eindruck_ausdruck

eindruck_ausdruck [aka reflections 2]

impression_expression
imprint_exprint
inprint_outprint

ein_aus
on_off

the limitations of translations mark out the cheesiness of the simple polarity of impression and expression. i remember back to how i could never remember, or rather: differentiate, which method defined which school: what was the inside/outside, stimuli/response of the impressionists and the expressionists. it took a long time until i remembered that the former were the keen outdoorsy ones, soaking up the world in all its fleetingness to then express these impressions.

eindruck_ausdruck signify research and art. the keen observation of empirical facts, relations and circumstances. the correct identification of these impressions stimulates research. it is impressed, never to be impressionistic. how different from the cheap and hazy thrills that paint offered on canvas. and colour even. my heart races, my gullet sings with adrenaline and it all turns into colour and mark on canvas.

simple. isn't it.

departures to define a break with observation, impression, towards one of gesture and mark, expression.

i remember being scalded for not being expressive enough about my national, if not international expertise.
i remember the impressions left from fraught research relations and the bewilderment of others if these were dared to be expressed.
i remember the realisation that the kind of politics that mattered did not have a place. could not have a place in the institution (see expressive expertise).

observations that fed the lack of expression as the expressions i would seek were not sought.

i remember the excitement of the problems that a canvas could posit.
i remember the recognition that only close observation could resolve whatever expression.

i remember the boredom with proclamations that artistic expression was all that was needed.

present memories that simply are the internal relations of eindruck_ausdruck. they only exist in each other, are one everchanging dynamic. one

4 3 minute wonders

they come by way of another film by luke fowler (bogman palmjaguar, 2007, currently on display the national gallery of modern art in edinburgh).

i spent a fair bit of time organising what it was that i've been doing with art in past, presence and future - how the formality of application procedures enframes the telling of a coherent story. in doing so, i stumbled again across the white room and my circling around it as an unfinished project. unfinished or in progress? these four glasgow tenement interiors are curiously related to the white, uninhabitated - or only at points inhabiated flat in berlin. they are fragmented, they are titled by people, these never appear, only in possession and the spaces they inhabit. hm... thinking... circling...

antisocial_notworking

i've been having a little debate with this project space by project.arnolfini... just in time for the holidays...

it landed on my desk thanks to variant's exchange with springerin and a recent article against social networking, here.

it resonates with my facebook wall, the information it pushes out to me to read of strangers and friends, the ones that i put into other people's faces and all social relations it generates, modifies and hides.

antisocial_notworking is also one of the coolest combinations of some of my own academic work on labour process, politics and moral panics over young people.

here's something for you:

Without politics, our friendships are empty of meaning and our exchanges lead to nothing but the commodification of life itself...

Furthermore, as labour time has become more difficult to measure and is less distinct from time outside work, much of it now practised as 'nonwork', outside of traditional production processes - 'notworking' as opposed to networking. The confusion over what constitutes work and non-work turns attention to situations where work takes the forms of nonwork. (Geoff Cox, 2008, Antisocial Applications: Notes in support of antisocial notworking)

now... where was the list of reference's, t told me about in september. immaterial labour etc...

now, ad 2, what does this mean for our social networking? signing up to hatebook? becoming invisible again? diverting, subverting, appropriating...

still debating...

Suddenly it's time

 

He took the time with him

That moment in the stormy sea,

and all time disappeared.

Time for the future                                                                            

time for the past

Simply being in time

with no need for it

no urgency.

That all went with him

Since then there was never any time left.

Personality crisis

A bit of proto punk to start...

I actually had collected a second song from the radio alongside this, as antidote, but can't think of it what it was... too bad.

I've still been circling around Matisse's condensation of sensation that seeks harmony and balance. And whether 'getting to a fleeting impression/sensation' is what I actually do with pastel sea sketches like these. I think it's not the intensification, the boiling down, getting to the essentials (if not essence) that I object - no, 'object' is the wrong word - to but the oneness, the balance and harmony.*

And, all the while, I'm back in California. A heavy thunderstorm clears the air - just as it does right now outside my Berlin window - , Ate tries out the various setting on the fabulous dSLR, I end up with some very nice portraits of myself in trashy camping van setting with a plastic palm tree in the background, and I read her from Matisse's Notes of a painter.

