Joanne Lee
In short:
Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design, I teach across the range of contemporary practice and theory from undergraduate to doctoral level and have a special interest in the everyday, photography, artists' books / independent publishing, conceptual writing and creative non fiction.
The bigger picture:
Prior to joining Sheffield Hallam University, I worked for 18 years in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, and on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Fine Art, Graphic Design, and Media and Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University and Bretton Hall College, University of Leeds, as well as holding the role of Photography Development Officer at Site Gallery, Sheffield. I continue to act as a visiting/guest lecturer in other Higher Education institutions: these have included University of the Arts London, Manchester Metropolitan University and Winchester School of Art. I am External Examiner for a suite of Visual Arts/Design courses at University of Bedfordshire, and was External Examiner for Print and Time-based Media at Wimbledon College of Arts as well as an External Verifier for BA (Hons) Visual Arts Practice top-up, City College Brighton/University of Brighton and for the validation of Transart Institute's MFA programme at University of Plymouth.
My research is pursued through both writing and visual practice (largely lens-based). There is frequently an explicit link to issues of pedagogy within art and design and a concern to develop accessible and compelling languages for engaging with ideas.
I am especially interested in the possibilities of independent publication for artists / designers / writers, and for developing critical and imaginative spaces beyond formal art or academic practice. My current work explores a curiosity about the aesthetics of everyday urban life and the processes through which critical and creative thinking are made possible. It is being realised through a serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, which explores the visual, verbal and temporal possibilities of the 'essay' and is designed and produced in collaboration with Sheffield graphic arts studio Dust.
I frequently develop work via the opportunities for production that arise in dialogue with creative and critical friends, and through organisations with whom I have developed a relationship. I have contributed to a range of independent / artists publications, including those for: Berloni, London; AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent; Artwords Press, London; Blank Gallery, Brighton; The Eccentric City, Birmingham; In Edit Mode Press, Malmö; YH485 Press, Norwich; SpaceStation65, London.
I have acted as an evaluator for Axis, a national arts organisation funded by Arts Council England and Arts Council of Wales, on the re-launch/development of 'Dialogue' an online publication. I was employed as writer-facilitator for Skittish, a project on Live Art and Sculpture realized by Dr. Lisa Watts, opening a day- long symposium at the Tetley, Leeds; I have acted as Seer in Residence responding to Dr Traci Kelly’s print installation in Bonington Gallery, Nottingham . I regularly write for gallery catalogues and for a variety of art and music magazines, and have participated in radio broadcasts / podcasts and discussion events, ranging from formal academic conferences to PechaKucha Nights and beyond. I was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds for a 2004 project entitled Critical Enchantment and in 2001, I gained an Arts and Humanities Research Council, Small Grant in the Visual and Performing Arts for a project entitled Made Up: resourcefulness as a creative strategy.
Address: Visual Communication
Sheffield Hallam University
Howard Street
Sheffield
S1 1WB
Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design, I teach across the range of contemporary practice and theory from undergraduate to doctoral level and have a special interest in the everyday, photography, artists' books / independent publishing, conceptual writing and creative non fiction.
The bigger picture:
Prior to joining Sheffield Hallam University, I worked for 18 years in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, and on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Fine Art, Graphic Design, and Media and Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University and Bretton Hall College, University of Leeds, as well as holding the role of Photography Development Officer at Site Gallery, Sheffield. I continue to act as a visiting/guest lecturer in other Higher Education institutions: these have included University of the Arts London, Manchester Metropolitan University and Winchester School of Art. I am External Examiner for a suite of Visual Arts/Design courses at University of Bedfordshire, and was External Examiner for Print and Time-based Media at Wimbledon College of Arts as well as an External Verifier for BA (Hons) Visual Arts Practice top-up, City College Brighton/University of Brighton and for the validation of Transart Institute's MFA programme at University of Plymouth.
My research is pursued through both writing and visual practice (largely lens-based). There is frequently an explicit link to issues of pedagogy within art and design and a concern to develop accessible and compelling languages for engaging with ideas.
I am especially interested in the possibilities of independent publication for artists / designers / writers, and for developing critical and imaginative spaces beyond formal art or academic practice. My current work explores a curiosity about the aesthetics of everyday urban life and the processes through which critical and creative thinking are made possible. It is being realised through a serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, which explores the visual, verbal and temporal possibilities of the 'essay' and is designed and produced in collaboration with Sheffield graphic arts studio Dust.
I frequently develop work via the opportunities for production that arise in dialogue with creative and critical friends, and through organisations with whom I have developed a relationship. I have contributed to a range of independent / artists publications, including those for: Berloni, London; AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent; Artwords Press, London; Blank Gallery, Brighton; The Eccentric City, Birmingham; In Edit Mode Press, Malmö; YH485 Press, Norwich; SpaceStation65, London.
I have acted as an evaluator for Axis, a national arts organisation funded by Arts Council England and Arts Council of Wales, on the re-launch/development of 'Dialogue' an online publication. I was employed as writer-facilitator for Skittish, a project on Live Art and Sculpture realized by Dr. Lisa Watts, opening a day- long symposium at the Tetley, Leeds; I have acted as Seer in Residence responding to Dr Traci Kelly’s print installation in Bonington Gallery, Nottingham . I regularly write for gallery catalogues and for a variety of art and music magazines, and have participated in radio broadcasts / podcasts and discussion events, ranging from formal academic conferences to PechaKucha Nights and beyond. I was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds for a 2004 project entitled Critical Enchantment and in 2001, I gained an Arts and Humanities Research Council, Small Grant in the Visual and Performing Arts for a project entitled Made Up: resourcefulness as a creative strategy.
