Visual Arts Practice and Affect: Place, Materiality and Embodied Knowing (Place, Memory, Affect) - Softcover

Schilo, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783487372 ISBN 13: 9781783487370

Verlag: Rli, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Visual Arts Practice and Affect brings together a group of artist scholars to explore how visual arts can offer unique insights into the understanding of place, memory and affect.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ann Schilo is a Senior lecturer in the School of Design and Art at Curtin University

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Visual Arts Practice and Affect

Place, Materiality and Embodied Knowing

By Ann Schilo

Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 Anne Schilo
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-737-0

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgements, 
Introduction Ann Schilo, 
1 Residency: An Account of Otherworldly Dwelling and the Artefacts of Place Anna Nazzari, 
2 Lyrical Landscapes Ann Schilo, 
3 Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive Thea Costantino, 
4 Touchstone Anna Sabadini, 
5 A Journey to the Other Side of the World on an Unknown Itinerary Susanna Castleden, 
Conclusion: Artful Confessions, 
References, 
Index, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Residency

An Account of Otherworldly Dwelling and the Artefacts of Place

Anna Nazzari

Every square inch of Snowball's Auction House is filled with stuff. Erin and I navigate our way through 1980s-styled bookcases, wardrobes, wooden tables, antique chairs, lawnmowers, sewing machines, cabinets, strangely shaped handcrafted objects, oily machines, old tools, and vintage bric-a-brac. The air has a slightly musty smell and layers of dust trace the clutter, like chalk outlines at a crime scene. From my position, I can see that this room steps up into another, which folds out into a larger Lshaped space that is spilling over with even more stuff. I look around; every turn is a visual reminder of a life lived. Objects and artefacts with nowhere else to go have somehow ended up here, waiting in limbo, in a superficial graveyard of discarded things. Amid this array of cast-offs, I can see that the event is over. The auctioneer is packing up his microphone, and the place is almost deserted of people. We approach the front counter to ask the attendant if we are too late. Motioning left, she leads us through makeshift aisles constructed of ageing furniture and ornamental knick-knacks and stops abruptly at an antique display cabinet with a large glass casing. She quickly unlocks it and reaches in to pull out a scuffed plastic bag, the type used to store large lunches and other miscellaneous odds and ends. She opens the bag and pulls out one small item and places it in the palm of my hand. In this unrefined state, it is not what I imagined. An off-yellow stain spreads from its pointy tip to its widening base. It has a coarsely ribbed surface that is peppered with fine grains of unidentifiable dark matter. There is a disfigured hollowing in its centre, and it is much heavier than I expected. Although not to scale, its irregular form mirrors a dog's canine tooth, and as I marvel at this palm-sized specimen I realize that this is my first physical encounter with a whale's tooth.

While studying its imperfections, my eyes shift to the remaining contents of the bag. Clumped together in this crude transparent container is an assortment of oddly shaped whale teeth. A lot number is scrawled messily in black marker on the exterior of the bag, making it clear that the contents are to be auctioned together as a whole. I casually asked the attendant if she knows anything about the history of the teeth. She is unable to pass on any information about the seller, but reveals that the teeth in the bag are antique and probably from more than one whale. The anonymity of the teeth is very conspicuous (figure 1.1). Not knowing the origins or approximate age of the teeth is disappointing – yet it is here, in this place, my conversation begins.

BACKGROUND

In 2012, Erin Coates, a Western Australian curator and artist, asked if I would like to be a part of a project she was proposing for the Spaced 2: Future Recall Residency Program, which places international and Australian contemporary artists with communities throughout Western Australia. The project was to be located in Albany, a small coastal city in Western Australia, and would engage with the community to reexamine the history of whaling and the art of scrimshaw: the technique of carving or engraving sea ivory (whale teeth). The residency was to take place over a two-year time frame and would involve at least a one-month per year stay in Albany. It was agreed, if we were successful, I would complete the residency in Albany, and Coates would curate the work to be exhibited at the Western Australian Museum (henceforth WA Museum) in 2015.

At the end of 2012, we received confirmation that our project had been accepted and that I would commence the first part of the residency in October 2013. It is worth pointing out that the distinctions between artist and curator ended up blurring somewhat: the result being a collaborative film titled Cetaphobia, and a separate series of drawings and scrimshawed whale's teeth produced by myself. It is not my intention to discuss the final outcomes of the residency, though aspects of this may filter into the conversation. What I am interested in proposing is a consideration of the residency as a type of otherworldly dwelling in place, and how artefacts within this domain generate meaning that is shaped by my specific perceptions of this experience.

RESIDENCY AND DWELLING

In 'Insites on Residency and Collaboration', Harriet Hawkins (2013) notes that in the context of the art world, a residency signifies a precise, often limited, period of time spent away from work or day-to-day activities, to research, reflect, present, and produce within the structure of a specific institution, organization, or art practice.

The term 'residency' also has direct associations with place as it encompasses the state or reality of living in a place. In their essay 'Dwelling, Place and Landscape: An Orchard in Somerset', Paul Cloke and Owain Jones (2001) assert that places are vibrant entities, co-founded and performed by human and non-human subjects alike, and that dwelling offers a means of understanding how non-human and human subjects are embodied in landscapes and places, how nature and culture come together in place, and how these formations inevitably have a depth of time where past, present, and future are all intimately intertwined.

Hawkins suggests that place no longer situates dwelling as a static mode of enquiry attempting to isolate and preserve the past, but rather a valuable, personal way of exploring the connections of place. For her, dwelling and place are perpetually binding, and she specifies that 'applying this dwelling perspective to an artist in residency develops an understanding of it as involved in thinking and living in a space, as works being formed in the context of a being-in-the-world, which in turn effects that forming' (2013, 165).

To contemplate dwelling, it is necessary to mention Martin Heidegger's essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking'. Here, Heidegger establishes that although building and dwelling appear as separate constructs, they are actually intimately paired activities, for within the idea 'to build' is also the notion 'to dwell'. Tracing the etymology of both terms, he discovers that the German word for the verb to build, bauen, originates from the Old English and High German word buan, which means to dwell. He notes that bauen also contains two other meanings. The first concerns an idea of protection, preservation, nurture, and cultivation, which relates to tilling the soil; and the second refers to the construction and erection of edifices. For Heidegger (1971), this historic understanding of building – as a system of construction and cultivation – incorporates dwelling and implies that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rli
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783487372
• ISBN 13: 9781783487370
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 210
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland