Last night the most burning issue seemed to be about outcome. How do you record an ephemeral work for reportage back to those who funded it? And how remarkable that most artists speaking have, at times or all the time, not felt comfortable reporting the negative aspects of their social engagement, instead packaging the projects in the aftermath as something that more resembles the utopian glimmers of their initial, very genuine, aspiriation.

I find this a little suprising as I have always believed it was an important step in moving forward and in my small experience (I stepped away from the funding circuit some years ago and am only just starting to consider hopping back on the gravy train) reports of the ‘failures’ as well as the ‘successes’ were always a welcomed, and I always assumed, expected, part of the acquittal process.

Last night I raised the subject of ‘community arts’ as opposed to ‘art that engages with the community’. I trailed off a bit without making any particular point as, to some degree, I was thinking out loud. But I was certainly not moving to suggest that one was the right way to go about things and the other wrong… I think where I was going with that subject is it that it seemed a general consensus that it is very hard to get the genuine, bona-fide public to actually engage as you would wish which is often what leads to the ‘failures’ (we also discussed the impotence of the terms ‘success’ and ‘failure’ last night but I use them here for their convenience.) that occur. The participants instead become the invested art community, friends and family rather than the broader community.

When I began my work of the last 10 years where I have focussed almost exclusively on the self, it was in part because I felt very much that artists were mistrusted by the non-arts public. That we were viewed as tricksters, charlatans and scammers (I think I hoped I could win back some general-public pals to the cause of culture by giving up something of myself instead of asking something from them). I think that could also contribute to an explanation of why this mode of working is on the rise. We want to contribute positively. We want to be seen as contributing positively. Anyway… I raised the community arts subject last night because I think in the shift from ‘community arts’ to ‘art that engages with the community’ that there has been another shift where the responsibility of storysharing/data collection and presentation has moved from the public themselves to the artist, and that makes it harder to disprove these negative views of artists and our utopian experiments within the community. The term I used a lot last night and in the wake of the Iteration Again project is ‘colonialism’.

While I have to believe that the sentimentality of the artists impetus is entirely genuine, I do feel that the appearance of ‘colonialism’ must be very carefully negotiated and shed because of the way it pushes potential participants/audience away. And I do believe something may be able to be gleaned from the field of community arts practice to assist in that negotiation. Because regardless of whether artists begin to talk about and celebrate the failures as well as the successes, unless we view each artwork as the experiment it is, learn from those failures and take that knowledge forward, there is a distinct possibility, as Amy Spiers suggested, that artists may become trapped in a cycle of wishing to do good in a world that simply does not want their version of what ‘good’ is.

I may be wrong, but when discussion turned to funding last night, I got the impression that, largely in this mode of practice, funding goes towards the cost of documentation. Well produced photographs, video or a publication that asserts the artwork took place. If it is true that the failures fail to be reported and investigated because one feels responsibility to the funding body to present only a positive outcome, then surely it is better to dispense with the idea of funding a document at all. Just make a work. Let it be over when it is over except in your thoughts and words and the way it goes on to inform your later practice. I suspect I’m oversimplifying the problem but perhaps, as in Sarah Rodigaris case, the work remains truly ephemeral. It just happened. The work for anyone but Sarah or those she encountered must remain an elusive concept and we must simply trust that it occured.

By this I don’t mean to naively suggest that projects centered in human interaction should cost nothing to produce. Just that perhaps this problem might be simpler than it appears. When I was a child and wanted something that cost I found ways to make the money or if you like, to fund the project. It might serve us well to revisit this mode of operation as Sarah did in selling off her belongings. Sell something. Make something someone needs. And when we do apply for funding, rather than focussing on publications we should consider instead, applying for an area of the project where ‘value’ is more concrete- the wages of the artists involved. I know the artists time and talent is often devalued in favour of other aspects to enable a project to take flight on limited funds, but it should be non-negotiable. It shouldn’t require documentation or a successful outcome, merely a well-kept timesheet. Success or failure, receiving a wage will still help you move forward to the next project. But I have digressed…

At the risk of sounding like a sudden evangelical Sarah Rodigari fan, I was cheered by her reluctance to give too much away of what occurred on her journey. She seemed protective of the people she encountered, who became enmeshed in her artwork along the way and the more I digest what she has made and what she has to say, the more I believe that this may be a little lacking – that is to say, the lack is an understanding that when you are engaging with the public for the purposes of creating an artwork, those who do enter into the role of participant are doing so very generously and we need to consider more carefully what they receive in return for their engagement and what we do with the material sourced from/through them. And this is outside of any University driven ethics requirement, but rests simply in human responsibility to other humans.

