Organizational Systems pt. 2

In my experience, it’s very easy to assume there is one right way to study and write and research and gather one’s thoughts. But the sooner you can throw out this assumption, the better. I don’t know who the “you” I’m referring to is because this really is just a reflection for me.

Said differently, I should have thrown that assumption out sooner. 

One nice thing about going through this experience with other students at different stages in the PhD is that we can share the things that work for us. One bad thing about going through this experience with other students at different stages in the PhD is that we can share the things that work for us. This is indeed both good and bad. I love learning what works for others. But with each new idea, I feel the need to test what does or doesn’t work for me. 

Ultimately, I’ve learned to trust my own instincts. After all, I have a lifetime of experience to direct what works for my brain. Why fight that? If I know it’s challenging for me to stick to a strict highlighter and post-it color system, why fight that? If taking notes in the margins doesn’t work, who cares? Just because that worked for Mark Twain doesn’t mean it has to work for me.  

So here are three things that do work for me:

Google Keep: Keeping track of notes and quotes from books is a huge challenge in writing a thesis. I tried many systems, including different databases, excel sheet templates, running word documents, etc. Eventually, I found Google Keep. It’s just Google’s very simple notes app (more on that below). It has a great tagging function and keeps everything looking clean and organized. I transcribe the quote or note into a new note and assign tags to it. Then when I need notes or quotes that I’ve gathered about walking or labor or copying, I just pull up that tag and it filters for me. A very simple app that is far more useful than the other overly engineered solutions out there.

Apple Notes App: In Bird by Bird, Ann Lamott writes about having a pen and notecard in your pocket at all times to scribble down notes and ideas. I tried that but kept leaving the pen behind. Finally, I realized that I already have a notecard in my pocket in the form of the Apple Notes App. I’ve used that app off and on for grocery lists and random reminders. Now I also use it as my “Bird by Bird” notecard. I have a few notes started for the PhD, but the most important is a running list of ideas about repetition. Just quick ramblings during those times when I need to get the good spark of thought down before it fades. While I know that the Notes App regularly backs up the notes, I don’t always trust that, so I also regularly send myself copies of the entire note via email.

Book Cart: The further I’ve gone in my reading, the more my books have gotten out of control. I looked around my small apartment/flat/condo (your choice) one day and realized that the books had exploded. I had multiple stacks in my bedroom. They were strewn about the couch and coffee table and floor. Three or four on my kitchen table. And every surface of my studio was covered in more books. I couldn’t remember where I put a book down, and when I did find it, I couldn’t remember where I left off. As a solution, I bought this little kitchen cart from Ikea and made use of some of their pegboard organizers as trays for the cart. While this doesn’t fit ALL the books, it does a far better job of organizing them than my previous system of chaos. I can move it around my space and have the highlighters, bookmarks, post-its, etc. contained. I’m quite a fan.

Organizational Systems pt. 1

It shouldn’t have been as big a surprise to me that a PhD would require improving, learning, or relearning skills. The endurance to write has been a challenge to get back. Reading art theory, philosophy, and dense texts is a muscle I’ve had to build up again. Analyzing and critiquing art has remained over the years, but learning to view my own work with an analytical eye has been an enjoyable new task. 

Through all of this, the biggest surprise is the need to build systems for organizing literary research. (And let’s face it, I should have seen this one coming.) A significant challenge in this has been establishing a pattern of organization that sticks. Over the last year and some change, I’ve started and abandoned numerous systems for study. 

Mind mapping platforms: I love the idea of these. It’s so impressive when I see other researchers and artists use them well. I’m envious when I see a presentation and the speaker pulls up this huge web of quotes and images, woven together through vague connections that sum up their thoughts. And despite my own mind feeling quite tangled, sorting out that mess on a digital platform feels so impossible. Every time I try one of these platforms I get overwhelmed by its potential and I quickly lose steam. 

Notebooks: I haven’t fully abandoned these, but I find them less and less useful for me. That’s mostly due to a bad habit of taking notes across multiple notebooks and not taking notes linearly. It’s the same bad habit I have with sketchbooks. I bounce from one sketchbook to another and skip pages throughout. I don’t know why. But I do know that it makes it very difficult to follow a thought or a history of ideas and notes. I keep trying this one, but it remains a challenge. 

Task management programs: I’ve used these in many day jobs, and here’s what I’ve learned: When you use them right and consistently, they’re the best thing ever, and when you don’t keep up with them, they become an absolute burden. I’m currently in the “not keeping up with them” period, and I feel frustrated and bogged down every time I get a notification on my phone or in my email reminding me that I haven’t accomplished a task I set for myself. 

I’ll just share these three here as this whole post is a very negative side of my PhD organizational systems. A follow-up to this post will highlight the things that ARE working.

Reading Diary: Mishandled Archive

The two required readings for the Mishandled Archives conversation were incredibly valuable for me. The main takeaways I had after reading them fall into two categories: writing style and my archive.

