CONTEXTUALISING RECALCULATING SEMINAR SCHEDULE

THURSDAY 25TH APRIL 2013
Title: Contextualising Recalculating
Location: ALG15a & ALG15b, Chelsea College of Art and Design


9:30     Arrival and coffee
10:15   The CCW-Budapest collaboration: the road to Recalculating (Stephen Scrivener. CCW)
10:30   Utilitarianism and the art school in nineteenth-century Britain (Malcolm Quinn, CCW)
11:15   Chastisement, correction, cure or confinement? Historical perspective from Bridewell and Bethlem Hospitals (Colin Gale, Bethlem Royal Hospital)

12:00   Art in Bethlem Royal Hospital (Michaela Ross and Josip Lizatovic, Bethlem Royal Hospital)
12.45   Discussion session
13.15   Lunch
14:15   Introduction (Balàzs Kicsiny, Academy of Art, Budapest)
14:20   Short PechaKucha-style artists talks*
15.30   Tea and coffee
15:40   Short PechaKucha-style artists talks*
17.10   Question and answer session
17.30   Close

This one day event accompanies the Recalculating exhibition (Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art and Design, 24th and 27th April 2013) which arises out of an on-going collaboration between CCW Graduate School and the Doctoral School, Academy of Art, Budapest. The collaboration has been sustained by a series of workshops in Budapest and London focussed on sites of historical and contemporary interest. In Budapest, the site of interest was the Csepel Island industrial region of city, which up until the late 1980s was the city’s industrial powerhouse, but has since undergone a period of decline and renewal. This workshop resulted in an exhibition entitled Csepel Works at the Labor Gallery in Budapest, May 2011. In July 2011, a second workshop took place in London that focussed on the institutional legacy, i.e., penal, medical and artistic, of the Millbank site and the Recalculating exhibition is an outcome both of this workshop and the legacy of the collaboration.


The morning session of invited presentations introduces new material into the project that addresses policy change in 19th century regarding art education and mental health and the contemporary function of artistic activity in the Royal Bethlem Hospital. The afternoon session comprises short presentations by the Recalculating artists addressing their contributions to the exhibition.


* PechaKucha 20x20 is a presentation format where the speaker presents 20 images, each for 20 seconds. Where possible, the images advance automatically.

MRES RESPONSE

Creative writing in response to Recalculating:

Aesthetics of the written word, in contradistinction to artwork and exhibition.

FLΔG COLLECTIVE

Recalculating the Triangle: FLΔG

FLΔG is a group formed at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2010, comprising of artists, students, former students, staff and researchers. We explore the relationship between art practices, art education, and pedagogy, looking at forms of knowledge production and dissemination in the art school and beyond. FLΔG continues where the ‘educational turn’ in the art world left of, bringing re-examined art/ pedagogy dynamics back into the discursive arena and physical space of the art school, but also by engaging with galleries and related art spaces. FL∆G was named after the room code of the Triangle gallery space, FLG01, with the A of FL∆G being substituted by a triangle, to reference the shape of the Triangle Gallery.

Understanding the Triangle as a very particular physical and discursive site was a key part of beginning to explore the relationship between art educational practices within the academy and the educational turn outside the academy. Site-specific art works, (responding either to the physical site of the Triangle Gallery, to the institutional site of Chelsea or to the discursive site of pedagogy as art) was a fundamental aspect of this project. Both as a way to discursively explore reflection within art practice, as well as an opportunity to explore ideas around the pedagogy of physical, material, artworks in relation to pedagogic theory.

The Triangle gallery is one of the few spaces at Chelsea that the general public has access to. It operates as an educational space, a space for student shows and as an open public space. It is linked through a pathway to the parade ground, adjacent to Tate Britain and we were interested drawing on the public potential of the Triangle as it mediates between the academy and society.

For RECALCULATE FLΔG proposes to show documentation of the re-adjustment of the Triangle Gallery through the inaugural FLΔG project in 2010, as a reflection on this event and to set up a reflexive site, where members of FLΔG will intermittently be present to discuss their work past and present.

FLΔG: Kiki Claxton, Hannah Clayden, Mario D’Agostino, Katrine Hjelde and Michaela Ross.

