I went to a creative sector ‘Triple Crunch’ meeting last night. The ‘Crunch’ is the combination of peak oil crisis, financial crunch and global warming. The art sector is trying to mobilise in order to respond to the loss of support and funding that will probably be coming in response to the Government’s heavy subsidy of the banking sector.
Representatives from artists’ studios, the performance arts, photography, design activism, sound recoding studios, public art agencies etc. were all there and some interesting resolutions were made. There was a strong concern that people coming into the creative arts industry in the near future would not have a very supportive environment within which to set up practice. Therefore the sector needs to protect its own and in order to do this will set up networks of professionals who will look to evolve supportive structures for existing and incoming practitioners. These networks will consist of ‘skill sharing’ cooperatives, that initially will be concerned to provide a bartering service based on a skills exchange, but will eventually evolve into a multi faceted loose structure that may eventually provide support in terms of housing, workshops, fund raising etc etc for those within the sector. Essentially the sector was asked if individuals within it could be generous enough to give time and skills to others who were perhaps finding the new climate difficult. It was interesting to see people debating the need for rhizomatic structures to be evolved. Deleuze and Guattari’s work was cited several times. I will keep posting information on this, as it sits squarely within the audiences agenda. In particular who is the arts for? If in times of economic downturn the arts are the first area to feel the pinch, does this mean audiences are fickle or that people don’t recognise the importance of the arts?

A couple of other bits and bobs. I have started to research new hanging mechanisms for paper based work. One area that the printing industry is developing is magnetised fixings. For magnetic signage products, used for posters etc see: http://www.anchormagnets.com/page74/Products/MagneticSheetRange
For magnets http://neotexx.com/?gclid=COOEyOH9ypkCFQO5GgodmTjctQ
Or http://www.shawmagnets.com/

One private view tonight with free wine. Wed 31st March
INVITATION TO PRIVATE VIEWN CND From 5.00 - 8.00
Holy Trinity Church,Boar Lane, Leeds
A sound installation of abstract field recordings The result will be a resonating collage of audio that relates yet contrasts to the theological setting.

It is the last studio session on Thursday. There are still people that I havnt made contact with. If you need me to look at what you are doing please post your URL into the comment box and say who you are if it is not obvious. Blogs are of course nothing new see http://latest-art.co.uk/blog/ but by now I am starting to get a handle of how they work. The good thing is that once the community of users starts getting familiar with the technology and at least one person ‘hosts’ the conversation, the potential for a good and proper dialogue increases. Whatever you might think of the level of my input, at least it’s shared. If I mention something to someone in a comments box, it’s available to all of the group. If you are not sure of what to do you can just look at what other people are posting up and check it out. It’s easy to see who is thinking and who is not. It’s not as good as face to face, but we can’t always be there in person. I’m aware that when I come in, I only see certain people, others I never or rarely see. Sometimes I find myself repeating the same thing to each person and this can be a good way of everyone being able to access the information in their own time. I’ve decided I like the informality of Blogs. I can just drop in information about an opening, just be thoughtful about my own contribution to this, try to raise the theoretical levels of thinking or just comment on someone’s posting by sending an artist’s name. The problem with essays is that they have an academic tone that has to be artificially kept all the way through and except for the writer only I get to read them. This is similar with the journal. However the sketchbook/notebook is different. The sketchbook’s drawing dialogue needs to be private. Drawings operate by triggering ideas as they arrive through the doing. It’s a delicate space to work in and perhaps would lose sensitivity if hosted online.

Just a thought. Some of you may be interested in on-line ways of reaching new audiences. E zines are now becoming very popular; this one in particular has some good quality images and is reasonably well respected. http://www.platform58.com/page/ezine-2#archive
The important issue of course is that you analyse the format. How do the social, behavioural and psychological aspects of cyberspace affect the way images are received and used? The Saatchi on-line gallery is probably the most well known repository of this type. See http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/