Writing Style
I have been in dialogue with my supervisors for some time about the use of writing style in an academic thesis. It was very helpful to read a piece of research that was woven so well with the voice of the writer/artist/researcher while still communicating the theoretical and conceptual ideas present. In my own writing, I find a swing back and forth between these two poles. I either use too much voice which drowns out the content, or I go all in on the academic side and write too dryly to be enjoyable. I’m trying to work out how to land somewhere in the middle or oscillate successfully between the two. This piece of writing was a great example of how to accomplish this.

Another insight I gained from these two readings in regard to writing style was the vast difference between short-form and long-form writing. I work in communications and spend a good part of my time condensing long reports down to very short blurbs. I enjoyed seeing how different the project was perceived merely by the difference in length. Obviously, the longer version is going to have more information to read about. But more than that, the longer version had more space to develop a voice, which gave an entirely different perception to the project. I’m now thinking about my own writing, both in my day job and in this program, and thinking about how to establish a voice quickly, or is that even needed? Not sure. But something good for me to think about. 

My Archive
The timing of this reading and conversation is very timely for me and my work. I am about to embark on making a series of work about my maternal grandfather. This is a series I’ve wanted to make for many years but have put it off until now. A big reason for putting it off all this time is due to the nature of memory and the archive in creating this kind of work. Reading the introduction to Tara Fatehi’s book brought many questions to my mind; nothing is more productive for my ideation process than filling my mind with questions. One particular question is about the use of “cross-contamination” when talking about the archive. She writes:

“It is, rather, to view it as a site of thinking and sensing that we can inhabit. A place where the ‘appositionality’ of things, to borrow Fred Morten’s word, forms a creative force for cross-contamination and new production. The drive for cross-contamination and inter-animation between artist and archive has allowed me and the histories I have been working with to mutually affect each other.”   

I like her use of “cross-contamination” here, but I think in the way I’m engaging with and employing the archive, this term doesn’t quite fit. I’m not sure what I would use instead, and that question excites me. I want to explore more ways of thinking of the archive, and more importantly, explore how I would describe my use of the archive in my own work. Does it change from series to series? (I’m certain it does). What drives each use of the archive for me? When does it feel natural or challenging or tedious or useless?

Guided by Stupidity/Guided by Silliness

For the last 15 years or so, my art practice has largely been focused on my experience with mental health. It’s hard to not make overly serious work when your mental health experience is steeped in suicidal thoughts, extreme depression, debilitating OCD, uncontrollable anxiety, and frustrations with ADHD. The importance of delivering lessons about these experiences overshadows the ease of making lighthearted or fun artwork. I’m not at all saying that these two are mutually exclusive. In fact, whenever possible, I have tried to imbue some fun into my art. But oftentimes, the weight of these topics takes precedence over finding a joke or something fun to include.

Over the last 9 months or so, however, I have had a pair of similar questions at the forefront of many of my artmaking decisions: Is it stupid? Is it silly?

I ask these questions as positively as possible. I don’t mean “stupid” or “silly” derogatorily. Neither is an insult to me. They are just simple, guiding questions that help me remember to try to include some fun wherever possible. 

The path of the art making process is littered with points of decisions. Each choice offers new choices for an artist to make and new directions to take the work. When I come up to two or more equally good decisions, I find these questions perfect for helping me progress. Between two equal decisions, I now always choose that which is stupider/sillier. 

Similarly, artists can hit a deadend in the art-making process, unable to proceed due to a lack of quality options. Again, these two questions can be a perfect tool for pushing through, carving a new path that is at least fun and lighthearted.

These questions have not failed me yet.

I wanted to make a video work for an exhibition I created about self-care, self-help, and self-medication. The final film shown was the third attempt. The first video was going to be a first-person POV video of me going on a routine walk I go on everyday. I filmed the video and began editing it to be hit with the realization that it was incredibly boring. I tried again in the vein of a first-person POV video, this time adding other self-care habits I use. This video was also incredibly boring.

Feeling stuck, I put these questions to the test. I went back to the drawing board, thinking about how to make a video about self-care habits, only this time, I let the stupid/silly threads lead me, ultimately weaving together a video far more compelling, entertaining, and impactful than the previous two could have ever been.

Addressing the Edge

I had a drawing professor in my undergrad who was always going on about “addressing the edges” whenever we made work on panel or canvas. It was of utmost importance to him that the decisions about the edges of a panel or canvas were made with full intentionality. If it was a work on paper, the paper should be displayed with equal intentionality, either framed behind glass or mounted to a panel (whose edges inevitably also needed to be addressed). Since that time, I have developed the attitude of considering the raw wood edge of a cradled panel to have the same finished effect as a frame. It’s a nothing decision, in which I hope pushes the edge to disappear from view, letting the work on the front surface of the panel stand without competition.

