Tom Burtonwood

In an effort to be as thorough as possible in the documenting of my art practice / experience, i’m going to upload my writings, mostly student work, from both undergraduate and graduate courses. I can’t promise that the writing will necessarily make sense removed from the context of assignments produced for assessment, nor can i promise if the writing is any good.

I’m engaging in this process firstly to archive this material digitally. Most of it was produced pre-email and almost all of it exits only in hard copy form. So i’m keen to get as much as possible a digital image file and using my super basic OCR software get the meat of each text saved as a txt file, for potential future clean up. The writing i produced at SIUC was mostly printed on Holly’s electric typewriter and often i used tihs very physical machine to introduce images and visual textures designed to either play with the texts or butt against them.

Secondly the pieces i produced for various art history classes at SIUC i often considered art works in their own right and so to my mind it makes sense to present them in this context. SOme of the ealier pieces from Loughborough are less interesting or experimental in their delivery but my musings on installation practice and so forth were foundational to my eventual phenomenological “total experience” installations at that time and now. So please bear with me.

As usual these pieces will be presented in no particular order, the first is a response to an article by David Deitcher about Michael Foucault. I will endeavor to actually determine which article this was a.s.a.p. UPDATE: here is info courtesy Carma Gorman (thank you)____ David Deitcher, “Looking at a Photograph, Looking for a History,” in The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, edited by Deborah Bright. New York: Routledge, 1998 (ISBN 0415145821 pbk): pp. 22-36.

Luggage / Baggage, photocopy, source unknown

Full text via OCR scanning below (note this is text once removed, copy pasted exactly from the OCR translation for the accurate text please click this link to view the original document at full size http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3365/3605539697_e7193a325c_b.jpg

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Deitcher meets Foucault uptown. “looking for a history/stating one’s case” Tom Burtonwood

AD438

Carma Gorman 10/24/00

1st scene: Deitcher meets Foucault,

“Who am I?”

“Who do you want to be?” “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”

“Boyar girl?” “Both”

“Oh Oedipus.”

L am writing about David Deitcher’s article as assigned because L am

trying to show how the insisttfut personification of the wri ter_ is in fact

a strategy to undermine traditional, patriarchal academic study, and therefore explain how this tactic may be used to posi t al ter’:c…nati ve history.”

I have used the structure laid out in Booth et a~del~~~atelY as a

counte;r- balance to what I had previously been educated”,111 post;;tcolonial ~_// ~post …. industrial Englan~ -bhe third personT “one” obviously is the royal 6we8wio in turn validates,~assimilate~, steals and ~~he knowledege

we the lOyalrUbjects garner in ~IThame. hO~(d5

Perhaps that is stretching this reading a little far, but it is in keeping with Foucault’s thesis that the reade~ role is more important

than that of the author. I certainly do want to suggest that in writing ;Y;WJ/

(par. ticu~arlY from. a.n academic perspecti v~) ~he _£.L~~ Of”th~ ~.~_~~or .-is ~~:r::~lY I Lt1?91l, s_!:~ted. It seem~, ,to r~late to that tradItIon of “he” thIS and-’.'he” that. _ ~-

or -”-h-e” (then~heathen?)!. and therefore I am comfortable suggestIng , ~ ?

that ltegardless of how’¢Ti ti¢’i:dthe wr±tirrg-pTesente~t,t6_.a?t)1ibric, ‘.’ e{ l~

~~e t~!e~~~~~r w~~~in~6~-u:-~~~_~i~~~~~- ~~~:~;~~~dt~h:~e~~~:i~:n~’r~a~~~:J- ‘e’m. ~~-

more in the camp of universal modernism. ,

——–

e.g. r

“I am a whi te male, age 26, I have studied art/and related fields f-or

some time now. I am involved directly with a’ creative process and it

/ has been my mission to involve a peripatetic visual discourse within the ~

text I submi t for cri tique ”

or

j’ “I (want to) believe … ” here Deitcher makes clear that this essay is his interpretation of a photograph and this view is not necessarily validated by

\ the canon. Dei tcher provides many of these ,examples “I am incl ined” /” I see them” /” I am incl ined” i obviously he is avlare that hi s reasoning could be wrong, and

guards his argument well. I think that this quo)e best sums up my thesis and it is taken from the Deitcher article,

“The master’s tools ,vill never dismantle the master’s house.”