StudentsZINE Vol.1 Issue 1

STUDENTSzine.com Issue 1 - 2010

Serena Caufield Oonagh Latchford Tessa Elieff Evelyn Morrison Salome Voegelin Tiago Esteves Fergus Doyle Trash DIY Brian Hand Andrew Kenny Joaquin Gasgonia Palencia Craig Bell Jenny Keane Dagan Wald Barbara Smith Sanjay K Sharma Laura Payne Tanad Williams

MISSION

STUDENTS is a new Irish Contemporary Art Magazine founded to readdress the current lack of representation focusing primarily on the development of students, emerging and under represented artists within their creative and research practices. STUDENTS is dedicated to create a platform for discussion and dialogue for students and emerging artists. It aims to be at the forefront of art criticism and theory and to engage and represent the work of committed emerging practitioners within the field of ‘Art’, to promote their work and related interests to a wider appreciating audience and to create a discursive network between national and international colleges and universities. STUDENTS is unique in that it caters for the ever evolving and dynamic creative practices that continues to emerge as sonic, video and performance works can be embedded directly into a downloadable PDF or experienced directly from an accompanying disc supplied with each issue.

SUBMIT STUDENTSzine are accepting submissions on an ongoing basis, to be considered for future issues please send your work to submit@studentszine.com - to send work in to join THE NETWORK e-mail thenetwork@studentszine.com SUBSCRIBE studentszine@gmail.com - Please email with subscribe in the subject line.

CONTRIBUTORS TEXTS

SALOME VOEGELIN BRIAN HAND

INTERVIEWS JENNY KEANE

WORKS

SERENA CAUFIELD OONAGH LATCHFORD TESSE ELIEFF EVELYN MORRISON ANDREW KENNY FERGUS DOYLE TIAGO ESTEVES JOAQUIN GASGONIA PALENCIA CRAIG BELL BARBARA SMITH TRASH DIY LAURA PAYNE DAGAN WALD SANJAY K SHARMA

TANAD WILLIAMS

LIST OF INTERESTED DISTRIBUTORS FOR FUTURE ISSUES NIVAL, National Irish Visual Arts Library, (NCAD, Dublin, Ireland) Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, (Barcelona, Spain) RUA RED, (Tallaght, Dublin, Ireland) The Burren College of Art, (co. Clare, Ireland) Basement project space, (cork, Ireland) Arttrail YMCA, (cork, Ireland) GSA, Gorey School of Art, (co. Wexford, Ireland) Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre (co. Wicklow, Ireland) The Little Ghost Gallery (co. Kilkenny, Ireland) SOMA Contemporary Art Box, (co. Waterford,Ireland) Nenagh Arts Centre, (co. Tipperary, Ireland) Number One Gallery,(co.Dublin, Ireland) Mothers Tankstation, (co. Dublin, Ireland) Exchange Gallery, (co. Dublin, Ireland) Ennistymon Courthouse Gallery & Studios, (co. Clare, Ireland) Tallaght Community Arts, (co. Dublin, Ireland) Pitzer Art Galleries, (Claremont, CA, USA) Academy of Fine Arts, (Prague, Czeck Republic) Collective Gallery, (Edinburgh, Scotland) Soundfjord Gallery & ResearchUnit, (London, UK) Trailer project space,(Rotterdam.Netherlands) Arteria Art Gallery,(Montreal,Canada) 221A, (Vancouver, Canada) Draiocht, (Blanchardstown, Ireland) CIT, Crawford School of Art, (Cork, Ireland) Catalyst Arts, (Belfast, Northern Ireland) Filmbase, (Temple Bar, Ireland) Cake Contemporary Arts, (co. Kildare, Ireland) ICPA, Colgate University, (NY, USA) 126 (Galway, Ireland) West Cork Arts Centre (cork, Ireland) Darc Space (Dublin, Ireland) Galway Arts Center, (Galway, Ireland)

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR First of all I would like to thank all of you who submitted work to our very first and extremely exciting zine. As this is our first issue we encourage you to send in your reviews and recommendations. We want to work with you so we can deliver to you what you want. Secondly I would like to apologise for the lack of a printed version of Issue 1. At present we have not received enough funding to put into circulation a printed version of this issue. However, it is our desire and aim to be able to have printed versions of future issues in circulation, and we have an amazing and extensive list of interested distributors who I would also like to thank that are awaiting copies to bring to the public.

STUDENTSzine aims to become a successful publication that supports the education and developement of aspiring students and committed emerging practioners. We at STUDENTS also hope that this zine can become a leader in the field Art criticism and theory and can become a helpful zine that will be kept close to hand across the world. One of the main reasons I started this zine was to fulfil a desire and eliminate a frustration that I felt when I was in college as an art student. I hope to open up the isolated and insular nature of many educational institutions around the world to make them more interconnected with each other and also to bridge a gap between artists inside and outside of the educational systems.

What follows are texts, interviews and works in various diciplines from artists across the world.

Enjoy! and Happy Christmas from all at STUDENTSzine

S E R E N A C A U F I E L D

This work has arrived from a feeling of personal disconnection and displacement. Being ‘between’ two geographical places, Norwich, and Wexford in Ireland, I have found it almost impossible to make art. I have learned that each place has elements of what I want, and what I need. Both, and neither, are home. I feel the need to question and interrogate my physical surroundings. Investigating, testing, and exploring how I can make artwork to bring both places closer together, I aim to encompass my situation productively while focusing on repetition, observation, and discipline as methods of production.

I often walk, run or cycle around ‘the block’ near my house in Ireland. I like to do the same here in Norfolk, where I’m staying with a friend. I have been exploring my new (also temporary) local surroundings as a vehicle to create new work. At the beginning, my walks were just walks, cycles, just cycles, and runs were occasional and just for the hell of it! I recently realised that ‘the block’ could be used as an interesting metaphor for the tensions and dynamics of the creative process. I make ‘the loop’ a daily endeavor. The repetition and rigour of the circuit allows me to re-invest discipline in my practice, as well as providing a framework to create. I as the artist, have the power to break this loop, negotiating different in-points and out-points, where the process of creation becomes more spiral like.

I constantly seek out to find things that visually interest and engage me. I stop and observe mundane objects/surfaces/marks, rendering them aesthetically interesting through the casual use of documentary photography. I’m intrigued how the combination of man and nature can attain such draughtsman ship just by co-existing, making marks that any painter would be proud of. I focus on the nature and physicality of these surfaces as a metaphorical ‘skin’. I like to think of the skin as a protective layer or barrier in which we are contained. It is also a permeable layer, which allows a transformation or crossover to occur. It is not simply a surface or envelope of sorts, but a real place of transformation and contact. It is the passage between internal and external; inner strength and outer fragility, between the paint pot and the epidermal deposit of paint on the surface, between the subject matter and pictorial form, and between the real and the imagined. Fragility, fragmentation and the emergence of pictorial matter coincide with the interchangeable habitation of the self. Many meanings can evolve out of many layers; layers that permit cracks and fragility, allowing a shift in matter and meaning.

Displacement also provokes disruptions and shifts of meanings and conventions. Patterns of displacement are not confined to highbrow artistic practices, but manifest themselves in everyday environments. With a theoretical framework focusing on the concepts of metaphor, mimesis, modernity, and identity, I would argue that the form of any architectural structure can function as a receptacle, as an instrument, or as staging of displacement. I also think that the gallery itself can manage to generate possibilities to turn contradiction into ambivalence. www.serenacaulfiled.com

O O N A G H L A T C H F O R D

Online social environments are a relatively new phenomenon and I am interested in exploring users’ profile pictures, a form of portraiture online. Travelling through a virtual space, I study its occupants on my way, observing little snippets of constructed and sometimes adopted personas. Vignettes of lives – be they fictional or not – and of our era.