EXCHANGING ARTISTIC RESEARCH SEMINAR SCHEDULE

FRIDAY 26TH APRIL 2013

Title: Budapest-London: Exchanging artistic research

Location: The Red Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design

09.30   Arrival and coffee

10.30   Artistic doctorate in the UK    Stephen Scrivener (CCW)

11.00   Artistic doctorate in Hungary   Balàzs Kicsiny (HUFA Doctoral School)

11.30   Discussion                      (Chairs) Kicsiny and Scrivener

12.00   Lunch

13.00   Doctoral presentation 1         Nemere Kerezsi (HUFA Doctoral School)

13.30   Doctoral presentation 2         Aaron McPeake (CCW)

14.00   Doctoral presentation 3         Kata Soós (HUFA Doctoral School)

14.30   Doctoral presentation 4         Katrine Hjelde (CCW)

15.00   Tea/coffee break

15.30   Doctoral presentation 5         Szabolcs Süli-Zakar (HUFA Doctoral School)

16.00   Doctoral presentation 6         Michaela Ross (CCW)

16.30   Discussion and close            (Chairs) Kicsiny and Scrivener

Close  

Since the early nineteen nineties a vigorous international discourse has been underway about the purpose and nature of artistic research. In Britain, this has been accompanied by the widespread introduction into academe of doctoral degrees in art. Whilst, the scope of artistic research is international, many countries have yet to establish doctoral programmes, whilst in others their inception predates the nineteen nineties. Thus approaches to and experiences of doctoral education in art vary markedly between one country and another. The occasion of the Recalcuting* exhibition, which arises out of collaboration between the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Doctoral School, Budapest, and CCW Graduate School, University of the Arts London, provides an opportunity to celebrate the work of artistic researchers who have successfully completed their degrees, whilst also exploring the affordances and constraints of the institutional regulatory frameworks within which their research was undertaken.

The morning session will contextualise the afternoon session by describing and discussing the frameworks regulating doctoral research doctoral degree programmes at each of the participating institutions. After lunch, recent doctoral degree holders from each school will talk about the research they undertook during their doctoral degrees.

*Recalculating, Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art and Design, 16 John Islip St., London, SW1P 4JU, April 24th-27th 2013.

POSTERS FOR THE RECALCULATING EXHBITION AND EVENTS

STEPHEN SCRIVENER

Redactions 1:1 - 1:2

A1 poster and A6 book

In a circular letter to the governors of Her Majesty’s Gaols, dated December 1854 and entitled Photography as an aid to the administration of criminal justice, James Anthony Gardiner, then Governor of Her Majesty’s Gaol, Bristol, argued for the advantages of the use of photography in the administration of criminal justice. The problem, as he saw it, was that there was no way of knowing whether an offender presented to his gaol for the first time had committed a previous crime elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The solution that appealed to Gardiner, and which he recommended to his fellow governors for “general adoption throughout the kingdom”, was the use of photography, because, “I might in scores of cases, even without the knowledge of the prisoner, procure his likeness, a very icon of himself, of which, being capable of multiplication to any extent, I might transmit a copy to wherever it might promise to lead to useful results.”  He went on to describe how, after twelve months of operation, he had perfected a system of photographing prisoners, reporting that by its means he had brought to justice several hardened offenders, who “being unknown in my neighbourhood, would otherwise have escaped with inadequate punishment.” He had achieved these successes by forwarding images of prisoners who had come into his charge to “several places”, thereby obtaining information of their previous convictions elsewhere.  As far as Gardiner was concerned, the photograph provided a means of attaching a set of criminal records to a single offender.

In an article under the heading Photographing prisoners in The Photographic News: A Weekly Record of the Progress of Photography, Volume 10, November 2^nd 1866, 524-525, the unidentified author acknowledges the photograph's “literal fidelity in rendering facts” and Gardiner’s ambition “to secure sun drawings of his enforced guests,” solely for the purposes of identification, but then proceeds to read example photographs in terms of what they have to tell us about the individuals photographed: “Not all brutalized, or besotted, or sinister; not all with the forehead villanous low, the square jaw, the coarse mouth, or the eye of wild beast; but in more cases a weak and weary, or a craven and humbled look. Some of the faces remind us painfully of another series of portraits, taken by Dr. Hugh Diamond, of insane persons, and suggest to us the connection between diseased morals and diseased minds, between crime and insanity. Physiognomy, to the careful observer, may often, doubtless, indicate tendencies of character, and suggest phases of mental history. None of the portraits before us look intellectual, or suggest culture; they are mostly of a low type; but there is nothing to suggest the dogged, resisting, vindictive beings, with overhanging felon-brow and sunken cruel eyes, which sensation writers at times attribute to the criminal classes. They are rather examples of God's image degraded and enfeebled by neglect; plants which resemble weeds, because left without culture. The only portrait marked as that of a murderer is that of a weak but not imbecile-looking old man, the mildest in expression amongst a score of criminals."

