Category Thoughts

Ambivalence

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

In A Test of Memory I question my paradoxical nature.

Is it an undesirable trait because it displays a lack of consistency and predictability? Does it make me an unknown quantity, fickle, unreliable, or even hypocritical? And specifically, in terms of the art world, how does this relate to the need to establish a defined and consistent style for commercial success and gallery representation, in creating a brand? I asked Perplexity AI what it thought.

In a nutshell, it’s not the paradox which is the issue but being unable to accept it. Embracing paradox is linked with greater creativity, psychological growth and is a realistic way of understanding selfhood in a complex world. It is the basis of dialectical thinking: two truths which seem to conflict but which both accurately describe you or your situation e.g. being independent but needing connection.

According to Kierkegaard, the self is essentially a tension between different poles and the process of becoming is learning to live with the contradiction rather than to abolish it. In fact, problems arise when the paradox turns into a chronic self-contradiction that seems unresolvable, which is often tied to perfectionism or all-or-nothing thinking. It creates a state of ambivalence. As long as I genuinely value and am honest about my paradoxical nature, then I am not a hypocrite or lacking in integrity. I need to accept both parts of myself and embrace the tension the paradox creates; to ‘develop the container large enough to hold it’.

In terms of the art world, whilst a paradoxical nature is an asset for making art, it is not for selling it. It does not fulfil the desire for consistency, recognition and stability. So, what is the answer?

  • Distinguish between practice (paradox) and brand (the curated external interface). Curate consistently eg strategise the release of work; lead with one voice whilst nurturing the other.
  • Be like Gerhard Richter, developing separate and opposing lines of enquiry which never merge – be distinctly one thing, then the other, do not mix them and become a muddy average.
  • Have a consistent conceptual narrative – make the paradox the subject matter itself
  • The Trojan Horse is an extension of the first bullet point: pick a lane and develop it and once you have a foothold introduce the other, pivoting under the guise of evolution.
  • Most importantly, don’t suppress the shadow side, and keep feeding it.

That all makes sense. So, how do I feel about it all now? A bit better, I think…

Reflecting on Reflecting

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

It has been a busy few weeks: the print sale, Research Paper, blog curation and 3-minute video.

Making the video was quite challenging. I started by selecting all of the images that I wanted to include and then I decided what to say. It was far too long. So I decided to change tack and think about what I wanted to say and then choose the images which best demonstrated the narrative. It was a good exercise in distilling everything down into a short space of time; of focussing the mind on what is important.

After such a spate of activity I would usually reward myself with a bit of a rest, but funnily enough I don’t feel like that – I feel energised, and with a sense of purpose. In my Unit 1 Feedback I was advised that I would broaden in scope and then narrow back down, and I think that this last unit has brought about some clarity for me, not necessarily in terms of the breadth of my practice but in terms of its future development. I’m feeling positive and I’m looking forward to tying up some loose ends and producing work which encompasses what I have discovered so far and which is not necessarily finished, but more resolved than it has been up until now.

Loose Ends

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I find the curating of the blog to be a rewarding process – I can identify all the ideas I’ve had, and things I was going to do, and which have been left by the wayside as I’ve gone off in another direction. I’m collecting up all the stragglers, and here they are:

I’ve been thinking about whether I should amend my Study Statement. I don’t think I will. My objective is to find my artistic voice. I am still doing that – I will find it in the process of making. Some of the elements of the statement, such as the specified topic areas and work plan aren’t really relevant anymore, as I have gone off piste, preferring the freedom. That has happened because of who I am becoming, not because the Statement is no longer relevant or needs redirecting.

La Cabina

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It’s interesting how certain sensory and emotional experiences from your childhood stick with you even later on in life. I remember the smell of Camay soap in the bathroom, 4711 eau de cologne and my father’s Old Spice.

I also remember seeing lots of posters in the 70s of people, usually women, disappearing down lavatories. There is always that moment of hesitation…

I was always trying to stay up late. This was usually accomplished by offering to brush my mother’s hair. Of course, what I didn’t bargain for is the reason why there’s a watershed when it comes to TV viewing. There was Danny Kaye in ‘Five Pennies’ whose daughter ended up in an iron lung because she got polio, although I’m sure my parents told me it was because she had too many late nights hanging out in jazz clubs with her father, and didn’t get enough sleep.

