artists have always proposed work as yet unmade, in order to receive funding, or explain their ideas before scaling up or starting projects. some artists though, have made a career out of exposing their unmade, or unreaised artworks, such as Peter Liversidge or Christo and Jeanne-Claude, increasing their status.
this series of talks will highlight how value can side with a proposition, and what we can learn by being outside the confines and economics of realisation.
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I am sitting in a Jon Rafman work, made digitally. it is part of a series of works titled ‘brand new paint job’. It proposes the domestic space of several artists in the western canon. or maybe these aren’t proposals for their actual homes, as each could, indeed, be the home of a superfan. none of these is actual. they are digitally rendered using images of original paintings. and in a way we can think of them as proposals. although they also function as documents. you’re being asked to think how you develop a proposal, and this short talk will address the materials you choose to use. in the context of our restrained and limited conditions of making, I want to posit that some materials are more useful or strategic for proposal forming than others, and I’ll do this through a series of examples and suggestions. perhaps we are even at an advantage in lockdown, when it comes to making a proposal, in that there is a constancy in looking outwards. the preposition always being to get out, or to return. in this talk, I’m going to suggest that certain materials propose more than others do. some, like bronze, with its expense and its physical weight, with its dire need for strict preparation, tend not to talk of suggested things, but of finalised things. oil paint can propose, of course, but often also, in its setting up, its embedded laying out of materials and prior purchasing tends to feel completist.
‘you can change charcoal as quickly as you can change your mind. take a drawing, with one brush, it just disappears. so there’s a fixability in it, as well as a kind of granularity that I really like.’
proposal is not an actuality. and I’m asking whether you think that certain materials speak too much of finish to be suggestive. in which case, you may not want to use them to make your proposal.
let’s go through some examples. the body. for the most part, anything you propose with your body needs to be wiped off, undone, or put back again.
using what you have, literally at hand, can swiftly become a fleeting impermanent monument. Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has been making one minute sculptures since 1997.
following Wurm’s hand drawn instructions, bodies are juxtaposed with everyday objects in order to create absurd, almost ridiculous structures.
participants are required to hold their pose for one minute.
the drawing acts as a proposal of course, a challenge or a request become an absurdist architecture of sorts, but the performance is also propositional, it cannot be maintained. And in its public execution, proposes to others, that they could also take part.
Janine Antoni has always used the body as a material. Paperdance is a collaboration with dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin. it revisits Antoni’a back catalogue of sculptural and performative works, proposing how they can be danced in sequence, and asking how they would collectively impact upon the material - the paper, which is also the packing paper from the crates in which the work is stored.
the body is a useful tool with which to begin a proposal.
as a space implying depth and interiority. it is also a space onto which to propose, suggesting modifications, prosthetics, and potentialised as a political site, or form of architecture. here are some drawings by Rebecca Horn. proposing additions to limbs and eventually becoming more developed works which often offer a sociological view of the machine as an extension of the body.
although the drawing is regarded as the proposal for the work, the work is itself a proposal. for a kind of body or adjustment. here is a video made in Berlin in 1974, of Rebecca Horn wearing the fingergloves.
this next example is in thinking that text itself as propositional. many artists use text to propose works, and indeed we all have to do this to generate opportunities for ourselves. and often funding for projects. text though, can hold the work in the moment of its proposition, suspending thing, including disbelief, realisation, and possibility. it also attests to authority, and can sometimes be used to critique forms of language that exists elsewhere, perhaps in the worlds of the museum, politics, scientific, social experiment. Sometimes, it simply allows the work to be mid-flux. mid-thought. in process. here are just two examples, one referring to the suspension of disbelief, and one historical example from fluxus, where instructions or schools, are used to themselves, suggest, generate an artwork.
fluxus is an international avant-garde collective or network of artists and composers, founded in the nineteen-sixties, and still continuing today. the first fluxus event was staged in sixty-one in the yeiji(?) gallery in New York. and was followed by festivals in Europe the next year.