Whilst Gardiner’s plan was not immediately adopted nationally, enactments were made in the Prevention of Crimes Act, 1871, Chapter 112, 34 and 35 Vict, with a view to the photographing of criminals as a means of facilitating their identification. Many of the thousands of prison photographs demanded under the Act are now held in the British National Archives and have already been copied and uploaded onto web sites, such as Ancestry.co.uk, thus adding to the already large number of mugshot web galleries, blogs, etc., and newspaper articles dealing with the subject. Often the power of this material seems to be what it suggests about the characters of the depicted individuals and/or the times in which they lived.

Redactions 1:1 – 1:2 is a work in two parts that plays with the two ways of reading outlined above: Redactions 1:,1, a poster, invites the viewer to participate in a process of identification (in the gallery space the poster is further redacted such as to present an additional problem to the viewer); Redactions 1:2, a book, plays on the suggestive potential of the juxtaposition of text and image.



Redactions 1:1 poster



Front cover of Redactions 1:2



A double-spread from Redactions 1:2

Images by courtesy of Tyne & Wear Archives, document TWAM ref PR.NC/6/1.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/twm_news/sets/72157625464218629/



ANNE LYDIAT

Recalculating

I live and work as an artist on an old converted Medway Coaster moored on the River Thames. In this hypothetical space of marginality and transgression I am regarded as ‘living outside the urban edge’, what Michel Foucault calls ‘other spaces’ or ‘counter sites’; …heterotopias which simultaneously represent, compete and challenge, as well as turn upside down actual places… 1


In the final paragraph of a lecture Foucault gave to a group of architects in 1967 entitled ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ (Des espaces autres), he describes the boat or ship as ‘the greatest reserve of the imagination, the heterotopia par excellence’. He states …as a moving entity, a boat exists outside mainstream society, and therefore embodies a kind of liberty… 2


As a process of mapping the lived experience of being on board ship I have made a series of indexical ink drawings (I am not claiming the drawings are heterotopic - they are traces of emotional and somatic experiences on the ship as a heterotopic space). By suspending a pen from the roof in the hold, I have captured moments of presence now lost, the fleeting, transient rolling of the ship in relation to the wind, and the tide on the female body. Charts that locate my emotional and somatic relationship to a space and place on the river that can never be navigated.


Similar drawings have been made by other female artists despite each being unaware of the drawings of the other. Could there be a link in these artworks that would indicate a gender aware art practice that relates to ‘feminine’ gendered narratives. If so, how might they inform the discourses in relation to the ship as a transgressive space used, occupied and ‘experienced’ by women?

1. F o u c a u l t, Michel 1997. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. – Rethinking
Architecture. A Reader in Cultural Theory. Ed. Neil Leach. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 350–356

2. Foucault, M. (1986) [1967] (Trans. Jay Miskowiec) ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, Vol. 16. No. 1. pp. 22-27. Johns Hopkins University Press.

ALISON GOODYEAR

Move me No.1 Septych, 2013

Oil on wood panels: each panel: 10cm(h) x 40cm(w) x 3.5cm(d); combined dimension: 10cm(h) x 280cm(w) x 3.5cm(d)

This work firstly is a painting. It has a sense of abstracted space relating to landscape painted on seven wood panels. Secondly, it is an experiment designed to ask the beholder to recalculate the work. In an “explicit invitation to exercise choice” (Eco, p.1, 1989) the beholder is invited to physically rearrange the seven wood panels horizontally along a shelf. Each choice is one of 5040 horizontal permutations (see 4 permutations of the seven panels exampled above).
Rather than a passive viewing, it is designed to encourage the beholder to reflect on their own aesthetic type experiences and re-position the piece till it answers their requirements, their judgments, simply put, how it suits them best. This piece could be seen as ‘open’, always in flux, often ambiguous, drawing on our natural urge to make sense of the world around us. It attempts to collapse the conventional relationship of beholder/artist, where there is only one acceptable version of aesthetic in the artwork. That there could be many versions, as acceptable, brings the beholder to re-assess their understanding of themselves in that world.

I would hope the non-artist beholder gain greater confidence in their artistic convictions, a personal aesthetic brought about through an autodidactic journey, self-learning prompted by interaction with the piece. On painter to painting relationships, Michael Fried suggests the artist Chardin, through his process found “a natural correlative for his own engrossment in the act of painting and a proleptic mirroring of what he trusted would be the absorption of the beholder before the finished work” (p.51, 1980). He also states that “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre” (p.164, 1998 [1967]), when an artwork acknowledges the beholder before it. Therefore can this work become an anti-theatrical alternative by creating “work(s) which acknowledge their own literality and thereby construct a beholder capable of acknowledging his own literal presence” Mulhall (p.12, 2001). Can the beholder still lose themselves, and become absorbed?