You see, while I get the premise behind this professor’s push for intentionality of the edge, I have grown to see this task as more akin to editing in filmmaking. I remember reading once that good editing is editing that goes unnoticed (for the most part, there are of course exceptions to this rule). When editing is noticed in a film, it is noticed because it is awkward or disjointed, often distracting from the film itself. The edge of a panel or canvas is the same for me. It can certainly be used to add or push the concept of the painting, but oftentimes these decisions are left to distract from the work on the front surface.

I found myself questioning this attitude all over again while producing a body of work for a recent exhibition. This body of work is focused on repeating a single surface in a variety of mediums, seeking to learn about the success and failure of a medium to recreate a particular surface. For this series, I recreated the same piece of oriented strand board (OSB) in ten mediums. 

When producing these works, I found myself in a mental debate about how to address the edges. I always intended to mount the works to a panel the same depth as the original OSB. This decision, I found, caused me to debate whether or not these were 2D or 3D objects. Because of the mediums I chose (drawing, photography, video, text, etc.), I had always considered them to be two-dimensional. When viewing the original OSB from the front, it can appear to be 2D, but of course this isn’t reality. The board has depth, 1/2 inches of depth, in fact. By deciding to mount the works on paper to 1/2 inch panels, I in turn made those 3D objects as well. 

I thought about drawing/photographing/printing/filming the edges of the original onto each panel, but that came with its own challenges (albeit interesting challenges with even more interesting implications). I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed with those ideas. I decided instead that it would be interesting to paint all the edges to match the original, which I remembered having one side painted red, while the other three were raw OSB. 

I pulled out the original board to mix up the paint needed, the orangy-yellow of the OSB and the red painted edge, only to discover that the board I was working from didn’t have a red edge at all. All four were raw OSB. This no longer seemed interesting to me. 

So I fell back into my old attitude of making the edge disappear, forcing these to be considered 2D rather than 3D objects. I still question if that was the right choice. But if I’m honest, time was against me and painting all edges white was the quickest (and I admit, laziest) solution.

Repetition Exhibition (IMAGINARY)

I have this idea for a repeated exhibition. The exhibition is made up of the same piece over and over on every wall. When I think of this exhibition, the repeated artwork is usually a drawing, simply because of the labor involved in attempting to recreate multiple identical drawings. I suppose you could achieve this with ceramics or painting or something else that requires the artist’s hand to reproduce. I never think of this show in terms of photography or printmaking though, because of their ease of reproducibility.

In my head, this idea is best exhibited in a large museum that has multiple galleries/rooms in the exhibition space. On every wall of every gallery is the same drawing in the same frame, hung at the same height. 

When I think about the exhibition, I’m tempted to curate it differently sometimes, maybe hang the drawings in a big grid in one room, sparse in the next, etc. But I always come back to the same desire for repetition. And while repetition isn’t fully possible because of the restraints of the gallery space, in this exhibition repetition should be sought after as far as it is possible in the artist’s/curator’s control. 

This tension between repetition and difference is something that comes up often for me, especially with this exhibition idea. Each time I talk to someone about the idea, they always offer the idea that there should be subtle changes in each drawing; that the drawings should have a different object added or be slightly different sizes in order to have something for visitors to look for (or look at). 

But I’m not interested in difference. 

I always come back to the pure attempt for repetition. I know repetition isn’t absolutely possible in drawing, which is why I often come back to that as the ideal medium to attempt repetition in.

Time is an essential part of this exhibition. While it may seem on the onset that space is the most important part, due to the focus of a gallery or museum with multiple rooms, this is a false assumption. In this exhibition, space is only there to serve time. The time needed to travel from one room to the next is vital to the audience’s experience. The realization that would come from walking out of one room into the next, only to discover more of the same drawing is what I’m most interested in. 

I think about this most often as a form of comedy, attempting to mimic the form of repetitive comedy that I’m such a big fan of. Comedians like Andy Kaufman, Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler, and Bo Burnam have all perfected this form of repetition. They each have bits where repetition is discovered throughout the joke, and each repetition causes a heightened experience. 

This exhibition is an attempt to use repetition in that same way, but I’m certain the response wouldn’t be the same. Audiences laugh when it is used as comedy because the audience is prepared to laugh. Artworld audiences aren’t prepared to laugh or have that kind of reaction. I think many viewers of this exhibition would find humor in it, and some may even laugh out loud. But I think many other visitors to the exhibition would be annoyed come room 3 or 4 or 5 after realizing they’re just going to keep seeing the same thing. The general public tends to be much more critical of art than comedy. 

You’re probably wondering what this repeated drawing would be. It is, after all, the heart of the exhibition. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what the drawing is. Sometimes I think it would just be a very banal water scene with a boat, maybe slightly stormy. Other times I think it would be a simple object like a chair. Or maybe it’s a plane in the sky just after takeoff, with some clouds and a slight landscape below. Other moments, I think it would be best as a drawing that uses a lot of repetition within the composition, like a table covered in jars or a tall stack of pillows. I’m almost positive though, that the drawing is representational.