As a group, the resulting works are a portrait of online social networking, rather than the individual as a whole. The works are interesting to me as social documentary, in how the apparent democracy and creative freedom possible with social networking sites seems absent, in the very formulaic visual portraits or profiles. I recreate these found images through the traditional medium of paint on a non-traditional surface. By repainting them I add another layer to this image exchange.

T E S S A E L I E F F

I began experimenting with electronic sounds in 2000. Through part charm and part bribery I managed to secure a weekly residency at an inner city venue in Adelaide Australia. Over five years I used the public outlet as what could be considered a social experiment, one that explored the sensation of sound in public space. What initially began as a naive trial, error and observation approach soon developed into a heightened listening awareness and intrigue of my surrounding sonic environment. In the year 2010 my work has developed to the point of exploring sound and it’s relationship with space not only in live performance but also in surround field recording method, post recording spatialization and as an instrument in it’s own entity. I use Space as a tool with which to sculpt sounds for both onsite recording and for live immersive performance.

Recent works have involved the recording of unique sonic environments via selfdeveloped multi track recording techniques and specific microphone placement. Selected spaces have included six level stairwells, underground drains, remote hilltops and stormy Australian shorelines. Resultant compositions are spatialized as a 5.1 surround sound piece, with final closure signified by a live performance of the work. Performance methods have involved multi speaker systems of various configurations for live spatializing (Stereo, LCR, quadraphonic, 5.1, 6.1 and even a 22 speaker system have been used). Favored tools used for live performance include sampler, midi controller, laptop, speaker placement, architecture (manmade or natural) and space.

Upcoming plans include, “Semantic Clutter” an event directed and curated by Elieff on invitation of Nat Bates for “Liquid Architecture Festival, 2010”. In September she will also commence “Live Arts Incubator” – a joint venture with Jacques Soddell at the Old Fire Station in Bendigo, Victoria.

Akousmatikoi (Live) - Tessa Elieff Click above to play

E V E L Y N M O R R I S O N

Perception beyond the visual is at the centre of my work, and visitors are invariably invited to engage with objects or situations. While for example wearing blindfolds or entering secluded spaces, they activate and complete the work, becoming inadvertent performers in the process.

Where there is a performer there is a spectator, and I am intrigued by the tension between the experiencer, the ‘inside’, and the mere onlooker, the ‘outside’. A metaphor for the various relationships we encounter in our lives, in particular the discrepancy between speculating and experiencing, between opinion and knowledge.

The Anxiety of the Lonely Listener Salome Voegelin “This is KAB Antonio bay California, six minutes after midnight. Have not heard from the weather-man yet so I can’t say for sure about that rain.

But there is a full moon and no clouds in the sky. I am Stevie Wane and if you don’t have anything to do right now. I’ll be here playing music all through the witching hour. And even if you do have something to do, keep me turned on for a while and I’ll do my best to do the same for you” (John Carpenter’s The Fog) The radio is not one thing it is multitudes. Radio is not innately anything, but is everything it is, dependent on who is listening. In this sense any radio transmission is truly contingent on the temporal, spatial and psychological (understood as an inner dimension) circumstance of the listener. The radio broadcast, emitting from its unsighted box, gives the room it enters different colours; working with the tones that are already there, stretching them in every direction.

Sure, this idea of contingency could be applied to other media too, but nowhere is the multiplicity of production and perception more profuse than in the darkness of radio, where no image preserves our hold an on authentic sense of reality, and thus no sense of non-reality limits the imagination of the listener. The temporal flow of radio is a blind stream, emanating from a faceless, boundary-less place.

The association of this transitory stream with a visual actuality is produced in a fleeting action of listening. Radio does not produce a certain object, but incites figments of individual imagination. It does not affirm the surety of a location or object but produces its own reality as a perceptual and individual uncertainty.

This is why tuning in to KAB you invent your own worst nightmare.

The horror roles out of an opaque fog answering your contingent auditory imagination.

This blindness of production and the consequent abundance of perception lend themselves to art practice. The artist working on radio does not produce a work confined to its reading, but enables the production of a multitude of works in the perception of the listener. He or she can trigger a process of invention and imagination, whose course of production, however, is indelibly the listener’s. Radio is thoroughly phenomenological; existing through a multiplicity of authorship. It does not work despite the audience, but works from the listener’s autonomous and unintentional process of perception, reciprocally producing the sound as well as him- or herself in a constant stream of now.

Contemporary Visual Art which is engaged in critical discourse rather than the production of representations, laments the limitations of a recognisable aesthetic, and attempts to challenge and deconstruct its corresponding conceptions of authenticity and the production of meaning. The visual artist works from a constructed aesthetic and attempts to challenge and disturb it in order to thereby unsettle the values it is based on. However, the visual expression is prejudicaly grounded in an at least seemingly substantial object, situated in an also at least seemingly substantial arena of the gallery or discourse. (In this context a photograph or a video screen is a visual object, and even a site-specific work is still signed by its visual environment and concurrent visual discourse). Any challenge to the material object and its in discourse constructed understanding necessarily remains in relation to that object. In this framework the artist challenges the basis of his or her own expression without however being able to ever abandon it entirely. He or she is caught in the substance whose valuation he or she set out to probe. Consequently the framework of visability, which at once enables and constrains communication, remains intact.

Ideologically, the visual supports communication and the idea that we share in a common discourse, which makes it possible to understand each other, and in favour of such comprehension limits what can be communicated and imagined. Radio works from the opposite end, its starts from a position of isolated aural non-substantiality, and works towards a communication that consequently remains forever transient and intangible, open to further generative production in perception.

Radiophonic sound produces a phenomenological époché: the individual listeners and broadcasters are separated from its source as well as from each other. Their gaze does not cross on a visual plain, which anchors and substantiates the experience of a piece as a reading of its intention. Rather, they listen from all angles, propelling the sonic materiality into a multitude of new directions all the time. The desire for radio comes, not out of a sense of visual certainty and collectivity, but out of an anxiety of solitude and a progressive fear of noncommunication.

This motivation for radio reflects on an understanding of the fragility of interaction and an awareness of the solitude of one’s position. The desire for communication is the motivation for listening to the radio.

The non-substantiality of its transmission however does not produce a collective sense, but forever amplifies the singular position of the listener, continually impelling him or her to imagine, invent and interconnect, without fulfilling the expectation of communication. In his or her engaged solitude the listener can imagine anything, and anything he or she imagines is true in the context of his or her imagination.

What public conventions there are, are soon hijacked and manipulated in the private and uncontrollable sphere of the listener’s mind.

No socially constructed sense of reality can force a limitation on the conceptual scope of the radio once it has entered the listener’s ear.

Instead, radio invites continually the production of multiplicities realities - footloose and fancy-free.

The sounds of the radio insidiously enter the space of the listener, mingle with the existing sounds and challenge its visual architecture.

The individual listener is at first disorientated and blind in the dark box of the radio. He or she cannot assume an instant, visual, sense of orientation, and insecurely taps around in its dimmed light to find some bearings. In radio we do not know the space as soon as we enter, but need to construct it continually as we aurally amble along its everchanging shape. There are no other people to ask for direction, there is no map, there is only us, and the faceless voices and sounds emanating from the box on the table, the mantle-piece, the bathtub rim, the car-stereo, etc. The reality we construct when listening is our own, the traps and monsters heard are ours too. Nobody hears us, however loud we scream.

This radio reveals the certainty of the visual community to be a deception. It shows how fragile and tenuous its collectivity and communication is. The visual substantiality hides misunderstandings, and, in the service of expediency, constructs an idea of translatability of meaning. In contrast, the connections made on the radio are fleeting, unstable and contingent. They do not pretend complete communication but trigger the urge to make sense, to communicate, because of its impossibility rather than in spite of it.

Radio is like John Carpenter’s Fog, you can’t see it coming until it’s in your ears. Entering insidiously into your body, it engages your imagination and transports you into a blind space all of your own. In there, cut off from a visual hold on reality, you are exposed to the imaginative dangers of its sounds, enticing you to produce your individual reality, and it’s not necessarily pretty.