Address: Visual Communication
Sheffield Hallam University
Howard Street
Sheffield
S1 1WB
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Books by Joanne Lee
Mirroring the scatter of heterogenous materials dumped or blown in to such places and the shifting process of use, reuse and abandonment, this publication involves a conceptual conglomeration of different aspects - a series of printed booklets, a collection of photographs - and a process of re-presentation in diverse forms and locations: each exhibition iteration will differ from the last as new ideas take root.
The essay, which runs to just under an hour of listening time, is accompanied by a printed publication featuring 26000 words of excessive, digressive footnotes (about lichen, large format photography, islands, creative block, binary erotics, fiddling, getting side-tracked, stickiness, shit, disgust, using animals to think with, the Katamari Damacy computer game, tumbleweed methodology, hoarding, clutter, impropriety, rubbish...) the generation of which, I realise, have become the point of the exercise..
Case studies examined in this book include the sophisticated tradition of 'academic' inquiry of establishment figures, like Joshua Reynolds and Frederic Leighton, as well as examples of radical reform undertaken by key individuals in the history of art education, such as Edward Poynter and William Coldstream. The role of 'Modern Masters' (like William Orpen, Augustus John, Gwen John and Jeff Wall) is also discussed along with the need for students and teachers to master the realm of art theory in their studio-based learning environments, and the ultimate pedagogical repercussions of postmodern assaults on the academic bastions of the Old Masters.
The concertina companion of footnotes starts to get a little out of hand, with many entries spawning notes of their own, and some of these generating still further annotation... Amongst these you’ll find a disquisition on the naming of colours, consideration of the biro’s invention and use, a list of recording artistes whose names claim spurious nobility, thoughts on archaeology, the different knowledge made possible by practice, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger on contradiction in essays.
You’ll also find extensive discussion of curiosity and careers, carrier bags and colanders, a consideration of the distinctions between amateur and professional wankers, as well as an engagement with experts and epistemophilia... Francophiles will enjoy name-checking those who’ve inspired this endeavour: Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Michel de Montaigne, Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Agnes Varda. Northerners will know that none of this could have happened without Mark. E. Smith and the mighty Fall.
Chapter 11 - entitled 'Languages for Learning to Delight in Art'
Legenda: Oxford, 2007
ISBN 9781905981137
Drafts/Draughts documents a conversation exploring the migration of ideas between real and imagined, conceptual and material in the making and reception of contemporary art. Using the poetic and conceptual potential of key functions in computer-aided design packages as suggestive devices for thinking, it attends to a range of issues currently preoccupying those involved in academic and professional art contexts. These include strategies for teaching fine art, the relationship of academic research to art practice, the complexities of working with experts from other disciplines, and techniques for engaging audiences and participants.
London: Artwords Press, 2006
ISBN 095439089X
Conference Presentations by Joanne Lee
In my paper I am interested to use this current fascination for pareidolia as the occasion to think about our desire to read meaning and significance into things. As an artist/scholar working with the everyday, rather than attempting to pin down definitive interpretations, I am interested in enlarging what can be generated from the ordinary objects and materials that surround us. My desire for richer, multiplied possibilities takes up Michel Foucault’s assertion that as academics we are suffering from ‘channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient’, and his suggestion that ‘we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings...’ My own attempt to do so occurs through an independent serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, each issue of which begins by recognising some instance of everyday life (graffiti on urban walls, the ubiquitous plastic bag, the scatter of gum on city pavements, the pareidolic desire to see faces in ordinary objects…) before using this as a means with which to think creatively and critically. The current paper focuses upon instances from issue #5 ‘I see faces’ and posits making as a making-one’s-way-into-understanding the everyday, before suggesting that using the everyday as material can in turn rethink academic and creative work.
I want to take up theorist Michel Foucault’s contention that in universities we are suffering from ‘channels that are too narrow, skimpy […] insufficient’, and pursue his suggestion that ‘we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings...’ I am interested, therefore, in speculative and associative forms of knowledge, where ‘low’ and ‘high’ materials and approaches are brought into proximity such that they trouble established ways of thinking. This talk ultimately argues for the sort of creatively critical work that enriches and makes wonderfully strange our relationship with the cultural and social artifacts that surround us. ""
This paper, then, focuses upon the lessons for creative and critical method to be derived from Perec’s oblique approach to the exploration of ideas. In Penser/Classer, he articulates the process of thinking through practice when he remarks his difficulty organizing material and notes the fuzzy, fugitive, unfinished nature of the ‘shapeless scraps’, describing how he muddles along, feeling his way, ‘meandering in the midst of words’. For Michael Sheringham, Perec’s ‘deviation into practice’ causes temporary but effective suspensions of judgement, where spaces are opened in order to ‘see what happens’, and where, via a decision to work through ‘projets’, research is less likely ‘to be achieved in a set way, being something with a ‘less defined, more hypothetical’ sense of an end point.
Using examples from Perec’s work, and from my own research through and into practice (which takes place via an independent serial project, the Pam Flett Press), I want to consider the relationship of meandering and criticality, the tensions between formal constraint and fuzzy thinking and the use of a productive oscillation between free-floating attention and active interrogation. I hope to show how such methods allow us to go beyond ‘the limits of orthodox, abstract thought’ (as Sheringham has termed it) and produce transversal work that is simultaneously literary/artistic and theoretical.
