Journal of Visual Arts Practice: Volume: 6 | Issue: 3

Journal of

Visual ArtsPractice

Journal of Visual Arts Practice | Volum

e Six Num

ber Three

ISSN 1470-2029

6.3

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Volume Six N

umber Three

in tellect Journals | A

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Journal of

Visual Arts Practice Volume 6 Number 3 – 2007

167–174 Special Edition Editorial

The Problem of Documenting Fine Art Practices and Processes Rebecca Fortnum and Chris Smith

Articles

175–189 Collecting the traces: an archivist’s perspective Sue Breakell and Victoria Worsley

191–199 Relating process: accounts of influence in the life history interview Linda Sandino

201–213 Articulating the tacit dimension in artmaking Michael Jarvis

215–228 Seeing what, how and why: the ARTnews series, 1953–58 Nigel Whiteley

229–243 Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead Ruth Pelzer-Montada

245–250 Andrew Grassie: Document First Andrew Grassie

251–256 Apocotropes, Dutton and Peacock, The Dog and Duck, Dutton and Swindells

Steve Dutton

257–267 Considering If...Then...Else... Mary Maclean

268 Index

9 771470 202003

ISSN 1470-2029 6 3

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ISSN 1470-2029

This journal Is abstracted andindexed by ART Bibliographies.

Journal of Visual Arts Practice – Volume 6 Number 3

The Journal of Visual Arts Practice (JVAP) is a forum for debate for theinternational community engaged in or concerned with research in fineart and the visual arts more generally. It is concerned with exploringthe boundaries of these disciplines and sharing debate on research andcreative practices. The journal works within a frame that recognises boththe expanding practices that constitute research in the fine and visualarts, as well as the increasing cross and interdisciplinary nature of creativepractices in the field.

JVAP encourages contributions relating to scholarly, pure, develop-mental, applied and pedagogical research. It encourages submissionsexploring new critical theories of research and practice as well as evalua-tions of the practical and educational impact of such research. JVAP willsupport critical debate within and across fields. It is peer reviewed, buthas mechanisms for supporting and encouraging new contributors. Thejournal will proactively support doctoral researchers as well as estab-lished academics.

The journal of Visual Arts Practice is a refereed journal supported bythe National Association for Fine Art Education.

Editorial Boardlain Biggs (University of the West of England, UK)Mary Anne Francis (Brighton University, UK)Ken Friedman (Norwegian School of Management, Norway; Demark’s DesignSchool Copenhagen, Denmark)Jill Journeaux (Coventry University, UK)Judith Mottram (Nottingham Trent University, UK)Kristina Niedderer (University of Wolverhampton, UK)Francis Halsall (National College of Art and Design Dublin)

Editorial Advisory BoardJale Erzen (Middle Eastern Technical University, Ankara)Mick Finch (Ecole des Beaux-arts de Valenciennes, France)Henk Slager (Editor of Lier en Boog, Amsterdam)

( JVAP has chosen not to use academic titles)

EditorChris SmithSir John Cass Department

of Art, Media and DesignLondon Metropolitan UniversityCentral House59–63 Whitechapel High StreetLondon E1 7PFUKe-mail:[email protected]://www2.ntu.ac.uk/ntsad/nafae/publications.shtml

The Journal of Visual Arts Practice is published three times per year by Intellect, TheMill, Parnall Road, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK. The current subscription rates are £30(personal) and £210 (institutional). Postage is free within the UK, £5 for the rest ofEurope and £10 elsewhere. Advertising enquiries should be addressed to:[email protected]

© 2007 Intellect Ltd. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personaluse or the internal or personal use of specific clients is granted by Intellect Ltd forlibraries and other users registered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) inthe UK or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Servicein the USA provided that the base fee is paid directly to the relevant organization.

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Journal of Visual Arts Practice Volume 6 Number 3 © 2007 Intellect Ltd

Editorial. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.167/2

Special Edition EditorialThe Problem of DocumentingFine Art Practices and Processes

Rebecca Fortnum University of the Arts London

Chris Smith London Metropolitan University

AbstractThis editorial to a special edition, devoted to the documentation of artists’processes, acts as an introduction to the debate and its generation in relation tothe articles in this edition. It outlines problems related to the methodologies andideology of documenting creative processes within the visual arts.

This issue of JVAP generates from observations that documentation andthe data produced as a trace of the artists’ processes has become one of thecentral issues of the debate in relation to research into artistic practice. Thisis perhaps made fraught by debates on the status of such documentationas well as the source of such material. Who documents and why areimportant questions – ‘who will/should narrate the story?’ – for instance.This is further expanded on in this editorial and through the articles to befound in this edition.

Alongside the articles on documenting artists’ processes of productionthis edition of JVAP, on artists documentation, introduces a double reflexiveprocess in that we have used work by artists that document their process inand through their own work. These are represented through the visual workof Andrew Grassie, Mary Maclean and Steve Dutton. It is also the firstedition where we have introduced the use of colour in the journal.

This experiment leads, of course, to a debate in turn about the repre-sentation of scholarly endeavour and in what medium. We would be gratefulfor a response through either the NAFAE website, or directly to the editor,on the substantive issues of this edition in representing the documentationof the processes of artistic practice thus providing data for further research or,indeed, the processes of documenting research, which is in itself a practice.It might be also be a debate on what extent these are coterminous.

The documentation of an artist’s creative process is a problematic areafor research. In 1962 Rudolf Arnheim voiced some of the concerns facingboth artists and researchers,

‘Artists … have learned to tread cautiously when it comes to reporting theinternal events that produce their works. They watch with suspicion allattempts to invade the inner workshop and to systematise its secrets.

[Arnheim, 1962:1]

167JVAP 6 (3) pp. 167–174 © Intellect Ltd 2007

KeywordsDocumentation PracticeResearch into practiceCreative process

JVAP_6.3_01_edt_Fortnum 12/12/07 4:31 PM Page 167

For the archetypal artist, working alone in the studio, the documentation ofhis or her process was felt to impede or alter the relationship between artistand work. One of the most celebrated examples of this is Hans Namuth’sattempts to document Jackson Pollock’s painting ‘in action’. It is recordedthat when Namuth and Pollock finished filming in 1950, Pollock pulled outa bottle of whisky, saying,

‘This is the first drink I’ve had in two years. Dammit, we need it!’[Potter, 1985]

Whilst it may be too simplistic to blame Pollock’s description of himselfand Namuth as ‘phoneys’ and his subsequent downward spiral on theirdocumentary project, there is a pervasive sense, even today, that too muchintrospection is bad for creativity. And this is all the more interestingbecause artists’ practices and their relationship to documentation and itstechnology have shifted considerably over the last fifty years.

Since the 1960s, when the artist began to engage creatively with thedocumentation of their own (often performative or dematerialised) prac-tices, the relationship between process and documentation has becomeever more complex. Today many artists engage materially with their work ina variety of ways, often choosing not to physically fabricate their own work ormake work that takes temporary, ephemeral or even no material form.Indeed the exchange between documentation, process and finished artwork has become blurred. Nicholas Bourriaud in his essay Postproductionstates,

‘…the contemporary work of art does not position itself as the terminationpoint of the ‘creative process” ( a “finished product” to be contemplated) butas a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities.’

[Bourriaud, 2005:19]

For many artists, even studio based ones, these shifts in thinking about artproduction have lead to their creative processes becoming more availableto a public. From the early 1990s we have witnessed artist-in-residenceschemes requiring artists to display ‘work in progress’ and over the last tenyears the strategy of artists creating gallery exhibitions where the work getsmade over the period of display have became commonplace. Recent tech-nology has increased the types of documentation possible and, courtesy ofvarious ‘reality’ media enterprises, we are much more familiar with thenotion of being observed. However whether this does indeed lead to a greaterunderstanding or a ‘demystification’ of the creative process is debateableand the sculptor Phyllida Barlow has commented recently,

‘An ignorance of how art becomes made and how artists work – what artistsdo – is prevalent at all levels of art, from secondary school through to highlevel retrospective exhibitions at international venues.’

Further to what was stated above, this issue of JVAP reflects on how andwhy artists’ processes get documented as well as debating the problemsof such documents. It emerges from work being done by the Visual

168 Rebecca Fortnum and Chris Smith


Intelligences Research Project at the Lancaster Institute for the ContemporaryArts at Lancaster University. An aspect of this project has been to investi-gate the way visual artists think and make and, most importantly, therelationship between their thinking and making. The project’s initiatorNigel Whiteley, in his contribution to this edition, quotes Martin Kemp,

‘…works of art are physical products made by executants who face realchallenges, and do not come ready-made from the heads of their makers.’

[Kemp 2003: 37]

– a statement rings true for most artists and, if demonstrated, does muchto challenge populist views of the ‘conceptual’ nature of contemporary art.The Visual Intelligences Research Project has begun to debate and docu-ment these ‘real challenges’ faced by artists. It acknowledges that mostvisual artists make a number of decisions whilst making their work thataren’t purely conceptual or only to do with material and technique but lie inthe relationships between these aspects of making.

An initial strategy of the project was to facilitate a closed seminar whereten established artists debated a number of questions that directlyaddressed their own processes. Questions were chosen to elicit reflectionon creative decision making, for example;

• What scope is there for unforeseen events occurring in your process? • Have you ever exhibited or sold your work before you felt ready to do so? • If you had to choose one work to represent you from all that you have

made which would you choose and why? [for complete list of questionsplease see www.visualintelligences.com]

The artists’ statements and emerging debate was fascinating. Patterns ofprocess emerged; the self imposed parameters of a practice, the way artistsstrategically balance unknown outcomes with known procedures and ideas,the movement between different types of engagement with materials andconcepts, the drive towards [and away from] resolution. This paved the wayto look at the issue in greater depth.

In December 2005 a symposium to explore the area further was held atLancaster University where VIRP joined forces with the University’s CASCPP(Centre for the Advanced Study of Contemporary Performance Practice).Entitled The Documentation of Fine Art Processes and Practices, ten speakersdiscussed a range of methodologies for documentation. Fine art practitionersdiscussed the use of the aural interview (Bill Furlong), the artist’s archive(Julie Bacon) and forms such as the blog (Sue Wilks) and the artist’s note-book (Gerry Davies) used by artists to develop and document theirprocesses. They were joined by speakers from other creative practices,where more established methodologies of documentation had evolvedthrough the context and needs of their particular discipline. Paul Harperspoke about his research developing ways to document (and thus preserve)the skills and approaches of different crafts practitioners. ChoreographerNigel Stewart demonstrated how in his own practice the documentation ofimprovised dance forms the basis for future choreographed works. ChrisSmith framed an important aspect of the debate by suggesting that artists

169The Problem of Documenting Fine Art Practices and Processes


take note of the many possible determinants shaping the accounting oftheir practices. He debated the several meanings of the term ‘account’, ask-ing what might determine their appropriateness, intelligibility, and authen-ticity? This discussion of the ways we can account for our practices andprocesses seemed timely within art education both in relation to develop-ment of Fine Art practice based research degrees and to the (then looming,now upon us) Research Assessment Exercise. However more importantthat these immediate, and perhaps parochial, concerns was the sensethat documentation will be needed to provide information for future scholar-ship and for rich and deep research.

Most recently a second symposium Did Hans Namuth kill JacksonPollock? The problem of documenting the creative process was held at ChelseaCollege of Art in April this year and marked a collaboration between theVIRP and the University of the Arts London (Camberwell College) with sup-port from the National Association for Fine Art Education. This symposiumshifted the emphasis from the methodologies of documenting fine artprocesses to the relationship between the artist’s work and the documenta-tion of its process, exploring their mutual dependency. This was demon-strated in very different ways in the presentations from artists Art &Language and Andrew Grassie. Additionally Ian Kirkwood, Head of theSchool of Fine and Applied Art at De Montfort University, discussed hisparticipation in an early 1970s BBC documentary of the radical course at St.Martins School of Art, known as the year of ‘the locked room’. But asKirkwood pointed out

‘The documentary however was a ‘docudrama’ made during the followingyear using the students as actors to dramatise some of the key events as theyhad unfolded on the course … [which raised] questions not only about thenature of the course in its focus on the creative process but also about thepossibility of documenting it.”

[Kirkwood, 2007]

Interestingly the symposium ended with a visit to see this and other docu-mentation forming the display St Martins Sculpture Department 1966–7 atTate Britain with its co-curator Hester Westley. The symposium also drewon research by art historians, academics and museum archivists to specu-late on how documents of process might elucidate an artist’s work. Someof those papers have been developed for this edition of JVAP.

Coinciding with this event an exhibition, Inspiration to Order, could beseen at the University of the Arts London research gallery at WimbledonCollege of Art. The exhibition, which had also been shown at SouthamptonUniversity’s Winchester Gallery and California State University StanislasGallery earlier in the year, incorporated documentation made in collabora-tion with the exhibition’s curator Rebecca Fortnum during a VIRP smallAHRC grant’s pilot study of the methodology of documentation. The showaimed to enact some of the issues the symposium debated, providing anaudience with a sense of the processes of making and thinking of contem-porary art practice. Notes, drawings, films, aural and written commentariesand photographs were shown with artworks, allowing the audience to beguided through the ten exhibiting artists’ decision-making processes.



For example the painter Michael Ginsborg recorded his thoughts on film ashe made a work for the exhibition whilst Beth Harland’s interactive digitalwork allowed the viewer to explore her extensive resources and influences.A podcast recorded conversations by the artist Vong Phaophanit’s andwriter Claire Obussier that occurred whilst editing his film All that is solidmelts into air (Karl Marx) and alongside Emma Rose and Neil Boynton’sinstalled film Rush one could view a short film of the collaborators dis-cussing the making of the work. Paula Kane exhibited her ‘studio wall’ ofstudies and resource material as well as her landscape paintings and MaryMaclean’s written reflection published here, accompanied her photographin the form of a leaflet designed to unfold like a map and be taken away bythe audience.

Fundamental to this debate is an underlying question – why documentthe creative process? Although (arguably) Namuth’s film assured Pollockhis place in history does it really has help us understand his creativeprocess? And can engaging with the making of a work of art make us bettercritics or artists? Arguments put forward in this edition make a convincingcase that this is so.

As artists how we voice what we do, both to ourselves and others, nec-essarily feeds into what we make. As Linda Sandino observes in her essay‘Relating Process’ on artists’ oral life histories; the stories that artists nar-rate in relation to their own processes may not necessarily be accurate buthow these stories are shaped (‘organised, connected and evaluated’) maydetermine the artist’s sense of identity and thus inform the artists’ path,containing the seeds of future works. The artist does not work in a vacuumbut constructs ‘narrative strategies of the self’ that are both ‘cultural andpersonal’ negotiating historical and contemporary figures, encounteredboth in person and through art works. This chimes with Michael Jarvis’sassertion that ‘the artist is the quintessential ‘reflective practitioner’.‘Jarvis speculates on the worth of making the hidden or tacit knowledge ofartists available to a wider public. He makes a strong argument for theadvantages to the audience as well as to artists themselves who, in doingso, will ‘achieve an ever increasing clarity of utterance’. Ruth Pelzer alsoreflects upon the ways in which documentation can create insights into(her own) visual practice. She uses the term ‘post-production’ to reflect ona particular quality of documentation, namely the practice of theory afteran exhibition of the author’s work. It is suggested that the insights gainedthrough such documentary post-production become the foundation forfurther practice, both for other artists and the author herself. This isequally true, whether post-production relates to the practice of theory orartistic practice. Indeed the artists’ pages here, by Steve Dutton, AndrewGrassie and Mary Maclean, demonstrate the contemporary artists’clear-sighted ability to reflect on their ways of making. For these artiststhis consideration of process is creative; not only does it pave the way forfuture strategies and works, it can also produce texts and images as artworks themselves.

Most in depth studies of an artist’s work will examine their workingmethod and, as we are establishing, the relation between artworks andprocess is complex. Sue Breakell and Victoria Worsley’s paper discussesthe archival material of Prunella Clough and Helen Chadwick,



‘two artists for whom documentation is an intrinsic and inextricable part ofthe creative process.’

In the discussion of these artists’ notebooks, letters, photographs andother ephemera, we become aware of the substantial layer of creativeresearch activity necessary to the production of these artists’ ‘finished’ artworks. The production and ordering of this material allowed the artists todevelop their serious and sustained practices. From the audience’s per-spective a glimpse into this activity can,

‘considerably enrich the visitor’s experience because it offers alternative waysto approach the works …’

Nigel Whiteley examining the ARTnews series, 1953–1958 also draws outthe importance of this kind of access to process. He suggests that thepluralistic approach adopted in this series is rarely found in documentstoday,

‘Description, analysis, interpretation and evaluation combine to give a richinsight into the evolution of an art work, revealing what is usually tacit knowl-edge and, most significantly, adding the dimension of why, to the usual realmof what, and the occasionally available how.’

He calls for a reprise of such enterprises. If viewed as one strand of infor-mation (amongst others) for those considering a work of art the dilemmasor ‘problems’ of documenting creative process become more straightfor-ward to resolve. Indeed from an historical perspective it would be difficultto mount a case against the documentation of process. Certainly interest inprocess as a way of gaining purchase on an artists work has establishedprecedent within art history.

Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall’s Tiepolo and the PictorialIntelligence charts the relationship between Tiepolo’s drawing and painting anddevelops a convincing argument that each stage of the artist’s processallows for visual problem solving expedient to the final work. Tiepolo is anartist working towards an as yet unenvisaged image, his sketches do notsimply detail his plans on a small scale, rather they evidence his thinkingaround the problems that the work creates. During every part of his processTiepolo is to be found negotiating his imagery, composition, situation,materials and techniques. His sketches are working drawings and, eventhough some may have been sold commercially, they have a job to do.Alpers and Baxandall extend this notion even further when they say thatTiepolo’s finished pictures ‘exhibit the process of its making’ (Alpers andBaxandall, 1994:51) . They continue,

‘an earlier process has been internalised into the finished forms of the figures[…] that he represents: their forms declare the process’.

[Alpers and Baxandall, 1994:51]

Alpers and Baxandall’s investigation of Tiepolo’s large-scale fresco FourContinents at Wurzburg shows us an artist who works best in that medium



and whose other work often sustains and develops the skills needed for hisfresco. Tiepolo’s process is responsive to changes in environment andmedia and this continuous evolution is important. Both in terms of theviewer’s experience (perceptions change in different lights and viewingpositions) and the artist’s process, it marks the practice as one without pre-determined conclusions. Alpers and Baxandall discuss this quality as

‘a notion of performance [that when] discretely used … can be of further usewhere Tiepolo is concerned. It focuses attention not on an object that hasbeen made, but on the activity of making’

[Alpers and Baxandall, 1994:27].

This is an exciting proposition, not only does the evidence of the processgive insight into the artist’s masterwork but it appears that this work inturn can lead the viewer into process. It is clear that the relationshipbetween process and artwork has always been complex and that art as a‘state of encounter’ (Bourriaud) is by no means confined to contemporarypractice.

However problems remain. As we have seen the historians and archivistsof art seek to preserve evidence of the creative process and thinking forentirely valid reasons. But these documents mediate between the artist andposterity and in doing so wield enormous (cultural and fiscal) power. Canliving artists publicly engage in documenting their own processes in a disin-terested way? Or should we merely attempt to keep producing documents,consigning their preservation to history’s sifting and the discrimination offuture generations. Kerstin Mey, one of the recent symposium’s speakers,succinctly summed up

‘a) processes of making art and their documentation influence each other b) the documentation of art/creative processes and their outcomes underpinthe validation of art practices as they allow us to determine precedents (andtheir genealogy) c) the practices of producing and dealing with archives inwhich those databases are ‘exposed’ to different forms of significant processesand narrative structuring is social practice in itself. Thus archives tell us a lotabout power relations and value hierarchies d) documenting and archivingmeans conscious and active participation in civil society.’

[Mey, 2007]

Can we, as artists, archivists, art historians and cultural analysts, afford notbe pro-active in this process? The Visual Intelligences Research Project atLICA and its collaborators at UAL and elsewhere are committed to workingwith artists to develop new and creative ways of documenting theirprocesses. We must have confidence in the value of the production, thepreservation and, eventually, the evaluation of documents of process.

ReferencesSvetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence by Yale

University Press, 1994.

Arnheim Rudolf, The Genesis of a Painting: Picasso’s Guernica, University ofCalifornia Press; (New Ed edition 1981) 1962.



Potter Jeffrey, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock, PushcartPress 2nd Printing edition (November 1987) 1985.

Bourriaud Nicolas, Postproduction, Lukas & Sternberg, 2005.

Kemp, Martin ‘Best Books of the Decade’, The Art Book, volume 10, issue 2, March2003.

Kirkwood Ian, paper abstract, Did Hans Namuth kill Jackson Pollock? The problemof documenting the creative process, www.visualintelligences.com, 2007.

Mey Kerstin, paper abstract, Did Hans Namuth kill Jackson Pollock? The problem ofdocumenting the creative process, www.visualintelligences.com, 2007.

Suggested citationFortnum, R. and Smith, C. (2007), ‘The Problem of Documenting, Fine Art Practices and

Processes’ Journal of Visual Arts Practice 6: 3, pp. 167–174, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.167/2

Contributor detailsRebecca Fortnum read English at Oxford before gaining an MFA from NewcastleUniversity and taking up a fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting andSculpture, USA. She has been a Visiting Fellow in Painting at Plymouth Universityand at Winchester School of Art, a visiting artist at The School of the Art Institute ofChicago, and a Senior Lecturer at Norwich School of Art and Wimbledon School ofArt. She has received several awards including from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation,the British Council, the Arts Council of England, the British School in Rome andthe Art and Humanities Research Council. She has exhibited widely includingsolo shows at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Spacex Gallery, Exeter, KapilJariwala Gallery, London, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, The Drawing Gallery,London and Gallery 33, Berlin. She was instrumental in founding the artist-runspaces Cubitt Gallery and Gasworks Gallery in London. Her book of interviews,Contemporary British Women Artists, in their own words, was published this year by IB Tauris. She is currently a recipient of the Art House’s Space for 10 award for mid-career artists and lead international artist for the TRADE project in Roscommon &Leitrim, Ireland. Contact: Rebecca Fortnum is Research Fellow, The LancasterInstitute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University & Senior Lecturer,Camberwell College, University of the Arts London.E-mail: [email protected]

Chris Smith is Convenor of the Visual Arts Practice Research Group and editor ofthe Journal of Visual Art Practice. His research interests lie in the field of art anddesign philosophy, particularly the connection between theory and practice, and aconcern with praxis in art and design. He collaborates with others from the VisualArts Practice Research Group in projects related to the relationship of imaginationand image, and with Art & Language on the question of ‘What work does the art-work do?’ This has led to various national and international symposia and exhibi-tions. Chris supervises a range of doctoral students drawn from art and design aswell as the crafts. He has run a number of workshops in collaboration with theCentre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design, University of the Arts, London,on supervision of Masters and Doctoral students. He also sits on the Council forHigher Education in Art and Design AHRC working group, examining issues relatedto practice-led research. Contact: Chris Smith is Principal Lecturer at the Sir JohnCass Department of Art, Media, and Design, and editor of the Journal of Visual ArtPractice.E-mail: [email protected]




Article. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.175/1

Collecting the traces: an archivist’sperspective

Sue Breakell Tate Library & Archive

Victoria Worsley Henry Moore Institute

AbstractThe phenomenon of artists drawing on their own and other archives is not a newone, but over the past few years there has undoubtedly been a significant increasein attention, among both artist and art historians, given to the archive as part ofthe creative process, as well as to archive practice. Archives have also becomecontested territory, caught up in discourses about the nature of museums andindividual anxieties about the significance and preservation of documentation.From an archivist’s point of view, archives have a positive and fertile role as botha resonant collective memory resource and a site of creative regeneration throughrevisiting the traces of earlier ideas and actions. Archive theory also emphasizesthe importance of context in the assessment of the meaning of a documentwithin a body of archive material. Consideration of the archives of PrunellaClough and Helen Chadwick within this wider context of archival theory andpractice reveals in both cases a distinctly archival attitude to the documentationof the creative process, one which provides a rewarding insight into their work.

Without memory support systems – from a tool to a digitalised archive –there would be no experience of the past and nothing from which to ‘select’ inorder to invent the future

(Beardsworth 1996: 47)

Archives are the hinge between the past and the future. They are prostheticmemories which are activated in the present. Archives always exist in thepresent tense, capturing that moment of a past action and fixing it. Thisinstant is thereafter reignited in another present moment when they aretranslated by an unknown reader of the future. This article examines themeaning of the archive from the perspective of two archivists working ininstitutional art archives. In the context of recent dialogues, it asserts thesignificance of the archive as both a collective memory and a site of creativeregeneration. Two case studies will demonstrate how the archives of twoindividual artists document their creative process and how this is integralto their practice.

