The Ladies of the Press* presents:

This book is

an imprint

“The photographs are already developed. We’re now dying the paper with one of Onya’s pigments”

Dana Ariel: “For us it links the session called ‘In the Dark’, exporting it into this session called ‘Landscape Encounters and Transformations’.”

Onya McCausland: “The pigment is from the landscape, coming from another dark landscape, mixed with the chemicals used to develop photographs. It is from the mine shaft northeast of England and originated1000m deep.”

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“Here! Here!” “This is us here. (Circles ‘Oxted’, in reference the quarry, on the blackboard map) This is the M25.”

“Though the M25 wasn’t there when Smithson was making work...”

I n d e x i n g T h e E v e n t

The session is delivered in a rotation structure with smaller groups moving from one session to another, experiencing and responding to events. We tagged along and participated too. Our experience was fragmentary and, as such, so is our response to it.

Ruth Bernatek asked us to make smaller groups and record sound within the conference space using a variety of retro and up-to-date recording devices. We were asked to select an object, and make a ‘listening’ recording of it, then a recording of us interacting with it, and finally making a notation of our recording. We were in a group that had a four channel microphone which we attached to a window battered by wind. We opened the window as a form of interaction.

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“‘Art and Agency’ by Alfred Gell, that text seems to resurface a lot.” Dawn Gaietto tells us as she waves her hand over a table covered in brightly coloured tulle, pins, cotton, and sewing needles. Dawn tells us that the workshop is referencing Gell’s concept of ‘volt sorcery’ where voodoo is seen as products of volt sorcery. She asks us to make a voodoo object, and in so doing, inscribe ourselves into the object.

“In that book, it is all about diagrammatic models of understanding the relationship between the artist, index, prototype and recipient. Gell uses the ‘sorcery volt’ as a circular model of the relationship between the four.” We ask her to elaborate and are soon scratching our heads. “Basically,”, she says, “in the end, the recipient and prototype are the same. The circularity plays back into it.” Another participant gets it, “Thank you! The artist is actually acting on herself/himself.”

Dawn adds, “His diagrammatic models that he works with are really interesting. It is incredibly useful. And, his writing is hilarious. He has great analogies!”

We are intrigued!

Writing’s on the wall: Scrawls at the blackboard café @againstdelivery page 7

Indexing The EventA whispered conversation with Bihter Almac about her game ‘O1: UE unexpected encounters’, as it was being played, so as not to influence the players! Bihter introduced her work as a game the object of which is to design an imaginary home, however the object/s of the game are themselves in question.

Ladies*: Why is it a board game?

Bihter Almac: I wanted to create diagrammatic language, to have architectural objects as part of the diagram. It is also some sort of a negotiation, without talking.

L*: Are the component parts inspired by anything in particular, or does it even matter?

BA: These are prototypes. The parts are inspired by the symbols I have in mind, but I have not achieved yet. I tried to design them so that I can still work on them. Actually, as they play (she points to the two players at the table), I am trying to see how I can change the parts. How they play is changing my research in a way.

L*: These objects do not appear to reference any recognisable forms. Is that intentional or important?

BA: Yes, this is not an architectural space. The pieces do not have any definition. It lets me focus on the kinds of a ways the players are communicating while they are playing with them.

It is an interesting proposition to make a prototype game, set the rules and provide the parts precisely for the players to change the future incarnation of the game itself through the act of playing.

“I’d like to think that we would all walk very, very slowly in the pouring rain.”–Gary Stevens

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We can also think about art work, done by artists in the world.

With my research...something that the artwork was constantly being validated by the artworld. I am constantly trying to think that I would look at the world and own it here, is there a way to construct a model to just look at, and they start to see it everywhere. Ability to dispense authority. Rather than owning something, finding a practice that points at. It doesn’t take authorship, it just points. There was a big crisis of what is your practice; a way of pointing outside. This session was to go outside, we have coffee outside and sip the coffee together. To share an experience. And I think...

Next room: BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG........That’s the world. The idea that there is a pattern/format to experience an event that is beautiful. Rather than own it, to create a structure to allow us to use. Everyone to use. And it stays in the world. I guess the validation is to simply point at it. Coming form a practice that working that circulation part 1, generating that studio practice, something to look at and partake, this is a different circulation there. You want to leave it there, but you want to position the attention somehow.

