new uni profile, why not

My PhD project Working With Art and Forestry examines aspects of what is involved in creatively producing and interpreting forests, and focusses on ways art comes to be made in forests. A key question is: how might art open up the ways people understand forests, what they are and what they are for?

My  18 months or so of fieldwork involved workplace ethnography with the Forestry Commission, with it’s managers, ecologists and designers. I spent a significant period (about ten months) in one place, working inside and outside a particular office in central Scotland. I also moved around a great deal, interviewing artists all over the UK, visiting the studios of ‘international’ artists commissioned to make work for public forests, as well as working with other self -defined ‘environmental’ artists.  I wanted to understand the work of Forestry Commission Scotland as a public body, the role of foresters, and artists, and engage with the discourses surrounding policy and practice in art as well as environmental politics.  In doing all of this, I became increasingly interested in the ethics of ‘environmental’ art, and  how ‘public’ (and ‘publics’) were negotiated within  the context of a government institution.

Developments in ‘environmental’ and ‘ecological’ public art in contemporary Britain mirror shifts in strategic government forestry policy and ‘best practice’; both of which illustrate broader transformations in global environmental discourses about how ‘nature’ is valued and how we ‘see’ nature. Rightly or wrongly, these are moral questions. ‘Ecocentric’ concepts, for example involving reciprocity or mutuality can be difficult to figure within ‘western’ traditions’  ; often animist perspectives are assumed, or denied,  leading to interesting configurations which complicate already complex dualisms (not least ‘self’ and ‘other’).

I am committed to exploring alternative methods to doing and making anthropology, specifically approaches to doing anthropology with, as well as about, art.  Doing ‘anthropology at home’, my PhD  research has involved working with artists, foresters, policy makers, students, and making, presenting and disseminating my work to non-academic audiences. I have worked with drawing and photography, made installations, given talks, lead experimental workshops. The aim has been to document and understand some processes of art as well as forestry design, management, and public consultation; crucially, to use these to work with people from different backgrounds, with different capacities and perspectives, and to sometimes bring these together, if  not to achieve consensus, to think through things, together.

Environmental Dialogues

http://environmentaldialogues.wordpress.com/

 

Which is part of this:

http://corecreativeresearch.com/

It’s old as well as new;  but I haven’t posted for too long, so am filling in

[Foucault meets Magritte]

‘Young Girl Eating a Bird’, by Magritte, 1927.

Two chance encounters juxtaposed around a question.

Magritte’s powerful (and powerfully obvious: it was not a pipe – it would be lying, he said, to write that it was), surreal juxtapositions are often funny – just ask Noel Fielding or Terry Gilliam. Or look at his pipe picture – simple, clever, surreal, straight to the point.  That serious art can be funny, is funny, isn’t prescriptive, aims at being challenging, all of this rests on it being recognisable, in some way.  We recognise the dark tales ‘Young Girl Eating a Bird’ plays with.

Today, immediately after seeing this painting, I had a chance encounter with a casual definition of experience from Foucault. (Meanwhile the clouds have opened and emptied on quiet streets;  sunlight reappears, bringing with it people and birds soaring in blue-r skies). The juxtaposition struck me, and I thought, yet again, of this question:

How do people share in a particular experience of the world, sufficiently, to find things they talk about recognisable? (Ellen & Fukui 1996:2).

The above has been rustling around in my mind for months. I have it writ large, posted up on my wall, juxtaposed with aerial images of forest paths and my line drawings, moving along the edges of things. It occasionally reminds me it’s there, catching me off-guard, like the restless sounds of swifts or swallows (or ghosts or dust falling) I hear at night from the boarded-up chimney and the blocked up fireplace, in my bedroom.

I have been thinking about how people think through things that are always changing. Obtuse, for now, I know, but the context is thinking about what art does, how an artist’s way of seeing things might have an effect, open up a different perspective that we can share through experience materialised. That’s one way of thinking about work; if we accept that, then we also recognise that something of their experience, of who they are, endures yet the work has no fixed meaning (so they all say).

It feels like: trying to remember something, articulate something that was only glanced sideways, peripheral to the object we had carefully and in good conscience fixed our attention on  - in the corner of the eye, back of the mind, there is a question. Our perspective shifts a little. That’s how I feel about the quote; maybe it’s just a way of talking about intrigue. But of course we make sense, so I’ll try to, somewhere else!

