Having realised that original proposal had become over-complicated I have returned to original short proposal.
This then is a slightly amended version of that original idea. Basically I wish to revisit exact locations where I drew a series of landscapes around my Oxfordshire hometown in the early 1990′s.
I will draw on tablet from exact previous location and then merge either in adobe or through a purpose built android app. with original drawing and a photograph of the view. There is also the multimedia option of engaging with text and music too.
If this successfull I will then take on to a more ‘public’ version of app. Posibly launched through an exhibition at local art centre. This however I will remove from the proposal timeline and place after the July 2012 M.A. deadline.
Here original proposal (amended March 2011)
M.A. RPT 2010-12
“TRACK : METAPHORS AND A SENSE OF BELONGING IN A NETWORKED FIELD OF VISION
A project focusing on site specific experimental multidisciplinary artworks merging traditional notions of practice with digital media, computation, and internet resources”
Multimedia – incorporating fine art and literary practice
The project is centred on site specific locations – a local art centre, an abandoned railway track (now a public thoroughfare) and a large area of downland previously documented in the 1990′s. The project will involve drawing/painting on a handheld device and access to internet resources specifically GPS locative applications.
I aim to draw together my multidisciplinary activities in one specific outcome. This may be an exhibition tied in with locative media that may involve public engagement depending on timeframe.
Using images of ‘migrant’ plant life found along a disused railway line in Oxfordshire over which I am superimposing sets of three words which reflect on not only the migrant plant histories but also reflect wider current concerns with displacement, nationality and sense of place.
The Didcot to Newbury and Southampton railway line was axed by Beeching but carried freight until the late 1960′s and I remember it being in use as a small child. Indeed the track represents a key component of my own personal ‘psychogeography’ thus enabling a serious meditation on aspects of rural life, diaspora and the changing role and use of the english landscape.
I hope to publish a very limited edition photograph and poetry volume containing not only the 12 ‘track’ images but also 12 ‘Downland ballads‘ which I am writing concurrently for the project. The poems are a part of the process reflecting on historical links and indeed ‘tracking’ aspects of my life and the history of this small and unremarkable part of the South Oxfordshire landscape that does not conform to ‘idealist’ notions of art and landscape.
Should an application to the recently opened Cornerhouse Arts Centre in Didcot be successful I hope to display the entire series as a digital series and also present the documentation and original paintings which will grow out of this project. This is hopefully to be sometime in 2011/12.
12 paintings each related to a song on the album ‘Suit of Nettles’ (hear below). Drawing on American South Folk Art and contemporary ‘Modern Folk’ artists like Daniel Johnston and Margaret Kilgallen. As the Professor from Derby said ” this is not naive art..this is knowingly done” ..it takes a lot of knowledge to paint this simply…although some didn’t agree…
“Liked most of the artwork except the Shaun Belcher works as I felt my 5 year old could do better paintings that that. I couldnt see the point in it.”
Anonymous comment on Lincoln show
A series of low resolution images from South Oxfordshire which were then added to with texts. These were the first experiments in mixing text and photographs and the first time I explored the ‘hinterland’ between ‘artwork and poetry’ which are two key cornerstones of my artistic practice.
The one word additions are not illustrative but explore a ‘no-man’s’ land between concrete poetry/typography and the photograph as a fine art object in its own right.
This images below are created through using wordpress CMS – the images are individual jpegs and the software draws them from the uploads area of a wordpress database.
As they are each stored as full images and thumbnails I can use them as a ‘Flower Typewriter’ and write any message I wish.
The original images come from a Funereal Wreath supplier and each is a plastic flower letter which can be purchased for £10 online from this East Midlands U.K. supplier.
Thus a six letter work of art would cost £60 to order. Anybody wishing to ‘purchase’ a work of art could therefore be provided with supplier and order there own….and hang it anywhere in world they wish.
The original ‘conceptual’ idea remains the copyright of the originator.
Authenticity digital print of image certificates signed by the artist ( LTD ED.) will cost £1000 each up to a limit of 10.
The subject references the Lincolnshire Flower industry, the high number of airbases and my Great Uncles wounding at Arnhem battle.
flower text 1 – ‘Asylum Seeker – web art 2007
flower text 2 – ‘Elysium Fields’ – web art 2007
flower text 3 – ‘Flower Picker – web art 2007
flower text 4 – ‘Asphodel Meadows’ – web art 2007
flower text 5 – ‘Migrant Worker’ – web art 2007
‘Asylum Seeker’ digiprint – A4 – web art 2007.
First in a series of web available digital prints. Illustration here 150 dpi example.
Full 300 dpi photoshop file available for purchase or as full digital print version printed and framed soon.
This was the project I did not complete and show at Lincoln because I became so disillusioned with the course. Instead I showed the ‘Suit of Nettles’ PR show cop-out..to fill the space as I felt this project was too complicated for what was basically a craft show….
The basic premise is as follows and over the next few weeks I shall start filling in the journeys week by week…
Every journey to Lincoln is annotated in a sketchbook. Informed by a reading of a single chapter from W.G.Sebald’s book ‘Rings of Saturn’. Thoughts and observations are written down as they occur with no linear logic.