Unless we are particularly resourceful, we pay in some way for every other material we might use as an artist. How are we paying for this material? How are we paying the public for their engagement? We can’t be naive and ignore the fact that a successful project is often our stepping stone to the next opportunity. But how are those giving time and sharing their lives being valued and compensated? I don’t believe that answer is that participants should be paid (I was uncomfortable with Hobart artist’s James Newitt’s 2009 work $1 for your story because of the named value it put upon the participants contributions) but I do think consideration of the possibility that neither the artist nor a funding body entirely owns the content (their likeness, experience, words or emotion) that people contribute (whether or not they are anonymous) is an important ethical idea that must be given greater consideration in documentation, reportage and promotion. The art project merely becomes a facility where this data is stored and respect for the data and it’s true owner must not be forgotten.

Perhaps this has not become as big an issue as it (arguably) should, because as many pointed out last night, the reluctance of the general public to become involved means that so often the demographic of participants is made up of friends, family, other artists; people with a personal investment in the success of the project. But if this issue was to garner greater consideration, perhaps the desired participants might not be so hard to source, projects might have more genuine outcomes, experiments might have more accurate results that we can learn from…

What do you think? I don’t know if I’m right about any of this but I certainly wonder about all of it.

I am glad to have all that off my chest and in safe blog storage for later rumination because tonights Touchy Feely panel discussion examines the suggestion that ‘Art should be instrumentalised to make a better world.’ and requires me to think about different things.

Now, hopefully, I can go talk on topic without doing boring dredges back to last nights yak-yak that send everyone snoozing and are alarmingly ‘off-point’.

I shall hit the ‘publish’ button and go form my thoughts about that right now…

My Disquiet Year exhibition of 2009 was sentimental. It consisted of works of a theraputic nature that I made to help me make sense of a time of distress and ill-health and that I had not really thought about showing until the opportunity came up quickly and I wanted to take it and they were just what I had waiting in the studio at that time. I had less feedback on and direct responses to that show and those works than most other things I’ve done. I wondered if it was embarrassing for people… if it was too much…

Much of the work I make would easily be classified as sentimental and with the ‘S’ word being key to the whole Touchy Feely thing, I decided to make a yardstick work; the most sentimental work I could produce.  Not a pictures-of-kittens, remember-when, ha-ha-I’m-so-lame sentimental work but something genuine and heartfelt. Then we might have an answer to TFs queries about whether it’s possible for things to get TOO sentimental.

Ten years ago this coming November, I suddenly lost a very close friend who I had known since high school.  She was an energetic, creative person who breathed music and was the first great influence on my musical tastes after my older siblings.  She died just before I began my MFA research which focussed on popular music and once I was done I dedicated my thesis to her.  I would be lying if I said that I still think of her every day but I do still think of her most days.

After her funeral her brother sent me a cassette tape of recordings they had made together, cover versions of old blues, folk and rock. Guitar, piano and voice, recorded casually, probably over a single weekend.  From this I chose their version of Bob Dylan and Rick Danko’s This Wheels on Fire not just because of her lead vocal but also the poetic commentary on our friendship that it provides. You know the way songs mean everything and describe your life perfectly as a teenager? Just like that. I think her brother actually played this recording at the funeral service but it’s one of those things that it’s hard to remember.

I recorded myself singing it with her. Very simply, re-singing her vocal line. This is the work.

I don’t think you need any further details about her or me or our friendship for the work to have value and I won’t be making a file of it available online for you to listen to.  It’s a very intimate thing and if you want to hear it you should go to the gallery and slip on the headphones.  If you can’t get to this gallery and you really want to hear it maybe you could try to get it to play in a gallery near you. I don’t mean to be difficult but context is everything, yeah?

I don’t think I would make this work without having this vehicle as an opportunity to ask the question: is it too much?

So – Inflight in Hobart, from the 25th to the 29th, 1 – 5pm.

And I really want to know what you think.

This is an approximation of one new work which I hope will be seen (gallery space pending) in Touchy Feely next week. The two videos will play on small monitors placed in relation to each other in the room and loop constantly. That looping is not going to happen here of course, but you can hit play on both and get a sense of what will be.

The genesis of this work is that these two friends of mine who have never met and do not know each other have each, independently, expressed that they think they are capable of making the most annoying noise that is humanly possible. And these are those noises.

I’m happy with this in many ways.  I was so tired of looking at my own face as I worked that I stopped making videos last year.  I obliterated that face with paint. I made audio works. I am gently edging back but to look at these two brilliant creatures instead is, for me at least, sweet relief.

And I can’t help but romanticise it. I think they will be like two sweet, strange little birds calling to each other in a room.

Happy New Year.

P.S. Apologies in advance to my dearest husband who works in the gallery where these will be.

