Below is an anonymous comment gleaned from CAMRU that I thought might add something to the conversation
click on image to see larger view.
x p
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Tim Wong interviews TAC here!
Consensus reached - onwards through interview process. TAC : Remember to use the association's login for commenting, and that all contributions are up for grabs for quoting. Tim: Look forward to your questions, and resulting writing!
Below is an anonymous comment gleaned from CAMRU that I thought might add something to the conversation
click on image to see larger view.
x p
Below is an anonymous comment gleaned from CAMRU that I thought might add something to the conversation
click on image to see larger view.
x p
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29 comments:
To begin: the first thing that struck me about the CAMRU's lodging in Prospect was its proximity to et al.'s further to the national interest. The wall of posted and pinned feedback seemed to directly challenge the didactic, standoffish nature of et al.'s negative space. Elaborate, if you will, on the CAMRU's form, function, aiding, and even disarming of contemporary art.
Whoa baby! is this the warm up question?
Okay, let's pare it back a little. Before we discuss the CAMRU, what compelled the inception of this particular collaboration?
Not to get in the habit of attaching labels, but would it be fair to also consider the installation as egalitarian? Et al. and TAC are both collectives, but there are some obvious modes of difference. Whereas they may renounce authorship, there seems to be an interesting – perhaps positive – friction within TAC that calls for both homogeny as a group, but also parity and recognition as seven individual artists.
When we first learnt that we would be beside et al in the show there was discussion of the fact that et al is one person pretending to be many and we are many pretending to be one.
In terms of the individual versus the collective nature of the group, we have operated on a consensus decision making process. This involves everyone deciding in advance that the best decision is the one which is the best for the group rather than any one individual, but also making sure that everyone's voice is heard and all members of the groupg voice honestly their opinions and feelings. this means that the decision making process can be slow, but hopefully that everyone is happy with the final decision.
Our use of language and project have been compared to self help language or models. We have noticed that this may be connected to the consensus decision making process in that everyone needs to speak and be heard, which means that all must be resilient enough to hear others' comments while also being compassionate enough to let them speak. This connects in with some self help type thinking.
This thought can also be linked to the structure of the project CAMRU in that we are not interested in censoring or cutting out certain voices in the responses, but rather creating an open floor to discover what people might 'really' think.
Your use of the phrase 'disarming of contemporary art' could be relevant here in that the project is disarming the show in terms of 'humanising' it by using the public's responses to create an alternative curatorial voice. It is egalitarian in that sense because it values all of the responses and tries to find connections and threads within and between them, as can be seen in our alterative room sheet on Steve Car's Popcorn Mountain and the new one on CAMRU.
To answer Tim's 1st question: (again)
The different approaches became obvious during the set up period when we were negotiating for space. further to the national interest requires the space for its inward facing perimeter and the internal 'negative space' of its 'strategy' zone - check out the taped territory marking on the floor, it’s a greyscale encampment. The structure means you become located either within or outside of its boundary, while the pervasive audio track transmits its authoritative info-philosophy monologue throughout the gallery
During the development of the trolley TAC put a lot of thought was put into its functionality. From the bar leaner height of the top tray, to its utilitarian plastic chairs - every decision was made with audience use in mind. The choice for orange stemmed from the first ever TAC meeting. During our fist ever process of consensus, we needed to decide on a colour for the wall in our previous show at Enjoy, (Nov 2006) One member thought it might be interesting to do a blind check of our collective choices, suggesting each TAC member put a colour name in a paper bag. Interestingly, all of the six colours were in the warm colour spectrum. The final choice came from a suggestion to translate from pigment-based colour to its most accessible light based source – tungsten bulb, which has a warm orange cast.
Later on when we were throwing around ideas for the trolley colour, we went back to orange, translating it back to a paint pigment and adding in associations with municipal, public works objects (like your everyday road cone). The title “contemporary art mobile response unit” came at about the same time, and we liked the link with a colour that warned of danger, and recalled safety.
