if i am a writer

If I am a writer I will have to be careful, I must not fall into the trap of believing that my passion, of itself, is art. As a composer or a painter I know that it is not. I know that I shall have to find a translation of form to make myself clear. I know that the language of my passion and the language of my art are not the same thing.

The sincerity of feeling is not enough, the true writer knows that feeling must give way to form. It is through the form, not in spite of, or accidental to it, that the most powerful emotions are let loose over the greatest number of people.

Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson

self-writing / autobiography

"There is no such thing as autobiography, only art and lies."  

(Winterson, Art & Lies, p. 69).

excavation. shaken from the grave.


Rembrandt painted himself into biblical passages, for example there would be fourteen on the boat rather than the traditional thirteen, as the artist would insert himself.


The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions. 
(Paul de Man, Autobiography As De-Facement, 70)

"The dominant figure of the epitaphic or autobiographical discourse is, as we saw, the prosopopeia, the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave; an unlettered stone would leave the sun suspended in nothingness."  (Autobiography As De-Facement 77)

Rousseau's autobiographical writings: his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (along with the works of Lessing and Goethe in Germany, and Richardson and Sterne in England), were among the pre-eminent examples of the late eighteenth century movement known as the "Age of Sensibility", featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age.
 
Reference point in the history of literature are St-Augustine's Confessions, and Essays of Montaigne. Rousseau continued the emphasis of introspection / recollection as a mode of writing, but how does Rousseau expand? linking to character to childhood and legitimicizing a mode of writing that advocated the pursuit of self-fulfillment as worthwhile , even noble. Later to influence Wordsworth, Shelly, Byron, etc, the romantics embraced this as well as the contempt for social mores, dislike of authority.

Art

the nature of a work of art
is to not a part, nor yet
a copy of the real world
(as we commonly understand
that phrase),
but a world in itself,
independent, coplete, autonomous;
and to possess it fully
you must enter that world,
conform to its laws,
and ignore for the time the beliefs,
aims, and particular conditions
which belong to you
in the other world of reality.

(Oxford Lectures on Poetry: Professor Bradley: 1901.  Cited in Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies)

authorship

"There is a tradition that includes Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, the comte de Lautréamont, and Jorge Luis Borges that rejects the originality of the author, characterises the author as producer, and identifies a collective authorship: Individuals are the ensemble of their social and cultural relationships. They compile and arrange knowledge and act as mediators of an idea, and ergo exist as a subject in the plural."

Nollert, A. (2005) “Art is Life, and Life is Art”, in Block, R. and Nollert, A. (eds) Collective Creativity. Kassel & Munich: Kunsthalle Fridericianum & Siemens Arts Program: 25

Spinoza: what can a body do?

In affect, we are never alone. That’s because affects in Spinoza’s definition are basically ways of connecting, to others and to other situations. They are our angle of participation in processes larger than ourselves. With intensified affect comes a stronger sense of embeddedness in a larger field of life — a heightened sense of belonging, with other people and to other places. Spinoza takes us quite far, but for me his thought needs to be supplemented with the work of thinkers like Henri Bergson, who focuses on the intensities of experience, and William James, who focuses on their connectedness.

(Brian Massumi)

see also: Deleuze, Gilles. Expressiom in Philosophy: Spinoza. (Joughin M. trans.) Zone Books, New York: 1992.

Eugène Cuvelier

Eugène Cuvelier (French, 1837–1900)
Près de la Caverne, Terrain Brûlé
Salted paper print from paper negative

Aristotle
poet: what could be / historian: actual state

practice-led

Roy Ascott, diagram/presentation, Speculative Research

Research, has traditionally been defined in academia by non-artists, however the emergence of practice-led research gives artists the opportunity to define research within the field of art. Particular challenges that this presents, is that within the creative disciplines there is a tendency to pose unanswerable questions, questions that would not be relevant to other established disciplines. How then do we evaluate it? What are our methods? Ultimately the research is speculative, a similar challenge that philosophy also encounters, however there is nonetheless evidence, a long standing historical record that attests to the value, if not the need, in searching and articulating a series of responses, if but not to contribute to the cultural landscape.