With this experimental work I am interested in how it could develop through and with the beholder. Will all 5040 horizontal possibilities be explored? Will the way this piece is painted (an original order of connecting imagery) result in a dominant order? Will the traditionally forbidden act of touching an artwork (to maneuver elements of this painting) be overcome? Will it engage a ‘critical agency’ (Foucault)? In asking the beholder to aid in the entropy of the artwork and then its potential rebirth through the shared, temporary language individual to this piece, does the relationship between artist/beholder not become something else? Artist/beholder-artist?

References

Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Fried, M. (1980) Absorption and theatricality: painting and beholder in the age of Diderot Berkeley and London: University of California.

Fried, M. (1998) Art and Objecthood, Essays and Reviews Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Mulhall, S. (2001) Crimes and Deeds of Glory: Michael Fried’s Modernism British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2001.

MICHAELA ROSS AND JOSIP LIZATOVIC (CURATORS)

re·cal·cu·late, to calculate again, especially for the purpose of finding an error or confirming a previous computation.

For several months, the artist-patient has been making cardboard structures, at first in his room and now, with permission, in an empty interview space within the Bethlem Royal Hospital.

The temporary cardboard structure, repeatedly modified, documents the endless process of adjustment which occurs as the individual calculates and recalibrates his relationship to the institution. The structure is simultaneously a form of escape, a hiding place, a filter, a second-skin – an alternative way of inhabiting the institution but also a reflection and a critique of its spaces and rules.

The structure has a specific use-value for the person who made it. Survival in any institution requires a series of recalibrations, moments when you conform and others when you resist. Making this structure is a response to the question: How do I make this space adapt to me when I am constantly being asked to adapt to it?

For the maker it is an opportunity and an invitation to occupy another space with its own rules – an autonomous zone – that both enables and protects.  There are windows so you can look out, but the random shouts and noises which reverberate off the cold, institutional surfaces outside, inside are muffled and softened.

The generic, modernist architecture of the institution is humanised by the structure’s presence. It is a stand-in for the human body (whose proportions it mimics). It has mimetic powers:  it blends in and conforms; from certain angles it looks like a reception desk or lift door, just another piece of institutional furniture.

It is like a DIY Trojan horse, an ambiguous gift, but what is it smuggling in and out through the locked doors of the institution? It is an object that slips between categories.

For the exhibition, a structure will be specially commissioned for the Triangle Space. It will either be constructed on site at the hospital or made directly in the exhibition space by technicians responding to the instructions of the artist.

The object will be shown alongside images documenting its making and installation in the spaces of the hospital.

Michaela Ross and Josip Lizatovic are artists who manage the art studios on site at Bethlem Royal Hospital. Bethlem Royal Hospital is the original 'Bedlam', one of the world's oldest hospitals for the treatment of mental illnesses. They are currently working together with the artist-patient in the medium secure unit of the hospital.

SZABOLCS SULI-ZAKER

Exhibition proposal for Triangle Gallery

 

Floating Balconies
Video installation (sheets, fan, rope, 4 projected stills) 2011-2012

These balconies could be anywhere in Eastern-Central Europe, like in Miskolc,in Belgrade or in Bratislava. Balconies of these type of flats at the same time universal – still bear traces of the socialist dictatorship – however like the backyard gardens it has been characterized by owners.

I collected balconies with strange subjects in my travel of post socialists countries,than I projected the pictures of four balconies to sheets, which were slightly moved by a small fan.



Sugar Factory
Lenticular Print, mounted on extruded polystyrene, 70x100cm.
HD videoloop. 2010-2013

In 2008 in the town of Szerencs, the most important industry, the sugar and chocolate

factory closed. It was the city’s most famous face which had been working for over a hundred years, it has disappeared with the closure of the factory. Over a hundred workers were gradually fired, there were no demonstrations. Once a year the workers,after their morning routine, go to the factory, as if to go to work, they reach the gate which is now permanently closed. This film documents their gathering as a performance.

I asked people to stop for a moment and look into the gate of the factory, in the video then slowly fade in the gate, as they become part of it.

Above the clock of the gate, the original title ‘Sugar Factory’ has been changed to Happy New Year – Forever Living, which can be seen from different view in the lenticular photo.

