RESEARCH FILE PART THREE.

RESEARCH FILE PART THREE.

The more I look into the technicalities of using a composite/scart adaptor for the TV, the more I realise that potentially the image quality could worsen. This combined with the dated television itself could mean an unexpectedly bad image. I do not know if this is necessarily a huge negative - I suppose bad quality for me at least reminds me of gritty CCTV images, and for the concept behind this - which put simply is about being watched- i don't see that as a massive problem.

I am going to have to rethink the camera system I use, everything is so much more expensive than I was expecting it to be.

It should work out cheapest to buy just a seperate camera on its own, and attach it to a monitor.

Although this means I will have to look into buying some sort of adaptor to make it work.

Need to speak to guy in maplins again.

I wanted to give the same level of audience interaction in my final piece as Dan Graham achieves below. but having had to simplify everything down I am trying to work out smaller details that might make a person stop and look.

One thing that strikes me about the images is the television monitor itself, the older, box-style sets are more inviting, you are less likely to gloss over them. I want the viewer to be as physically involved/close to the screen as possible.

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"he examines the various possibilities and forms of representation offered by the video medium, and draws the boundaries between these and representational spaces in television, film, or architecture."

STANDPOINT GALLERY (NEW NORTH PRESS VISIT)

Been debating whether to go forth with this 'inifinite..' image idea, and came across these photographs I'd taken whilst on the New North Press visit.

Although I loved these, it was its clouded, crowdedness was relevant for the piece, adding depth, whereas the more I consider its value in my own work I cannot seem to find any true justification for it.

Annelore suggested I look into Voids. The relationship is not quite as obvious and direct as it with Dan Graham's work, but there is a definite sense of the viewer becoming the observed as they fill the empty space, which is a key element in the development for my final piece.

I suppose it also is interesting in that although this informs my work now, at the start of the project this would have been the very kind of artwork I would force myself to be cynical of.

The exhibition, Voids, a Retrospective, fills, or fails to fill, five rooms in the French national museum of modern art on the fourth floor of the Pompidou building. All the rooms are entirely empty. The walls are white. The floors are bare. The lighting has been arranged just as carefully as for any other temporary exhibition. The gardiens (guards) watch suspiciously to make sure that the visitors do not touch anything, or in this case that they do not touch nothing.

The aim of the retrospective exhibition – refused by several other leading museums in other countries – is to celebrate and explore a movement begun in Paris by the minimalist artist, Yves Klein. Klein, influenced by Zen Buddhism, was the first artist to present an exhibition of blank walls at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1958.

Klein's exhibition of nothing has been revived for the Pompidou show (which can be seen, or rather not seen, until 23 March). In theory, the Pompidou is not presenting the same nothing because these are not actually the same blank walls. There are, explanatory panels with the same explanations.

Klein's blank walls are a "specialisation of sensibility to raw materials through stabilised pictorial sensibility". In other words, by seeing nothing, you are encouraged to see everything more clearly.

The Pompidou retrospective also revives the celebrated (briefly) Air Conditioning Show assembled (or rather not assembled) in 1967 by Art and Language, a British artists' collective. The show exhibits air-conditioned air in an empty gallery with white walls. Five curators have worked on the Pompidou's retrospective of nothing art, which includes works – or non-works – by seven other artists: Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Maria Eichhorn, Bethan Huws, Robert Irwin, Roman Ondak and Laurie Parsons.

One curator, Mathieu Copeland, says the exhibition is partly an exploration of art as the rejection of art: a refusal to add to a world already too cluttered with images. "But it is not just a kind of radical, conceptual art. You are also invited to explore, in a very physical way, each different space, all of which have a different texture. It is a true experience."

One of the five spaces is devoted to a work by Roman Ondak, More Silent Than Ever, first shown in Paris three years ago. The room is empty, just like all the others, but a panel tells the visitor that, somewhere in the room, there may be a concealed listening device. The aim seems to be to encourage visitors to examine nothingness very carefully.

