CAPTURING THE CONCEPT

Since beginning to think about architecture in preparation for my role in leading Walk and Talk sessions for Mind Into Matter, the subject has been cropping up everywhere!

By pure co-incidence last week I was lucky enough to go to a discussion event where Sir Nicholas Grimshaw was one of the speakers, and to see Capturing The Concept, an amazing exhibition of his sketchbooks. The exhibition contains Sir Nicholas' sketchbooks from 1982 to 2007 (he averages about 2 a year) open at selected pages to show drawings and annotations representing his thoughts and ideas for ambitious projects like the Eden Project and the refurbishment of Waterloo Station, committed to paper for the very first time.

In his foreword for Mind Into Matter, Alan Powers talks about "the architect's role as a special type of thinker", a notion which really became clear as I pored over the drawings and heard Sir Nicholas talking about the space we were sitting in for the discussion. His comments about its aspect and light, its situation in relation to its surroundings, the flow of people around and through it, all demonstrated his immersion in all things spatial. Add to this the technical knowledge and visionary qualities which make it possible to transform an idea from a few lines on paper into an extraordianry structure which is not only beautiful but functional too, and one begins to get an idea of the special thinking which our great architects harness.

(Capturing the Concept can be seen at the Royal Academy of Arts from 6th November to 31 January 2010)

What are you thinking?

This blog is an ongoing forum for discussion, inspired by the programme at the De La Warr Pavilion. The team of artists that work with us on interpretation will be regularly contributing to this blog in response to the work they do around our exhibitions and associated programme.

We hope you'll join the debate around art, culture and life in general.

Our new season has just opened. On the cusp of its 75th anniversary year, the Pavilion - a building of unique design and function - presents two exhibitions that celebrate the ideas, form and purpose of architecture.

Mind into Matter, curated by Alan Powers
Sons of Pioneers, Matthew Houlding

See our website for full details, www.dlwp.com

On alternate Saturdays, you're invited to join a member of our interpretation team for a cup of tea and a conversation about art, culture and life in general. These conversations will be summarised here, so you can join the discussion online.

We hope you'll join us for some Thinking Aloud.

Beuys has left the building.

And so we say goodbye to Joseph Beuys. Thank you to everyone who has taken part in so many interesting and thought provoking conversations over the course of the season.

A particular thank you to our Speakers' Corner contributers, who have given their time, ideas and energy for free. I have been amazed at how people responded to the opportunity to share and exchange ideas and opinions, and how a place like the De La Warr Pavilion seemed able to facilitate this exchange in a different way to many traditional forums.

Although Speakers' Corner won't continue in its weekly format, we hope to continue the spirit of exchange through our Thinking Aloud discussions that will continue bi-weekly, sometimes with invited speakers to stimulate the conversation.

Keep an eye on our website for full details.

Polly Gifford
Head of Education
De La Warr Pavilion

"Trees have Rights Too !"

A great final tour of the exhibition with a mixture of people who were engaged with the exhibition and knowledgeable about Beuys so we were able to have a broad based discussion about the work, the ideology and the materials used Beuys. All things fatty and felt like were admired and discussed as was his tightly controlled image and iconic 'look' - some picked up on his trickster character and ability to spin lots of stories and ideas together to create a series of rather confusing contradictions and double bluffs.

A surprising visual analogy was made between the poster advertising the 7.000 Eichen where the piles of basalt waiting to be planted resembled the piles of bodies found at concentration camps photographed at the end of the WW2. One member of the tour thought the connection would be obvious to anyone of the generation who directly experienced the Second World War.

It is interesting that Buchloh, a fierce critic of Beuys, felt he had sidestepped recent German history, yet years later on reviewing his original analysis of the artist, found that in fact Beuys was the only artist of the immediate post war period to really address issues relating to horrors of the Second World War.