My own attempt to do so occurs through an independent serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, each issue of which begins by recognising some instance of everyday life (graffiti on urban walls, the ubiquitous plastic bag, the scatter of gum on city pavements, the pareidolic desire to see faces in ordinary objects…) before using this as a means with which to think creatively and critically. Each edition ‘essays’ – that is, tests out, experiments with – the quotidian, such that it finds different form according to the material explored. I would like to discuss the third issue, Gumming up the Works, which focuses upon chewing gum and uses this both as material to think about, and to think with. In considering how its digressive structure essays such matters as an aesthetics of lumps, actual and metaphorical chewing over, and how mouths and hands fiddle whilst our heads are otherwise engaged, I want to posit making as a making-one’s-way-into-understanding the everyday, and to suggest that using the everyday as material can in turn rethink academic and creative work.
My proposed contribution to Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer takes up Raunig’s critique of the modulating university to demonstrate my own attempt to make space for such ‘wild and transversal writing’, to secure the use of invention within the context of a creative academic enquiry and to increase the possibility for different forms of critical, artistic expression. The Pam Flett Press, my independent, self-funded pamphlet serial, emerged in 2011 out of a growing frustration with the spaces and forms within which I felt my work as both an artist and an academic was supposed – professionally speaking – to appear. It is both a protest against existing modes and structures, and a demonstration that alternatives remain possible. It explicitly seeks to allow Raunig’s kind of transversal approach, being characterized by one of its readers as having concerns with matters ‘from the academic paper to the toilet door’ and as a result it has found readers from regional zine fairs to Harvard University and beyond. In order to avoid the ‘crass uniformity’ of language or modes of expression, each issue may take a different format as dictated by its content: the next, Gumming up the Works (which chews over actual and metaphorical chewing gum, considers the digestive abilities of worms – and artists – as well as processing the creative and critical potential of clutter, and discussing form/formlessness through an aesthetics of lumps and piles…) uses the voice as well as printed words and images, and its necessarily digressive footnotes run to over 26000 words… If the ‘essay industry’ normally straitjackets, as Raunig proposes, the Pam Flett Press seeks to restore the properly creative and critical possibilities of the form by recalling that etymologically the essay derives from ideas of trial, test and experiment. For Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer I want to begin with one of this forthcoming issue’s more extensive footnotes, which specifically proposes an attitude of rigorous impropriety towards forms of research, publication and distribution. Continuing the project’s process of essaying, I want to undertake a performance reading with images, through which I will propose a series of exemplars from the Press and test out the stances/positions they suggest.
Within this broader context, this case study will consider two distinct features of the NTU course. Firstly Seán Cummins will explore the course practices that effectively turn the curriculum ‘outside in’, making porous the boundary between university and professional practice, and bringing opportunities for students to develop powerful networks which are able to sustain long after graduation. Secondly, Joanne Lee will discuss how writing assignments are staged to develop the conversation students have with their own practice and the broader cultural field, and to enable them to test out different voices/modes of address. In both instances learning is communal and dialogic, and focused by the students’ particular interests: this paper will address how a curriculum can promote creative, independent learning through the conversations made possible by outward facing networks and practices of writing.
This paper will begin with Derek Jarman’s use of the then derelict Docklands’ landscape as a film location, circumnavigate London with Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’; listen to the narratives suggested in Anna Best’s anti-guidebook ‘Occasional Sights’ and re-excavate Stephen Gill’s photographic archaeology, amongst other examples. It will examine the contemporary fascination displayed on the web for such spaces, as evidenced through the Flickr.com sets devoted to ‘desire paths’ striking out across open spaces, or Bill Keaggy’s archiving of ‘arbortecture’ (trees growing out of buildings) and ‘sad chairs’ abandoned on waste ground. It will also draw upon my own creative ‘fieldwork’ conducted in Sheffield and Brighton, UK. Ultimately, I am interested to discern how this resourceful and imaginative ‘gleaning’ might allow a shift in the relationships city dwellers have with such marginal urban sites.
This presentation explores three of the innovative and interdisciplinary learning spaces made possible by the new curriculum design. Firstly, it will consider Thinking Space: writing through an open curriculum. This section will explore the role of writing for students’ learning experiences within Fine Art at NTU. It will show how a series of carefully designed writing assignments, across a 120-credit Level 3 module, enables practice, theory and professional skills to be developed holistically. It will also demonstrate how this innovative approach to writing (assessed through a Research Portfolio) has replaced the traditional final-year dissertation.
Secondly, it will explore Space for Critical Encounters: “Show and Listen”. The Fine Art Programme offers distinctive studio seminars; these “Show and Listen” sessions offer a significant innovation upon existing models of “studio crit”, as the difference between intention and interpretation is experienced by students as a live event through the joint “witnessing” of one another's presentations. Using Martin Buber's notion of “encounter”, the presentation will explore how these situations create a “revelatory” space, through which interpretation is “performed” and the myth of intentionality unraveled. As a result, the group experience cumulatively builds a form of “co-knowledge”.