A group of 20 teenagers were being shown around the Pompidou retrospective yesterday by their teacher. All, or almost all of them, including the teacher, were dressed in black. Against the white walls, they resembled pieces from a chess set. The teacher, rather convincingly, praised the exhibition while the teenagers tried to stand on one another's feet or trip each other up.

Tom Lubbock: A critic's view

Empty? It depends what you mean. The earliest case was not a room but a piece of music – John Cage's 4'33", where the pianist sits for four minutes and 33 seconds without playing a key. Many say there's plenty to hear in the silence.

The winner of the 2001 Turner Prize, Martin Creed, exhibited an empty room at Tate Britain. Or was it? The lights switched on and off every five seconds. That made it a pretty full, eventful room, no?

These works follow a typical trajectory of modern art. Step by step, from reduction to reduction, we make a clean sweep, from figuration to abstraction, to a uniform canvas, to a blank canvas, and then to a blank wall.

Having arrived at emptiness, fill her up again – with meanings. Sometimes the emphasis is on absence, on contemplating nothingness. Sometimes it's on noticing what you might have overlooked.

Perhaps you should notice all the gallery background noises you ignore. Perhaps you should see that art has its environment, which crucially conditions our experience of it. Or perhaps you should be looking at the only exhibits that remain in your empty gallery – yourselves.

The empties are always going to be full of something. The art consists of working out what.

I don't know how useful these instructions are - I want to achieve something similar but using a monitor, camera and mirror format? The obvious place to look is still Dan Graham but I'm feeling like i'm not looking at a wide enough range of sources to aid the development of my final piece

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INFINITY MIRROR

This article was taken from the October 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Two reflective surfaces facing each other will copy an image between them seemingly for ever. Steve Sutton, president of the Freeside Atlanta Makerspace, talks us through the process.

1. Gather your materials

You'll need two pieces of "two-way" mirrored acrylic or a "traditional" mirror, LED (or other) lights with a power supply, a 4 x 2 piece of wood about five times the length of your frame, nails and a black material or paint.

2. Prepare the mirrors

Coating glass can be difficult. If you can get mirrored acrylic, it has the advantage of being ready-made, saving some trouble. "Tint is really hard to apply to mirrors for a beginner," Sutton confirms. You have been warned.

3. Space and frame the mirrors

You need a frame capable of spacing the two pieces of glass slightly apart. Make channels in the 4 x 2 with a saw. Slit the wood, then cut the pieces to fit. Nail together three peices and leave the other side open for the mirrors.

4. Light it up

For this effect to work properly, the middle needs to be lit up. Black out the inside of the frame between the mirrors with paint or tape. Attach the lights inside the frame, between where the mirrors go, then slide the mirrors in.

5. Finish up

Attach the fourth side of the frame. Sutton uses a hinge and lock, but nails will work if you are confident in your work. Drill a hole for your power supply to run through. Turn it on, hang
it on the wall and enjoy your "infinite" creation.

This was the only piece I remember from the 2014 Summer Exhibition.

I was reminded of this as I began to realise this project (along with a lot of previous work through the year) revolves a lot around dissecting the process of art-making itself, as well as art from the perspective of the 'everyday' viewer.

In one sense I think this mainly interests me as it pokes fun and in a way trivialises the work surrounding it at an exhibition as prestigious as the one at the RA, but also it causes the viewer to confront their position as part of the artwork.

I want to take this 'photograph within a photograph' format - someone viewing a photograph of someone viewing a photograph of someone... etc.

Cornelia Parker visited the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2012 and took a clandestine photo of one of the most successful prints in the show. Every time a sale is made a red dot is added to the piece - and this one was doing so well the red dots began to inhabit the wall as well as the frame. To quote the Gallery notes, at this point 'a rush of covetousness came over (Cornelia Parker)'. The artist doesn't make representational work, especially much- beloved landscapes and pets and flowers and cottages. She is an abstract artist who displays ideas with astonishing verve, originality, depth and wit.