I had an interesting morning looking at everyone in REN's blogs. They range from just started to quite extensive thoughts and images about the audiences issue.
At some point I will have to mark the evidence, whether it is in the form of a blog or not.
There are always two aspects for me when I come to assess work, one is the apparently simple task of responding to the brief outcomes and the module descriptor.
So what is this easy bit?
The module descriptor indicates that as this is a 10 credit module I should initially be looking for evidence of 70 hours work on the part of each individual student. OK so how? Well, the writing itself evidences time spent thinking and reflecting. Images can reflect time spent going places, fiddling with the technology in order to download etc. What people talk about evidences where they have been, visits to the Yorkshire sculpture park, openings etc. walks around the city looking for suitable sites for art work/audience interventions, visits to London Galleries etc etc. On top of this there is evidence of actual art stuff, tryouts in terms of collages or photographs of pieces of work in situ etc. In some cases the blog itself has been constructed as part of the communication system that surrounds an art work and is integral to it. Lots of stuff there that I can use to evidence time spent.

But what about the aims of the module?

The Audiences module runs parallel with the students’ core practice based ‘materials’ module. The aim of this module is to raise students’ awareness of how considerations of audience can on the one hand effect how they present and site their own work and on the other hand become an important driver as to content and context.

It is important for them to consider how this growing awareness opens out opportunities for extending their own existing practice as well as them becoming more theoretically aware. In particular students will be given an opportunity to exhibit at St James Hospital and they need to reflect on this opportunity not only in how they present but how an audience might receive their work.

So I will need to reflect how this is evidenced too. This brings me to the other issue I bring to bear on these things. As an artist as well as an educator I’m always looking for that insight or involvement that suggests that this business means something to the people involved. I strongly believe in the power of art to engage with the human condition. It has a unique role to play in how we can communicate to others. It doesn’t give answers, it doesn’t provide solutions to problems but what it can do is open a door for insight or reflection in unpredictable and complex ways. It most importantly is not straightforward. It can act directly through the senses, in this case I am a firm believer in a phenomenological approach to thinking about this stuff and use the embodied mind as a starting point for thinking about metaphor. I.e. I am as subjective as the next person and this will affect how I mark the module.

But back to the criteria. I did publish those a couple of weeks ago but as always I’m out of time, but will return to reflect on this topic another day.

One more space that I havnt directed your attention to. Holy Trinity Church on Boar Lane. (This is the road that you turn into as you turn right out of the rail station) The use of churches as sites for art has of course a long history. You may want to consider whether or not the past still resonates into the present when working in these venues.

NCND Radio Art Installation 30th March - 3rd April
Opening Night Monday: 5.00 / 8.00Continues Tuesday - Friday: 12.00 / 4.00
Holy Trinity Church, Boar Lane, Leeds
This sound installation features abstract field recordings which are transmitted throughout the church to suspended radios; receivers will also pick up sounds from several different locations outside the building. The result will be a resonating collage of audio that relates yet contrasts to the theological setting. Influences are taken from a wide range of analog broadcasting sources, particularly Number Stations. These strange encrypted messages have been transmitted between frequencies since World War Two. The coded signals still continue today and have an incredibly unusual auditory and musical quality that have been abstracted and recreated in the installation.
This exhibition will also feature on the 1st April Art Walk for more details got to http://www.pavilion.org.uk/artwalks.html

An interesting event coming up at PSL. Morphic Resonance. See below for the posting. The most interesting issue in relation to audiences is that the space will be used an an extended studio. The fact that the audience is therefore invited into the site of production, asks questions about the relationship between the concept of the gallery and the studio.
The post as copied from LVAF.
25th March to 17th June 2009.Wed-Sat, 12-5pm or by appointment.
Private view 12th May 6-8pm.
Morphic Resonance* is an experimental project for PSL by artists andartist collectives nominated by artist-led spaces from across theNorth of England.
For the first 6 weeks the artists will be working at PSL using it as an extended studio space, moving towards an exhibition from 13th may. The project examines the urge among artiststo control the dissemination and production of art.
PSL is open to the public throughout.
Featuring: Rachel Lancaster, Ant Macari, No Fixed Abode, Nous Vous,David Steans and Hardeep Pandhal, Rebecca Chesney, Robina Llewellynand Elaine Speight (Pest Publications), Richard Rigg, Silver Mawson, Daniel Simpkins and Penny Whitehead (The Royal Standard).
*The term `Morphic Resonance,' coined by biologist Rupert Sheldrake,describes `the basis of memory in nature…the idea of mysterioustelepathy-like interconnections between organisms and of collectivememories within a species.'
In collaboration with theartmarket. Supported by: Arts CouncilEngland, Leeds City Council, Castlefield Gallery, Static, WorkplaceGallery and The Royal Standard
PSL [Project Space Leeds]Whitehall Waterfront2 Riverside WayLeeds LS1 4EHUK www.projectspaceleeds.org.ukinfo@projectspaceleeds.org.uk
+44 (0)7930 236383

For a very different audience engagement experience tomorrow night (Friday) try this.

