Writing from the Gap

 

 

So few pictures, so many thoughts. It turns out that writing and making was not to be my next thing.  I haven't read much and it feels like I have forgotten most of the things I have ever read. I forgot what the word was for making up new words and had to look it up. It is a Neologism - this is a word to be remembered and forgotten multiple times.  Just like the familiar actors in Carry On films who fade gradually into obscurity. As I age I have become more comfortable with things fading, with letting things go.

My dead dad is a big gap; the space he occupied persists. His ending coincides with a fading in the line of my practice, the lack of desire to find the non existing path that used to make sense of things, desire always marks the way. Sometimes the gaps add up and the space that they used to occupy gets filled with something else. As my PhD thinking and my old idea of an artist's practice fade, the gap opens, the plane of consistency, the fold constituted by its absence. 

While doing my PhD I made up two important words that flowed into concepts.  In reality I made up one word and appropriated another. These are below (from my PhD glossary),

Newsense 

Newsense is a word I made up for the purpose of this study, I describe it as a
concept. For a while I hyphenated the two words to new-sense or used
brackets new(sense). However, it felt useful to invent a new word. It is
intended to stand in for nuance, new sense, nuisance, and nascent. As a
dyslexic, I see this word as all these things at once, in this context it makes a
complete newsense of itself. 

Ravelling 

Ravelling is the second concept I developed for this study it is presented as a
coming together, a knotting and tangling of threads that do not centrally
position a human actor.

I had a glimmer of practice that shimmered in my peripheral vision yesterday.  I was thinking about my new workshop, the central thing or object or desire of the last 10 months.  It's a rather large  objet  petit a  but still suffers from related issues of desire and ego.  It can never fill the gap of the need that enunciated its making.  Even with attached sauna, the true proposition of an eternal recurrence is both divine and terrible. Even as a Doctor of Philosophy I find it hard to refer to Lacan and Nietzsche in the same paragraph without a hint of irony, though this gap of writing must be filled with something.  Every story has to return somewhere.

I write things without reference which is now my privilege. Proposition Cottage has become a desire. If I build it, ideas will come.  It started as part of practice, my next step, the thing that filled the gap.  When I stopped the writing, the representation in words, I briefly felt a return to a space of making. This was a space-away, where I remembered how the world could fold.  I wondered if I had mixed this desire to make with my hands with the idea of a practice.  For many years the idea of art for art's sake has felt as ridiculous as a white bearded God lording it up in heaven. Something lots of people believe in but I find problematic. 

To return to the glimmer of practice before I fall into the gap of making again.  I was wondering about what I would do when I actually finish Proposition Cottage.  It has come a long way since I read Derek Jarmen and pondered death.  There is a background worry about what I will actually do in there.  Making art objects is a real possibility, tinkering with patina on sea worn plastic to form vibrant assemblages, this is, in the end the way of many an aging art school taught sculptor.  Yet memories of the Ouroboros, the snake feeding on her own tail, reminded me of my long term ravelling with alchemy. The stoned philosophy of change and transformation.  So that is it, the glimmer of an idea at the edges of the gap. Why not, in later life, become an alchemist.  It is not a popular hobby yet it sits in a tradition of experimentation that gave us phosphorous matches and sent Isaac Newton mad.  Who knows what I will distill from the gap, who knows what transformation could take place.  So here's to boiling mercury and distilling urine in my Alembic in a vain effort to conjure gold and find God in the gap that opens up on the edges when things unravel. 

Making art, Levi Strauss the analogy of the bricoluer

 

 

 Further, the 'bricoleur' also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he speaks' not only with things, as we have already seen, but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities. The 'bricoleur' may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it.  

