language

Ghosts, partial presences Spectres /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own (Digitally edited). It’s a failed digital photo but I love it, I confess I found it in my photo album, and have no idea how I made it.

If the ghosts of UVR past haunt her work, ghost being actual history imagined history and environmental and inherited history both direct and indirect

Something that has theoretically died, returns as a spectre. Revenant. Not just people but also  concepts, values beliefs. Returned but transformed.

Something of the past has returned and is revenant in and through UvRs art. A spectre, a ghost.

Her father, the camps, the wood, the people. More importantly her geographical imagings - simulacra - ghost of a ghost. All manifest around her work.

If the ghosts of UVR past haunt her work, the ghost being Rydingsvards lived history, her inherited history both direct and indirect and her imagined history . Then what of it? What does this mean. What does this mean for the liminal?

The liminal is the naturally occurring 'differance', that brings us the necessary temporary relief from our rightful and wrongful structures, to allow change to enter.

Ghosts are the active but partially agency that differs from the liminal inactive

Wood the Ghosts of trees liminal agents in the in between

Working with the ghosts of materials

Disturbing Ghosts:

Does the liminal disrupt language because of translation? The need for translation. Which creates a change i the angle of vision?

Disruption of language. Hamlets father . Is he called father, ghost or king? As a spectre he is all three and none, for his body is dead and gone he cannot embody the king or father and a ghost is not embodied.

 

Stacking /  by Justin Harrison

This piece has come from fussing in my studio over various works, I’m not sure I love it, but I don’t hate it either. It needs re-photographing as it’s flattened out in the photograph.

More intuitive making without solid plans or intentions but rather letting the materials find their own voice, working quickly I ask questions of the form and wood, where does it want to be, in what state, why is the harder question I have left aside for now. I’ve been thinking a lot about materials and their role in the language of the work. Dialects and translation and interpretation. Intentional application of histories.

The elements are bundled again, stacked the wood finished and unfinished, left in different states. Histories are stacked and layered.

Benjamin's proposal Cultural translation is a coming to terms with the foreigness of language. Such foreignness revealing the liminality of both the indigenous and the extra territorial. Working with materials and modalities of difference whether linguistic, visual or digital demands something other than finding a consensual form of resemblance or appropriation.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homi+bhabha+translation+and+displacement 1:01:40

 

Translation /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

Translation can be more than just. language:

Objects, people, time, thoughts, feelings, beliefs

Many things can be translated, their location and nature moved.

Categories are a important but not essential structure and often articles can 'bleed' through into another. Poetry can become a film, a book can become a painting. Death can become life.

In the moment of translation, something new and generative can happen. Through the interstices - Homi Bhabha.

There is a poetic sense that can be felt around the phenomena of translation, in addition it almost feels divine. That as an act it is the will of a deity becoming manifest.

 

Mechanics of Paper /  by Justin Harrison

MA Session - Paper folding.

I like it when there is no clear boundaries with certain disciplines, especially in the arts, which is why I like Derrida’s work, the structures get broken down and bleed into each other.

With the paper folding the surface becomes space. 2d is both 2d and 3d. Sculpture and single plane. It seems a natural response to then photograph the work, explore the tonal planes and how the sculpture can return to an image, abstracted and RePlaced.

It’s no secret I love process and the practical tuition was very satisfying. Finding the form in the paper feel good too as we creased the paper. In this I chose to work with waxed paper. I love how it takes and draws each crease in white, whilst maintaining a warm translucent qality. Ultimately the paper doesn’t perform so well structurally but then moving beyond folded form it then lends it’s self to more possibilities. Again the language of materials is there to be found and negotiated.

 

Dislocated /  by Justin Harrison

Transformation at my shoulder. (Image my own)

Reading Derrida’s ‘Structure Sign and Play’ is hard work. But then I didn’t expect it to be easy. I’m looking for something in his writing that I don’t even know if it’s there. I will push into some other peoples writing on him but I also wanted to look at his work firsthand.

There are some interesting phrases and I’m not sure that I properly grasp what he is investigating however I find it’s slow burn with him, that fragments gradually become more apparent and useful as I mulch over them.

