WORKING WITH THE FOUND OBJECT

primary research

secondary research- sourced works:

• alantutorials

series of tutorials, with very abstract processes, and obscure outcomes.

• Marcel Duchamp ‘fountain’ 1917 – the way he recontextualises found objects is particularily relevant

final outcomes – processes supercut + the two sculptures

Reflective statement part 1 Working with the found object

This work is a documentation of a series of processes. I have been exploring the materiality of two different objects, and how their materiality interacts with their original and oppositional contexts, which includes their physical location and additionally their utility or hierarchical ranking as an object – useful, or discarded.

One of the things I enjoy about art is considering what gives it value. It is undeniable that the aesthetic qualities of art play a part in its value, even in cases where the art aims to deliberately subvert and challenge traditional ideals of aesthetics.

The work aims to make comment on the value of art as that relates to its intended meaning. The outcome of my processes has resulted in an entirely unchanged metal disk and a broken shaving razor, which were both found objects. They have endured cyclical processes that are not evident in the final objects – these processes, and intended meaning, are invisible. The physical processes are evidenced only with the video, and the intended meaning is only evident in the framework of thinking I am communicating through text. The juxtaposition of the wordless film with this unnecessarily word heavy justification also aims to further highlight the absurdity of the context in which art exists.

MAKING AND BREAKING NARRATIVE

primary research:

secondary research – sourced works:

• Dorothy hartleys food in england – information on archaic recipes

• student meal vlogs – jarring contextual juxtaposition

• maisie cousins – visceral/grotesque imagery

final outcomes – these two films

Reflective statement part 2 Making and breaking narrative

I began my research in an area of interest: archaic/traditional British food. I have been reading Dorothy Hartley’s ‘Food in England’, and have been enjoying discovering elements of English culture that have been gradually expropriated and erased, to be replaced with more profitable and marketable forms of sustenance as we have moved through industrialisation to more advanced stages of capitalism.

I have used the format of contemporary student food vlogs as a stylistic symbol of this change, juxtaposing it to the archaic nature of the content (brawn) with the contemporary context. The unsettling visceral imagery is in part inspired by the work of Maisie Cousins, and aims to highlight the frictions between culture and capitalism.

The second video is to be watched in succession with the cheap and easy student meal. The same butchery proccesses are applied, but on a product which obviously doesn’t require them. This contrast with the first video aims to highlight how detatched we have become from the processes of food production. The pig head in the first video – a visceral and identifiable part of an animal, is supplanted with a homogenised unidentifiable sliced meat product, in sterile plastic packaging. It is mechanically processed to the point of being completely abstracted from its origin.

MAPPING THE SOUNDSCAPE

Primary research: initial sound recordings

secondary research- sourced works:

• gundam building videos – the altered rythm of the audio clips

• Schafer’s research from the lecture

final outcomes: edited weightlifting sound

Reflective statement part 3 mapping the soundscape

I have been enjoying jarring, abrasive sounds, and contrasting sounds, and muddying, obscuring sounds. I have found it interesting how Schafer’s research places value judgements on different sounds. Phrases like “noise pollution” particularly in reference to urban landscapes demonise sounds you would find in more populated areas.

I have been exploring pure sound, and the mental environments it creates, and how editing it changes the mental environments. The rhythm, contrast, pacing, pitch, volume all work to create pictures in the brain, and when you are not given visual stimulus, what images do you create purely from sound . Additionally, how does this affect our value judgements of these sounds.

