I have been trying to get my head around our proposal for Italy and our discussion on sculpture and the space that forms (sometimes invisibly) sculpture.
It hits so many thoughts all over the place that I'm trying to make sense of it all. I find myself having to ask myself: why do we want to make a sculpture (of a performance or action) in the first place? I wonder what this means, this desire to memorialise an action or a moment, and I wonder what the meaning of this motivation to memorialise is.
[The glass piece I felt is somewhere not too distant, if not very close, to what we are discussing. With that piece we connected to a performance that had happened, so that the work's form in some way reflected or was open to this idea of change / movement. The work will change over time it will not always be the same; the form of the glass moves, the text may change, the text will be placed in a different position each time and then everyone's engagement through their breath on the glass provides a different experience. To try to capture something that is not designed to be captured, as we I know we have discussed many times, is an awkward process and I wonder why we even began thinking of it in the first place, why not just do the performance and leave it at that. I'm not criticising what we did, just thinking about what motivated us to do it as I think it's relevant to this.]
Jo retold an anecdote in her talk on Friday of when a curator who was putting on a Flanagan exhibition telephoned Barry Flanagan to ask if he could remake some pieces of a sculpture that had been lost. Flanagan's reply was, "The memory of the piece completes the work."
I thought this was really beautiful and something that I think is interesting. It's not just the memory of the work but perhaps also the engagement of the piece by anyone who sees it there and then that is exciting. It's as if the sculpture extends beyond the material exhibited and continues to develop in our heads.
I suppose a lot of art, not just sculpture, attempts to change the current state, or at least challenge it. I like the the possibilities that sculpture might allow us to do this; by setting something up or making something, like a sculpture, that generates doubt in the mind of whoever sees it, doubt that maybe they don't immediately understand quite what they are seeing because it doesn't make sense in the context of their normal day to day. But this doubt and subsequent thought has the possibility of leading to a new experience. There's a transformation, a leap from our object / sculpture / intervention to the expansion of the idea in the head.
I think one of the most interesting outcomes of Music In Offices is not the singing or playing the music but the subversion of office structures. It's kind of funny how something like the setting up of a choir in an office can mess up and undermine office divisions and structures. It's like new channels and connections are opened up, a new perspective of the same object, the office, is stimulated. But at the same time the vehicle that brings you to this experience is just singing, something completely normal that anyone can do.
When I begin to think about sculpture, I feel I need to understand why we want to make a sculpture. If it is even partly to do with memorialising (which I think it is) then I think the idea of how the sculpture develops in the invisible, inarticulate spaces of our heads (and the spaces between the sculpture and our heads) is fascinating.