Some key points/quotes for now:

  • The impossibility of the centre of a structure being inside the structure. (Paraphrase)

  • “The centre had no natural locus” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p2

  • “We have no language - no syntax and no lexicon - which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped the from, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p2

  • Evasion of the binary. Ideas and articles occupying more than one position at the same time.

  • “without the risk of erasing difference [altogether] in the self identity of a signified reducing into itself it’s signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself”

  • “had been dislocated, driven from it’s locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference.” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p3

  • “language bears within itself the necessity of it’s own critique” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p5

  • “The superabundance of the signifier, it’s supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p11

  • There is something about when reduction occurs, that it cannot but help be generative. Distillation seems impossible because that the act of it, creates the new. Similar to the decomposition of a body. The reduction is infinitely more generative. Death as a creative force.

 

Disrupted averages /  by Justin Harrison

Image: My own

Disrupted averages (Concept - Jonathan Kearney)

In the studio I have an hour or so.

Not long///

I have left items out on the desk from my last visit. I do it to provoke myself. It’s irritating and funny at the same time. Pieces of textured leather  - favourite tools. It all makes me want to make things immediately - the materials speak, not a language I entirely understand but it is language none the less.

I hang some large watercolour paper I have plans for - been day dreaming about making huge black ink drawings. Bold and sensitive, ink dispersing to granular clouds of vapour.

My phone is a pain in the arse and kepis turning off ###

Disrupt your averages/// 

I tried to make something in a hurry tonight. 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I decide I have to make something in the next hour, using what I have collected or hoarded around me. This means working fast, the opposite of what I normally do, usually I take long, considering, measuring, crafting experimenting. This has to go out the window.

So I begin, I keep it simple. I take two pieces of wood  cut the other day. I had plans for them, but I can always cut more. (I have a generous supply of old fence panel wood stashed in the corner). Playing with the two pieces in different arrangements I decide I want to join them somehow, I consider plaster but know this will take too long, instead I cut a small piece of leather with the intention to make a cuff to join them.

I’m already breaking my own rules by not sharpening my head knife first - it should cut in one or two passes - it takes too many and leaves slight double edge. I cringe internally and move on.

Then get annoyed an go back and clean it up, but quickly. Next I soak the leather to wet form it. I run it under a tap - ideally I’d leave it in a clean bowl of warm water and watch the bubbles ecstatically escape the back of the leather but again this all takes time. The skin takes long to relax under the cold water. Like me it's cold.

As I fold the leather around the wood and clamp it - I realise that it’s too small compositionally, intuitively I want a larger cuff - to have more presence. I should have seen this before I started.

Then I have a some realisations as the hour comes to a close///

  1. I’m no way gonna finish in time.

  2. I failed and that’s fine.

  3. I will need to cut more leather and reform it and wait for it to dry.

    Thats annoying ### It’s annoying as its wasteful, and is gonna cost me time and finance. Then it occurs to me that this is an issue for me. Like a big issue. I don’t like to waste anything, because I can’t afford to. I realise that historically I have always worked very carefully and methodically and meticulously. I thought it was because I liked well made work. (I do - but that’s not the point) It’s mostly because I’m afraid to make mistakes. I’ve learnt to work this way to not spend money or make errors.

I think about the maxim - the rich stay rich while the poor get poorer. (This week it was announced that the worlds 10 richest men have doubled their wealth over the past two years whilst more people have fallen into poverty).

I wonder if rich culture increases and advances, because it can innovate far quicker, it doesn’t need to conserve its resources. It can afford to waste a few prototypes, raw materials, money and make mistakes. Where as poorer cultures work must work carefully and methodically with the precious few commodities or compromise instead, still creative and innovative, but advancing at a slower speed.

I also realise:

  1. All the work I've done is really useful and informative and it's ok to experiment and waste a little bit of leather. No time has been wasted but well spent exploring. It's informative.

So. interesting. I disrupted my average tonight and I saw something in myself, my practice and perhaps my culture.

IMAGES+++

My own

 

I am everything you left behind. I am everything you don't want /  by Justin Harrison

An ‘opportunistic print’. So not necessary my work?
’Somebody’ left a sink in a hot mess.
I just found it and pulled a print form it.
I’m gutted that I didn’t think to photograph the sink first, it would have made this.