Same Walk no. 1

This is an initial post as a dumping ground for my initial impressions following a presentation/performance using repetition as a self-fulfilling format. The presentation was given alongside other students, each of us presenting research conducted in our programs. The presentations were 15 minutes each, followed by 15 minutes of feedback by guest reviewers and those in attendance. 

While thinking about what research to share, I had the idea to make a presentation that was a mirror of itself, using the theme of my research—repetition—as the main structure for the presentation. I planned to write a short presentation and repeat it multiple times to fill the 15-minute time slot.  

I tried writing the script multiple times, but I kept getting hung up on the specific information to share. I was also equally hung up on the decision to have slides or not, and if I did have slides, what to put on the slides that wouldn’t give away the joke of the repetition too quickly. The audience would recognize a repeated image or slide much faster than they would recognize that I had repeated information verbally.

After many many failed attempts at writing the script over a couple of weeks, I decided to go on a walk to think it through. Shortly into the walk, I realized that I should write about the walk itself. I go on this walk repeatedly to work through ideas or problems in my head. Why not talk about that repetitive walk as the main framework of my presentation? 

Instinctually, I took my phone out to photograph banal moments along my walk to use as the slides, which solved that issue.

Once that decision had been made, the writing of the script went fairly quickly. The script came together in three main parts: the walk; Kierkegaard; and my programme approval. I debated a bit how short to make the script and how many times to repeat it. Once I started writing, I realized that I had too much information for it to only be one or two minutes. But I wanted a least five repetitions. This made an easy decision for me, to keep it to three minutes. The script is (and I’m writing this from memory, three weeks later):

I go on the same walk over and over and over. It’s just under two miles and in that distance I walk along the same sidewalk, past the same houses and trees. I hear the same dogs barking at me from their yards and see the same neighbors also out on their routine walks.

I go on this walk at least once daily.

The monotony of walking along the same path over and over gives the space needed for my brain to think and process and ideate, much in the same way as meditation. Thinking of repetitive acts as meditation in this way feels productive to me. 

It’s the same repetition that leads to the comfort we find in endlessly rewatching the same tv shows despite countless hours of new content created for our entertainment. It’s the same repetition that causes the sun to rise each morning and set each evening. And it’s the same repetition that gets us to put one foot on the floor, and then the other, getting out of bed to start another day.

Life itself is monotonous and repetitive. But don’t get it wrong, repetition isn’t futile hopeless or tiresome.

My research project is focused on…oh wait, shoot, sorry. I tried to have this memorized, but I think my cards got out of order. Ooooone second. Ok, there we go.

According to Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, all life is repetition. This may sound bleak.

To Kierkegaard, repetition is best understood in its relation to recollection. Recollection and repetition are the same movement in opposite directions. Recollection involves reliving memories, always reaching for something unattainable. Repetition however, uses memore as a motivation to propel yourself forward into life, actively choosing to repeat the same things day after day. 

My research project is focused on the deployment of repetition in visual arts. Through distilling my research questions and aims to their essentials for the programme approval, I have realized how basic and fundamental repetition is to all arts practices. Each choice to step into the studio is an act of repetition. Each repeated conversation working through a concept. Each repetitive mark made in a drawing. Each rehearsal. Each print pulled for an edition. Each exhibition opening seeing the same people drinking the same drinks at the same galleries. Repetition is at the very heart of the creative process.

It’s because of this repetition that (repeat) I go on the same walk over and over and over.

Some interesting things occurred when giving the performance. First, I was extremely nervous. I don’t usually get nervous public speaking or presenting, especially in a setting so casual. But the weight of the performative aspect of this presentation added nerves that are uncommon for me. These nerves shook me, causing me to shake and add many unplanned “umms” and “uhhs.” However, each time I repeated the three minute script, I got slightly calmer and delivered the information smoother and smoother. The benefit of repetition and practice was demonstrated in the moment as each repetition got a little better, until finally I fell into a flow and rhythm that was later commented on by the audience. 

The “umms” and “uhhs” were also to my benefit in the end. While it felt like failures on my part, they made it more challenging for the audience to pick out flaws, as they weren’t sure what was fact and what was fiction. Because I had scripted in a flaw with the notecards getting mixed up, it made the audience question what was scripted and what was genuine each time an “uhh” was uttered. 

The intentional use of the first sentence as a reiteration made it so that it wasn’t initially noticed that I had started over. The most perceptive audience members noticed when I talked about hearing dogs, as this was just odd enough to catch their ears. Most noticed though, when I messed up the notecards for the second time. The most interesting reaction though, was the audience member who was genuinely concerned for me. He was worried that I had lost my mind a bit and hadn’t realized myself that I had started my presentation over. It wasn’t until the notecard mixup that he knew I was intentionally repeating myself. 

There’s a lot more for me to unpack in this, but I will leave these thoughts here for now, while this experience continues to bounce around my head until I’m ready to unpack those things.

