Language

Process Post. /  by Justin Harrison

Nothing too deep or revelatory. More me just making sure I’m writing about my process.

Yet something feels right about this, somethings I make and am unsure, but this I’m ok with.

Materials lead me again and there is something provocative and pleasing about the natural canvas.

I’m making a large icing bag basically, but for clay. I’m making my own tools to work with and that to is satisfying. I’m tempted to get ealborate, but I should have learnt from previous lessons that it will slow me down, but it’s hard - I want to make pretty!

The plan is to locate naturally occurring clay and use it as a medium to draw with, although I am now having to research and figure where I might find it. This could involve a number of exploratory walks and scrambling but then I like that kinda thing.

I feel drawn to the process of engaging with the land, gently moving an element and decontextualising it into a medium and meaning - a form of translation.

This too I’ve been looking at ‘Translation’ what does it really mean to translate language and other things? What and how does it happen? It’s connected to the Liminal.

Also please note it took me a ridiculously long time to figure the pattern out, when it shouldn’t.

 

Liminal Landscapes /  by Justin Harrison

Bodies without flesh or bone 

Partially present

Dead Quiet in their slow overwhelming absence

Insubstantial

Far off the light might be fading

Or resisting

The map has bled into the earth

The colours and key, now clay

Navigation a vapour

A whisp

That briefly curls in the air

We stand on the shore 

thresholds

We are Unable to cross

Boundaries

We are unable to comprehend

The mist

A veil 

The land

Sleeps

I

Wander

 

Negative Lever II /  by Justin Harrison

Exploring the Negative Lever in the studio, using the card frame as a template I took the outline and had begun to explore it looking at the boundaries and boards it makes.

It gives me the opportunity to work inside and outside, across positive and negative. I was tempted to fill the entire frame in black but something stopped me, something about the quality of the line - the fading and incompleteness…

…and there’s that word again incompleteness, I’m beginning to look at Homi Bhabha again: ‘Translation and Displacement’ and ‘How newness enters the world’. Engaging with boundaries and boarders.

 

Poetic discovery of the hidden /  by Justin Harrison

An interesting conversation in the MA group today, following so questions form JK Andrea gave me a very interesting challenge…

Describe my research/practivce - using new words, ones that I haven’t previously used. Also the word ‘multidisciplinary’ was banned too.

I felt the challenge - it was good one which made me think about my work differently - consider it from different interstices.

I found these words: Poetic discovery of the hidden.

Which felt really good, there was space in them and yet they articulate a lot of what I feel.

 

Notes on das ding /  by Justin Harrison

Been having a little root around the work of Rick Boothby and Das Ding. Another research rabbit hole courtesy of Jonathan K.

I need to get my head around this but I have the sneaky suspicion that there are some juicy connections to be found amongst, Das Ding (The Unkowable) and Differance. The Abyss, the void, the sacred and anxiety.

Sometimes I land upon certain words or the relationship between words - ‘points of intersection’. I guess that’s why I also write poetry within my work. And ‘anxiety’ has caught my attention. Boothby touches upon this and the Abyssal, the unknown

“What is unknown in the fellow human being”.

“At bottom anxiety is not without an object. It is directly related to the most profound object - das ding. The object that has no exactly known content. The Abyssal object. The primordial stimulant of anxiety.” Boothby reporting Lacan.

“The object potentially being the unrecognisable facet of another human or human object”

Subtracted space.

Uncertainty, Incompleteness. - What we cannot know. Das Ding. Unknowing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmBOWQOrH7g

///

Inadvertently I also found a lecture by Stuart Hall on race as a floating signifier. which I need to explore. The notion of a sliding signifier feels like it has a relation to Differance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PodKki9g2Pw

 

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

 

Materials Matter /  by Justin Harrison

Finally back in the studio.

I’ve taken the clamps off the paddle roughly made form fencing panels - I still like, although it feels slightly out of character for me. There is a curious freedom to it that I would have resisted before as poorly made, lacking craft, and although I do miss my beautifully made items - there just isn’t time to fuss. I have a number of things I want to see completed, ideas manifested.

But somehow the Fence Panel Paddle feels like its not doing enough work. I think it needs a mixture of textures - I wish I had fine sanded and polished one layer to stand in contrast and resistance. Do I make another paddle and put in the fine layer on that one? Do I like the work enough. Especially when there is more to be made. The value to making the faster care free work is that I am more generative. Make more…

I move on for now and cutting the wood for a jointed paddle. It’s hard to do it well and cut straight by hand but I am learning. The cuts straighter - it’s hard working in green wood, everything blunts faster, and it’s super tough to drill. The green wood has a high level of resistance I get as far as I can for now as I left a key tools at home.

I move on to strip some other branches for a bundle and realise that they are not Holly. Most of the time I have been picking up fallen Holly branches and I’m used to the colour and feel of the wood. As I take the bark off a branch it reveals fine stripes and yields it’s bark differently not quiet as satisfyingly. I don’t like it, it feels all wrong.

It makes me think of my research artists Anish Kapoor and Ursula von Rydingsvard. The materials are vital, a core part of the language of the work, even with Anish Kapoor who often worked with negative space and voids, the materials that are the genesis of the void are a vital part of the tension. The rock, wax, glass and fabric. It’s unavoidable, not just the material but the way an artist chooses to work them. The materials matter. Even the spaces in-between the materials, the ‘differance’, because it is influenced by the neighbouring elements.

I feel like in my work there is more for me to do, to find to visit upon the materials, but then I’m not sure I have the language I want yet.

I realise that I am in a transitional place, quiet normal for an art MA, but never the less it’s unsettling, I see that my conceptual underpinning is far more rigourous - especially from all the research I’ve been doing. I’m not there yet, my work still isn’t cogent, but I feel the difference the movement. And it’s quiet ironic yet not surprising that I should enter into this having been writing about it.