Stevie Wane, KAB’s radio DJ, is talking to the listeners in the Antonio Bay area. She is in the light tower, ‘on top of the world’, overlooking the houses that delineate the visible community down below.

Her broadcast roles out like the fog she sees coming towards the town, but is powerless to communicate the horror of. Her voice creates momentary connections with the individual listeners, but rather than bringing them together these fragile trajectories highlight the solitude of each of them, and amplify the isolation of their fates. The transient paths of the radio-waves invisibly chart the visible community, but the horror of the fog highlights the fragility of contact and the isolation that characterises the individual subject despite this visual communality. The radio is a lonely-box, it represents the wish for communication and connectivity but ultimately reveals the futility of such a desire. As human beings we want to communicate, make shared sense of the world. Radio in its insistence on isolation plays with this desire, edges the listener on to participate, gives him or her a sense of belonging without however truly being able to offer such a connectivity. Instead anxiously we play on with the material we hear, forever attempting and failing to stabilise its meaning and belong.

This uncertainty makes fertile ground for artistic expression. Doubt triggers a more reciprocal and temporary production of meaning, a personal sense or non-sense of the work, enabled by the dark space of radio.

Roland Barthes talks about the ‘accent’, as the location or moment in a photograph that goes beyond a collective and stable comprehension.

He explains how he can infer a shared semiotic meaning from a photograph in its studium, and that there is only one particular point, the accent, where the collective meaning making processes escape him.

There, at the accent, he is left baffled and alone in his experience of the work.

In the photograph the accent finds a dialectical counterpart, which frames it in relation to the studium. The radio however produces only accents.

There is no certainty. Every fragment of every sound is an accent, unrecognisable, entreating the listener to place it temporarily in the individual context of his or her imagination. At the accent, I cannot refer to a visual framework to ascertain that what I hear is what is going on.

Any notion of an authentic, shared, reality is suspended. The only support for meaning is my own sense of imagination. Of course there are recognisable rules of production and transmission, commercial and independent. However, even within such a structure, the darkness of reception disorientates, and in this disorientation demands of the listener an effort of production, of re-orientation: organising the material heard to produce a personal and contingent sense. And any meaning so created is ever only fleeting and needs to be re-constructed again and again. Radio is not blind in the sense that there is no visuality to its production. But its visuality is produced in the imagination of the individual listener and not by the medium or its aesthetic and ideological parameters. The visual aspect of radio is temporal and contingent.

It is produced by the listener rather than provided by the producer.

Radio curiously presents many characteristics that are promoted as digital radicalities in concurrent contentions of the network age. The notion of autonomy of production, the potentiality of interactivity and participation, and the idea of a multifarious production in perception are all issues that are hailed as new and exclusive to the digital.

The similarities and differences between the radio and the net invite a re-consideration of radio’s potentialities for art practice in the age of networked art. The internet like the radio is a phenomenological space, a virtual-life world created through my being in it, and reciprocally I too am at the moment of surfing intersubjectivly my on-line self. In this sense the internet, the virtual, has a thoroughly sonic character and demands a sonic sensibility.

The net demands me to be engaged, enveloped by the act of surfing. I am not only reading a pre-exiting text from a distance but as surfer I am a quasi listener, physically and directly involved in its production.

On-line I generate the site and my trajectory through the site, through my surfing in it; I open rooms, unfold them, shed light into them. I close them, it goes dark again, the music stops, it does not exist anymore, at least as far as I am concerned.

The surfer on the net works in isolation. He or she is part of the same paradox between meaning production and communication as is the radio listener: the internet user goes on-line from a solitary and remote position, visits a visual chat room in order to communicate, to connect, but inevitably remains alone. The solitary user of the network, trying to communicate with the world outside, displays a radiophonic anxiety. The surfer on the net is, like the listener to the radio, motivated by his or her quest for meaning and communication. And like the radio, the net can only ever present the limits of a collective understanding. The horror of this anxiety resonates the experience of the lonely listener, who, tapping around in the solitary place of his or her imagination, becomes aware of the barriers to a collective sensibility, but urges on exactly because of this adversity.

Despite these similarities, the digital is presented as more radically participatory than radio due its actual interactivity. The digital offers me Barthes’ experiential ‘accent’ actually at the ‘clicking point’ of its interfaces and feedback mechanisms such as mouse-click, mouseover, plasma screen tactility, motion detectors and any other soft- and hard-ware operation input devices. Rather than working from the sonic ‘accents’ of the radio broadcast and extending the work conceptually in my individual imagination, in the digital, I can extend the work actually via a ‘mouse-click’ interaction. . The abandonment of a singular collective meaning is represented rather than invented in this clicking motion.

The work unfolds outwards and a multitude of works become visible.

However, this multitude is at once enabled and limited by the hardand software devices that make it possible. The limit of participation at these operational accents is directly proportional to the extensions that the technology allows the user to generate. Digital interactivity is a visual interactivity in that it is forged and restricted by its enabling technologies and programming ideologies. Like the visual artist, the practitioner working in the digital can challenge this technology and its aesthetic outputs in order to unsettle the values it is based on. But due to its own tied-upness with a technological, visual, meaning and substantiality, even if a temporal rather than a spatial substantiality, it forever reaffirms the pretence of the collective.

However, the digital understood as a sensibility, a conceptual idea, rather than a technological actuality, emulates a radiophonic anxiety and imagination. After the advent of digital technology, radio becomes a conceptual digital: the listener produces, in his or her solitary imagination, the work continually from the sonic ‘accents’ understood as mental ‘clicking-points’. As concept the digital rethinks radio and re-evaluates its production. It is no surprise then that radio is currently being revived as an artistic platform. However, the actual digital, despite all its emphasis on interaction, does not in fact produce its own promise of a truly generative radicality but only makes us think it.

And, as we realise that this actual interactivity can only ever be the representation of interactivity, we come to understand the unease of our own loneliness motivating any communication and do not presume that there is a way to mitigate this angst. Maybe we come to accept instead that we build communication, again and again, from the anxiety of unshared fantasies, through imagination, to fleeting understandings, and back again. The moments of understanding we get are contingent and fragile like the transitory sounds of the radio.

“I don’t know what happened to Antonio Bay tonight. Something came out of the fog, and tried to destroy us. In one moment it vanished. But if this has been anything but a nightmare, and if we don’t wake up to find ourselves safe in our beds, it could come again. To the ships at sea, who can hear my voice. Look across the water in the darkness, look for the fog.”

(John Carpenter’s The Fog)

Selected Bibliography Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, (Vintage:UK, 2000 [orig. 1980]) trans. by Richard Howard Bochner, Mel, ‘Excerpts from Speculation [1967-1970]’, in Conceptual Art, (Dutton Paperback: NY, 1972) Morse, Margaret, Virtualities, (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1998) Strauss, Neil ed., Radiotexte(e), (Columbia University Press: New York, 1993)

T I A G O E S T E V E S

Tiego E is a writer, rocordist, sound artist and musician based in London, UK. He is also the founder member of the ambient / experimental project Katzgraben. The Sound Of Places (TSOP) is a specific sound art concept that aims to eplore collage, sampling and looping techniques (both audio and visual) to describe places and their memories.

Between January and March 2010, Tiago E. wandered around the Union Chapel (Islington- London) capturing sounds: the sound of voices in hallways, the tuning of instruments, soundchecks, quiet noises, footsteps, doors opening and closing, the sound of sirens and traffic outside, the sounds of the unpredictable, the sound of “ghosts”…) and filming spaces, objects and architectural details (stained glass, windows, doors, shadows, corridors…). The idea was to make a documentary-essay, a collage of sounds and images to be presented in the form of a 30 minutes video/sound installation to be played in a loop. Here, sound is the primordial element. It is sound that reveals the vitality of a sacred building which became one of the most prominent live venues in the London music scene.