I get the municipal aspect of the work. While it's not quite the word that came to mind initially, I certainly found myself attributing the 'safety orange' to a sort of council aesthetic. Whereas Et Al.'s piece came across as institutional and from a higher authority, the CAMRU belonged in more of a community holding pattern – and importantly, communicated from a ground a level.
Anyway, let's talk a little about the responses themselves. In conceptualizing the CAMRU, was there a conscious effort to replicate the modern social networks – text messaging, blogs and forums, online messaging – or does the handmade function more deliberately reference spaces like public toilets, graffiti patches, and even talkback radio airwaves?
hi tim,
now to answer this lonely question.
It is not so much that we were not interested in communicating current communication strategies. text, blog, etc. It is more that we liked the accesable written comment form. thoughts to have a laptop on the trolley or in the foyer we quickly put to one side as too 'institutional' and we have been wary that the work CAMRU could seem too closely associated with the city gallery and appear to be an education strategy from the public programs team.
the toilet wall likeness is great, has lent an informalness to the communication, and in a few cases, writers adding on to each others notes has created some excellent critique. as far as this colaborator is concerened it is a great unexpected reading/use.
With a week left to wrap this up (although I'd like to let the interview run its course provided it still has legs), I'm going to put my MOB hat on temporarily and throw a bunch of pithier/background questions TAC's way in an effort to speed up the back-and-forthness of the process. So feel free to answer any or all of the following at will.
Comment on the genesis of this collaboration. It began through a collaborative artwork, correct?
As artists, did you all converge out of a commonality of practice, a mutual appreciation/necessity for each other's ideas/skills as practitioners, or something more pressing: an urge to participate, a response to the exclusivity of art... perhaps even a break from the solitary confinement of making and conceptualising art as individuals? (i.e. would you agree with the last statement that it can be a quite a solitary vocation?)
What do you make of gallery visitors who don't participate in the project? Does the CAMRU potentially discourage a whole quadrant a critical response? Or is that just indicative of the organic evolution of the CAMRU (i.e. many "jump in the popcorn" comments will, by default, stimulate responses that both pertain to and follow in spirit the jest and irreverence of those comments before)?
Where to from here for TAC?
Comment on the genesis of this collaboration. It began through a collaborative artwork, correct?
TAC had a mysterious genesis. Liz Allan conducted a project entitled ‘Dear Melbourne’ through Enjoy Public Art Gallery, whereby letters were sent to a gallery in Melbourne and gallery-goers were expected to write back to the letter writer in Wellington. Liz then sent out a call to those who had been involved in the project to see if they would be interested in being part of a group to discuss and interrogate collaborative processes. This was part of the show Every now, and then curated by Melanie Oliver for Enjoy. Thus began The Association of Collaboration. After the show at Enjoy we were asked to take part in Prospect 2007 at the Wellington City Gallery.
As artists, did you all converge out of a commonality of practice, a mutual appreciation/necessity for each other's ideas/skills as practitioners, or something more pressing: an urge to participate, a response to the exclusivity of art... perhaps even a break from the solitary confinement of making and conceptualising art as individuals? ( i.e. would you agree with the last statement that it can be a quite a solitary vocation?)
I think there is definitely a commonality between the members of TAC. We were originally bound by having taken part in Liz’s project Dear Melbourne. This shows perhaps at its most basic level a general interest in art, writing, sharing of ideas and desire to communicate. The process of collaboration and sharing of ideas is something I think that is immediately appealing to some people and completely terrifying to others. I think we all enjoyed the initial sessions and discussion and conversation. Indeed, all acts of creativity involve a certain introspection and isolation, depending on how you work best. TAC is not necessarily saying that working with others is the best and most productive way of working, but having feedback from others who are working towards a similar goal can be extremely fruitful and creatively fulfilling.
What do you make of gallery visitors who don't participate in the project? Does the CAMRU potentially discourage a whole quadrant a critical response? Or is that just indicative of the organic evolution of the CAMRU ( i.e. many "jump in the popcorn" comments will, by default, stimulate responses that both pertain to and follow in spirit the jest and irreverence of those comments before)?
