Tom Burtonwood

Mobile Sculpture, sketchbook page, 2000

At some point it occurred to me that you could “park” / install / display / deploy a mobile sculpture at Walmart or some other retail store parking lot fairly easily. You have a captive, if likely bemused / uninterested, audience and some super absurd awesomeness. Never did follow thru on this 100%. the mobile lander/ sculpture “Action” documented here comes close but we didn’t really leave it in one place and wait for a reaction… hopefully I will get the chance to make amends on this fairly soon.

Post it Note sketch, 2000

Posting has been slow of late as i prepare for the start of the school semester, i’m teaching courses at SAIC and UIC in the fall and with the new term only days away at UIC i’m putting the finishing touches to the syllabus and what not. It’s great to be teaching again, i’m looking forward to meeting my students and immersing myself in academic life. I’m hoping to take some classes myself either in Motion Graphics or Maya both of which would be a big help to the studio effort. Holly is also about to start school at SAIC for her MFA in sculpture so we’re about to become a very academic household again.

Post It Notes, 2000

In a search for the sewing machine Holly dug out some sketchbooks from a “hidden” closet last night, and found some real treasures. I’ll be trying to get back in the daily posting groove and share these with everyone. Looking at this current post and the last one i;m struck as usual by the similarities and connections between the work i was making in the period of 1995 – 1997 and 2000 – 2001. The synchronicity of seeing all this work, from Loughborough, Carbondale and now Chicago together for the first time combined with my “new” studio practice is very exciting and I hope that i can get some of these “unfinished ideas” out in the real world soon. As you can see from the drawings these images mostly revolve around the idea of unfolding sculpture, of an installation that is either MANPORT (man portable) or VEH PORT MOD (vehicle portable modules) …. At the time i was making this work, i was back in the UK i think for the summer before my final year in C’dale. Regular air travel meant that i had to carry whatever i took back and forth across the Atlantic. After transporting an aluminum relief across the water in the summer 0f 1999 i realized that i should quit making art out of solid metals like aluminum or iron and focus instead on more MAN PORT objects / items. This idea for making in a general sense has held true for me throughout my practice, working with Holly or by myself. Apart from a brief stint between 2004 – 2005 (ish) i’ve never owned a car or other form of motorized transport and frankly do not plan to. Holly and I factor our living plans around public transport. When we do a big install we rent a cargo van or similar. And so it goes for my art practice, these sketches illustrate ideas for either unfolding installations that expand from a compact module to fill an exhibition hall, to paraphrase Marshall Mcluhan, “the medium is the message”…. the work is about networks, structures—- and it speaks this with form — it is what it is — OR the sketches illustrate pieces that are still modular, but are wheeled and can be moved from place to place and exhibited not necessarily in an exhibition hall but rather taken out into the public sphere.

Post It Notes

Studio wise i’ve been building and calibrating a camera stand to record all the frames of the Permutations animation i drew while in France this summer. It’s taken a lot of effort and fine tuning, and in the long run maybe it would have been quicker just to scan these images in at a low ppi… but i have another experiment / idea to follow up on now…. which if it’s half way interesting will post asap….

Anyhow plenty good material here to work from…. ok now i’m off downstairs to draw.

wow. i found this photo today. and i’m totally thrilled about this work again! i gotta get in the studio for sure. sad thing is i don’t have ANY  of this work anymore. it either got trashed or gven away. i f anyone has any of these pieces please let me know they went to a good home! totally crazy.

another essay, again no reference as yet as to what i am writing in reaction too. i know bad form. will make amends soon. UPDATE: T. J. Clark, selection from introduction to Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973 (ISBN 0-691-03982-8 pbk): pp. 10-15.

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Y Pages 2,52 www.SUnlimBS.COm -WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2000 Sports Final

Clark silently delivers his message. Presumably a deliberate ploy as introduction and method. Who could begin a book stating one’s case explicitly?

His method is to leave details unwritten and prompt confusion. Clark writes that “it is easier to define what methods to avoid than propose a set of methods for system~tic use.” Clark removes the social history of art from systematic academic discourse because society is not a rational organism. It is prone to irrational behaviour, general attitudes, archetypes and stereotypes. Clark writes that it is im~ortant to discard those elements/methods w~ understand as conventional. Negation constructs the unwritten idea.