THE SOUND OF PLACES Union Chapel Islington London, UK. By: Tiago Esteves On next page

THE SOUND OF PLACES Union Chapel Islington London, UK. By: Tiago Esteves

F E R G U S

Working with video, Text, Large Format film photography and installation, I draw attention to both social policy and specific areas of local historical importance that has in some way become overlooked. Over the last two years I have used my interest in local history to become a main influence in my art practice. While using landscape photography for its accessibility as a medium for viewers from a broad background, while making the work as multi layered as possible.

D O Y L E

Through a series of photographs taken on land reclaimed from the sea during the early 1850’s, I explore connections between Photography and survey, theatre and landscape and language and control. I am interested in this time in Irelands past where mapping and the Anglicisation of place names coincide with the mathematisation of nature and perception.

Ellipses project 2009

Fire Wall 2006 - Fergus Doyle Click above to play

T R A S H D I Y

Konstantin Sha and Stanislav Andreev run a creativity-studio Trash DIY (Design It Yourself) which specializes in making of pieces of interior and exterior design and promotional objects in the up-to-day trend “Recycling”. We lead the avant-garde of this trend in Russia trying to arouse social awareness on this topic and it gains its popularity both within the progressive minds and the majority of common citizens because in our country the community is still unconscious about the need of trash and waste recycling.

Our professional skills in preservation and study of art help us to create the objects not only beautiful but practical in use in everyday life. We are deeply aware of the complicated ecological situation in our country as it’s right now that we encounter this extremely acute problem. Nowadays Russia recycles only 15% of its consumer wastes.

Running our project we want to demonstrate to the community the benefits and the culturologic value of using the so-called trash and to reveal the reality of trash and waste recycling.

Art is one of the most evident and understandable means to bring an idea. Participation in your art-residence projects will give our artistic concept a strong development stimulus.

Since we had no example to follow we took our own path which absorbed our national unique and indigenous colour.

A struggle at the roots of the mind: service and solidarity in dialogical, relational and collaborative perspectives within contemporary art.

Brian Hand Raymond Williams in his definition of community offers the dialectic of solidarity and service (working with people or voluntary work sometimes paid), and sees this dialectic on a philosophical level as operating between idealism and sentimentality.1 For Williams solidarity equals positive change whereas service equals the paternalistic status quo.2 In this short essay I will explore how this dialectic between service and solidarity in relation to concepts and practices surrounding art forms that have prioritised an active social dimension has been conceptualised in recent art theory. A socially engaged or community based art practice is a current theme in discussions around contemporary art. This subject is very broad so to lessen the confusion I will look at just three distinct participatory approaches: dialogical art, relational aesthetics and collaborative/collective art projects. In the past 50 years, community based visual arts have emerged within working class and marginal communities both here and elsewhere and are now a well established set of practices aligned with the broad principles of community development. While participatory arts in general are recognized as an important tool in a bigger scheme of grass roots social empowerment, a weakness in state supported community based arts activities, besides inadequate funding, has often been the top down approach of sponsoring agencies/institutions. In this familiar scenario artists are parachuted in and out and little attention is given to long term engagement. In our age of consumer orientated individualism, community, as Homi Bhabha reminds us, is something you develop out of.3 Community can imply a herd like conformity, a suppression

of difference, or simply the ideal of individual freedom. The Arts Council has dropped the once popular term ‘community arts’ for the more neutral and arms length term ‘participatory arts’.

Community, Bhabha outlines, is synonymous with the territory of the minority and the discourses of community are themselves ‘minority’ discourses incommensurable with the discourse of civil society.4 Community, he argues is the antagonist supplement of modernity. It becomes the border problem of the diasporic, the migrant, and the refugee. Community in this sense almost has an atavistic resonance because it predates capitalism and modern society and leads a “subterranean, potentially subversive life within [civil society] because it refuses to go away”.5 In this sense invoking community is at once to locate a togetherness and paradoxically an estrangement from or antagonism to the notion of a frame or limit to what constitutes a community. As Grant Kester argues:

The community comes into existence […] as a result of a complex process of political self-definition. This process often unfolds against the back drop of collective modes of oppression (racism, sexism, class oppression, etc.) but also within a set of shared cultural and discursive traditions. It takes place against the grain of a dominant culture that sustains itself by recording systematic forms of inequality (based on race, class, gender, and sexuality) as a product of individual failure or nonconformity.

There is, to follow Bhabha, Nancy and Pontbriand, a contemporary value in the concept of community because it somehow evades the grasp of the bundle of discourses which describe it and remains opaque to itself. As Douglas observes:

In ‘community’ the personal relations of men and women appear in a special light. They form part of the ongoing process which is only partly organised in the wider social ‘structure’. Whereas ‘structure’ is differentiated and channels authority through the system, in the context of ‘community’, roles are ambiguous, lacking hierarchy, disorganised. ‘Community’ in this sense has positive values associated with it; good fellowship, spontaneity, warm contact … Laughter and jokes, since they attack classification and hierarchy, are obviously apt symbols for expressing community in this sense of unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations.

Indeed, while the definition of community resists empirical study and interpretation there is something similar in the resistance to profit in the community artwork which, because of multiple authorship/ownership, remains unexchangeable and therefore economically unviable within the traditional art market and auction houses.

DIALOGICAL ART Dialogical art or aesthetics is an umbrella term borrowed from Bakhtin and Freire by Kester. Kester’s work tries to give legitimacy and a sound theoretical grounding to the alternative practices of community arts, recognising them as new forms of cultural production. To paraphrase Kester’s nuanced arguments: dialogical art aims to “replace the ‘banking’ style of art in which the artist deposits an expressive content into a physical object, to be withdrawn later by the viewer, with a process of dialogue and collaboration” Community based participatory art is a process led, rather than a product led, dialogical encounter and participating entails sharing a desire to unveil or discover the power structures of reality with a view to creatively imagining a contestatory and oppositional platform where radical and plural democracy might take root.

According to Kester, and borrowing from arguments by Walter Benjamin, art is not a fixed category/entity or thing, except that it reflects the values and interests of the dominant class. For a host of art movements, especially avant garde ones, their relationship with the dominant order is channelled through a dialectical and often contradictory relationship where a specific and important discursive system constructs art as a repository for values actively suppressed within the dominant culture.

“There is nothing inherent in a given work of art that allows it to play this role; rather, particular formal arrangements take on meaning only in relationship to specific cultural moments, institutional frames, and preceding art works” So while the challenge art poses to fixed categorical systems and instrumentalising modes of thought is important, it is not necessarily simply located in the artwork itself as a discreet, bounded, formally innovative object. Rather Kester argues that the tendency to locate this principle of indeterminacy solely in the physical condition or form of the work of art prevents us from grasping an important act of performative, collaborative art practice. “An alternative approach would require us to locate the moment of indeterminateness, of openended and liberatory possibility, not in the perpetually changing form of the artwork qua object, but in the very process of communication and solidarity that the artwork catalyzes”.11 To uncouple the material form from social practice is not as straightforward as Kester makes out because both are overlayed and imbricated thoroughly in the history of Modernism.

For Kester, dialogical art is an approach that separates itself from both the traditional non-communicative, mute and hermetic abstract modernist art (Rothko, Pollock, Newman) and the more strident innovative heterogeneous forms of shock based avant garde work (such as the Futurists, Surrealists and Dada movements or the more recent examples of work such as Christoph Schlingensief’s public art project

Foreigners Out!) designed to jolt the hapless alienated viewer into a new awareness. Kester argues that both anti-discursive traditions hold in common a suspicion about shared community values and that ‘art for the people’ suggests an assault on artistic freedom, individualism or even worse raises the spectre of fascism and Stalinism.12 While such fears are grounded in history, in many peaceful and settled democracies not under immediate threats from extreme ideology, the tradition of anti-discursivity, isolation and negation still resonates in mainstream aesthetic practices.

