in negotiation

sunday march 1st 2009

"the fact is that there is no way to escape the market: it absorbs subversion and packages dissent, selling us an image of ourselves as conscientious objectors even when we are deeply entrenched in its system. Many artists play this system, using entrepreneurial strategies as a medium to make works that provocatively confuse the always porous distinctions between art, popular culture and lived experience."

Nancy Spector, Artforum issue 112 Jan-Feb 2008

To coincide with site08 Darbyshire Award winner Emily Smith’s Retrace: Scripting Memory exhibition at SVA in negotiation invites participants to tackle issues surrounding the sustainability of artistic practice, whether through public funding or private sales.

Please contact Colin Glen on colin@colinglen.co.uk for more information and to book a place

Colin Glen has written the following text to accompany the discussion.

download word version of the text here or scroll down.

The Writing Machines of Emily Smith
Site08 Darbyshire Award winner exhibition

When you ask an artist to choose whether the predominant motivation for making work is either money or recognition, the vast majority will say that recognition, and particularly peer recognition comes uppermost. Although money is necessary for the realisation of projects, for the manifestation of ideas in form, it is in fact the alternative ‘currency’ of attention and response from a respected audience which ultimately provides an artist with the confidence needed to sustain an artist while following a line of personal enquiry, often investigating abstruse ideas. An artwork’s value is seen as being a particularly human phenomenon – the attribution of meaning to combinations of materials and by extension attribution of meaning to existence. This value is represented by financial currency in order to place the artwork on the scale of exchange value given to the made object. For instance, Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal of 1917 is of higher status and therefore of more value than a urinal found in a plumber’s supplies. Conversely, however, critical attention alone can also be seen as an abstraction of the value of the work – reduced, not to the ‘commodity’ status of everyday goods, but as simply an illustration of ideas. This detaches the work from the world of prescient needs in a second remove which converts the art object into a museum artefact.

The intended value of the site08Darbyshire Award is a contribution to this debate between the personal and the public. The prize, this year received by the installation artist Emily Smith, consists of both advice and the manufacture of new work to the value of £1000 from Darbyshire Framemakers and a solo exhibition hosted by SVA. Rather than simply the presentation of a cheque, the award offers a form of mentoring service from Mark Darbyshire in the form of a dialogue with the winner in order to realise work which previously could only have existed at the proposal stage. The particular aptitude of the framer is to interpret the artist’s ideas and, in many ways, to fully realise an artwork as a finished work. The frame acts as a boundary, a liminal line between the artwork as private meditation and its placing in the public sphere. In some ways the job of the framer is similar to that of the translator, making the meaning of the artwork accessible, the frame translating the personal language of the artwork into the common tongue of the language of art. Indeed Mark Darbyshire regards his role as a kind of ‘facilitator’, making possible ideas of the artist through a process of co-ordination. With the award he intends to act as a conduit between the public funded artist-led SVA and the art market of gallery owners, collectors and museums. SVA is principally a site of production and it also acts as a facilitator for project-based experimental events allowing both studio artists and visiting artists to develop their work in an environment somewhere between the cell-like privacy of the studio and the glare of attention of the gallery.

The series of work that the award will enable Emily Smith to realise is itself an enquiry into the systems of realisation, how thoughts are realised in form. She is using the award as an opportunity to further her interest in how language, speech and writing both create and obfuscate meaning by developing her ‘writing machines’. She defines writing broadly as the leaving of traces and her installations such as Drip (2006) investigate the way that marks both articulate and erase their own presence. There is an implication that history both articulates and erases at one moment. She is profoundly influenced by the writings of ‘deconstruction’ philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) who forwarded the ideas of ‘trace’ and ‘difference’. The ‘trace’, the mark, defines what it is not by its presence, thus leading to its innate sense of difference. The ‘trace’ is not simply a sign of something that has been present and is no longer there furnishing evidence of existence, the ‘trace’ indicates that former presence is only comprehensible through the mark left, suggesting that the ‘something’ cannot be proven to have been there without its mark. Smith uses her personal history as the starting point for creating metaphoric reading of the traces of a loved one’s former presence. Her poetic associations are apparent in the piece His Cabinet (2006) in which she projects the images of the contents of the shelves bearing the materials of the cabinet maker, such as wood stain and varnish, onto plaster casts taken directly from the objects themselves. The effect of the projection is to make the images come alive to memory in an uncanny nostalgic way. Smith both separates the image from its object, like memories of the past and compounds this differentiation through the overlaying of the ghost image back onto the cast object. This sense of the uncanny in her work reflects her interest in Brian Dillon’s writing on memory and the personal history of loss in relation to our domestic spaces. Dillon writes:

In the house of our memory, we’re always present, feeling our way round a physicality we know as well as out own bodies. But to see that house empty, to walk around in it for the last time, is to catch sight of a less tangible image: the ghost of ourselves, wandering from room to room like a bad student of classical rhetoric, failing to find the proper places to deposit his lesson. He’s lost his bearings: nothing is in the right place, and all the wrong memories lurk dustily in corners, or tumble from their nooks to fall at his feet, broken reminders of his misplaced perspective.

For Smith the award will give her the opportunity to develop her deepening interest in the workings of memory and its manifestation whilst simultaneously allowing her to gain experience of showing her work in a critical context. In addition the show will provide an opportunity for the audience to see artwork as it exists between the public and the private, SVA being principally a venue for enabling project-based practice, indeed the award is itself an artist-led initiative having been set up by studio members in 2006. There are advantages both to the artist who is given the opportunity to develop their practice beyond simply producing a new body of work, and also to the audience who can see work which has benefited from the clarity of execution and presentation that is necessary for existence in the commercial sector.