proposal for doing things

TRANSIENT ARRANGEMENTS:

EXPLORING THE SPACE BETWEEN WORK, IDEAS AND ACTIONS

My practise is concerned with emotional responses to contemporary issues such as violence, cynicism, romance, pornography, loss, regret, anxiety, insecurity or boredom. With photography, drawing, painting, text and installation, my work attempts to steer conversations that navigate the spaces between these ideas.

With my Contextual Enquiry Project (CEP), I intend to expand on a number of themes addressed within my work up to now, focussing specifically on the aspects of site, narrative, exhibition and modes of viewing. Parallel to this, I would like to investigate further themes that have previously threaded through the work, specifically the concepts of boredom and failure, and more recently the access of information and text available on the internet and the appropriation of these texts, images, videos and other media within art. I would like to understand how our culture responds to the mass of information that is now available to it and address these themes within ongoing projects involving text, installation, video, performance, the object, drawing and painting. Through a series of self-directed ‘mini-briefs’, I intend to work towards developing a fully realised project that will fluently address how art is viewed and experienced across a range of platforms, and how work can exist in multiple forms in order to illustrate, critique and experiment with modes of viewing including but not limited to the gallery, public space, the internet or the home with a view to develop work that can exist on a multitude of platforms and mediums whilst still maintaining a coherent message.

Central to this is the idea of work that continues to be made, the on-going enquiry, work that may not be ‘finished’, and notions of what ‘finished’ means or projects that consist of numerous pieces of work orbiting a central recurring theme or idea or may straddle medium or resist explicit definition. The concept of resistance in art as outlined by writer and curator Yasmil Raymind in her essay, ‘Contending With Comfort: The Possibility of an Abstract Resistance’ is useful to become familiar with at this point as a work that ‘constructs a force field of tensions between what is revealed and what is withheld, between what lures and stuns us and what we permit to confront us.’ This is not to claim that the work may excuse itself for being deliberately misleading or evasive, however. I believe in this instance that this tension and this resistance will be the central core of my research, and to do so I will employ a number of devices.

With theoretical and practical elements running alongside each other within, throughout and around my art, it would be necessary first to address research points with a series of stand-alone projects conducted either alone or collaboratively. These may be small works, essays, installations or actions. Beginning with home-based installations and actions for camera, elements of all work will be documented openly online at www.karlarbuthnot.com with the intention of building an online catalogue of all work completed within the project brief. It will be important that various methods of working are explored, and to this end studio based practice, home-based work, work in a site-specific or public context and online will also be investigated. It is my hope that each of these works will begin to address the themes I am primarily concerned with. The mini-brief practice will also enable works to be completed in a variety of settings that will be central to exploring multi-disciplinary approaches.

 A key part of this process will be the viewing of other work, and specifically discussion with artists and individuals practicing today whose artwork specifically deals with the gallery/public space, but who may also successfully bridge the gap formed by the rise of the internet/blog space. Although Net.Art will be an area of interest, I feel it necessary to clarify that it is the multi-media aspects of artists work and the open-ended nature of work that may appear online as well as within a public or private space that, at this point, will be of primary interest to me. Public and Products Liability Insurance Cover (PPL) has been taken out with Artists Interaction and Representation Scheme (AIR) that will cover any work undertaken in a public context including the making, preparing and exhibiting of art in a residence, workshop, community project etc. Full paperwork can be provided on request for further information regarding this policy.