the next phase

As I write respond/reply is moving into a new phase. Much collating and editing of material has been done by

Helen and some by myself, resulting in a collection of notes, transcripts, writings and images that are ready to be formed into a publication of some description. We have identified a fantastic designer and are keeping our fingers crossed that she will find the material interesting to work with.

At this stage what the publication will look like is undetermined, in fact the possibilities are endless.

Here is a taster extract of one of the transcripts

When I think how did we get here? I don’t know how we got here….. so my thing is to go back to we’ve got an institution, what is an institution? How do we recognise an institution? How does an institution bestow respect admiration and affection and how does that institutions can bestow some of those things, some of the time?

It is now May and the project continues but with the end of our funding signalling a shift in focus to decisions around what we might do now and in the future with the work and relationships we have built over the past eighteen months.

Although these concerns are looming large, production continues. Recent writing from George is shown below, responding to one of Caroline's gilded postcards as illustrated earlier in this blog. This image and resulting poem has started a discussion around stories beyond words and how the artist and/or poet may wish to stimulate the viewer/reader to travel along a personal path from the subject.

Gilding Lilies

1.

A thin lick of gilt that frames the act,

One golden moment stolen from the sun,

The solid gold baby in the wretched cot

The glow of passing summer, snapped, snapped, snapped.

2.

I am the king of gold, my Midas touch

Lethal as the Gorgon’s stare. I am classical

And hallowed, straight as a die rapt

In perfections and somewhat beyond gone

Out of the world well on the way to truth

Dressed as cliché, each word poured fresh

Minted, mounted, mantled, minuted, mined.

3.

Two reproductions of paintings by Raphael Soyer

Stood in for melancholy. My parents’ shorthand

Comprised the banalities of my own banality..

Our need of art came down to Raphael Soyer.

But why the melancholy? Why the need for it

In reproductions? Was it aspiration?

Cause enough, God knows! And yet the image

Was oddly fitting, creating our need for it.

We were modernists of nostalgia. The whole house

Swam and rang with the fetish of missing things,

Their nodding ceremonies, their hand-me-down

Lost gold look gilding the whole house.

Later I knew that Soyer wouldn’t cut it

Not half as much as melancholy did,

That gilding was a matter of melancholy,

A link to further links and as with any link

The only thing to do with it is cut it.

4.

Sometimes the frame will swallow up the act.

Sometimes the memory outshines the sun.

Sometimes the cot of gold contains a child.

Sometimes a snap is the only thing you’ve got.

George Szirtes

More recent work

Caroline Wright, Gilding the Lily.

Notebooks

Phyllida Barlow, try this out, notebook 2010.

Reviewing the work

Helen Rousseau, Book of Borders, 2010

(15) Curtains / blinds

1.

It was when time was finally receding

we found perspective, or rather it found us,

diminished and helpless on the far horizon.

Perspective was the thing we’d keep our eyes on,

since shrinkage was, for us, a form of bleeding,

and everything was closing in around us.

So everything closed in, and we were shrunk

within the very terms we thought we’d mapped,

our maps being vague approximations,

too imprecise for neater calculations.

Either our systems or our eyes were junk.

However free we were we still felt trapped.

However free we were we still were locked

in houses too small to live in, cars too wide

to miss a pot hole or a traffic cone.

The mind won’t fit the skull, it just gets blown,

and yet keeps spreading and will not be blocked.

It wants to fly because it’s stuck inside.

These words want out. They want a natural light

if only so they might feel less uncertain.

Perspective starts here where they say their names

so any drawing underwrites their claims.

Their vanishing point is what is lost to night

whose drawing is the drawing of a curtain.

2.

Little by little she let down the blinds.

The light in the room obeyed her as she moved.

It was a work of delicate gradations.

She could control gradations in this way,

leading the light as if it were a horse

she might have ridden right back to the stables.

Horses of light were champing at the bit.

They stamped the darkness, breathed a thin grey fume.

Light trembled with excitement that was fear.

The blinds kept moving, light was growing thinner.

It was like dusk, or dawn, some half-way station

between two busy major terminals.