Repetitive Listening

I’m fairly new to streaming music, having only conceded to using Apple Music two years ago. My preference is still CDs, vinyl, cassettes, or if I’m in the studio, my iPod. Because of the limited space on an iPod, I tend to listen to the same music in the studio over and over. My iPod includes albums that the art teacher in high school played in drawing class (Bridge Over Troubled Water, A Night at the Opera, Songs for Silverman), music from the print studio in undergrad (Age of Adz, Moment Bends, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?), and other tried and true albums for making art (The Ugly Organ, The Room’s Too Cold, More Adventurous). 

For years, I have had a rule of only listening to the iPod in the studio, as an attempt to keep the phone out of that space. But over the last two years, I have begun breaking that rule to allow for other listening while in the studio. 

Today is Spotify Wrapped/Apple Music Replay day (depending on which service you use). For the second year in a row I have noticed a very close connection to the work I produce in the studio to the music on my Replay. This realization caused me to think back over other bodies of work and the music I listened to in the making. I’ve always been somewhat conscious of my music choice’s effect on my art production, but I didn’t realize just how clear that connection truly is.

Stats:

2022 Top song | Read My Mind by David Bazan (Killers cover): This song reached number one for me due to the two weeks that I decided to listen to it on repeat while working on a large drawing of folding chairs.

2022 Top album | Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues by Vladimir Ashkenazy: This album reached number one for me due to setting the rule that I only listen to it while creating a suite of 18 lithograph and screen print monoprints inspired by Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues. That meant hours and weeks and months of listening to it in the print studio.

2023 Top album | Read Music/Speak Spanish by Desaparecidos: This album reached number one for me because I listened to it almost exclusively while creating the screen prints for my exhibition about American suburbia. My top artist and top song were also from this album. If I wasn’t listening to this album while printing, I was listening to The Suburbs by The Arcade Fire on my iPod. 

I share these thoughts only to highlight not only the importance of music in my art making, but the role that repetitive music listening plays in the studio. From listening to the same albums for the last 20 years, to strictly choosing to listen to one song on repeat to affect my making, repetitive music plays a bigger role in my practice than I give it credit for.

Reading Diary: Here-ing in Contested Spaces | Erin Wilkerson

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

This text raises interesting ways of thinking about bodies, identities and being. I’m very interested in the idea of experiencing disorientation in order to understand being oriented. I wonder if this way of thinking can easily be applied to other forms of otherness? 

I’m also interested in this order of disorientation leading to orientation in regard to my current research on repetition and difference and the idea that repetition is only understood through difference. I would like to further explore these connections and other relations in language/phenomenology. 

Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene

This reading raised questions about categorization for me. I kept coming back to the two different names for the mud volcano: Lumpur Lapindo (Lapindo Mud) and Lumpur Sidoarjo (Sidoarjo Mud) or Lusi. The author quickly relates these two together and discusses the political implications of both names. For me, however, the first (Lumpur Lapindo) holds much more significant political weight. 

Because of this categorization, I kept thinking about the boundary between categories and the implications of language when determining a name for something. It makes me think about the history of color perception attached to language. Cultures can only perceive certain colors once a name is attached to it to distinguish it from other colors. Similarly, the name in which people choose to refer to this disaster imbue the situation with so much context. Just something interesting for me to dwell on.

On Contested Terrain

Beyond the themes of conflict and war in Lê’s work, I really enjoyed the connection to contemporary photography with work from a different period. I find often in the contemporary art world, we’re quick to write off the opportunity to reference works from before the 20th century. I love the way she uses the traditions of survey photography to contest the realities of history and war.

Reading Diary: Performance, Digitality, and Borders | Cianetti

These texts demonstrated the various ways that borders can be a space for activation and creativity. They each explore the idea of borders from a different perspective. Despite these differences, they share many overlapping themes, specifically overlaps about borders as active spaces and borders as spaces for growth. 

On borders or active spaces:

“Since the border is always in between and in motion, it is a continually changing process.” Thomas Nail, philosopher, 2016

“This space has also wanted to be face-to-face, and later on, we managed to meet each other, we found a way to find each other. I think this has been one of the coolest things that has happened with the semillero, that it hasn’t stayed in the (virtual) space, but that it mutates and goes where it wants to be, where it wants to germinate. […]”

I like the idea of thinking of borders as energetic spaces, always in movement and always in flux. These two quotes make me wonder about what causes a border to be so alive and full of energy, positive or negative? Are there aspects integral to borders that cause this energy and this action? Is it possible to create that energy by finding non-physical borders in our practice?

I know this is a very capitalist way of thinking, trying to take a positive from a space, but it’s something that was on my mind throughout the readings.

On borders as spaces for growth:

“In the rehearsal room, we use many different starting points: sounds, images, text, light, actions. There’s a phase of rehearsal which is about generating possibilities, and then there’s a need to reflect and edit and shape.”