Thirdly, it will consider The Curriculum is Out There: Delivering Contemporary Practice. This section begins from Boris Groys’ (2007: 146) suggestion that "The mechanisms of contemporary art, rather than the results, could be a field of academic knowledge... Instead of studying works and canons, we would study processes and strategies.” Given that the diverse territory of contemporary professional practice is the intellectual subject matter of Fine Art students’ study, how might this actually be delivered within the timetable? This section will show how the reinvention of the traditional lecture format within an interrelated series of practitioner talks is combined with the “Reflexive Archive” project to enhance their reception, using online resources to engender student discussion.
We seek a debate about how turning the curriculum “outside in” can promote independent learning and allow students practical/intellectual mobility in a rapidly changing world. We welcome discussion around how the approaches outlined, with their emphasis upon co-learning and a refusal of the lecturer’s “mastery” of the discourse, have a wider resonance with colleagues from other fields in higher education.
Colleagues from other fields express considerable interest in a number of aspects of our approach; they comment enthusiastically on what they see as the ‘deep learning’ facilitated by our distinctive ‘studio seminars’, and the thoroughgoing integration of practice, theory and professional skills.
This panel session will outline, reflect upon and open further debate concerning three specific ‘learning spaces’.
Three papers will be presented:
Sean Cummins “Space for Critical Encounters: ‘Show and Listen’”
This paper considers the learning space offered for students within the Fine Art Programme’s distinctive studio seminars. These ‘Show and Listen’ sessions offer a significant innovation upon existing models of ‘studio crit’: the difference between intention and interpretation is experienced by students as a live event through the joint 'witnessing' of one another's presentations. Using Martin Buber's notion of 'encounter', the paper will explore how these situations create a ‘revelatory’ space, through which interpretation is 'performed' and the myth of intentionality unraveled. As a result, the group experience cumulatively builds a form of 'co-knowledge'.
Joanne Lee “Thinking Space: writing through an open curriculum”.
This paper will explore the role of writing for students’ learning experiences within Fine Art at NTU. It will offer a concise case study of how a series of carefully designed writing assignments function within a 120 credit Level 3 module, demonstrating how practice, theory and professional skills are developed holistically as a result. This paper will demonstrate how this innovative approach to writing (assessed through a Research Portfolio), has replaced the traditional final year dissertation.
Rob Flint “The Curriculum is Out There: Delivering Contemporary Practice”
This paper begins from Boris Groys' suggestion that, "The mechanisms of contemporary art, rather than the results, could be a field of academic knowledge... Instead of studying works and canons, we would study processes and strategies.” So, given that the intellectual subject matter of Fine Art students’ study is the diverse territory of contemporary professional practice, how might this actually be delivered within the timetable? This paper will show how the reinvention of the traditional lecture format within an interrelated series of practitioner talks (the ‘Live’ and ‘Contexts’ presentations) is combined with the ‘Reflexive Archive’ project to enhance their reception, using online resources to engender student discussion.
The presentation will recognize the body as a cognitive organ, and will argue that were we to recover the original meaning of the term asthitikos - perceptive by feeling - it would allow the development of an investigative method applicable to a broad range of research beyond the traditional remit of aesthetics. I consider this approach to aesthetics to allow a form of bodily knowing that is not pre-critical or naïve. My presentation will consider sense perception to include the visual, but also the haptic, auditory, etc. and will attend to issues of emotional affect such as shame, boredom, etc., in order to develop new approaches to knowledge. This project draws upon an audio/visual/sensory practice as well as the work of theorists such as Susan Buck Morss. It utilizes a range of emerging contemporary approaches to aesthetics and affect including those of Constance Classen, David Howes, Jane Bennett, Philip Fisher, Lars Svendsen, etc. Crucially, however, it is focused through the non-fiction of a creative writer, Georges Perec, whose suggestions as to the methods by which we might attend to the world we inhabit, I find persuasive.
Questions
I am interested to raise questions about what constitutes a properly aesthetic investigation, and whether sensory engagement can actually be critical. I would like to discuss how the habitual limiting of aesthetic consideration to the artistic sphere is preventing us developing useful investigative tools. Further, it seems that binary categories have become established where practice-led research is now commonly opposed to ‘traditional’ research, partly through a concern to establish the research of artists as being somehow of a different order: I am interested to explore alternatives for aesthetic engagement that might better enable us to investigate our world.
The architectural theorist Luc Lévesque has suggested that such a binary opposition in readings of the terrain vague is reductive: it results only in a repetitive argument about order and disorder, from those who view these spaces as either debased or emancipatory. Instead, he argues that we ought to think of these spaces as material for thinking about/through interstices in our lived environment, reminding us that the interstitial denotes both a space ‘in between’, and an interval in time. This paper considers the role of terrains vagues as shifting but tangible thresholds. It will explore a range of creative investigations into these sites including research into ‘Public Phenomena’ conducted by the collaborative US group Temporary Services and the urban interventions of Canada’s L'atelier d'exploration urbaine, Bill Keaggy’s photographic archiving of ‘arbortecture’ (trees growing out of buildings) or ‘sad chairs’ abandoned on waste ground, and my own ‘fieldwork’ conducted in Sheffield, Nottingham and Brighton to think through the practical and conceptual possibilities of these urban liminary zones.
Mirroring the scatter of heterogenous materials dumped or blown in to such places and the shifting process of use, reuse and abandonment, this publication involves a conceptual conglomeration of different aspects - a series of printed booklets, a collection of photographs - and a process of re-presentation in diverse forms and locations: each exhibition iteration will differ from the last as new ideas take root.