A bespoke mobile guerrilla projection unit will be taking a projection trundle through Leeds on Friday night! The mobile projections and mobile cart handiness are provided by the talented and experimental Dave Lynch sharing some of his quirky visions with us! Stating at the Packhorse at 8.30pm LS6 before meandering down Woodhouse Lane, (projecting as we go!) towards the O2 Academy, Millennium square and Leeds City Art Gallery where we will stop for approx 10mins in each site to project shorts from the best of Outdoor AV's show reel for your viewing! Click on the map for route/site directions:http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=102559007930663046930.000465582932b5565a204&z=15
This event is brought to you by Outdoor AV and DarkDay 09

For those of you interested in curatorial practice, this could be a useful thing to go to.
Henry Moore Institute,Wednesday 18th March, 6pm. Artist talk - Jens Hoffman (California College of the Arts) - 'Fire'Free of Charge - not necessary to book
Jens Hoffmann (*1974, San Jose, Costa Rica) is a writer and curator of exhibitions. He has worked as a curator since 1997 and is currently the Director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. From 2003 to 2007 he was the Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He has curated over 30 exhibitions internationally since the late 1990s. Currently he is a lecturer at the Curatorial Practice Program of the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, a guest professor at the Nova Academia de Bella Arti in Milan and an adjunct faculty member of the Curatorial Studies Program of Goldsmiths College, University of London. He works as adjunct curator at the CAAM - Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for which he is curating the exhibition 'Cristobal Colon' (2010) and a guest curator at ArtPace in the San Antonio, Texas. He is co-curator of the 2nd San Juan Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico opening in April 2009. 'Keep The Fire Burning' will be about artists as provocateurs and the history of anti-autoritarian art - starting with a painting by Ruscha in which LACMA is on fire.

N.B. Tom Cookson is showing in the Interim exhibition down the road in the old Vernon Street college building. Opening tomorrow (Wed) at 6.00pm. A good networking opportunity as students from other colleges will be showing too. PS no one has mentioned any of the shows around college, what do you think of the college as a site for exhibitions?

Some stuff for Thursday
Louisa will be taking a walking tour of possible sites for your artwork. Meet at 1pm in the studio. In order to find out places people are looking at I will put up a map of the centre of Leeds so that people can indicate on it where they are thinking of possibilities for either publicly sited or gallery based interventions. There are still blogs I cant find, so I'm also posting up a list of those I have found with gaps. Can you fill in the gaps for me please?

For interesting resource on sonic art visit http://www.sonicartsnetwork.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=3&Itemid=84