“...It was important for us to create or seek these same spaces of knowledge sharing that we had encountered through our Master’s degree. It is a space of a lot of estrangement, and so much commotion. It is also a space for a lot of experimentation…

“We referred to the figure of the semillero…if we managed to turn it around, if we managed to propose a horizontal space for the research group, if we managed to remove the hierarchies that existed and preserve the spirit of research and investigation that the research group has. And to also create a space for meeting with many other people who may not have the same line of research as you. So, without losing that desire to search, research, and play, we took on the name semillero.

“A moment had come when we imagined the seed as a creative power, as a minimal power that brings with it many possibilities that perhaps are not in our hands. After that, we became aware, not only of the seed as a unit, as a power, but also of everything it implies: the terrain where it is found, the conditions, the contradictions it implies, and all these vital processes, the life or death they go through, and everything that could happen around it.”

There is something so powerful in settings where people can learn and grow and explore together as communities in the ways described in both of these quotes.

Other questions, thoughts and quotes from the readings:

I’m interested in the notion of sector-navigating. This was a new idea for me. I haven’t thought of my practice as a form of sector-navigating before, and I’m curious to learn more about what this means on a practical level.

I’m pasting these two other quotes here as a place to store them. I love the ideas in each. In the first quote about “Live Art” as a movement, I don’t think I’ve read a quote that better breaks-down the lifespan of art movements.

“One of the things that became clear is that “Live Art” is an instance, a moment that is going to happen. Just as cubism has already passed. What is not necessarily going to pass are the ways in which certain transformations and changes that are part of life itself manifest themselves and happen.

“The moment institutions begin to take these terms, suddenly they finance them, and that is what is happening here. From being an intuition, from finding a space (because I don’t find my space and this is the one that more or less gives my work a body), suddenly it becomes institutionalised, and little by little loses its strength. In a way, our work is linked to this because we have obviously studied something with [the term ‘live art’] in its title. We understand that it’s a title and that what is underneath are those forms of manifestations, those practices that will continue to come together and that we will continue to explore, and these are the [forms] that we would call our art, our way of traversing these artistic, academic, social spaces… I think I’ve made everything more complex, but it’s the truth!” 

I am often questioned and often question myself about why I’m making a painting or print or drawing, particularly when a photograph is involved in the process. Questions come up from myself and from others about why not just print the image as an inkjet? I’ve not been able to articulate my thoughts about this question as well as this quote:

“I remember one of the very first gigs we did with Near Gonewhich is performed in Bulgarian and English and someone asked us – why on earth we had made that choice when Kat’s English was perfectly good. And that is very telling isn’t it. But you can say that about anything. Why on Earth make another drawing of the sea when someone might say that Turner’s version was perfectly good? So, we kind of get back to the sense that we are looking for ways in which we “say” what we want to say in the way we want to say it and show it and hope that more people fall on the side of enquiry rather than – this is lost on me. Isn’t that what all culture and art tries to do?”

Re

The prefix “re” has a lot for me to dig into. Simply put, “re” can either mean “again” or “back” depending on the context of the word.

The following is simply a list of “re” words. Nothing more. These are the ones that come to mind quickly. There are plenty of others not listed here.

Repeat

Recall

React

Research

Recycle

Redeem

Reject

Recede

Return

Revert

Revenge

Rejuvenate

Reframe

Recant

Reduce

Redo

Reimagine

Rediscover

Regain

Retain

Retention

Retort

Rebuttal

Reuse

Recognize

Recluse

Refurbish

Rescind

Rebuff

Repeal

Rebuke

Reiterate

Renounce

Replenish

Resign

Restrain

Reprieve

Requiem

Retaliate

Restore

Repent

Reinforce

Refuge

Reclaim

Resume

Reveal

Responsible

Reverse

Reject

Report

Reserve

Recognize

Relate

Recommend

Refer

Resist

Rearrange

Reflect

Repeal

Repel

Reincarnate

Reciprocate

Reform

Relax

Recommend

Reserve

Release

Respect

Remove

Repercussion

Refuse

Reimburse

Reinstate

Recoup

Revere

Recover

Release

Respond

Reply

 

Potential Chapter Titles

As a writing exercise, here are potential chapter titles for my dissertation. Following this list (which is in no particular order), there are three potential structures for the chapters. This exercise helped me think through some of the relationships of the different topics on my mind. As a follow-up exercise, I plan on mapping out some of the projects/series/methods I plan on making, as well as writings that I plan on reading.

This exercise has dissolved a lot of the fear/stress that I’ve felt about the task of writing the dissertation. It’s much easier for me to now view this undertaking as simply writing 10-14 essays that lead into each other.

This exercise also helped me cut out branches of research that I had planned on, i.e., the effect of repetition on a visual artist’s mind/mental health and body. While these two areas of research are still important to me and might come up in this project, they seem like they lead to a different set of questions and findings; they feel like an entirely different dissertation, based more in medical research.