(The following article started out as a coda to the evaluation I was asked to write for the Derby Postgrad. Course and ended up as a stand alone piece on my Moogee art criticism blog)
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose
Nothing, I mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, no no
Yeah feeling good was easy Lord when he sang the blues
You know feeling good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.
Kris Kristofferson ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’ Lyrics
A money culture wants the figures, the bottom line, the sales, the response, it wants a return on its investment, it wants more money.
Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy, for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no short cuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. There is only the experience.
Arts planning and funding in the U.K. has been thrown into turmoil by two or three concurrent factors. One a slowdown (pace – ‘recession’) globally which may well remove the Labour Party from power in the next two years.
Two a diversion of a significant amount of lottery funding to the Olympics (even if there were no Olympics to pay for the income from lottery is in a downward spiral).
Thirdly a cut-throat bottom-line cash-driven business model in arts education that is pumping out a hundred fine art graduates per institution into the muddy waters of U.K. Creative Industries PLC. Even the most hard-nosed ACE administrator realises that the gravy will be spread thinner and thinner soon on some very poor fare…
Where are all these new ‘geniuses’ going to go?
‘Free Enterprise’?
So here I am 50 years old and advocating ‘Freemium’ policies, freecycle marketing and not-for-profit artists organisation and pressure-groups. I must, therefore, be mad?
I honestly believe this is the only sensible way forward…the arts council’s golden goose has probably laid its last golden eggs for a while in terms of low-end funding..
For new models perhaps we should look to American free enterprise models that are not based on ‘state funding’. We need enterprise, imagination and communal enterprise to survive this recession.
Nottingham was the base for the East Midlands Group in the 1970′s that survived and prospered because all of those things..not just because it was state-funded. It high time that artists stopped ‘competing’ like so many little businesses for government ‘largesse’ and actually started producing high quality work people actually might want to take an interest in.
This starts with reskilling our fine arts graduates instead of spilling them out with pretentious notions and badly conceived ideas of being the next Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. Removing the skills base was one of the tragedies of the past two decades of art education.
GLOBAL/LOCAL?? Digital freedom?
The free market is dominant to a degree we have never seen before and it destroying not only local communities but the old ‘communal’ bonds between creative individuals. Grants and lip-service cannot change the digital wrecking ball creating havoc with creative copyright. Protecting one’s work digitally is impossible. All creative output can be copied and distributed freely…those who do not accept this are swimming against a very strong tide.
The only ‘saleable’ commodity left to the artist is his/her own ideas and experience and the ‘authenticity’ of their personal appearances..or substitute appearances in shows etc. Crafts practitioners are strong on the ‘authentic and personal’ properties that sell items but fine artists no longer are because of recent changes in fashion. To have abandoned traditional skills just at the point where they are most needed is madness. I call this kind of art and skills based production ‘slow art’ to differentiate from the internet’s dissemination of ‘fast food art’. This ‘fast art’ is eroding the market for all the arts…
A ‘near-perfect’ copy of a Francis Bacon can be painted in China in the time I have taken to write this evaluation ….so why bother being Francis Bacon any more the students argue..we have ideas…such wonderful ideas….Indeed all 100 have wonderful ideas..it is putting them into ‘practice’ literally that requires skills and understanding as well as ideas.
Some digital artists are already ‘outsourcing’ their creative output to others on a massive scale..just like companies.
It began with YBA’s (Hirst and co. had most ‘artifacts’ ‘made-up’ for them) now everyone’s doing it…especially those students coached early in their career in networking and the ‘wow factor’.
Students are no longer taught to make paints or stretch a canvas or cast bronze ..we have entered a period of ‘Warholian’ education.
True ‘authenticity’ is in short supply now and Fordism is a more relevant philosphy to artists now than the ‘Van Gogh’ suffer and paint model..ironically both he and Picasso engaged in bartering – swapping paintings for food and drink when poor….plus ca change….
Everything else in the arts has been up for grabs since the internet was invented.
To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson in ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’…..
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to sell.
‘Conrad Atkinson Remix 1978-2008′ by Moogee the Art Dog
has been selected for ‘Penned’
July 17, 6-8pm, 2008 – Opening Reception
July 18-20, 2008 – ARTSCAPE
at the Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore
An exhibition of pen and/or marker drawings including photographs of the pens used to make them. The more than 100 drawings in this exhibition cover a broad range of pens from the generic ball point to the traditional rapid-o-graph and feather quill to the modern array of jell and artists’ pens.
This exhibition will travel to Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington, VA and Lump Gallery/Projects, Raleigh, NC and possible other galleries in the coming years.
I think this is a good show to be in. It’s travelling to a lot of trendyish galleries and will be seen extensively around the US. The Arlington centre is a DC district space. The N Carolina one is, I think, well visited. There is most likely tobe a New York venue as well.
Artist/curators who are working on the exhibition:
Cynthia Connolly, artist, photographer, Director, Ellipse Arts Center,
Arlington, VA;
Bill Thelen, artist, Director, Lump Gallery/Projects, Raleigh, NC;
Andrew Jeffrey Wright, artist, co-founder Space 1026, Philadelphia, PA;
Wendy Yao, Owner/Director, Ooga Booga, Los Angeles, CA;
Kim Domanski and Gary Kachadourian, Artscape, Baltimore
