AND COMFORT

AND WAKING UP

EVERY MORNING

IS A WRENCH

FROM THE DREAM STATE 

INTO THE PARANOID 

NEW MIND

AND WE ARE STILL

SAD AND LONELY

IN A WORLD OF GLASS

_____________

Montgomery’s language and prose speaks of existential dread in a cold, Capitalist society. ‘WE ARE STILL SAD AND LONELY IN A WORLD OF GLASS’, ‘NEW PRIVILEGE SLAVES’

He writes of the layouts and landscapes of cities and the different lives and chance encounters they enact. He presents an appreciation of beauty in everyday cities, cities as archives of lives, happenings and experiences. ‘THE LAND MUST HAVE DREAMED THE CITYTHEN WE SUNG IT INTO BEING LIKE A CHOIR’

He speaks of cultural frustrations and an inherent sense of wariness towards digital social media lives and the takeover and speed of the digital, and the power of advertising: ‘IN ALL PICTURES NOW THE FAMOUS PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY BEGUN TO LOOK LOST AND LONELY’ 

He works under Situationist-led practices and is inspired by things of the Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord)

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Jet Sweeney, RIP(E) 

[Spoken Word Peice]

This piece inspires my own writing in its poetic rhythm, its repetition, desperation, intensity, pace - mixture of slow and fast, its alliterative nature.

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TRANSPARENT THINGS – GOLDSMITHS CCA 21 Feb–09 Aug 2020 

 Artists: Nairy Baghramian, Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Becky Beasley, Gareth Cadwallader, Nina Canell, Michael Dean, Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Marie Lund, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Overton, Lucy Skaer, Renee So, Kerry Tribe.

Transparent Things uses Chapter 1 of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel as a script. In this brief text objects exert uncanny agency, pulling us back anecdotally and materially into their past, and catalysing radical perceptual shifts, lending itself to an exploration of contemporary sculpture.

Through the prism of Nabokov, the exhibition cues contemporary philosophical interest in object agency, and the power of fiction. Included are art objects that operate through various imaginaries, relating material, social and personal histories where the past erupts into the present. Works acknowledge time, either unfolding over the span of the exhibition, or indexing its passing. Further, in response to Nabokov’s ‘transparent things’ as having the power to seduce and hold our attention, some objects appear anthropomorphised, demanding to be read as bodies in relation to our own.

Alongside being a novelist and poet, Nabokov was also an accomplished natural historian and entomologist (studying butterflies). Reproductions of a sample of his many studies of butterflies are included in the exhibition. The pattern of wings was a subject of special study and can be read as the model for his mode of fiction making, which deploys repeated motifs and images. The exhibition itself thus works through repeated forms and artworks across the building, following visual logics and shared affinities.

The figure of transparency is exploited for its particular resonance within the art field. Transparency implies legibility, but objects can withhold themselves and their histories, frustrating interpretation, or absenting themselves from the frame. Some trouble the skin or surface of artworks’ as carriers of meaning, others demarcate the limits of perception.

This exhibition explores the relationships of objects and their material and social histories - explores the idea of transparency within objects - transparency implies an ease of understanding, however the objects are frustrating in their denial of interpretation.

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AUDRE LORDE POETRY: 

Coming Together 

A Litany For Survival

Black Mother Woman

Love Poem

For Each of You

A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.

Her poetry  “rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling.” Concerned with modern society’s tendency to categorize groups of people, Lorde fought the marginalization of such categories as “lesbian” and “black woman.”

Lorde’s poetry is known for the power of its call for social and racial justice, as well as its depictions of queer experience and sexuality.

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Poem by KAI ISIAH JAMAL 

Kai-Isaiah is a spoken word poet/performer who tackles social matters through dialogue. Mainly focusing on talks, poetry and open conversation attempting to deconstruct moulds regarding gender and stereotypes within the black culture which influences hyper masculinity and unavailability to be vulnerable to people of colour with emphasis on self exploration within his work. Being a TPOC, Kai-Isaiah's work explores the trials and triumphs trans folk face and feel. Hoping to give visibility for trans folk of colour he speaks the unspoken and represents the unrepresented.