Clark is asking those who would seek to interpret the socially historical impact art to put their ears to the ground and listen to the public in its yarious manifestations. Social history might only be understood at ground zero away from the pie-chart Marxism.

Clark presents his thesis in three key areas of text, on pages 11/12/and 13. Thes ideas are corroborated then with evidence plucked from the 19thCentury, France. He focuses on Parisian intellectuals and their political thinKing with regard to the 1848 revolution. The avante-garde were estranged from popular revolutionart thinking because their aesthetic drive was entirely a PLAYTHING OF THE wealthy classes.

At the bottom of page 11 he notes the”hypocritical discourse” of artist and criti that precludes the public whose lack of education means they cannot enter the deb . He differentiates between public and audience, etymologically audience is close to author in structure and also intent. The public is quite different. This point is made clearer by the Freudian analogy which indicates something psychological that requires treatment. When the convention of criticism breaks down, when the artist gives something that does not present easy or clear interpretation this is the point at which the public can enter the discourse. On page 13 clark writes th the purpose of social history is to find the “general nature of structures,” that the artist encounters in a random fashion, and to “locate specific conditions of such meeting.”

What Clark does not say or write is that a social history of art requires the reaction of the public to the artwork in question. This reaction need not be prof und, no·r need it lead to the barricades. A social historical reckoning has to foc on society, its currency will be the interaction of art and life. Academics can analyse the origins and futures of society but Clark suggests that it takes socie to voice its opinions before we can be clear as to the social history of an artwo The artist works within a society, he/she is framed by their relation to their neighbours, therefore the issue of social hisotry is contained in a moebius strip that has no begining and therefore no end.

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

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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.”

…work in progress, 2001 (installation with David Lohman and David Constable / with Jason Pritchett on the audio component… link>  Institutional Critique )

This photograph documents that chaos created when 3 artists collaborate on a site specific installation deep within the “corridors of power.” Revisiting the scene of a prior installation Burtonwood and Lohman brought Constable along to wreak sonic havoc once more on the Allyn Building admin corridor SIUC school of art. in this outing the contents of the still life closet was emptied out into the hall way and a tannoy installed with a looping glitchy gnarly sequence of sounds pounding out.

Lander, Cardboard and mixed media, 2000

Lander was the next generation of mobile sculptures i produced at SIUC. The Lander was a in military speak a MANP (Man Portable) sculpture. Drawing inspiration from the Apollo Eagle Lunar Lander the piece folded into a compact rectangle that could be carried as a backpack. A standard camera tripod provided legs to raise the Lander off the ground. The sections were intended to resemble solar panels or some kind of sensor array. Once again i painted it a bright yellow for maximum disruption when set up in public.

Apart from creating some kind of absurd intervention, this piece was the first system sculpture. Traveling first from Carbondale via Amtrak to Chicago, then by air from Chicago to Minneapolis (via Kansas City) and back again this piece was an early stab at developing an administrative art work. Lander was a super important work for me as it focused in on a range of themes and practices that would shape my development both at Carbondale and later here in Chicago.

First and foremost it got the work out there. In a real physical sense. Not only was the work shipped around the Midwest but at each location it was installed on the street for 10 – 15 minutes and passed out information to passersby. Each intervention was documented with photographs and later in the gallery these images were combined with maps showing each site. Apart from the simple act of getting visibility this project cemented the DIY ethos that would define pretty much everything i have done since as an artist and arts professional. In a wider sense this piece symbolized the transportation of ideas, creating networks, developing “integrated systems.” All concepts that again would prove key to my thesis show and later to my practice. And oddly enough for me this piece was pre-internet, sure i was using email, and thinking about web sites and so forth but it was still dot com bubble land, ie it wasn’t utterly ubitquitous. For me this piece was about tracking an object of intellectual curiousity through physcial space, as one might track a package via fed ex.

UPDATE 08/29/09

APS Filmstrip showing different installations in MPLS, 2000

Digging thru boxes tidying the studio and found this image, of showing various installations of Lander in and around Uptown in Minneapolis during the Thanksgiving break in the fall of 2000. I love the format of this APS filmstrip, a sort of pre-digital image, or at least a transitional technology that if anything was a signal of the eventual demise of 35mm (135) camera film. Anyhow i love how this image shows all the different states, with a numerical designation in the bottom left corner and so forth. At some point i’ll upload further documentation of the project and possibly build a small sub-website to tell the story completely.