Misconceiving the archive The notion of the archive has become popularly associated with somewhatinsidious stereotypes, which are contrary to archivists’ views of their work


Keywordsarchivescontemporary artcreative processdocumentationHelen ChadwickmemoryPrunella Clough

JVAP_6.3_02_art_Breakwell.qxd 12/12/07 4:31 PM Page 175

as practitioners. The archive is popularly conceived as a space where thingsare hidden in a state of stasis, imbued with secrecy, mystery and power. Themotif that pervasively recurs is that of dust and dirt. Dustiness implies aplace of no movement, of objects that have been left to rest. Archives areoften perceived as dark spaces, stereotypically located in the basement sig-nifying a burial or entombment of things past. Because they are sometimesseen as beginning at the end, archives are inextricably linked with death. AsAndrew Wilson comments, ‘archives can, indeed, be depressing places...What had been creation (the gesture that articulated) has now become littlemore than a mute document for a life lived’ (Wilson 2002: 67).

A particularly modern malady is the increasing anxiety about the sheervolume of material which is being generated. At the same time, making anyselection is problematic, given that any selection process is inevitablyloaded and politicized. In ‘The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away’, IlyaKabakov expresses this ambivalence. The room of the man of the title isfilled with a lifetime’s garbage, bearing witness to meaningless and ulti-mately pointless efforts to classify and record all the links:

A simple feeling speaks about the value, the importance of everything... this isthe memory associated with all the events connected to each of these papers.To deprive ourselves of these paper symbols and testimonies is to depriveourselves somewhat of our memories. In our memory everything becomesequally valuable and significant. All points of our recollections are tied to oneanother. They form chains and connections in our memory which ultimatelycomprise the story of life.

(Kabakov 2006: 33)

Archives have also been implicated in ideological discourses about themuseum, reflecting both personal and political anxieties, such as those ofChristian Boltanski:

Preventing forgetfulness, stopping the disappearance of things and beingsseemed to me a noble goal, but I quickly realised that this ambition wasbound to fail, for as soon as we try to preserve something, we fix it. We canpreserve things only by stopping life’s course. If I put my glasses in a vitrine,they will never break, but will they still be considered glasses?... Once glassesare part of a museum’s collection, they forget their function, they are thenonly an image of glasses. In a vitrine, my glasses will have lost their reason forbeing, but they will also have lost their identity.

(McShine 1999: 91)

Daniel Buren, meanwhile, has written of the problematics of the art museumand its activities, which he describes as ‘a careful camouflage undertaken bythe prevalent bourgeois ideology, assisted by the artists themselves. A cam-ouflage which has until now made it possible to transform the reality of theworld into an image of the world’ (McShine 1999: 221).

Positive spacesAs archivists we see a positive and fertile reading available in the space ofthe archive, with its endless possibilities of reiteration and regeneration.

176 Sue Breakell and Victoria Worsley


Unlike libraries which classify books by subject, archives retain the originalorder of the set of documents as they entered the archive, where such anorder exists, because this order itself has evidential value. From thesecollected traces (an archive is never complete) the raw material offers anendlessness of readings – not one set account. This presents the viewer/researcher with the freedom to reactivate the archive, producing their ownunmediated responses and subjective stories from what they find, like aDeleuzean rhizome.

Archives have always been stored in the most secure places, so that theyare isolated from contamination or corruption and can exist in their owncontext as immutable entities. This inaccessibility transforms them into themost authoritative and powerful testimony of actions. The archivist pre-serves the archive’s authenticity, which goes beyond physical security, byintellectually preserving the organic integrity of the interrelationships withinthe sets of papers, through the description of their context.

Archives are also spaces of remembrance. This encompasses two oppo-site but complimentary purposes; to remember is both to store and toretrieve. But documents have to pass over the archival threshold, whichbecomes the locus of recognition and empowerment. While the notion ofthe entry and therefore selection of documents into the archive is ideologi-cally problematic, there must ultimately be some kind of selection becausewe cannot keep everything. Yet no selection is free of bias, and this is whyarchives should seek to be as transparent as possible about their processesand avoid the stereotype of mystery; to show that there is a body of profes-sional consideration and evolved practice which testifies to an awareness ofthe problematic of its position, and seeks to explain its response to that sit-uation. Once over the threshold, archives become perpetual memories of,and monuments to, the actions they bear witness to. Their pastness con-tinues to exist, and is recognized in their presentness.

Recently, there has been a significant resurgence and interest in the pastand how it is represented archivally outside the archive, especially withartists. In contrast to the melancholia and cynicism associated with post-modernism, Hal Foster has identified an archival impulse in which nothingis passive about the word archival; in fact remembering through archivesbecomes a political act which Foster defines as an ‘aesthetics of resistance’.In the face of ‘an amnesiac society of advanced capitalism dominated byculture industries and sports spectacles... a world at once roiled andarrested by information flow and product glut’ (Foster 2004: 10), he positsthe artist-as-archivist, who recovers gaps from the past and converts theminto beginnings perhaps to remind culture of its own wish symbols and for-feited dreams. It is ‘[the] desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, torecoup failed visions... and everyday life into possible scenarios... to turn“excavation sites” into “construction sites”’ (Foster 2004: 22).

This comes out of a discourse which has been defined by Derrida asarchive fever:

We are all ‘en mal d’archive’: in need of archives.... [we] burn with a passionnever to rest interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slipsaway.... It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for thearchive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a

177Collecting the traces: an archivist’s perspective


nostalgia for the return of the most archaic place of absolute commencement.No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion … can arise for a person whois not already, in one way or another, ‘en mal d’archive’.

(Derrida 1996: 91)

As art archivists in an institutional context, it is part of our role to collectthe traces, highlight them and rehabilitate them, and in doing so continuethe memory of the actions represented there, and open them up for newbeginnings and juxtapositions. This too is an aspect of archives whichmany artists find of particular interest: the opportunity to subvert and re-figure existing orders and practices, a notion Susan Hiller has described as‘orchestrated relationships, invented or discovered fluid taxonomies’(McShine 1999: 93).

Carolyn Steedman, in her book Dust, writes that ‘the archive is also aplace of dreams; humanity is its own creation’ (Steedman 2002: 56). In hervision, people can be re-written or re-performed into being; not just resur-rected, but given actual life and presentness. It is this almost magical qual-ity that is recognized by Umberto Eco when he writes of the mediaevalmanuscripts in the monasteries in The Name of the Rose, which are any-thing but dormant.

I had not thought each book spoke of things human or divine that lie outsidebooks. Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of books; it is as ifthey spoke among themselves... it was then a place of long, centuries oldmurmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another,a living thing, a receptacle of power not to be ruled by a human mind, a trea-sure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those whohad produced them or been their conveyors.

(Eco 1998: 286)

Even Kabakov’s nihilistic depiction of garbage contains a note of hopeful-ness which echoes this concept:

A dump not only devours everything, preserving it forever, but one might sayit also continually generates something; this is where some kinds of shootscome from new projects, ideas, a certain enthusiasm arises, hopes for therebirth of something...

(Kabakov 2006: 37)

It is against this background that we consider the question of whether doc-umentation destroys the creative process. Our response to this question isto turn to two artists for whom documentation is an intrinsic and inextrica-ble part of the creative process. In doing so, we must first consider thenature of documents in the context of the creative process.

Creative constructionsAs outlined above, the viewer of archive material must always take intoconsideration the context of its creation: its position within a wider bodyof material created by that same individual or unit. The traditional recordof the creative process was the sketchbook or preparatory study, which



can tell us how an image evolved, what changes were made, at whatstage, and why. But there are far more complex questions than this inrelation to the archive material. As well as preparatory drawings, there isa whole ripple effect of documentation of the creative process within lessobvious sources: a letter to a friend might include a reference to thework, directly documenting the process in the artist’s own words. A diaryentry recording a visit to a particular place, a play seen, a social appoint-ment, documents possible influences. It is this material, these traces of alife and its experiences, which are such a vital element of the analysis ofan artist’s work.

While schools of critical thought consider the validity of differentapproaches to the work itself, there is no doubt that much insight into theartist’s creative process can be gleaned from the complete body of docu-mentation of their life and work – and preserving and giving access to thismaterial is the purpose of the archivist’s work. Each individual piece of doc-umentation has the potential to converse with others: while the sum of thearchive can never add up to the whole of a life lived and experienced organ-ically, viewed together this cacophony of tales functions as an unstructuredbiography.

Ripples or concentric circles of information radiate out from the work atthe centre: the work itself; immediate preparatory documentation, suchas sketchbooks and notes for the work; more general documentationabout the creative process not so closely linked to this work, but indicat-ing areas of interest, themes and broader ideas; references to the work/process in letters or diaries, which can show when the work was in progress,or the artist’s personal responses to the work; and finally references toexternal influences, such as other people’s work, exhibitions, friends andplaces.

As the rings spread outwards, they move from the specific to the gen-eral, and the potential field through which the relevant traces are scatteredgrows wider. It is important to consider as wide a range of evidence as pos-sible, from 360 degrees around the work, to form a full and balanced per-spective. The rings are not all present in any one artist’s documentation; allarchives are different, just as each person has their own creative processwhich may or may not be documented in their archive. We must alsoacknowledge the gaps – the unrecorded (or lost?) reason for a particularactivity, or the play seen but that fact not documented. But that way mad-ness, or archive fever, lies – the wish to have and hold every piece of archiveinformation as if the source of some kind of power. For it is precisely in theserendipitous survival of some information, and not others, that lies the joyof using archives. House moves and clearouts, spilt cups of tea, the needfor a scrap of paper for a shopping list: such are the everyday events whichcan affect the survival of archives. The thrill of a discovery lies in the uncer-tainty of its survival.

The significance exists in assessing not only the content of the docu-mentation, but its context. Why was the document created? What was theintention? As an archive, was it generated unconsciously, as part of aprocess, or was there an element of self-consciousness or self-reflexivity inthe act of recording? The conscious creation of documentation can be com-pared with the act of autobiography, which involves the attempt to control



and shape the received idea of one’s life, and a conscious selection andanalysis of information about that life, through a very subjective filter. Forsome, this consciousness is an intrinsic part of their work; for others it issimply reflective of a wider culture which is more aware of the presence andpotential significance of archive material.

Prunella CloughA particularly rich source of the kind of documentation described in thismodel is the archive of Prunella Clough. The archive was donated to Tateby her estate in 2005 and selections from it are part of the Prunella Cloughdisplay which was shown first at Tate Britain, and subsequently at theCastle Museum, Norwich, and the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. Anonline interactive also featured in the show at Tate Britain and remains onTate’s website (http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/prunellaclough/interactive.shtm). The display demonstrates the important function of doc-umentation of the creative process. It can considerably enrich the visitor’sexperience because it offers alternative ways to approach the works, and tounderstand the imagery for viewers to whom the apparently abstract worksmay be difficult to read.

While Tate has many artists’ archives, rich in correspondence, sketch-books and a wealth of other documentary material, Clough’s is an excep-tional example in relation to the creative process, and her own distinctlyarchival approach to documentation demonstrates its importance to herimmediate and future practice. The collection includes notebooks, colourswatches, photographs, extensive and varied notes on colour and paint,and little compositional drawings. There are also very characteristic textualnotes which vary from what are effectively diary entries, to notes which looklike concrete poetry and which capture what, for her, are the essential char-acteristics of the environment or object in question:

Sky/roofSteely wet black grey, warming to wet brick work

Cold pick-up on last leaves very blue-green with shine, graduating through(Monet-wise) to ochre naples

The selection for the display and the interactive were made with the aim ofrecreating the sense of discovery and exploration of the archive. It is excep-tionally focused and rich: suddenly a dazzling light is shone on her creativeprocess, all the more illuminating because of the lack of such informationduring her lifetime as a possible approach to her work. Clough was a veryprivate person; she did not seek publicity or public favour, and made fewpublic statements about her work (although some of these are published inthe Tate exhibition catalogue). It seems unlikely that she generated docu-mentation with an eye on any viewer but herself. This archive was createdpartly as a natural product of her creative process, and also for her ownfuture use, building up a body of practice, for reference and for furtherworks. Because of the nature of the material, little relates to specific works,but rather it is a sort of primordial soup within which the genesis of theworks begins. There is rarely direct preparatory work; although there are



some direct links, the process is generally more subtle. Clough always saidthis was not source material in that sense:

‘Since I do not draw directly in a landscape, it is the memory or recollection ofa scene, which is also a whole event, that concerns me. A painting is madefrom many such events, rather than one; and in fact its sources are many layeredand can be quite distant in time, and are rarely if ever direct’ (quoted inTufnell 2007: 99)

The poet Stephen Spender wrote of his own note making:

A few fragments of unfinished poems [written fifteen years ago] enable me toenter immediately into the experiences from which they were derived, the cir-cumstances in which they were written, and unwritten feelings in the poemthat were projected but never put into words. .... The imagination is an exer-cise of memory.

(Spender 1946: 71)

This is how Clough’s archive operates. Her economical verbal or visualaides memoire act as triggers so that she can access the memory or sensa-tion again and develop it. She said

If I take a thing from the real world, detach it and put it into a painting, some-thing takes over that goes further than anything that I can logically describe orassess.... Paintings are made slowly because I work slowly on many things atonce.

(quoted in Tufnell 2007: 53)

As viewers of the archive, we cannot access the memory, but we can followits trace and in this way edge closer to understanding her process, as wellas finding clues as to the content or conception of the work.

The extent of the use of verbal rather than visual material in Clough’screative process is significant. Stephen Spender wrote that ‘[a poet] shouldbe able to think in images; he should have as great a mastery of languageas a painter has over his palate [sic]’ (Spender 1946: 61). Clough’s use oflanguage reverses this analogy to confirm its point – as a painter, she has amastery over language as a tool of her creativity. Her father Eric wrotepoems, and so did she – a number of typed-up poems exist in the archive,mostly dating from the 1940s or 1950s. A diary entry records the submis-sion of poems to the publisher John Lehmann. It seems they were not pub-lished, but her verses demonstrate the characteristics of her writing: anidiosyncratic perspective, expressed through a spikily economical verbalidiom, which is in close parallel to her visual work.

Evident in the archive is a conscious desire to record and classify, from anearly age. This includes notes made from her extensive reading, not onlyabout art (history and practice) but across many disciplines. Several note-books meticulously record her reading, quotes from literature and philosophy,instructions from technical guides and artists’ manuals. Even her pocketdiaries demonstrate her particularly spare yet rigidly organized approach: intiny pocket diaries dating from the Second World War, one part of the day’s



small apportioned space records events in the war; the advance of troopsthrough France, for example, or a fierce bombing raid; in another, somewhatcryptical jottings record what she has done or will do that day, including con-certs or meetings with friends; and in another, her current reading.

While generally the archive does not relate directly to specific composi-tions, the relationship between the archive and finished works is clear. Text


Figure 1.


and images supplement one another; words capture the colours, the subtlerelationships between elements of form, graduations of colour, compara-tive and relational observations. Photographs record structural forms andjuxtapositions, and an overall picture which might later be cropped orzoomed in on. For example, detailed notebook entries describing her viewof Lowestoft harbourside, her own photographs of scenes at the fishingdock (Figure 1) and published postcards of the same site, all relate closelyto a series of works depicting scenes at the harbour, including ‘Fishermenwith Sprats I’ (1948, Pembroke College Oxford) and ‘Man Hosing MetalFish Boxes’ (1951, Tate). Tantalizingly, the notebooks often describe imagessimilar to those used in finished works, but not quite as seen. It is a constantprocess of evolution; a later entry may document new sights and influ-ences, or an evolving idea on which she has made further progress.

SpratsFish on tarp on floor in rel. darkIn nets irreg, being picked up & shaken out, flying up in front of men. Netochre & trans, in all shaken folds being piled onto net carrier. REF

Similarly, her photographs of industrial scenes inform works such as ‘Lorrywith Ladder’ (1953, Private Collection) or ‘Cooling Tower II’ (1958, Tate)(Figure 2). The photographs are often gathered by her into groups, andplaced in envelopes marked with such titles as – LIGHT, RIVER, GASWORKS


Figure 2.


or LIGHT INDUSTRIAL. She wrote extensive notes from close observation ofthe busy scenes, not only along the Thames on her doorstep, but on visitsto industrial areas all over the country. A notebook from the 1950s docu-ments scenes from Doncaster, Grimsby, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Gravesendand Neasden. Here she observes factory and industrial sites, buildings, lor-ries and the men who operate in this environment, and the interactionbetween these elements.

Cranes and LorriesFirst wharf crane bunch new appearance... jagged toothed form, grey on grey,sky metal = only latter darker with black lines etc light linear look. Taller craneswinging crates, pale warm REF 1950s notebook

Clough’s photographs of such apparently unlovely scenes are an evocativedocument of their time and place. As Margaret Garlake points out, herimages of street scenes and shop windows are reminiscent of the broadlycontemporary images of Nigel Henderson (Tufnell 2007: 99). The archiveshows that this interest in more unconventional subjects dates back asearly as the 1930s, when she was taking photographs of a power station inNorway and an abstracted image of a glacier.

In many cases, there is evidence that Clough cropped or framed herimages to take on a flat-plane abstraction which relates directly not only to theforms within her paintings but also to their composition. A photograph ofparked cars on the street in the sunshine, or of piles of cheap plastic productsat a street market, are taken not because of the materials being recorded butfor the formal and structural accidents of the elements they contain.

By her own intrinsic documentation of her creative process, Clough allowsaccess to her world in a way which would not be possible without it. It takeson a secondary purpose in allowing us to see her work in a very different waythan through responding only to the works themselves. Indeed, her view onthe world asserts itself powerfully on the eye of the beholder of her archive.

Helen ChadwickHelen Chadwick who died in 1996 at the age of 42 is an artist that pre-figured the artist-as-archivist. Her fastidious research and production ofher art was coupled with an extensive documentation of the process of herpractice. This bears parallels with contemporary archival art but with a sig-nificant difference, the process for Chadwick, was retained in the personalsphere and not made public.

Her papers came into the Henry Moore Institute in 2003 and becamepart of the public realm. There are over one hundred boxes of materialincluding notebooks, accounts, papers relating to the arrangement of exhi-bitions, photographs, studies and test-pieces for works, press-cuttings andher extensive library. On first inspection, there was an obvious and systematicorganization to the archive made by Chadwick. This perhaps counteractsthe image of the creative artist who works in a disorganized manner, fromimpulse, but many artists, especially successful ones, keep well-organizedrecords of their work and the business of being an artist. Hans UlrichOlbrist’s film of ‘The Secret Files of Gilbert & George’ reveals that record-keeping is fundamental to their practice and the same is the case with the



German artist, Thomas Schütte, who showed me his archive at his studio inDüsseldorf. Following on from the archival tendencies of his teacher, GerhardRichter, Schütte decided as a student that the first investment he would makein being an artist would be a filing cabinet. As his career developed, the num-ber of filing cabinets increased so that he now has a suite of them, elegantlycoloured in an olive green, containing all the documentation relating to hiswork. He acts as his own archivist and adds any relevant document to therelevant file so that he can then forget about it allowing him to live in thepresent whilst consigning the past safely to his green filing cabinets.

In some cases, an artist will be able to edit their papers before theycross over the archival threshold and become public. More often than not,an artist will die without having had the chance to decide what, if anythingshould be kept for posterity. This was the case with Chadwick, whose suddendeath left this responsibility to her estate. Chadwick had already depositedan edited version of her notes and artwork relating to ‘Of Mutability’ at theVictoria & Albert Museum, who had purchased this work. Her archive atthe Henry Moore Institute contains further, more detailed and often intimateaccounts of the development of this piece and this clearly presents anethical dilemma about the intentions and wishes of the artist and what theywould have wanted in the public domain. This has to be balanced againstthe historical importance of the material and if necessary, the archivist orestate, can put a closure period on any material which is deemed sensitive.

It is only through access to Chadwick’s archive that we can trace thedetailed intellectual construction of her works. This process can be revealedby examining just one example of her works, ‘Ego Geometrica Sum’ (I amGeometry) (Figure 3) of 1982–84 which comprises ten geometric sculpturesthat represent key moments in Chadwick’s growth from her premature birthto the age of thirty. It includes an incubator, a font, a pram, a boat, a wigwam,a bed, a piano, a gym horse, a cube representing high school and a statuerepresenting the ages fifteen to thirty. In addition to the sculptures are ten


Figure 3.


photographs called ‘The Labours’ which depict Chadwick holding and thengrappling with each of the ever-bigger sculptures.

When the piece was completed Chadwick wrote a rhetorical ‘artist’sapology’ which gives a highly condensed version of its meaning in the formof a prose poem:

suppose ones body could be traced back through a succession of geometricsolids... as rare and pure as crystalline structures, taking form from the pres-sure of recalled external forces... and if geometry is an expression of externaland exact truths, inherent in the natural law of matter and thus manifesta-tions of an absolute beauty, predestined, of divine origin... then let this modelof mathematical harmony be infused with a poetry of feeling and memory tosublimate the discord and desire in a recomposed neutrality of being

Chadwick’s artist’s apology references the renaissance ‘Apology for Poetry’by Philip Sidney, using similar devices of obscuring meaning and censor-ship through metaphor and allegory – it both reveals and conceals her posi-tion – whereas the documentation in her archive discloses her creativeprocess. Her self-conscious documentation of her practice is evident evenin her student years when she constructed a catalogue raisonne of her artwhich extends to two volumes in which she pasted contact prints of thework annotated with their titles and dates.

‘Ego Geometria Sum’ represents the axis between the private life of theartist and the public artwork through Chadwick’s investigation of her per-sonal identity through her memory and the emotions she had connected tosignificant events in her past. This process is most consciously docu-mented in her notebook for ‘Ego’ in which she records her research, feel-ings and development of the work. In noting ideas for the possible title anda description of the piece she describes it as her ‘personal museum’ and ‘ametaphor for memory’.

Chadwick began her research by reconstructing her life story throughher family and personal archives. She collected amongst many other thingsold toys, receipts for her pram, clothes, letters about the piano lessons shehated, birthday cards, photos and school reports. She collated and cata-logued this documentary evidence into a year-by-year listing of her life usingthe material traces as prompts for the forms which later became the sculp-tures. Chadwick stated she was ‘building up a picture of the past throughobjects that (a) contained me (b) reoriented me (c) moulded/shaped me’.At the same time she revisited the architectural spaces where the events ofher past had been played out and photographed them including the hospi-tal she was born, the church she was baptized and her schools and shewrote that ‘bricks and mortar remain, physically concrete, yet memory andpast life is gone evaporated’. She also created an ‘Album of Photographies’in which she set these photographs of buildings next to a source photo forthat period. For the page that relates to her wigwam sculpture that repre-sented her life at five years of age, for example, she sets a contemporaryphotograph of herself in front of a wigwam with her parents in the gardenof her home next to an image of her former family home in Croydon takenin the early 1980s. The latter emphasizes the electric pylon that was next tothe house and this features on one of the sides in the final sculpture.



The documents and images of her past became the sources for theforms of the geometric shapes in ‘Ego Geometria Sum’ and also for thephotographic images which appeared upon the surface of them, through aphotographic emulsion which was absorbed into the plywood of the sculp-tures. Chadwick defined these as ‘archaeological presentations’ and describedthem as ‘coffins/tombs/wombs/shelters’.

Chadwick combined the emotive with the mathematical in what she sawas a set of ‘metaphysical shapes taken from my size and shape using myown body measurements and dimensions to calculate the size of the cabi-nets’ at each different age so that she could be ‘contained within them’. Sheused a scientific model for the ‘curve of growth’ from J. M. Tanner’s Foetusinto Man. On a graph in this book that gives each of the heights andweights in the development of a human’s growth into adulthood she plot-ted her own ages and heights and added the geometric shapes she woulduse to represent each particular age in ‘Ego Geometria Sum’. She usedthese calculations to establish the exact volume of her body at the ten dif-ferent points in her development that she chose so that the volume of thegeometric sculpture corresponded exactly to her body at that time. Tanneralso noted that a human stops growing at the age of thirty which becamethe end point for the artwork (Figure 4).


1

50

27” ≡ 69

32” ≡ 81

41” ≡ 104

45” ≡ 114

54” ≡ 137

60” ≡ 152.5

63” ≡

50” ≡ 127

17 ” ≡ 4512

14

22” ≡ 5660

70

80

90

100

110

120

130

140

150

160

170

180

190cm

GIRLS

Foetus into Man

Longitudinalstandards

Limits forsingle occasions(cross-sectional)

97

97

F

M50 5025

979075

103

3

3

Height

170

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

97 90 75 50 25 10 3

97 90 75 50 25 10 3Age, years

97 90 75 50 25 10 3

5+4+3+2+

Breaststage

5+4+3+2+

Public hairstage

Menarche

Figure 4.