Circulation Part 2: The Artwork in the World (Excerpt)

The word art-work and artwork, what artists do in the world. For me it became two different things; one being the object and the other being an action that doesn’t mean it results in an artwork. Which isn’t necessarily intended as a creative practice but sometimes influences a creative practice. A lot of artists I know do installations of other people’s artwork for institutions. In terms of going outside, I was thinking about this morning’s experience. The most striking thing for me was the sound. The collective sound, it was constantly changing. The video was completely silent. Then it was like track training. That’s what I was thinking about: art-work and artwork.

It has affect in the world that is beyond the artist. Something much bigger that happens. That is why I invited Ellie Harrison today. She started something called Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund. As a proposition.

Thanks for letting me gatecrash...I’m here to tell you about Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund. Launching the project concept and running a kickstarter campaign. A new autonomous funding scheme for radical art across the UK. A to be an alternative to mainstream art, and the alternative that is being

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proposed to museum spaces is to get corporate sponsorship like BP or other big fossil fuels. You are compromising your words here. I have been practicing as an artist for over 10 years; the more I’ve seen about what is wrong in our world, the more I wanted to use my skills, energy and my time to directly try to effect positive social change. I run a campaign in my spare time but in setting up this scheme I try to make shift in the artworld so more politicised artworld can happen. An alternative support structure. It may take 10 years to set it up, but it will not have anyone to answer to. Really, I’m using my role as an artist to initiate this project. This is only the beginning: thousands of projects will result from the funding scheme. The art itself will be renewable. So if you like the idea you can support it. Or come to the event we are doing in Beaconsfield tomorrow. Then it will have a huge impact in the real world.

A real world addressed to artists?

Not just to artists - the laboratory of insurrectionary imagination, what platform is doing, the art not oil campaign, it’s inspired by these groups; activists and artists coming together to make a change in the real world.

You will only fund work that has a political agenda. Interesting isn’t it, how the body decides what its principles are.

I’ve worked with Liberate Tate for five years, and I have been ethically compelled to act on my conscience as an artist. Knowing and being aware of climate change and what is happening, thinking about that in an open way around culture. There needed to be a massive shift of consciousness, doing it via culture but it was being suppressed by Tate because it was being sponsored by BP. Just the nature of that sponsorship means that it cannot be done in an open way. We talk about ethics in research; we have art education, and ethics is introduced. How these collective forms of ethics, the collective norm, is not necessarily what an ethical position might be. There are very interesting questions about acting ethically in the world somehow, as artists.

I think they are linked, the two ways of thinking about it.

I suggested a flat diamond. It’s flat; has no facets and looks like a glass coin. It’s taken away the glamour. It’s an invitation to a new narrative as a platform, and send it to the world. It does not need financial value. It was about trying to find this practice that enables distribution without asking for validation by being in the world. Maybe it can become, maybe not.

Then it [the flat diamond] will be this fetishised object, for the jewellery industry. It is an exquisite

object. I take for granted that I am not an artist 24 hours a day. Life is like that. There are moments you activate the distribution more. Taking a lot of personality out of it. If we are talking about the big market companies supporting Tate, we need to think about ourselves in the spectrum of production. We have to enter the discussion from this ground. The divide is really disturbing (the difference between artworld and the real world).

I would be scared to compare the theatricality of something that is potentially very precious. The trade mark or art marker - another question about you (André). What could be your...you work in a small village...

To become art, it needs a distribution.

What do you mean by distribution?

Of course this is a classic Duchampian whatever...

For three years I have been working on the flat diamond, but there is no flat diamond.

Like a Maltese vulcan. It somehow gets the narrative going, but it doesn’t matter.

You talk about wanting structure; we were given an example of a structure. That goes beyond. Actually, your name will not always be attached to the project that comes out of it. I think there is a generosity in that. There is a structure there for making that happen.

I’m thinking about radical practice and communitarial practice, there is a lot of community originated work, someone might describe as relational aesthetics but is not. There’s lots of levels of radicality of politicality. Also in terms of labour.

I have a very basic question: When we are using the term world, how are we understanding that?