Dialogical art, or conversational art as Bhabha termed it, foregrounds the encounter and interpretation of the co-producers of the art work and as such is against the traditional scenario where a given object or artifact produced by an individual artist is offered to the viewer. Some examples for Kester of solidarity orientated dialogical art include some of the work of Wochen Klausur, Suzanne Lacey, Hope Sandrow, Ne Pas Plier, Ultra Red, Maurice O’Connell and the ROUTES project in Belfast in 2002. Examples of work closer to the service or paternalistic end of the spectrum for Kester, include some of the work of Alfredo Jaar, Fred Wilson, and Dawn Dedeaux. For Kester there are just too many examples of institutional led community based work by well known and established artists that reinforce the neo Victorian view of a given ‘disadvantaged’ “community or constituency as an instrumentalised and fictively monolithic entity to be ‘serviced’ by the visiting artist”.13 As Sholette has observed, “the avant garde promise to drag art out of the museums and into life is today remarkably visible in all the wrong places. Museums and foundations now claim to nurture art as social activism”

RELATIONAL AESTHETICS The criticism that participatory projects in the art world can be toothless is clearly present in the critique of relational aesthetics by Bishop, Foster, and more recently Martin.15 Relational aesthetics is a term coined by French curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud and relates to a diverse body of work made by artists in the 1990s, such as Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Vanessa Beecroft and Philippe Parreno, that foregrounds interactivity, conviviality and relationality as the subject of its artistic practice. This social rather than socialist turn is seen as a direct response from the privileged art world to the increasingly regimented and technologically administered society. Again like the theory of dialogical art there is little emphasis in relational aesthetics on the art object as such and what the artist “produces, first and foremost, is relations between people and the world by way of aesthetic objects”. There is a further similarity in that relational aesthetics rejects the non-communicative strategies of autonomous abstract art that avoided content like the plague. Bourriaud’s argument is provocative and interesting in that it sees art from a Marxist perspective as an apparatus for reproducing the all encompassing hegemonic capitalist ideology, but due to the complexity of the cultural sphere in the age of information there are slips and gaps within the reproduction of the dominant ideology that can be exploited by certain artists as creative heteronomous interstices. Hence while acknowledging on the one hand institutionally supported contemporary art’s complete immersion in capitalist relations and submission to capitalist imperatives, Bourriaud believes that relational art can, within this system:

create free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the ‘communication zones’ that are imposed on us.

It is a French tradition to invest in art as a strategically resistant activity and Sartre viewed the primary aim of art to challenge the established interests within society, so Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics sets itself in opposition to the culture of commodified individualism. As Liam Gillick claims: his object based work is only activated by an encounter with an audience. “My work is like the light in the fridge, it only works when there are people there to open the door. Without people, it’s not art – it’s something else stuff in a room”.18 This is a common perception of the experience of theatre, where the audience gathers and forms a body for the duration of the performed event. The limits of this interactive empowerment of an audience community can be seen in the marketable success of the individual signature of the international artists associated with relational aesthetics. As Adorno observed about the underlying use value of the exhibition, “the words museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. They testify to the neutralization of culture” Yet while Bourriaud celebrates the role of the artist as a service provider he does caution:

Of course, one fears that these artists may have transformed themselves under the pressure of the market into a kind of merchandising of relations and experience. The question we might raise today is, connecting people, creating interactive, communicative experience: What for? What does the new kind of contact produce? If you forget the “what for?” I’m afraid you’re left with simple Nokia art – producing interpersonal relations for their own sake and never addressing their political aspects.

Our current era is characterised as the era of the service led consumer economy and many artists are now earning a modest income from the payment of fees from cultural institutions for participating in exhibitions and other activities including institution led participatory arts programmes like those at IMMA or indeed temporary public art programmes funded by percent for the arts schemes.

As Sholette observes:

cultural tourism and community-based art practice must be thought of as a local consequence of the move towards a privatized and global economy […] the remnants of public, civic culture aim to make art appear useful to the voting population as a form of social service and tourism.

COLLABORATIVE / COLLECTIVE ART PROJECTS Solidarity implies a different kind of economic relationship, something more reciprocal and committed than financially dependent.

Collaborative groups are the final approach that I wish to consider in this discussion on participation and the work they make “can raise complex questions about participation among artists - not just issues of process (Group Material and Tim Rollins + K.O.S. operated by sometimes tortuously arrived-at consensus), but also of credit and ownership”.22 Celebrated art groups of more than two members in the past 100 years include the Omega workshop, The Russian Constructivists, Berlin Dada, the Situationists, Gutai, CoBrA, Fluxus, Art & Language, the Guerilla Girls, the Black Audio Film Collective, Act Up, Gran Fury, RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, Paper Tiger and Temporary Services. With the exception of the writings of Sholette, Gablik and edited publications by Thompson and Sholette and Sholette and Stimson, contemporary work made by collaborative groups has often failed to merit serious critical attention. 23 Having co-founded and worked with the collaborative groups Blue Funk, The Fire Department and 147, as well as participating with the collective RepoHistory, I can speak from experience that there are multiple challenges in group art making and art activism. Art collectives are risky as sharing does not come easily to visual artists and the tacit knowledge of one’s practice can be difficult to communicate.

Group formation is interesting in terms of how a shared political position can motivate action and organise a group to tackle an issue. A transitive relationship is implied in making collaborative work and becoming engaged in the wider social and political arena. Conversely the lack of artists’ groups signals a lack of problematic issues within the cultural/communal sphere or is it a sign of a more widespread inertness where we have become what Agamben sees as “the most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history?”

Joining or forming a collaborative art group or collective may impoverish you, but it is paradoxically good for one’s individual identity and at least your life expectancy. As our society dismantles most of the traditional groups like the nuclear family for example and replaces them with consumer orientated lifestyles, collective identity can re-value individual participation and self worth. As Habermas has argued “a person can constitute an inner centre only to the extent that he or she can find self expression in communicatively generated interpersonal relations”. In this sense, the agency to express solidarity or opposition with the other, is significantly different to the relentless mass organization of our lives into stratified data banks, market segments, audiences, biometrics, google accounts and biological samples, what Deleuze calls the administered forms of collective control.

Judging work, be it dialogical, relational or collaborative on a scale from solidarity to service asks of the reader to reflect on the social dimension of participation and the material dimension of social practice from aesthetic/political perspectives. The future that is mapped out in phrases like the ‘knowledge economy’, ‘virtual communities’ and ‘cultural industries’ is a future that threatens solidarity through corporate control. I hope artists, students, and audiences at IMMA remain alive to dealing with these complex forces and engage with what Williams generously believed art could be: a struggle at the roots of the mind to figure out an embodied sense of creative engagement with self-compo

sition and social composition.

1 Raymond Williams, Keywords, London: Fontana, 1988.

2 Virginia Nightingale, Studying Audiences: The Shock of the New, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 14.

3 Homi Bhabha, ‘Conversational Art’ in Mary Jane Jacob and Michael Brenson (eds.), Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art, Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 38-47.

4 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994.

5 Partha Chatterjee cited in Homi Bhabha, 1994, p. 230.

6 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces, California: University of California Press, 2004, p. 150.

7 For this broad discussion see Homi Bhabha, 1994; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Trans. Peter Connor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 and Chantal Pontbriand, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy / Chantal Pontbriand: an exchange’, Parachute Contemporary Art Magazine, October 01, 2000, pp. 14-30.

8 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 303.

9 Grant Kester, 2004, p. 10.

10 Ibid, p. 90.

11 Ibid, p. 90.

12 Grant Kester, ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art’ in Variant 9, 1999.

13 Grant Kester, 2004, p. 171.

14 Gregory Sholette, ‘Some Call it Art: From Imaginary Autonomy to Autonomous Collectivity’, www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writingpdfs/06_somecallit. pdf, 2001.