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TATE PAPERS: NEGOTIATING THE ARCHIVE /

An archive is now understood to mean anything that is no longer current but that has been retained. 

The archive is popularly conceived as a space where things are hidden in a state of stasis, imbued with secrecy, mystery and power.

For some the archivist is a rule maker, casting spells around archives, which are suspended in time, waiting to be rescued and re-animated by users.

The experience of using archives and the impulse to rescue and rehabilitate not just the lives and actions documented in the archive but the very material itself – the stuff of history – while several recent novels feature archivists prominently (the summary of one describes an archivist as ‘proud gatekeeper to countless objects of desire’).

“A simple feeling talks about the value, the importance of everything.... This is the memory associated with all the events connected to each of these [objects]. To deprive ourselves of these paper symbols and testimonies is to deprive ourselves somewhat of our memories. In our memory everything becomes equally valuable and significant. All points of our recollections are tied to one another. They form chains and connections in our memory which ultimately comprise the story of life.” - Ilya Kabakov

Western capitalist societies we are surrounded by stuff but uncertain about what is significant.

According to the French historian Pierre Nora, ‘our whole society lives for archival production’. At a time when we both crave and feel overwhelmed by information, the archive can seem like a more authoritative, or somehow more authentic, body of information or of objects bearing value and meaning.

The idea of artist-as-curator became the ‘artist-as-archivist’, the archive became implicated by association in art discourse, while maintaining its own principles and practices.

The shape and contents of an archival body of material are part of its evidential value. This may or may not include a particular original order in which it was arranged, reflecting the processes that created it. [!!!]

The significance of an archive may lie also in the interrelationships between the component parts of the archive, which can also imbue each with authenticity. 

Often, things are called archives that are really just groups of material.

A collection of individual, decontextualised ‘treasures’. Such a collection is not generated by any activity other than collecting. By contrast, an archive is a set of traces of actions, the records left by a life.

‘Found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’.

Archives are ‘frozen in time, fixed in a documentary form and linked to their context of creation. They are thus time and space bound, perpetually connected to events in the past.’ It continues: ‘Yet they are also disembedded, carried forward into new circumstances where they are re-presented and used.’

“Desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of utopia … [a] move to turn ‘excavation sites’ into ‘construction sites.” (Hal Foster)

“A dump not only devours everything, preserving it forever, but one might say it also continually generates something; this is where some kinds of shoots come for new projects, ideas, a certain enthusiasm arises, hopes for the rebirth of something.” - Ilya Kabakov

There is no one fixed meaning of any archival document: we may know the action that created the trace, but its present and future meanings can never be fixed.

“We are all ‘en mal d’archive’: in need of archives … [we] burn with a passion never to cease searching for the archive right where it slips away … [we] have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return of the most archaic place of absolute beginning.” - Jacques Derrida

Archives are traces to which we respond; they are a reflection of ourselves, and our response to them says more about us than the archive itself. Any use of archives is a unique and unrepeatable journey. The archive is attractive territory for the exploration of critical theory because of the processes it both documents and enacts, its contradictions and discontinuities.

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Nina Canell, Invisible Whispers /

“My practice as an anthropology of energy.”

In order to be able to discover the hidden secrets and traits of objects, she always collected a lot of useless items.

This domestic and slightly anachronistic object that somehow enabled a kind of conflation of the experience of the internet as being something linear and lossless fluid with something incredibly physical dirty andreal. Two dimensions combine together and create such a strong syntax of plasticity and materiality of Internet.

These mundane object exhibits an amazing face at different viewing angles, and the visual impact produces physiological discomfort. 

Nina Canell generally consists of materials that are normally used for specific purposes, moreover, the nature of the process also as the material of her work.

Many of Nina Canell’s works set up relationships or relations between things, elements, materials, and also between people. The body of the visitor encountering into the works, such as Perpetuum Mobile (25kg), consisting of a bowl of water and a paper bag of cement. 

In her work that reveals the poetic potential of physical processes which cannot be verbalized, probably because it is difficult to make the object talk autonomously, not just contrasting all other beings as variations of "object", which can be linked to the basic principles of object-oriented ontology.