As I said, after lunch I chanced upon a reader on Foucault; it’s pages fell open to a definition, if a casual one, of experience. It resonates with the way I have been thinking about this potential for art (for everything?). Foucault was discussing his “difficult relationship” to truth, and the intentions of his writing – his books are not for teaching but rather are “more like invitations or public gestures”. Here it is:

“An experience is something that one has completely alone but can fully have only to the extent that is escapes pure subjectivity and that others can also – I won’t say repeat it exactly, but at least encounter it  - and go through it themselves.  [He relates this to his 'prison book' and the way his readers responded to it]. They had the impression that the book concerned them or concerned the purely contemporary world. [...] They sensed that something in present-day reality was being called into question.[...] people read it as an experience that changed them, that prevented them from always being the same or from having the same relation with things, with others.“

What potential! Not only in art, but art has this transformative potential. it is a moral imperative, it *should* contain intrigue, challenge and question. Well, to shape experience, it should. This is often the goal (as often articulated, extruded, when words are required) but not can easily fall on either side of the line. But when it is done, often, it is done by encouraging one to look closer, to look again. It can help us share in an imaginative space, which, in the end, work to constitute those other realities (physical, political, temporal.

Forgive the obtuseness. But I am, afterall, writing about forests, where it’s easy to get lost, to stumble, but in doing so to encounter, or discover the liminal, the magical – in ourselves, as well as in fairytales.

Saltus Opus (The Work of the Forest); Saltus Movere (Have to Move); Saltus Memoria (Recollect).

lines and kinds of being in between.

I wanted to take a little time to write out and up the notes from Tim (Ingold)’s ‘Lines’ lecture yesterday afternoon. The 4 As class for UGs was expanded with visitors from ECA ArtSpaceNature, people from Scottish Sculpture Workshop and other interested parties. We didn’t have much time, though we did  a short exercise, which I helped Jo V devise, just thinking around some of art and anthropology, and in between connecting lines. I will write something of that, somewhere else. For now, though I should be writing the formal academic beginning of … something, a chapter, I thought this was as good a place as any for the ideas about Lines, so they don’t get lost under the tree’s weight of paper on my desk, and while I can still decipher my handwriting…

From Tim we had connecting lines: the abstract streak of a salmon jumping the falls, and Kandinsky’s (1935) ‘Line & Fish’ essay – escaping from objects, the death, or the absence of life, in constrained representation, in the figurative ,and the necessity of things (like salmon) to exist in the external environment, we have the line, life itself. The movement.

There was a lengthy exposition of Deleuze & Guattari’s ways of thinking about ‘striated space’ versus ‘smooth space’. In smooth space, we lose the external, somehow; everything is internal. Analogies helped somewhat:  materially (i.e. fabric) smooth space is like felt, without edges, or boundaries, it’s surface textures unlike the orthogonality of it’s other, more akin to writing paper, or the weft and warp of the striated space produced in the cross-threads of a loom. This is like the farmer’s fields, compared to the relatively smooth, irregular movements of the nomadic pastoralist, or the mariner.

Tim, further, makes a distinction between plot lines and guidelines (for better explanation, better to read his words in his book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lines-Brief-History-Tim-Ingold/dp/0415424275). Essentially, guide lines establish space, while plot lines constitute the texture of the surface.

He also outlined something of the difference and significance of the optic vs the haptic. The optical is about projection against a background; the haptic is rather a close-up, a movement of following lines and textures “wandering through the world like a dog, sniffing”! This is NOT to make a distinction between touch and vision – both configurations can involve all the senses.

Levi-Strauss and Derrida’s critique (of ethno-centrism) also referenced, when thinking about what writing is and does. If writing is drawing lines, the trace of a gesture, leaving marks, as drawing is, then writing is as old as speech. Tim likes the idea of thinking about writing and drawing as threads, rather than traces; loom-like.

Later, during some questioning that challenges this notion of thread, he mentions André Leroi-Gourhan (clearly an influence on Deleuze & Guattari, especially in ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ as well as Derrida’s conceptualisation of différance.) Other vague (and vaguely challenging) questions arise about ‘the meaning of meaning’ and the ‘original’ drawing.

I ask something about contested lines; what happens when people draw lines for a purpose that’s then misunderstood or contested (I was clearer then, and I think he knew what I was asking. It felt fundamental, when thinking about the problems of miscommunication, who reads what from their lines, how and to what end, and from which direction, and the subjectivity of traces, or threads, of gestures. It’s to do with what happens when they’re placed on a table, in the world). Lines, Tim said, are redrawn; meaning emerges in the way the line is practiced. Reading lines, then, is not a decoding, but a further weaving of a line, adding another line, or layer. To another point I am grappling with,  he agrees; “it’s not flat”.

Of course, difficulties, or differences, of how to think about imagination, and intention; of whether even improvisation requires a schematic, are raised.