15 See Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, in October, 110, 2004, pp.

51-80; Claire Bishop, Installation: A Critical History, London: Tate Publishing, 2005; Hal Foster, ‘Arty Party’, in London Review of Books, 25:23, 4, 2003 and Stewart Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, Third Text, 21(4), 2007, pp. 369-386.

16 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel, 2002, p. 42.

17 Ibid, p. 16.

18 Liam Gillick cited in Claire Bishop, 2004, p. 61.

19 Theodor Adorno quoted in Rubén Gallo, ‘The Mexican Pentagon Adventures in Collectivism during the 1970s’, in Blake Stimson, and Greg Sholette (eds.), Collectivism After Modernism, pp. 165-193, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, p. 170.

20 Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Public Relations’, Interview with Bennett Simpson, Artforum, April 2001.

21 Gregory Sholette, 2001.

22 Robert Atkins, ‘Politics, Participation, and Meaning in the Age of Mass Media’, in Rudolf Frieling (ed.), The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, pp. 50-66, London: Thames and Hudson, 2008, p. 58.

23 See Gregory Sholette, 2001; Suzi Gablik, ‘Connective Aesthetics: Art After Individualism’, in Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the New Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, pp. 74-87; Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, (eds.), The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, Cambridge Mass and London: MIT Press, 2004 and Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (eds.), 2007.

24 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? California: Stanford University Press 2009, p. 10.

25 Jürgen Habermas quoted in Peter Dews (ed.), Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity, London: Verso, 1992, p. 38.

26 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 206-212.

Brian Hand Brian Hand is an artist and lecturer based in Carlow and Wexford. He is a graduate of NCAD, The Slade School of Art and DIT. Hand has lived and shown his work in Dublin, London, New York and Scotland. He is a former member of the art collectives Blue Funk and 147, and participated with the group Repohistory in their final show in 2000. Over the years he has been commissioned by a number of artists to write essays on their work including Anne Tallentire, the late Noel Sheridan, Daphne Wright, Shirley MacWilliam, Colin Darke, Anne Bevan, Sean O Flaithearta, Dennis McNulty, and Dorothy Cross.

In 1999 Hand was awarded an Arts Council Bursary in Critical Writing and contributed a series of essays to CIRCA on the discourses relating to the study of audiences. In 2003 he was curator of the arts council’s ‘critical voices’, an interdisciplinary programme aimed at facilitating critical and creative exchanges, introductions and conversations in the arts. Hand has worked in third level education for many years and established a new undergraduate art degree for I.T. Carlow in Wexford. He was course director of the programme from 2003-2010. His most recent solo exhibition/project was ‘Little War’, a site specific installation in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle during the arts festival in 2008.

A N D R E W K E N N Y

My work consists of video and sculptural works which explore how concepts of reality, the occult and the paranormal are formulated according to individual belief systems. Through these explorations I question how individual perceptions of reality merge and form new periods of technological and scientific advancements. Combining elements of Victorian beliefs and the modern, my interactive sculptural work is a play on the old and the new. Through this interactive element I pinpoint this connection between personal beliefs and mass reactions, whilst also giving attention to the unconscious beliefs pervading science, religion and the paranormal. Through the juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary materials and technologies, the work conveys a sense of nineteenth century side-show attractions whilst referencing obliquely the electronic advancements of today. My recent video work further explores the issues regarding the paranormal and the unexplained by presenting a number of themes such as dowsing, spontaneous images and mind over matter. The work draws on the writings and ideas of a variety of writers such as Charles Fort, Carl Jung, Colin Wilson and Lylall Watson among others.

Andrew Kenny graduated from the Wexford School of Art with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 2008 having previously studied for three years at the Gorey School of Art. Since graduating he has undertaken extensive research in various paranormal phenomena including spirit photography, thoughtography, psyshic phenomena, ESP, telepathy etc and produced experimental works which has led to his recent exhibition - ‘A Helping Hand to Little Frogs and Periwinkles‘.

J O A Q U I N G A S G O N I A P A L E N C I A

Tur Dearg (Red Tower)

Like many boys, I grew up on kings and queens, knights and castles. There is always a horse to ride, a dragon to slay, a princess to save from the evil baron, and yes, there is always the magic of the druids and the sorcerers.

Despite everything that Ireland is now, despite my previous visits to its green countryside, despite one of the highest growth rates in EU and despite its burgeoning IT industry, Ireland will always be, to me, a land of magical enchantment.

In my mind, this myth-soaked country has castles with towers that overlook the historical marketplaces. I will propose to build this tower, albeit one that ushers in Ireland’s great strides in today’s world, one that marks the incredible depths of its history, its myths and its culture in stride with modern Ireland, now victorious knight of Technology. It will still overlook a market square yet be of modern form, a salute to a more glorious future, while keeping close to heart its history, its heroes and the great men and events that have shaped it to be what it is today. It will be iconic, dazzlingly fresh and unforgettable, a beacon both to tourists from all over and to the advances of multimedia technology.

Tur Dearg will stand 30 feet high, and will not have the traditional square/angular dentate crenellations that mark so many of Eire’s castles. Instead it will be crowned with avant-garde rounded//curvilinear forms, much like those of the sea anemone, and more akin to the flowing strength and power of the internet, of computer technology, shadowing the profile and power of Ireland’s fabled round towers. It will be made of durable stainless steel painted a deep crimson with what is usually used to protect surfaces of airplanes and ocean-going vessels. It will rise like a giant, spotted red toadstool in the fairy ring of the Marketplace.

Emblazoned on its skin will be past and present symbols of Armagh, of Ireland, of Navan, of the Future. Its multimedia opponent will broadcast, on a very large round screen, both TV content, news, concerts, movies, football games and even mark time or show ads for income for the district, or even create a rave party for the youth.

It will be a product of artist and community interaction, and will memorialize what the community believes must be recorded, that which must be given that rare vantage point to oversee what Ireland now is and what it can still be in the future. The community will decide on the content of the new media components (screen/video/sound/marking time), the symbols on the pedestal as well as the inscribed names of people, places and events that makes Armagh what it is. Truly, a modern tower with Armagh’s history in its heart and its technological future in mind.

C R A I G B E L L

I am a digital media artist informing and interacting with audiences, through ideas in psychology and philosophy. I build a relationship with my audiences through my work. I do this by leading the audience to interpret the work for themselves as an artistic experience.

My work acts as an artistic medium that allows myself and the audience to pass through it like a channel for self-exploration. Similar to certain music, it possesses a universal openness, which offers multiple readings to all who remain open to it. My practice has been influenced by the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud and many others.

Through the studies of the Gaze, Existentialism, the Uncanny, mental health/illnesses, and even surveillance, I’ve created an amalgamation of representations of some of these ideas, relating them to the idea of human liberty within the mind and body as a whole.

Craig Bell - Keep Performing (2009) On next page

Craig Bell - Keep Performing (2009)

JENNY KEANE! INTERVIEWED BY KATHARINE MAY K First of all can you tell me what prompted you to start working in video and were you working in any other media prior to working in video?

J Well, I came from a printmaking background, and my first interest in lens- based work stemmed from using photography for research for my prints. Video would be a more recent development in my work, and it began as photograph based ‘animations’. I used to take about 600 photographs and then layer them at second intervals in a video program to create subtle movements. I had never intended to make video work initially but the work just lended itself to the medium.

What is it about time-based work that attracts you?