Last week I mentioned a couple of links to how you could theoretically position some of your writings on audiences. However both the positions I wrote about (reception theory and the ‘death of the author’) were taken from the point of view of the audience as interpreter. As artists we are usually much more interested in theoretical approaches that empower us to communicate our ideas. One of the most successful is the use of rhetoric.
Rhetoric as a discipline has been used for thousands of years and used to be a large formal part of everyone’s education. However this is no longer the case.
I started to get interested in it as a way of helping me make better decisions about the images I was making during the 1980s. On recommendation I read Francis Yates’ book ‘the Art of Memory’ a wonderful text that makes you aware of how important memory was to society before universal literacy. Memory training was part of rhetorical training and as soon as I started to get more into what this consisted of, I realised that I had unearthed a fantastic system that could be used to make decisions as to not only how something was working, but how to push ideas forward.
For instance one of the rhetorical ‘tropes’ is metaphor. Artists use metaphor all the time, but examining it under the umbrella of rhetoric you come to a deeper understanding of how it works as a persuasive tool. Rhetoric is one of the three arts of discourse; the others are logic and dialectic. Logic was something I was introduced to when I did my Dip AD and was introduced to British analytical philosophy and Wittgenstein. A dialectic approach was something I was already using as I thought of conceptual art very much as an argument or dialogue with my audience. But I hadn’t understood that rhetoric was probably the most powerful of all three. Rhetoric was aimed at teaching senators to persuade audiences of the veracity of their argument and it was very precise in the way it worked. However first of all if you want to use it you need to think through how to translate the training as it is for the use of the spoken word and not for the making of art objects. For instance ‘Alliteration’ is a rhetorical trope. It explains how the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of several words in sequence helps a speaker to engage an audience’s attention in the way the words are connected, not just by meaning but by a deeper ‘sound’ value. You can use this in the way you build things. Repeating variations of a form throughout an installation or sculpture can convince the viewer that there is a common visual idea that flows throughout the formal values that you have set up. However ‘Anacoluthon’; which means a lack of grammatical sequence or a change in the grammatical construction within the same sentence can be used in visual constructions when you want to draw attention to a change in concept. You can suddenly change materials or colour to create a moment of attention to a particular aspect of what you have built.
Another trope is ‘Anadiplosis’ which means ‘doubling back’, it is the rhetorical repetition of one or several words; more specifically, repetition of a word that ends one clause at the beginning of the next. The visual equivalent of this is making sure each object within an installation has something about it that reflects a visual quality that is found in its neighbour. This can help the read as an audience strives to understand how to piece together your thinking.
‘Anastrophe’: the transposition of normal word order can be used to create unexpected juxtapositions and therefore engage your audience’s attention. An obvious visual version of this is to put unexpected formal sequences together. I could go on, but I would hope that by now you have the idea. Just look up ‘rhetoric tropes’ on the internet and find out what they mean, you could then try and apply some to what you are trying to do. It worked for Warhol, ‘repetition’ is a rhetoric trope.

Linking through to alternative audiences can be very useful. Seven Arts in Chapel Allerton hosts Café Scientifique. I try and attend whenever I have time because the concept behind the Café is that scientists at the peak of their profession are given the opportunity to discuss and explain their ideas to the general public. There have been some terrific debates and if you want to keep up with what is going on in other professions this is a great way of doing this. As an artist I believe its part of our 'job' to do this, if we become ignorant of the complexity of the world we could be accused of a certain thinness in our practice. The next café Scientifique is on Wednesday March 18th; the subject is ‘Antimatter’ and the speaker is Frank Close, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University. Starts at 8pm at Seven Arts, Chapel Allerton, doors open at 7.30. Catch number 2 or 3A bus from the centre of town, bus stop opposite the Grand theatre, get off at the old Chapel Allerton Police Station.

Just one new gallery opening to draw your attention to.

Brahm Gallery presents 'Taxonomy', Photoconstructs by Samuel Fisher

Brahm Gallery invites you to the private viewing Thursday 19th March 2009 6-8pm

Public Viewing dates
Friday 20th March 2009 – Tuesday 21st April 2009

Brahm Gallery is proud to present ‘Taxonomy’, new work by Samuel Fisher. Architectural artifacts as principal manifestations of the politico-economic conditions we live within are Samuel’s primary source of exploration. Inspired by the sacred geometries of Islamic art, his work addresses both the beauty of the infinite and simultaneously our almost dystrophic urban reality.

Exclusive to the opening night, work purchased or reserved will be subject to a 15% discount off the marked price. Brahm Gallery is a commission free gallery and all sales revenue goes directly to the artist.

Brahm Gallery is open to the public on weekdays (except bank holidays) from 10am to 5pm Brahm Gallery The Brahm Building Alma Road Leeds LS6 2AH www.brahm.com/gallery gallery@brahm.com

Free Entry

This should be really interesting. Henry Moore Institute,Wednesday 11th March, 6pm. Artist talk by Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment - 'Air' It's also free of Charge.
Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with visual artists, choreographers, and photographers. His work ranges from performance to video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. Etchells' published work includes Certain Fragments (Routledge, 1999) and The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer). Addressing the element of Air, Etchells, who has collaborated with artist Asta Groting on one chapter of her ventriloquism project 'The Inner Voice', will speak about language, voice and silence, and about presence and absence in performance, drawing on his own practice and that of others in the zone of contemporary performance and art. This event sits alongside the concurrent Henry Moore exhibition 'Asta Groting: 1987-2008' and the Henry Moore Institute gallleries are open until 9pm on Wednesday evenings. This presentation is free of charge and it is not necessary to book. It is part of a '4 Elements' series of talks in March at the Institute and Tim will be followed by Jens Hoffman (California College of the Arts) on the 18th March and Mark Godfrey (Tate Modern) on 25th March.