(Strauss.Levi1966 pp 22)

   In Savage Mind pages 16 - 22  towards the end of the first chapter Levi Strauss uses the analogy between bricolage and engineering to help the reader think about mythical thought and scientific thought.   The analogy is useful but I think Strauss demonstrates that he is neither an engineer or a bricoleur as he shows little understanding of what it is to make, or repair something.  My critique is not quite the same as Derrida's who suggests that all roles such as the scientist and the engineer are already categories of myth created through language.  My critique is more as a maker and a builder in that the bricoleur's collections of odds and ends is not finite, it is added too as life moves forward.  Equally an engineer will often look to what is to hand to solve a problem, every workshop is filled with springs and nuts and shims, these bits and bobs are held within the minds catalogue of both the bricoleur and the engineer. 

There are four distinctions and two oppositions.  scientific thought is set against mythical thought and the bricoleur is set against the engineer.  The analogy is of some use when trying to understand the everyday nature of mythical thought. This is grounded in a phenomenology of local everyday experience. However these oppositions crack when looking at artifacts you have made that talk of bricolage. 

I made the sculpture above for my wife's Christmas present. It is bricolaged, engineered  and the product of a savage mind.  I can describe its parts and hope that its art lies beyond these word of description.  

The base is a piece of Oak.  I cut up a set of shelves that had being in my office for over 10 years.  They had been a place I would dump things that would then gather dust.  I can't remember where they came from but I probably salvaged from a skip outside an ecclesiastical building. I cut the rest of them up for kindling and made three panels incase of mistakes or future projects.

The pewter has lived in a cast iron pan since I last melted it 30 years ago. I was casting elephants to support a globe in a re-imagining of an invention of the Greek scientist heron of Alexandria.  The River and the frame are cast in a single pour of molten metal.  Moisture created a vigorous bubble that splashed in my face and made it past my safety goggles burning the corner of my eye.  This scar is part of mythical thinking.

The River is the Ouse  it flows through us and between us.  Growing up by a river is an important part of my identity and childhood, Kim grew up by the same river. I'm aware of four generations who never strayed far from the water of the Ouse its dirty flowing tides etches a course into the oxbow lake of childhood memory. 

The sacred heart is Mexican.  I bought it from Ebay when it arrived it was very shiny so I left it in a plastic bag coated with balsamic vinegar. I bought to make a gift about love and we had walked past a giant collection of silver sacred hearts when we were last in Venice. I acquired it to make into something, perhaps not this something though. I don't want to unpick this more as it is a choice that is both sacred and profane. 

The enamel badge behind the heart shaped door is from the 1960's it was awarded to a blood donor after a certain number of pints.  My dad had one in a small cardboard blue box.  I would covet it as a child, sat on a small piece of cotton wool. There is something about blood, Christ, sacrifice and hearts that feels appropriate.  I bought the badge from ebay as I didn't have access to the one in my memory, in this writing and within the making the badge I procured and my dads donated blood is now a single thing. 

The stone is Malachite - an ore of copper.  I include it here as some of the things I made a long time ago had slices of geodes inlayed within them. The stone is a reference to a previous body of work yet this reference is irrelevant.  This is why it sits on the over side of the river , to give weight.

I bought the magic lantern slide from ebay when I was looking for potential windows for proposition cottage.  There are two men hanging from the basket.  It is impossible to not associate this with the precarious  nature of love. We grew up by the same river and we hang from the same basket slung under a balloon.  I was reminded of the front cover of Ian McEwan's book 'Enduring Love.'  The opening chapter is a horrific description of the moments before a death fall. Love can feel like this, like life it is fragile, something to cling onto.

The sculpture is a gift, a demonstration that I can make something from fragments.  I am not sure how to describe it in art terms, an assemblage, art provera, assisted ready-made, found object, bricolage.  It is an example of all of these yet as all the objects it contained were sourced with the intention of making an artwork it does not follow Levi Strauss idea of bricolage. Nothing apart from the wood ground was ready to hand.  It seems unfair to suggest that because of this the piece is not the work of a bricoleur.  Perhaps it is the bringing together of stories, feelings, memories and love that is the true work of the bricoleur.  Strauss focus on analogy and separation of objects and things from experience memory and emotion does not fit well with making art.  Though it is a useful way to talk about mending a fence.