In her notebook Chadwick wrote she wanted ‘to apply some code/rule/theory to the work to validate it as an organizational model of growthnot just an illustration of life’ and she researched on a wide variety ofsubjects. The theoretical model that allowed her to move away from whatshe said were ‘personal details to immutable laws’ was in Arthur Koestler’sbook the Sleepwalkers. Her annotated copy of this book from her libraryreveals how she linked the ten sculptures to the mystical number ten ofPythagorean theory. The harmony of numbers which Koestler writes aboutwas also influenced by Kepler’s disproved theory that the universe wassupported by an invisible skeleton made of geometric shapes whichChadwick also used as a means of devising the work.

The notebook also discloses how Chadwick felt the simple images of herpast were too bland on their own and how she determined to combinethem with a nude image of her adult self like a ‘ghost’ as a double exposureon the sculptures. The archive includes all her contact prints for the nudeswhich shows how she composed her body into a form that related to eachsculpture – foetus-like for the incubator and standing upright in the finalpiece of the statue. Her archive shows she researched physical manifesta-tions of mental distress, including catalepsy, for the poses – which give thenude a sense of rigidity.

In contrast to the artist’s apology, the archive reveals the many layers ofthe intellectual and physical processes involved in the construction of ‘EgoGeometria Sum’. As with Clough, there is a clear contrast between what ispublicly revealed by the artist – the artist’s apology, or her silence – andwhat their private documentation explores and reveals.

These two artists are only given as empirical examples from a mass ofrecords; all of the documentation exists in the archive to be consulted byany researcher who will bring their own interpretation to the material. Wehave argued that the documentation in archives enriches and deepens ourunderstanding of artistic practice. They situate, contextualize and allowmultiple readings or stories to be constructed from them. In this way thepast resonates in the present.

ReferencesBeardsworth, Richard (1996), Derrida and the Political, London: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques (1996), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Eco, Umberto (1998), The Name of the Rose, London: Vintage.

Foster, Hal (2004), ‘An Archival Impulse’, October 110 (Fall), pp.3–22.

Kabakov, Ilya (2006), ‘The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away’, in CharlesMerewether (ed.), The Archive, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/London: Whitechapel,pp. 32–37.

McShine, Kynaston (ed.) (1999), The Museum as Muse, New York, Museum ofModern Art.

Spender, Stephen (1970 [1946]), ‘The Making of a Poem’ in P E Vernon (ed.),Creativity: Selected Readings, London: Penguin, pp. 61–76.

Steedman, Carolyn (2002), Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, New Brunswick:Rutgers University Press.



Tufnell, Ben (ed.) (2007), Prunella Clough, London: Tate.

Wilson, Andrew (2002), ‘Archives are Exhausting’, in Anna Harding (ed.), Potential:Ongoing Archive Artimo/John Hansard Gallery, pp.66–69.

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/prunellaclough/interactive.shtm

Unpublished materialTGA 2005 11 Papers of Prunella Clough, Tate Archive, London.

2003.19 Helen Chadwick Papers, Leeds Museums & Galleries (Henry MooreInstitute).

Suggested citationBreakell, S. and Worsley, V. (2007), ‘Collecting the traces: an archivist’s perspective’,

Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 6: 3, pp. 175–189, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.175/1.

Contributor detailsSue Breakell heads the Archive department in Tate Library and Archive. The Archivecollects material relating to British Art since 1900, including the records of artists,galleries, art institutions and critics, as well as managing Tate’s own institutionalrecords. She has a particular interest in the relationship between art and archivesand archives and memory. Contact: Archivist, Tate Library & Archive, Tate Britain,Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

Victoria Worsley is Archivist at the Henry Moore Institute Archive, a specialist repos-itory holding papers relating to British sculpture. She has a particular interest inartist’s books and concrete poetry, the display and exhibition of archives and mean-ing and memory in archives. Contact: Archivist, Henry Moore Institute, 74 TheHeadrow, Leeds, LS1 3AH, UK.E-mail: [email protected]



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Relating process: accounts of influence inthe life history interview

Linda Sandino University of the Arts London

AbstractThis article explores how process is narrated in artists’ life history recordings. Anartist’s identity is entwined with his/her processes and the work. Talking aboutprocess, therefore, is also an identity story constructed under the rubric of the lifehistory. I use the term ‘life history’ in this instance to denote an audio recordingthat broadly spans family background, education and professional practice. ‘Lifestories’ refer to the bounded narratives that occur in the life history, while‘narrative’ itself, in this article, refers to the process of narration and the text itproduces. This article explores how oral history interviews elicit ‘stories’ whichenable artists to situate the meaning of their creative processes in relationalcontexts arising out of events, and characters encountered in their lives. With itsfocus on the spoken word as the story telling medium, artists engage in makingverbalized sense of their actions not only to the listener but also to themselves. Itmust be made clear, however, that life histories, like autobiographies, are hereproblematized as deeply mediated texts that do not transparently reflect theirauthors’ intentions, nor present any immanent ‘truths’, nor construct a unifiedsubject. The article opens with a discussion of how life histories in the visual artsare situated in a cultural context as a set of relationships, following on with adiscussion of the concept of the individual ‘relational self ’ as a narrative strategyof identity in stories of process and making.

IntroductionReviewing Richard Cándida Smith’s Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry andPolitics in California (1995), a work based on oral history sources, for TheAmerican Historical Review, art historian, Abraham Davidson criticizedSmith for not focusing sufficiently on the actual artworks. ‘In some cases’,Davidson wrote, ‘we are given too much about the writer or artist, not quiteenough about the achievements. Such is the case with the AbstractExpressionist Clyfford Still: we’re told of his arrogance, of his comments tohis students, of his exhibitions, but not quite enough about his paintingstyle’ (Davidson 1996: 914). However, turning to the section on Still, Ifound substantial discussion of the reception of Still’s paintings inCalifornia, with richly layered descriptions of his then ‘style’ from the per-spective of critics, students and Still himself (Smith 1995: 16).

Davidson’s criticism seems to raise the fundamental question for oralhistorians working with artists: should we focus on the life or the work? AsDavidson’s comment demonstrates, the distinction is disciplinary: arthistory, cultural history, social history, all maintain a particular subject


Keywordsidentitylife storiesnarrativeprocessrelational selfIntroduction

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specificity in their approaches to their research material. In life history work,however, disciplinary distinctions, the separation of life and work, and themonovisual lens is fractured and experience is represented in its multipleconfigurations. Unlike the thematic focused interview, or the monographictext, life histories provide individuals with a discursive space in which toconstruct their tales of identity and reflect on how this was achieved bothpsychologically and socially.

Such is Smith’s thesis in Utopia and Dissent using archived interviews inorder to examine the impact of the increasingly subjective focus of post-warCalifornian art and poetry on American social and political culture. Withthis primary research material, he weaves a compelling cultural history,situating individual lives within their socio-historical context, stressing theimportance of the interplay of the study of work and life. His aim is, there-fore, to

bring to the surface the discourses of familiarity that interweave with those ofauthority to create the matrix for a professional life. Neither analysis of worknor analysis of utterance alone is sufficient, because both contain each other,although in ways that mask the other voice.

(Smith 1995: xxiii)

One is compelled, therefore, to listen ‘in stereo’ (Anderson and Jack 1991)to recordings to both the individual voice and the larger discourses whichstructure it (Tamboukou 2003). But as Smith demonstrates, the discourseof post-war avant-gardism in the United States was responsible for bothmaintaining and challenging the myth of autonomous practice.

The California situation reveals that aesthetic practice was both a field for theconstruction of identities that reproduced existing hierarchical relations andan arena for subversion and disruption of those same identities.

(Smith 1995: xxiv)

This conflict or paradox could be applied to most contemporary artspractice in the West as artists forge new identities created out of theirtransactions with existing ones.

Drawing on oral history archives, Smith describes Still’s shift to non-representation in 1941 when he

began experimenting with lines and colors [sic] for their own sake, withoutany element of figurative allusion. He credited the breakthrough to intensivestudy of Pacific Northwest Coast Indian Art, but unlike others who appropri-ated Native American imagery and myth, Still looked for a way of visualizingthat might help him repudiate the ‘authoritarian implications’ present in the‘grand tradition’ of European painting, but without in any way using imagerymeaningful only to the specific context of Indian societies.

(Smith 1995: 99)

This explanation on the face of it is a fairly standard account of how anartist, through the means of appropriation, is able to move forward in

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his/her practice. Ironically of course, Still’s ‘borrowing’ of Native Americanart echoes Picasso’s strategy with African art in the early twentieth century(Rubin 1884). However, rather than seeing this as a failure on Still’s part toescape the modernist paradigm, I want to show how such strategies canbe seen as specifically ‘narrative’ strategies of the self, and how lives can bestructured as ‘stories’ that are both cultural and personal. Furthermore, thatstories of appropriation in the arts are instances of how selves are created‘relationally’ (Eakin 1999).

The relational selfAutobiographical theorist, Paul John Eakin in How Our Lives BecomeStories (1999) has mapped the concept of the autonomous self in auto-biographical writing and its prominence in male autobiographies fromEnlightenment individualism, in which the self is unique and separate, tocurrent feminist critiques of this model. He demonstrates how despiteoffering a different model of identity formation, feminist autobiographicaltheorists have, nevertheless resulted in sustaining male-female binaries inwhich:

• the individual is opposed to the collective• the autonomous is opposed to the relational• narrative is opposed to non-linear, non-teleological forms (Eakin 1999: 48).

Despite attempts to move beyond these binaries, the relational self contin-ues to be characterized as female (p. 51), and the autonomous as male, andEakin rightly asks how it might be possible ‘to recognize both theautonomous and the relational dimensions of men’s and women’s liveswithout placing them in opposition’ (p. 52).

Eakin proposes a relational model of identity as one where the self is‘developed collaboratively’ in conjunction with either an ‘entire social envi-ronment’ such as family, community or institutions, and/or other ‘key’ indi-viduals (p. 69; in his examples usually family members). As Norbert Eliashad already suggested:

What are often conceptually separated as two different substances or two dif-ferent strata within the human being, his [sic] ‘individuality’ and his ‘socialconditioning’, are in fact nothing other than two different functions of peoplein their relations to each other, one of which cannot exist without the other.[emphasis added] They are terms for the specific activity of the individual inrelation to his [sic] fellows, and for his capacity to be influenced and shapedby their activity; for the dependence of others on him and his dependence onothers; expressions for his function as both die and coin.

(Elias in Eakin 1999: 66)

Psychologist Eliott Mishler’s influential work also proposes a relationalmodel of identity as opposed to a linear, developmental model in whichidentity is ‘immanent and indwelling’ (Mishler 1999: 16). Citing the variousways in which relational models have been variously characterized as either‘dialogical’, ‘discursive’ or ‘narrated’, they all nevertheless

193Relating process: accounts of influence in the life history interview


represent a radical shift in viewpoint, from the autonomous individual as thelocus of identity and the source of its stability and constancy over time andacross situations, to the socially situated production of identity and to theways individuals position themselves vis-à-vis others.

(Mishler 1999: 111)

While ‘influence’ may be seen as a ‘common sense’ view of how identitycan be construed as relational, I want to propose how the relational thesiscan be extended to account for and in some sense reconfigure the prob-lematic notion of influence in the arts in which the myth of autonomousindividualism continues despite late twentieth-century art history’s missionto be contextual and to unmask its ideologies. For most art historiansauto/biography continues to be seen as a form of patriarchal mythmaking,only valid if it reflects the lives of marginalized others challenging universaltruths (Acton 2004; Meecham and Sheldon 2005).

Although Eakin concentrates on autobiography, he extends his argumentto include life stories generally. Drawing on the work of psychologist JeromeBruner and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, he concurs with the notion of a‘narrative identity’, noting that ‘narrative is not merely an appropriate formfor the expression of identity; it is an identity content’ in which the self is‘defined by and transacted in narrative process’ (Eakin 1999: 100, 101).

In the context of a life history, asking the initial questions about processmay be quite straightforward while the answer roams over a more expandedspace since the telling is part of a larger retrospective and reflective accountwhich will incorporate more than issues of techniques. Respondents, aspsychologist Elliott Mishler notes (1999: 69) ‘transform questions… intothose to which they can give meaningful answers’. Sometimes for instance,individuals describe their introduction to making art by focussing on anepiphanic moment in their childhood as in the following example.

One fine art ceramicist describes her introduction to pottery at the ageof nine when she attended Saturday morning classes at the Chelsea Pottery,describing her teacher as ‘benign’, and ‘lovely’, ‘he’d just give you the licenceto make anything you wanted to make. There was no sense that: This is whatyou’re going to do today’ (Track 4). Her teacher, therefore, provided a cre-atively supportive but liberating space in which the artist could successfullyrealize her young imaginative creativity: ‘I loved it. Absolutely loved it’, sheemphasized. Reflecting on her reasons for ‘desperately’ wanting to attendthese classes, she resisted rationalization: ‘I don’t know why I wanted to doit this much but I just had this thing about clay […] from when I was tiny.’ Inthe coherence of artists’ life stories, such affinities are frequently stated, orlocated as immanent signs. However, as Bruner (citing anthropologistMichelle Rosaldo) points out these feelings of affect, ‘grow not from“inner” essence relatively independent of the social world, but from experi-ence in a world of meanings, images, and social bonds’ (Bruner 1990: 42).So, rather than focusing exclusively on the artist’s emphasis on affect, onemust note the contexts in which these feelings arose: the nurturing, sup-portive environment of the class and her teacher. Significantly, this con-trasting anecdote is part of a section describing A Level art classes atPutney School for Girls as ‘very limited. We did still life and composition….We couldn’t do life drawing […] because we weren’t allowed to have a model so

194 Linda Sandino


we had to go to evening classes’ at the Central School. There, she alsoremembers feeling ‘liberated’ because ‘the teacher was good and I rememberfeeling that my skills were really progressing there. I was really being taught howto look at the figure. How to do it in a way that I hadn’t really been taught howto […] before’ (viva004/05-4).1 These accounts of being taught art are signif-icant not only because of what they might tell us about art education in thelate 1960s or early 1970s but are important in representing memories ofexperiences of the institutional sites of art production: at once bound byrules and but also as a site of freedom from rules.

Relating and referringJerome Bruner has challenged the concept of autonomous individualismdemonstrating how ‘transactions’ play an important role in constructingidentities. Bruner is concerned with language as ‘our principal means ofreferring’ in which crucially: ‘Achieving joint reference is achieving a kind ofsolidarity with somebody’ (Bruner 1986: 63). Solidarity is culture forming,and the stories individuals narrate construct knowledge thereby sustainingtheir particular worldview (p. 132). Other work on the concept of identityand relationality has focused particularly on family relationships and theirrole in helping children to become storied selves (Eakin 1999), and howindividuals mark out their identities within families (Mishler 1999). Butartist’s life histories demonstrate the transformative stories to be toldabout the relational dimension with objects (or surfaces) as well as withother artists. Referring is not simply a shorthand tactic but an act of com-munication indicating the shared world space in which the ‘transactionalself’ is situated. Although these affinities are noted professionally by critics,curators, historians and students, when artists incorporate them into theirnarratives, the positioning of these affinities is used to reveal, or explain,qualities which the artist seeks to transmit to the listener. Since the inter-views are audio not video, the narrator must use stories and references totranslate images into words and it is the occasion of telling the life thatenables this relationality to be made manifest:

Funnily enough that connection is one I make now. That wasn’t what I was work-ing towards when I was making the slip. It was something I recognized when Imade it as being […] maybe subconsciously something I was […] looking at whenjust looking at wall surfaces that have a bit of accidental marking on them that’sto do with some little event that’s happened […].

The beginning of this story and the meaning (Portelli 2006) of the ‘vaguelypainted effect’ glaze was then linked to seeing the works of Cy Twombly,‘which are, some of the things that just deeply move me more than anything’.However, the question I asked was not: ‘How does it move you?’, a ques-tion situated in the present requiring another register of translation,extremely difficult to express, which is the language of feeling. The questionI asked was: ‘So, when did you first come across Cy Twombly’s work?’because the structure of the interview is retrospective. By requesting a storysituated in the past, emotions are woven into the description of the eventand become part of its poetic reconstruction which does not leave the tellerstruggling to find words to express feelings. Memories in which emotions


1. This interview is partof the VIVA (Voices inthe Visual Arts)archive held atCamberwell College ofArts, University of theArts London. Therecording is with SaraRadstone viva004/05.


play a powerful role are usually recalled more easily (Evans 2001), and nar-rating the experience converts emotions into a storied form providing themwith a framework of ‘sequence’ and ‘consequence’ (Riessman 1993, 2001;Riessman and Speedy 2007) in which ‘events are selected, organized, con-nected and evaluated as meaningful’ (Riessman and Speedy 2007: 430).

However, in this story sequence and consequence (or evaluation) arereversed since for artists ‘explanation’ and ‘justification’ is the establishedpractice of artist’s public narratives, as enshrined in the Artist’s statement,or manifesto, which then structures talk about work generally. Art is wherethe artist’s ‘I’ begins.

LS. So, when did you come across Cy Twombly’s work?

S. I don’t know when I first came across it […], years and years ago. And, havingsaid that makes it sound as though it was a very close thing but it’s actuallynot. It’s something I’ve recognized as an inspiration more than sort of followedit, if you know what I mean? It’s something I think that’s a connection and that’swhat draws me back to his work. More than thinking: That’s what inspires me,I want to do something like that. It’s never been anything like that. It’s to dowith finding, a sort of, a particular approach and sensibility in it retrospectively.

The story of seeing Twombly’s work in 1990 at a MOMA retrospective ispresented in terms of an epiphanic encounter with the auratic presence ofthe actual works, formerly seen only through the opacity of the printedreproduction. Epiphanies, of course, are themselves ‘interactional momentsand experiences which leave their marks on people’s lives’ (Denzin 1989)and often provide particularly vivid accounts which want to defy narrativeordering.

And it just, I mean I don’t know how to describe what it did to me but it was themost, almost a life-changing experience seeing that exhibition and seeing the workin the flesh […]. I mean it was a revelation. It really was. I just couldn’t believe thebrilliance of it, and the depth of it, and the questions that it kicked up about every-thing to me. And I was completely bowled over. It was absolutely the most won-derful experience, seeing it.

The impact of this encounter with Twombly’s work continues as a visualdialogue with the catalogue that ‘sits’ in the studio enabling the artist tocontinue the intensity of the dialogic encounter initiated by the exhibition.‘And, I bought the catalogue and that sits in the studio and I look at it, youknow, weekly.’

The narrative continues to describe in detail the affinity with, and impactof Twombly’s work, relating it to the earlier description of the artist’s usesof glazes:

And, I just find that whole, the whole idea of making a piece of art in a frame, I’mtalking about his two dimensional work, and […] what the frame does to that piecewhich couldn’t not be art. You know, what’s the statement saying: this is art, andthis isn’t art? The wall is a wall but this is framed as being something particularand special. And that’s just so fascinating to me. And the nature of his work, it

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being this apparent intense casualness of the text and the markings and the qualityof the surface which is so beautiful in reality. The sort of depth of it and the way it’sapplied. The absolute painterliness which you don’t really see that much in repro-ductions. And then taking that onto the three dimensional works which are so dif-ferent obviously from the two dimensional but seem to be speaking about exactlythe same sort of issue, of taking an object that’s so casual and putting it separatelyand joining it with another, saying: this is worth looking at. And the way it makesyou look at the world, obviously in a very simplistic level, in a fresh way. I found itjust so wonderful. So it continues to be, sort of intriguing, for that.

Life histories and storiesAs stated above, the place of autobiography has been problematic in theinterpretation of artists’ work. However, the increasing use of interviews isevidence of the continuing desire to understand the lens, or perspective, ofthe author/speaker (Andrews 1991, 2007). In dialogue between interviewerand interviewee closed meanings are destabilized through the interactivityof the conversation in which statements can be questioned, clarified, rein-terpreted, shared and archived to preserve their historical moment for fur-ther analysis.

Life histories produce narratives that focus on singularities. AsTamboukou has suggested they ‘grasp the living moments of the subjects’subtle interrelatedness with their world’ in which ‘the auto/biographicalexercise of memory is not about the self becoming ‘intelligible’; it is ratherabout the experience that the self has of being narratable and thereforefamiliar’ (Tamboukou 2008). In documenting process via the medium ofthe life history interview, a text is created that is open and multiplebecause the process of the interview enables a constantly reflexive, evalua-tive self to emerge. Life histories in the arts have been used to pin downmeanings, to uncover ‘intention’ but these quests can never be conclusiveas one analyses the complex representations and interpretations withinthe recordings (Proctor 2006). Rather life history narratives enable ‘auto-biographical understanding […] through the interpretive and imaginativelabor of meaning making’ (Freeman 2007). The story of encounteringTwombly’s work and its effects of brilliance, depth, art/not-art, providedthe interviewee with a context in which to understand and communicatemeanings about her own work. Twombly is the referent for a meaningful,identifiable language of surfaces used to communicate the questions thatdrive her own work.

As presented here, the story seems to conform to Riessman’s sequenceand consequence model: seeing the exhibition and its effect. The model isuseful in helping to select where stories might begin and end. However,stories of identity are not so clearly distinct since they are embedded in thetotality of the narrative. Artists’ oral life histories are thoughts-in-processthat contain the polysemic complexity of an identity-in-process. Artworksand the artist’s identity are as much ‘works in progress’, or ‘in process’.Personal narratives are the ‘die and coin’ in which experience is mademeaningful, in which individuals situate themselves in time and place citingsignificant others who have contributed to shaping their identity as artists,and also as parents, children, teacher, friend and the many other identitieswhich constitute the self of the telling.



For stories define the range of canonical characters, the settings in which theyoperate, the actions that are permissible and comprehensible. And therebyprovide… a map of possible roles and of possible worlds in which action,thought, and self-definition are permissible (or desirable).

(Bruner 1986: 66)

Life histories, therefore, provide a rich text of the ongoing strategies ofmeaning-making captured in the moment of the dialogic encounter of therecording. But rather than seeing these stories as providing access totruths, the recordings offer an opportunity to hear the self in the process ofbecoming through reflective narration. By listening and responding to thesenarratives, we can unravel the singular and complex ways in which artists’identities are created and re-created, and understand how artists’ stories ofprocess are imbricated in the larger project of identity formation. Storiesalways have meanings as well as intentions. They are also populated withcharacters whose roles in the plots demonstrate the relational networks inwhich meaningful identities and concepts are constituted and shared.

ReferencesActon, M. (2004), Learning to Look at Modern Art, London: Routledge.

Anderson, K. and Jack, D. C. (1991), ‘Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques andAnalyses’, in S. B. Gluck and D. Patai (eds), Women’s Words: The feminist practiceof oral history, New York and London: Routledge.

Andrews, M. (1991), Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

—— (2007), ‘Exploring Cross-Cultural Boundaries’, in D. J. Clandinin (ed.),Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology, Thousand Oaks, Londonand Delhi: Sage.

Bruner, J. (1986), Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

—— (1990), Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Davidson, A. (Reviewer) (1996), ‘Utopia and Dissent: Art Poetry and Politics inCalifornia’, American Historical Review, (June): 914.

Denzin, N. K. (1989), Interpretive Biography, London: Sage.

Eakin, P. J. (1999), How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Ithaca/London:Cornell University Press.

Evans, D. (2001), Emotion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeman, M. (2007), ‘Autobiogrphical Understanding and Narrative Inquiry’, in D. J.Clandinin (ed.), Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology,Thousand Oaks, London and Delhi: Sage.

Meecham, P. and Sheldon, J. (2005), Modern Art: A Critical Introduction, London:Routledge.

Mishler, E. G. (1999), Storylines: Craftartists’ Narratives of Identity, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Portelli, A. (2006), ‘What Makes Oral History Different (1979)’, in R. Perks and A.Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, 2nd edn, London and New York:Routledge.

Proctor, R. (2006), ‘The Architect’s Intention: Interpreting Post-War Modernismthough the Architect’s Interview’, Journal of Design History, 19: 4, pp. 295–307.

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Riessman, C. K. (1993), Narrative Analysis, London: Sage.

—— (2001), ‘Analysis of Personal Narratives’, in J. F. Gubrium and J. A. Holstein(eds), Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method, Thousand Oaks,London: Sage.

—— and Speedy, J. (2007), ‘Narrative Inquiry in the Pscyhotherapy Professions: ACritial Review’, in D. J. Clandinin (ed.), Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping aMethodology.

Rubin, W. (ed.) (1884), ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal andthe Modern, Vol. Exhibition catalogue, New York: MOMA.

Smith, R. C. (1995), Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California, Berkeleyand Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Tamboukou, M. (2003), Women, Education and the Self, Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan.

—— (2008), ‘Redefining the Narratable Subject’, Qualitative Research, Sage. forth-coming article

Suggested citationSandino, L. (2007), ‘Relating process: accounts of influence in the life history interview’,

Journal of Visual Arts Practice 6: 3, pp. 191–199, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.199/1.