I’m troubled by my work which today feel overly simplistic and lacks essence, presence. But I continue accepting that ‘passage’ is rarely a comfortable space and this is my work. The jointed paddle itself a tool of passage, awkward and it’s purpose ‘offset’, present but impractical. The differing of meaning in my work - ‘Differance’

Growth and Decay - I like the abstraction of the process. the gradual loss of recognisable form and purpose, the granular yielding back to constituent elements.

NOTES:

Listening to Homi Bhabha whilst working in the studio - this lecture is crucial to my research - if only I could extrapolate and assimilate it all.

Start at about 25 mins in:

///How we see and where we look.

///The displacement in the angle of vision.

(((UvR and AK displaced through occupation and othering)))

They have a new angle of vision in their displacement.

This is manifested in their work - only it will be translated again.

28 Scale/scalar

30 Benjamin quote: Displacement angle of vision a positive element emerges anew…..Dialectical contrasts

Breaking constructed intention.

Interstices smallest change makes a small difference - scalar notions of translation and history - small movements  - it is from them that Life is born anew.

Translation is a temporal displacement of scale.

 

Interstices /  by Justin Harrison

In the intersticies the edges are blurred , indefined, indistinct. There is no clear demarcation, margin, boundary. Yet the apperature is clearly perceivable.

The liminal represents the free play, the opportunity for change. The change in the angle of vision, the change in space, time, concept. It is the opening up, where deconstruction can operate freely and generate the new. Broader passages of movement.

Hauntology, spectral, third space, void these too are different angles of vision through interstices.

Everything and nothing, liminal and void, inside and outside, interior and exterior. These appear binary terms - where is in between these? Differance?

We fear change. Being in passage. The moments of uncertainty. Movement.

Change - Passage - Is movement.

Again - Differance free play.

Stasis is a little death. Stagnancy.

Do I make ritualised tools of passage?

 

Rabbit Holes /  by Justin Harrison

In thinking and researching about ‘Belonging’, ‘Boundaries’, ‘Transformation’ ‘Formation’

I have been looking at Derrida a lot, his exploration of ‘Differance’ ‘Trace’ Deconstruction’, ‘Spectres’ and ‘Hauntology’. I have now discovered Homi Bhabha. I see similarities of thought and approach, descriptions and models. I don’t know either work well enough to specifically state what exact differences or similarities they share. However I do feel the readings I have already made around Derrida - help me to being to approach Bhaba’s work.

I am also aware that Bhaba criticises Derrida’s work in falling short and failing to address Ethnocentricity and yet…

I do find the exploration of Space more specifically the third space and linguistics very interesting and return to my own enquiries to the language of art, navigation of change and the liminal.

Translation, Afterlife, Ghosts.

It’s a Rabbit hole I fear to go down, the depth of both authors work feels beyond me.

Translating transformation by documenting change. Looking back at the afterlife.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVQcdbSV6OI

 

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.

 

Coding of Space /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

In thinking about the Summer school - ‘Rivers the Jugular veins of Empire’:
The coded language used in the past and now is key. E.g ‘Exploring party’ or ‘Civilising Mission’- this is not correct or transparent, but something else - more sinister, treacherous and obfuscating. Perhaps more accurate would be ‘Murderous pillaging of assets’ and ‘A mission to aggressively encode a people in preparation to enter the financial machine of empire’.

Then the concept of space: Ownership, occupation and outworking.

Can Space be described as occupying 3/ possibly more realms:

1.Physical space
2.Temporal space
3.Conceptual space.

How can/should this space be occupied in light of what we know and what has been learnt from history. (All history)

Other unorganised thoughts:
Space: giving/using space in film - temporal, spatial, conceptual?

Relationship of belonging to/in space. 

Again the idea of belonging is one that I find challenging and multifaceted.

Historical ref of Belonging: set against empire and obstacles overcome to this point.

Cultures erased by colonialism in name of ‘civilisation’ were/are subject to an aggressive recoding to financial production.

An aggressive re-coding to financial production.

 

Initiating a pact with the impossible /  by Justin Harrison

 

There is a place. 

Outside. 

Impossible to find but always here.

Formless.

Where from nothing, comes something. 

Birthed.

I thought I was alone.

Mistaken.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

“Sans savior, sans avoir, sans voir”

“Initiating a pact with the impossible”

Caputo J - The tears and prayers of Jacques Derrida - p xx

 

Self Digestion /  by Justin Harrison

(Image my own)

I discovered in researching Autolysis, that this is a reason for hanging game birds, as found in the Flemish Game Painting I’ve previously looked at. The process is used to ‘tenderise the meat’. So that which gives the meat its flavour, is basically ‘self digestion’. Which kinda puts me off that type of meat, consuming partial decomposed/digested food.

But this then loops back language and structure. I can’t quiet pin it down, but there is a commonality of impossibility/contradictory duality - non binary. Death is destructive and generative at the same time. The centre of a structure can have no natural locus but exists outside of itself - denying structure it’s structure. Deconstruction cannot escape it’s own deconstruction????


”Autolysis - a process of self-digestion, when the enzymes naturally present in what had been a living organism proceed, after the death of the organism, to break down its cells or tissues. For example, when game birds are hung to tenderize them, autolysis of the connective tissues occurs. This is most relevant to crustacea (crab, lobster, and prawns) where the enzymes in their ‘liver’ or midgut gland flood ‘the muscle tissue and break it down into a mush’ (McGee, 2004) if they die before they are cooked.” The Oxford Companion to Food https://search-credoreference-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/content/title/oupof?tab=contents