The essay, which runs to just under an hour of listening time, is accompanied by a printed publication featuring 26000 words of excessive, digressive footnotes (about lichen, large format photography, islands, creative block, binary erotics, fiddling, getting side-tracked, stickiness, shit, disgust, using animals to think with, the Katamari Damacy computer game, tumbleweed methodology, hoarding, clutter, impropriety, rubbish...) the generation of which, I realise, have become the point of the exercise..
Case studies examined in this book include the sophisticated tradition of 'academic' inquiry of establishment figures, like Joshua Reynolds and Frederic Leighton, as well as examples of radical reform undertaken by key individuals in the history of art education, such as Edward Poynter and William Coldstream. The role of 'Modern Masters' (like William Orpen, Augustus John, Gwen John and Jeff Wall) is also discussed along with the need for students and teachers to master the realm of art theory in their studio-based learning environments, and the ultimate pedagogical repercussions of postmodern assaults on the academic bastions of the Old Masters.
The concertina companion of footnotes starts to get a little out of hand, with many entries spawning notes of their own, and some of these generating still further annotation... Amongst these you’ll find a disquisition on the naming of colours, consideration of the biro’s invention and use, a list of recording artistes whose names claim spurious nobility, thoughts on archaeology, the different knowledge made possible by practice, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger on contradiction in essays.
You’ll also find extensive discussion of curiosity and careers, carrier bags and colanders, a consideration of the distinctions between amateur and professional wankers, as well as an engagement with experts and epistemophilia... Francophiles will enjoy name-checking those who’ve inspired this endeavour: Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Michel de Montaigne, Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Agnes Varda. Northerners will know that none of this could have happened without Mark. E. Smith and the mighty Fall.
Chapter 11 - entitled 'Languages for Learning to Delight in Art'
Legenda: Oxford, 2007
ISBN 9781905981137
Drafts/Draughts documents a conversation exploring the migration of ideas between real and imagined, conceptual and material in the making and reception of contemporary art. Using the poetic and conceptual potential of key functions in computer-aided design packages as suggestive devices for thinking, it attends to a range of issues currently preoccupying those involved in academic and professional art contexts. These include strategies for teaching fine art, the relationship of academic research to art practice, the complexities of working with experts from other disciplines, and techniques for engaging audiences and participants.
London: Artwords Press, 2006
ISBN 095439089X
In my paper I am interested to use this current fascination for pareidolia as the occasion to think about our desire to read meaning and significance into things. As an artist/scholar working with the everyday, rather than attempting to pin down definitive interpretations, I am interested in enlarging what can be generated from the ordinary objects and materials that surround us. My desire for richer, multiplied possibilities takes up Michel Foucault’s assertion that as academics we are suffering from ‘channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient’, and his suggestion that ‘we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings...’ My own attempt to do so occurs through an independent serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, each issue of which begins by recognising some instance of everyday life (graffiti on urban walls, the ubiquitous plastic bag, the scatter of gum on city pavements, the pareidolic desire to see faces in ordinary objects…) before using this as a means with which to think creatively and critically. The current paper focuses upon instances from issue #5 ‘I see faces’ and posits making as a making-one’s-way-into-understanding the everyday, before suggesting that using the everyday as material can in turn rethink academic and creative work.
I want to take up theorist Michel Foucault’s contention that in universities we are suffering from ‘channels that are too narrow, skimpy […] insufficient’, and pursue his suggestion that ‘we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings...’ I am interested, therefore, in speculative and associative forms of knowledge, where ‘low’ and ‘high’ materials and approaches are brought into proximity such that they trouble established ways of thinking. This talk ultimately argues for the sort of creatively critical work that enriches and makes wonderfully strange our relationship with the cultural and social artifacts that surround us. ""
This paper, then, focuses upon the lessons for creative and critical method to be derived from Perec’s oblique approach to the exploration of ideas. In Penser/Classer, he articulates the process of thinking through practice when he remarks his difficulty organizing material and notes the fuzzy, fugitive, unfinished nature of the ‘shapeless scraps’, describing how he muddles along, feeling his way, ‘meandering in the midst of words’. For Michael Sheringham, Perec’s ‘deviation into practice’ causes temporary but effective suspensions of judgement, where spaces are opened in order to ‘see what happens’, and where, via a decision to work through ‘projets’, research is less likely ‘to be achieved in a set way, being something with a ‘less defined, more hypothetical’ sense of an end point.
Using examples from Perec’s work, and from my own research through and into practice (which takes place via an independent serial project, the Pam Flett Press), I want to consider the relationship of meandering and criticality, the tensions between formal constraint and fuzzy thinking and the use of a productive oscillation between free-floating attention and active interrogation. I hope to show how such methods allow us to go beyond ‘the limits of orthodox, abstract thought’ (as Sheringham has termed it) and produce transversal work that is simultaneously literary/artistic and theoretical.
My own attempt to do so occurs through an independent serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, each issue of which begins by recognising some instance of everyday life (graffiti on urban walls, the ubiquitous plastic bag, the scatter of gum on city pavements, the pareidolic desire to see faces in ordinary objects…) before using this as a means with which to think creatively and critically. Each edition ‘essays’ – that is, tests out, experiments with – the quotidian, such that it finds different form according to the material explored. I would like to discuss the third issue, Gumming up the Works, which focuses upon chewing gum and uses this both as material to think about, and to think with. In considering how its digressive structure essays such matters as an aesthetics of lumps, actual and metaphorical chewing over, and how mouths and hands fiddle whilst our heads are otherwise engaged, I want to posit making as a making-one’s-way-into-understanding the everyday, and to suggest that using the everyday as material can in turn rethink academic and creative work.
