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INTRO BY EMMA COCKER
Candice Jacobs is an artist based in Nottingham, and curator of the exhibition An action, event or other thing that occurs or happens again, currently at both Bonington Gallery and One Thorsby Street. Candice has been invited to explore some of the ideas, processes or questions underpinning her own work and the exhibition. As a further provocation or starting point, she has been asked to think about and address ideas around REPETITION, WORK and BOREDOM.
In some senses, this talk continues a conversation between Candice and myself that we had at G39 in Cardiff last year alongside an exhibition of her work at the gallery. Some of you might have read a transcript from the conversation, entitled MEANINGFUL MEANINGLESSNESS which can be read on the
Nottingham Visual Arts website
So before Candice begins her talk I also wanted to position a couple of coordinates myself, which in turn function as a kind of context for some of the ideas I am thinking about as part of my own practice. Within my own work (which operates under the title Not Yet There) I am often exploring ideas around boredom, repetition, failure, purposelessness; questioning how it might possible to recuperate a critical value and sense of meaning from acts and gestures which at face value appear to be meaningless or futile.
So firstly, the title of our previous conversation MEANINGFUL MEANINGLESSNESS drew specifically on our shared interest in the work of Walter de Maria, in particular his statement Meaningless Work from1960 and Boxes for Meaningless Work from 1961. I want to begin with a short extract from an essay by Christy Lange called Bound to Fail in which she writes about Boxes for Meaningless Work.
"Boxes for Meaningless Work. Transfer things from one box to the next box, back and forth, back and forth, etc. Be aware that what you are doing is meaningless" (Walter de Maria, Boxes for Meaningless Work, 1961).
“The work is constructed simply of two wooden boxes, easily mistakable for Minimalist sculpture. It is inscribed with its own title and instructions: "Boxes for Meaningless Work. Transfer things from one box to the next box, back and forth, back and forth, etc. Be aware that what you are doing is meaningless" (Walter de Maria, Boxes for Meaningless Work, 1961). The artist's directions animate the object; you can almost hear the dull thud of an item being dropped into the bottom of each hollow box, generating the sad echo of something being discarded in an empty bin… The noise becomes a rhythm as the user shuttles the item from one box to the other, over and over again, knowing that the process will serve no purpose other than to exhaust the person performing it. He will eventually have to stop, and therefore fail to complete his task […]
Meaningless work is potentially the most abstract, concrete, individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied, important art-action-experience one can undertake today. Walter de Maria, Meaningless Work, 196
For de Maria, states Lange, the secret to performing meaningless work is not to do with the action itself, but gauged rather by the resulting lack of accomplishment, the sense of never getting anyway or of failing to identify – let alone reach – the desired goal. The gesture of filing letters in a filing cabinet, de Maria argued, certainly had the potential to be truly meaningless but only if it remained an open act, only if the person performing the action were not a secretary, furthermore if some attempt were made to periodically scatter the papers willy-nilly on the floor.
The second coordinate:
Repetition, Repetitiveness, Reproduction, Duplication, Reduplication, Redoubling, Reaffirmation, Redundancy, Tautology, Recurrence,
Re-occurrence, reiteration, Restatement,
review, rehash, reassert,
Monotony, monotone, tedium, humdrum, pitter-patter, repeat,
chorus, duplicate, ding-dong, sing-song, reduplicate,
do it again, go over, double, ditto, come again, dwell upon, repeat oneself,
sing the same old song,
retell, restate, run over again, do it again, again and again,
recur, over and over, repeat, frequently,
time after time, year after year, day after day, ever-recurring,
incessant, frequent, incessant,
over, over-again, over, over-again, twice more, ditto, once-more, ditto, twice more, encore.
Description: tumblr_lu8tie03z51qin2koo1_500.jpg
I am reading the work Repetition: Portrait of Robert Smithson, 1966 by Mel Bochner. It is reprinted on the very first page of Briony Fer’s publication, The Infinite Line.
Fer begins the publication An infinite Line with the statement ‘We are lost without repetition’. Her first chapter begins with a quote from the Danish philosopher Søren Kiekgaard, What would life be like if there were no repetition?
The third coordinate I want to highlight is the 1966 essay Boredom and Danger by Dick Higgins, in which he writes about various Fluxus practices in relation to boredom, or more specifically a form of super-boredom or new boredom. Super-boredom describes a state of immersion or of ‘losing oneself’ made possible through a form of repetition or an intense experience of boredom. In ‘Boredom and Oblivion’ in The Fluxus Reader, Ina Blom states that ‘Repetition has the capacity to undo identity … Boredom, or the level beyond the initial experience of boredom which Higgins calls ‘super boring’ – essentially has to do with indistinction, disappearance and oblivion”. So three coordinates - meaningless work, repetition and boredom. With that I am pleased to welcome Candice Jacobs who will elaborate these ideas further.
>slide of drawing of ideas in map of gallery<
INTRO ME:
I make work and use other artists works to generate meaning and a further understanding of my current thoughts and ideas around meaning, manipulation, control, popular culture and political strategy.