TAC I think are interested in the failure make a response as much as the response that are made. I think most people who went to Prospect didn’t make a comment on the work; people run out of time, motivation, interest. And that’s fine, we’re not about forcing people into engaging with something that they don’t want to. What is interesting is the different levels that people engage at, and the way in which they go about that. In terms of discouraging critical response, I think that the CAMRU is such an open project that it invites any level of response from people. Someone could sit down and write a critical essay if they really wanted, as much as they could post a yellow post-it note on the wall. People can follow on from precedents that are already set, ie writing ‘Barry and Linda 4 Eva’ and stuff like that, but ultimately I think people have made their own assumptions at what TAC was looking for, or even showing us all something that we weren’t looking for at all.
Where to from here for TAC?
I think now it is important for us to sit back a bit an assess CAMRU and the outcomes of this project. People have given us so much, it is quite overwhelming, and I think it is really important for us to give this contribution the respect and focus that it deserves. There is a lot for us to tease out, not only in the response from the public, but also within our own internal processes and methods. Three members of TAC have moved to different cities since we started out, so we are really coming to terms with how to work long distance and how this will affect the way we go about things. It makes decisions harder, but it also an interesting complication I think. TAC is looking at working outside of an art context in the future, and examining how collaborative processes work in other fields and disciplines.
There was certainly a sense of isolation in practice for some of the members involved. This was particularly true for teh artists adn writers involved in the group. There was a general agreement that making work as is often teh case in isolation can be fraught with problems and creative dangers int erms of not having the level of critque and feedback that is available, say at art school. In terms of where to from here for TAC in that sense, some initiatives have sprung from the need which are not to do with the collaboration but are products of working together. So one member has written about another's show, and there has also been a critique of a body of work set up.
Initially the getting together was managed in a fairly random way, ie through Liz Allan's 'Dear Melbourne' project at Enjoy, where people who visited the gallery were asked if they would like to write a letter to a participant in Melbourne. The letter writers were then contacted to see whether they would like to be part of this project. So; random in the sense that it was anyone who came up to Enjoy gallery, but not so in the sense that only a small group of people probably visit the gallery. This approach to the groups' membership I feel had an effect on the way we worked, in that it could have been anyone else, adn so noone has been 'chosen' for a specific reason. I enjoyed that about teh group, and feel it contributed to the sense that we were yes a response to the exculsivity of art.
Personally I feel that much art is made from impulses which are common to everyone, but when that work gets put into a gallery, especially an institution like the City Gallery, which is imposing and beautiful aand lal of those big things, that it is easy for people to feel alienated and unsure of their own initial responses to work. What CAMRU has managed to achieve is to illicit responses from people which are not high brow or necessarily thought out in an art context, but are simply honest. It is fascinating to have documented some of the people who have come to the gallery, not in a quantative way but a qualitative way where something of those people has been left behind. In that sense although I do feel that yes some critical responses may have been discouraged, I am not sure that is a negative thing. I observed some art writers edging around the work adn certainly not leaving their mark on a piece of paper. But those are people who have other means and well recognised means to voice their opinions.
TAC rearranged the responses through the show becasue we were aware that if we left up lots of responses like 'kick me', that might encourage lots more like that. These actions were clearly noted by some return visitors, who questioned what right we had to 'censor' their responses. The responses that were taken down were all documented, placed in a scrap book which lived on CAMRU, and used in the collation of the alternative room notes. Many of them will soon be being redistributed in the form of inserts in the back of the Prospect catalogue.
My sense was that peopel responses were often very genuine, and although it is easy from within the art world to discount comments which don't seem well expressed or in depth, my sense was that the popcorn responses in particular meant that the work was really sucessful. Those responses could have been rephrased in different words and they would have made critical commentary. Writing and thinking about art is often just unpacking an initial responses which may be quite basic, adn finding out where it comes from adn what else it connects to or resonates with. CAMRU aimed to aid this process. It has been sucesful in teh first stage of illiciting an incredible amount of responses, adn some which have been critical adn in depth. The most common response has been from people who have responded by making their own artwork adn adding it to the wall. This was an unexpected response and an exciting one, because it implies that people are inspired to exercise their own creativity when visitng a show such as Prospect.
