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I find myself in the privileged position of being able to list four new publications that have recently included my work. My great thanks to all involved.
Art + Science Now by Stephen Wilson and published by Thames and Hudson, features an image of my work Wet Cup (2000) photographed by Manuel Vasonin the Human Biology Chapter.
Art + Science Now is a groundbreaking overview of the art being made at the cutting edge of scientific research. The first illustrated book in its field, it shows how some of the worlds most dynamic art is being produced not in museums, galleries and studios but in the laboratory, where artists probe cultural, philosophical and social questions connected with scientific and technological advances. Featuring the work of around 250 artists from the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the USA, Japan and elsewhere, it presents a broad range of projects, from body art to bioengineering of plants and insects, from music, dance and computer-controlled video performances to large-scale visual and sound installations. This comprehensive guide to contemporary art inspired or driven by scientific innovation points to intriguing new directions for the visual arts and traces a key strand in 21st-century aesthetics.
Here is a link to slide shows of the artists from Art + Science Now.
Marina Abramovic + The Future of Performance Art, edited by Paula Orrell and published by Prestel, includes photographs by Marco Anelli of Stair Falling (2009), made for Marina Abramovic Presents . . . , Whitworth Gallery, Manchester International Festival, 2009.
Abramovic’s remarkable career as one of her generations most challenging performance artists has paved the way for younger artists who are interested in this complex and often radical art form. Lately Abramovic has turned her attention to exploring ways to encapsulate the art from after the performance is physically completed. This project explores the diversity of contemporary performance from exciting new artists from around the world. Their use of story telling, virtual worlds, audience participation, sound and body are documented in this illustrated volume. An interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist with Abramovic outlines the challenges and goals of her new project while essays by leading curators in the filed of performance art explore methods for preserving this unique art form.
The Many Headed Monster, by Joshua Sofaer and published by Live Art Development Agency.
The Many Headed Monster is an original and inventive resource for anyone interested in contemporary performance practices and their relationships with audiences. Across a range of artistic disciplines, artists are dealing with audiences in innovative and creative ways, placing the audience at the heart of their work. Contemporary culture is marked by the emancipation of the spectator and the transformation of the audience from passive recipient to active participant. The Many Headed Monster is a critical and practical resource investigating what is at stake for audiences today when they attend a live event.
The Many Headed Monster is a boxed set containing a lecture complete with presentation instructions, extended notes and author’s commentaries, a dvd of 22 performance works by leading UK and international artists, and 50 full colour image cards.
This article re-stages on the page a dialogue between Arnolfini’s archivist and the research fellow on ‘Performing the Archive: The Future of the Past’, which took place at the interdisciplinary conference Archive Fever/Archive Fervour (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, July 2008). This conference promoted opportunities for archivists and academics ‘to discuss the ways in which both fields intersect and to explore the ways in which mutual co-operation can benefit their future development’. Their dialogue started from two provocations put to one another:
‘How do performances remain? How do they produce traces, or document themselves?’
‘How do documents perform and are archives performative; what do they do?’
Their responses interrogate the discreteness of the archive, the documents contained within, and the performance events that are its objects; questioning the distinction between acts of performance, documenting, archiving and using archives. In the context of this dialogue, ‘ephemera’ refers both to passing moments—the temporality of event-based art—and its residues. In the case of performance, the artwork cannot be collected as an original object, only traces, such as memory and ephemera, remain. The article presents a conversation between theoretical positions and practical propositions, made with materials selected from the holdings of both the Live Art and Arnolfini archives.
”This writing is all just fake (copied from other writing) so you should go away and not read any of it.”
Kathy Acker, “Translations of the Diaries of Laure The Schoolgirl”, p. 104, Hannibal Lecter My Father, Semiotext(e).
A series of private ‘actions’ of the copying by hand onto laboratory filter paper a science research paper published in 1994 called ‘The Effects of Fibroblast Growth Factors in Long-Term Primary Culture of Dystrophic (MDX) Mouse Muscle Myoblasts’, written by Janet Smith and Paul N. Schofield.Although it’s not strictly a transcription,it is meant to play on the trans or crossing from one mode of knowledge to another, or one disciplinary area into another. In my case, as a non scientist engaged in artist practice in a highly sophisticated bioscientific context, my taking a form of that knowledge through a personal, explicitly performative and embodied process perhaps produces and maybe acknowledges some of the knowledges that get omitted from the conventions of the science paper. My digestion of knowledge by the writing. The simultaneous flickerings of readings and writing involved in transcribings.Or at least that’s the theory. The actual writing out of, the practice and process will yield some unknowables.
The use of transcription is also a punning of the biological process of the same name in which an RNA copy is synthesised from DNA, leading to gene expression. Highly relevant when discussing a genetic disease like Muscular Dystrophy. The play of words within genetics that relate to linguistics, speech acts and acts of writing makes me curious. This was initially sparked by Janet’s lab meeting white board drawings, in which she drew a cells interaction and intractions across it’s membrane borders, demonstrating it’s relations with it’s immediate environment and how that plays out within and without. She also demonstrated the transcription processes. Witnessing these action drawing, spatial and temporal, revealed many of the subtleties of her highly nuanced area of expertise.My copying actions are inspired by a few sources; one is Monica Ross’s 2001 performance of the coping of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) by Walter Benjamin. See http://www.justfornow.net/Another is the glorious post punk US avant guarde writer Kathy Acker who melded many source texts together in a kind of cut up practice. An early method given to her by her creative writing teacher David Antin was ‘don’t be afraid to copy it out,’ to find it in a book and work with that. ‘See Death (and Life) of the Author, Peter Wollen on Kathy Acker, London review of Books. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n03/peter-wollen/death-and-life-of-the-authorMatthew Goulish, US performance maker and writer who writes‘My writing involves rearranging, altering, adding to, subtracting from, the words of those who came before. I did not invest this method. I copied the idea of copying.’10.2 In Memoriam to Kathy Acker, Writing live writing deathp 117, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance.Routledge. London and New York, 2000.Another would be the generative writing/drawing practices of Jordan McKenzie, who as used many approaches to writing to reveal, disclose and translate texts into drawing practices. For example Palimpsests see http://www.jordanmckenzie.co.uk/palimpsest.htmBarthes, Joseph Kosuth, Fluxus and many more.Slips of tongues and absent mindednesses.My approach is crude but I think its downstream issues might generate something interesting. Including the mistakes (mutations) and absent-minded flaws the transcriptions will produce. The idea of moving something through my very own physicality, digesting so to speak is perhaps another way of tying understand and come into an explicit relationship with.
When telling Jennifer Willet about the proposed action to write out research papers including Janet’s 1994 paper, she reminded me of Benjamin’s One-Way Street, The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen ThesesVIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.retrieved on 14th Oct 2009 from here.
But actually my version is less a seeking for inspiration and more a wish to move though the body, my body, ’scientific discourse’ and to find ways to write back into it and around and in it’s margins. Jennifer and I discussed paper, what to write on - and where? My sketch book, a Muji notebook, brown wrapping, paper, acid free print makers paper? Each material surface creates a set of knots to the text and the actions, as doe the where?
* And there is a footnote about getting taxis and suicide and tissue culture.