By way of a more resolved piece of work, following the line of thought about invasive and undesirable sounds, I filmed some training of the University weightlifting team, and then exported it as a sound file and cut it to the peaks on the waveform, and adulterated it slightly on audacity. This gives a supercut of all the clattering and banging and scraping sounds that are jarring to the ear, and a natural byproduct of activity. I have aimed to subvert these associations by introducing  subtle elements of rhythm.

these are the sounds I have recorded all mashed together with a few additional contrasting sounds

I have been enjoying jarring, abrasive sounds, and contrasting sounds, and muddying, obscuring sounds. I have found it interesting how Schafer’s research places value judgements on different sounds, and how that links to research on accent i have read, how aesthetic judgements are more strongly linked to associations with the region the accent comes from than being purely aesthetic. To take that angle it is arguable that some sounds are judged more on negative associations with their source. The sounds of a noisy city are functional sounds of work and transport, with proleterian connotations.

additionally, making note of our conversation in tuturial, how success in a city is associated with sounds NOT of the city – nature in parks, not being able to hear your neighbours or the street. The house i live in, the plumbing has issues and makes lots of noise, and you can always hear people shouting or stamping about. it is interesting which sounds are romanticised and which are considered vulgar – why is hearing your neighbours not a comforting and familiar reminder of human presence

it is also interesting how we choose to control sound and experience – sound proofing, parks as zones of natural sound, noise cancelling earphones. how sound is controlled and used functionally – alarms to wake you from slumber, or to remind you to check the oven

I have been exploring pure sound, and the mental environments it creates, and how editing it changes the mental environments. The rhythm, contrast, pacing, pitch, volume all working to create pictures in the brain, when you are not given something to look at, what images do you create purely from a sound stimulus. I have used the sound from one of my previous outcomes, which contains alot of repetetive stabbing noises, and the sounds of activity, and doing things. The second trach is from the soundwalk, and contains more passive ambient sounds.

These are both doctored recordings of real sound, with the intention of provoking different mental simulations. To further this idea, I have been exploring synthesised sound. My flatmate Charlie loves his video games, in which sound is a key component in creating a convincing and immersive experience. I have recorded and slightly adulterated an audio clip of one of his recent games, and put it in series with the other three audio tracks. This series aims to take the listener through the realms of active, man made sound, natural ambient sound, and synthetic man made sound that aims to replicate natural ambient sound, all bieng edited to subvert elements of their original context and associations.

By way of a more resolved piece of work, following the line of thought about invasive and undesirable sounds, I filmed some training of the University weightlifting team, and then exported it as a sound file and cut it to the peaks on the waveform, and adulterated it slightly on audacity. This gives a supercut of all the clattering and banging and scraping sounds that are jarring to the ear, and a natural byproduct of activity.

I began my research in an area of interest: archaic/traditional British food. I have been reading Dorothy Hartley’s ‘Food in England’, and have been enjoying discovering elements of English culture that have been gradually expropriated and erased, to be replaced with more profitable and marketable forms of sustenance as we have moved through industrialisation to more advanced stages of capitalism.

My family has ancestry in butchery (believed to be the etymological root of the surname “Stuffins”, although I am sure that is pure conjecture) and a love of cooking is ubiquitous throughout all branches of the tree. I talked to my grandpa about this, and he sent me a very old family recipe for brawn, alongside his adaptation of it, because the original makes 27 kilos. Brawn is a dish of pigs head meat (sometimes bolstered with cubes of pork, trotters, etc) set into jelly, and it is not common to see it made any more. I attribute this to the development of capitalism, with alot of archaic foods that were once common dying out as we move through the 20th and into the 21st centuries. A pigs head is always going to make less profit than more expensive cuts like a pork shoulder or belly, so there is less incentive to advertise it. The necessity for profit would drive a butcher to try and sell as many pigs as possible, which would make it alot less worthwhile trying to sell the head and organs.

In an effort to reclaim some shard of lost culture, I decided to make this dish and film it, so I went and got a pigs head from the butchers. It was free, because literally nobody buys it ever. I went about butchering, cleaning, and preparing the pigs head for the cooking process.

One of the things I enjoy about old archaic recipes are the bits of information that are out of touch, like old names for ingredients, or chunks of important information left out with unnecessary detail in other sections. When editing this video, I placed extra emphasis on the butchering of the pigs head, because that was not at all mentioned in any recipes and was the hardest bit to get to grips with, and then left out a chunk at the end between taking the meat off the bone and arriving at your finished dish, because this is the part with the most detail in recipes, and it is quite self explanatory.