ABOUT THE SHOW
An action, event or other thing that occurs or happens again is a project that explores how repetition is used as a tool for the manipulation and control of the masses. This will provide the starting point and main direction for the lecture.
The lecture will not provide a step-by-step guide to the exhibition, instead I have approached it in the same way as I make work, by using artists and artists’ works to highlight the key concepts and critical concerns. By using other artists and artists’ works I am able to generate meaning or a context for my own thoughts and ideas. Essentially, I am curating this talk just as I have curated the exhibition. However, I find using the term curating an issue, as an artist, I figure things out as I go rather than start with a pre-conceived idea. I use the creative process and “making” to fill in the gaps of my understanding, the artwork is the thing that makes sense whilst everything else around it provides a support mechanism for it. I need the artwork to say the things that I am unable to articulate.
TO START THEN, let us use the text-based work that Emma referenced by Walter De Maria called “Meaningless Work” which can be found in the book “An Anthology of Chance Operations”, essentially a Fluxus book made in the 1960s, featuring text based works by George Brecht, John Cage, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Robert Morris and Nam June Paik amongst many others.
>slide of Walter De Maria in the book An Anthology Of Chance Operations<
De Maria was a very important artist within the Fluxus movement along with experimental sound artist John Cage and a little later on, Nam June Paik – whom all have played their part within the exhibition currently on show. The Fluxus movement included an international network of artists, composers and designers. They were active in Noise and Visual Art. Fluxus encouraged a Do-It-Yourself aesthetic and valued simplicity over complexity, holding a strong opinion supporting anti-commercialism. In my opinion, this is not too far removed from the young art scene found within Nottingham today.
>image of text: Walter De Maria, Meaningless Work<
>READ<
It is an apt starting point to use this work to begin, seeing as I was meant to deliver this lecture last week, on the day that there was industrial action. For me, the Strikes highlighted the fact that people feel undervalued and overworked, or that perhaps their contribution to the labour market is essentially meaningless to the people in power – or the politicians. The economy seems to have a dominant and direct influence over the way that people view their job and subsequently, their lives.
Working or having a job is something that every one of you will know about – in some respect – and will definitely be something that you will be faced with when you leave this institution. I think as artists we have the ability to think outside of the box and have an outside perspective on what it means to have “a job”.
Since the age of 13, I have mainly worked as a waitress with the odd bit of factory work, office work, manual labour and more recently marketing. Most of these jobs have involved a large amount of repetition, whether that be saying the same things to customers over and over such as “Thank You” or repeating the same action such as when I worked in a number plate factory and was literally part of conveyor belt completing Piece work. As much as this type of work was boring, somehow, it allowed me some degree of escapism and allowed my mind to wander. I was able to think of other things whilst un-consciously completing tasks and actions that contributed to a larger system of production. I began working with this as way of producing artwork by creating films, sound installations and working with the people within these types of businesses who essentially had no direct interest in contemporary art. The idea of value comes into question here, as many of the people I worked with do not see any value in contemporary art. This is very similar to the way that my family would consider contemporary art as well.
The way I have been brought up of course has had an overwhelming influence over who I have become. My family, the friends’ I’ve had, their opinions, political views, what music we listened to or the clothes I used to wear.
I have been brought up by a family who essentially hold quite a conservative viewpoint on the world and on life, you should work, have a job, earn money, earn a living. But to me, working or having a job has always seemed to have a lack of meaning. For me, making things and using other artists and artists works has helped to generate the meaning and understanding that I felt I was lacking.
PHILOSOPHY OF BOREDOM
It was the Swedish Philosopher Lars Svensson who stated that “without meaning comes boredom”,
“That boredom has serious consequences for society, not only for individuals, ought to be beyond all doubt. That it is also serious for individuals is because boredom involves a loss of meaning, and a loss of meaning is serious for the afflicted person.” “…..If boredom increases, it means that there is a serious fault in society or culture as a conveyor of meaning. Meaning has to be understood as a whole. We become socialised within an overall meaning (no matter what form this takes) that gives meaning to the individual elements of our lives. Another traditional expression of such an overall meaning is ‘culture’.”
JAMES RICHARDS
I would now like to screen a short film by the artist James Richards. Richards has recently had a solo show at the Chisenhale in London and I was lucky enough to work with him on a project at Zoo Art Fair in 2009. He was born in 1983, and currently lives and works in London.
I first encountered his work in a project called The Politics In The Room, a fitting title for a project in relation to this talk. Someone once told me “Politics is everywhere, you can’t escape it – someone has already made loads of decisions for you, what to learn, what to look at, what to aspire to, what to want and need – everything has been formulated for you and your understanding of your consumption of the world.”
>Play The Misty Suite, 2009 by James Richards (7mins)<
This film mimics something of the mixtape, which doesn’t really get made anymore. The practice of re-editing VHS footage gained prominence in the 1980s and was presented as inserts on TV channels, or as an accompaniment to nightclub performances by experimental bands.. Re-mixing can explore the possibility of repetition and distortion, and can also respond to external factors such as the beat of music or the rhythm of a superimposed narrative.