Nina Canell’s works also express that humans are not “subjects” -- against nonhuman beings as “objects”.

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CONTEMPORARY RUINS IN THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY / THOMAS HAUSER

Thomas Hauser’s photographic sculptures, they appear to be made of antiquated, aged materials, only revealed as something more modern by their contemporary jagged edges and intentional asymmetry

These objects—he calls modules.

A perfect representation of the never-ending possibilities for novelty within the medium of photography.

A constant state of flux—both literally and figuratively—and he successfully plays with the chemical potential of the medium.

“I collect the materials from piles that I find in the street, and in my studio there’s always a lot of stuff on the ground, so I assemble each object from this stuff that surrounds me—it’s a very natural process. I call the final sculptures “modules,” and they are always in flux. I fix them when I show them in an exhibition, but in the next show, their form might change. I like everything to constantly be in movement and progress—even the paper I use on each module remains photosensitive, so at the beginning of an exhibition the paper is white, but over time with light, it disappears and changes colors. Everything is always in this constant state of change.”

“When I use the copper plates, you can’t see the picture engraved on the back of them—it’s like a secret. So in the end, the mirror can no longer reflect an image because of the oxidization, the prints are becoming harder to read because they are slowly overdeveloping, and even in the large prints, each subject hides their face and identity, making those images hard to read as well.”

“Everything and everybody is slowly turning into stone in this way, like petrified wood. This creation of a mental image is like creating ruins within a memory.“

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Lost, Sought, Found: Activating Everyday Material / 

“Whether it’s firehoses, carpets, cotton, etc. or vessel forms like bottles and bags each material has a unique history which intrigues and informs my vision of their renewed possibilities. It is the energy and texture that is acquired through use that is of interest to me; their mutability, the history that they have gleaned through consumption; worn and discarded materials often found on the street are worked, knotted, drilled, ironed or wrung out to become charged with a devotional function and meaning.” - Nari Ward

The act of finding, choosing, or assembling utilitarian or discarded objects in the context of artistic practice or institutional display.

The use of found material generally succeeds in bringing the planes of art and everyday life together, requiring the viewer to consider the value of a banal or discarded object within the context of an artist’s studio, a gallery, or a museum. Found objects also partake in a conversation about commodities and economies.

The artist in incorporating the found object has somehow recuperated, reactivated, or rescued the chosen material from an inevitable death of obsolescence, a present or future uselessness caused by its falling out of the circulation of capital and commodities.

The found object bears traces of use, of its owner—of multiple uses and multiple owners—and sometimes traces of its own fall from grace into the rubbish heap.

A fluid definition of sculpture: “that understands itself not as a self-sufficient, complete form but rather as a receptacle, an intersection of disparate materials and images.”

Cartographies of urban (or terrestrial) space, calendar of personal marked time, but also a record of urban decay, breadcrumb traces of commodity circulation and waste, embodied human presence.

A comment on capitalist societies/commodity driven world: Preserving the most aesthetically ruined and economically valueless implies that these pieces of detritus are “worth” saving, that they have value beyond the monetary.

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The Practice of The Everyday City / [Gabriele Basilico’s photography]

Projects developed by Basilico in the 80s: markedly ‘slow’ appreciation of the beauty that still remains in the urban environment.

Aesthetics of beauty in the classically non-beautiful - to take away the classical and expected beauty from photography is to work towards a political communication: promotes change in attitude to urban environments.

Basilico sought new methods of aesthetic appreciation - helps us to understand places and non-places: places on the edge, uninhabited.

There is no ‘ideal city’ - the city simply is itself.

Basilico’s photos like other landscape photographers of the 70s/80s held an aesthetic of total detached indifference to the subject/object of his photographs.

In order to take the photographs that he did, Basilico had to physically become a pedestrian in these environments - moving, ‘practicing’ urban space - Basilico became a wanderer. 

‘Place’/’Non-place’ dichotomy -- Empty spaces marked by their histories/pasts, limited by the weight of said marks: barely human spaces where humans barely live. The marks on the surface of cities/landscapes can always be interpreted.