 

Mending a fence - an example of bricolage.

 

Instead of reading Savage Mind or Derrida on difference, or pontificating on whether the bricoleur is connected to Guattari's concept of the nomadic, I have searched out a personal example of my bricolaging. I'm pleased with this repair. It has endured for 3 years, survived four storms with first names, and still has the capacity to make me chuckle.  

I shuffled back through my mind to find an example of something I had made that pointed towards what I read yesterday.  I will not use bullet points, but for simplicity and relevance I will make a list of why this repair fits the bill.

1. It is made from materials that were to hand.  

2. It reused old materials and borrowed from old structures in the garden that I had demolished.

3. The post to the left of the image is bolted to the living root of a buddleia.

4. Every decision was made for a practical rather than an aesthetic reason.

5. This is a simple repair that is fit for purpose and it will probably last as long as the rest of the fence.

6. I had no idea of what this job would look like when it was finished when I started.

7. This repair demonstrates an awareness of what materials can do but shows little skill or adherence to any convention.

8.  Stauss's engineer or Guattari's royal scientist solution would be to replace the whole fence with a new one. 

9.  There is an easy aesthetic that is not over-thought or over coded. It is what it is.

As I write this, I am reminded of Richard Wentworth's statement about a folded cigarette packet and Henry Moore. 

‘I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore. Five reasons. Firstly the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works.’ 

Modesty of both gesture and material - this is something to take seriously. I speculate one of my imaginary second year sculpture students from a parallel life. They present my repair as 'Fence-mend, restoring the borderline" to our crit group.  I would think them pretentious and cynical in appropriating my work, yet it would prove hard to not acknowledge modesty in both gesture and material. 

Bricoleur and Bricolage - what Ai says

 

I was thinking about ideas and concepts and if there was something I could draw on to start some useful writing.  I decided that Bricolage was important as it holds all sorts of possibilities and it is another word like Assemblage that benefits from not having a direct equivalent in English.  I've been doing some reading and it feels like Makeshift and DiY don't really cut the mustard. The French word holds more mystique, suggesting a romantic notion of a valid yet alternative way to approach a problem.  On the other hand, Do-it-Yourself conjures images of the half finished or poorly done job. The light switch fixed upside down or the square peg in the round hole.  The Bricoleur in my mind's eye wears a beret and creates interesting ways to effectively fasten onions to his bike. Like most of the French men I have met he is a bit cool, owns part of the UK's energy distribution network and is very good at everything he does. I have only met two alpha male French men and they both make artisan handbags. I see this is as a coincidence rather than a stereotype unlike the onions beret and bike.   The AI produced definition suggests the bricoleur is a Jack-of-all-trades but this doesn't feel quite right either.  I'm sure the expert bricoleur can plumb in a dishwasher and pull out the bump in the side of his car with a slide hammer, yet this seems quite pedestrian for a word that deserves italics.   

My reading today has expanded my understanding a little.  The term was employed by Levi-Strauss in his book Savage Mind as a metaphor to expand his thinking on myth.  Levi-Strauss was a structural anthropologist so bricolage is offered as a structure, a framework to understand how myths are made.  The breaking down and rebuilding of ideas, thoughts and experiences that are present, to-hand, ready to be reformed.  In contrasting the bricoleur to the engineer, Strauss sets a modern society with its systems and extensions against a society, neither savage or primitive, which only has available what is to hand.  