Digitally erasing the image that she had stolen, she showed a photograph of Stolen Thunder as her own work in the R.A. 2013 Summer Exhibition, The cool, shy greys and white invite us in to a place where our own fantasies can flourish. What was the original picture? Does the original artist know it's been wiped out, then resurrected? What could you (or me) put in that blank space to take the world by storm? After all, we think nothing of constantly redesigning and redecorating our own homes, obliterating precious occupants' vision with paint and paper and fabric.

The artist kept the red spots as part of the picture, she says, 'in the hope of accruing some of her own sales by a Pavlovian response from the audience'.

The excerpt used for the video, taken from the Suprematist Manifesto (from 100 Greatest Artist Manifestos).

I purposefully chose a segment of the text that was particularly 'flowery'. I have no real background knowledge, and was going based purely on the complexity of the language itself.

I should perhaps look into it with more depth.

I suppose this was a research task in itself.

Posting this mock interview of myself, I was mainly looking to see whether there would be any reaction, any comments, likes dislikes or even views.

At the time of writing there were none, unsurprisingly.

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Mori Cross (°1996, London) is an artist who mainly works with installations. With a conceptual approach, Cross tries to approach a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way, likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical and believes in the idea of function following form in a work.

Her installations demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

Her works directly respond to the surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences from the artist as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, she makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.

Her works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image.

Re-titling old artworks with Ben's input.

I reckon I (and a lot of others) overuse this word a lot but I wasn't entirely sure I was actually using it correctly. Not sure a lot of people actually know exactly what it really means?

Came across this site, writes your artists statement for you after filling in a couple of details.

With this I was mainly looking at how I can be perceived by others as being pretentious, taking myself too seriously. This effectively trivialises me as the 'artist'.

Although when I began watching this I was in the 'art student' mindset, scrolling down to the comments I became detached from that. Putting myself back into the position of who I was before, removing myself from my 'art bubble' I found myself viewing the video in a totally new way. When others trivialise and mock, it becomes natural to join them. It's so easy to completely alter a perspective. Humour is extremely powerful.

Capital Affair

Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti both cultivate an artistic praxis essentially concerned with the production of cultural values and mass communication. Invited by the Helmhaus Zürich, they have collaborated on a project, as they did earlier this year for the exhibition “Cadeaux diplomatiques” at the Kunstmuseum Thun.

For their project at the Helmhaus, the two artists decided to use the CHF 50,000 budgeted for their exhibition by hiding it in the galleries of the Helmhaus in the presence of a notary. The amount of the budget becomes the property of the person who finds it. Visitors do not find themselves confronted with a work of art, which has a use and exchange value, but rather with the actual production costs, that is, the budget of the exhibition: a work of art that is not there.

Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti thus create an encounter with emptiness, with a work whose existence is still potential. The exchange that takes place among the visitors in the exhibition galleries becomes the raw material of this artistic project.

The project not only poses the question of the value of art for society. It also poses, more generally, the question of the essence and value of art per se: what do we expect of an exhibition? Beauty, endorsement, social and political relevance? Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti’s project is a caesura in the conventional cycle of changing exhibitions. Both generous and confrontational at once, the artists delegate creativity to the public. Thus activated, visitors generate their own performance. The (supposed) absence of art is compensated by social contact, by the traces left behind by the public, by mental and physical activities such as the intense study of the empty galleries.

The question of money is a particularly explosive and political issue in Switzerland, the country of bank secrecy known for its discretion in dealing with finances. One week before the exhibition closes, on September 22, 2002, the people of Switzerland will go to the polls to vote on the use of the country’s surplus gold reserves.

Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti currently rank among Switzerland’s most highly wooed living artists. With their conceptual approach, they investigate the routine and ritualized workings of the “operating system of art”. To this end, they modify or abandon its customary territories. Inventive and efficient, subversive and provocative, they operate in the chinks between art and society in order to examine the premises and possibilities of art and, in particular, the medium of the exhibition.

Simon Maurer, Curator, Helmhaus Zürich