 

Repetition and the Curatorial Remit

Repetition in Application: Composition, Concept, Process

Repetition to Cause Impact

Copying

Repetition in Thought and Theory

Disregarding Difference

Repetition vs. Recollection

Repetition and Failure

The Impossibility of Repetition: Time and Space

The Transformative Power of Repetition

The Implications of Repetition

Visual Satiation

The Labor of Repetition

 

Repetition in Thought and Theory

            The Impossibility of Repetition: Time and Space

            Disregarding Difference

            Repetition vs. Recollection

Repetition and the Curatorial Remit

            Repetition to Cause Impact

            The Implications of Repetition

            Visual Satiation

The Labor of Repetition

            Repetition in Application: Composition, Concept, Process

            Copying

            The Transformative Power of Repetition

            Repetition and Failure

 

The Implications of Repetition

            The Transformative Power of Repetition

            Visual Satiation

            Repetition and Failure

            Repetition to Cause Impact

The Labor of Repetition

            Repetition in Thought and Theory

            Repetition in Application: Composition, Concept, Process

            Repetition vs. Recollection

 

The Impossibility of Repetition: Time and Space

            Copying

            Disregarding Difference

            Repetition and the Curatorial Remit

 

i

Visual Satiation

Repetition vs. Recollection

The Impossibility of Repetition: Time and Space

ii

The Implications of Repetition

Repetition and Failure

Repetition to Cause Impact

iii

The Labor of Repetition

Repetition in Application: Composition, Concept and Process

The Transformative Power of Repetition

Copying

iv

Repetition in Thought and Theory

Repetition and the Curatorial Remit

Disregarding Difference

Reading Diary: On Work

The three required readings for this workshop included: a practical guide for collaborating with non-artists; an article on improving accessibility, while working on diminishing emissions; and a list of resources for diminishing digital emissions. 

Co-creating with People, usually non-artists

I really enjoyed this text. I appreciated how tangible and accessible the writing was. The themes covered are very important conversations to have. Sections one and three were particularly resonate for me. 

1. make with, not for - I have been asking “Is there an ethical way to make work about stories that are not your own, when the people are marginalised, vulnerable or underrepresented?” in my professional work a lot recently. Artists are often storytellers and we find ourselves with the desire to raise awareness about things we witness. How do/should we tell stories of others when we aren’t in a position to work directly with the group? My instinct is to say no, regardless of how positive the intent might be, but there are other times when my mind shifts from this instinct. 

This section does a great job of highlighting the importance of recognizing power dynamics when telling stories with others. 

While I liked this section, I do find myself still grappling with the question posed at the beginning. 

3. you can only create safer spaces - This section does a good job of hitting on what is truly needed when making safer spaces: listening and letting people do what feels comfortable. Too often there is an intention to be welcoming and inclusive, but that sentiment slips into a demand to be the same kind of welcoming. It’s vital to let people make the choice on how to participate in a way that is safe and healthy for them.

How do we increase access and inclusion while powering down civilization? 

I struggled with this text. I found it challenging to grapple with the guilt induced by it, particularly when it is being shared for a workshop that I will be flying to. The text was highlighting very important issues but did it in a way that left me with more unanswerable questions in the end. 

Applying Disability Justice, Climate Justice, and Solidarity Economics to your Digital Practice

I also struggled with this text. There were some sentiments that aligned with my priority for accessibility. I appreciated the clarity in the resources shared, but I found some of the resources slightly problematic given the theme, particularly OBS Studio due to being sponsored by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. The text is posed as focusing on disability justice, climate justice, and solidarity economics, but the majority of the text is only focused on climate justice. 

Aside from highlighting the digital accessibility specialists, the text doesn’t give a lot of resources or information about digital accessibility that is so central to disability justice. Readability, plain language, image/color contrast, font choice, more accessible popups, and non-autoplay videos are all essential to creating an accessible digital presence that could be highlighted in this text.

Suburbs in process no. 1

These are some initial working images for an idea about printing and cutting out the same suburban house to later be mounted on floating tabs for framing. The image is of my favorite suburban house. Not this specific house, but this specific architectural plan for a house.

Garage, two windows above of the same size, split level to the side with a door (hidden here due to perspective) and windows next to the front door.

I have found this same house in other suburbs in America. The landscaping and building materials change from house to house, but the structure remains the same.

These prints were made with CMYK halftone printing. I shifted the colors from print to print by playing with transparency levels in the ink and pressure/number of drops. The two perspectives of houses (garage left/garage right) were printed simultaneously, exposed on the screen at the same time. This allowed me to make duplicates with the same levels of transparency and number of drops for each pair. The final pair of mirrored prints will have the same placement of houses in each position.

I am debating framing and showing multiples of smaller grids (3x4) of houses of the same color range, multiples of smaller grids (3x4) of houses of different colors, or a pair of single large grids (4x9). I’m currently leaning toward the pair of single large grids.

EOI Updated

Learning How Not to Die

Current research project aims:

My primary research aim is to examine the role of repetition in a visual art practice. I am interested in how an artist deals with/interacts with physical repetition in the creative process, as well as the implications of repetitive thoughts on an artist’s mental health.