I feel like the actual real life bricoleur may not exist, he is a myth constructed to offer a metaphor to explain myth, a metaphor with traction. For Proposition Cottage, my desire to  present myself as a bricoleur is problematic as it would mean not buying all my materials from Wickes.  Practically, I cannot build my new workshop with materials that are to hand. I can incorporate my prosthetic leg and the remains of my friend Wayne's greenhouse-on-a-trailer sculpture. I can include childhood memories and my own myth as a maker/sculptor/scholar.  However, my mind has become less savage and I want, as Ruskin suggests, to build for a 1000 years or at least the potential useful last 30 of mine. I will need to buy some materials that will last the test of time.  I could just buy a big pile of stuff; I'm already collecting odds and ends and then see this pile as a proposition and begin to tinker and improvise.  There is something about the scale of a building that needs more than tinkering, perhaps not a design or a cutting list but something Deleuze would speculate as a diagram.  It is the relationship between purpose and possibility, not function and form. 

I think that to be a true bricoleur it is necessary to not try to be one.  If you make too much effort you are missing the point, you are trying too hard and will produce artifice, the artificial pastiche of an impossible desire for authenticity.  

I decided that I would write something to help artists come to bricolage in an informed way rather than the usual  'We all know what this means don't we'  approach.  I wondered what Chat GbT would come up with to see if it was actually worth trying to do my own version.  I've copied this below,  I don't think I could do any better but it may be worth trying to write of the struggle that this concept brings to actually making something. 

Structuralism did not last very long; Derrida deconstructed it almost in the moment of its emergence.  He also didn't agree with Strauss on Bricolage.  If it's rainy tomorrow I may try and write something about this. If it's a bit nicer weather I will chop down the holly tree.

The terms bricoleur and bricolage originate from French, and they have interesting meanings both in their original context and in their broader, more abstract uses, particularly in cultural and intellectual discussions.

Bricoleur:

A bricoleur is someone who engages in bricolage. The word is often used to describe a person who is a "jack-of-all-trades," someone who uses whatever materials or tools they have at hand to solve problems or create things. In a more philosophical or cultural sense, a bricoleur might be someone who combines elements from different sources, disciplines, or traditions in a creative and often improvisational manner.

Bricolage:

Bricolage refers to the act of creating something new by using a diverse array of objects or materials, often repurposing existing things. It’s a term that goes beyond just the practical idea of constructing or assembling something. It is often used metaphorically in fields like anthropology, literary theory, and cultural studies to describe how people combine cultural, social, or intellectual elements in novel ways.

Cultural and Intellectual Usage:

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously used the term bricolage in his structuralist analysis of myths and cultures. He contrasted the bricoleur (the “handyman” or “maker”) with the engineer—the latter being someone who approaches problems in a more systematic, rational way, with a clear understanding of all the tools and materials needed. For Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur uses available resources, creating meaning out of things that might seem disconnected or random, much like how myths are constructed from available cultural elements.

In the 20th century, thinkers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault also used the idea of bricolage in their work, referring to the process of reassembling fragments of knowledge, language, and power in new ways, without necessarily following formal rules or established systems. The bricoleur here is seen as someone who operates outside the strict boundaries of structured knowledge or rational design.

Modern Usage:

In contemporary culture, the idea of bricolage is often invoked in creative industries, DIY culture, and art, where individuals or groups take what they have at their disposal and make something unique and meaningful. The term is also used in digital and media studies to describe how people, especially in the internet age, remix and repurpose existing media, ideas, or technologies to create new forms of expression.

In AI Context:

AI and machine learning could be seen as a kind of bricolage in the sense that they often work by combining large datasets from various sources and "repurposing" them to generate new insights, predictions, or content. The "bricoleur" of the AI world would be those who develop and apply these systems, piecing together available technologies, algorithms, and data to create something new, even if they don't have a complete understanding of every underlying process.

So, AI might interpret bricolage not just as a creative, cultural process, but also as an analog to how data science, algorithms, and machine learning systems are assembled and employed in innovative ways.

Summary:

• Bricoleur = A person who uses whatever is available to create or solve problems.
• Bricolage = The process of constructing or creating something with available resources, often through creative or unconventional methods.
• In intellectual terms, both represent a non-linear, improvisational approach to creation and problem-solving, which contrasts with more systematic or scientific methods.