I thought it would be interesting to shift the emphasis of the traditional narrative to the butchering because that is the least common necessity of contemporary recipes, and it was apparently self explanatory in the 18th-20th centuries. I also enjoy the juxtaposition of a tutorial video for an archaic recipe on a modern platform, and the title of the video reflects this, satirising current fashions in cooking videos, whilst still being accurate to the content.

(video contains pigs head being cut up which could be disturbing for some viewers)

Reading ‘Food in england’, one of my favourite bits is the old etching stlye illustrations of food, and every recipe or so is accompanied by a bit of poetry or prose. One idea I had for a final outcome was an illustrated recipe for this dish, with illustrations and prose of my own that subvert traditional recipe tropes (thinking abstract, visceral type images).

After my seminar on the 23rd, I have decided to conduct further research and work towards an outcome that has my research more present in it. I have called my grandpa again and have discussed this topic with him, and found some interesting inspiration to develop the project further.

g: nowadays theres no family butchers , they used to go to the market buy a pig and butcher it themselves, youre not allowed to do that nowadays you have to take them to a standard EU sort of sanctioned slaughterhouse and have them slaughtered so most butchers, our butcher in the village he doesnt but her any meat he buys a tray of chops, a tray of legs a tray of shoulders

me : he doesnt even cut it up?

g: all the butchering is done mechanically at the slaughterhouse

• this is particularily interesting and relevant – to butcher an animal yourself there is an incentive to make the most of the animal you would have to eat all of it that you could, and there is alot to be eaten in the organs and more obscure off-cuts. It would be a huge waste to throw that away. If you are selling animals however, your goal is to make money rather than to make the animals stretch, so it is more profitable to not deal with the bits people are less likely to buy, so your’e less likely to put emphasis on advertising and selling it.
• To finalise this project i wish to reflect on the increasingly mechanised processes of butchery. I am going to do a similar butchery video, this time with a packet of thin sliced ham from the supermarket

This video is to be watched in succession with the cheap and easy student meal. The same butchery proccesses are applied, but on a product which obviously doesn’t require them. This contrast with the first video aims to highlight how detatched we have become from the processes of food production. The pig head in the first video – a visceral and identifiable part of an animal, is supplanted with a homogenised unidentifiable sliced meat product, in sterile plastic packaging. It is mechanically processed to the point of being completely abstracted from its origin.

a montage of torment

This is more of an ill-informed pseudo-philosophical ramble than an academic piece of writing, but being so isolated from actual human contact has been ruining my mind and I losing my grasp on the necessity of proper academic practice. It feels like just another arbitrary code of behaviour at this point. This work is a documentation of a series of processes. I have been exploring the materiality of two different objects, and how their materiality interacts with their original and oppositional contexts, which includes their physical location and additionally their utility or hierarchical ranking as an object – useful, or discarded.

One of the things I enjoy about art is considering what gives it value. It is undeniable that the aesthetic qualities of art play a part in its value, even in cases where the art aims to deliberately subvert and challenge traditional ideals of aesthetics. One of the things I particularly appreciate is the necessity of a sort of frothy jargon, a necessity to justify your creation with convincing reasoning. The value of art is widely accepted as subjective, but not necessarily recognised that it is transient, depending on context, and how well you have personally been convinced of the artworks value. I also enjoy the notion of a necessity for an underlying meaning, as if a work of art is of less value if it is to be enjoyed rather than to be a lense through which we may ponder other incorporeal intricacies.