Tim says, in order to say something about life, the human sciences require a theory to parallel Eistein’s theory of relativity, for we are in similar ways discovering the limitations of a Newtonian (?) approach. Newton’s theory of gravity might seem to explain the motion of the stars and planets in the heavens from our perspective, but Einstein showed that gravity was not  really a force (acting at a distance) as such, merely the observed effect of the warping of space and time by matter. What’s interesting too is that apparently the effects of the difference between these ideas can only be seen at vastly different speeds (I want to say at different scales, but measuring time and space this way becomes… imaginatively stunted). So we need a different speed/time/scale for thinking with? Maybe more speed-bumps as Latour demands, but them he and Tim disagree about lines and points on lines, as intersections or interactions.

For my part, I was thinking, inspired a little by Rosalie (http://rosaliemonoddefroideville.blogspot.com/) about the in between lines. I made (captured) these images before and while thinking of different kinds of being in between.

Reflecting now, on the lines:

reflected back and forth and myself, between the way I see the world and the way the world sees me; between doing and not doing but living with the in between or half finished that involves lines which slant and slide in strange messy angles, half-thoughts and unexpected intersections; with the layers of things that become something else when applied and re-applied, movements of stepping away and of surprise; and, in another light, the materials that we create our own boundaries with, yet which let the light in; themselves points of interaction, as we are.

“crystal coffins, and loves true kiss” (thank you, Lal)

core?

Stumbling towards an ethical CORE(?)

 

I ‘performed the following, quietly - reading out into the world, giving voice (only) an ‘academic’  (only giving voice/only an academic!) in a sea of visuals. I sat, avoiding the projector’s glare,  in a black box, but with an audience. It was hot, all those bodies stuffed into the dark square, and fans were arranged in circles around the feet of those sitting at the front, their heads bent, attentive, if not to me, or those before, to their thoughts (and occasionally, to their phones ).  I avoided their eyes, easily done in the dark. It’s not like me to pass up a chance to try to talk with/in my pictures, but I’m working with words, at the moment. I’m trying to know what I think, when I see what I write*

*This a paraphrase of something Gertrude Stein said. She also said “Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something”. The point is that I know these words lacks some kind of care, perhaps that of sustained attention? But yes, they the movement in them aims at not stumbling. A series of thoughts, like passing clouds, suspended water

Annie Cattrell 'Conditions'

Annie Cattrell was there, these are her clouds, above.

The words are an attempt at Latourian (!?) ‘speed bumps’ for my thinking, and speaking…

“What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them” Lynn White

“… surely no other creature than man has ever managed to foul it’s nest in such short order.

There are many calls to action, but specific proposals, however worthy as individual items, seem too partial, palliative, negative: ban the bomb, tear down the billboards, give the Hindus contraceptives and tell them to eat their sacred cows. The simplest solution to any suspect change is, of course, to stop it, or better yet, to revert to a romanticized past[...] ” (1967)

He was being sarcastic, here, I think, but it’s a bitter warning. More, his point remains: humans “must first examine and critique their attitudes toward nature”. My PhD, Working between art and forestry in Scotland – is about what is involved in creatively producing and interpreting forests, exploring the ways art comes to be made, and how forests are managed, designed and visualized, within the context of Forestry Commission Scotland. These involve divergent ways of thinking about, understanding, and acting in, ‘nature’ (as well as, perhaps, science and politics!) and it’s social and political effects.

I’d just like to say something about where my thinking is, at the moment, and how it might coincide with the interests of CORE, into creative research into the ‘environment’. Some themes have emerges from the conversations I’ve been having. 1) That there are divergent ways of describing and understanding the temporal, in terms of both landscape and making that seem to be incommensurable, on the one hand, the phenomenological and the structuralist on the other- is this bifurcation even a problem?

2) there are different ways, means and ends of drawing –as a way of seeing, of observing, coming to know places, drawing in the landscape (ie burning) or drawing with a camera that say something about the ay nature od conceived of, externalized, or other

3) that how we think about nature has a lot to do with how public spaces and public issues are constituted as public – so I’m interested in the role of artists and art in constituting these, and the waysForestry Commission Scotland,  as a public institution, opens up broader issues around publicness – public benefit, value, space, ethical and moral considerations. T

his leads me to the final point: 4)forms and debates in an around environmentalism and ecologism should be set within an ethical, or moral framework. It’s this that I want to touch on a little more here.

As I hope these themes indicate, coming to know ‘nature’ can involve different ways of seeing, working with, presenting and re-presenting. (I am wary of ‘Representation, for reasons I am sure you are all aware of). I can’t go into more detail, because it’s not possible to be exhaustive; but anyway it is problematic to try to address these differences in opposition: it might work to either set up a negative dialectic (art/science, illustrated by the practices of forestry and art-making) which I want to avoid, since it only serves to further bifurcate and polarize. I also want to avoid suggesting commonalities between “Art” and “Science” – this may also suggest a mix up, of fact and value.

