Having had my tutorial with Liz, a studio crit and my essay tutorial with Bernice, I now feel as though I should be able to write about my work quite thoroughly, what has happened is I feel like I have finally got a finished piece that I would like to exhibit, the colours and ideas seem to have converged in a way that gets very close to my original intention. I think it goes back to some of my thinking from last year about the nature of reality, the work poses questions about what makes objects real, what is their integrity in space and in their appearance. This is connected quite closely to my critique of Minimalism and relates back to this idea of epistemology, Morris' question of how do we know something is art, although I am going at it from the other direction, rather than taking objects and questioning whether they are art objects I am defining things as art objects and then asking whether they are in fact real objects.
This relationship that I want the viewer to have with the objects has become entangled with a narrative that has been perceived as dystopian which I am interested in but it is a point of contention because I am not sure whether the potential for the work to speak purely critically is more interesting than for it to allude to something bigger outside of the work, I want the work to be autonomous but perhaps this is seen as a negative now? Maybe there is something around Bataille's ideas of base materialism that denies the autonomy of the art work, maybe it should be implicated in the grubby real world and taken back down into reality, I think I am more interested in making a reality for the work to exist in where the edge of the work is the end of the work and the questions of reality are contained, rather than it being a question of the extent to which the work flows out of itself back into the context outside of itself as an art piece, I want it to be contained in itself as an art work so that the question of reality happens much more specifically to the shapes and forms. This is a difference between conceptual and spatial autonomy, is the work that you look at dependant on an external theory or is it a self contained visual experience, but then I don't think it is a self contained visual experience if it is not contained in space within the boundaries of its own materiality and it is this autonomy of space that I am more interested in than a conceptual autonomy, I'm thinking now that perhaps it is ok if the work refers to a discourse around minimalism and materiality which exists outside of the work as long as the work does not rely on specific references in the work. I think work that is detracted visually by a dependance on references is what I'm trying to avoid.
I want to remove the associations of the objects by comparing them to each other, the foam tube exists in comparison to the computer model so it cannot exist in comparison to its original function as pipe lagging or floatation device. But then there is the problem of the colour, the colour will always be associated to something but it is my intention that the colour is implicated in my own imagined world where potentially these are the only colours that exist. I'm interested in how objects and images can be used in arbitrary ways to fill up a space within reality, they become paradigms, examples of a perfect way of seeing where the physical properties of the materials become interchangeable. This is partly why the presentation of the video is vitally important because it adds so much more to this simplified world than the other objects depending on how it is displayed. If I continue to display it with the computer visible then it adds all sorts of narratives about the process through which the work was created, which has a certain immediacy which fits in with the general appearance of uninhibited arrangement and production techniques, the idea that using a screen monitor would remove it too far from the original process and make it seem over considered. But then there is the problem of a narrative and the computer bringing to many other issues into the work. Potentially this issue of displaying the computer or not will be very significant in the progress of my work, I am interested in the relationship between the computer and reality and what might be outside of that so building out from the computer sculpturally is a very immediate way of exploring this.
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