The work aims to make comment on the value of art as that relates to its intended meaning. The outcome of my processes has resulted in an entirely unchanged metal disk and a broken shaving razor, which were both found objects. They have endured cyclical processes that are not evident in the final objects – these processes, and intended meaning, are invisible. The physical processes are evidenced only with the video, and the intended meaning is only evident in the framework of thinking I am communicating through text. The juxtaposition of the wordless film with this unnecessarily word heavy justification also aims to further highlight the absurdity of the context in which art exists.  It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that humans are trying very hard to pretend we are not all just hairless monkeys, and we don’t know what is going on.

Using my initial experiment as a guideline, I have performed the same (/similar where a process cannot be replicated) processes to a different subject. I have chosen one with juxtaposing qualities – where the 0.5kg york plate was resilient, heavy, discarded, this second object is more fragile, light, and had a more useful intended function.

I have chosen a disposable bic razor.

I began with the mandatory subjugation – this razor proved far less stonefaced in the path of punishment

As I had done previously I took a rubbing to create an impression of the object and subsequently attatched that impression, and other bindings, to the object. The razor, despite being more fragile, was far more resistant to my other processes, and it proved difficult to effectively complete them.

After creating this conglomerate of waste, I went about putting the physically altered object back into its original contect to create a jarring image.

As I then moved to my restorative processes, I encountered similar problems – this object was much more succeptible to physical change, but would not cease in making it difficult for me to effectively render change unto it.

The nature of this object was such that if I were to cast it into the oven, despite being completely disfigured, the fumes and smoke produced would be intolerable. Another example of insolence from my second subject. I had to completely alter my process to accomodate, and cast it instead into the freezer, in a spoons measure of water.

It was only loosely fixed, and came apart easily. I decided to capture this new sculptural form back in the razors original context.

I then prised my second subject from its icy bindings and placed it back home, as I had done with the my first one.

I remember when I was a child there was a book about an owl, finding discarded objects without use, like pencils sharpened too short or spoons lost down the back of the settee.  There is a similar sense of melancholy about this, the fractured implement. Despite its original purpose, usage and ownership, it is now without purpose – broken and discarded, the same as the first object.

The artist I have been influenced the most by thematically is Marcel Duchamp. He is so often used as an example in higher education, particularly his iconic ‘Fountain’ 1917. For this reason I have only ever shunned his work, becuase you get more points if the stuff you’ve researched isn’t in the teachers powerpoint. His ‘readymades’ series of works, made in association with the Dada movement, I find particularly interesting. The way place and process are used to recontextualise found objects, transforming not necessarily their physical form but instead how they are percieved. I enjoy how this challenges not only traditional notions of art, but also of objects- even an object of niche and specific function can, given new context, be a vehicle which novel ideas are inspired.

I have enjoyed exploring these themes through my work, as within the realm of illustration there is rarely opportunity for this kind of conceptual, cerebral work, or for any kind of sculptural processes.

My main Aesthetic influence for this project is drawn from Alan Resnick, particularly his video series titled ‘Alantutorials’. It is a very extended project, with a long overarching narrative, amounting to a disturbing and surreal conclusion. It begins as a series of tutorials, with very abstract processes, and obscure outcomes. It is shot from a first person perspective and is anxiously narrated by Alan Resnick. A compiled playlist is linked below for reference:

In undertaking these processes, I have enjoyed exploring the materiality of this object and its humble resillience to lasting physical change. And so it is cast away once again, as it was, discarded, with no mark nor memory of what has been endured.

I then baked and quenched our subject, but neither heat nor cold could rupture its stoic visage

I allowed a for moment of retribution, casting our subject once more into the flames – and it emerged, unmoving, enacting only a feeble vengeance. Little trace of violence was left – faint scalding.

what is done must be undone, our subject is scraped of its bindings and cleansed

I have used various processes to transform the object in form and nature. What was once simple, robust and identifiable has become more complex, fragile and abstract. It was once whole in its singularity, now it is a conglomorate. After transforming the found object I have placed it in other spacial contexts, creating a jarring juxtaposition of object and place, with the alien and abstract occupying the familiar and domestic.