some window action

Testing out marker pens on window....what I found:

• black pen gives good strong mark 
• colour pens give much weaker mark and give translucent effect
• all pens including permanent markers wipe off easily

I am gonna get pigment marker and try out. In our research some really good effects were achieved by using white pigment markers on glass.

Tracey

 

     

between chance and choice

• Chance operations in art emerged in the 1920 with the Dadaists. Duchamp a big fan of using chance possibilities to explore the production of new creative possibilities that challenged ideas of order and reason.

• John Cage used the I Ching (Chinese Book of Changes) to determine pathways for his work. Other artists incorporating chance, relinguishing a degree of control to determine outcomes in their practice, Merce Cunningham, Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly.

• The work below, 'Providence Diastic' 2008 by Clement Valla, references American poet Jackson Mac Lowe’s systematic, chance-based ”diastic" poetry. Mac Lowe would select a key phrase, then read the text until he found a word whose first letter matched the first letter of the key phrase. He would then keep reading until he found a word whose second letter was the same as the second letter in the key phrase, then a 
word whose third letter matched, and so on. Using the letters in ‘Providence,’ Valla created a diastic poem using words found on billboards and signs around the city. The resulting text is a chance based selection of found words from the city itself.

Tracey

progress from pre-Easter meet...

 Summary of our meeting in which we tried to pin down our intentions:

• Participation - all agree we want to involve visitors. 
• Script of some kind for participants - all agree. 
• Much discussion on Sol LeWitt. Some of group keen on reproducing one of his wall drawings. Others did not feel this was sufficiently 'original', so we dropped this idea.  
• Group process - we agreed we all need to be in favour of an idea to progress it.
• Drawing surface - use window. 
• Create grid using tape on window - masking tape, electrical tape, use of colours? Grid will create boundaries for visitors to draw within. Grid could be asymmetric, does not have to be uniform.
• Design drawing instructions. These are about putting parameters around the drawing  e.g. do your best writing with your other hand, draw with your hand tied together with one other person.   
• Drawing instructions - do they need to be thematically linked? My personal view (TS) is a very strong yes, that there needs to be a link to give the piece coherence e.g. drawing with constraints imposed. Not everyone agreed with this, and thought we should use random instructions.
• A game of chance - we got quite excited about idea of turning this into a game, so visitors would select their drawing instruction by e.g. throwing a dice. In that case there would be 6 instructions. Make a huge dice! 

       Tracey

'A Practical Guide for Temporary Exhibitions'

Found this book (Ed. Andrea P. Stevens, 1991, Smithsonian Institution) on organising temporary exhibitions. It suggests to consider the impact of the exhibition on visitors. Impact on participants?

• Behavioural Objective: how do you want visitors to change from the time they enter to the time they leave the exhibit?
• Content Objective: what questions should visitors be able to answer after visiting the exhibit? 

Tracey

 

throwing a net round the ideas...

These seem to be themes/tensions/interests emerging from our research so far: 

• drawing as performance
• using real time and space (window) in gallery 
• mapping on window; inside/outside?
• drawing as dance/choreography
• imposing constraints/limitations on drawing
• participation of gallery attendees
• how to 'manage' participation? freedom to create versus provide script/instructions?
• recording on the day - film?
• manipulate or re-work the drawing outcome in some way, as performance?

enough already!

Tracey