Artists Ackroyd and Harvey were the guest speakers at Speakers Corner and they spoke about their project using acorns taken from the original Oaks used in 7,000 Eichen in Kassel. Beuys’s Oaks were planted 27 years ago and theirs are just 2 years old, yet the potential to spread the word about the importance of trees for the global community is huge. In his social sculptures like 7000 Eichen Beuys promoted the idea of regeneration, the passing of time and the connection between life forms on the planet and how they can be sustained and supported by the broader community in creative ways.

Ackroyd and Harvey posed a number of questions :
Why are we unable to find global agreement about the preservation of forests?

The creation of cities and civilizations, stretching back to the first city created by Gilgamesh to defend his people from outside threats , depended largely on clearing large areas of forest in order to both create the space to build cities and the materials with which to construct them. The Romans too cleared large areas of temperate forest to grow crops on and for domestic and industrial use. With ever increasing deforestation civilizations soon decline and the 20th century in particular has seen not only continued deforestation, particularly in tropical climates, but also an associated increase in desertification.
The suggestion was made, via an Antarctic survey and a meeting with comedian Marcus Bridgestock, that every small step that politicians and world leaders make to halt this destruction, should be supported and applauded by the rest of us (preferably whilst wearing a suit and tie !)


What do we need to do stop the drive for economic growth ?

This often means the wealthy increase their wealth at the expense of the
poor.
The drive to exploit the planet to create wealth is deeply embedded in the
west and increasingly in the rest of the world. Belief systems
that see-saw between Plato who lamented the loss of forests in his day and
Socrates who dismissed nature as kind of folkloric fantasy mirror similar
swings between a romantic view of nature and the thinking dominated by
logic, reason and the capitalist drive to make greater and greater profits from natural

resources.

We know that around 50% of forests are cleared for domestic dependence on fuel and that this rate of deforestation is not sustainable but there are some positive actions made by groups and individuals which could well lead the way to better understanding of how we might work together to ensure forests and other resources are sustained and regenerated for the future.

Manchester, for example, has a long term tree-planting strategy and has increased its stock by many thousands. This follows research that suggests that by increasing our tree stock by 10 % in urban areas we can lower the temperature.

In Turkey 2 business men have planted 850,000,000 acres of oak trees.

In the face of violent opposition 30 million trees in Kenya have been planted by women’s groups led by Wangari Maathai.

Ecuador recently voted on a new constitution that would give Ecuador's tropical forests, islands, rivers and air similar legal rights to those normally granted to humans.

China, the Philippines and Haiti have taken steps to preserve and maintain their forests.

Polly Higgins, a barrister and environmentalist, started a website and blog - Trees Have Rights Too which led to her going to Sweden to present the call for a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights at the Tallberg Forum and later at the United Nations UK & Northern Ireland conference on Climate Change.

Books :
Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison

A keen audience of 22 contributed to the talk with informed insights and knowledge about a range of environmental issues. It has been interesting to note that for the talks that I have been a part of that much of the audience has been made up of those interested in the subject of the talk (rather than coming at it from an artist's angle) It would be interesting to know how many of the particpants spend time looking at the exhibition before hand and whether the work of Beuys in any way illuminates or resonates with their interest in war, education, forestry, bees etc !

!!!!!!!!!!! E ! N ! E ! R ! G ! Y !!!!!!!!!!!!

The afternoon of September 12th was one of shifting currents of thought and energy. In the gallery there was a steady movement of people looking at Beuys.

One couple had returned following an earlier visit and had brought friends back to show them the exhibition, even though they felt they didn’t really like it and thought it didn’t belong in the De La Warr Pavilion. They led me round the exhibition asking animated questions and demonstrated a deep fascination with Beuys’ choice of materials and sculptural arrangements.

The Fat Chair provoked quite a bit of discussion, which led onto talking about how art can be made out of anything and that rubbish can be recycled into artefacts.

I really enjoyed talking to them because they had what I can see, upon reflection, was a kind of constructive resistance to the work that allowed them to question, doubt and be opened up to possibilities of understanding.