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André: A lot of these discussions are turning towards categories. Structures, divides between theory and practice...we need some craziness around there.

Ellie: Are you all artists in this space? Do you feel you have a responsibility to the outside world, the real world, and do you have a desire to affect change on the real world? Do you want your art to reach beyond institutions and change people’s lives?

Ana: “Wait! My phone’s frozen...hold it there, keep posing!” ww(Takes iPad off Renée)

“It’s a self portrait” —Susan Collins

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Embodied Changed: Desire / Transformation (closed session) We were so pleased to be able to take part in this closed session where participants shared aspects of their practice in relation to the theme of desire, embodied. As with all live events, it is impossible to capture the intricacies and intimacies communicated but here is a collage of thoughts that circulated as well as scans from the round table, trances of our encounter.

I am researching coolness and looking at creative methodologies. I am interested in the idea of being cool, applying ‘cool’ to objects and subjects.

I feel like when I am making art, I try to address the circumstances that I am in. There is a desire to see the opportunities of the space. How subtle can that line be, between being in the world and…

…imagination?

Because I study Romances, I do not like to use the word imagination, it is over-determined.

And what about anachronistic language?

Yes, I had issues with how to name the subjects who used queer slang in the past. Fag, or faggot, were the closest translations in most languages to the subject. I was not comfortable with this term. I had this dilemma of retroactively applying stereotypes to these anachronistic forms of language. I decided to use the term ‘queer’, but I have not been able to find an answer that satisfies me. It is an anthropologically problematic issue.

Whenever there is this retroactive construction of subjectivity, the question is how to deal with recognising yourself in historical subjects.

In the staging of intimacies and dealing with the proximity to the historical subject there is a conflation between fact and fiction. An art historian telling a fictionalised account of a real encounter with an artist, as a failed historical document because of her personal identification with it. She brought it up at the roundtable because it is still unresolved but nevertheless worth sharing.

I feel like everything is over-memorialised and at the same time, there is an industry emerging that is dedicated to obliterating your online presence after death. There is this emerging issue of digital legacy. At the same time as you can go viral you can as easily be forgotten. There is this phenomenon on facebook of people mourning on the deceased person’s wall, using it as a space to express your mourning. Increasingly, for every action you take online there is small print about what to do in case of death. The whole taboo around death manifests in also in our digital lives.

“Amateur” photos from Jean Beers.“B-e-e-r-s. It’s like two pints of beer.”

“Oh my god! It’s alive!”

But, what agency can we have in death? A parallel, in the realm of art, is the reinterpretation and reincarnation of artist’s artwork after death. The estates of women artists especially have been exploited in recent years, after their death.

In language, remembering and forgetting are so intertwined: Remembering to forget or forgetting to remember and so on.

The problem of identification is how do we get a subject-to-subject relationship when the research necessitates complete immersion. Especially if the research is based on self-observation. One of the things I was studying during my PhD was hysteria, and I found the more you read about hysteria the more hysterical you become. I was wondering how to conduct research by identifying with the subject, literally, becoming the subject.

It is about identifying yourself within your research, the ‘me, myself and I’, as part of the research process.

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“Here’s another contribution”

“I used Sketchup, personally”

(in the imagination)

—David Burrows

“Now, I want you to use After Effects”

(in your imagination)

—Warren Neidich

“Here’s another contribution”

“I used Sketchup, personally”

(in the imagination)

—David Burrows

Indexing The Event:Where is the work?“This question forms a part of my thesis. I apologise in advance for the dry talk so early in the morning!”

Henrietta Simson talks us through the structure of her session. She first describes her research then reads an excerpt from her research to us and finally, we are asked to experience the work itself, appropriately called ‘After Image’, installed in Studio 5. We are to compare and contrast the intention behind the work with the realisation of the work. Her methodology sounds coherent, but she is asking us to consider her methodology itself, in particular the gap in between the theory and the practice within her work.

“We can think about the gap between the idealisation and realisation.”

‘After Image’ consists of a circular, temporary wall construction with an opening at one side. The draped ceiling has a back-projection of a video that is in turn reflected in a concave, clear bowl set on a table in the middle of the structure. The walls are coloured in a deep blue colour.