My proposed contribution to Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer takes up Raunig’s critique of the modulating university to demonstrate my own attempt to make space for such ‘wild and transversal writing’, to secure the use of invention within the context of a creative academic enquiry and to increase the possibility for different forms of critical, artistic expression. The Pam Flett Press, my independent, self-funded pamphlet serial, emerged in 2011 out of a growing frustration with the spaces and forms within which I felt my work as both an artist and an academic was supposed – professionally speaking – to appear. It is both a protest against existing modes and structures, and a demonstration that alternatives remain possible. It explicitly seeks to allow Raunig’s kind of transversal approach, being characterized by one of its readers as having concerns with matters ‘from the academic paper to the toilet door’ and as a result it has found readers from regional zine fairs to Harvard University and beyond. In order to avoid the ‘crass uniformity’ of language or modes of expression, each issue may take a different format as dictated by its content: the next, Gumming up the Works (which chews over actual and metaphorical chewing gum, considers the digestive abilities of worms – and artists – as well as processing the creative and critical potential of clutter, and discussing form/formlessness through an aesthetics of lumps and piles…) uses the voice as well as printed words and images, and its necessarily digressive footnotes run to over 26000 words… If the ‘essay industry’ normally straitjackets, as Raunig proposes, the Pam Flett Press seeks to restore the properly creative and critical possibilities of the form by recalling that etymologically the essay derives from ideas of trial, test and experiment. For Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer I want to begin with one of this forthcoming issue’s more extensive footnotes, which specifically proposes an attitude of rigorous impropriety towards forms of research, publication and distribution. Continuing the project’s process of essaying, I want to undertake a performance reading with images, through which I will propose a series of exemplars from the Press and test out the stances/positions they suggest.
Within this broader context, this case study will consider two distinct features of the NTU course. Firstly Seán Cummins will explore the course practices that effectively turn the curriculum ‘outside in’, making porous the boundary between university and professional practice, and bringing opportunities for students to develop powerful networks which are able to sustain long after graduation. Secondly, Joanne Lee will discuss how writing assignments are staged to develop the conversation students have with their own practice and the broader cultural field, and to enable them to test out different voices/modes of address. In both instances learning is communal and dialogic, and focused by the students’ particular interests: this paper will address how a curriculum can promote creative, independent learning through the conversations made possible by outward facing networks and practices of writing.
This paper will begin with Derek Jarman’s use of the then derelict Docklands’ landscape as a film location, circumnavigate London with Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’; listen to the narratives suggested in Anna Best’s anti-guidebook ‘Occasional Sights’ and re-excavate Stephen Gill’s photographic archaeology, amongst other examples. It will examine the contemporary fascination displayed on the web for such spaces, as evidenced through the Flickr.com sets devoted to ‘desire paths’ striking out across open spaces, or Bill Keaggy’s archiving of ‘arbortecture’ (trees growing out of buildings) and ‘sad chairs’ abandoned on waste ground. It will also draw upon my own creative ‘fieldwork’ conducted in Sheffield and Brighton, UK. Ultimately, I am interested to discern how this resourceful and imaginative ‘gleaning’ might allow a shift in the relationships city dwellers have with such marginal urban sites.
This presentation explores three of the innovative and interdisciplinary learning spaces made possible by the new curriculum design. Firstly, it will consider Thinking Space: writing through an open curriculum. This section will explore the role of writing for students’ learning experiences within Fine Art at NTU. It will show how a series of carefully designed writing assignments, across a 120-credit Level 3 module, enables practice, theory and professional skills to be developed holistically. It will also demonstrate how this innovative approach to writing (assessed through a Research Portfolio) has replaced the traditional final-year dissertation.
Secondly, it will explore Space for Critical Encounters: “Show and Listen”. The Fine Art Programme offers distinctive studio seminars; these “Show and Listen” sessions offer a significant innovation upon existing models of “studio crit”, as the difference between intention and interpretation is experienced by students as a live event through the joint “witnessing” of one another's presentations. Using Martin Buber's notion of “encounter”, the presentation will explore how these situations create a “revelatory” space, through which interpretation is “performed” and the myth of intentionality unraveled. As a result, the group experience cumulatively builds a form of “co-knowledge”.
Thirdly, it will consider The Curriculum is Out There: Delivering Contemporary Practice. This section begins from Boris Groys’ (2007: 146) suggestion that "The mechanisms of contemporary art, rather than the results, could be a field of academic knowledge... Instead of studying works and canons, we would study processes and strategies.” Given that the diverse territory of contemporary professional practice is the intellectual subject matter of Fine Art students’ study, how might this actually be delivered within the timetable? This section will show how the reinvention of the traditional lecture format within an interrelated series of practitioner talks is combined with the “Reflexive Archive” project to enhance their reception, using online resources to engender student discussion.
We seek a debate about how turning the curriculum “outside in” can promote independent learning and allow students practical/intellectual mobility in a rapidly changing world. We welcome discussion around how the approaches outlined, with their emphasis upon co-learning and a refusal of the lecturer’s “mastery” of the discourse, have a wider resonance with colleagues from other fields in higher education.
