JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015

This article articulates an example of the relationship between practice and theory that utilizes the Freudo-Lacanian approach, of a researching art object. The artwork and the writing are not separate entities, but rather ask the same questions and intervene into public space in New York, and the academic world simultaneously. The Public Utteraton Machines, which will be installed on pavements in New York in 2014, are not finished when installed, because they ask questions.

This article furthermore synthesizes arguments for the relinquishment of traditional notions of the creative magus or genius figure, disengaged with society, in favour of artistic research as a means to forge a coherent connection to the world outside the artists own life world. It argues that the separation between practice (making art) and art history (writing about other art), i.e. an art historical approach to interpreting art, is not the only way to create or interpret public art and writing. Therefore in this case, intervening into the public art discourse in New York where my research takes place, through an unfinished object in space is most appropriate.

Martina Copley’s practice is a vagabond investigation in the place where language recites.

There are some principles. Letting the work speak how it is made. Uncertainty in a dynamic puts everything at attention. Everything requires attention. Look at the change of things, what takes place, notated and not. Vantage includes the way in which objects come into question even as they come into view. Stutter and stumble are descriptions of flow that have their own flow. Beginning in the middle, what happens in the middle is itself, and new. All things are equal to world.

Carried by an interest in attention, annotation and the processes of abstraction, I approach my practice as a kind of transcription. I use temporal elements in a material proposition like the stutter, loop, iteration and fugue, to unstructure anticipation and complicate the ‘view’. Things that normally exist in different registers or levels of abstraction are apprehended at different degrees of nearness and distance. The work creates its own order of things as an accumulation of things, each thing its own way of holding something in attention. It is not the content of the object or the material I choose to work with that counts but everything that lies beyond it.

The aim of this article is to critically examine a culture-led regeneration project in Manchester. Through specific case studies I am aiming to contribute to the broad discourse around the nature of artistic production and cultural activity in this post-industrial city. This article outlines a new direction for artistic production in the ‘new maker’s economy’ which I am discussing with the intention of drawing out potential issues regarding the future of independent art organizations.

By breaking away from traditional means of display, I am exposing our relationship to ceramic objects and confronting our preoccupation with style.

Examining the controversial art practice of Dutch artist Renzo Martens, this article examines the ‘heart of darkness’ beating within contemporary social practice. Written for a collection of texts on the theme of ‘exchange’ and concentrating on Martens’s most recent project, the Institute for Human Activities (IHA), based on a Congolese plantation, this piece asks what is really exchanged through participation in social art and who really benefits.

This article explores what the ambiguous notion of ‘critical’ art implies, using the following three terms which I think are important to address the inquiry: ‘boundary’, ‘Antonio Gramsci’ and ‘polyphony’. In this article, I will consider various efficacies of critical art and discuss works that have critical significance. Critical art and projects can be works that aim to draw a new frontier in relation to political issues by interrogating both the visible and the invisible, or it may be that art projects provide an alternative model of sensibility and subjectivity in order to enable us to become subjects, creating another possible society.

All of us have a place in our homes where we keep meaningful things. These are things that would be devastating to lose or have destroyed. Our relationship with these things shows us how we have a fundamental, innate relationship to the objects around us. It is curious how design might begin to play a strategic role here. Design can be defined as a process that acts as a mediator between people, objects and spaces often concentrated on ergonomics, economic efficiency, functionality, ‘sustainability’ and technology. Material Communications provides a way for makers to critique this and adapt their existing design process in order to take care and reflect on the meaning and significance of supplying individuals with material objects. The process of designing products and environments is rich with tactics for making and arranging tangible objects and spaces. Unfortunately, design in its current state is yet to provide a strategy that explicitly addresses this potential. As an interior and product designer, my research is focused around re-orienting the design process as a strategy to slow down and to nurture our relationships to artefacts.

Material Communications is a strategy applied in family therapy that expands the understanding of the cognitive world for designers, and reveals the value of the material world for cognitive scientists. This research method has been put into action in a case study within child and family therapy. Through this research I have asked, ‘How might the process for design be used to bridge the gap between the material world and the cognitive world?

The basis of this project and the sketchbook response to the Beijing residency was to summarize my findings on geologic formations that are created in Beijing’s parks and public spaces and how these can be used in the studio as reference materials in creating representational and abstract sculptures made of bronze, copper, aluminium and iron. Chinese ink paintings were used as a starting point for creating photographic dioramas in the studio, using the faux stone and rock techniques used in fabricated landscape gardens. Upon completion of the residency, a series of metal sculptures based on stones incorporating a sense of faux landscape features had been cast successfully.

This historical series of photographs, produced by the photographer Paul Bennett-Todd, selects from the period 2002–03 thirty images taken at the ‘SpeedQueen’ night at the Warehouse Club in Leeds. Bennett-Todd has presented this snapshot of the venue at the apex of its vibrancy and popularity; clientele at their self-assured peak. An energetic and inclusive event, ‘SpeedQueen’ embodied in its walls an almost poetic celebration of sexuality, transgender, class, race and age. ‘SpeedQueen’ ran at the Warehouse from 1997 to 2006, capturing the culture and colours of the new millennium where people, environment and music combined. Like Wigan casino and Manchester’s Hacienda, SpeedQueen (appearing originally as ‘Vague at the Warehouse’ between 1993 and 1996 occupies an almost mythological place in queer subculture’s own folklore.

Tarun Mansukhani’s Dostana/Friendship (2008) is the first commercial popular feature film from India to exclusively engage in a queer dialogue using the device of ‘mistaken identity’ and ‘misreading’ (Ghosh 2007). This film provides a rich site for studying the traffic between discourses of sexuality, Indian-ness, diaspora and performativity. This article will address the queer representation of these fictional characters and queer framing, analysing the concepts of ‘dosti’ (friendship) and ‘yaarana’ (friendship) and the trope of the homo-social triangle in Hindi cinema. Indian popular cinema unlike European cinema has received quite scant attention within arts criticism and this article attempts to look at both the aesthetic underpinnings of a popular Indian cinema such as Dostana which is also ushering in a new queer cinematic aesthetic within the global cinema discourse. This article was presented at the Global Queer Cinema Network at the University of Sussex and has benefited from the advice and feedback of B. Ruby Rich, Deborah Shaw, John David Rhodes, Nguyen Hoang, Samar Habib, Cuneyt Cakirlar, Juan Suarez and the organizers Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover. Finally it has also benefited from intense discussions and debates with fellow Bollywood writer, Steven Baker.

Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty offers the term ‘Parafiction Art’ to describe an emergent genre of artwork in which the artist imitates, invents, fakes or makes up narratives, people or events that are perceived by the spectators, for different reasons and for different lengths of time, as true. These works play on the overlap between fact and fiction in a unique manner:

Like a paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor, a parafiction is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real. (Lambert-Beatty 2009: 54)

This is why Parafiction Art possesses the power to influence specific contexts, and to challenge their statuesque. Arguing for the special importance of Parafiction Art within political contexts that strongly adhere to specific truth-values, this article examines recent parafictional practices in Israel and Palestine, and how these works challenge the hegemonic regime in this problematic geopolitical context: the right-wing Israeli government on one hand and the terrorist attacks on the other. Hardly any English literature has been published on the subject to date.

Charlie Boyer and The Voyeurs – Live Score: Belladonna of Sadness for the ‘East End Film Festival 2014’: Psychedelic. Pornographic. Japanese. Beaten up. Shut Her Up and That’s All She Will Be