Additionally, repetition’s relation to time and space are an inherent part of the art making process, whether consciously or not. Repetition can be used as an aesthetic choice, a tool for production, or at the heart of a concept itself. Skill is directly affected by repetition, which contributes to a deeper understanding of a multi-disciplinary approach to art making.

Some of the questions I might explore in my research are:

1. What does the labor of repetition do to a concept when an idea is reproduced? And what happens if the concept is reproduced in a different medium?

2. How does my art practice affect my understanding of repetition and how does repetition affect the making of my art?

3. Can repetition and difference be separated? Can one exist without the other?

Project goals:

Through this project, I would like to understand the implications of repetition on my creative process. I want to gain a better understanding of the role of medium/material choice in my studio practice and how that role shifts through repetition. I also plan to use this project to understand how repetition interacts with visual art in process and in completion.

Contextual review:

Repetition has been researched primarily in the education field through pedagogical frameworks and studies on the effects of repetition and student learning; the health field in effects of repetition on the body and repetition in relation to mental health; and the philosophical field as a concept for understanding time, difference and identity. 

In the philosophical field, repetition has been explored most notably by Søren Kierkegaard and Gilles Deleuze. While both authors are writing about repetition from a philosophical lens, they do it with very different methods and with different results. In Repetition, Kierkegaard focuses on repetition in regard to time moving forward and backward. His book is written under the pseudonym “Constantin Constantius” and follows his dive into repetition through his experiments and relationship and a patient referred to as the Young Man. 

Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze’s doctoral thesis, takes a deeper approach at writing about repetition. Deluze’s argument of the text is that difference and repetition precede identity, and that repetition’s only purpose is to highlight difference.

The arts and the creative process provide additional avenues of looking at repetition. Artists engage with repetition in more than just the philosophical. The ways artists use repetition, including in process, aesthetic decisions, concept, and curatorial choices, inform repetition beyond what the philosophical field has explored. This project will apply the literature produced by the education, health, and philosophical fields to my understanding of repetition in the visual arts, while also expanding the knowledge of repetition as it stands solely with the creative process. 

Methods:

The research will be conducted through case studies of multiple bodies of work. Each series produced will explore an idea within repetition. Each body of work will have visual and written documentation of the process to create opportunities for me to analyze what is happening before, during, and after the work is created.

Timeline/structure:

  • Months 1-30: Research repetition in its various forms.

  • Months 1-30: Create artworks exploring repetition. The length of each series can be adjusted based on the needs of the idea. However, the process for each series will follow the pattern of: Research and concept generation; Creation of work; Synthesis of findings.

  • Months 24-36: Write about the findings and understanding of repetition and visual art. 

Indicative bibliography:

Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz. Health. London, Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2020.

Condee, William. “The Interdisciplinary Turn in the Arts and Humanities.” Issues in
Interdisciplinary Studies, no. 34, 2016.

Dreher, Peter, et al. Peter Dreher : Just Painting. London, Occasional Papers, 2014.

Eirini Kartsaki. On Repetition. Intellect Books, 1 July 2016.

Frédéric Gros, et al. A Philosophy of Walking. London England, Verso, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. Vintage, 30 Jan. 2013.

Gilles Deleuze, and Paul Patton. Difference and Repetition. New York, Columbia
University Press, 1994.

Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? London ; New York, Verso,
2015.

Kentridge, William. Six Drawing Lessons. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Kierkegaard, Soren, Howard Vincent, and Edna Hatlestad Hong. Fear and Trembling ;
Repetition /. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1983.

Lange-Berndt, Petra. Materiality. London, Whitechapel Gallery ; Cambridge (Mass.) ;
London, 2015.

Repeat/Recreate. Clyfford Still Museum/Clyfford Still Museum Research Center, 2015.

Sirmans, Franklin, et al. Toba Khedoori. Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County
Museum Of Art; Munich, Germany, 2016.

Advisory team support:

The team I am interested in working was chosen based on their versatile and sensitive approaches to art-making. Because I work with such sensitive topics, often drawing upon my own experiences, support along the way is immensely helpful. I’m not looking for therapy through my advisory team, but an understanding and support of the sensitive nature of my themes is important to me. I also value critique and want to push my practice based on honest and transparent feedback from professionals I respect. And lastly, I need guidance on how to hone my practice-based research in the studio in a more formal way.

Additional questions of interest:

Concept:

What is a concept? What is a precept? 

Where does a concept live?

What happens to a concept when it is repeated exactly? 

What happens to a concept when it is repeated in a different method/medium/process?

Work/practice:

How does repetition correlate to skill?

How does an artist keep up an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking without losing the skills used in the different disciplines?

How does practice inform repetition? How does repetition change when practice increases the skill/consistency in a copy?

How does repetition affect artists’ bodies throughout their careers? What are the health implications of a repetitive art practice?

Mental health:

What role does repetition play in mental health?

How do nostalgia and repeated engagement with media affect mental health as it relates to Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition/recollection?

What is the relationship between repetition and anxiety? Self-medication? Suicidal ideation? OCD?