Colleagues from other fields express considerable interest in a number of aspects of our approach; they comment enthusiastically on what they see as the ‘deep learning’ facilitated by our distinctive ‘studio seminars’, and the thoroughgoing integration of practice, theory and professional skills.
This panel session will outline, reflect upon and open further debate concerning three specific ‘learning spaces’.
Three papers will be presented:
Sean Cummins “Space for Critical Encounters: ‘Show and Listen’”
This paper considers the learning space offered for students within the Fine Art Programme’s distinctive studio seminars. These ‘Show and Listen’ sessions offer a significant innovation upon existing models of ‘studio crit’: the difference between intention and interpretation is experienced by students as a live event through the joint 'witnessing' of one another's presentations. Using Martin Buber's notion of 'encounter', the paper will explore how these situations create a ‘revelatory’ space, through which interpretation is 'performed' and the myth of intentionality unraveled. As a result, the group experience cumulatively builds a form of 'co-knowledge'.
Joanne Lee “Thinking Space: writing through an open curriculum”.
This paper will explore the role of writing for students’ learning experiences within Fine Art at NTU. It will offer a concise case study of how a series of carefully designed writing assignments function within a 120 credit Level 3 module, demonstrating how practice, theory and professional skills are developed holistically as a result. This paper will demonstrate how this innovative approach to writing (assessed through a Research Portfolio), has replaced the traditional final year dissertation.
Rob Flint “The Curriculum is Out There: Delivering Contemporary Practice”
This paper begins from Boris Groys' suggestion that, "The mechanisms of contemporary art, rather than the results, could be a field of academic knowledge... Instead of studying works and canons, we would study processes and strategies.” So, given that the intellectual subject matter of Fine Art students’ study is the diverse territory of contemporary professional practice, how might this actually be delivered within the timetable? This paper will show how the reinvention of the traditional lecture format within an interrelated series of practitioner talks (the ‘Live’ and ‘Contexts’ presentations) is combined with the ‘Reflexive Archive’ project to enhance their reception, using online resources to engender student discussion.
The presentation will recognize the body as a cognitive organ, and will argue that were we to recover the original meaning of the term asthitikos - perceptive by feeling - it would allow the development of an investigative method applicable to a broad range of research beyond the traditional remit of aesthetics. I consider this approach to aesthetics to allow a form of bodily knowing that is not pre-critical or naïve. My presentation will consider sense perception to include the visual, but also the haptic, auditory, etc. and will attend to issues of emotional affect such as shame, boredom, etc., in order to develop new approaches to knowledge. This project draws upon an audio/visual/sensory practice as well as the work of theorists such as Susan Buck Morss. It utilizes a range of emerging contemporary approaches to aesthetics and affect including those of Constance Classen, David Howes, Jane Bennett, Philip Fisher, Lars Svendsen, etc. Crucially, however, it is focused through the non-fiction of a creative writer, Georges Perec, whose suggestions as to the methods by which we might attend to the world we inhabit, I find persuasive.
Questions
I am interested to raise questions about what constitutes a properly aesthetic investigation, and whether sensory engagement can actually be critical. I would like to discuss how the habitual limiting of aesthetic consideration to the artistic sphere is preventing us developing useful investigative tools. Further, it seems that binary categories have become established where practice-led research is now commonly opposed to ‘traditional’ research, partly through a concern to establish the research of artists as being somehow of a different order: I am interested to explore alternatives for aesthetic engagement that might better enable us to investigate our world.
The architectural theorist Luc Lévesque has suggested that such a binary opposition in readings of the terrain vague is reductive: it results only in a repetitive argument about order and disorder, from those who view these spaces as either debased or emancipatory. Instead, he argues that we ought to think of these spaces as material for thinking about/through interstices in our lived environment, reminding us that the interstitial denotes both a space ‘in between’, and an interval in time. This paper considers the role of terrains vagues as shifting but tangible thresholds. It will explore a range of creative investigations into these sites including research into ‘Public Phenomena’ conducted by the collaborative US group Temporary Services and the urban interventions of Canada’s L'atelier d'exploration urbaine, Bill Keaggy’s photographic archiving of ‘arbortecture’ (trees growing out of buildings) or ‘sad chairs’ abandoned on waste ground, and my own ‘fieldwork’ conducted in Sheffield, Nottingham and Brighton to think through the practical and conceptual possibilities of these urban liminary zones.
This paper revisits Jane Gallop's attempts through the 1980's to 'think through the body' and explores Susan Buck Morss' more recent work on 'somatic' responses to aesthetic phenomena. Such responses 'can't be stomached, gobbled up by the mind' and leave a 'non-digestible residue' for further critical cognition. Both writers suggest that there is proper critical work to be done through paying attention to our carnal response to art. James Elkins has stated that as professionals, we very often have only 'an academic passion, an intellectual enthusiasm' for the works we view and study. As an artist, educator of artists and viewer of art, I certainly wish for more than this. This paper then, considers the possibility of loving and/or lusting after art as potentially displacing experiences. Given that Elkins rightly says that our looking is never neutral, that like a shopper in a store we always 'have our eye out' for something I want to determine whether an acute physical attraction/response to certain artworks really does permit such critical endeavours or whether we have frequently already decided what our eye is out for and simply seek satisfaction.
