today

I made this sign and took this photo whilst my love was overseas for an extended period of time; it was a way of trying to get at something, an idea. Or maybe it was an idea trying to get at me.

Over a year ago, I began a Masters degree. My research will be concerned with collaboration and ethics. Everyone was very pleased about this.

There's been some tussles over definition of terms, and the proper way to conduct collaboration within the university environment, which has lead to an extended period of nothing much. I've been on leave for the last year & I've started to feel that it is not so much a question of defining, researching and conducting collaboration and ethics in a universal 'everyone agrees' kind of a way as it is a question of something much more personal, local, egocentric. In the same way that my intent in writing a sentence like my research will be concerned with collaboration and ethics was kind of like putting up a sign-post collaboration indicating one direction, ethics indicating another, at a random point in uncharted land. My research will proceed in these two general directions, what we will find out there, nobody knows. Which no doubt contributed to the problem with definitions, leaving everyone involved a bit hemmed in too early in the piece and a bit too uncomfortable.

This sign points me somewhere a bit more definite. As it's not so much a question of who owns what, or who gives consent for one person to do something to another person or with another person and how informed that person is about what they are doing, it turns the idea around from collaboration and ethics to an ethic of collaboration.

Maybe this will point generally somewhere in the direction of 1) practice as learning (an improvement of the self); 2) in the mode of something like a conversation (with one's peers, history, the past of one's own practice, with specialists in other fields) as opposed to an isolated and singular pursuit; 3) the idea of art as something other than original, always indebted to the past, something that is the result of a conversation with one's context, a process of co-creation, or a continuum of creative activity; 4) how art makes a picture of itself, shows the trace of its own coming about: i.e. bears the marks of more than one's own hand or mind; the concept of the mise en abyme; 5) how an artist might promote the conversation as a method for making work, and by extension, how an artist in the academy pursues conversation as a research methodology as opposed to other methods promoted and made available through the academy; 6) how conversations are initiated, acknowledged and documented, & 7) the history of such practices in the field of the visual arts. (one might also consider how documentation has become incorporated into the economy of the arts as product and fetish); 8) the relation of the viewer to the work, the relation of the artist to the viewer through the work, generosity as a trope in the visual arts; 9) explicitly, the art work as a way of thinking about you, the viewer, collaborator in the making of meaning, audience.

Labels: thesis