In short, bricolage and bricoleur speak to a certain art of making things in an opportunistic, inventive way, which can apply to everything from craft to intellectual work to AI systems.

Picking up where I left it

 

 

Almost a year since I stepped away from this project.  I thought this film of my Dad was going to be the next step in a long series of steps.  He was already ill when I shot this, we all knew really but it wasn't something any of us cared to dwell on. I forgot to put my lights in the car so the natural light gradually fades. Towards the end, Dad is in shadow though he isn't raging against the fading of the light. He is tired, and he has had enough. Dad would have built his workshop by now, unrestrained by self doubt. He pragmatically just got on with most things, building his house, supporting his family, and eventually dying with dignity and the least possible fuss.  I've watched the film a few times since his leaving and of course I did the edit so I have constructed the narrative.  I'm not sure I can watch it today, it's not that I'm trying to move on its just that this film was supposed to be the next post I was going to make in a line that got broken, an unraveling.  In a sad way it was trying to scratch into how Dad ever got the confidence to design and build his own house. I was struggling to get started on my workshop and wanted to catch a dose of his 'no time like the present' force of will.

Nine months since he died and the idea that grieving is a process becomes more and more of a reality.  This writing and the eventual making was intended to be about building a new identity and coming out of the deep dark underbelly of completing my PhD.  Perhaps the concept that the writing and building was identity work, got wrapped up with grief and spurned a need to escape from practice for a while.  In moments it was liberating to feel honestly and unapologetically that I have little to offer and nothing to lose by dropping the end thread of a practice that has recently become a little slack. 

Change is coming; I finish my last piece of funded work on Saturday.  This project will be all there is that could be conjured as a practice after that. I find it hard to believe I haven't done anything for a year.  This isn't like me, though I haven't been feeling myself.

Arcadia for All

 

 

 

 I've got to the end of Arcadia for All it was a good read.  I am struck that for Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward there is an emphasis on dwelling, they seem most interested where the makeshift buildings become homes. Their focus is on the plotland developments of the interwar years as an exceptional period, the physical manifestation of a hinterland that is also an historical hinterland, a between time.  Written in 1984 the book draws on Raymond Williams concept of 'real history' to paint a true picture of lived experience.  They aim to look back through the fog of romanticism, look past nostalgia to critically explore the past. We walk with the families who spent their summers playing in sand dunes, raising goats, picnicking and also shitting in the woods and carrying drums drinking water for long distances.

The problem is similar to the concerns I had about the Humberstone Fitties.  I love them for what they are, and for what they have grown into. The additions the bricolage, the ability for them to absorb anything into an overall aesthetic of reuse and entropy.   Yet even as I count the ways I love them I would not like to see similar add hock developments across our green and pleasant land.  This contradiction sums up the the book in a nutshell, its complex brilliantly researched and conflicted.  We love the idea and the associated freedom of plotland developments but there is still something very British about an unbroken view across rolling hills.  The same generation but not the same social class that gave us the country  shack developments and the intangible Englishness of an Eric Ravilious landscape. Ironically while looking for an example of a Ravilious landscape I found an image of an old bus propped up on barrels clearly waiting to be up cycled into a dwelling. I also found a painting of two Boer war fever caravans where Eric lived with his wife Tirzah Garwood while they were in Sussex.   The draw of a simple life, lived closer to nature is a desire that transcends class, everyone is looking for an escape. I wonder if this compulsion is sustained in our current obsession with glamping and wild swimming. People are drawn to alternatives as there is often a discontent in what we have, whether it be the constraints of a modern  new build in an urban township or the creaky floors and drafts of an old Victorian terrace. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I came to plotland development through the idea to re-imagine Prospect Cottage  in my garden.  My journey into Arcadia and a visit to The Humbertone Fitties have felt like a diversion.  I succumbed to the aesthetics, the way something looked on the outside which doesn't really correlate to the way I feel on the inside.  Part of this is the trying to write when I'm not making and trying to plan something in the abstract.  Of course the mind tells me there is a need to have a plan for a building on this scale but the gut tells me something different.  I am going to try and think about the nature of Gothic, a further distraction but there is snow on the ground and although I am of the Northern tribes I am not prepared to go out and do any ground clearance until the weather warms. 