But the film which has haunted me all these years is a Spanish 30 minute film – ‘La Cabina’ which was made in 1972, but must have been shown on the BBC sometime later because I think I must have seen it when I was about 8 years old. Funnily enough, it seems that a lot of people saw it ‘accidentally’ when they were of a similar age. There is very little dialogue which makes it even more disturbing. A man goes into a telephone box and can’t get out. Passersby try and help him but fail, as do the fire brigade. He’s hoisted onto the back of a lorry and taken away, and at one point he sees another man in a phone box on the back of a lorry. He ends up in a huge underground warehouse where he’s offloaded amidst hundreds of phone boxes with decaying bodies, some of which have ended their suffering by using the phone cable.

It won an International Emmy award. I wonder whether it should get an award for messing up a generation of children, along with ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ and the ‘Twilight Zone’.

Image from http://www.imdb.com

What’s In A Name?

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I used Perplexity AI as an aid to narrow down areas of research for my research paper. A strange choice of name bearing in mind that to everyday people ‘perplexity’ means to be bewildered or in a state of confusion. But in tech-talk it is a measurement of how well a probability model predicts a sample. Even so, I’m still not convinced that it’s the best brand name for a product which is supposed to inform, and this is perhaps best explained by the reason it was chosen for the start-up: the domain name was affordable.

It was an interesting experience, which at times left me feeling frustrated, despite its excessive flattery. On a number of occasions, it told me what it thought I wanted to hear by making up sources and references. When I challenged it, it eventually owned up, apologised profusely and complimented me on my academic rigour. Such hallucinations are common place, apparently, as well as its inability to answer a question the same way twice.

Making Contact

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In yesterday’s session we looked at ‘thick description’ as opposed to ‘thin description’. Thick description gives extra information, creates a mental image, and prompts questions. Thick description is using language to expand understanding and allows us to recognise what we bring to it, emphasising that we are the makers of our work and we are bound into it. For me, this echoes material engagement theory: as humans we make things and are, in turn, made by the things we make.

We were given a few minutes to describe what was in front of us – the part that no-one ever gets to see on our Zoom sessions. I use my daughter’s bedroom whilst she’s at uni. I wrote down:

A sea blue wall displaying the board wrapped with small, glowing lights – a showcase of scraps of paper arranged haphazardly with multi-coloured pins, some images, some reminders of future tasks. Numerous containers with an assortment of writing materials; pens and pencils standing to attention, ready for action. The white desk with its marks of ink and nail varnish – traces of past actions of my daughter. It makes me feel connected. I sit where she sat. I feel her presence.

As I was writing it, I suddenly felt emotional – I don’t know where it came from – maybe because I was thinking in a sentimental way, and that became a release valve for the stress and tiredness that I’ve been feeling. Or maybe, despite my bravado, I just really miss her.

We went on to think about our own contact zones, and how we are influenced or changed by the contact, and how it impacts our work and the reason we make it. This discussion generated a whole host of different ideas. For me, it is about how they make me feel; I am influenced by contact zones that generate an interest, prod me and provoke a response from me, and I often put myself in zones which make me feel uncomfortable and challenge me, that take me out of my comfort contact zone. I am not sure that if my contact zones made me feel completely at peace and in equilibrium, with nothing to respond to or process, I would even feel the need to make art.

There’s No Time Like The Present

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For a post-mortem.

Well, I’ve submitted my research paper.

How do I feel about it? I’m pleased with how it turned out and I found it to be a rewarding experience – it has certainly made me think a lot more, and has been incisively relevant for my work.

This morning was a bit stressful as the broadband was playing up and I had some last minute changes to make and quite a few references to double check. It didn’t help that I was constantly switching between laptop and iPad because my laptop is so old that it turns out that it no longer supports the latest browsers. As a result, it was submitted a few minutes past the deadline, which has really disappointed me. Even more so, that when I’d taken a break and had another look, I saw a few incomplete references and other errors in the paper. Word blindness.