"Art research is speculative, anticipatory and visionary. It involves thinking out of the box, seeking to move the mind, the senses, and the arena of action beyond the initial frame of inquiry. When involvement in art research is no more than an employment move to compensate for the collapse of the art market, or a servile academic repackaging of 20th century art strategies, it loses its distinction from humanities research, or simply hangs on the coat tails of scientific inquiry. Speculative research must produce its own protocols; the artist as researcher must engage with knowledge in new ways, creating new language, new frames of reference, new systems and behaviour. It must be non-linear, associative, risky, connective, transformative as well as intellectually, artistically and even spiritually challenging. The material, conceptual and spiritual infrastructure needed to support this emergence calls for research in creative agency, architectural form, and cultural organisms "

(Roy Ascott, presentation, Speculative Research)

How does making participate in the recuperation and genesis of (embodied) knowledge?

The place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body:
live, tactile, visceral invocation
time as a process and material
coupling reason and imagination
when language fails - conceptualization as violence to original experience
 
what is art research?
process, qualities, principles, constraints?

Shopenhaur

Body as direct access to the thing-in-itself, an irrational force often referred to as will, somewhat like the platonic essence that underlies all appearances. We, through our bodies, have direct access to this will, each through our own private experience. Through both being a body and having a body, the will is the common ground, the primordial stew, that we all manifest in action, agency, in representation. Shopenhauer proposes the thing in itself, as a blind striving force, a repository of drives, conflicting. Despite the irrationality, there is nonetheless an ethics, grounded in the common grounds which binds us all in an understanding of both pain and pleasure. When the ego is quiet, it is possible to empathize, understanding that another's pain () is also our own.

Excerpts: The brain and spine as parasitic, manifestations of the intellect, a tool of the will/primordial stew which S considers secondary. Demonstrated in instances when the intellect is absent for example (horse, clock) when blind striving force is no longer governed. Nietzsche promoted such states for example in Dionysion self-experimentation by inducing debauchery and inebriation, giving priority to the unconscious, the primordial.

Can the will deny itself? Would taking one's life be also an act of the thing in itself?
Both S and N suggest the positive, that the will begets life. Maintaining that the will is blind, yet assuming that the will strives to propagate.

() is a signature of Ann Hamilton, who inserts ellipses in her text to indicate a pause (rather than the traditional ommitence.

The Onion Field
Davison, George, b.1854-1930
Camera Work XVIII, 1890
15.4 x 20.4 cm
Photogravure

NSPIRED BY EMERSON'S ideas and images, photographers began to explore the expressionistic potential of photography. This movement, known as Pictorialism, was characterized by painterly techniques involving soft focus lenses and heavily manipulated printing processes like gum bichromate and bromoil. George Davison's famous image, The Onion Field, is an early example of an impressionistic or pictorial photograph. Its soft focus was achieved using a pinhole lens.

Pictorial photographers considered themselves serious amateurs—motivated by artistic forces rather than those of financial gain. In Europe they formed salons and clubs like The Linked Ring Brotherhood, The Royal Photographic Society (of England) and The Photo-Club of Paris. And in America in 1902, Stieglitz established the group called the Photo-Secession. He chose the name "Secession" because of its use by some societies of avant-garde artists in Germany and Austria to denote their independence from the academic establishment.

Photogravure proved to be an effective tool for the pictorialists, aiding in their mission to convince a skeptical audience that photography had significant expressive potential. For once, the qualities of gravure enabled them to more accurately reproduce the subtle and beautiful character of their images in books, journals and limited editioned portfolios.

The final issues of Camera Work were illustrated with images by newcomer, Paul Strand. For the first time these gravures, printed on a heavier stock, have come to represent a turning point in the history of the medium. Stieglitz wrote of Strand, "... The work is brutally direct. Devoid of flim-flam; devoid of trickery and any 'ism'; devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant public, including the photographers themselves. These photographs are the direct expression of today..." Straight Photography was born.

http://www.photogravure.com/history/chapter_pictorialism.html

Photography with large-format cameras