I think it is important to note that while CAMRU is a project that has clearly been created for the audience to activate through use, it concurrently inhabits formal, associative and aesthetic territories.
If audience members refrain from literal participation with the work (ie contributing responses, artwork) and choose to engage with the unit, response wall and outposts in a more specular viewing tradition then this is not a failure of the project, and is certainly not a failure in the audiences' chosen mode of response (critical or social).
I think this project speaks to a dialogue about the function of contemporary art and, importantly, this challenge is located within the institution it is challenging.
CAMRU seeks to provide an alternative mode for audience response (both to itself, through its functionality, and in terms of a way to make material comments that are only shared in private) complete with a transparent way for the audience to display their opinions and have them included in a discourse they might not usually get a chance to be heard in.
I don't think that use disrupts the potential for other peoples, or their own, contemplation.
My motivation for 'converging' came from a desire to experience first hand the good and the bad things about working with other people.
Although there has been some suggestions that collaborative processes and even The Association itself is a utopian enterprise, I think everyone has come into this experience with their eyes wide open to it's challenges and complications.
I am not part of this process out of a desire to offset creative isolation (for which there are much easier solutions) but because I want to experience for myself the collaborative creative process and hopefully through doing so contribute to a greater understanding and use of its benefits and some working solutions for its pitfalls.
As for the gallery visitors who don't participate in the project? i don't see them as a problem. To be honest if i came across CAMRU as a gallery visitor i might be too shy to write what I really thought based on what others had written etcin such a public domain. How many critical responses do you see in art gallery visitor books?
Maybe there has been too much focus on the written content of the post-it notes during Prospect? Perhaps it's arbitrary?
I don't propose that we are acting as cultural activists but I hope that as a result of CAMRU institutions such as City Gallery will become a little less promotional and a little more self-critical and reflective.
Thanks for all the lucid commentary and answers so far. There's plenty to draw from already, so I'll be making a start on the MOB article.
In the meantime, I wanted to query TAC's position on being profiled as individuals within the piece. Beyond identifying you as a collective of seven artists, there's room for me to profile you each individually – be it in brief. Given you've all been answering as 'one voice' though, that may not be ideal. In any case, what's everybody's preference?
(Note: the interview can revert temporarily to off-the-record at this point, so you can all answer as individuals if need be.)
Interesting question Tim, we are being frequently called to discuss this point, and often of our modes of representation (the group & individual combo) are being drawn out through this process.
I think what TAC has been attempting to do via the format of this interview is develop the speaking voice of consensus to relate the decisions and thoughts that have come as a result of many hours of discussion - turning over ideas, debating our direction and processes. I have been amazed at how this articulation of the collective voice has effectively synchronised the voices of the six/seven* individuals which contributed to it.
At times in the interview some of us have been motivated to step forward and respond from our own personal (I) positions. This is a benefit of working with the process of consensus, whereby room is always made for individual opinions to bring challenge, new thoughts, dissonance and flavours to the group discussion. I think that although we sacrifice some clarity of representation in doing this, we gain a lot more in terms of our transparency and well roundedness.
On that basis I think it makes sense to include our individual profiles, in brief. I wonder whether it might work for TAC to compile it by working to some guidelines you (Tim) might set, or would we (TAC) prefer to make a list and hand over the scripting to Tim?
*Although one member of TAC, Alex Bishop, decided not to continue with her involvement a few weeks after the start of the Prospect show, her contribution to The Association and CAMRU continues to inform our workings.
A late arrival...
As artists, did you all converge out of a commonality of practice, a mutual appreciation/necessity for each other's ideas/skills as practitioners, or something more pressing: an urge to participate, a response to the exclusivity of art... perhaps even a break from the solitary confinement of making and conceptualising art as individuals? ( i.e. would you agree with the last statement that it can be a quite a solitary vocation?)
I was interested in being involved because I am not an artist - Liz's invitation seemed to offer a good opportunity to think through an art project from a different position and to work in a different kind of team structure to what I am accustomed. I was curious. Enlivening the space between art and audience is not the responsibility of only the
artist/s and I don't think art making is a solitary process for many...