George Maciunas is historically considered the primary founder and organiser of the movement. and the major centres of fluxus activity were New York, Germany, and Japan. Internationally uncategorizable, fluxus projects were wide-ranging and often multi-disciplinary. humorous and based in everyday inexpensive materials and experiences,
including everything from breathing to answering the telephone. when asked to define fluxus, Maciunas would often respond by playing recordings of barking dogs and honking geese. perhaps confounding his questioner but also demonstrating the experimentation and embrace of absurdity at its cause.
performances, which fluxus artists called events,
in order to distinguish them from happenings and other forms of performance based art were a significant part of the movement. and these were often based on sets of instructions. called scores, referencing the fact that they were derived from musical compositions. following a score would result in an action, event, performance, or one of the many other kinds of experiences that were generated out of this vibrant movement.
perhaps test out some fluxus instructions. it could be that they propose something you can’t anticipate how you would see through. or generate responses from other media.
however you make your proposals text is likely to creep in. whether to explain, or to test or to notate,
or even just to let your tutors know exactly what it is you’ve been up to. Uk based artist Peter liversidge begins the plans for each of his exhibitions at his own kitchen table, typing proposals on an old typewriter. the resulting pages complete with typos,
liversidge’s work realises work through creativity, compromise, and collaboration. Looking at institutional decision making, and redefining traditional notions of authorship.
returning to the idea of a propositional material, perhaps a good way to think of this is by considering what the behaviour of your materials is. whilst you’re in the middle of something. and in a way a proposal is like being mid-making. it could also therefore be seen as holding a work. a moment of indecision. of wetness, of being part-moulded, left to soak, or even misleading, mismeasured, or misinforming.
these works by the duo fischli and weiss are made in unfired clay. each scene is playful in subject and inscription and follows an inscrutable logic. providing a survey of our times which is incomplete.
the imperfections reflected in the rough and seemingly unfinished maquettes through which these issues are explored.
being in an unfinished state, a decision in some works can also be a moment en route for a larger scale for others.
I’m choosing here to focus on artists building models for or if larger things In order to make quick tests for scaling up. you may want to consider the economy and flexibility of cardboard as a means to propose on a small scale for something to be realised in a large scale later.
here is a model made from the painter Polly Apfelbaum. for a Californian exhibition in 2015. she talked of the show as a gallery sized immersive painting. and the model as proposal, attests to the viewers’ experience of being subsumed in the work.
here is the exhibition in its realised state. the growing up of the cardboard work. it is interesting that Apfelbaum exposes this work, not as a work in its own right, but in direct acknowledgement of the importance of proposing to actualising. attesting to its value as a mode of processing and thinking through.
I also make cardboard models for large scale exhibitions. these are not so much a test for immersion but more for proximity, and taxonomical indexing of elements. the models help me to maintain the relationships between works in the planning stages of the show. and test their connections to each other. here you can see the cardboard version with its wall painting and movable modular works. and here is an image of the show itself. the scrappiness of the early model, which I have kept and value, is integral to its role as a form of note-taking.
this small painted work from 2000 by polish artist Paulina Olowska is made inside a shoebox. and was shown as part of a rotating series of curated opportunities to exhibit in shop windows. a form of mobile gallery taking on retail as both subject and method.
Olowska’s works often refer to fashion and display, so this was an apt form for gallery representation. the immediacy of both painting and its agility as an exhibition makes it literally pret-a-porter, so form and content form a dialogue. when you choose the materials for your proposal, you may want to remember the symmetry here, between the choice of container and the wider subjects in olowska’s work outside it.
these are my own photographs of the work ‘grotesque process’ by Thomas Demand. using thirty tonnes of grey cardboard shaped by a computer and laid out to form a stratification, with nine hundred thousand sections, German artist Demand reproduced the rock chamber, stalactites and stalagmites of a grotto on the island of Majorca.
the installation began with the finding and drawing of a postcard image. Demand creates huge complex environments in cardboard, photographs them, and he usually destroys the models as the digital photographic image is the artwork. Fondazione Prada in Milan persuaded him to make an exception on this occasion and to allow them to keep the grey cardboard sections which is usually the plan or model.
at Fondazione Prada, this grotto motif returns as the work, processo grotesco, grotesque process,
for which demand also sets documentary materials, including post cards, books, tour guides, catalogue illustrations, various ads, and the massive reconstruction of the Spanish grotto. alongside the actual artwork which is the photograph, titled grotto. and I was less interested in it, and forgot to photograph it and so have not included it here.
in addition to this exquisite cardboard model, as a precursor for demands photograph, the accompanying archive may also be useful for you to consider as a form of proposal.
the document, as a propositional material. perhaps your proposal could also be a collection of sorts. an index containing found images of texts via research activity, which through their own interconnections, drive a suggested work, awaiting realisation.