Read her pretty much the passage of my last post - the thriving for a true, thickened and authentic representation of who the artist is on the canvas he paints on.

The picture wall, graphite in A4 Moleskine

And we're playing time warp - trying to bridge about a hundred years of identity politics, psychology, feminism and subject formation. Try to relate Matisse's sense of self, his belief in his own skills, ability and worth to our visit in California, to Ate, Justin, Kerstin and Fynn and their drag performances between glamour model, business woman and Texan cowboy (a link to Ate's films? Try here), and my own fumblings about person-making by abstract landscape paintings.

And it is at that point that I begin to appreciate the ability of different media - other than a paintbrush, pen, paper, paint - to get to what I may be after with my persistently growing tag 'person-making'.

My 'getting to what matters' may happen through life drawing/painting or even photography. But, honestly, I think I need to delve deeper first into more of theory_politics_practice of stuff I know, I've learned and experienced. And with these, I will always end up with some far more complicated than harmony if I seek to condense sensations and experiences. Sorry... there are one hundred years between us... so much happened, unhappened, got lost and won. It does not translate.

As you may guess, I am actually pretty pleased with myself over this. For all the stuff that I am concluding at the moment, this is a great point to have arrived at - beginning to set more explicit into relation the art I am doing to the theory and practice of knowledge production that I have engaged in up to this point. The myriad of interconnections are becoming clearer and I am also quite happy by now to talk about them. Put them into relation to each other, to write them into one cv.

Good, that has been one of the points I've been aiming at. And I also think this the conclusion of California - certainly not of Matisse - there's more to the White Room, but that will probably have to wait until I'll be on holidays - finally and long overdue - Among the Fields, from Friday onwards.

So: Bye, Bye California... I'm looking forward to seeing you on a video loop soon. But have some slides of my photos, complete with campingsite ambience first:

* and, if need be, I can add at least 5-10 pages on the relevance of internal relations, dialectics and all that stuff that is being kept continually in motion, sets itself into relation to itself and others, doesn't stand still and moves, moves, moves, often with plenty of friction, and thereby is always in the process of becoming. - But I better didn't

The sound of thirteen years

I've been a bit torn... Matisse and White Room or the remaining bits from California...

Indecisiveness led to silence but last night settled it. I had invited friends for a party in this flat which I will leave in a week. Ambitiously, I had called it Finissage, with the idea being... yes, correct... to have some of the White Room artwork in the White Room. Fat chance... of course that didn't happen and it was just a very nice party with a bit of art work in practice.

One of the people who turned up was someone I met first three years ago - in a kosher cafe on the corner of Aza in Rehavia, Jerusalem. He's been in Berlin for the athletics world cup and I. met up with him and he came to the party. The party was a funny mix of German, English and Hebrew with some other people from Israel there too. At some point N. just said... "oh, I love listening to the sound of Gesa's English." Quick I replied "well, listen, that is the sound of thirteen years." Never thought about it, but yes... the way I speak is the result of thirteen years.

And this takes me back to some ancient post on the stuff that matters - where I fantasized that if I ever was to study art I would spent years with life drawing and painting since people were what mattered. I'm back with performance and person-making and the ways these inscribe our bodies and make who we are.

So, whoever will in future listen to my English will listen to thirteen years of Glasgow, friends from Ireland, a bit poshed up University exposure and some mysterious Stornoway twang.

It made me think also of my father's cousin Baerbel, at least that what I think is her name, but in any case it sounds like a good name for her. Baerbel moved to England in the 1950s, not anywhere in England but Salford. The first time I met her was in 1994, when I had just come back from a long cycling tour through the English North and she and her husband were visiting my parents. Wow... and how English eccentric she looked, hairstyle, make up and dress sense. She clearly wasn't from Hamburg any longer but from halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. And the way she talked. How weird her German sentences sounded. Yes... a life lived elsewhere.