Contributor detailsLinda Sandino is Senior Research Fellow working on narrative and oral histories atCamberwell College of Arts’ Voices in the Visual Arts project. She has also under-taken extensive oral history recordings for the Life Story Collection at The BritishLibrary National Sound Archive. Contact: Camberwell College of Arts, University ofthe Arts London.E-mail: [email protected]



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Articulating the tacit dimension inartmaking

Michael Jarvis Northumbria University

AbstractIt is important for artists not only to acknowledge the often ‘tacit’ nature ofwhat they do, but to attempt to articulate their practice in a variety of contexts.

Developing knowledge about the complicated processes of making art mustinevitably lead to a more enlightened grasp, understanding and encouragementof the artist in the contemporary climate. Thus, the common multiplicity of rolesassumed by the artist (e.g. the artist as curator or teacher) should have greateracknowledgement and lead to an enhanced sense of the worth of art in society.

A more effective articulation of practice can enable the subsequent relation-ship between artist, artwork and viewer to become closer. The analysis of tacitand often hidden artmaking processes and meanings should help to develop amore informed viewer.

In the article, I will discuss the practice of artist Alex Katz and how his tech-niques can be seen to mask the extensive effort involved in the design and con-struction of his paintings. The elegant surfaces of Katz’s paintings belie thecomplex and tacit procedures of their making.

I also maintain that by connecting the procedures of artmaking to activeand reflective researching their often unacknowledged, implicit and tacit valuescan be better understood.

An initial scrutiny of some artworks can be misleading in that the very art-fulness of the image can often conceal the artistry of its making. A work like‘Black Scarf’ of 1996 by Alex Katz (Figure 1) is a typical instance of this. It isa large painting, six foot in height, featuring a figure dressed in a coatappearing from a flat blue grey background and a preternatural bright faceemerging from the shadows. The facial features are precisely delineatedagainst a flat pale yellow colour with only the faintest of accents in brownindicating eyebrows, eyes and eyelashes and shadows. The flat red of thelips are modelled only slightly by minimal touches of white and pink. Thescarf around the neck and coat lapels are indicated with the minimum oftonal modulation while the hair makes a transition from a silvery white greyat the crown down into a shadowy black which merges with the scarf. It is apainting whose cool, glacial elegance seems artificially contrived and whosetemper is created by the very technical procedure of constructing the workin the first instance.

Michael Podro explains how the very procedure of the making of thepainting can exemplify its subject matter. Thus he describes Tintoretto’spainting of Vincenzo Morosini (c.1585) as a work which ‘urbanely acts thegrandee it depicts’ (Podro 1998: 91). In other words, the way in which the


Keywordsartistryexpertiseimplicit intuitionprocess procedure reflective practitioner tacit

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painter deploys his techniques of specific brushwork and painterly ‘hand-writing’, of the use of textural contrasts and the way colour is chosen andapplied all contribute to mirror the elegance and nobility of the persondepicted. It is as if the technical qualities embody the character of the per-son portrayed and there is a reciprocity of relationship between them.

Such work, whether contemporary like that of Katz or from Tintoretto’ssixteenth century Venice can appear to us to be ‘effortless’ and to somehowbelie the amount of preparatory work which has gone before, the oftenunacknowledged part of artistic practice which is mainly unseen. In thisarticle, I want to discuss the hidden ‘tacit’ dimension of artmaking and tospeculate upon the importance of documenting the creative makingprocess.

It is important to focus upon the way artworks create a discourse andinteraction with their viewing audience. Podro highlights the way in whichthe artist can manipulate the relationship between the artwork and theviewer. ‘At the core lies the relation of the viewer and the viewed, and theway each may identify with and address the other while the painter by turntakes all the parts’ (Podro 1998: 106).

There is a sense here of the artist being like a puppeteer, able totransform the art of viewing (the viewing experience) by means of technicaltrickery. This is important to emphasize because it reveals that the artist isin command of what is being shown and, in the completion of a workwhich appears ‘effortless’, there is a deliberate attempt to conceal pre-vious procedures in the searching for a particular stylistic effect or appear-ance. Painting is an interesting practice to explore in this context becausesome painters do not bother to conceal their procedures. In fact some, likethe Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser, are often concerned to show the ‘history’of their procedures of painting in quite deliberate ways and are content tolet the painting exist as a kind of ‘palimpsest.’

In this article I will be discussing paintings by Katz as they seem todemonstrate certain key attributes, not the least of which is the elegantmastery of technical means, which effectively hides the actual effort involvedin their preparatory procedures. Why is it necessary or even important tolocate this tacit process, to try and reveal how a creative process may bedocumented?

Art practice and process has historically been almost hermetically sealedfrom the public gaze, perhaps because that which is worthwhile and radicalin art is at the frontier where real possibilities of failure are more often thannot the ‘norm’ and where to invite scrutiny (to make one’s process toonakedly available) is to let the genii out of the bottle and to render oneselfand one’s practice impotent and almost powerless. As the experience ofJackson Pollock with the photographer Hans Namuth shows, observationof intimate transactions between an artist and his/her material processescan blunt and even ossify practice. Furthermore, if the trend in current pro-fessional practice is to identify those aspects which are deemed to be‘good’ or ‘best’ practice, then there is a danger that this will invite a host ofimitators which will, in turn, deny opportunities for newer and more radicalforms of practice.

There is also the need to challenge some popular mythologies aboutartistic work. The actual truth of the way artists work in exploratory, intuitive

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but often seemingly chaotic ways can disguise the careful methodologiesunderpinning practice, where ideas are conceived, worked through, discarded,adapted, modified and so on. This actuality of a process occurring overtime goes against the grain of popular mythology whereby the artist suddenlyhappens upon a ‘big idea’ or key pivotal concept which will have revolutionaryconsequences. Thus, Matthew Collings recently criticized the simplisticversion of how art is made in the film ‘Pollock’ of 2000 where the painter’suse and ‘discovery’ of the drip technique is seen as an accidental revelation,something seen incidentally, out of the corner of an eye and which wasgainfully exploited as a technique which changed the course of modern art(Collings 2007: 44–47). The further implication is, of course, that thisinsignificant incident took a ‘genius’ to recognize and to develop. Not onlyis this a grotesque parody of artistic practice but it also panders to thequintessential modernist myth of the lone genius (usually male) discoveringrevelatory breakthroughs in practice as a matter of inevitability, a significantpoint upon a steady and unbroken trajectory of achievement.

I wonder whether such distortions are a reason why many films aboutart are probably doomed to failure and unsatisfactory because they can onlydepict those moments of revelation and to show how characters respond tothem rather than depict the actualities of practice which are arguably, mun-dane, monotonous and repetitive.

Such fictional fakery tells us little about an artist’s procedures and work-ing practices. Where a process has been documented, for example, HansNamuth’s filmic and photographic recordings of Jackson Pollock takenbetween June and November 1950, it seems artificial and contrived, a per-formance put on for the benefit of an audience. Namuth’s film was choreo-graphed to such a degree that any sense of truth or authenticity must betreated with suspicion. This is not to say that the word ‘performance’ isinaccurate or inappropriate but just that it is very difficult to document apractice and to ascertain what these rehearsals or demonstrations amountto or where they lead.

Why is it important for the tacit and hidden aspects of making to bearticulated? The word tacit is derived from the Latin tacere meaning to besilent, and in our usage has come to mean something being understood orimplied without being stated (see Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 1996).In the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts symposium of 2005the underlying rationale was to investigate ‘the relationship between artists’thinking and making’ (LICA, The Documentation of Fine Art Processes andPractices, December 2005), and was concerned with identifying how proce-dural decisions and processes are evidenced in an artist’s finished work. Ifa relationship is postulated here between the artwork in its making and itsfinal manifestation, it is especially important to identify how the visualproperties of the artwork and its potential meanings are constructed andsustained.

A further rationale might be that art processes are becoming increas-ingly available to public scrutiny. Work ‘in progress’ is now an acceptableway of looking at art and artists in the same way that other professionalpractitioners (like doctors, lawyers and teachers) are becoming familiar withsuch public appraisal and judgement. There are, of course problems with thisincreased ‘transparency’. Increased scrutiny can lead to a concomitant

203Articulating the tacit dimension in artmaking


culture of ‘accountability’. Such accountability often can lead to a quantita-tive logic of league tables and spurious rankings, and worse, an inspectionculture that can deter risk and inhibit innovative practice.

In Higher Education and universities art is often assessed alongsideother subject areas often with little account being taken of art’s intrinsicqualities and differences. In the case of practice-based Ph.D. research thejudgement of ‘worth’ or ‘quality’ is seen as problematic with questionsbeing raised as to their equivalence in Ph.D. terms with other more easilymeasurable research outcomes. As MacLeod and Holdridge mention aboutArt and Design,

it’s shape, form and content are little known and understood. It is part of a youngresearch culture.....which sits uneasily within the broader academic researchframe of universities within the UK (and EU). It remains curiously focused onresearch methods and protocols rather than on an elucidation of the culture itselfthrough reference to what is being produced by doctoral students.

(MacLeod and Holdridge 2004: 156)

Arguably, it is precisely because of the often tacit nature of practical workand the difficulties of articulating practical concepts and procedures intoconventional language that these protocols remain inadequate to actual artpractice.

Art practice as tacit knowledgeWhat needs to be restated is the way in which art practice is able to con-struct a dialogue between theory and practice. Perhaps its very ‘tacitness’lies in the binding together of theory and practice so that one cannot be dis-tinguished from the other? Carr (1986: 183) emphasizes the importance ofself-reflection as a valid category of knowledge so that theory and practicecan be viewed as mutually constitutive and dialectically related. He arguesfor a recovery of self-reflection as a valid category of knowledge in order forthis to occur.

Such a transition need not be from theory to practice or vice versa, butfrom irrationality to rationality, from ignorance and habit to knowledge andreflection. This idea can be applied to fine art practice in some interestingways. For example, dialogue can be inherent between an artist and themedium, often a silent interchange, or can be activated between the workand the viewer. Guy Claxton analyses expertise as ‘the unreflective masteryof complex but familiar domains’ (Atkinson and Claxton 2000: 35) and I thinkthis applies well to how artists exhibit mastery within a context of routines,procedures and repertoires. Catherine Dunton, in describing such proce-dures in relation to the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci argues that,

The significance of the unique relationship between perception and facture isthat attention is now caught up with intention. Once fixed, the next line, thenext investigation of the eye is fatally influenced by these marks. The eye is nolonger free to rove where it will but must enter into a highly sensitive relationshipwith the choreography of lines that take on their own rhythm and pace. Thehand is not the tool of the mind reproducing the object after the eye’s

204 Michael Jarvis


unremitting gaze. Rather, its movements become a constituting part of thecreative-perceptual process.

(Dunton 1999:342)

Perhaps the need to make one’s practice more ‘explicit’ is a consequence ofthe changing modes of looking? For example, in painting there are key rela-tionships between the artist and the emerging marks on a surface of a paint-ing, and also between the viewpoint and the visual field so that the process ofmaking, of mark and gesture superceding other marks and gestures is contin-ually present on the surface of the image. Thus, there is an additional elementin what Catherine Dunton calls ‘the reciprocal process of vision’ (Dunton1999: 341). By making the process of practice more explicit the artist is accen-tuating the implicit differences between art as opposed to ordinary visualexperience. ‘In art, we do not require an act of memory to account for thepresence of the journey of the eye in its successor; it is recorded on the pageto which the eye constantly returns’ (Dunton 1999: 341).

In the transition from a position of ‘not knowingness’ to an increasinglysharper and more finely grained self-reflexive knowledge the practice of AlexKatz makes for an interesting case study.

Donald Schon (1988: 28) distinguished between ‘reflection in action’and ‘reflection on action’ where the former is a more spontaneous orintuitive response to a problematic situation (characteristic of artistic practice)where the knowing is in the action. The latter is a more retrospective responsein which thoughts and choices between actions are considered with a viewto improving effectiveness in future situations. This is a more critical andtheoretical stance. One needs to value both types of reflection as the con-struction of a relationship between the two is a necessary aspect of being areflective practitioner.

Such notions call into question traditional concepts of professionalknowledge. Often, an outstanding practitioner in any field is defined not bythe extent of their explicit, professional knowledge, but by qualities ofwisdom, talent, intuition and artistry. It is interesting that such terms areoften used to define phenomena which elude conventional strategies ofexplanation. As such they also elude conventional strategies of measure-ment and quantification. Schon’s premise is that inherent in the practice ofthe competent professional is a core of artistry. He defines this artistry as‘an exercise of intelligence, rigour and a kind of knowing’ (Schon 1988: 13)and is characterized by practitioners who are adept at handling situationsof uncertainty, uniqueness and conflict.

I would argue that the artist is the quintessential ‘reflective practitioner’,especially with regard to the interaction of hand, body, tools and materials,where to become ‘skilful in the use of a tool is to learn and appreciatedirectly, without processes of intermediate reasoning, the qualities of thematerials that we apprehend through the tacit sensations of the tool in ourhand.’ (Schon 1988: 22). As Thornton explains it, a key idea is to explicatethe ‘process of continuous responsiveness to experience that is often evi-denced in the practice of professionals but is sometimes shrouded in mystery,perhaps, because the process has seemed difficult to explain (Thornton2005: 172).



Careful reflection does not keep means and ends separate but enablesone to define them interactively in response to a problematic situation. Thistype of thinking and problem solving is often alluded to but less explained,as a crucial approach to knowledge and skill acquisition. It can be seen as acritique of prevailing, traditional hierarchies of knowledge where general,theoretical, propositional knowledge has enjoyed a privileged position asagainst a more problem solving, speculative and ontological type of knowl-edge where the mode of being or thinking is more intuitive than deductive.

The studio – a context for artistryOf especial interest to artistic practice is how to frame (or understand) thecontext within which such artistry can flourish, that is, in situations whichare unstable or unpredictable and in which one’s previous knowledge orexperience may only partially help in managing problems. The operation ofsuch creative artistry would seem particularly apposite to the practice ofmany different types of artist.

What is germane to artistic practice is that any artist has an interactionwith materials to a greater or lesser extent (and I define ‘materials’ in as widea spectrum of practice as possible, from clay to film, from paint to perfor-mance, from working alone to collaborating with other practitioners etc.)Schon argues that reflection in and on action constitutes a critical dialoguewith one’s knowledge in action and which enables one to develop and experi-ment. He cites jazz improvisation and conversation as evidencing this collec-tive (and sometimes singular) mode of improvisation. Crucially, in respondingto the indeterminate and difficult areas of one’s practice, one can open areflective conversation with the materials of their craft and practice, therebyremaking a part of the practice world and thus engaging with the usually tacitprocesses of world making which underpins their daily practice.

Claxton, in (Atkinson and Claxton2000: 41) relates intuition to experi-ence arguing that ‘intuition is more a matter of drawing upon and extract-ing meaning from a largely tacit database of first hand experience, than it isof rational delineation.’ Further, that ‘creative individuals tend to be thosesteeped in their specific disciplines and who are able to draw upon a well ofexperience in novel, flexible and integrative ways’ (Claxton 2000: 41). Hediscusses intuition as being more than unconscious tacit understandingand knowledge, but also to do with the faculty by which one is open to a dif-ferent flow of events or alternative ways of working. In Katz’s case it is thisability to improvise after a long period of deliberation.

There is also a connection with processes of learning here. MichaelEraut, in (Atkinson and Claxton 2000: 256) contrasts modes of learningwhich are explicit and conscious with those which are implicit and moreintuitive. These seem to me to be subtly related. For example, you can bereading a textbook and quite consciously taking notes but the actual importof that text may only come later on when you are thinking about it at leisure.

Claxton goes on to offer an anatomy of intuition, a family of ‘ways ofknowing’ which can also be seen to be a compendium of tacit characteris-tics belonging to the artist. Among them are qualities of expertise, implicitlearning, judgement, sensitivity, creativity and rumination. In lookingclosely at the work of artists I think it is possible to recognize how theseattributes can characterize their working procedures so I will go on to

206 Michael Jarvis


discuss the work of Alex Katz and how his procedures exemplify and fore-ground the qualities of expertise and implicit learning.

The tacit artistry of implicit learningI think that both explicit and implicit modes of learning act upon each otherand that both enable us to acquire knowledge that is not always manifestedat the time, and that we are not always completely aware of acquiring?Katz, for example, talks about learning to make work over a period of time(Sylvester 1999: 192). In other words, it is the practising and acquiring ofexpertise within a context of repetitive routines, procedures and repertoiresso that an apparent mastery and ease of execution hides the tacit ‘artistry’of laborious preparation and improvised, seemingly flawless execution.Claxton discusses such expertise as the ‘unreflective mastery of complexbut familiar domains’(Atkinson and Claxton 2000: 40) and I think that suchmastery also connects deep learning with constant practice so that analmost slavish adherence to certain procedures enable one to operate inalmost an ‘unthinking’ way and allows opportunities for new and freshinsights to be made.

The idea of performance is the other key aspect of the Katzian project.In large works, he will complete the process in a single painting phase butthis is painstakingly prepared for in a series of smaller studies and full sizecartoons, where, in an emulation of traditional ‘pouncing’ techniques, asystem whereby charcoal and chalk dust is brushed onto a final designthrough a network of tiny, pinpricked holes in a full size cartoon, he willtransfer key information to the larger canvas and execute the painting ‘wetin wet’ over the course of a single day. The extensive ‘Wedding Dress’ seriesof 1992 is a typical example of this studied and painstaking approach. Suchworks demonstrate how Katz achieves a distancing strategy by means ofthe progressive development of the image into sketch, then drawing, thencartoon and finally into the painting. This ‘distancing’ involves the transi-tion from the ‘seen’ object or body into the 2D language of painting, initiallyof brushstroke, facture and surface and then into flat and unmodulatedplanes of colour. In the work of Katz, the tacit expertise is expressed in thetemporal but very deliberate process of making, the development of variousstudies over time so that enough information is collected for a definitivefinal performance.

This process of painting is a risky technical undertaking and relies uponthe artist’s deep understanding of the properties and viscosity of paint anddifferent pigments, of, for example, how much the paint needs to be thinnedout to enable specific brushstrokes to be made, and which particularmedium will give the optimum bloom and effect.

Katz is preoccupied with problems of style and performance. He has aconcern with the flatness and objecthood of a painting, and with the potentialrepertoire of marks and possibilities which goes into the making process.Katz explains how with

the sketches and drawings, its an indirect procedure to get to the big canvasand the colours are pre-mixed the day before and on a lot of them I have toget specific brushes for specific strokes.

(Sylvester 1999:180)



The whole process is conceptualized beforehand. The subject material istransferred to the final canvas and the preparations are made for the finalperformance. In this way figures and objects are extracted from everydayexistence, transmuted through the sketches and preparatory studies andthen transformed into the artificial, simulated life of art.

The expertise of the painting procedureSome commentators have compared the distancing and artificiality in Katzwith the Mannerist style of the sixteenth-century painters like Bronzino,Pontormo and Giulio Romano. In fact, to follow Shearman, the very term isderived from the Italian term maniera which literally means ‘style’. It is aconceptual, intellectual approach, one that ‘should, by tradition, speak asilver-tongued language of articulate, if unnatural, beauty, not one of inco-herence, menace and despair; it is, in a phrase, the stylish style’ (Shearman1979: 19). A. B. Oliva describes the typical detachment of this style as notan outcome of a process but rather as the process in itself (Oliva 1999: 40).The concept of maniera was originally developed from a literature of man-ners in the Renaissance and was used to define a way of living which wascultured and refined, almost an artwork in itself.

This aspect can be plainly seen in paintings like the Katz Black Scarfof 1996 (Figure 1) and, for example, a Bronzino portrait like that of Eleonoraof Toledo with her son Giovanni de Medici of c.1546 (see Graham-Dixon1999) where the sheer beauty of surface is immediately apparent. Thelack of tangible facture and lack of evidence of the painter’s interventionwith signature markings and brush strokes means that we are notinvited to penetrate beyond or beneath the surface. Every formal aspectis articulated across the respective surfaces which act like mirrors forour sensibilities. Graham-Dixon describes Eleonora’s face as a mask.‘She has nothing to declare but her visible perfection’ (Graham-Dixon1999: 297). The painters have ensured that nothing is allowed to distractus from the evident beauty of their stylistic transformations. With theBronzino it is the richness and complexity of pattern and line which isbeing demonstrated while the Katz focuses upon subtle gradations oftone and colour.

The tacit knowledge and skill in Katz’s painting which results in such an‘unnatural beauty’ can be analysed more carefully. For example, in the BlackScarf there is a careful loading of different brushes with grey and whitepaint and caressing of these onto the surface with one continuous move-ment, from top of head to where it fades out at top of collar. Also, where thepaint amounts are carefully judged to run out at a precise moment andplace. In re-running an imaginary video one might detect one or two broadwedged brushes loaded with pigment being traced downwards in three orfour strokes and on top of the wet black underpainting below.

In this performance it is perhaps the quality of improvisation which con-nect with the idea of implicit learning, where expertise is acquired by non-conscious, non-conceptual means by the manipulation of tools, materialsand media. Katz attempts to describe this process in different ways. Thus,when discussing the ‘wet in wet’ technique he says that, ‘ it’s like finding apart of yourself that you didn’t know was there and working with it’(Sylvester in Katz 1999: 172).

208 Michael Jarvis



Figure 1: Alex Katz, Black Scarf, 1996 oil on canvas 183 ∞ 117 cm.


Further, that there is a kind of heightened awareness during the paintingprocess that is both conscious and unconscious, ‘...when you paint percep-tually and you’re painting faster than you think so to speak, you speed it up,and when you speed it up to that degree your unconscious takes over. Thebrushstrokes are not conscious at all’ (Sylvester in Katz 1999: 174).

Katz identifies the importance of working with aspects or entities whichare unknown, and to leave oneself open to this as a new way of working canresult. ‘I work with different parts of myself. I like to open up and let any-thing happen and then try to figure out what happened. Then it becomesanother process’ (Brehm in Katz 1999: 48).

The process of improvisation enables the painter to short circuit pre-conceptions in the attempt to keep an image fresh and alive, and in ordernot to be circumscribed by previous solutions. If the practical explication ofknowledge and experience can be temporarily clarified in a ‘finished’ painting,there is also a sense in which this product must remain provisional andincomplete as it tends to initiate further enquiry and problem solving. Then,it is to the more implicit framework of knowledge and intuitive expertise towhich the painter must return.

The expertise of the procedure is located in the balance between theprocess of planning and intuitive action. Katz again notes the importanceof conscious and unconscious cognitive processes working in tandem

…it’s hot and cold. Because it’s all pre-planned and pre-mixed like a print. Butwhen you paint, the performance part, you have to let your conscious mind goand float. You may know what colour is going on top of what colour but themarks you make have to come out of your unconscious…

(Brehm in Katz 1999:50)

It is precisely because of the amount of preparation that Katz is able tomake, that the final performance can be an intuitive and spontaneous exer-cise. The statement implies that the pre-planning process enables the finalperformance to be freer, even a more unconscious and liberating experi-ence. ‘The optical element is the most important thing to me. That thepaintings actually have to do with seeing. It has to do not with what itmeans but how it appears’ (Brehm in Katz 1999: 44).

Katz talks about the primacy of the optical element of making and seeing.Brehm argues that there is a lack of congruence between the original imageand final painting which renders the act of seeing a more conscious one. Thisfurther implies that the act of transformation, in itself, is of vital importance,a progressive curve on the way to a definitive final performance. The distancetraversed between the different stages of image making also enables Katz towork through any emotional attachment he has to the subject material so thatthe final work can be made in a more meditative and detached spirit.

There is often a disjunction between the perceived image, the plannedstages and the final piece. For example, the differences between the small,initial painterly sketch, ‘Good Morning’ of 1974 is in stark contrast to thesubsequent much larger and more stylized version, ‘Good Afternoon’, com-pleted in the same year, where all traces of gestural brushwork and textureare sacrificed to the overall integration of the composition. The hand andmind of the painter intervene in conscious and unconscious ways. The

210 Michael Jarvis


lengthy process of gestation allows the final pieces to appear effortless.Despite their genesis in reality the pictures are defined more by the waythey are made, by their stylistic attributes. This seems to indicate what Katzmeans when he talks about wanting style to take the place of content.

ConclusionI would argue that it is important for the contemporary artist to be able toacknowledge the often tacit nature of what they do. This runs contrary tothe traditional position of artistic practices being largely hidden and unac-knowledged because of a resistance to theory and explanation. Esser-Hallfor example argues that,

Amongst students of art practice a resentment against theory is evident,because with its emphasis on an imposed structure and method, it presentsitself as the ‘Other’, that is part of a hierarchical education system. Theory isperceived as relating to practice as the rigid to the freeflow, the constructed tothe playful, the prescriptive to the creative – almost as captivity to freedom.

