Writing - Phyllida Barlow

Writing work – a project with Helen Rousseau and Caroline Wright.

There is a problem between words and work – and by work I mean making art and looking at art and understanding its processes of production. To begin with, why do we call the art we make ‘work’...how would someone else who works in some other profession, or with some other activity, understand this rarefied naming of art as ‘work’?

Is the naming of ‘art’ as ‘work’ a kind of avoidance of what art is? Art’s reality as a distinctive, often elitist pursuit can be troublesome, and naming ‘art’ as ‘work’ locates it , art, as a generic activity, something quotidian and on a par with what everyone does on a daily basis. Or is it to claim and make known the endeavour which making art involves: the hard slog and struggle which so often accompanies the processes of production, the thinking and the bringing to a final realisation of an art work?

Even more confusing is the expression ‘it works’ used when looking at a work of art, or when finishing an (art) work, or during its production, and frequently when teaching in tutorials when discussing a student’s work. Does this expression –it works- have its origins, for example in the industrial revolution, in relationship to machinery, and also to craft, when it was, and is, essential that things intended for use worked efficiently, without breaking down? What do we mean when we say ‘it works’, ‘it’s working well’, ‘I like the way that works in the space’, ‘That works much better like that’, etc., etc.

The drawing and writing project proposed by the artists Helen Rousseau and Caroline Wright offers an opportunity for me to locate writing at the interface between doing, looking and words. I will be given their drawings to study. I will equate my act of looking, seeing, observing, watching, scrutinising, glimpsing – so many words to describe the act of seeing and looking – with words... the drawings will equal how I write and how I use and construct with words.

I will not write ‘about’ these drawings. That is, I am not interested in the description which might match the image. Or so I think now. Instead, I will write ....what? As yet, I do not know. Perhaps I will begin with a listing, or indexing, of my responses. I know I do not want to use the words ‘drawing’, or ‘work’, or ‘paper’, or worry about how the drawings are made, or what they are of...I want to see these drawings as if they are inseparable from my experiences of the sounds of traffic, the smell of coffee, the view from this window in front of me now, the muddle of domesticity, the demands of my work and studio activity, the interruptions and anticipations of daily life...for words to be from the sentient world around me. Phyllida Barlow. June 2009.