I suppose I ought to put a more theoretical stance forward for those of you with a more conceptual interest in audiences.
An initial two strands that could be looked at. One is reception theory and the other is the ‘death of the author’. Reception theory focuses on the scope for "negotiation" and "opposition" on the part of the audience. This means that a "text"—be it a book, movie, or art work—is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the viewer interprets the meanings of the art work based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text/art work is not inherent within the work itself, but is created within the relationship between the work and the reader. Some key texts:
Holub, Robert C. Crossing Borders: Reception Theory and Poststructuralism
Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.
On the other hand the phrase ‘the death of the author’ has several interpretations, all of which relate to reception theory. "Death of the Author" is an essay by Roland Barthes that you can find in his collection of writings ‘Image-Music-Text’. Barthes said that you need to liberate texts from their authors, as an ‘understanding’ of the author forced false interpretations on what the text actually said. For instance the classic example is the one John Berger in ‘Ways of Seeing’ uses when illustrating the way we read Van Gogh. Berger proposes that we read the Van Gogh painting of a cornfield through a filter of the following text ‘This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself’.
Derrida however takes the issue further. He asserts, there is an "absence of the sender, the addressor, from the marks that he abandons, which are cut off from him and continue to produce effects beyond his presence and beyond the present actuality of his meaning, that is, beyond his life itself..." Consequently, the act of being an audience, for Derrida, is always already an acknowledgement of a two-fold absence: "the absence of the referent and the absence of the signifying intention."

Derrida would further argue that deep reading or close observation by the viewer can perform the "reverse of what its author intended"; Derrida presents a counter-logic which opposes any authority of the author, he states "the names of authors have here no substantial value." He may have been aware of what Duchamp described as, ‘the stink of artist’s egos’ and in a time of celebrity culture it is a refreshing reminder of how our delusion of control over our lives is in fact just that. The Jade Goody case being a very clear example of how ‘readers’ can take over the ‘reading’ of someone’s entire life. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology or Signature Event Context. Fredric Jameson’s The Prison House of Language is a good introduction to Deridda and the ‘I’ problem. Going back to art, Robert Morris’s the ‘I’ Box could be read as a reflection on the complex nature of authorship. Perhaps in a far more profound manner than either Barthes or Derrida. However all of these issues touch upon a key point in relation to the ‘Audience’ module. As a maker/producer you have no way of fully controlling audience reaction to your work and one of the ‘rites of passage’ that an artist has to go through is an acceptance of this.

A couple of resources

http://www.ubu.com/
http://www.greylodge.org/

Ubu in particular is a great resource for rare artists’ videos or sound pieces. You may want to reflect on the audience for this database. Who would use it, why and because of its existence, do you think artists could use it as a distribution network?

The Artists’ Book Fair over the weekend was very busy. If art audience interests are measured by attendance the book fair must be well up on the graph. The fact that you can buy art in a very accessible package, which is also available at reasonable prices is a clear attraction.
The fact that so many artists’ works can be seen in one venue at the same time is also very attractive. There is a chance you will find at least one thing of interest. Having the artists there in person is also a bonus, not just for the audience but for exhibitors too, as I’m sure one of the reasons for exhibiting is that there are wonderful networking opportunities. There are a lot of opportunities for those of you interested in book art. For instance the latest call is for the European International Book Art Biennale. See http://www.eibab.blogspot.com/ for details.
I think of the book format as an opportunity to develop a miniature, pocket sized art gallery. There are some of my books in the college’s collection down in Vernon Street, (see images above of a couple of sample pages) the college collection has books from several well known artists as well as past students. Well worth a browse.