And in that darkening there was a moment

when breath failed and the pain slipped into numbness,

and night, or just the blinds, brought darkness on.

George Szirtes

We've reached a point in the project where we're taking stock of the material generated so far. Posted here and in the following posts are works and thoughts from the end of last year as well as some produced more recently.

new year, new work

Happy New Year to all our blog followers.

It is something of a surprise to think that respond/reply is now almost a year old. I guess it is at this time of year that one takes stock, putting up measures against everything we do. So much work has been made and so many subjects discussed, two exhibitions and two public discussion events have taken place and there is still another six months to go.

Looking forward with eager anticipation to 2011 and everything drawn and written that it brings.

Wysing Arts Centre

It has been a busy time.

Since the open discussion in Ipswich Town Hall Gallery we have installed some work for a show at Wysing Arts Centre in the Wysing Arts Contemporary series entitled Partnering. Here, our project has a very different flavour to the work at Ipswich since we have tried to focus on the nature of the four protagonists working together rather than majoring on the work produced as a result.

A large (2.5 x 3 mts) photograph forms a backdrop to a stage set on which sits the desk and chairs that we use for meetings. On top of the table are copies of our work in a box file, a sound recording of our open discussion and a script for an imaginary play. It is multi layered, and needs time to uncover everything.

We plan to hold our next meeting in the gallery space on the stage.

The open discussion event on 1st October was well attended - about 65 people in total, many of then students from Suffolk New College. Phyllida, George, Helen and Caroline spoke for around 40 minutes, outlining the project history, its development and their individual reasons for taking part. The conversation ranged from "what is art?" to the student and art institution's roles today. There were several questions from the floor bringing the event to a close after almost two hours.

The project will be represented at the next exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre near Cambridge. Called Wysing Arts Contemporary:Partnering, the show looks at different ways in which artists are working with other people, be they artists, those from other professions or communities. The show opens on 16th October and continues until the end of November.

Excellent news - a poem by George that was written right at the beginning of the project has been selected as the poem for the National Poetry Day card.

The show is nearly up!

Everything is now finished bar a few minor adjustments. The evaluation cards are printed and in place and the work is hung and the gallery staff are setting up the drinks in the foyer. All that remains is to enjoy the private view.

Installation going well albeit a little slower than we would have liked.

Images are of Helen putting up work and Stephanie, a fantastic work experience student who has done sterling work painting walls.

Hope to see you all on Friday at the private view from 6pm to 8pm

Tomorrow installation begins in the gallery in Ipswich. It will be a good opportunity to get the work out in one space and to be able to react to and explore all the pieces together. Whilst we bring work to our meetings, this is an additional process not a cumulative one, since it is impractical to transport every single piece of work on every occasion. Our opening is on Friday 10th September when we are looking forward to public reaction to respond/reply.

We are delighted to be invited to take part in a show that is being held at Wysing Arts Centre. Rather alarmingly in terms of time, it opens on 16th October so there is much to do in preparation. The show is called Wysing Arts Contemporary: Partners and offers us the chance to present work that addresses the relationship between the four of us as well as the drawing and writing work we are producing.

.

It seems only a short while since respond/reply started in early 2010 but already the four artists have met on three occasions and a fourth meeting is planned for October.

Much material has been produced by all of us, and in some cases multiple responses have built up from a small starting point. We are not being prescriptive or orderly in our responses, each of us can choose to respond at any time to any other piece of work. Already this has led to George writing about Phyllida's recent show at the Serpentine.

We are busy preparing for a show in the Town Hall Galleries that opens in September. This will take the form of a project space, with the work to date exhibited to show the changing and developing nature of the project. Helen and I plan to spend some time in the gallery, making work and also responding to visitors comments. On 1^st October we are holding a public discussion event where we will hold our normal meeting in the gallery and invite the public to join us. We are hopeful that several students from University Campus Suffolk will also join us as we will be working with them in the weeks prior to the event.

Helen will be running a Big Draw workshop in October half term and we plan to visit the local library to work with the public on drawing and writing related activities.