(Esser-Hall 2000:289)

It is time that these rather simplistic binary oppositions were challenged.The making explicit by the artist of their particular position or mode of prac-tice is helpful in the way that practice can be defined, positioned and con-textualized.

Why is this of critical importance? There are a number of pressures forthe contemporary artist at the interface between their public and privatepersonas, where artists and makers are required to ‘legitimate’ their prac-tice, and to be accountable in the development and outcomes of specificprojects. This is mirrored by the burgeoning of creative and practice-basedMA and Ph.D. routes in universities in which there is posited a close rela-tionship between theory and practice, and where the practice is required tobe explicated, not only to validate the creative self, but for a wider profes-sional validation and critical acceptance across the whole spectrum of otheracademic disciplines.

However, I think there is a deeper, more complex cultural level whichmight be affected by such ‘articulation’ and which should be seen as benefi-cial. If we accept the idea of the artist as a reflective practitioner then part ofthat process is a willingness to articulate the tacit and more unacknowl-edged aspects of practice. This involves a self-conscious reflexivity and acuteawareness of procedure similar to that demonstrated by artists like Katz andFrancis Bacon before him. It is in this articulation of practice that theprocesses and findings of artistic research can be analysed and understood.Of course it might be argued that the artistic endeavour is essentially a soli-tary one. However, by legitimating art as a form of ‘action research’, that is,as a form of enquiry which is problem posing as much as problem solving(see Cohen, Manion and Morrison 2007: 298) we would be placing it moresquarely within the wider public and societal context. As MacNiff argues,

I have generally found that a heuristic approach to research benefits frombeing tempered with an orientation to other people, the medium of expres-sion, and the objective properties of the process of creation. I have discovered



that a complete focus on the self tends to generate disconnected, unfocused,and random expressions which are of little significance to a larger communityof people.

(MacNiff 2004: 152)

I think that developing and sharing knowledge about the complicatedprocesses of making art must inevitably lead to a more enlightened grasp,understanding and encouragement of the artist in contemporary society.Thus, the common multiplicity of roles assumed by the artist, for example,as curator or teacher, should have greater acknowledgement and lead to anenhanced sense of the worth of art in our society.

A more effective articulation of practice can enable the subsequent rela-tionship between artist, artwork and viewer to become closer. The analysisof tacit and often hidden artmaking processes and meanings should help todevelop a more informed viewer. The question for us, as artist practitioners,is not about the worth or value of articulating our practice but to considerhow we can achieve an ever increasing clarity of utterance.

ReferencesAtkinson, T. and Claxton, G. (2000), The Intuitive Practitioner, Buckingham &

Philadelphia: Oxford University Press.

Brehm, M. (1999), ‘Art by Nature’, Alex Katz – Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea,Trento, Hopefulmonster.

Carr, W. (1986), ‘Theories of Theory & Practice’, Journal of Philosophy of Education20: 2, pp. 177–86.

Cohen, L., Manion, L. and Morrison, K. (2007), Research Methods in Education, 6thedn, London and New York: Routledge.

Collings, M. (2007), ‘Diary’, Modern Painters, June, pp. 44–47.

Dunton, C. (1999), ‘A Merleau-Pontian Account of Leonardo’s Studies from Life’, ArtHistory, 22: 3, pp. 331–46.

Esser-Hall, G. (2000), ‘The Role of Phenomenological Hermeneutics in ArtEducation’, International Journal of Art Education, 19: 3, pp. 286–96.

Graham-Dixon, A. (1999), Renaissance, London: BBC Worldwide Ltd.

MacLeod, K. and Holdridge, L. (2004), ‘The Doctorate in Fine Art: The Importanceof Exemplars to the Research Culture’, International Journal of Art and DesignEducation, 23: 2, pp. 155–68.

MacNiff, S. (2004), Art-Based Research, London and New York: Jessica KingsleyPublishers.

Oliva, A.P. (1999), ‘The Oblique realism of Alex Katz’, in Alex Katz – Galleria Civicadi Arte Contemporanea, Trento, Hopefulmonster.

Podro, M. (1998), Depiction, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Shearman, J. (1979), Mannerism (Style and Civilisation), London: Penguin Books.

Schon, D.A. (1988), Educating the Reflective Practitioner, San Francisco and London:Jossey Bass Publishers.

Soanes, C. (ed.) (1996), The Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English,Oxford University Press.

Sylvester, D. (1999), ‘Interview with Alex Katz’, Alex Katz Galleria Civica di ArteContemporanea, Trento, Hopefulmonster.

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Thornton, A. (2005), ‘The Artist Teacher as Reflective Practitioner’, InternationalJournal of Art and Design Education, 24: 2, pp. 166–74.

Further works (illustrations)Figure 1: Alex Katz, Black Scarf, 1996 oil on canvas 183 ∞ 117 cm Reproduced with permission (Copyright) DACS, LONDON/VAGA NewYork 2007. to appear on page I of the above article

Suggested citationJarvis, M. (2007), ‘Articulating the tacit dimension in artmaking’, Journal of Visual

Arts Practice, 6: 3, pp. 201–213, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.201/1.

Contributor detailsMichael Jarvis is an artist, writer and lecturer. He works at Northumbria Universityin Newcastle upon Tyne where he contributes to undergraduate and postgraduateprogrammes in Teacher Education and Fine Art.

Currently he is studying for a Ph.D. in Fine Art at Lancaster University. Theresearch is concerned with the practice of painting in relation to various announce-ments of its ‘death’ and demise since 1840. Contact: Northumbria University,School of Health, Social Work and Education, Coach Lane Campus, Newcastle uponTyne NE 7 7XA, UK.E-mail: [email protected] institution address: Lancaster University, Lancaster Institute for theContemporary Arts, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YW, UK.E-mail: [email protected]



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Seeing what, how and why: the ARTnewsseries, 1953–58

Nigel Whiteley Lancaster University

Abstract Between 1953 and 1958, ARTnews in the United States included a series thatfocused on a particular contemporary artist who was interviewed while makingan artwork. Amongst the artists, usually American, were de Kooning, Gottlieb,Diebenkorn, Mitchell and Lippold, and the series title used the artist’s name,followed by ‘paints a picture’ or ‘makes a sculpture’ or some variant.Interviewers/writers included Fairfield Porter, Frank O’Hara, Thomas B. Hess andIrving Sandler.

As well as providing an informative survey of contemporary art practice inNew York, the series was innovative in that it provided an insight into the artist’swork in progress and his/her thoughts about creativity. The format enabled theartist and commentator to talk about a particular work in terms of its aims,theme, preoccupations and interpretations, and for the commentator to providenot only a formal analysis, but also to describe some of the decision-makingprocesses of the artist – why the artist had made a particular decision andrejected other alternatives, and to what effect. Furthermore, a certain amount ofdetailed technical information about materials and methods was disclosed, aswell as information about the artist’s working environment, such as the size ofthe studio, whether the artist worked close-up, and whether the work stood on aneasel or lay on the floor.

The overall result was to create a series that gave a reasonably intimateinsight into the everyday creative processes of artists in the United States in theearly to late 1950s. Rather than romanticizing the creative act, so giving yetanother breathless account of the intuitive, inspired or tortured genius, the makingof art is demystified by an openness about the making process, and a makingexplicit of what is usually tacit knowledge.

This article examines one of the ARTnews series – Fairfield Porter’s 1954article on Larry Rivers’s Portrait of Berdie I, 1953, and evaluates its contributionin terms of a better understanding of how artists think about works they arecreating.

Any creative practice involves knowledge and experience that developthrough an engagement with the activity. The more one practises the activity,the more the knowledge becomes ‘second nature’ and, it is generally thecase, the more expert one becomes. This type of embedded knowledge isoften called ‘tacit’ knowledge and it can appear very mysterious and unfath-omable to someone outside the particular creative practice. Many artists,


Keywordsart history creative process visual intelligence

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critics and dealers have been content to keep knowledge tacit, in order touphold the notion of ‘creative genius’. The artwork was seldom presented, letalone understood, as a work that grew out of a frequently fraught decision-making process involving ideas, materials, physical manipulation, tech-niques, skills and judgement. Rather it had, supposedly, suddenlyappeared, to recall J.M. Whistler’s phrase, as a ‘…masterpiece… perfect inits bud as in its bloom – with no reason to explain its presence – no mis-sion to fulfil – a joy to the artist….’ (Whistler 1890: 116). All we saw is whatthe artist did – the outcome. As late as 1948, Matisse was remarking thathe had ‘…always tried to hide my own efforts and wished my works to havethe lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone sus-pect the labours it has cost’ (Matisse 1948: 140). Even when those labourswere captured on film – recordings of artists including Matisse himself and,later, Jackson Pollock are well-known examples – this did little to help anunderstanding of the creative process which still appeared opaque: we sawwhat the artist was doing, and how he was doing it, but why particular deci-sions were made rather than others remained incomprehensible to most.Seeing Pollock ducking and diving around his floored canvas, jabbing andlunging with paint-filled brushes and sticks, may have made aspects of thecreative process visible, but it did not necessarily make it understandable.We had little or no access to why.

Today, it is still rare to see art works as other than the outcome of a hid-den process. This is, in my view, regrettable because it perpetuates the mys-tique of art, and keeps an unnecessary distance between creativepractitioners and their audience. Whether you are a member of that audi-ence, or a critic, historian or, indeed, another artist, witnessing somethingof the creative process can make us see a work differently, and give usinsights into the artist’s ways of working, intentions and, even, values andassumptions. It enriches our understanding not only of particular art works,but also of creativity in general. The opportunity for insight and under-standing is significantly increased when we are not just a silent observer,but an informed one, and this requires a spoken or written commentary byeither the artist or an interviewer, so that seeing what and how is supple-mented by seeing why.

One of the most impressive examples to date of seeing what, how andwhy was provided by an irregular series that ran in the American art maga-zine ARTnews between 1953 and 1958. There were 28 articles in total, withthree-quarters of them in the three-year period 1953–55. Each articlefocused on a particular contemporary artist who was interviewed whilemaking an art work. Amongst the artists, usually American, were Willemde Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell, RichardLippold and Larry Rivers. Non-Americans included Alberto Burri, GeorgesMathieu and Georges Fautrier. The format of the article was the artist’sname, followed by ‘…paints a picture’, ‘…makes a sculpture’ or some vari-ant. Among the interviewer-commentators were eminent critics includingFairfield Porter, Frank O’Hara, Thomas B. Hess and Irving Sandler.Occasionally an artist was the interviewer: Elaine de Kooning wrote threearticles, and Fairfield Porter, responsible for six of the articles, was himselfa painter and the subject of an article. Photographs of the art work inprogress and the artist at work were taken by photographers attuned to

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studio culture such as Rudolph (Rudy) Burckhardt and, on one occasion,Hans Namuth, whose photographs and film of Pollock at work becamelegendary.

As well as providing an informative survey of contemporary art practicein New York, the series was innovative in that it provided an insight into theartist’s work in progress and his/her thoughts about creativity. The formatcomprised about 3,500 words text and captions, and about a dozen photos,including a colour illustration of the finished art work under discussion.This format enabled the commentator and artist to talk about a particularwork in terms of its aims, theme and interpretations, and for the commen-tator to provide not just a visual analysis, but also to describe some of thedecision-making processes of the artist – why the artist had made a particulardecision and rejected other alternatives, and to what effect. Furthermore, acertain amount of detailed technical information about materials and methodswas disclosed, as well as information about the artist’s working environment,such as the size of the studio, whether the artist worked close-up, andwhether the work stood on an easel or lay on the floor.

One particular set of photos that accompanied an ARTnews article hasbeen reproduced several times and has become well known in its own right.That is the illustrations included in the article on Willem de Kooning, thevery first article in the ‘…paints a picture’ series, in March 1953. Mostmonographs on de Kooning (for example, Hess 1959: illustrations 111–2,114–7; and Waldman 1988: 88–89) reproduce the six illustrations of thestages of the development of Woman 1 between 1950 and 1952 to demon-strate the notion of spontaneous and unpremeditated creativity as a keyingredient of Abstract Expressionism. The commentator in the ARTnewsarticle was Thomas B. Hess, a champion, along with Clement Greenberg, ofde Kooning’s work, and he also included illustrations of four preliminaryworks to make the point that the evolution of the art work was neithersequential nor, apparently, logical. Further photos show the artist at work; amoody portrait of de Kooning ‘pausing for a smoke’ (Hess 1953: 30); and ashot of his palette-table and mixing cans in the foreground, beyond which isa view through the window of his Fourth Avenue studio showing the streetoutside.

The de Kooning article has some things to recommend it, but too muchof what Hess writes plays to the image of the romantic, inspired and inspi-rational bohemian artist, and such a tone obscures the virtues of the series’approach. Others in the series are limited by either too formalist an analysis(e.g. Seckler 1953, on Stuart Davis); the parochialism of the art (e.g. Porter1956, on Jane Freilicher) or the pretentiousness of the writing (e.g. Tapié1955 on Georges Mathieu). The article I have selected as a case study of thebest of the ARTnews approach features an artist about whom there is nosurrounding mythology about ‘masterpieces’, and for whom subject matterwas important, thus offering the potential for more than a merely formalistanalysis. The artist is Larry Rivers, and his work appeared in ARTnews inJanuary 1954, discussed by the artist-critic, Fairfield Porter.

In this article, I am going to provide an overview of the scope of the arti-cle and emphasize some of the main points as representative of theARTnews approach. The article on Rivers included fourteen illustrations,with the main art work in colour.

217Seeing what, how and why: the ARTnews series, 1953–58


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Figure 1.

Figure 2.



The title page included three photographs: the first was of Rivers atwork and showed the artist and the painting, so the viewer could gain asense of the work’s size and how the artist worked on it; the second showedRivers’s work table and the scale of his working environment and, in thethird, according to the caption, ‘a series of studies in different mediumsshow constant experiment and close attention to detail a wall of studies bythe artist’ (Porter 1954: 56). What the viewer gained from these photographsis some sense of the environment in which Rivers worked, from the dimen-sions of a sketch and painting, to the size of the studio, and something ofthe process in terms of the importance of sketches and parallel material –all, I would argue, relevant contextual information.

On the second page we have one of the innovations and strengths ofthe ARTnews approach – the illustration of the art work’s changing appearance.Here we have six illustrations charting the evolution of Rivers’s painting of hismother-in-law, Berdie, from a charcoal sketch through to an oil painting. Thecaption makes the point that, although the composition and the dark areas‘…remain steady, the picture appears and disappears through a process inwhich erasure plays as positive a role as painting’ (Porter 1954: 57). Nothingbetter illustrates the idea that a painting evolves than this set of photographsalthough, as the text discusses, that evolution is far from steady and predictable.

The third page is the final page to include multiple photographs. Thefour illustrations include the artist at work; a photograph of Berdie; an earlydrawing and an intermediate stage of the painting. The caption picks up onthe similarity between the photograph of the model, and the two illustra-tions of the work in progress to make a point about ‘The directness of theartist’s vision’ (Porter 1954: 58). The final illustration appears on the nextpage and is a colour plate of the finished Portrait of Berdie I, 1953 (Figure 4).Interestingly, rather than presenting the work uncritically, Porter’s captionremarks that ‘The finished painting, almost 7 feet high, shows little attemptto conceal the ‘abundance of dissatisfactions’ from which it grew’ (Porter1954: 58). Porter’s caption quotes from a remark by Rivers, as we shall see.

If the photographs are useful for certain types of information, the text in thearticle opens up a range of possibilities for understanding. The text com-mences by introducing the reader to the 30-year-old artist: Porter tells us aboutRivers’s ‘restless and nervous’ personality (Porter 1954: 57), his engagementwith music and poetry and the influence in his art of Courbet and de Kooning.The opening paragraph concludes with Porter’s view that the artist has ‘notattained his final maturity’ (Porter 1954: 57) – an honest opinion that is unlikelyto be phrased as directly nowadays. The second paragraph continues with bio-graphical information: that Rivers moved to Southampton, Long Island, inMay 1953 and worked on sculpture, outdoors; and that he rented a garage nearhis house and converted it into the makeshift studio, illustrated in the article.Porter then outlines Rivers’s distinction between painting, sculpture and draw-ing: for Rivers’s, ‘Sculpture is a slow and substantial kind of drawing and astatue is more distinct from the space around it than a drawing is’ (in Porter1954: 58). As Rivers puts it slightly later in the article, ‘Drawing is the ability touse a line or mark to produce air, space, distinctions, peculiarities, endings,beginnings. It is like the backfield in a football team; it is the star’ (in Porter1954: 58). Biography, none of which has unduly mythologized or romanticizedthe artist, gives way to an insight into the artist’s thinking.


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Figure 3.

Figure 4.


Having not worked on painting for six months, Rivers determined to‘get his hand in again’ (in Porter 1954: 58) by painting his mother-in-law.This underlines that no one is claiming a masterpiece in the making, but amore modest approach to creating a painting which is, again, different fromthe usual claims made by critics in essays in terms of significant works.Porter moves on to describing Rivers’s creative process: a pencil sketchdirect from the model is ‘freely transferred’ to a canvas, without the model,using ‘sign-painter’s charcoal’ (Porter 1954: 58). The process is described insome detail:

When he draws, Rivers rubs out a great deal; about as much time is spent onerasing as on making marks. Next he laid in colour in thin washes. On thework table were several cans of turpentine and one of raw linseed oil, in orderto make sure to get his brushes clean between colours, although he findssome dirtiness is useful as a way of continuing and unifying colours from onearea to another. He kept pounds of rags under the table to wipe out colours.This makes for a similarity to pastel: the colour that is wiped out has partlystained the canvas already, and therefore it remains under succeedingcolours. He used 1-inch to 11/2-inch hardware-store brushes, 3/4- to 1/2-inchflat bristle brushes, and one 3/8-inch round bristle brush.

(Porter 1954: 58)

There is material here that, in normal circumstances, would be unknown,but which gives a fuller understanding of Rivers’s way of working: theimportance of erasure; the technical effect of using colour and its visualoutcome and information about the brushes that he uses. This is tacitknowledge made public, and is of interest to other artists and the art audi-ence who gains an insight into how Rivers’s way of working leads to thefinal art work.

Porter tells us that Rivers then started another painting of the same sub-ject. In contradistinction, this one was loosely stretched, making it ‘softer’and ‘easier to erase’ (in Porter 1954: 81). We are told the order it was drawnin, and which parts were erased: ‘…the right half of the figure (on the leftside of the canvas) was related to the chair back, the line of the left hand,the dark of the sleeve above the right arm, the nose, the left eye; thenalmost all rubbed out again. While erasing, Rivers commented, ‘I like astubborn canvas – this is like a page’ (in Porter 1954: 81). Porter is convey-ing a sense of the artist making decisions, tentative decisions and ones thatare sometimes reversed. The decision-making process is embedded in thecreation of a particular work and, with the accompanying photographs ofthe stages of the evolution, this allows for careful scrutiny and, again,understanding of how the artist’s process relates to the visual outcome,and the aesthetic.

One of the most revealing passages is an utterance by Rivers about therelationship between newness and familiarity:

There are differences between the points of view of an artist… there is thepleasure that you get in doing something that is new: you use new colours ordraw in a way that you hadn’t until that time. This is pleasurable. These feelingssometimes are enough to make the artist feel that he has done something



that is worth while doing. Another approach comes out of a certain familiarity.Through familiarity the artist comes to something that he has not previouslyexpressed, like the difference between a one-night stand with someone, wherethe evening is full of new and interesting relationships, or something thatcomes out of knowing someone for a long time, that seems to be more sus-taining…. I think one has greater art who seems to have even more than hehas shown, not who has shown most that he has.

(in Porter 1954: 81)

This sheds light on Rivers’s attitude to subject matter and his general con-cern with inventiveness. It has a significance beyond the particular artist,helping the reader understand an artist’s motivation and the possible tensionbetween a new work looking like a previous one (and thus revealing theartist’s personal style), and a work being significantly different from othersby the artist.

A shift of focus between the art work being discussed in detail, andmore general statements by Rivers about art, is characteristic of Porter’sarticle, with one type of statement informing the other. The second para-graph on page 81 changes back to the work in progress:

After considering it, Rivers erased the whole charcoal sketch on the secondcanvas. He drew two ovals for two faces. ‘I will draw the figure onto the headon the left, then I will take it away, and it will be on the head on the right, forthe surprise of the relationship as I come to it.’ Then, before erasing every-thing again, ‘On the first canvas I was more direct; now I know the anatomyor directional things, and so forth, which makes it slower.’ Faint tracesremained. ‘Sometimes if I can catch the right eye, at the beginning, I knowthat I won’t have to change things, but I haven’t got it…. I drew more natu-ralistically before, but now it has gotten to be something else.

(Porter 1954: 81)

Here we have a description of the process, with a description of what andhow the artist is doing but, more importantly, why he is doing it. Rivers isable to articulate and explain his decision-making process, and his rationale.The article continues in this way, with Porter describing Rivers drawing thehead, eye and the ‘V’-shapes of the dark parts of the dress, and Riversexplaining that

I wanted to find some method that would relieve me from the tension thatcomes from trying to decide what the picture is: to give the meanings of specificthings I know, in a way that has nothing to do in a big sense with painting, butallows me to exercise enjoyment in painting and drawing, yet in a way removedform the magic of art. Details help me forget that big sense of the painting.


However, the details could present their own problems. Porter commentsthat ‘The scale of the head was getting too big; from the neck to the breastsit was too long’ (Porter 1954: 81), and Rivers then sought to make corrections,‘…keeping his hand always on the canvas, like a lawnmower on the lawn’(Porter 1954: 1981). The combination in the article of what, how and why –

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description, analysis and explanation – using the critic’s commentary andthe artist’s insights into his own aims and methods, is an informative andinsightful one, illuminating why the art work looks as it does.

The next four paragraphs address problems arising in the paintings,such as the size of the head, and how Rivers dealt with it. In order to moveforward with the paintings, Rivers went back to the model and did somestudies, some of which were detailed, and some others explored differentposes. The colours of the second painting were erased, and the first paint-ing was repainted. As before, Porter describes what actions Rivers took,such as working over the model’s shoes, and redrawing the left arm. Thereis a focusing down to the colours used by Rivers: ‘…cerulean and Prussianblue, chromium oxide opaque, green earth, Naples yellow and red medium,burnt and raw umber, black and zinc white’ (Porter 1954: 81). Porter thencomments on the way Rivers uses colour, applying it in one of the areas‘…deliberately, larger and shaggier than reality, then [he] goes back to thedrawing….The inaccuracy of the register is a way of hinging parts togetherby colour; it serves a different function than the drawing, which separatesthe parts’ (Porter 1954: 81). This helps the viewer see what is going on inthe painting, and how Rivers achieves his style.

Two paragraphs later, the focus moves out to Rivers reflecting on hisown values and temperament:

I have the moral idea that nothing easy can be good, at least for myself. I feelguilty about blankness on the canvas; unable to accept it – I have to force athing to go on to something else. That accepting of the first strokes of athing is an admission of a certain kind of character trait… there have beenmasters who have been able to do portraits in an hour and a half – the idea ofvirtuosity. Though I feel that I have some of this myself, it is meaningless.Why be a virtuoso? For whom and for what reason? It is thrilling to have togo through many possibilities before I can accept anything… Though all maybe equally good, all places, I have to have tried them before I can say any-thing is OK.


This is the tone of an artist thinking and conversing informally with guardsdown, rather than issuing a carefully worded statement, that retrospectivelymakes sense of his practice. Again, we gain insight into the aesthetic ofRivers’s paintings with their messiness and even awkwardness. The distrustof virtuosity, and the balance between newness and familiarity leads Riversto the view that ‘I think the history of art grows out of both boredom andinterest. If one hundred people have done something very well, you can’tmake yourself see clearly if you do it too’ (in Porter 1954: 82).

The rationale underpinning his aesthetic is continued in the next para-graph. Rivers was unhappy with the blankness at the bottom of the firstpainting and said, ‘You can have a large blank area especially at the bottomof a painting, but then I feel that I must introduce something to break it (inPorter 1954: 82). In order to achieve this, ‘He wanted the cross pieces of thechair between the feet to remain faint, but to be sensed strongly’ (Porter1954: 82) – this was Rivers’s way of ‘breaking’ the blank area withoutdestroying or overemphasizing it. The way he achieved the effect is a good



example of knowledge from ‘inside’ a practice. Decisions to do with visualbalance could also have psychological implications. According to Rivers,

The features set up a psychological situation which I have to accept or rejectwhile the other parts don’t have that kind of attraction… emphases come outin the face beyond drawing and the general colour relation to the rest of thepainting… one is a victim of its look… I can’t express pity, hatred, joy, anxiety;I have to work on until the expression or the look is something that you can’tgive a name to.


