This project has several strands, initially I was going to try and utilise as many printing techniques as possible to create posters using the statements and then I settled on screen print for that element, for uniformity and clarity.
I recently held an opening for the "This Comment has been deleted" project at
Koffee Pot in Manchester, the work is up until the 9th of April.
One interesting thing about this project is that it really does spark conversation as to what is art and what is not, it's always a personal opinion really but it's something most people are very passionate about and have something to say.
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| Some of the supporting reading material I have been looking at, articles and essays. |
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| I have no idea who this lunatic is or who let him in.. oh well, art is for everyone after all! |
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I cut up some of the prints that had mistakes or were not very good,
people had fun making new statements. |
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Participatory projects and surveys
Art Gallery Here project
I came up with this project as a response to the fact that many people feel alienated from art; artists, art and galleries are not always accessible to many people and I wanted to explore ways to take this back to basics so this project asks artists to deposit a piece of work anywhere they choose and leave it for someone to find. People who are marginalised or have no access to art now have the opportunity to own a piece of original art and to interact with the artists and each other.
The "gallery" is only available online on this map and once I have gathered some more entries I will make an online gallery page for it.
Everyone who feels creative is encouraged to submit something if they like, anywhere in the world and there is no criteria, your work will not be moderated, you choose what to leave, simply leave a work in the location of your choice, add the tag and submit it via
Curator Space.
The map:
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Surveys:
I created two surveys, one designed for
art gallery professionals in the visitor and engagement teams, these are the people who devise programmes and come into contact with visitors both regular and occasional so they have much to tell me, I work in this field myself but it's interesting to see how other places feel and what their experiences are.
The
other designed for the visiting public, I am most interested in the opinions of people who do not visit galleries very often to find out why this is and what can be done to change this.
If you are an art gallery or museum professional and would like to
participate in this survey please download it here and email it to me at:
my university email
The idea here is to see what sort of work or projects I can devise that eliminate this invisible barrier that many people feel.
-Here are the responses I have recieved as of today for the general public survey:
(click for larger view) up to date responses can be
viewed here ( If you are interested)
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Mixed media pieces:
I have started creating mixed media pieces in response to the comments, thinking about what people might have been visualising when they made these coments.
I came up with a few pieces that are coming together to form a fictional exhibition guide.
These are mock ups of some of the pages for the fictional exhibition guide, some are works in progress and I have a few more pieces to make, some physical some digital, photographs, collage and mixed media. I certainly want to try and represent the individual comments so have chosen ones that can be visualised.
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Artspeak/interpretations:
this element of the project is still very much in progress and at the research/theory stage, I feel that many of these comments I have worked with are made in reference to the fact that artspeak is, in fact bollocks for the most part, it is alienating, it is confusing and does seem designed to create an invisible barrier, one that keeps "us" in and "them" out. No one in reality speaks like this so if we want art to be accessible and open to all I think this needs to be looked at seriously, it must be worked on, I have spoken with galleries who agree and are working on making it more accessible.
Question: Would you be more comfortable visiting exhibitions if the descriptions were more realistic and in more everyday languague?
Reading some gallery guides and exhibit descriptions can make people feel stupid even if they are not in any way stupid and this feels very much designed.
I found an artists who is creating a fantastic project where he is decoding and recoding this language and he has a
documentary here.
It has me thinking about ways in which I can remix these comments themselves into something other than words.
I think I will go through all my collection of gallery guides and exhibition leaflets and see what I can find!
I am working on a written piece to pull all this together in a series of booklets.
Interventions and Gallery visits:
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I was thinking about the decoding artspeak project and looking for ways I could put the statements through so many different processes that they would be unrecogniseable as their original form and would become abstract art works themselves, in the way that artpeak is often indecipherable from regular language.
I found a
little site that converts binary data to an image, the image generated is tiny so I put it into Illustrator to see what an autotrace would come out like.. of course there are many options but I went for a default.
So the Phrase
"When I was younger art, proper art, was landscapes that you could hang on the wall."
is converted to binary then into a tiny thumbnail, and after a bit of vector manipulation
( it comes out black and white of course and I colourised it) comes out like this:
so realistically I could mess around with these elements and create a digital landscape picture.
I think I will try this for some of the images I have not been able to visualise in "traditional" forms..
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the tiny image at the bottom that was generated is what I created the coloured one above with.
I might create a series of digital pieces with these and possibly do screen prints, some layered pieces.
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| Conceptual art is for people who want to feel like an artist but lack the talent, originality and work ethic. | | | | | |
These are two more I made from some comments and have some screen prints to make from them.