After experiencing the Speaker’s Corner discussion all about energy led by Steve Martin, physics teacher, I could describe their engagement with the exhibition as manifestations of kinetic, potential and elastic energy:

They moved enthusiastically from work to work, with an attitude of boundless enquiry bursting through a thin veneer of mocking deprecation of Beuys. This was their kinetic force.

They were keen to have their minds opened and find out more, I felt we could have talked all day. This was the potential energy they exhibited.

And they were willing for their minds to roam, for us all to take part in a spirited and lively conversation that took us in many directions. And in this way they showed what elastic, mind-energy can be like. (I apologise to Steve for stretching an interpretation of his explanation of the forms of energy to its limits.)

Steve’s talk was well attended by up to 25 people. He was very energetic in his demonstration of seven types of energy: kinetic, potential, thermal, gravitational, sound, light and elastic, using an elastic band as a prop. He communicated his enthusiasm for his subject very well to the gathered group.

His basic thesis was that the universe, having been created by a big bang was full of energy and that energy cannot run out, it can only be transferred. Therefore, on the one hand, there is nothing to worry about in terms of an energy crisis because energy is readily available everywhere if we only harness it sensibly. On the other hand, however, humans are constantly showing how wasteful we are of energy and seem incapable at the moment of properly investigating and implementing sustainable forms of energy.

The discussion turned around ideas of how to plan more constructively

for our future energy use and despair at how we, as humans, let greed and profit motivate us in the short term instead of acting sensibly in the present to conserve our future energy needs.

There was a sense in the group of shared interests and some irritation at the actions of others. We formed a kind of microcosm for that moment of people bonded by a common need for rational approaches regarding the production and consumption of energy.

Many thanks to all who were present on the afternoon of the 12^th. If any of you would like to add anything here do make your own contribution to the blog.

Art Education

This Saturday's 'Speakers' Corner' tackled the thorny issue of art education. If we take as a starting point Beuys' statement, 'Everyone is an artist', then how can art be taught? Beuys lost his teaching position at the Dusseldorf Academy due to his refusal to limit access to his course.

Leo Powell introduced some reflections on his personal experience as an art student today. In particular, he is interested in how our environment affects the way we work and think. He described the problem of certain kinds of seating, for example in a pub, where individuals can find themselves excluded from the conversation. For him, a round table is not just a table but a philosophy. Showing us a series of images, he traced the historic development of art school environments beginning with a seventeenth-century, amphitheatre-style arrangement. From students seated at easels, each working from the model, there was a radical departure in the 1960s when dialogue rather than instruction took centre-stage. In today's art studio, the laptop - portable technology - is a key component of the working environment.

In today's art school, the communal, studio space is often empty with many people preferring to work at home where they have easy access to the kettle/internet. Whereas Leo had looked forward to the freedom offered by the art school experience, with the emphasis on the student pursuing his/her own interests independently, he found it a challenge to work in a vacuum. His conclusion was that the most important thing an art school can provide is not studio space or tools but a community. Developments in technology mean that this community can be constructed in different ways. For example, his tutor answered a question sent by email, responding using her Iphone while on the bus. What do these experiences mean in terms of the student-teacher relationship?

In the imagined art studio of the future there are, for Leo, 4 key points to be taken into consideration:

Access to information
You no longer need to physically visit the library and much course work can be delivered virtually. Open access to knowledge means that the traditional authority of the teacher is undermined - and this is a good thing! The teacher becomes a facilitator/catalyst.

Communication
Online learning environments make you focus on the content rather than the mode of communication.

The computer used to be seen as an an additional tool in the learning environment - now it is the environment.

Interface
If you consider the way Microsoft Office is structured, does being forced to organise everything into files and folders make us work and think like office workers?

The group discussion focussed on notions of time, play, the encounter with real objects (books) and focus. If the teacher-student relationship is irrevocably changed as a result of open access to knowledge, is the 'inspirational' teacher still something to hope for? What about the example of Beuys as shaman? What is the role of passion and the emotions in the teaching of art? Are one's peers the most influential teachers?