As a non-driver is amazed at the number of aspects a driver has simultane-ously to co-ordinate, so too the viewer could only be impressed at the wayan artist has to balance so many diverse matters during the making of anart work. The balancing act may not always lead to resolution:

These paintings consist of the faint remains of all the things that I did notwant, that the whole canvas wouldn’t give up no matter how much I scrubbed,scraped or merged; so in a way all of it grows out of an abundance of dissat-isfactions.

(in Porter 1954: 82).

To an audience used to seeing works publicly displayed, usually because theartist was satisfied with the end result, the idea that an art work may merelysurface out of an ‘abundance of dissatisfactions’ was, no doubt for many,an unexpected revelation. Rivers mused on the fact that an artist oftenknows little of an audience’s response to his or her work, and that whatmay be a normal way of doing something to the artist, may seem odd orquirky to a viewer.

Returning to the development of the canvases, Porter describes compo-sitional adjustments made by Rivers. Then,

He started to make a series of sketches of the whole figure, from the paint-ings, as if to get an understanding of what the painting was or could be. Theywere on canvas, mostly about 18 by 12 inches. The idea of wholeness predom-inated. In two days, he started and went back to about six of these sketches….To him, each sketch was valuable as a different organizational interpretation.One could be considered a block before an arc, another a variation on dotted-ness, another a composition between two vertical parallels, or between angles.

(Porter 1954: 82)

However, Rivers adjudged that none was ‘…of a strong enough nature tomake me destroy what I have done already’ (in Porter 1954: 82). He alsospent a day considering whether to start a third canvas, but eventuallydecided against it. The idea of a strongly linear development in the creationof an art work is undermined in not only Rivers’s words and actions, butalso the uncertainty, sideways moves and apparent back-tracking whichwere probably far greater than most spectators would ever have imagined.Rivers himself addressed the issue of control, admitting, ‘I want to be ableto control…. It is not that I have to know what I am doing every single

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second, but I do not want to be at the mercy of art’ (in Porter 1954: 82).What Rivers meant by this is that ‘I can get a thrill out of what occurs dur-ing painting, but surprise does not equal quality. Surprise may not evenindicate quality at all’ (in Porter 1954: 82). In the context of the apparentcasualness, even the seeming arbitrariness of some passages of Rivers’spaintings, this distinction between surprise and quality could not be readilypredicted, but again underlines the article’s articulation of Rivers’s quest fora fine balance between opposing, and sometimes contradictory, forces.

The provisionality of Rivers’s works in the article was emphasized by theartist who admitted that ‘What started out a whole thing was painted as adrawing, two pastels and eight paintings. I don’t know which is ‘the’ paint-ing. So although each painting is a statement, I don’t think that I havemade ‘a’ painting. I am not telling anyone that this is a process, a way ofpainting, a way to work; it just happened’ (in Porter 1954: 82). How differentis this unresolved, evolutionary process was from the normal viewing con-dition of a ‘finished’ work in a pristine gallery. A final decision Rivers had tomake was which work would be reproduced in colour for the magazine. Hedecided on the first one, not because it was the most resolved, but because‘…it is a member of the family that looks like no one, the different one – thebest. I don’t know what to do with the others. I don’t know if they arefinished. So I distrust them’ (in Porter 1954: 82). Asked by Porter whetherhe liked the first one because it had been around longest, Rivers replied‘No, it is less on the surface, it has more weight, it is more awkward’ (inPorter 1954: 82). Most spectators were probably more likely to haveselected the second painting because of its more conventionally unifiedsurface and higher degree of finish. But, Porter contends, ‘…this finish islike the virtuosity that he distrusts, because it may be the outward sign of alack of that search for distinctions…’ (Porter 1954: 82–83). Thus, Porterconcludes that ‘Rivers’ paintings often have the look of beginnings…. [and]his style has the merit of lacking those superficial graces that can hide aninner emptiness’ (Porter 1954: 83).

So, what claims can be made for ‘Rivers paints a picture’ and, indeed,the series as a whole? Porter’s article on Rivers is certainly a period piece,and captures the mood of its time for the individualistic, unsatisfied, trou-bled, bohemian artist struggling and striving for a more authentic work ofart, distrusting ease, charm and virtuosity. Rivers’s attitudes grew out of theabstract expressionists’ romantic discourse of spontaneity and unfinished-ness in art. In 1951 de Kooning had stated that ‘…French artists have some“touch” in making an object. They have a particular something that makesthem [sic] look like a “finished” painting. They have a touch which I am gladnot to have’ (de Kooning 1951: 565). Rivers’s attitudes and values – even theway he talks about art with the almost existential sense of uncertainty andan ethical dimension – are clearly shaped by the metanarratives of the timein art and culture.

Yet I would argue that the approach of the ARTnews series as a wholehas value that is lasting because it is generalizable. When one takes awaythe historically specific content and examines the series as an approach,there is much to recommend it. The range an article covers is impressive.In Porter’s article we have information about Rivers’s background, influ-ences and working environment; a description of the evolution of the



artworks; the recording of his working process and methods, verbal, writtenand photographic; information about the materials he uses; commentariesand interpretations by both the artist himself and Porter about what is hap-pening; key quotes by the artist about his aims and beliefs; rationales andexplanations by the artist and critic about the artist’s decision-makingprocess; and evaluations by, again, both the artist and critic about the artworks. The photographs play a key role in illustrating the working environ-ment, the artist at work and the stages of the decision-making process inthe evolution of the paintings. Description, analysis, interpretation andevaluation combine to give a rich insight into the evolution of an art work,revealing what is usually tacit knowledge and, most significantly, addingthe dimension of why, to the usual realm of what, and the occasionallyavailable how.

This was an innovative approach; it remains so. Normally, even habitu-ally, we have statements by the artist for a catalogue or book, generally writ-ten with an eye on positioning the artist in relation to the contemporaryscene and historical longevity. Or we have interviews with the artist,detached in time and space from the decision-making process. Even furtherremoved from the material process are the commentaries and essays writ-ten by critics and historians. These are, of course, all valuable and con-tribute to cultural knowledge and understanding, but they are different fromthe ARTnews approach. What these other approaches almost invariably lackare specifics about the artist’s working process and thinking, and the docu-mentation of the creative process with an embedded commentary thathelps to explain why as well as what and how. It is in this sense that theapproach is still valid today. This is not to claim it offers the truth about art,or returns to some sort of naïve acceptance of intentionality. Of course, anystatement by an artist of what he or she is doing must be treated with cau-tion. Equally, though, we must exercise caution when we read a more‘authoritative’ interpretation by a historian. Reviewing David Hockney’sSecret Knowledge book, Professor Martin Kemp makes the point that itreminds us that

…works of art are physical products made by executants who face real chal-lenges, and do not come ready-made from the heads of their makers.Whether he is right or wrong, in part or whole, it also reminds me that art his-torians have no monopoly of interpretation, and that many of our concernsmay be driven more by the internal dynamics of our industry than by acts ofhard looking and intellectual adventure.

(Kemp 2003: 37)

No account is neutral or objective, and it is important to get a range of dif-ferent types of perspective. I would argue that the most neglected perspec-tive, because it is often inaccessible and apparently mysterious, is thedecision-making process. At its worst, the ARTnews series romanticized thecreative act, so giving yet another breathless account of the intuitive,inspired or tortured genius. At its best, the producing of art was demysti-fied by an openness about the creative process, and a making explicit ofwhat is usually tacit knowledge. Now, at a time when so much art writing isdifficult to distinguish from press releases, the ARTnews approach is

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refreshing because it is less prone to aggrandize or mythologize the artist.There is still a danger of this, as the de Kooning piece demonstrates, but itis generally less likely because the creation of an artwork is brought farmore down to earth – the work observed may be mediocre, finished butunresolved. The artist is seen not as someone creating through ineffabledivine inspiration, but an individual making practical decisions, and makingthe best of ‘an abundance of dissatisfactions.’

The tacit knowledge involved in the creative process was once com-mented on by the painter Alex Katz who remarked in 1997:

Well… I’m pretty sure… you have an idea about what a painting should be, oran idea of a painting. And then it correlates with something I see and thenI start out empirically and optically. And when I do that I get involved…there’s an unconscious procedure and it gets into something I wouldn’t havethought of to start with. It moves around a bit and that’s the part that’s inter-esting. Because when you go in there you find things; weird things happenand some are all right and some aren’t all right. But they wouldn’t have hap-pened if you just took the idea and did it, and that’s part of it. I think withpainting you have the opportunity to go inside yourself and find your uncon-scious intelligence or your non-verbal intelligence and your non-verbal sensi-bility and your non-verbal being in a sense. And you alternate betweenconsciousness and unconsciousness and it can engage much more of youthan if you just merely took an idea and executed it.

(Katz 1997: 238)

Katz uses the terms ‘non-verbal intelligence’ and ‘non-verbal sensibility’ todescribe the decision-making process. Equally, he may have referred to‘visual’ or ‘creative intelligence’ to describe this tacit knowledge andprocess. Whatever the term employed, what he is alluding to is a decision-making process that ensures the right sort of outcome as opposed to amere illustration of an idea that someone without experience, skill, exper-tise etc., would be more likely to produce.

When it was successful, the ARTnews series was an approach that gaveus some insight into creative intelligence. It is an approach that is bothvalid and appropriate today, especially when boundaries between privateand public space are more permeable (the artist’s studio is less off-limits),and when technology can be minimally invasive, yet almost all-revealing.The ARTnews approach could and, I would argue, should be revisited, tech-nologically updated and utilized to help us stand the creative process so weare less bedazzled by hype and mythologizing.

Referencesde Kooning, Willem et al. (1968 [1951]), ‘Artists’ Session’, in Herschel B. Chipp (ed.),

Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 564–8.

Hess, Thomas B. (1953), ‘De Kooning Paints a Picture’, ARTnews, March, pp. 30–32,64–67.

——(1959), Willem de Kooning, New York, George Braziller.

Katz, Alex (1997), in David Sylvester (ed.), Interviews with American Artists, London:Pimlico, pp. 235–50.



Kemp, Martin (2003), ‘Best Books of the Decade’, The Art Book, 10: 2 (March), p. 37.

Matisse, Henri (1968 [1948]), ‘Facility in Painting’, in Herschel B. Chipp (ed.),Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, University of California Press, pp.140–1.

Porter, Fairfield (1954), ‘Rivers Paints a Picture’, ARTnews, January, pp. 56–59, 81–83.

——(1956), ‘Jane Freilicher Paints a Picture’, ARTnews, September, pp. 46–49, 65–66.

Seckler, Dorothy Gees (1953), ‘Stuart Davis Paints a Picture’, ARTnews,June/July/August, pp. 30–33, 73–74.

Tapié, Michel (1955), ‘[Georges] Mathieu Paints a Picture’, ARTnews, February,pp. 50–53, 74–75.

Waldman, Diane (1988), Willem de Kooning, London: Thames & Hudson.

Whistler, J.M. (1890), The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, London: WilliamHeinemann.

Suggested citationWhiteley, N. (2007), ‘Seeing what, how and why: the ARTnews series, 1953–58’,

Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 6: 3, pp. 215–228, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.215/1.

Contributor detailsNigel Whiteley, a cultural historian, is Professor of Visual Arts in the LancasterInstitute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University. He has been a visitingprofessor in India and China, and lectured widely in the USA and Europe. His mostrecent book is the critically acclaimed Reyner Banham: Historian of the ImmediateFuture (MIT, 2002), and other solo books include Design For Society (Reaktion, 1993,regularly reprinted), and Pop Design – Modernism to Mod (Design Council, 1987).Whiteley is editor of De-Traditionalisation and Art: Aesthetic, Authority, Authenticity(Middlesex University Press, 2000). He has had essays published in journals suchas Visible Language, Art History, The Oxford Art Journal, Artforum, the Journal ofArchitectural Education, Design Issues, Architectural History and Cultural Values, andhis work has been translated into Indian, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese,Croatian and Korean. Contact: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts,Lancaster University, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

228 Nigel Whiteley




Post-production or how pictures come tolife or play dead

Ruth Pelzer-Montada Edinburgh College of Art

AbstractThe article reflects upon the visual practice of the author. The term ‘post-production’ is used to reflect on a particular quality of documentation, namelythe practice of theory after an exhibition of the author’s work. Hermeneuticalaesthetics is drawn upon to ground this endeavour, as it enables us ‘to see moreof what has yet to be seen’ (Nicholas Davey). The concept of performativity isdeployed to trace the cultural signification of the medium of printmaking inwhich the work has been made; the exhibition venue which represented a mix-ture between a workshop/studio and the ‘white cube’; the particular works inthe exhibition; the role of installation and the place of the viewer. Special con-sideration is given to the hallucinatory quality of the work and the role of repeti-tion with regard to the performative constitution of the viewing subject. It issuggested that the insights gained through such documentary post-productionbecome the foundation for further practice, both for other artists and the authorherself. This is equally true, whether post-production relates to the practice oftheory or artistic practice, but ideally both.

Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead1

The following article is based on a presentation given at the EstudiosVisuales Conference in Madrid, in February 2004, as part of a session withthe title ‘Visual Culture/Artistic Practices’.

The term ‘post-production’ acts as a catalyst for the reflection of a par-ticular aspect of my artistic practice, namely, the mounting of an exhibitionof prints in the format of an installation. The exhibition took place in April2003 in an artist-run gallery space, a so-called Produzenten-Galerie (literally‘producers’ gallery’) in Frankfurt. The term ‘post-production’ has recentlygained popularity through the influential French critic and curator NicolasBourriaud. In his book of the same title, the term serves to designate a par-ticular, and for him, characteristic trend in contemporary art, which he seesrepresented by the work of Rikrit Tiranvanija or Vanessa Beecroft, amongstothers. This art approximates to the service industry whereby artists ‘don’tcreate, but reorganize’ existing material or types of communication.2 As willbe shown later, I have defined the concept of post-production in a differentsense from Bourriaud.

Since minimalism, the modernist gallery space has been problematizedin and through artistic practice as well as in the theoretical and criticalliterature. Much of this theorization has filtered through into artistic work-ing practices and now functions at an almost intuitive level. Post-production


1. The phrase ‘How pictures come to lifeor play dead’ is aphrase borrowed fromLane Relyea in anessay in Frieze, 41(June/August 1998),pp. 52–57 on the legacyof Michael Fried’s artcritical writing.

2. ‘“Public Relations”,Nicholas Bourriaud inan interview withBennett Simpson’, ArtForum, April 2001,http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0268_39/75830815/print.html(accessed 28 January2004); see alsoNicholas Bourriaud(1998), Post-Production,English translation,New York: Lukas &Sternberg, 2001.

Keywordsdocumentationhallucinatory effecthermeneutical aestheticsperformativitypost-productionprintmaking

JVAP_6.3_06_Art_Plezer_.qxd 12/12/07 4:37 PM Page 229

is a post facto reflection on and documentation of this hitherto largely prag-matic part of my practice. The theoretical thrust of post-productionbecomes part of an ongoing practice and will feed into future work. Theinterrelationship between theory and practice as once described by Deleuzein conversation with Foucault seems apt here: ‘a system of relays within alarger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical andpractical’.3 Deleuze’s more complex suggestion notwithstanding, the fact isthat the concepts of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ are frequently a short cut for theo-retical practice and artistic practice, respectively. This is how I will, albeitreluctantly, deploy these words. In an article British philosopher NicholasDavey has taken up the challenge of the two, often opposing, camps. Notsuppressing the conflict, he has argued for a ‘fruitful collision’ between theoryand practice. Although he refers less to the process of artistic productionthan that of aesthetic experience, his theoretical combination of hermeneu-tics and aesthetics, or ‘hermeneutical aesthetics’, is relevant to groundingmy concept of post-production. Drawing on Heidegger, Davey asserts that

Hermeneutics and aesthetics are similarly structured by an unstable synthesisof idea and sense, which is distinctly ‘eventual’ in character. On the one hand,there is a hermeneutic (interpretive) element in aesthetic experience thatbrings meaning and content to what is seen. On the other hand, there is alsoan aesthetic element in hermeneutic experience which gives ‘weight’ to inter-pretation, which lends it sensuously to concrete instances (applications) of itsthematic concerns.4

The ‘eventual’ character here referred to by Davey, ties in with Deleuze’s‘relay’ which similarly suggests a motion in time. Of importance to me is‘the relation of aesthetic experience to language’. As Davey goes on to say,‘Insofar as individual aesthetic experience is linguistically mediated, aes-thetics (can) be conceived … as an integral part of a shared historical dis-course concerning the realization of meaning.’ Hermeneutical aesthetics istherefore

indicative of an attempt to bring into language that which is held within animage, not to the end of surpassing the visual but with the aim of enabling us tosee more of what has yet to be seen. [original emphasis]5

If one considers the encounter of the artist with his/her production as aproto-aesthetic experience, then post-production can be seen as con-cerning itself with ‘more of what has yet to be seen’. Further, the ‘post’ inpost-production is to be understood in the sense of Deleuze’s ‘relay’ andthe ‘eventual’ character of the aesthetic experience as mentioned byDavey. It implies a temporary ‘switching’ motion, not a once-and-for-allfixed ‘aftermath’.

PerformativityJudith Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’ can also be drawn upon to inquireinto the space and place of the particular aspect of practice under considera-tion here. Performativity has in recent years emerged ‘at the centre of cul-tural experience’, as the British philosopher Peter Osborne has put it.6

230 Ruth Pelzer-Montada

3. Foucault, Michel,Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:Selected Essays andInterviews, Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1977,p. 206.

4. Nicholas Davey(2005), ‘Aestheticf(r)iction: the conflictsof visual experience’,Journal of Visual ArtsPractice, 4: 2[0]+3, pp. 135–49.

5. ibid.

6. Peter Osborne,‘Gender asPerformance: AnInterview with JudithButler’, in PeterOsborne (ed.), ACritical Sense: Interviewswith Intellectuals,London and New York:Routledge, 1996, p. 112;see also ‘Interview withJudith Butler by PeterOsborne and LynneSegal’, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm (accessed 4 December2003).


The ‘eventual’ character of the aesthetic experience, according to Davey, maybe linked to performativity. Performativity is differentiated by Butler from‘performance’ although both have been sometimes used synonymously – evenby Butler herself. Performativity, unlike performance, does not presume ananterior subject but rather stresses its constitution in and through whatButler herself has described as ‘a certain kind of repetition and recitation’or ‘citationality’ of cultural practices.7 Butler, while applying citationality to apolitics of gender subversion, has pointed out a major problem. Citationalityor performativity in terms of cultural practice in and of itself is not subver-sive, as it ‘conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’.8

Therefore, there is the necessity to reflect on the specific codes and conven-tions that a particular practice enacts performatively. In my own example,this implies both the ‘siting’ and ‘citing’ of printmaking within the context ofvisual culture and the way in which my prints occupy the gallery space.

Print practice within visual cultureTrained as a painter, my artistic practice has been for the last nine yearsexclusively in the medium of print. Visual culture is the point of referencefor much of artistic print practice today. At the same time, printmaking, asa technical art form characterized by reproducibility, is closely affiliated withvisual culture in its modes of operation. While one of the oldest of the tech-nologies of mediatization, it continues to play a cultural role, despite thefact that newer modes of visualization typified by digital technologies nowcomplement and even supplant it. Artists in the last forty or more yearshave utilized print processes to comment on the explosive mediatization ofthe visual after the Second World War, coupled with the spectacle of com-modity production, as theorized, for example, by Guy Debord. This trend iswell exemplified by the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol inthe late 1950s and early 1960s. While not wishing to suggest an essentialistnotion of a medium, the role, in art, of print practices is vital. It could beargued that reproducibility or ‘repeatability’/repetition as one major featureof print makes it a ‘citational’ practice per se.

Technology is, with repeatability, the other category that is relevant to adiscussion on print. In German, the word Technik encompasses both theEnglish words ‘technique’ and ‘technology’. This notion of Technik can beapplied to print practice. Following on from Marcel Mauss, the art historianDidi-Huberman has spoken of technique in terms of ‘a tension between itsmaterial and its symbolic efficacy’.9 The tension between technique as amode of artistic skill and technique as ‘technology’ forms the crucial matrixin print practice. Their respective cultural significations could be said to beplayed out in artistic print through a tension between touch and surface.10

‘Touch’ here refers to traditional modes of artistic expression as in theartist’s mark or signature style, traditionally the ‘facture’ in painting. Inprintmaking, an almost fetishistic concern with the sensuous effect of ‘tech-niques’ parallels the signifying power of the facture.11 ‘Surface’ applies tothe opposite of individual expression. It refers to the signifiers of techno-logical mass modes of production, or reproducibility. Individual artisticexpression and its signifiers, such as the facture, have traditionally connotedauthenticity, originality and the real. Emphasis on the surface implies thesuperficial, the artificial and the spectacle.12

231Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead

7. ibid. See also JudithButler, Gender Trouble,Feminism and theSubversion of Identity,New York and London,1990; and JudithButler, Bodies thatMatter: On theDiscursive Limits of Sex,New York and London:Routledge, 1993.

8. Judith Butler, Bodiesthat Matter: On theDiscursive Limits ofSex, p. 12.

9. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ähnlichkeitund Berührung,Archäologie,Anachronsimus undÄhnlichkeit desAbdrucks, Cologne:Dumont, 1999, p. 16.

10. The particular ‘turn’this tension has takenin postmodernpractice, and morerecently, with thearrival and incorporation of digital means, mustdue to spaceconstraints remainunexplored here. The Digital SurfaceConference at TateBritain, in Summer2003 aimed to illuminate someaspects of this tensionwith regard toprintmaking.

11. B. Buchloh, ‘FromFaktura to Factography’,October, 30 (Fall), 1984,pp. 82–119.

12. The tendency towardssurface or ‘superficial-ity’ in postmodernculture has beennoted by a number of theorists, mostnotably FredricJameson and JeanBaudrillard.


My own work draws on the cultural connotations of repetition as a shortcut to reproducibility in such a way that it conflicts with the ‘facture’, theexpressive hand-drawn mark. The same set of ‘expressive’ marks isrepeated through multiple variations of size, order, placement and colour(Figures 1 and 2).

In this way, varying codes are generated which in their turn are repro-duced in numerous (and potentially infinite) configurations (Figure 3).

I would argue that the tensions inherent in print as an artistic andcultural practice with their powerful cultural connotations between surfaceand touch are enacted in my work through the citational modus of the seem-ingly uniquely expressive and authentic. The hallucinatory and kinaestheticeffect achieved through repetition can be argued to mirror the function


Figure 1: Positive-Negative I, Detail, Screenprint 1999.


of spectacular commodity fetishism at the same time as it calls into playthe haptic qualities traditionally associated with the facture of conventionalaesthetics.

The performativity of installationI now turn to a discussion of the installation of my exhibition. How do thediscursive and the factual/material intersect at the level of the work, thespace and the viewer? What cultural modes of signification are cited or per-formatively enacted?

GalleryMy chosen exhibition space was the Galerie Zement in Frankfurt. A formerindustrial print workshop, this space is now used as a studio by a painterand an animator who also both organize and curate the exhibitions. Thespace is on these occasions turned into a gallery. Unlike in their earlierphase in the 1970s, when artist-run spaces constituted a crucial element inthe institutional critique and commodification of art, they now have to func-tion in a more competitive, enterprise-oriented environment for artists.Today – despite their differences – such spaces continue to provide a semi-institutional framework, especially for younger artists, to establish a ‘posi-tion’, to gain the necessary experience and to win potential critical noticefor further ‘career opportunities’. As an institutional and architectural for-mation, some such spaces exist as a hybrid between the studio/workshopand the conventional modernist gallery, or ‘white cube’, a term which will


Figure 2: Specimen Nr. 26, screenprint, 2003, 35 x 35 cm.


be discussed in more detail later. In light of the ambiguous and temporarycharacter of such artist-run spaces, the notion of performativity seemsespecially apt.