Previously, I have completed work with time enough left to review at my leisure, and so I’m wondering what went wrong this time. I certainly planned to have it completed with time to spare, and it’s not like I haven’t had since the Spring to do it.

On reflection:

  • I struggled for ages to think of a subject – I kicked the proverbial can down the road.
  • it took me a long time to work out how I could encompass the areas in which I’m interested – self, memory, mapping, and materials – into a cohesive and comprehensive research question.
  • maybe the scope of it was too much – it encompassed philosophy, psychology, cartography and cognitive archaeology. There was a lot to research to extrapolate relevant concepts. Whilst Perplexity helped refine searches, I still had to read all the sources eg material engagement theory was developed over a period of a couple of decades, through numerous published papers, and a lot of the sources were heavy and difficult reading, my aged brain not being able to digest and assimilate a vast amount of information anymore
  • I can’t multi-think the way I used to. I can only focus on one demanding mental load at a time otherwise I feel overwhelmed and can’t function
  • I didn’t appreciate the amount of work that was still to do after my last session with Janet. I was so relieved that my second draft had legs that I think I took my foot off the pedal and let other things get in the way, although I did make some work.
  • I think that I anticipated being able to really crack on in the last month but various things got in the way of this, feeling under the weather with one thing after another, and the print sale. I spent so much more time and mental bandwidth on that than I anticipated, but, it was a valuable learning experience.

This really does sound like a roll call of excuses, but at the end of the day, what’s done is done, and all I can do is try not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.

Now for the video and blog curation…

A Light Bulb Moment, Or Is It?

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

In last week’s session we thought about ideas.

Where do my ideas come from?

From my lived experience; my past, my present, my interactions with the world and the people in it, a moment in time, what I read, hear, see, feel, smell and taste.

What do they look like?

A network or web where they interconnect, or wait to be connected.

What kind of a web is it?

A spider’s web. Some ideas are fleeting and wispy and drift away, whilst others are more robust and have some form.

Other’s ideas are like seeds which grow over time (akin to Bateson’s ecology of the mind in which, like organisms, ideas grow and flourish whilst others become extinct) which need to be cared for and nurtured, or a breeze or mist, pre-existing ideas waiting to be received.

Maybe the source of the idea depends on what interests you at any point in time. I’m interested in my experience of living in the world, and so I don’t think that my ideas pre-exist because they are bespoke to my unique lived experience. Often they are triggered by something, a reaction to something, and so they don’t often come to me out of the blue. They are a combination of everything and anything, but at their very basic I believe that they are a matter of neuroscience; the complex neural interactions between knowledge, memory, emotions, and experience, all being broken down and continuously recombined in infinitesimal permutations, consciously and subconsciously in dreams, flow states, and acts of automatism.

Just because they are bespoke to me doesn’t necessarily mean that they are original. Gompertz doesn’t think that originality in a completely pure form actually exists and that all ideas are additional links in an existing chain (Part One: Think Like An Artist). There are numerous quotes from creatives who have built on the ideas of others: Newton and the shoulders of giants; Jobs and stealing great ideas; Twain who said that all ideas are secondhand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.

We then considered Brian Eno’s concept of the ‘scenius’ (a creative co-operative of intelligence) and the articulation of the ideas of the scenius by an individual who is then held up by society as being a genius. On reflection, I think that he is right to the extent that the genius is just the tip of the scenius iceberg, but that both should be equally celebrated, and the attribution of the idea should be shared. It’s not enough to have an idea – it needs to be acted upon and often this involves elements of risk, courage and persistence.

Undoubtedly, collective recognition encourages greater sharing of ideas and increased creativity. In this respect, the existence of a scientific scenius goes some way to explaining why two different people can come up with same idea at the same time eg Bell and Gray, who both came up with same idea of the telephone. But, the idea didn’t come from nowhere – the circumstances at the time were demanding a solution to an existing problem, and the latest scientific developments and knowledge in the field, which were needed to devise the solution, were already widely known and shared amongst the scientific community, to the extent that Gray and Bell had detailed knowledge of each other’s work. So really, it was just a matter of time before someone came up with it. Maybe to that extent, it could be said that the idea was in the ether waiting to be received by someone who was attuned and had the requisite knowledge to implement it.