UPDATE: Due to the number of artists and space being at a premium and all that, this work WON’T appear in the Touchy Feely exhibition after all. It waits patiently for it’s eventual venue. Please stay tuned for a post on the work that will DEFINITELY be in.

Touchy Feely  will be much of my life next week. Based here in Hobart it’s a… well… not exactly a symposium, it’s much more casual than that but something LIKE that and it seeks to answer the question ‘Is socially engaged and relational art too sentimental?’.

Now rightly or wrongly, I’ve never really aligned myself with the school of thought that is relational aesthetics, and I draw a long bow to describe myself as particularly ‘socially engaged’, but I AM a sentimental idiot and quite blatantly and deliberately so in many of the works I have made over the years and so, once I stopped worrying about how relational or socially engaged I might be, I was really pleased to have been invited to exhibit and talk and play and swill around in a pit of ideas for a brief 5 days. Because I also LIKE to talk art and dissect ideas and swill around and this year folks, I’m prising the chrysalis open a little wider and hoping to be more active and participatory than I have been for a while.

The Touchy Feely exhibition will open next Wednesday, 25 January, 5:30 at Inflight ARI and will feature a series of lightening fast artist talks from those taking part.  It’ll be like the speed dating of artist talks.  They call it Pecha Kucha but I’ll lay it right out on the table and tell you  – I don’t really know what that means. I think basically before you have a chance to be bored by me, I’ll be done and someone else who may interest you more will be talking and flashing pictures at you.

So come along if you’re in the area. You can check out the Touchy Feely Tumblr for the schedule of events for the rest of the week and more info about the artists involved.

I’m also taking part in a debate of the statement ‘Art should be instrumentalised to make a better world’ er… it may be a debate but it may be simply a discussion panel.  I’ll prep for one and wing it for the other.  See? CASUAL.  What a spiffing way to spend a Friday night. Especially since So You Think You Can Dance, US, Season 7 has finished.

If you’re interested in this project but not in Hobart, I plan to keep blogging my way through it (What? Yeah!) as do the curators, Pip and Amy who also hope to post video of performances, talks etc.  So tune in.

Shortly will come a couple more posts about the two NEW works I will have in the exhibition. Stay tuned.

Later Gators.

P.S. I know I haven’t blogged in a very long time. I haven’t meant to avoid talking about activity but it’s been lots of studio noodling and mothering,  then Xmas, then some more noodling and mothering to now. Some of the noodling coming to fruition. Some of it is rubbish. We’re over a hump now.

From Awesome Robo.  Click for more.  Cujo‘s a gas.

When I look at the stats for this blog I can see what people have been looking for.  It’s enlightening reading.  Often they arrive accidentally, a lot of the time by Googling the word arse, searching for someone named Keyra Augustina (and more specifically her arse or ass), Kate Bush’s breasts and also, more mystifyingly, what is a ferret.

But I can also see that people are looking for more specific things, usually specific videos of mine and possibly leave this blog a little befuddled and disappointed by not finding a YouTube branded link.  Maybe all the stuff on the blog is confusing but I’ve always found my art and life to be intrinsically linked so haven’t felt the need in the past to separate them more divisively.

My tip to jump straight to the art, is to use the tags and categories on the right side there. Art will limit the chit-chat purely to art whereas i made this will limit more specifically just to my art (and words and things).

I used to have a website for years but I killed it for various reasons.  Even when I did, I only used video stills, not actual video.  At the time I couldn’t afford the space to host videofiles at a quality that satisfied me and I was dissatisfied by the compression available through YouTube and such and preferred to directly provide people with video upon request, which is still as I prefer to share what I do now (outside of exhibitions). It’s been my little filter of quality control.

But great leaps have been made in the available quality through the YouTubes etc. and they are now very different beasts and whats more I have opened a Vimeo account where I am about to start loading up an archive of stuff. Even more startling I am building a new sally-rees-artist website but it’s taking some time, so I hope those of you who are finding the blog frustrating can bear with it just a little longer.  If you want moving images, please email me (sallyrees70@gmail.com) with your address for a showreel or enquire direct about a specific work and I’ll be more than happy to pop something in the post to you.  That’s how I roll.

This blog will stay an integral part of my online presence as I find it a great place to write my thoughts about a works genesis/creation/life, write about other artists work, make announcements, post inspirational nuggets, noodle about my life and occasionally just get on my soapbox about something. There will be a link back here from the website when it is done.

Be patient with me.  I’ll reward you with moving pictures.  Lots of moving pictures.

Thanks for listening I hope this is helpful.

via Wired via Boing Boing

From a collection of documentation of childhood graffiti from antique sources, found at Public Collectors

From a collection of documentation of childhood graffiti from antique sources, found at Public Collectors