But there you go, somedays I’m awake and the others…well.

This isn’t the first time I’ve played this game, there have been a few other occasions where I have been able to ‘capitalise’ on chance. But this episode has inspired the words or perhaps title:

‘I am everything you leave behind’

‘I am everything you don’t want’

This happens sometimes - something sticks in language, I discover a pull in the words. I feel a weight behind a phrase - yet I don’t understand what it is. It’s like it’s a mystery for me to solve. Maybe in the making. Something exists beyond my frame and I have to pull it in. Land it.

This image is a landing of some kind - of the phrase.

 

Chen Zhen /  by Justin Harrison

There is something deeply satisfying about the physicality of Chen Zhen’s sculpture and choice of materials. It seems he often chooses to leave the material unaltered but manipulated out of it’s normal context. A particular and specific use of visual language. The black rubber inner tube becomes an almost natural element, like grass or reeds, yet they are unapologetically honest in their use with no attempt to cover up or hide the history of the objects or material.

In fact the presence of the history of the object is imperative, intrinsic to the reading of the work. The language of history and past experiences is. curious one because that too is read and created especially by the viewer and their lived experience. The associations and emotions attached to an old chair or a drum can be multifarious.Yet there is still a specific tone of voice to the work. Awkward and suggestive, nostalgic and melancholic.

I like the work but I wouldn’t want to make it.

“One should learn to break out of one’s own cocoon and be courageous enough to break away from one’s self and to abandon one’s own cultural context. The Chinese proverb ‘the soul has left its shelter’ in fact symbolizes the critical state in which one’s creative capacity has reached the most active zenith.” Chen Zhen
(Quoted in Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea 2003, p.83.)

Connected to this notion of moving beyond one’s immediate cultural environment is Chen’s term ‘Transexperience’, which he coined in 1998 while living between New York, Paris and Shanghai in order to describe what curator Hou Hanru has defined as ‘the dynamic and dialectical process that occurs when an individual is displaced between cultures, societies and languages’ (Hanru, ‘“Transexperience” in the art of Chen Zhen’, in Serpentine Gallery 2001, p.15.) According to Hanru, ‘Transexperience suggested to [Chen] both the fusion with these other influences and, simultaneously, the ability to transcend their impact’ (Hanru 2001, p.15). As a result of his combining creative techniques and influences from the divergent countries and cultures in which he resided in works such as Cocon du Vide, Chen has been described by art historians as a ‘transcultural artist’, as was explored in the exhibition Chen Zhen’s Transcultural Art in Paris Retrospective at Galerie Perrotin, Paris, in 2014. Tate website:
 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/chen-cocon-du-vide-t12941

///Temporary Homes For The Liminal\\\

 

Day 2 in the Forest/// /  by Justin Harrison

Stripping the wood down to the raw white wood I find there are about 4 different layers of to get through till you get to the wood.

My wife worries that I’ll be cold, I have a thermos of hot Japanese tea but I don't need it the work is hot it’s self.

I spent more time stripping wood of it's bark. Learning about the material and how it responds. It informs about the time scale if I want to work larger. It will take longer than I thought.

I also burnt the wood a little, it was green, wet and took time to colour. I'm not sure if I like it. Whether it will work how I imagined. I wanted a gradient that transitioned well but its patchy and organic. It's not how I drew or imagined.

I tested a stripped stick and a natural one against each other. Hammered them into the dark brown earth. There was something about it I liked and I wonder if it might work better on a much larger scale. There does seem to be a language to it - the contrasting vertical presences. Although I miss the craft of drawing and sculpting - this feels too simplistic somehow.

Perhaps when I add copper to it the voice will come through more.

Another thought crossed my mind. how. would the work change in voice if I were to cast sticks in porcelain? It would take black colour well if I wanted to dip or stain. Raw porcelain has that toothy bite to it which would take the black.

I'm also worried that this is taking a lot of time, all this effort for work that's not very good.

I took more sound recordings too, they still amuse. 

Oh year and the ribbons, as I shaved the bark off I made ribbons which reminded me of the blown out tire, the same forms occurred, similar violence had occurred to the object to create the form.

Stripped.