Over the last six weeks I had funny encounters. To me, my name is terrifically German - sorry: it is not a foreign name. But: "Oh, and how come that your German is so good?" wasn't asked once but I need more than one hand for it. Similarly, my Spanish teacher, after an hour asked again: "And, you are Scottish then? You sound exactly like the other Scottish girl I teach". Well, yes, my Spanish mistakes are English Spanish mistakes, not German ones: I generally translate from English into Spanish because that's how I learned Spanish. Yet, the highlight was someone who, while we, after a day of work, were waiting on the train, asked - in disbelief - "And really, this is your first time that you're in Germany?"

Well, I guess I wasn't here for the past 13 years, just listen to the sound of my voice and how I talk. Perfomance... I don't think you need a camera for it, do you?

[In case you wonder... this was the follow-up, if not conclusion from California, Matisse is to follow]

Pictures? None for today, maybe a sound recording would be appropriate...

Let's play

A few months ago I found two little books on performing and acting. I read them. That was a bit strange - if there is one thing I never ever liked then it was a stage, a theatre performance or, even worse: ROLEPLAY.

But things change, don't they?

So, I've been using roleplay as a very legitimate tool for some of the workshops and group work I've been doing.

While I was reading the little book on stage performance and acting I took note for my list of things I really, really have to do. Be on a stage and act, play, sing. Hm, singing... I'm still not convinced about, but the rest firmly made it onto my list.

The list also functions as 'Things I'm scared about but that's not a good enough excuse'.

Just as well that one of my friends is a film maker and video artist :)



So, while in California, we reappropriated a broken bbq to integrate properly into the camping community. But somehow our staged performances upset the integration. Just as well that ageing Hollywood Diva Glitzi had to leave after a short appearance. This was enough though to rattle one or two otherwise rather bored campers to come asking for her (and us) repeatedly over the next days. But we finally managed to scare them away.



The sunset picture wall doesn't quite make a stage but the camera is a very expensive and proper one and so was the boom (I can now validly add sound technician to my list of skills). And so appeared Ulla Wagner, 47, whose husband Woelfi promised her a honeymoon in California. But really only ever meant Kalifornien at the Baltic Sea. What on earth to do with your dreams after such a disappointment??? Well... dreams? They are for other people! Ulla and Woelfi have their very own California with a once new campervan.

Ulla and Glitzi left after the first evening...

Uncannily, our first proper interview was with someone who'd been coming to the camping site for 30 years, was in his 80s and while he told Ate behind the camera the good things, the sad things and broken dreams were for the sound technician standing to the left of him.

Become someone else in front of a film camera. Also: Tick.

The exhibition opens on 16 October at the Kunstraum Bethanien, Kreuzberg, Berlin. And I am soooo curious what she will do with 9 hrs of film, 800 stills, 10 interviews, lots of sea, sand and camping idyll.

The sea? That's next. How wonderful it was, and so close to the once new camping van.

The care home for clowns.

"For most of the times, things were usually funny at the care home for clowns. The inhabitants had the habit of tripping up over their enormously large shoes, falling face down into those soft cream cakes that were lying about everywhere. Occasionally, there were visitors who, for a variety of reasons, could or would not keep their own clowns. They took their favourite clown out of the cage, let them make exalted jokes, and laughed when the clown made funny faces. Only the moment when the clowns were lead back to the cages and the visitors had to say goodbye to them with sadness, these moments were terrible. Then they would sit there, those sad clowns with tears in the corner of their eyes." (from the taz, a few days ago)

MBTi, learning and development in groups

So, the first insight of personal preferences has been: oh, that's what I like, and there's a name for it. It's simple and rather fundamental - it's about personal positionings (rather than identity).

What made this first set of insights significant is for a good part the person who offered them - S. did her PhD in Chemistry and did so being intensely unhappy - struggled with her lab team and her supervisor with the result that she left feeling incompetent and unable to complete the task in hand - finishing her PhD. She eventually left academia and begun working as a trainer and consultant - offering training courses for PhD students and academic researchers. And relatively late in the process discovered MBTI and her strong preference for intuitive information gathering and a decision-making based on feeling. And realised that her supervisor - along with many other academics do prefer sensory fact finding and rational decision-making.

Now: do we value difference or do we relate to people who do things similar to ourselves?

