Tom Burtonwood

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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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

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.”

…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.

Studio, Carbondale, 2000

In keeping with the diagonal slant of the previous post i present this snap shot of my studio, circa 2000, at the Glove Factory, Carbondale. One of my abiding interests are systems and the information they require to exist andthe data the produce. Part of this fascination includes being overwhelmed by information, whether undertaking research for a specific art work and not knowing where to draw the line, or attempting to define a complex system, or some other instance of massive overload, in any case there is way more data out there than we can hope to understand or parse together or see the linkages and discern the differences. One response to this phenomena for me has always been to drop the filters and just present it, warts and all, un-mediated as much as possible. i think on one level i enjoy the aesthetic of overload, of sensory over stimulation  and on the other hand in the presence of so much random material i try and still develop relationships and linkages. The image above is taken from my studio in Carbondale toward the end of my 2nd yerar there. having re-newed my attraction to all things reflective i started pasting up on the studio walls pretty uch any thing and everything that seemed half way interesting without much thought as to how it would look or what it might be later on.