I will take many things from reading Arcadia for All, as I am not going to live in my makeshift hut/shed/shack/workshop/studio and it is actually in my suburban garden I am perhaps off the mark.  This is why I'm struggling with the materialization of proposition cottage, pastiche, garden room, derivative, not art, not functional, expensive, altogether uncomfortable.  I thought it might propose a renewal in practice and to be of use this is what it must become.  My feeling is that I may need to spend less money and assemble some parts that will suggest their new use. Explore the things I don't yet know that will fit together.  Perhaps I need to find a " timeless way of building that sets itself against design.  I like this quote from the final chapter of the book

 "The enormous interest of the plotlanders, statistically insignificant (though you have only to open a conversation with Londoners of a certain age to learn that many have spent a holiday at Jaywick, Canvey, Shoreham, Pett Level or the Selsey Peninsula), is that they reverted to the 'timeless way of building', seized the opportunities available to them when marginal land was as cheap as dirt, and built for themselves. They had opened a crack in the crude duopoly of access to housing in Britain, a country where the use of land is more strictly limited and controlled than in almost anywhere else in the world. In peasant Andalusia, the local phrase for getting married is building a house, and the village finds à site and helps with the quarrying of materials.(P293)"

Walter Segal

  I have spent most of the day watching videos and reading about the Segal method of building.  I like lots about it but it also feels very architectural.  I think the image above has the look of a Segal design in that it shows its structure on the outside.  This timber frame sits on light foundations that do not require leveling.  Much of the technique is about simplification of building to make it achievable by the untrained.  The structural integrity relies on a tartan framework that sits on a series of flagstones which are supported by concrete foundations.  The flagstone is set at an slight angle for runoff and the foot or wooden pillar is wrapped in lead which seals the end grain.   I am not sure what attracts me to this system that feels limited and Fordest.  The buildings look like something from the 1970's, they are light and optimistic.  They don't look like something I would build though.  They lack a certain Gothic dimension, the in the moment rugged, northern industrial chic that a Sheffield  garden may require.  They remind me of my dad in their insistent practicality and rationality.  I may say that form follows function but when I see it enacted in practical modernist simplicity I long for the superficial and the messy. I like the stuff on the surface, the fact that buildings have both a skin and an envelope. 

I priced up materials and everything seemed prohibitively expensive, Ceder shingles, tanalised timber, double glazed windows, wood wool boards.  I again had the feeling I was making a pastiche, when I was looking for some sort of honesty. There is a gap between the Segal approach and the small buildings I love when I encounter them in the world. The Humberstone Fitties  or the upturned boat sheds on Linderfarne.  The makeshift dwellings of the plot-lands.  Either Thoreau's, Walden or the brick built shed at the Riley's house where we used to watch the rats steel the chicken food.  I feel a long way away from making any decisions. Perhaps I need to decide on materials and make this process more about building something practical again.  The proposition may be more simple than I think.  In the short term without some sort of simplification it feels unlikely anything will happen.  I wonder if overthinking is the same as over-coding.

Perhaps it was not a wasted day it just felt that way.  There are too many separate things going on to form a raveling, the raveling needs the making along the line for it to take shape, for it to tangle. I am sorting out the threads, tidying up the draw full of bits but the doing is missing.  The design process entwined with a low level anxiety about becoming pointless does not feel nomadic even though a destination feels unlikely it is still a pull in a direction, a map, a plan a move away from the smooth space of possibilities.