I think that most of my work deals with subversion. My prints were never big about process, my photography was never big on composition, and as such I began using the time based medium of video as an act of refusal. My work ‘wasn’t video’ it was moving photography! I still generally try not to adhere to the conventions of the process and spend a good bit of time exploring the boundaries of video. Possibly because I am a secret printmaker, trying to undermine the fascination of Video Art! (Ha!) The use of narrative has never been something that I have worked with; my work generally tries to avoid or subvert narrative through repetition or distraction, and I would be more interested in fluid and continuous pieces without beginning or end. And yet, more recently I have been looking at the video as part of installation. The reason why I find this is quite strange, and something that I would not have normally done, is because I see Installation as a place of narrative, where the audience creates the narrative themselves while exploring the space, but I think now that this is even more interesting, as the ‘narrative’ created is idiosyncratic and jarring or distorted.

The use of your own body always seems important in your work. Could you explain why this is?

The body was always something that was involved in my work. The body is both outside and inside, private and public, self and other. I had not, until recently used my own body, until I was forced to, because I knew that no-one else would do a video piece the way I wanted them to… It was an act of perfectionism that led me to use myself! My anal-retentiveness was possibly a blessing in disguise! I think that it was just something that I needed to do. My work generally takes the form of actions, so I don’t think that at the moment I could really use anyone else. I had spent a good while researching and looking at the idea of Narcissism a few years ago, in relation to theories of the self and sexuality, this was when I first began to work without a model, and then I knew that the work needed me in it.

Looking at yourself in your work, can you describe what you see?

I don’t know, I see me. I see me creating the piece, the effort of the action, the way I was feeling at the time I made the work. But at the same time, I kind of don’t see me, I look past the figure and see what it is trying to say, if it is saying something to me. I feel like an actor, I don’t really like looking at myself on screen, but at the same time it’s fascinating. I look at the work and know that this is not what I really look like as I socially interact, or live day to day. But that is in some way why I do the work, I become a character, possibly not a very active or powerful one, but someone or something else all the same.

Who would you cite as historical antecedents in your work?

Theoretically I would be interested in Luce Irigaray- especially her book ‘Elemental Passions’ which began my love of exploring a new sense of Language; I really love Barbara Creed as well- she writes about the Monstrous-Feminine and the subversive use of Horror Films; Jeanette Winterson for her poetic language that I have quoted in my work several times; Julia Kristeva is brilliant, her book Desire in Language really got me thinking, as well as her writings on Abjection; Freud would be in there too, for Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny. Who else? Lacan. And Hillel Schwartz… Her book ‘The Culture of the Copy’ really inspired me. Artists that have influenced me from the beginning

would be James Rosenquist, Francis Bacon for his use of distortion of the body, Nam Jung Paik. Takashi Murakami was a big influence, especially his over-eroticized sculptures. Margarita Manzelli… I love her work. Most of them are not Video artists, but they were people that inspired me before I began creating Video.

I think as women artists we can’t escape the fact that gender is an issue in our work. Would you agree with this?

Yes and no. I have always been interested in semantics and etymology; the construction of words and their histories, as well as the differences between speech and the written word. And this is where my interest in gender began.

Theorists have written so much about language and ideas of patriarchy. ‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. I used to be so afraid of the ‘F’ word, and I never really read any Feminist writing until I began to look at language as something that was a big part of my work… Gender, eh? Yeah, I suppose that it is an issue, I never really thought about it too much before. I definitely think that different people would get different things from my work, and I have recently thought about that in relation to sexuality. Elizabeth Grosz places the word sexuality into four separate, but connecting ideas; it is a Drive, an Act, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. I think that my work deals with all these issues, but I don’t think that they necessarily are the main focus, nor should they be.

Do you feel that your work deals with other issues as well? If yes, can you explain something about this?

My work has always dealt with Fear. It’s a very general statement, I suppose, but it is something that has taken me years to accept. Yeah.... Fear and Desire. These are the two most important things in my work. Julia Kristeva thinks that Language is about fear and desire, too. She says it’s just a fetish, the only fetish that we can not separate from. I think she got that from Lacan, when he said that Language comes about from Lack (of the mOther), and Fetish is the disavowal of Lack.

Recently in the seminar where we read the Interview between Ian White and Mary Kelly you pointed out that you would have been interested in hearing what she and Laura Mulvey would have had to say in their conversations about the fact that they, to quote Mary Kelly, “had been accused of destroying pleasure”.

What do you think about this concept and does it have any relevance for your own work?

It definitely does, I have always been interested in the idea of pleasure. I have read a good bit on Freud and Lacan, and the idea of pleasure has always been something that has come up. I have been interested in sublimation, fetishism and sexual desire. I think that ‘destroying pleasure’ was something that was quite interesting, I don’t think that their intention was to destroy pleasure, but rather to explore a new way of looking at it, breaking it down so that it could create something new; something, I suppose, less patriarchal. Kelly’s Post-Partum Document fragments the relationship with the child into many sections, including Psychoanalytical, physical and poetic. So I think that it is definitely a breaking down of the inexplicable bond between mother and child, to redefine it. I enjoy breaking things down in my work, pushing something constantly to create something new.

Laura Mulvey wrote the seminal work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1973. Do you know this work? If yes, do you think it is still relevant today, 34 years later?

Yeah, I know that essay, I looked at this during my Degree year, and it definitely influenced the work that I was doing at the time. It is really interesting the way Mulvey used Psychoanalysis to explore the ideas of film; it was apparently the first time that this had been done. I am also aware of the fact that it caused so much controversy when it was published, especially with relation to the way she failed to mention the female, or the homosexual spectator. I do think that it is still relevant, even though she was talking about films of the 50’s and earlier. One of the key concepts that interested me was the idea of looking without being seen; this kind of ‘safe’ voyeurism. It’s something that I’ve liked to challenge.

Are there any contemporary artists whose work excites you?

At the moment I have been looking at Candice Brietz, her Mother & Father pieces; Mona Islam; Bjorn Melhus; Pippilotti Rist - of course!; Mika Rottenberg – she’s brilliant! I’ve only seen two of her pieces in New York, but they’re the kind of Video I’d like to do if I could! I suppose my idea of art has changed these days, I now look mostly at Video work, it think it’s because I understand it more, in a way. But that doesn’t stop me from appreciating prints or photography; I just don’t think I could really go back to it, personally, without feeling like something was missing....

Where do you think you will go for inspiration for your future work?

I recently saw a piece by the artist Cecily Brennan in IMMA, whose work I thought was amazing. I actually watched the 8 minute video piece twice. Now that’s good going, because even as a video artist, I still don’t give that much time to look at video unless I feel passionately about it. So, she has inspired me to make a piece of work that someone will want to watch twice! Or at least the whole way through!!!!

D A G A N W A L D

Dagan Wald was born in Israel in 1984, he is a member of the screenwriters guild of Israel. In 2008 Wald graduated with BFA in cinema and television studies majoring in writing and directing from the film and television school ‘Sapir’ college. In 2003 Wald was the winner of the ‘Sunnit’ fund of the Israeli second broadcasting network for television and radio for his movie ‘Teddy Bear’. Now, Wald comes back with his latest movie ‘Whiskey Sour’.

WHISKEY SOUR The alternative movie for Tel Aviv’s 100 anniversary. Eddy Guinness is visiting Israel after publishing a best seller in German about a devastating romance he has had in his youth with a depressed woman. In the middle of his book tour she appears.

WHISKEY SOUR - DAGAN WALD Click here : http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi945095449/

B A R B A R A S M I T H

Any moment, any fleeting presence, has the potential to be relegated to the realm of the forgotten or unnoticed. Our familiarity with the platitudes of the everyday often renders its traces invisible; in their invisibility they escape. There is an implicit frailty within such mundane, ambiguous, and repetitive moments. These moments leave impressions upon spaces, objects, and bodies. These marks contain susurrations of narrative decoded through acts of careful looking and noticing.

In response to this sensation of being caught up in the pulse of time, I create an informal archive of objects concerned with the metaphysical. My archive is an exaggerated collection of moments of both being and nonbeing; the archive is both absurd and irrational in my attempt to accumulate evidence of the ephemeral. Unsettling in its sense of incompleteness, those who observe the contents of the archive are witness to a strange aftermath. Care in looking and making is given with no clear reason.