Now (ad 2): I loved my Phd, it excited me and I loved working on it. And, thinking about it, I always knew that my supervisor contributed extensively to me loving my PhD and the process. He loved ideas, concepts, and connections - and that is the level we connected. He was excited to figure out what ideas and concepts I was excited by. He also, and much stronger than I, made decisions based on the social rather than logic and that meant that he validated my endeavour (and therefore myself who never thought of herself as an academic) and in turn fed my enthusiasm.

Things changed since. And I very much struggled with people with other information gathering and decision-making preferences. One in particular was also clear that - while my creative thinking was intriguing - I wasn't quite able to articulate, put it into a clear language and relate it to what he perceived the core of academic scholarship. 'Gesa, what you identify as your (inter)national area of expertise sounds wishy-washy to me'*, sticks in my mind. - Try harder....

And, yes - I tried harder and did so fairly successfully. But, and that is where S. and her finding her preferred way of working comes in: Logic and facts aren't any better than social and intuition. Thus: knowing what your preference is then enables you to take a position, reflect on it, develop it and change it when it's important...

It's fairly straightforward person-making and reflective abilities. And, while I'm having my head a bit far up my backside at the moment, this is nonetheless intrinsically social. It is made within a set of relationships, is validated within these and, crucially: at points ignored and dismissed.

So, just as much as MBTI can provide such acknowledgement of this is what I'm good at and this is what I'm likely to ignore and therefore opens up the possibility for personal development, it also provides a way of understanding (or at least: looking at) group dynamics.

Most obvious for my work is that in the context of research teams but also in the student supervision I am doing, notably at postgraduate level. One of the first points we discussed referred to giving feedback - commenting on academic work and progress. Here, what one hears as feedback is often strongely shaped by thinking/feeling preferences. If I make decisions based on logic, I want to hear what worked well and what went wrong - I want to have constructive feedback and the piece to be recognised on the strenght and quality of the piece of work I've done; alternatively, I am very concerned with the personal effort I put into the work and the relationship between me and the supervisor, if I have a strong preference for feeling.

Thus, in order to communicate, if I am the person giving feedback, I will need to (a) know my own preference and to have the ability to recognise how that makes me assess a piece of work; but also (b) to appreciate that the other person may have a different preference, may hear differntly to what I mean to say and therefore (c) need to provide a range of clues to communicate.

One way to help? Ask the person what they think about the piece, and the way they frame their response may give you a clue (e.g., if they emphasise the effort they've put into it, they could prefer feeling).

As you may see... this is about difference, and recognising such difference. Consequently, it makes a lot of sense to team teach in teams of people with different perference patterns. Then, some of the students say: well, I really couldn't stand Gesa, but I liked x, and the session probably worked for them. It is also about not assuming: one cannot easily identify preference styles - these are also shaped and modified by so many contextual factors - e.g., in work-contexts I often communicate with a strong Thinking preference, but really that is too straightforward (and possibly not only leaves me but also other confused if I pursue decisions in a different manner).

It's a simple model - and as such limited. Yet, it seems a rather dynamic model: it doesn't say anything about ability but simply about preference; it also doesn't provide an excuse for saying 'oh, I can't deal with detail or with logic'; and it allows for some understanding into group processes and the stuff that can go wrong. What I also like about it is that it offers strengths for each of the preference combinations - rather than saying Sensing is superior to Intuiting it explores the abilities that arise out of each combination.

And that leads onwards and backwards to collecting information and to knowing. I've kind of always known that I pick up stuff from everywhere and most often non-verbal. And it used to confuse the hell out of me because quite often the verbal communication was the complete opposite to all else I knew. So, for as long as I can think I have been communicating with ghosts - the stuff that people do not say. Often with rather disastrous outcomes. That kind of knowledge moved much more to the surface since I started painting (yes: this is a post about art!) and MBTI as a tool validated that. And it also made it clear that it is something precious, important and something to develop further.

So, I'm back with the ghosts and what is important for the paintings I do...

* and me accepting this as a valid question of course also demonstrates the extent to which human capital development and competitiveness is intrinsic to academia.

Away with the swans

While I'm at it, I can just throw in a few more random thoughts on The Swan.