What I might do instead is try to make a really important point, following Bruno Latour, and many others: that before we can begin to do any kind of ‘political ecology’ (or rather, in order to do it, as well as doing it) we have to work (slowly, because it’s perilous) to conceptualise the bases for thinking: how we think about and use ‘nature’ (as well as society, politics, ecology, art, and science, or some other words), accepting the failures and limitations, of the sometimes incendiary and even militant attempts to transcend, rise above, or go beyond, the dualities when what we have to do is, to borrow an archaeological line of thought, ‘burrow down’ (witmore & webmoore), not create hybrids, but find answers that “encompass more than human intention alone”.

“The problem is perhaps the interaction, how much we think we can act upon it”.

This was a remark made during a workshop I ran, as part of my fieldwork. It brought together people whose work explicitly engages with the value of trees, wood and forests, and who have experience of collaborations between art and forestry.  Despite agreement and commonalities, as well as differences of opinion about what art might do, what seemed fundamental was this diversity of ways – the cross currents -  in which ‘nature’ was perceived; variously under threat, fragile, benign, resilient. Such diverse approaches to ‘nature’ are also evident within contemporary environmental art practice). I think this comments speak to the value we give to nature – as either something seen outside ourselves, or something we are part of, ‘how much we think we can act upon it’.

But hold on, here, because we are starting to talk about values, as well as facts, and intentions. Hold onto my first quote: “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them” Because although efforts to ‘overcome’ the nature/culture, self/other,subject /object have been and are being made, it still seems, as Bohm said way back in 1980, that there are disparate forces. Work has indeed been done to challenge to traditional anthropocentrism (not least in Anthropology), questioning the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on earth. Tensions within many different approaches to nature demonstrate how such moral reasoning is an aspect of every-day engagement in the world – engagement with the ‘environment’ is part of a ‘worldview’. Yet key concepts, nature and natural, appear ambiguous … for eg, we may, paradoxically, need to use technological powers to retain a sense of something not being in our power…. (the way foresters are remaking wild or ‘indigenous’ landscapes, say)!

It might be time to back track a little:

It has been argued that the historical roots of the environmental crisis can be found in strands of Judeo-Christian thinking which had encouraged the overexploitation of nature by maintaining the superiority of humans over all other forms of life on earth, and by depicting all of nature as created for the use of humans. Lynn White  said this, arguing that in order to successfully address the emerging environmental crises, humans must first examine and critique their attitudes toward nature. I agree, and do as Latour suggests, introduce speedbumps to effect a slowing down:

“Nature is the second speed bump that political ecology is going to have to encounter along its route. How, some will object, can nature inconvenience a set of militant and scientific disciplines that have to do with the way to protect nature, to defend it, to insert it into the play of politics, to make an aestetic object of it, as subject of law, or in any case a concern? And yet, this is where the difficulty arises. Every time we seek to mix scientific facts with aesthetic, political, economic, and moral values we find ourselves in a quandary. If we concede too much to facts, the human element in its entirety tilts into objectivity,  becomes a countable and calculable thing, a bottom line in terms of energy, one species among others. If we concede too much to values, all of nature tilts into the uncertainty of myth, into poetry or romanticism; everything becomes soul or spirit. If we mix facts and values, we go from bad to worse, for we are depriving ourselves of both autonomous knowledge and independent morality.” (Politics of Nature, p4)

Contextualising these ideas within traditions of modern art might be productive (no matter how much a break/breaking/broken, is declared, mostly in the move from inside to out).  In some senses modern art practices work to maintain a conception of the creative individual, or even present romantic perceptions of the isolated individual communing with ‘nature’…. Yet many of the art practices I’ve encountered  appear to adopt an alternative, relational approach – which I would say is an ecological one -  an ethical position which posits the self as being constituted by relations with other things, crucially informing action.

These are moral issues. Whilst motivations akin to deep ecology’s “biospheric egalitarianism” (a position which holds that all living things have intrinsic value independent of their usefulness) are influential, other responses to a perceived environmental crisis are, rather, apocalyptic in tone.  Some representations of nature, across arts and the sciences, are problematic: we see nature ‘run wild’, simultaneously out of control, vengeful, fragile… some militant environmentalists advocating ‘de-population’ (of humans, in order that non-human life may flourish) which to me seems to present a  ‘nature’ is perceived and represented not merely as benign, also as intrinsically fragile. The multiple effects of these ways of thinking about nature are grounded in conceptualizations of the moral authority of nature. This posits value to the ‘non-human’ in complex ways, also problematically reflected in anthropological and related arguments about  non-human ‘agency’, which should also be subjected to critique.