“I am interested in the structure of the work and the relationship between the physical and virtual experience of the artwork: The problematised, illusory, hyper-realistic nature of the visual.”

The work references the work of Giotto di Bondone, in fact it is a conscious reconstruction of a Giotto chapel made contemporary through the stitching of perspectives from multiple images of the interior using up-to-date digital technology.

“The motion capture reimagines Giotto’s chapel interior using contemporary technology into a three dimensional, rotating perspective.”

Within the context of Cartesian philosophy, during the 17th and 18th century the camera obscurer was used as a

reference for human vision. The camera obscurer also served as a model for the human mind, projected out into space.

For our own purposes, it is useful to consider the camera obscura as a machine of assemblage. The identity of the observer does not exist independently of the optical device. After Image is an iteration of the camera obscurer. However, rather than projecting an objective truth, it consists of a world of image and reflection caught up in a one another.

“The writing was directing the experience towards my thesis whereas the realisation is completely different. Almost, like it has its own world.”

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Kristen Kreider: I will order (my thoughts) in four points: noise, flock, world, three. If you can’t hear me, just raise your hand…

(woman in front raises her hand) Laughs.

Noise. What was attractive was that you worked with a difficult space. An extra layer to work with. If the delivery had been standardised, it might feel that other rooms might feel like noise. But the way it was organised, it began to feel more like a conversation, including interesting disruption. One could see it as an invitation. In fact I got lost in my workshop group initially. One thing I was thinking about in terms of space being conducive to the ordering system, which formed my understanding of the day.

Flock. Okay, as I was encountering the workshops, you addressed the index. You sense that movement becomes a sort of collective mind in this fluid space, these conversations that are coming up. When things were ordered, there was a grammar or syntax to things being ordered, but they were poetic in the sense that something understood in one context was juxtaposed with another, opening up meanings. There was a sense of change. Another theme and suggestion coming out of the day was affecting change. I guess this leads into the world.

There was a lot of discussion about the world - the work world, art world. There were lots of different understandings. My understanding is how we exist in relation. Whether we exist in relation to each other, this table; it’s credited to this relationality. What came out of this was can we affect change in this world? Things like activism, people power - it has a bigger effect, often. Also we were talking about the minute effects, whether through artwork or day-to-day relations and ethics. Those questions were implicit in some of these conversations, at least for me.

Three. In Dave’s talk we looked at firstness, secondness and thirdness. Imagination came in there - the way we might use our imagination to imagine new systems but also the thought that those system apparatuses are shaking us up.

The Round Up...

My name is Ciara…I am the imposter here. I hang out with pretentious philosophers and I try to get them to come to the idea that knowledge is something broader.

A book published nearly 40 years ago called Against Method, by Paul Feyerabend could have inspired the title of Against Delivery. It was against the common thread of thought. Always play the game ‘what Feyerabend might say’… Feyerabend was coming from a performance background. He worked with Bertolt Brecht. He was trained as an opera singer. His biography ‘aptly killing time’ was about all the best plays, we went…etc. He has a tiny connection with UCL; for a very short period of time he worked at the department I am based now. The department of history of science. Our claim to fame! He really tries to look at art/visual/performative as a model for thinking about science. As a way for opening up the domain of science which was characterised in his science. He used art as a gateway to make knowledge much more broader. Maybe science can improve by looking at art. So he didn’t just suggest the title for your conference, but he would very much endorse - safe to say - spirit of this conference. The language you need to make sense of those languages, its potential constraints and limitations. He would also challenge you to think what are you exactly delivering in going against delivery? What are you achieving? You are challenging that for the purposes of what? I suppose that is Feyerabend’s message would be if he was standing in my place.

“We weren’t against delivery for the pizza.”

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The effects of Against Delivery was achieved by: Colorplan 135gsm Canary Yellow; Colorplan 100gsm Pristine White; Brother HL-2240D (now discontinued) with very genuine and well-meaning toner

Don’t forget to pick up some gloves, this zine self destructs!

“I need somebody else to be the zebra.” —Nir Segal

Colophon:

@againstdelivery – part 2: Imag(in)ing Change Friday 13 November 2015 Woburn Square Studios Slade School of Fine Art www.ladiesofthepress.org