There's this song, for example:

... I think my clear favourite on the album.

M. told me about the imagery of the swan. Since then it hasn't left me. I think we must have talked about it after my discovery of Mallarme's swan. Or was it before?

The swan as it glides all gracefully over the still water. Neck held high, all silent, all calm.

And, yet, underneath the water the feet are moving fast and faster and faster still. Helplessly, in panic so as to keep moving still and gracefully above the water, the neck held high.

Along with the snake fights, I've seen so many swans of late. It's clearly gendered. Some men fight snakes and some women glide swan-like across the lake.

Well... that's what you get when ponds are still and deep and surfaces so still. Never knowing what's underneath, heh?!

Answering back... x2

Elqui 1, Detail, oil on canvas, 70x80cm

From the Guardian Magazine's Space Solves, 6 June 2009:

"Re Dear Diary... I need a Fireproof Safe (9 May), I, too have diaries that I try to keep safe. However, I have now produced a 10-word summary of each weekend on an Excel spreadsheet and have backed this up in several places. This is not only safe, but it can easily be searched, so helps to answer all those 'When did we last see Fred?'-type questions."

Hello?! ... I have some questions too... how about:

Am I asking the wrong questions?
Do I not understand the purpose of a diary?
Why do I never see Fred?

But that wasn't it. There's been more talking and answering back that led to some laughter. This time, M. and mine when I showed her one of my recent poetry finds, Carol Ann Duffy's edited collection of poets' responses to other poems, Answering Back.

Ready?

To women, as far as I am concerned

The feelings I don't have, I don't have.
The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have.
The feelings you say you have, you don't have.
The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have,

The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they've got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven't got them.

So, if you want either of us to feel anything at all
you'd better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.
DH Lawrence

Chosen by Jean Sprackland who responds with

Feelings

He adjusted the chain on my bike, so I let him
leave a few oily marks on my blouse. After that

he'd always be coming round when my parents were out,
asking how did I feel. Had my feelings
grown, altered or faded. Were they dying.

I thought of a tortoise asleep in a box of straw.
In spring you had to reach in and feel for warmth,
carry it onto the grass and try it with dandelions.

It was weeks before I knew that all I wanted
was to be driven at night up to the gravel pit
wearing only his proper coat, then to throw it off
and run into the water feeling nothing at all.

Who is it you are?

Elqui 2, WIP, Detail
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

My inbox has been getting, aside the usual junk, a few anonymous emails. Some of them were comments made on the blog and I'll start with these.

Anonymous 1 commented on my 'Notes to future self' said that in order to know my future self it was crucial to know who I was now, and promptly recommended I'd buy a book - HIS book, I suppose. It struck me as an intriguing, if slightly off-kilter and possibly not very successful way of marketing one's publishing efforts. I should possible try the same.

But, anonymous had a point there and I'll come back to that later.

Shortly after, Anonymous 2 left a comment which slightly threw me. I got the first rant against my art in the commentary. It was intriguing too, intriguing for the fact that within 2 years it was indeed the first commentary left that thought the prints I showed were awful. I thought of my brother's joking how art commentaries tend to be of the nature 'oh, I think that's wonderful'. And my brother's right. Art blogs work very different from other, notably political blog that the people who usually do radio phone-ins or write angry letters to the editor don't really participate.

That point was made even clearer when I was reading - in the newspaper - about the death threats and all assorted violence directed at a feminist blogger in the US. She poignantly stated: 'These are only ever left by that unknown angry entity that is 'anonymous'. Funny that, isn't it?

There is such power in remaining anonymous.

So, I was thinking of these two comments when earlier this week I received a password and login details for one of those business sites where recruitment panels send job applicants to for psychometric testing. The anonymous email stated 'if you have any questions about this test, please contact your administrator who initiated this email'. In the Notes from Administrator section there were no notes.

It left me wondering who at my work place - and it was clearly initiated form my workplace wants to know who I am? Whether I'm extrovert, intuitive, thinking and perceiving, or the opposite. I wondered if it had anything to do with the redundancy procedure notice I received recently, or with a new tutoring job I applied for, or, or, or...