The images above are the work of George Musgrave and C F Tunnicliffe

Just a reminder
12th International Contemporary Artists’ Book Fair
Friday 6 and Saturday 7 March 2009
11.00am–6.00pm
The Parkinson Court, University of Leeds

I went to the Marianne Springham opening last night, it was good to see a few students find the Design and Innovation Centre gallery space. This much more commercially focused gallery is at the centre of studio, office and workshop spaces for designers and design related businesses. It therefore has an existing audience of people who work in the building and a shop style frontage which allows an artist to engage with a passing public. Because of these factors the space suits certain types of work and there is an opportunity for artists to sell. Obviously if the rest of the building is devoted to design businesses, there will be people passing through who have had some sort of art training, so they are more likely to take an interest in art work, especially if you can place it in a domestic or office setting.
The work on show raised several questions. Comments overheard on the evening; “I’m not sure but the work’s too nice”, “It’s not serious enough”, It’s too jokey”, “Its too easy to like” as well as “It’s uplifting”, “Really good to see work that’s light-hearted and funny” , “You could live with this stuff” , “It’s great to see work that’s so unpretentious” There was a fascinating divide here. I felt some people were slightly ashamed that they liked the work. It wasn’t “difficult” it didn’t “engage” with contemporary theory. I was reminded of Bourdieu’s theories on Taste. His classic book is ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste’, in which he describes how taste can be seen as a socially constructed quality that is used to maintain or gain a position in society. Sometimes it’s hard to separate your own thoughts and ideas about something from the pressures of the group mentality. (The Fine Art community can be very snobbish). Did I like the work? Yes, some of it. In particular those images that reminded me of ‘There was an old woman who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why…’ that nursery rhyme is somehow very disorientating, the concept is more frightening than most horror films, as the old lady swallows larger and larger things, the images become more and more grotesque and the ‘horror vacui’ that lies hidden beneath those apparently simple verses, tugs at my nerve endings. What appears simple may not be. I think we are deceived by certain platitudes that childhood is ‘nice’ and that children are ‘simple’. The work did press some interesting buttons.
There are two artists that I spent hours looking at during the 1950s. George Musgrave and C F Tunnicliffe. George Musgrave sculpted the cowboy and indian models that I played with and C F Tunnicliffe painted the pictures that the wildlife cards that came in the tea were based on. If I think back no other artists have had such powerful presences in my life, both of course would not be regarded as models for contemporary practice. However in terms of working with a targeted audience they are excellent examples to look at. The targeted audience is of course myself, a 5 to 6 year old boy living in Dudley in the Black Country. Both these artists worked with commercial organisations to distribute their work, both artists’ work was reduced in scale and received by myself as something for me as a child, these products were not for the adult world.
However looking back, Musgrave’s figures are wonderful compacted summaries of the body positions of the heroes and villains that the Western films of the time engrained in our heads. Are his tiny figures, sculpturally as interesting as Michelangelo’s David? Well yes to a 6 year old I believe they were and over 50 years later, part of me believes they still are. George’s work is still around, I find it in junk shops occasionally, if anyone sees any of his sculptures in unlikely places, let me know. (Oh, George also invented the yellow parking lines, so his work still penetrates our lives in very significant ways) Tunnicliffe on the other hand is now having a revival and he is seen as part of the English romantic tradition, in particular his wood engravings of animals and farm scenes, are regarded as being part of a tradition that goes back to Thomas Berwick.

Just a reminder of the brief outcomes.

For 20 marks. Apply and research primary and secondary sources
For 40 marks. Explore the contextual and professional location of their creative practice and its relationship to publics and audiences
For 40 marks. Realise a synthesis between concept and creative practice

Studio practice evidenced through performance or portfolio of images. The blog should therefore consist of images as well as text. The images should evidence both contextual and professional location of practice, (i.e. all the stuff collected and responded to when thinking about exbition site and context) as well as showing some actual work or proposed work that evidences a synthesis between concept and creative practice. (This could be a series of collages that demonstrates how your work would look if shown on the High Street)
Project report 500 words, is the actual text of your blog. 500 words would be a minimum, I would expect if you keep it up to be rather more than that.

Remember it was suggested that you all produce some images based on a site and a consideration how it could be used for this week's meeting.