Poem by George Szirtes responding to Helen Rousseau's drawing

Limit Frame


Nothing is limited, there is only a frame
that is endless and not without character,
such as chequers or diapers or neat folds
and knife creases, such as one finds
on a tablecloth or a pair of pressed trousers,
say, on a gentleman of advancing years
whose last recourse is elegance, because
nothing remains, and nothing is limited.

And, say, you took graph paper, and limited
yourself to forty-five or ninety degrees because
there must, after all, be a rule to govern the years
that remain, and you hitch up your trousers
in a businesslike fashion that nobody finds
peculiar, you discover that everything folds
back on itself, even your undoubted character
which is seeking its own unlimited frame.

So there you stand in your unlimited frame
that nonetheless frames you, with a character
others perceive as character, though the folds
of the skin deepen into a condition one finds
intolerable, tucked into dogtooth-check trousers
of which this ribbon is earnest, and so the years
pile up, folded over like skin, limited because,
something must, at the last count, be limited,

because only the frame can ever be unlimited,
so one, meaning you, is still framed, because
the limit is in you not in the frame, and years
resolve down to this, to years of old trousers,
to several millennia of archaeological finds,
to knife-blades, knife-marks, elegance and knife-folds,
a timescale utterly beyond framing or character
where the only character permitted is that of the frame.
Cloudscape


Look, there are clouds - or is it waves? -
pulsing through a medium, beneath plain paper
and air, something billowing, and, breathe in,
or breathe out, they are still there, those clouds –
or are they waves? – like a gentle washing away
or washing within, such as you feel on the road
in summer when walking down towards the lake
in your head where the grass pulses like water,

and you think of the paper rising through water
within its own frame, the pulp and the lake
and a sieving out, an opening of the road
onto whiteness, that takes you back or further away
into the distance, jostling with the clouds
that are forever inventing images lodged in
vapour and mind, or just on a piece of paper
where even faint shadows resolve into waves,

and here there is nothing but paper unfolding like waves
blown by the air that moves through all paper
that is something you draw on but also draw in,
just as the mind will constantly picture in clouds
a face, a body or land that is further away
that it can imagine, in which the limits of road
meet at infinity or at the nearest unruffled lake,
though there is no such thing as wholly unruffled water,

no character, no years, nothing, only the water
that billows through paper as if it were a lake,
as if elegance was water pretending to be road,
a road on which there is no walking away
only towards the thing on the paper that is like clouds
that cannot be framed because they’re what we’re framed in,
and so depicted, as things are depicted on paper,
steadily mounting like all-but-invisible waves.

Poem by George Szirtes responding to Caroline Wright's drawing Postcard (swan)

Postcard 5: The Swan’s Reflection

Cygnus

I am calligraphy. On salt marsh, on the village pond,

I write my name in arabesques. I speak white

To the cloud and the clouded water.

I am the furthest quarter

Of the starless night

And beyond.

I am breast

And wind and moon

And the sheer distance

Of constellations, the persistence

Of desire, the nebulae of systems soon

To vanish: cry and echo, curvature and rest.

Reverse side

Call now.

The phone is on mute.

There is no speech, no language

Lodged in those empty spaces, no gauge

That can measure a distance so silent and absolute

We cannot address it in words, because we don’t know how.

Listen to the street. The voices in shops, in the bus queue,

On the platform. Something curves back at us,

Some echo, arabesque, a kind of pageant,

Like the rhythms of an imagined

Language: sign, Cygnus,

Me, you.

Hattyú*

*Hattyú (Hutt-you) is Hungarian for swan.

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.

early visual and written material

The project is now established and material is being generated at a regular pace, both drawings and writing. The next posts include a selection/extracts of some of this material. it is not chronological but illustrates the early stages of the project.

The first post

respond/reply is a research project based around drawing and writing.

The project will take place over eighteen months between Phyllida Barlow, Helen Rousseau, George Szirtes and Caroline Wright. This blog will record their journey through thoughts, images, quotations, writing and other methods bringing together the processes into one document.

The inaugural meeting takes place on 7th January 2010 - read more about the project here after then.

Caroline