Our current educational climate is one in which failure is considered a problem that ought to be eradicated. Whilst course documents may speak positively of risk-taking, the reality is that risking failure is not an option for either staff or students. Whereas Frenhofer, the fictional artist in Balzac’s novel ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ once provided a compelling myth to artists, students now seek to avoid failure at all costs. This paper considers the implications of this fear of failure upon the art and artists of the future and proposes a less defensive approach to the practice and theory of art.
I am interested to compare these two versions in order to ask what might be gained from our fascination in looking at others and their ‘real’ lives. Rather than seeing some viewing/picturing as inappropriate or inauthentic whilst in other cases it is radical or ‘true’, I wish to suggest that it may allow a mood of enchantment that can actually be important for political/ethical life. My approach is informed by Jane Bennett’s 2001 ‘The Enchantment of Modern Life’ where enchantment is defined as being ‘struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’ and where it can subsequently be cultivated to form an ‘ethics of generosity’.
I begin by reconsidering Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s 1973 concept of ‘ad-hocism’. A term which has had more currency for theorising craft/design rather than fine art, it suggests a creative methodology which relies upon the inventive use of what is to hand. I then continue with an exploration of explicitly excessive creative methods, which might involve the squandering of time and the profligate use of resources in ludicrously labour intensive practices or those that require the consumption and/or destruction of material. I will recognise that in these cases the very out-of the-ordinariness or spectacle can determine the powerful effect. Finally I will consider creative practices that do not seem on the face of it to be practices at all. Within the garden plants will perhaps self-seed, pollinate un-aided by humans or arrive unexpectedly. Creatively speaking, one may seek to refuse control or utilise the practices of chance: I conclude with Charles Darwin’s experimental situation in which the growing tips of plants trace exquisite drawings upon the surface of smoked glass plates...
I am concerned that in reality there is very little openness. Rather we have a narrow orthodoxy of pseudo-interdisciplinarity that in fact privileges the same few theories/theorists time and again. This approach is hidebound by an unduly reverential application of models from other studies. Staff teaching on fine art degrees frequently admit to ‘fearing’ this material, and yet still seem to consider its study essential to their students. There is also a tendency for criticism to focus expressly upon the negative - a model of lack and disappointment concerned with how artworks (or other critics) have failed. Further, as Barbara Stafford has indicated, most theorising of the image/the visual is defined by a deep mistrust of the object of study: the image has become synonymous with seduction and misrepresentation. I contend that these negative, deficit models of criticism seem unproductive in educating the next generation of practitioners (or their audience).
Students consider that fine art seems overly concerned with theoretical niceties and is too little about ‘meaningful’ ideas or experiences. Further, they perceive that there are prescribed positions/readings/opinions - they fear transgressing will result in getting the art ‘wrong’. For some students this certainty is reassuring: they fear having to experience art without having it first pre-digested by criticism. As a result we now have a public debate about contemporary art reduced to whether it is ‘craftless tat’ or ‘cold conceptual bullshit’. I have a much greater ambition for art and its ideas which requires a truly open and interdisciplinary method. Utilising recent work by Jane Bennett on an ethics of enchantment, Susan Buck-Morss on somatic responses, Adam Phillips on curiosity and Gregory Ulmer on heuretic (as opposed to hermeneutic) theory, I will call for a method and language that are suggestive, accessible and fully cognisant of the complexities of experiencing of art. I wish to reassert the etymological meaning of discourse from its Latin root discursus - a going to and fro - in order to propose a less defensive approach to the discussion of art and its affect.
I want to take up theorist Michel Foucault’s contention that in universities we are suffering from ‘channels that are too narrow, skimpy […] insufficient’, and pursue his suggestion that ‘we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings...’ I am interested, therefore, in speculative and associative forms of knowledge, where ‘low’ and ‘high’ materials and approaches are brought into proximity such that they trouble established ways of thinking. This talk ultimately argues for the sort of creatively critical work that enriches and makes wonderfully strange our relationship with the cultural and social artifacts that surround us.
Different versions of this talk have been given to MA Fine Art, Sheffield Hallam University; as part of the 'Contexts' talks series in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and to Fashion & Textiles students as part of the Design & Visual Culture component at NTU.
From the Henry Moore Institute press release:
Undone is concerned with sculpture that lies somewhere on the threshold between the made and unmade. This fascinating exhibition brings together a large body of recent work by international contemporary artists and in doing so identifies a shared aesthetic that characterises the work of this otherwise disparate group of artists. These ‘homespun’ sculptures, made from readily-available materials by artists from Europe, the US and Brazil seem to reflect a new age of austerity.
Focusing on objects and structures which are ‘handmade’, using traditional and more ad-hoc craft techniques, the works featured are often created using a simple, repetitive action, from crochet, plaiting, weaving and winding to stringing, shredding, binding and crumpling. Drawing on a wide range of materials, colours, scales and textures, the structures are as much bound together as they are poised to disintegrate. The selection includes work by Tonico Lemos Auad, Claire Barclay, Alexandra Bircken, Nayland Blake, Ruth Claxton, Krysten Cunningham, Michael Dean, Angus Fairhurst, Leo Fitzmaurice, Tom Friedman, Franziska Furter, Neil Gall, Jim Lambie, Tim Machin, Sally Osborn, Simon Periton, Mary Redmond, Eva Rothschild and Armando Andrade Tudela.
Whilst contemporary sculptors such as Damien Hirst and Mark Quinn experimented with the use of diamonds and gold at the height of economic boom, the ‘make do and mend’ approach illustrated by Undone seems more appropriate to newly constrained times.
http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/exhibitions/undone"