  

  

　

CV

1976, Debrecen (Hungary)
www.suli-zakart.com
szabolcs@suli-zakar.com

Qualifications, Memberships:
2009- Hungarian University of Fine Arts,
DLA programme,
2007-2009 University of Pécs, Hungary, DLA
2005 University of Pécs, Hungary, visual
education teacher, (MA)
2000 University of Szeged, geography - Szeged,
Hungary, (MSc)
2000 Gyula Juhász Teacher’s college, Szeged, (BA)
2008- member of Studio of Young Artists Association
2004 member of the Association of Hungarian
Creative Artists
Prizes, scholarships:
2010- “Gyula Derkovits” National Art Award
2010 Space Gallery, Bratislava
2009 National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Scholarship
2004 “Young Art” in Europe Award, Grand Prize,
Paderborn, Germany
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2012
Critical Aspects of Social co-Existence, Stúdió
Lajos Vajda, Szentendre – with Éva Ludman
2011
Autodafe. Small Synagogue Contemporary
Gallery, Eger Hungary – with Attila Szabó
Breath, Public sound- and video installation,
MODEM, Debrecen –with Sándor Imreh
2009
Monument & Denatural, Lajos Vajda
Studio, Szentendre – with Attila Szabó
Horizon , Medgyessy Museum and
Contemporary Gallery, Debrecen
2008
Horizon, Magyar Műhely Galéria,
Budapest, curator: Erika Baglyas
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2012
Good Sign - Gallery by Night, FKSE, Budapest,
curator: Balázs Beöthy, Luca Ménesi
Anatomy of Integration, Sculpture Quadrennial
Riga, curators: Aigars Bikše, Inese
Baranovska, Ivars Drulle
Crazycurators Biennale IIII
Bratislava, Slovakia,
curators: Juraj Čarný, Katarína Slaninová
2011
Csepel Works. Univ. of Fine Arts and the Univ.
of the Arts London CCW, Labor, Budapest
Rezidens, Space Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia,
curators: Juraj Čarný, Katarína Slaninová
2010
Visible & Invisible, Artmill, Szentendre,
curator: Máté Csató
“Qui Vive?”
2nd Moscow International
Biennale for Young Art, Russia
curator: Daria Pyrkina
12th Nord Art, Büdelsdorf, Germany
curator: Wolfgang Gramm
2009
1st Danubiana Biennale, Damubiana
Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovakia
1+1+1+14,
Medgyessy Museum and
Contemporary Gallery, Debrecen
Blocked Disbursement,
acb Gallery,
Budapest, curator: Anna Lénárd
“Young Contemporary Statements”,
Zsolnay Manufactory, Pécs, curator: Sári Stenczer
2008
Street ‘08, “Club Gödör”, Budapest,
curator: Anna Lénárd, Attila Szabó
Transmit and transparent
13th International
Biennial Print Exhibition, ROC, Taiwan, curators:
Pao-Hsia Hsueh, Ling-Hui Hung, Yu-Chin Huang
Partition_
MODEM Centre for Modern
and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen
curator: Eike, Attila Szabó
2007
Prix Ars Electronica, CyberArts, Linz, Austria
Athens Video Art Festival 07
Athens,
Greece, curator: Hlias Chatzichristodoulou
2006
Pouffee (public intervention) at the official
opening of the MODEM
2005
4th International Graphic Biennial,
Novosibirsk State Art Museum, Russia,
curator: Vladimir Nazanckij

AARON MCPEAKE

Journey After the Funeral (2007)

This work records part of a train journey between Belfast and Carrickfergus, capturing reflections of the light and passing landscape on a table surface. The journey was one, which I had taken many times as a child and young adult but on this occasion it was taken just after my mother’s funeral. The reflection of the passing landscape was not only a nostalgic revisiting of times past but also a prompt to consider how the world had changed; a reevaluation or recalculation. Given the contemplative nature of the work this piece deliberately has no audio.

Running time 17 mins.

 

A Sense of the World – the blind traveller (2007)

This work is a documentary travelogue which employs shadows in combination with ambient sounds to mediate the experience of the artist travelling through Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. The work draws from the journeys made by the celebrated 19th century ‘Blind Traveller’; James Holman, and was edited in line with the actual chronological order of the journey. Given that vision had been lost by both the artist and the historic character, the shadows and the sounds in the film are intended to prompt to the visual imagination into ‘colouring in’ what might be taking place.

Running time: 26mins.

VÁNDOR, SZILÁGYI KORNÉL, SZOLNOKI JÓZSEF

Oppression test, 2012

Video installation

“Cobblestones: weapon of the people!” - Oppression Test. How can you connect a naked data collected from the compression test of a country's cobblestone with the political tolerance of that particular nation.

Paranoia Recycle, 2013

Analogue film performance with 8mm and 16mm projectors 

Propaganda film footages from the past and self shooting films to the future


http://kaoscamping.blogspot.hu/2009/07/6fkse-2008.html