Installation or how pictures come to life or play deadAs already indicated, every work of art can be considered performative –what Davey, in reference to Heidegger, calls its ‘eventual’ character. But per-formativity understood in a more narrow sense is an inbuilt feature of mywork. Prints function potentially as conventional ‘pictures’, hung in frameson the wall. Mine are mainly conceived as multiples or as a series specificallydesigned to derive their appearance from the chosen site. Since minimalism,


Figure 3: Prototypes VI b, detail, screenprint, 2000.


installation refers to ‘a four-fold relational dynamic between objects, theirsurrounding space, its architectural frame, and the body of the viewer, inwhich architectural form [is] a given parameter of the exercise (even whenviolated)’.13

The ‘site specificity’ of installation to which Peter Osborne refers in thequote above is applicable to the gallery/workshop of the Galerie Zementwith its particular architectural features and discursivity. This is a narrowerreading of the term as is often currently the case. Instead of site specificityas pertaining to a specific physical location, it now more usually implieswork that occupies a broadly cultural space, such as a shopping mall orother public location.14

In the case of the Galerie Zement, site-specificity entailed the successfulnegotiation between the workshop aspects and the gallery elements to‘stage’ a semblance of the codings of the white cube. Brian O’Doherty’sterm for the modernist gallery space, has, especially since the publication ofhis essays on ‘The Ideology of the Gallery Space’ in 1986, stood as a criticalshorthand to denote the reactionary exclusivity of art in its pristine con-fines.15 While it promises transcendence from the outside world, the whitecube as gallery space ultimately disguises its commercial nature. As indi-cated previously, other forms of ‘accreditation’ have supplemented and, insome respects, replaced the gallery space, but the white cube – notwith-standing its many variations – remains. O’Doherty’s erstwhile critique hasbeen subsequently revised. Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Staedelschuleand Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt, stated in 2001 that the white cube ‘can beseen as a structure of inclusion’ rather than exclusion.16 This seems whollyapposite, as the assumption of the exclusivity of the gallery space and thework therein appears to be based on a falsely modernist assumption thatart can ever be ‘exclusive’ of cultural context.

Unlike most galleries, the physical characteristics of the workshop atZement collided with the subtlety of the prints themselves. The work, there-fore, could be said to demand the features and rhetoric of the white cube.All the elements, such as heavy electronic surface wiring, rough and dirtystonework, and two rows of striking heating pipes, conspired to create aform of visual noise. Instead of treating this visual noise merely as a distur-bance, a performative hitch, the major interruptions were eliminated. Gapsin the stonework were filled in and/or painted over and so on. The printswere then displayed in such a way as to articulate certain ‘noise’ factors. Forexample, the horizontal line of surface wiring on the upper part of a wall,ending two-thirds along the wall, was used as the reference point for theformat of the work White on White (Figure 4).

This series of single sheets consisted of a particular set of multiple rep-etitions of the ‘original’ marks that form the basis of all my work. The par-ticular pattern of White on White was, as the title suggests, printed in subtlewhite and off-white tones, arranged in a vertical, continuous row. Thesheets were hung flush with the wall, following its line to floor level andthen extended in a rectangular angle out onto the floor into the space. Theuppermost horizontal edge of the sheets paralleled the wiring above it. Itsright-hand top corner was aligned with the wiring where the cable disap-peared into the wall. The disturbance of the wiring was integrated, yet italso conflicted with the work. Similarly, two rows of strikingly shaped grey


13. Peter Osborne,‘Installation,Performance, orWhat?’, Oxford ArtJournal, 24: 2, 2001, p. 149. It is not possi-ble to explore here thehistorical and concep-tual genesis andtheoretical problemat-ics of the term, anexamination of whichhas recently beenundertaken by variouswriters. Osborne’sarticle offers a usefulcritical overview ofrecent publications.

14. Miwon Kwon, ‘OnePlace After Another:Notes on Site-Specificity’, October,80 (Spring), 1997, pp.85–110.

15. Brian O’Doherty,Inside the White Cube:The Ideology of theGallery Space, Berkeleyand Los Angeles:University of CaliforniaPress, 2000.

16. Daniel Birnbaum,‘From the White Cubeto Super Houston,Five Shows in thePortikus’, Parkett, 63,2001, pp. 187–93.


heating pipes – in the form of discs around a central pipe – both accentu-ated and disturbed the display of Grey on Grey. This large wall piece (with asurface area of 261 cm in width and 304 cm in length) consisted of twelverepeat sheets and was printed with a similar yet different pattern fromWhite on White. Aligned at its upper boundary with a pipe running belowthe ceiling, the sheets adhered to the wall and then loosely curved aroundthe back of the pipes to emerge underneath them into the floor space(Figure 5).

Noise as excess of information – in the more general sense – is com-mented upon by Mark C. Taylor in his book The Moment of Complexity,Emerging Network Culture:

Noise, it is instructive to note, derives from the Latin word ‘nausea’, whichoriginally meant seasickness. When information becomes the noise that


Figure 4: Installation View White on White, screenprint , 87 x 380 cm, 2003Galerie Zement, Frankfurt.


engenders nausea, differences and oppositions that once seemed to fix theworld and make it secure become unstable. Lines of separation become perme-able membranes where transgression is not only possible but unavoidable….As these polarities (between order – disorder, organization – disorganization,form – chaos) slip and slide, they eventually reverse themselves to disclose thespecter of dynamics that appear to be fluid.17

In the exhibition space at the Galerie Zement the two architectural and spa-tial codings – or polarities – ‘slip and slide’. The workspace with its affili-ated connotations of honesty, reality and workmanship conflicted with thesupposedly neutral white cube with its affinity with the spectacle. One couldargue that the citational articulation of these codings through the work onlyre-enacts or performs ‘capitalism’s destabilizing, destructive dynamic ofdispersal and dissolution’.18 Yet, I would counter this assessment with theargument that it is precisely the task of art to make such operations visible.The codings of the white cube which separate the gallery space from ordi-nary architecture then become key to mark this citation as a citation. AlexPotts in his study on the historical continuities between sculpture andinstallation has said:

[…] if installation is architecture, it is another kind of architecture from the onewe experience on a day-to-day basis … Installation isolates and condensesparticular architectonic shapings of space and then artificially stages these so


17. Mark C. Taylor, TheMoment of Complexity:Emerging NetworkCulture, Chicago andLondon: University ofChicago Press, 2000,pp. 100–01.

18. Alex Potts,‘Installation andSculpture’, Oxford ArtJournal, 24: 2, 2001, p. 16.

Figure 5: Installation View Grey on Grey, multiple screenprints , overall dimen-sion 261 x 304 cm, 2003, Galerie Zement, Frankfurt.


one attends to them in a qualitatively different way from the architectural inte-riors one normally inhabits …19

Constituting the viewerHow does the citational quality, the placing and character of the work, affectthe viewer? The citational character of the work holds true to the root of itsLatin origin ‘to cite’ which comes from citare, ‘to set in motion’, ‘to call’ or‘to summon’. Hence citation and interpellation, the summoning of the sub-ject, are closely connected.20 Althusser’s term of ‘interpellation’ drew atten-tion to the ideological nature of subject formation and the emergence ofidentity through language and discourse.

I shall [then] suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals … or ‘transforms’ the individuals intosubjects … by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation orhailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplaceeveryday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ [original emphasis] 21

The citational quality of interpellation is obvious in this much-quoted pas-sage of Althusser’s definition of his concept.

What particular quality did this ‘hailing’ assume in my installation? Theexhibition at Zement had aspects that are already existent in classical sculp-ture as well as in installation as suggested by Potts. This is to do with thenature of the encounter staged between the viewer and the work and the‘resulting interplay … between focused and dispersed apprehension’.22

Conventionally hung prints, or pictures in frames, tend to invite ‘focusedapprehension’. The emphasis is on the viewer’s gaze, which is attracted byand to the framed object with the surrounding space functioning as a neu-tral envelope.23 Installation interpellates the viewer in a different way. Theviewer could be said to be ‘called’ from all sides and he or she is bodilypositioned in the space as opposed to the emphasis on sight in a conven-tional display. The boundaries of what constitutes the work and the spaceoverlap and may even collide. Therefore, Potts can speak of an ‘interplay …between focused and dispersed apprehension’.

In addition to this general feature of installation, the hailing or constitu-tion of the viewer was played out in the exhibition at the Zement Gallery ina specific way. This is because my pieces had a hallucinatory quality. In thetwo large wall pieces, White on White and Grey on Grey, this quality wasachieved by printing in duotone colours. The result was that backgroundand pattern are not visible in one glance. Depending on the viewer’s posi-tion, a different pattern and a differently coloured background come intofocus (Figures 6 and 7).

In a more sculptural hanging piece, Virtual 9, the ‘interplay … betweenfocused and dispersed apprehension’ operated in another way. The piececonsists of nine Perspex panels (each measuring 71 cm x 71 cm), whichwere hung in a row. The position of the screen-printed pattern that wasrepeated on each of the panels shifts from one panel to the next. Thestrength and hue of the semi-transparent colour also vary slightly. Theeffect of the hung piece was that the swirl of linear marks that appeared tothe viewer seemed, at first, to consist of a chaotic mass (Figure 8).


19. Potts, p. 17. As alreadyindicated, this ties inwith Butler’s sugges-tion that discoursestend to hide ‘their citationality andgenealogy, presentingthemselves as timelessand singular’ (see AlexPotts, ‘Installation andSculpture’ op. cit. andSara Salih, JudithButler, London andNew York, 2002, p. 95).

20. Salih notes this in herintroduction to JudithButler’s work.

21. Louis Althusser,‘Ideology interpellatesindividuals assubjects’ (1969), inPaul du Gay, JessicaEvans and PeterRedman (eds), Identity:A Reader, London,Thousand Oaks, CAand New Delhi: SagePublications, 2000,pp. 31–38.

22. Potts, p. 7.

23. For a more complexanalysis of thisviewing situation, seeJacques Derrida,Memoirs of the Blind,Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1993.



Figure 6: Grey on Grey, detail, side view.

Figure 7: Grey on Grey, detail, front view.


Only from a certain position, when the viewer positioned himself or her-self at a particular distance from the work, did a relatively stable image,extending deep into space, gradually appears (Figure 9).

Apprehension in these works is problematized; its performativenature becomes obvious due to the difficulties the viewer experiences.


Figure 8: Virtual 9, detail, screenprint on nine perspex panels, overall dimen-sion 71 x 71 x 240 cm, 2003.

Figure 9: Virtual 9, installation view, screenprint on nine perspex panels, overalldimension 71 x 71 x 240 cm, 2003.


The disorienting, if pleasurable, effect of the work also alludes to the rela-tive loss of control the viewer or subject experiences through its constitu-tion within cultural practices.

Fundamental to achieving a hallucinatory effect is the use of serial rep-etition. Briony Fer in an essay on female artists of the 1960s (Hesse,Bourgeois and Kusama), notes the connection of serial repetition, as inKusama’s work, to the hallucinatory. She also comments on how such art‘places the subject or spectator, how it might incur the coming-into-beingof the subject – in particular the feminine subject’.24 Its effect isdescribed by her as both an intensification of ‘bodily affect’ at the sametime as a ‘blanking or effacing of the subject’.25 This ‘blanking’ or ‘efface-ment of the subject’ is connected in Fer’s psychoanalytically informedinterpretation to a particular kind of anthropomorphism. Fer’s commentscan be applied to an explanation of the effect of the prints in the exhibi-tion. The particular anthropomorphism or ‘mimetic compulsion’ invokedby her, draws on Surrealist writer Roger Callois’s ‘model of mimicry’.Mimicry explains the

way an insect which changes colour through camouflage does so in order tobecome invisible; as it disappears, it loses irreparably its distinctness. Ratherthan a sign for its surroundings, camouflage acts as a negative signifier, asign of non-being, which effaces rather than produces connotational value.

This has nothing to do with ‘the art object carrying associations to or con-noting things in the world’ but refers to ‘the spatial lure of objects’ and ‘thecoming-into-being of the subject in the scopic field’.26

The two large wall pieces could be said to demonstrate an anthropor-phism of this kind. Ostensibly a reference to decorative schemes such aswallpaper and the implied idea of art as wallpaper,27 the shape and colourschemes in both works attempt a sort of camouflage: printed on flatposter paper rather than quality artist’s paper, the sheets form a smoothsurface with the wall. The colour scheme extends the play on the work asbeing identical with the wall, being an addition or even an adornment, oralternatively, an interference, a disturbance. The most basic interferencewith a white wall is a mark. Grey could be considered its archetypal colour.The colour scheme in both White on White and Grey on Grey makes refer-ence to this. Physical make-up and the siting of the works perform both anappearance and a non- or dis-appearance; the works oscillate between walldecoration, interference/noise and camouflage. More specifically, the intri-cate repetitive pattern of these pieces with its ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ quality, as already described, constitutes the viewer in a way whichFer has noted as being characteristic of hallucinations, as ‘that swingbetween an intensification of vision … to a kind of blanking’ or ‘effacing ofthe subject’.28

It is this swing to which the second part of the title of this article: ‘howpictures come alive or play dead’ alludes. As Alex Potts has said of installa-tion art and its relationship to the viewer:

Installation has become part of the general fabric of things in contemporaryculture, and in a way, art feeds on this situation … lulling us into mesmerized


24. Briony Fer, ‘Objectsbeyond Objecthood’,Oxford Art Journal, 22: 2, 1999, pp. 25–36.

25. ibid., p. 35.

26. ibid.

27. It was only after myFrankfurt exhibitionthat I came across anarticle which includeda description ofchangeable wallpaperin the Prada shop inNew York designed byRem Koolhaas: ‘Thisimmense space … isthe site for an installa-tion in the artisticsense of the term:structures and displayunits are ‘hung’ likeartworks, while theimmense wallpaperpasted right along onewall (the width of theblock) can also bechanged like anartwork.’ ChantalBéret, ‘Shed,Cathedral orMuseum’, in MaxHollein and ChristophGrunenberg (eds),Shopping: A Century ofArt and ConsumerCulture (exhibition catalogue, SchirnKunsthalle, Frankfurtand Tate Liverpool),Ostfildern-Ruit: HatjeCantz Publishers,2002, p. 78.

28. Fer, ‘Objects beyondObjecthood’, p. 35.


fascination with the spectacle … at the same time stopping us short, inducingus to reflect on the enticements and disenchantments involved … it engulfsus at the same time that it can make us aware of the framings and closuresthat are also part of the substance of contemporary, consumerist spectacles.29

In this way, such work – instead of being wholly entrenched in the specta-cle, or totally resisting it – can be shown to have relevance within a broadercultural context.

SummaryI have shown how the application of theoretical insights – the ‘post-production’ of the title – as a form of documentation can assist an artist inelucidating a process that was initially approached in a mostly pragmaticfashion. Nicholas Davey’s idea of a hermeneutical aesthetics was drawnupon to justify the viability of this endeavour. The concept of performativityhas been deployed to trace the cultural significations of the medium, theexhibition venue, the particular works in the exhibition and the place ofthe viewer. Special consideration was given to the hallucinatory quality ofthe work and the role of repetition with regard to the performative constitu-tion of the viewing subject. In this way, the work is deemed to function asparticipating in as well as resisting the wider cultural trend of spectacularcommodity production and consumption. It is suggested that the insightsgained through such theoretically inflected documentation or post-produc-tion become foundational for further practice, both for other artists andmyself. This is equally true, whether post-production relates to the practiceof theory or artistic practice, ideally both. In a future article, I plan to inves-tigate the particular way in which post-production feeds into productionboth theoretically and practically.

References

Althusser, Louis (2000), ‘Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects’ (1969), inPaul du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman (eds), Identity: A Reader, London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 31–38.

Béret, Chantal (2002), ‘Shed, Cathedral or Museum’, in Max Hollein and ChristophGrunenberg (eds), Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture (exhibitioncatalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Tate Liverpool), Ostfildern-Ruit:Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. 78.

Birnbaum, Daniel (2001), ‘From the White Cube to Super Houston, Five Shows inthe Portikus’, Parkett, 63, pp. 187–93.

Buchloh, B. (1984), ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October, 30 (Fall), pp. 82–119.

Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, NewYork and London: Routledge.

—— (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York andLondon: Routledge.

Davey, Nicholas (2005), ‘Aesthetic f(r)iction: the conflicts of visual experience’,Journal of Visual Art Practice, 4: 2 + 3, pp. 135–49

Derrida, Jacques (1993), Memoirs of the Blind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Didi-Huberman, Georges (1999), Ähnlichkeit und Berührung, Archäologie,Anachronsimus und Ähnlichkeit des Abdrucks, Cologne: Dumont.


29. Potts, p. 19.


Fer, Briony (1999), ‘Objects beyond Objecthood’, Oxford Art Journal, 22: 2,pp. 25–36.

—— (2001), ‘The Somnambulist’s Story: Installation and the Tableau’, Oxford ArtJournal, 24: 2, pp. 75–92.

Foucault, Michel (1977), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays andInterviews, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Kwon, Miwon (1997), ‘One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specificity’, October,80 (Spring), pp. 85–110.

Osborne, Peter (1996), ‘Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler’, inPeter Osborne (ed.), A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, London andNew York: Routledge.

—— (2001), ‘Installation, Performance, or What?’, Oxford Art Journal, 24: 2, pp.147–54.

Potts, Alex (2001), ‘Installation and Sculpture’, Oxford Art Journal, 24: 2, pp. 5–24.

Salih, Sara (2002), Judith Butler, London and New York: Routledge.

Taylor, Mark C. (2000), The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture,Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Suggested citationPelzer-Montada, R. (2007), ‘Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead’,

Journal of Visual Arts Practice 6: 3, pp. 229–243, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.229/1.

Contributor detailsRuth Pelzer-Montada is lecturer in Art and Visual Culture in the Centre for Visualand Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art and practising artist with focus onprintmaking/installation. He is completing a practice-led Ph.D. at Duncan ofJordanstone College of Art, Dundee, on the significance of repetition in relation tothe theory–practice relationship. Contact: Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies,Edinburgh College of Art, Evolution House, 78 West Port, Edinburgh EH1 2LE.Tel.: 0131 221 6174Fax: 0131 221 6163E-mail: [email protected]



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Andrew Grassie: Document First

AbstractThe following artists pages reproduce five paintings made by Andrew Grassiebetween 2003–7. They have been selected by the artist and the editors to demon-strate how the documenting of a work of art can become the subject of a work itself.Andrew Grassie was a speaker at Did Hans Namuth kill Jackson Pollock? TheProblem of Documenting the Creative Process symposium, Chelsea College of Art,2007. He wrote in his abstract, “It is true that the ‘Documentation of Artworks’whether they be my own or other artists has become a central concern in my prac-tice. I will attempt to explain how this has come about and what implications theremay be. From my initial awareness of becoming the narrator of my own story, ofstanding back and painting myself painting, to the creation of implausible exhibi-tions that never actually existed. I hope to examine how the actual media and tech-nique of working closely from a photographic source correlates to this detachmentand comments on the artwork itself. It may touch upon the supposed neutrality ofthe ‘slavish copy’ within art photography and the position of authorship, or thenotion of faking your own work. Further more, the gradual documentation of anartist’s work creates a kind of mausoleum for them and a monument to their life’sachievement. Aside from the issues of ego and the market’s vested interests, thereseems to be an appetite from a public’s perspective to steal a glimpse behind the artobject as if they might capture some of the magical process that goes into creativity.It seems to me that there are more and more ‘preserved’ artists studios and archivesaround. This ‘behind the scenes’ glimpse has always fascinated me and I may looka little at whether this actually reveals anything other than a hall of mirrors.”

245

KeywordsDocumentationPaintingProcess

JVAP 6 (3) pp. 245–250 © Intellect Ltd 2007

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Figure 1: ‘Abstract Painting ’89’, 12.9 x 19.8cm, Tempera on Paper on Board, 2007.Courtesy of Maureen Paley.





Figure 3: ‘The Framing of the Painting: Derbyshire Frames’, 12 x 18cm, Temperaon Paper on Board, 2003.Courtesy of Maureen Paley.

Figure 2: ‘The Making of the Painting’, 12 x 18cm, Tempera on Paper on Board,2002.Courtesy of Maureen Paley.



Figure 4: ‘The Photographing of the Painting: FXP Photography’, 12 x 18cm,Tempera on Paper on Board, 2004.Courtesy of Maureen Paley.

Figure 5: ‘Private: Office.’ 15.1 x 24.3cm, Tempera on Paper on Board, 2006.Courtesy of Maureen Paley.


Suggested citationGrassie, A. (2007), ‘Andrew Grassie: Document First’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice,

6: 3, pp. 245–250, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.245/1.

Contributor detailAndrew Grassie was educated at St. Martin’s School of Art BA Hons (1984–1988)and the Royal College of Art 1988–1990 (MA Painting). Recent solos shows includeInstallation, Maureen Paley, London (2006), Private, Sperone Westwater, New York,(2006) and New Hang, Art Now, Tate Britain, London in 2005. Group shows since2004 include Very Abstract Hyper Figurative, Thomas Dane, London; The Studio,Dublin City Art Gallery; Wrong Galerie Klosterfelde, Berlin; Territory, The ArtsGallery, University of the Arts, London; News from Nowhere, Lucy Mackintosh,Lausanne. Switzerland; Edge of the Real, Whitechapel Gallery, London; GalleriaFabjbasaglia, Rimini, Italy; In Search of the Real George Elliot, The Hatton Gallery.Newcastle; If You Go Down To The Woods Today, Rockwell, London; John Moores23, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and Size Matters, Arts Council Touring Show, UK.





ApocotropesDutton and PeacockThe Dog and DuckDutton and Swindells Steve Dutton Coventry School of Art and Design,

Coventry University

AbstractThe article focuses on the relationship between the documentation of an artwork and the art work itself by citing two projects by the artists Steve Duttonand Steve Swindells. The article suggests that the artists were attempting to blurthe relationships between the work of art and its documentation by creatingboth simultaneously.

These photos (Apocotropes) were made by the then collaborative duo ofDutton and Peacock (Steve Dutton and Percy Peacock) back in or around1999/2000. Many of the concerns we were working with then ring true forme still, particularly the question, ‘where is the work?’

Being at a loss to know what to do and how to proceed in our new stu-dio after a period when we had been teaching a lot and not having any timeto work, we set about creating a ‘fake’ site of production. If we could not‘actually’ work then maybe we could just pretend. We imagined what thespace would look like in the production of some as yet unidentifiable artwork which we would have liked to have been making. Of course by creatingwhat was effectively a stage set we began to occupy the space in a slightlydifferent way, ‘acting’ as artists allowed us to start to feel like artists again.

Inevitably as we began to think that something interesting might behappening we realized that we needed to document the process (as artists‘proper’ documenting ourselves as artists ‘acting’).This was not straightfor-ward though. We were aware that by documenting the process we wereputting it somewhere which might stop us from being able to consider itstill as acting. By framing it, we were of course freezing it, and making itinto art. In the process of documenting this work we found that certain‘sets’ and certain photographs of the sets were more engaging than others.The act of documenting, by its act of framing (actually staging the stage)was starting to generate the work without there actually being any ‘work’ todocument in the first place.

Although we took the usual huge amount of photos of the process theonly photos that meant anything to us were the ones we were tightly framing.So, after initially just taking snaps of the process we decided to get more


Keywordsart/documentationinstallation/

performancetext/image

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formal about it and set up a large format camera at the end of the studiospace in a fixed position. We made a number of sets in this way and foundthe three shown here to be the most interesting for us.

A piece of work made six years later by myself and Steve Swindells goesinto the matter further. The text piece ‘Tales from the Dog and Duck’, withslight variations was exhibited twice, firstly as part of our show ‘Text + Work =Work’ at Text + Work, The Arts Institute at Bournemouth in early 2006, fol-lowed by the version shown here, which was shown as part of our installa-tion ‘Tales from the Dog and Duck’, shown at Kookmin Gallery in Seoullater in that same year. The Text was installed as a large solid block of texton both occasions, making it awkward to read. The text attempted toaddress itself as a work in its own right, refusing to be demoted either tothe status of reflection or document, or promoted to the status of art.

It could be said that the aim of both the photographs and the text was todisrupt the relationships between what is supposedly a document, a work,a critical reading, a story or a performance and to address the question ofwhether any of these classifications are of any use to us whatsoever. If any-thing, the approach to documentation, be it through a text or an image, wasto make another set of relations, which would themselves be in need ofdocumentation at some point further down the line.