Another type of exhibition space to look at:

Marianne Springham exhibition Opening at Leeds Design Innovation Centre, the Calls, Thursday 6.00 to 8.00.

Another gallery space to investigate
WHITE: Four Artists Whose Work Has Absolutely Nothing In Common Except For The Lack Of Colour
Opening night party - TUESDAY 10th March 6-9pm
Open - 1-5pm Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 11th-13th
Hope House Gallery, 65 Mabgate, Leeds, LS9 7DR
I havnt had time to investigate this space, but again it could be useful as a comparison to others.

It might also be worth investigating RED ERIC STUDIOS which has large white studio space available in Leeds city centre. White warehouse space 90 sq metres, 4m high ceiling,central heating, kitchen and bathroom facilities,large windows,so with lots ofnatural light and car parking spaces.Available to hire by the hour or by the half/full day. Weekdays and weekends, daytime and evening sessions.If you would like to go and have a look or to book a space, contact: CharlieRED ERIC STUDIOS47 WESTFIELD ROADLS3 1DG0113 242562907926646065

Pavilion seem to be organising art walks. This is on tomorrow, 4th March. Meeting points as follows, one space I haven’t mentioned before is St Johns church; it might be interesting to go just to look at the space there.
17:30 Leeds Met Gallery: Perhaps Nothing, Perhaps Something18:00 Leeds Art Gallery: Rank. Picturing the social order1615-200918:20 Henry Moore Institute Asta Gröting Sculpture: 1987-2008.19:10 Something Visual, St. John's Church.Meet at Leeds Met Gallery at 17:30. For more information contact GillHoward: 0113 242 5100 or gill@pavilion.org.uk

An interesting weekend in terms of art work to see. PSL offered an opportunity to assess how that gallery’s open tall white wall and breezeblock feel supported/effected the artwork and the audience’s experience of it and to compare this with the OLSEN experience.
My read on this could be linked to earlier comments on the frame. The informal nature of the work within PSL I feel reflects a need to integrate the work into the ‘real’ world. Rory’s radios leak the sound from radio stations normally heard in domestic and work settings into the gallery, a fax machine links us to another place, could this be an office somewhere? A smoke machine creates a fog within which we have to look at everything else, are we supposed to be reminded of a club scene? Most of the work played with the everyday world, how are we meant to read a horse when its in an art gallery. Are we supposed to switch our reading between ‘real’ and ‘constructed’ worlds? As an audience are we then to take this experience and load it onto what is happening as we walk out of the gallery into the world. The edges of one thing fraying and being rewoven into the other, collaboration perhaps being opened out to us as observers now participants in the process. However there were still several signifiers operating in the PSL space that guaranteed that it would be ‘read’ as a professional art gallery space. The fact the walls were raised to 12 feet and painted white, the convention of the ‘opening’ or in this case the ‘closing’, how the work was presented as a discrete series of pieces etc. In fact I think this space is closest to the warehouse spaces you often find art shown in when visiting larger cities. It feels ‘international’ and doesn’t have that parochial problem of having to overcome the municipality feel of locally designated ‘official’ spaces for art.

OLSEN was the opposite. Framed worlds seen in the mythologised dark of a cinema space. This reminded me far more of the way pre-historic art in caves is described in The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
by David Lewis-Williams. Lewis-Williams describes the membrane between the real world and the world of the ‘other’ as being essential for shamanistic practices. A spirit world, a place where only the mind can go, linked to the unconscious but needing a place to become, was seen as vital to early human’s wellbeing. He refers to the cave wall as the membrane which allows passage between these two worlds. For me the projection on the cinema wall and my immersion in the dark operated the same way. Some of the work seemed designed to work with that trance like state you can find yourself in when gazing at flickering lights in the dark. Perhaps as an audience I need that framework in order to suspend my disbelief. Artists I was particularly taken with were: James Holcombe, Victor Alimpiev, Emily Wardill, Makino Takashi, Pete McPartlan and Pat O’Neill. For those of you into Beuys there was a very funny film by Ken McMullen.



By the way smoke and fog machines are things to look at in themselves, there are so many varieties, do you think Dave Ronalds chose the best one? See:
http://www.kave.co.uk/Kave_New/hire/effects.htm