Function is subverted through repetition and material shifts. Objects are reconfigured to create a sense of wonder and a need to look.

I treat all of the objects with consideration of their ontological status and collect them to keep them from going out of existence. Through making, I ask where I exist; I reconsider the etherealness of the individual moment and the power of collective experience. Observations and collections are translated and transformed to create a space for interrogating the artifice. This space for reflection prompts an engagement in a conversation with a moment that has passed. In searching these objects for latent content, one begins to understand that the details are elusive; the specifics of someone’s presence have disappeared.

S A N J A Y K S H A R M A

The year 1999 was a turning point in my academic career as I started my formal training as an artist at the College of Art, New Delhi. Hailing from the small town of Dhanbad, I began my sojourn into the unfathomable realm of creativity at an early age. My ideas found expression in observing contemporary society which fuses the language of tradition and modernity.

Today, having spent the last 10 years of my art practice in Delhi, I feel I was reborn into a fresh context, while retaining the integrity and distinct character of my roots and the growing years. Moving into a new context helped me understand time, space and the co-existing planes of perception and observation.

Through my works I try to portray the human condition in relation to its situation, time and space. I work towards generating multiple reverberations out of everyday situations, we all invariably encounter. The idea is to dismantle the network of events and happenings for the sake of ease and accessibility. Sometimes the motive is to compare my work within the context of the contemporaries yet undertake experimentation.

I feel deeply inspired by the conflicting circumstances we face in our mundane lives. Weather it is the environment thrown into disarray or the socio-political situation in our country, one faces compelling encounters or interrelated elements. Although the context affects the impact of these events on us, it never becomes completely elusive.

The materiality of the paper and the canvas are an important part of my compositions, so I don’t stretch the canvas before I start painting. My technique involves texturing the canvases with layers of colour slowly reaching a sensitive point where the subtle richness of these interventions reflects an aesthetic purgation.

The tonally blended works then become an embodiment of my approach and awareness towards materials.

L A U R A P A Y N E

The chronology of my artistic practice begins over a decade ago with an intrinsic tendency toward photorealism, which has gradually lead to an exploration of the manual/mechanical dichotomy I see present in much post-modern art and contemporary media. I’m not the first to address representational tradition during the digital age. James Elkins prediction of the proliferation of classical values over the twenty-first century has fueled my investigation of these occurrences. Amidst the accessibility of documentative technology available, I wonder how photorealistic painting can transcend the vast possibilities of contemporary media.

My paintings often address the provenance of photographs and the distortion that occurs through contextual relocation. Looking at documentative images, I exploit the technical conventions of nineteenth and twentieth century photography to determine social cues and bias perceptions of the past. Transposing public domain portraiture, such as government photos or mugshots, through my meticulous and remastering process of painting addresses how the mechanisms of public circulation reduce specific identities and generalize representation. Scrutiny of how graphic technologies are engaged, exploited and abused is catalyst to my current practice. Through paint, and more recently video, I’ve begun my investigation of historical portraiture as it operates within art and the public domain.

T A N A D W I L L I A M S

Tanad Williams is an undergraduate in Fine Art, Sculpture, at the National College of Art & Design, currently living, working and studying in Dublin. His practice focuses around a variety of mediums, their manipulation and use in querying certain social situations. He is interested in the relationships between people as well as the interrogation of accepted social boundaries.

This work entitled ‘Pride’ is an autobiographical piece detailing a particular family incident inspired by the finding of a frailty in someone considered to be overtly strong. Dealing with the fear of losing not only the person, but also the memory, it compares and contrasts the inherent positive and negative aspects of pride: burden and freedom. Born of an investigation into the merits of an adult awareness in the face of death and the acceptance of responsibility, this video piece is a challenge to the level of intimacy between artist and audience. tanadaaronwilliams.wordpress.com tanadaaronwilliams@gmail.com

‘Pride’ By: Tanad Williams On next Page

‘Pride’ By: Tanad Williams

CURRENT PROJECTS AT STUDENTSZINE Life Between Gorey’s Buildings Open Call For Innovative Ideas and Research STUDENTSzine a new Irish Contemporary Art Zine has collaborated with a recent pedestrianisation initiative in Gorey, Co. Wexford called Pedestrianise Gorey Main Street. Pedestrianise Gorey Main Street’s core aim is to show that there is support within the local for more pedestrian friendly streets. Its page that can be found on Facebook has received an overwhelming amount of support and encouragement, because of this we at STUDENTSzine have decided to issue an open call for innovative ideas and research titled Life Between Buildings.

Life Between Buildings Life Between Buildings believes that towns across Ireland should open up, invite and include people in their development, having different activities and possibilities and thereby ensuring multiplicity and diversity. With this open call Life Between Buildings wants to encourage, support and promote the ideas, capabilities and problem solving abilities of Artists, Architects and Urban Designers in developing innovative research projects and sustainable solutions.

What we are looking for are creative ideas that encourage pedestrian / bicycling friendly streets that could be applied within the town of Gorey, whether interesting new street design or layout to possible events that could take place there. Let your imagination and creative abilities go wild.

All ideas submitted will be uploaded to the online gallery on www.studentszine.com If you are not familiar with the town-space of Gorey you can place yourself directly within the town by checking out google maps http://maps.google.com/ and searching “main street, gorey, Ireland.”

About Gorey Gorey is the principle town in north County Wexford situated 52 kilometres north of Wexford Town. It is linked to the towns of Wexford and Enniscorthy by the N11/M11 National Primary route, which also links the town with Dublin and other urban centres along the eastern coast. The town itself is 95 kilometres from Dublin. The Strategic Planning Guidelines for the Greater Dublin Area show the Greater Dublin Area extending as far south as Arklow, which is identified as a ‘Large Growth Town II’. The completion of the Arklow by-pass has improved its accessibility to the capital and has put Gorey - only 16 kilometres south of Arklow - within commuting distance from the larger employment centres of the Dublin Region. (Local Area Plan 2010, P. 5) The vibrant Gorey area has always had a strong history as a market town and is now one of the most popular and sought after areas in which to live. With the completion of the new bypass Gorey has become a town that can lead the way in progressive pedestrian / bicycling friendly initiatives.

We at STUDENTS zine and Pedestrianise Gorey Main Street are looking forward to your new and exciting ideas and proposals.

Contact Any individual, collective, school, college or university eligible to apply: Please submit all works to submit@studentszine.com STUDENTSzine www.studentszine.com

THE NETWORK THE NETWORK is a new initiative brought to you by STUDENTSzine.

Make contact with all types of STUDENTS of life and learning here at THE NETWORK, from fellow artists, performers, designers, curators, researchers and makers of all kinds.

Benefits of joining are; access to International Artists and their practices, The opportunity to be selected for future events organised by STUDENTS and if you decide to organise an event of your own you can send us the documentation of your event and we will put it in a very next issue of STUDENTSzine as long as you list our website details on all your catalogues and promotional material.

Any Individual, Collective or Organisation can join for FREE! If you want to show what you do on THE NETWORK please send an e-mail to thenetwork@studentszine. com and include the following; Up to six jpeg images of your work, you can also send us in video or audio files and a brief Bio or Statement about your practice. Please send in your email address and website details also .

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STUDENTSzine.com is free and makes no profit from the publication of any materials found therin. STUDENTSzine.com is a publication for the distribution of works from students and emerging practitioners and will not be liable for any offense taken by any individual(s) resulting from any materials contained therin. No work in the magezine may be used in any way without the permission of the copyright holder. All works are the sole property of their creators unless otherwise stated.

All works submitted to STUDENTSzine.com must be the sole and original work of the contributor(s) and must not interfere with any other publication or company’s publishing rights. STUDENTSzine.com is founded, directed and edited by Richard Carr, Wexford, Ireland.