Steve DuttonJuly 2007

252 Steve Dutton


253Apocotropes, Dutton and Peacock, The Dog and Duck, Dutton and Swindells


We write, in the presence of a potential, as it were, of objects of art placedin a gallery, with an over-arching remit which concerns the production ofform with uncertain intent; or to be more precise the production of formthat is unable to set its sights on anything other than the site of its ownproduction. This potential vagrancy creates ‘hungry’ circumstances; any formis under pressure by being traded, collected and ultimately tested as to itsperformance as a piece of work. Its very performance is under scrutiny fromthe critically reflective demand of the space and its curator. This compels usto ask something of this division, between the production of form and theproduction of meaning in respect of what makes art work. We imagine, ini-tially, that the divisions are propositional, for the sake of a moniker per-haps, or to suggest the presence of a critically engaged practice orinstitution, the assumption being that an exhibition suggests a resolutiontowards meaning, whereas rejections in the studio intimates practice assomething other to meaning. This would make sense considering the loca-tion of the gallery within an academic institution and an aura it might seekto create. In terms of production, which is the work and where is meaningreally situated? The issue within these ‘tales’ then, is not only the contentand visual style in which they may be publicly presented, but rather the sug-gestion that they might collapse into academic observance, protocol andpotential closure and if they do, the proposition that this closure may elimi-nate their potential as art. After all, is not an exhibition, in terms of artisticpractice at least, all about the openness of the work itself and, the work, thelabour, of the reader or viewer in interpretation? In order to stimulate apresence of work within the ‘Dog and Duck’, our approach to the exhibition

254 Steve Dutton


is one of (mild) resistance. This resistance is itself made visible with theaid of strategic refusals, one of which is, most crucially, the refusal to exile aprofound sense of doubt from the idea of work – so a subtle system offeints hazards a form of existence as work. We propose then that these‘tales’ are to be conceived as ‘work’ in a reciprocal relationship to whateveris not in the ‘Dog and Duck’. We liken this process to collage, where wemight meld documentary significance adjacent to the uninformative, deco-rative or fictive. In short, the ‘Dog and Duck’ is rendered into the context ofthe processes of work by being placed within the space of ‘work’, attachingitself to the not so unique aura of the art work, that is, on this occasion, thegallery itself. We are interested in the fact that a series of tales and workboth may operate in the interstices between reading, looking and listening,which involves not just the production of writing, but also graphic or archi-tectural design and a horizon of modalities that may be quite different to aworld of cultural theorizing. We are already prone to producing unstableinscriptions on the image/text boundary; the incentive being these uncer-tainties may lead to quasi-theoretical or quasi-poetic eruptions within theconventions of contemporary cultural production. The destination of ‘Talesfrom the Dog and Duck’ is not only unknown at the point of productionbut, in a get out clause familiar to many frustrated arts administrators, con-tinuously evolving. In its defence, against accusations of clear intent, theresistance to protocol and closure in the production of tales reveals strangedistances, borne out of the process of collage itself. These distances lie inthe wake of a resistance to another aspect of work, of forced labour (whichis often pushed to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual andhis/her progeny) sidling toward a furious passion for the idea of work as afundamental aspect of being alive. Relief to forced labour is often found inthe ‘Dog and Duck’. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, thisimpossible tension between work as one thing and work as another, we arecaught in its cast as it becomes a sacred halo under which we are transfixed.We will never know if we are truly emancipated from the thing to which weare indebted for setting us free. The obligation to work never ceases itsinterrogation, its registration of demand: it institutionalizes, professionalizesand rewards its own pursuit with more work. Work works. Likewise, for theprofessional artist, work can only ever be traded as a value if it ‘works’; thatis, if it ‘does’ something. In contemporary art terms, successful work canrange from appearing to disturb or disrupt the norm, shake the masses outof their semi-hypnotized states, critically affect, stir the emotions, send usto sleep, affect social change, affect magic, make money or maintain acultural hierarchy, amongst a host of other hierarchies. In seeming oppositionto this, the amateur artist does not think of his/her creations as work, butas something silhouetted against work. It is precisely the sensibility of ahobby or interest in relation to work which makes it pleasurable and gives asense of value to the process. Does the amateur consider if their creations are‘working’? Does the amateur even consider the idea of ‘work’ at all? Theaffectation of art as work serves to delineate that which is professionalagainst that which is not, that which is serious against that which is flippantand this delineation is understood through the presence of text, or criticaldebate. It is a depressing thought that the professional makes ‘work’ and‘texts’, the amateur makes ‘pictures’ and ‘stories’, and the ‘Dog and Duck’

255Apocotropes, Dutton and Peacock, The Dog and Duck, Dutton and Swindells


is a site of convergence that serves both. A similar division was made in theexcellent, but sadly now defunct, American/Australian art magazine Art/Text through the 1990s. In this case, the signal of the word text tells us thatthe art is there to be read, like any other sign in the complex web of signsthat make up our worlds. The effect is to legitimatize the untethered effectsof the work by framing it within the cupped hands of theoretical critiqueand thus integrity. This cupping never really allows theory to touch thework but carefully frames it within its protective enclosure, indeed, often inorder to protect it from the critical aspects of the very theory by which itseeks to be framed. Victor Burgin amongst others has always maintainedthis theoretical cupping was subordinate to the demands of the art market.In short, the presence of text does what countless thousands of art stu-dents (and numerous artists) have felt it necessary to do over the years;that is, to justify and legitimize the idea of the work as ‘work’, which oncedone, allows the work (or indeed the market and the pub) to proceed asnormal, as pictures and stories. What is at stake in the ‘Dog and Duck’ isthe complex delineation of a profession.

Dutton and Swindells 2006

Suggested citationDutton, S. (2007), ‘Apocotropes, Dutton and Peacock, The Dog and Duck,

Dutton and Swindells’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice 6: 3, pp. 251–256, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.251/1

Contributor detailsSteve Dutton works as an artist both collaboratively with Swindells and individually.His projects have been exhibited throughout the United Kingdom and internation-ally, in Txtrapolis at NAFA in Singapore, Kookmin Gallery in Seoul, Text + Work inPoole UK, CAFKA, in Kitchener, Ontario; Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Artin Toronto and Sheppard Fine Arts, Reno. Artwords press has recently published‘Misleading Epiphenomena’, a collaboration between Dutton, Swindells and archi-tectural theorist, Barbara Penner. He is Professor in Creative Practice at CoventrySchool of Art and Design. Contact: Professor in Creative Practice, CoventryUniversity, Priory Street, Coventry, CV1 5FB, UK. Tel: 024 768 88623E-mail: [email protected]

256 Steve Dutton




Considering If…Then…Else…Mary Maclean University of Reading

AbstractArtists engage in the production of their work through a number of strategies.This written reflection investigates the methodologies of my practice as an artist,focusing on the development of an individual work, a single photograph. Itexplores a discussion of three fundamental elements of the photographic image:time, space and light. Reference is made to the critical writing of Marc Augé.Literary and visual influences are explored in the effort to locate the intentionsfor the work. The work’s material form takes its cue from the underlying conceptualaspiration.

This work was made in collaboration with the Visual Intelligences ResearchProject at The Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, LancasterUniversity and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It waspublished as part of the exhibition Inspiration to Order first shown at CaliforniaState University Stanislas’ Gallery in October 2006.


KeywordsartAugédocumentationphotographyprocess

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258 Mary Maclean


259Considering If…Then…Else…

Figure 1:If…Then…Else, silvergelatin photograph,96cm x 109cm, 2006.


We … are animated by a constant fragile calculus of remembering and forget-ting, a constant tug and pull between memory and oblivion, each an invertedtrace of the other.

(Young 2004)

Eccentric Spaces is on at Frith Street gallery. I make a connection betweenthe ‘eccentric’ of the title and the slant the term is given in an essay ChrisHorrocks (2001) wrote for I’m Wary at Five Years gallery, linking it to anunstable, precarious, away-from-the-centre mode of viewing. My mind wasnot really on exhibitions. There was no focus beforehand on what I was goingto see. When I enter the gallery space a film is running, its imagesengulfed by the soundtrack. It projects in an indeterminate bluish hue. Afigure flees through the enclosed spaces, its movement the result ofstartling agility. Images of baroque fountained opulence flood the narra-tive, offering a space of uncertain fantasy. The film’s architecture is expe-rienced uneasily – it is neither completely the fictions of a scaled-downmodel nor the realities of an existing space. The projection unfolds in arhapsody of scenes that are furtive, archetypical, unreal, urgent. I amreminded of relationships to other places which are not experienced: apostcard I have in a drawer – Potsdam, Schloss Sanssouci, Musikzimmer –shows a view of an interior I have never visited, the narratives attaching toits existence expanding endlessly. Downstairs in the gallery a strangealliance of improbable romance and familiar mundanity takes place. Thefilm shows in a succession of lingering moments a sequence of folliesand grottoes. The camera is static as a matter of fact. These obduratepieces of architecture are tied to the present moment through the incidentof ongoing sound and movement captured in the film. The follies mighthave been built with reference to the artifice of ruin; in the contemporaryworld they become that very thing. More than engaging with the erosionsof the past, they seem to point to a fascination with the incomplete, theyet-to-transpire.

I am in the library. There is the usual flat winter light coming in from thewindow and some library users more or less absorbed at the desks. Thespace is on the third floor so the scene outside is sliced off, the top of trees,the top of buildings, a partial segment of a network of roads. The space out-side seems infinite, the space inside sticks to itself.

Next time I visit I bring a 35mm camera and use about half a film. LaterI make a planned visit with a medium format camera and tripod. So muchof the sense of the finished work spins out from this first moment with thecamera. I am aware of the imperative to make optimum use of the time.Each decision attaching to the how of photography seems crucial. I tend touse more film than I need in an effort to ensure that I achieve the presenceof the initial concept. I make choices which go against what I want, thatseem unlikely, just to split open the chance of locating what I think is there.I am conscious of the variations in the light. These subtleties affect what Ihave considered I may be able to achieve, the sense of re-imagining thatfirst slate grey encounter with the space.

You know, that was the first story I wrote. But it’s not wholly a story … it’s akind of essay, and then I think that in that story you get a feeling of tiredness

260 Mary Maclean


and scepticism, no? Because you think of Menard as coming at the end of a verylong literary period, and he comes at the moment when he finds he doesn’t wantto encumber the world with any more books. And that, although his fate is to bea literary man, he’s not out for fame. He’s writing for himself and he decides todo something very, very unobtrusive, he’ll rewrite a book that is already there, andvery much there, Don Quixote. And then, of course, that story has the idea …that every time a book is read or reread, then something happens to the book.

(Borges 1967)

Some years ago I visited an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery whichwas a collection of August Sander’s photographs. I retain a dutiful recollec-tion of Sander’s highly skilled vision but also a more explicit memory of aphotograph of two women, the arms resting beside the stomach, the waythe fabric of the dress hung across this stomach, the solidity of the stancewhich seemed to offer an exact correspondence to unvisited memories ofvarious relations in Germany from my mother’s side. I could not reconcilethe detachment of Sander’s approaches with the power of this one image toelicit such a sensate, unbidden response.

Within the unpeopled architectural space that I photograph, the natureof the space is highlighted, encouraging a focus on the qualities adhering toits structure. The chosen spaces are anonymous, off to the side, unremark-able. But they act as powerful witnesses to a mode of existence and carrythe traces of that existence.

We are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypo-thetical, following its traces wherever they appear on the surface…. The wordconnects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thingthat is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

(Calvino 1996)

Near the end of a study trip to New York a friend recommends a visit to theSwiss Institute where ‘Five Billion Years’ is showing. A slide projector runsin the gallery space, throwing a light square onto the wall. Within the mech-anism is a gathering of dust, projecting a just discernable opacity on thewall. The projection alternates between sharpness and blur as the lensworks to establish focal distance, the ongoing rhythm tracks a movement ofinflation and deflation, paralleling the act of breathing.

Sometimes a suspicion is in my mind that to photograph a space is notto interpret, make new or disturb but simply to avail yourself of a copyingdevice which links itself uncritically to the perception of reality.

I decide to introduce the device of drawing into the photographic space.The act of cutting into the surface of the photograph seems exciting, momen-tarily transgressive, breaking its apparently unbreakable connection to reality.The pared-down language of an intricate arrangement of lines allows me toimpose a mesh of fantasy across the cool, untouchable surface. I work with aselection of ready-made vistas, mountain backdrops, lakeside scenes takenfrom slides of anonymous holiday scenes that I collected. I trace elements ofthese back onto the photographs. The two languages remain irreconcilable.These efforts do not resolve themselves into completed pieces of work. Theydo, however, allow me to move towards a new position of thought.



A complex relation to the functions of time seems possible within theindividual photograph. Instead of a succession of filmed fractions of a sec-ond as experienced in film, the photograph makes only an abrupt, singleinsertion into the world yet succeeds in filling that insertion with a mass ofunstated relations to time. The single frame seems to imply events prior toand succeeding the moment of the image, working uncannily on an incon-clusiveness that we might experience in the perception of time.

We are all sensitive to the splendours of beginnings, to the rare quality ofthose moments when the present is freed from the past without as yet lettinganything shine through of the future that sets it into motion. Beyond theirsadness and desolation, what is fascinating about the shapeless scenery ofthe most developed urban life (airports, parking lots, cement covered squareswhere anonymous silhouettes pass each other without stopping) is theirunconscious resemblance to the almost abstract, barely outlined spaces ofcourtly romances…. If one day we should lose this dark desire for encounterand renewal that moves us now and then, would we not be dead without real-izing it, before our time, thereby taking away from death the poetic power thatis attached to everything we can ‘see coming’ from afar?

(Augé 2004)

After I have processed the negatives I start to imagine how I can achieve adeadpan quality to the image. There should be an absence of weight, eachelement level with itself.

When I look at the negatives, I am surprised at the way the light hasemphasized and de-emphasized certain details. One frame includes someinstitutional furniture that seems to make the image too heavy. The posi-tion of the camera in another gives a dramatic perspective to the edge ofthe table so this has to go too. I set the camera at close range, focusing onelements that seemed peripheral to the purpose of the space, part of atable, a section of thickly painted wall, the view from the window. This selec-tion, which looks at a small part only of the overall space, is intended topropose to the viewer a recognition of further moments and spaces,tracked through a sensory response to the image. The metallic hue gives adull reflectivity, implicating the viewer back into the space of the image.

Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface.(Hofmannsthal 1996)

I decide to attend a symposium ‘Lost Horizons’ at Camberwell College ofArt. The symposium is an element of a project circling the questions ofcultural eclecticism, global structures and the representations of geo-graphical site. As part of the proceedings Juan Cruz is introduced. As he isabout to move to the front, there is a fumbled exchange – will he describehis contribution? Shaking his head, he is already in the mode of perform-ing his work. Over a sequence of 80 slides, which show a Spanish town’sbuildings, roads and adjacent views, the artist delivers an inventory of thetown’s physical layout, almost in the language of a surveyor’s report withoccasional hints at the urban site’s historical links to industry. It is voicedin a series of abrupt cuts across English and Spanish, each language

262 Mary Maclean


segment isolated in self-containment but lodged in a continuity throughthe flat line of the artist’s voice. This flatness, forming an archive ofreduced statements transmitted through a web of aural and visual threads,seems to imbue the work inversely with a far greater resonance than statedon its surface.

Julia Kristeva is in a discussion on her new work of fiction at the FrenchInstitute. The conversation suggests it will have as its focus the divergenceand convergence of the paths of theoretical writing and writing which formsitself around the structures of the novel.

In part it is a defence of the attractions of writing through the device offiction, working through a sensorial language that becomes possible in thenovel. This intimate endeavour is new; she discusses ‘risk’ as the creativeact’s precise word. She describes the form of the novel is ‘a narrative ofmetaphysical inquiry’. This seems to centre fiction back amongst the great-est critical undertakings. I am fascinated by this discussion of the inter-twined positions of the essay and the novel. The oscillation across fact,flight and fantasy seems to be the very point to which we continually return.Driving home I hear an interview with her on Radio 3’s ‘Night Waves’.Elliptically she circles the same points, offering responses to the samequestions, structuring the reply with the same vocal intonation so that Ifind myself wrapped in a curious reception process, unable to distinguishbetween precedent and hindsight.

I decide to revisit the paradox of density and emptiness. As a student Isaw Constable’s cloud studies in one of the galleries at the Victoria & AlbertMuseum. These studies were so empty, seemingly void of a subject, yetwere weighty, showing the speed and drag of the paint. They had anassertive completion about them, very much physically present, but tied toa description of semi-translucent ephemera.

When I first got in the building I did not want to ask anybody wherethese paintings were – I just wanted to stumble across them with the helpof a map. There were two floors with British art and I wandered throughboth sections. I did not see them. I asked one of the guards who gave me along explanation of how they used to hang in the Henry Cole wing but shereally was not sure where they were now and that I should go to the Printsand Drawing Study area and they would be able to help me. Through aheavy glass door, I entered another environment. Sign your name andaddress and the woman over there will be able to help you. Yes, she knewthe studies I was referring to and they were on second floor – about ten ofthem, she said. Would I like to look at the catalogue of all the works byConstable held by the Victoria & Albert Museum? After apologizing for notbeing able to find it as it was only her second day at work since everythinghad moved there, the catalogues did turn up and she brought them overand said I was very welcome to look at them and I could come back anotherday and ask to have works brought out as it was too late today. I leafedthrough the catalogues, extremely similar versions of each other, and saw awhole lot of reference numbers at the back in the category ‘cloud studies’but they did not match up to the images or the descriptions. I eventuallyfound the paintings and they did form quite a large group. But there wereonly two images which were totally clouds, the others, although the mainpoint was the sky, had scenes of activity, suggestions of landscape.



264 Mary Maclean

In choosing an interior viewpoint when encountering a space, it is thephysically contained entity I want to emphasize; the space into which thevisitor is absorbed so that a mutuality transpires between the individualand the physicality of the surrounding space. These spaces are availableand encountered countless times in everyday life. They are places in whichthe individual might not want to linger.

The photographs are large scale. There is a physicality to the work thatruns counter to the habitual thin membrane of the photographic surface.I prepare an aluminium sheet, brushing layers of silver gelatin onto thesurface, so that the image has an embedded quality, seeming to existinside the metal. There is a specific tactility to the work not normallyassociated with the photographic; each image bearing the autography ofits making. Small irregularities and the drag of the brush slightly disturbthe perfection of the photographic finish, creating the sense of an imagethat is not quite pinned down. The uncertainty is worked into the sensu-ousness of the surface. The medium of the silver gelatin captures anunexpected depth and in this sense the encounter for the viewer with theimage is slowed.

I am reminded of a hallucinatory moment in Borges’ Funes theMemorious (1971):

We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leavesand tendrils and fruit that make up a grapevine. He knew by heart the formsof the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare them inhis memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he hadonly seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the RíoNegro the night before the Quebracho uprising. These memories were notsimple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermalsensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Twoor three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but eachreconstruction had required a whole day.

I am curious about the qualities of emptiness – faceless, withdrawn,absent, offering through this facelessness a screen that fascinates, inverselyshot through with the potential to signify.

I make some last decisions about what I will include in the frame ofIf…Then…Else…

I want the work to achieve a restlessness between its elements, giving ita perplexing evenness in priority so that the location of the ‘subject’becomes hard to track. The distinguishing features of the interior spaceunhinge themselves: they are made to exist in relation to another, moreabstracted space of reverie and escape. The work ties itself to a single place,a library, meshed into the particularities of that site. At the same time itresists devotion to this specificity, opening up the image to a wider spacethat is recognized as culturally systematized.



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References Anger, Kenneth (1953), Eaux d’Artifice, running time: 12 minutes, starring: Camilla

Salvatorelli, directed by: Kenneth Anger, Italy/USA.

Augé, Marc (2004), ‘The Three Figures of Oblivion’, in Oblivion, Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press, p. 81.

Borges, Jorge Luis (1971), Funes the Memorious, Labyrinths, Penguin ModernClassics, p. 91.

—— (1998), interview with Richard Burgin 1967, ‘The Living Labarynth of Literature;Some Major Work; Nazis; Detective Stories; Ethics, Violence, and the Problemof Time…’, in Richard Burgin (ed.), Conversations, Minneapolis, University Pressof Mississipi.

Calvino, Italo (1996), ‘Exactitude’, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York:Vintage, p. 77.

Constable, John (1776–1837), Study of cirrus clouds about 1822, Study of clouds datedSept. 5, 1822, visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, January 2005.

Cruz, Juan (1997), Sancti Petri.

Eccentric Spaces (April 2005), group exhibition of Kenneth Anger, Edwina Ashton,Volker Eichelmann, John Riddy, Thomas Schutte and Bridget Smith at FrithStreet Gallery London.

Eichelmann, Volker (2004), Folllies and Grottoes, ongoing project.

Five Billion Years (April 2004), group exhibition including François Curlet,Philippe Decrauzat, Ceal Floyer, Tony Matelli, Jonathan Monks and HiroshiSugimoto, curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, Swiss Institute, 495 Broadway,New York.

Floyer, Ceal (2002), Autofocus Light projection with Leica Pradovit P-150 projector andUnicol telescopic tilting stand, Dimensions variable.

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1996), quoted in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, ItaloCalvino, Vintage, Exactitude, p. 77.

Horrocks, Christopher (September 2001), Anamorphosis Now, unpublished essay onI’m Wary, a collaboration between Mary Maclean and Sally Morfill at Five YearsGallery London.

Kristeva, Julia (March 2006), the theorist, the novelist with Professor MarianHobson and Professor Stephen Frosh, on the occasion of the publication ofMurder in Byzantium, French Institute.

Lost Horizons (May 2000), a project by Melanie Jackson, Camberwell College ofArts.

Sander, August (June 1997), ‘In Photography There Are no Unexplained Shadows!’,National Portrait Gallery London.

Young, James E. (2004), foreword to Oblivion by Marc Augé, Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press.

Suggested citationMaclean, M. (2007), ‘Considering If...Then...Else...’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice 6: 3,

pp. 257–267, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.257/1.

Contributor detailsMary Mclean is currently Lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the University ofReading. Mary Maclean studied at the Royal College of Art, the Rijk AcademyAmsterdam and Glasgow School of Art. She was Visiting Fellow in Painting at

266 Mary Maclean


Winchester School of Art. Awards include a Pollock Krasner Foundation Award andthe Abbey Award in Painting at the British School at Rome.

Solo shows include: Before, The Room, London (2007); Almost Nothing, NeutralSpace, Brighton (2006); Somewhere ... fast, Belfast Exposed, Belfast (2004); and StillMoves, East 73rd gallery, London (2002). She has participated in group shows includ-ing Trace ... between record and recall, The University of Greenwich (2006), No par-ticular place to go, Apt gallery, London (2004), Fiona Crisp, Mary Maclean, Ozhang,Seven Worcester Terrace, Bath (2003) and Residual Property, Portfolio gallery,Edinburgh (2000). Contact: E-mail: [email protected]



Index – Volume 6

Baldwin, M., Ramsden, M., and Harrison, C., Now They Are Surrounded, pp. 13–31.

Barrett, E., Experiential learning in practice as research: context, method, knowledge,pp. 115–124.

Beech, A., Don’t fight it: the embodiment of critique, pp. 61–71.

Breakell, S., and Worsley, V., Collecting the traces: an archivist’s perspective, pp. 175–189.

Crouch, C., Praxis and the reflexive creative practitioner, pp. 105–114.

Dutton, S., Apocotropes, Dutton and Peacock, The Dog and Duck, Dutton andSwindells, pp. 249–253.

Fortnum, R., and Smith, C., The Problem of Documenting Fine Art Practices andProcesses, pp. 167–174.

Francis, M.A., Dirty work: art beyond ‘autonomy’, pp. 33–44.

Grassie, A., Andrew Grassie: Document First, pp. 245–248.

Halsall, F., No medium just a shell: how works of art configure their medium, pp. 45–59.

Imani, Y., Knowledge creation, business and art: exploring the contradictions andcommonalities, pp. 141–153.

Jarvis, M., Articulating the tacit dimension in artmaking, pp. 201–213.

Johnson, M., ‘The stone that was cast out shall become the cornerstone’: the bodilyaesthetics of human meaning, pp. 89–103.

Maclean, M., Considering If...Then...Else..., pp. 257–267.

McVittie, F., Top-down and bottom-up approaches to actor training, pp. 155–163.

Niedderer, K., and Reilly, L., New knowledge in the creative disciplines – proceed-ings of the first, Experiential Knowledge Conference 2007, pp. 81–87.

Pelzer-Montada, R., Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead, pp. 229–243.

Riley, H., Beyond the horizon: future directions for the teaching of visual arts prac-tice, pp. 73–80.

Sandino, L., Relating process: accounts of influence in the life history interview,pp. 191–199.

Smith, C., and Reilly, L., What work does the artwork do? A question for art, pp. 5–12.

Sutherland, I., and Krzys, S., Thinking with art: from situated knowledge to experi-ential knowing, pp. 125–140.

Whiteley, N., Seeing what, how and why: the ARTnews series, 1953–58, pp. 215–228.

268 JVAP 6 (3) Index © Intellect Ltd 2007

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Volume Six N

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Journal of

Visual Arts Practice Volume 6 Number 3 – 2007

167–174 Special Edition Editorial

The Problem of Documenting Fine Art Practices and Processes Rebecca Fortnum and Chris Smith

Articles

175–189 Collecting the traces: an archivist’s perspective Sue Breakell and Victoria Worsley

191–199 Relating process: accounts of influence in the life history interview Linda Sandino

201–213 Articulating the tacit dimension in artmaking Michael Jarvis

215–228 Seeing what, how and why: the ARTnews series, 1953–58 Nigel Whiteley

229–243 Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead Ruth Pelzer-Montada

245–250 Andrew Grassie: Document First Andrew Grassie

251–256 Apocotropes, Dutton and Peacock, The Dog and Duck, Dutton and Swindells

Steve Dutton

257–267 Considering If...Then...Else... Mary Maclean

268 Index

9 771470 202003

ISSN 1470-2029 6 3

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