The film is in 2 parts and connects dream-like sequences with the idea of an all-seeing eye, it takes found footage from Night Mare On Elm Street and educational videos and over lays them with a meditation CD and video. For me, I find it interesting how meditation uses repetition to directly control the way you think and feel. My favourite part of the film is the 2nd part where the girls is supposedly doodle on a piece of paper, the idea of the doodle is something of interest to me and how unconsciously we are able to perform actions whilst our mind is elsewhere, essentially we can commit mindless acts, this is why I am in interested in the folded crisp packet. For some, this is an action performed without thinking, similar to that of the doodle. Driving is another example of a mindless act for me, the idea of looking at the motorway for hours on end feels like it mimics the effects present in meditation or zoning out. It was Lars Svensson again who talks about this idea of super-boredom – which Emma can go into more detail of later.
>SHOW IMAGE OF 13 Fold, 2011 by Candice Jacobs<
This leads onto my next chapter about my interest in electronic music, in particular minimal techno and acid techno. These are two music genres that I have been brought on since I was 14/15. I am enticed by their complete simplicity and repetitive beats, their seemingly endless journey that take you no-where yet somewhere.
This type of music falls into a very eccelctic and specific group of people as it is not enjoyed by the masses, for many they find it incredibly boring.
>PLAY RICHIE HAWTIN track, Reduction And<
Richie Hawtin, the artist whom I am playing now created a vinyl record which included a series of looped tracks, the vinyl had been cut with one singular groove rather than a groove that had a start and an end point. The vinyl was created mainly for DJs to use whilst mixing in other tracks during a set. A friend of mine played it one night without realising its structure and we ended up listening to the same track or loop over and over without even realising that the music hadn’t changed.
Loops are an important element to the show, they are important to consider when talking about repetition. Next, I’d like to play a sound work by the artist Jonty Lees, called Spiral Drawing.
>SHOW Spiral Drawing, 2009 by Jonty Lees, vinyl record<
The artist recorded himself drawing a continuous loop from the central point out to the edge, the record plays from the inside out. For me, this in itself is a perfect example of De Maria’s Meaningless Work, and replicates what I was talking about earlier about mindless acts, or acts and actions without meaning.
For many people, it is their jobs which provide structure and meaning to their lives. However, one should not consider the terms work and labour without discussing the term leisure or debating the idea of leisure-time. Workers produce products and services – this is their job, however at the end of this work-time it is time to embark upon leisure-time. It was through the philosophical movement of Marxism that the idea of the weekend is said to have been invented. The same workers who make those products and services tend to use them also in their leisure time. Work and Labour are essentially part of a continuously looped system in perpetual motion feeding and consuming itself.
For me, I tend to watch a lot of TV when I’m not working. It provides me with a sense of escapism. Earlier on, I spoke about how repetition through boredom allows one to zone out or escape from reality, television also achieves this for me.
Thinking of the wider context within the show, of how the masses are manipulated and controlled, is the television another tool used within a capitalist system to highlight the need for continued consumption, consuming the consumed. Are there patterns, rules, or techniques in place that subtly play tricks on the mind, or is it merely the use of repetition or repeated ideas, patterns and rhythms that creates this sense of familiarity within which we find comfort which allows it to consumes us?
Political and economic agendas are always served by conceiving of the audience as controlling or controlled, as duped or resistant, as making meanings or receiving them. The cultural communications theorist John Fiske suggests that:
“television watching should be conceived of as a process of meaning production in which ‘text’ is merely a substratum from which the viewer may construct various realizations. Television must be analysed not in terms of political economy, but in terms of cultural economy, in which viewers reject their role as commodity and become a producer of pleasures and meanings.”
Repetition is used a lot within the construct of television viewing and in generating meanings. Whether its within the repeated programmes schedules week by week or in the advertising placed between programmes such as This Morning and Dolmio, or X-Factor and Talk Talk, even BBC News 24 falls into the trap of repeatedly playing the same imagery when a story breaks out, just the idea of 24 hour news must have had to consider the use of repetition within its construct.
>Clip from THE DAY TODAY, Chris Morris<
Television contributes towards the generation of a false consciousness where the viewers makes meaning from the signs and symbols which the media provide.
The artist Pierre Hughue believes that the idea that the separation between life and work and their representation is only an artificial construct undertaken for political reasons. He believed that the television set is a place of collective elaboration, a space of interactions between different people, an ideal miniature of the working community.
So, working, having a job, contributing to the system, consuming the system, making products and them consuming them, this is essentially the construct of our current capitalist society.
I just wanted to read short excerpt from a short story written by Francesco Pedraglio, one of the artists in the show which to me deals with this idea of consumption, and of consuming the consumed where work and Labour are essentially part of a continuously looped system in perpetual motion feeding and consuming itself.
>Read excerpt from The Lot by FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO<
Pedraglio believes thinks of writing as a combination of meanings and non-meanings.
In conclusion then, it is this idea of a looped system of consumption that is prevalent today, where meanings are generated by a false consciousness, where we are able to form a collective self that shares the same thoughts and ideas, the same experiences, pleasures and meanings. A meaningless society that continuously feeds itself with boredom.
>Play clip from Railings, 2004 by FRANCIS ALYS<
END