What do you make of gallery visitors who don't participate in the project? Does the CAMRU potentially discourage a whole quadrant a critical response? Or is that just indicative of the organic evolution of the CAMRU ( i.e. many "jump in the popcorn" comments will, by default, stimulate responses that both pertain to and follow in spirit the jest and irreverence of those comments before)?
To be honest, I was a little disappointed at the level of response/ engagement from audience members though perhaps I am not surprised. I
would have liked to edit more strongly to encourage more serious discussion or comments, but people seemed to be enjoying jotting their
own haphazard statements and it was important that it was audience driven I guess.
Where to from here? Who knows.. we have somewhat disbanded and are now encountering new challenges of remaining a group long distance. And like any relationship, this can work but is a little harder, so time will tell...
Re: Liz's Response
Essentially I will be discussing TAC as a collective, however I would like to digress to the extent of, firstly, naming each of the artists, and secondly, identifying some basic biographical way-points for each individual: i.e. formal art education, your independent art practice, work to date, former collaborations, age, relevant associations etc. In short, some brief background information to help foreground TAC as a collective of artists (as opposed to the pretense of Et. Al).
Perhaps everyone could email a short bio to me direct (lumiere@lumiere.net.nz)? Time is somewhat of the essence, so it would be good to have something from all by early next week (or even better, the end of the weekend).
P.S. Interesting 'gleaned' comment; if anything indicative of the lingering negative public perception of Et. Al.
i think that makes sense Tim, for us to email you our bibliographic details. Thanks for providing your email address. Do we need to reach consensus on this guys?
i'm happy to provide details on bio stuff, similar to our propsect stuff?
i'm keen on short individual bios.
i guess we really need the same from every member so Tim will need to keep in mind not every member is an artist.
So a more general current interest or employment might be more relevant/ consistent than a list of shows or collaborations.
i suggest we fill in categories such as
-name
-age
-formal qualifications (and year achieved)
-current work (i.e. Paula Booker is an artist, writer and curator based in Wellington with an interest in self-organised artist’s initiatives. She was a founding co-director of Canary Gallery in Auckland 2004 - 2006 and currently work as writer & publications manager at Enjoy Public Art Gallery.)
Thanks to those who've sent through bios so far. Perhaps if you could all reach a consensus by Thursday on the application of your bios into the article, and I'll take it from there. Really all that I'll be doing is, apart from naming each in the group, is dedicating a sentence or two to everyone's background: i.e. Liz and Andrea are graduates of Massey University; several are based in Wellington, others in Melbourne, Christchurch etc. etc. I guess location and personal practice/vocation is the most important in establishing the makeup of TAC. I'll also refrain from singling out any individual members.
Yep I think bios is a good idea, sorry for clocking in so late. I have emailed mine to Tim in teh structure suggested above.
Sian
hi Tim,
You should've now received 6 bios, and that is the number of current members. As liz articulated, Alex Bishop left a few months ago.
Bio a gogo!
Thanks for agreeing not to single out any indiv members in your writing. Were you planning on showing your MOB article that specifically refers TAC to the group before publishing it?
Would be good to know either way,
Paula
hey - i've sent me bio. also, i posted that comment on the very first day of CAMRU! i just meant it as a stimulus for other conversation, so people could see what sort of stuff we were interested in discussing. (i quite like et al. also by the way)
i meant the comment that Paula has put up on this original post by the way. i realised that the previous comment didn't make much sense after i had re-read it.
That's funny Tom! I thought i recognised the handwriting from somewhere. I wonder whether any one else from TAC did the same? We never had a 'party line' on that, did you do any more? did you find people followed your conversation train?
Thanks again to everyone for being so cooperative and making this unusual interview process work. I'll email through a copy of the article to the TAC account once I've completed it (likely Sunday), though I may aim to draft it out earlier so you can all offer some feedback if necessary – though once I let it go to the editors on the Monday, it's in their hands...
There's always a second life for the article (unabridged) The Lumiere Reader though, and will let you all know if we need to revisit the interview process for round two.
Thanks for being such a considerate and courteous interviewer Tim, looking forward to your write up!
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