Curious me left the email untouched but did a bit of Myers-Briggs personality testing anyways. I find them curious, a bit more reliable than horoscopes, I suppose. And fascinating how much of personel management builds on these 16 types. So, even curioser I wondered if people were all equally distributed across those 16 types. Of course they aren't. And I grinned that I end up in one of the rarest category. How funny is that. Now I need to find something about the prevalence of certain types in academia. I think I can have a good guess. :)

So are we anonymous or one of 16? That's not really a binary question, is it? It's a bit similar to the following: how many possibilities are there in a limited palette?

Love and loss in 0s and 1s

Elqui Valle 1, WIP, Detail
Oil on canvas, 80x70cm

One of my favourite blogs disappeared. It disappeared after infrequent posting over the past few months and then just a simple Goodbye message flickered up on my sidebar. Neda's Papiers Collés was a true find when I stumbled upon in over a year ago. Her collages get to the bits of personmaking that I admire greatly but don't have a clue of what to do with it just yet - I also simply lack the guts of putting that stuff into art. They opened up a view onto collage as medium and emotions as subject matter which thrilled me. Now, they are gone and the website is vacant.

But: the feed is still circulating - don't know how and why - but you should be able to find it with a feedreader. [http://www.papierscolles.com/feeds/posts/default]

Hm... thinking about it... it's ghosting now... resonating around cyberspace. How long, I wonder?

It's this strange business of doing stuff with people over a distance. And how to maintain, develop, move on and let go. Quite a few of blogs I discovered early on have disappeared by now. When it happened to the first one, I sent a concerned email after a while and the reply I got made me feel that I overstepped the mark of interaction amongst strangers. So, I won't send Neda an email; but I do wish her all the best and hope that's it's for good reasons that her blog is gone. Thanks for all those beautiful collages!

And, while I was away, both Casey and Jala made a wee pass at my blog - thank you, you two. It's thoroughly appreciated, even if I have been so slow in acknowledging it. Let's see where I can pass it on to.

... now that I've introduced ghosts, I will sit down and write up some of my persistent thoughts on this, this may take a while... - M., I think you may know what may be coming next...

Notes to future self

Ryuichi Hirokawa, Al Ram checkpoint, West Bank, 2002
Guardian, g2, p. 25, 30/4/2009

... really for in five years, but maybe also already in two?

I gave a research seminar on Wednesday and was talking about youth policing, workfare and the making of criminalised selves. Much of what I was initially interested in with my academic work revolved around questions of social control, discipline and importantly the practices, policies and experiences that make a responsible and disciplined citizen. Much of these original questions had gotten a bit submerged in the interim with a much stronger focus on policy and governance but after the seminar I ended up talking to two colleagues who have, though in different fields, maintained a keen interest on such disciplines of the self.

...

Longwinded, half-baked... it links up with some of the abstractions I am intrigued by, again and again, and which require a much fuller set of art skills, techniques, and experiences that I currently have. - Questions over person-making, the stuff that happens inbetween, outside, elsewhere or in the middle. Well: the stuff that matters.

When I was talking to my two colleagues about what art I do and would love to do, I for the first time made those links between academia, knowledge production and painting quite explicit. Well: I do tell people at university that I love the kinds of questions and problems a piece of art poses in its production, and how it is necessary to let it provide its own answers - that no will of my own can make that canvas into something finished.

And I do enjoy the way in which this undoes what so much academics perceive the individual ingenuity of the lonely, fabulous, young academic who raises, on the basis of his own achievements to intellectual and professional heights. - well: remember the snake fights?

But, the discussions with M. and E. took me back to Foucault's Discipline and Punish; they also provided links to some more recent work on the making of entrepreneurial selves in thoroughly flexibilised and casualised labour markets.

On the way home, I saw this in the paper, took it with me, scanned it and it's here now as a reminder. That look, locking the police officer in its stare, defiantly. Now: I love that kind of photography, holding, maintaining a moment which radiates outwards, captures stuff (incidentally or purposefully) beyond its immediate reach. For whatever I'll do in two or five years? We'll see. I doubt that it will be photography, and I doubt it will be figurative, but: who knows?