Meaning, Context and Interpretation

Two questions continue to crop up when looking at Beuys, namely: how and where do we find meaning? This week our tour opened with a discussion on Beuys' wartime experiences and the possibility of extreme events shaping life. I spent some time with Adrian who had come from Margate to see the show; what he knew about Beuys was sketchy and he talked about the difficulty separating fact from fiction. Some things seemed far-fetched yet turned out to be true, for example, he had heard that Beuys had at one time been an acrobat in a circus, but surely this was just another story spun to add mystery to a charismatic artist? We looked at connections between Monument to the Stag, Coyote II and the significance of traditional animal myths and their spiritual power in Beuys’ work. The potential for healing took us to the artistic legacy of 7000 Oaks and Adrian drew a parallel to his own experience of urban regeneration, talking of the Turner Contemporary being an integral part of the Margate Renewal Partnership plans. As a fellow artist, I was interested in how Adrian saw himself getting involved in the gallery’s current community projects.
Sue, her friend and their two sons were whispering about the strange use of materials when I joined them. Looking at Fat Corner (Process) we talked about energy and warmth, making a connection to social sculpture and environmental change. But the work looked so simple, the materials everyday, it seemed to the boys as if anyone could do it. Maybe that was the point, if everyone could be an artist, using found materials might be part of that message?


In the spirit of Beuys, Rohan Jayasekera, Associate Editor for Index on Censorship, held Speakers Corner standing in the gallery where people were free come and go. There was strong language from the start, which Rohan neatly identified by raising a hat in the air shortly before it’s arrival, giving spectators the chance to leave, or to stay and gauge whether the offense was worth the knowledge imparted.
It was fascinating to hear him speak about the reasons why we censor others and ourselves. Here are just a few of the many aspects of censorship and freedom of expression that he talked about.
Setting rules and “bad language”: Individually, we all set our own rules about what language we are prepared to use and tolerate and our reasons are various. Rohan addressed the importance of considering context when deciding what is or is not offensive and to guard against the temptation to be politically correct. As one example, he cited the renaming of Guy Gibson’s dog in the classic WWII film The Dam Busters, and the continuing debate around its racial offense. Some words, once overwhelmingly abhorrent are now considered by some to have lost the power to harm, having been ‘reclaimed’ by the intended victims.
Censoring extremists and Freedom of Expression: Should those who speak to offend as well as those who offend while speaking have the same freedom of speech? What about extremists such as David Irving and Geert Wilders? Someone asked about the row concerning Rohan’s decision to appear with David Irving at the Oxford Union, declining to comply with the “no platform rule” refusing fascists the right to a shared public forum. As Rohan supports the general principle of freedom of speech, he believes that principle should be extended to extremists also. The Oxford Constabulary decided to cancel the event, citing concerns regarding public order – censorship or real concern?
Rohan turned our attention to the restriction the individuals right to Freedom of Speech, particularly when expressing political dissent near Parliament and the restrictions imposed by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. But what about fundamental freedoms found within Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights?
Interpretation of the rules and fear of prosecution: Rohan argues that Human Rights Act 1998 is open to selective interpretation. Obviously, the Act can be and is used to good effect, but there are times when it can be seriously misused to control information to serve personal or commercial interests. The case of Mosley v News Group Newspapers Limited came up, in which Max Mosley challenged an invasion of his private life.
Freedom of the Press: Journalists around the world face serious danger for simply doing their job. Rohan spoke specifically of the jail sentence recently meted out to J.S Tissainayagam, found guilty on terrorism charges after criticising the army’s treatment of Tamil civilians. The Government interpreted his reports as false, accusing Tissainayagam of stoking ethnic discord, sentencing him to twenty years hard labour.
These are just some of the many aspects of Rohan’s presentation. We ended with a discussion exploring how complex the issues surrounding censorship are and how important it is to defend the right to freedom of speech. Context and interpretation of rules and law seem to be the central issues. The advice Rohan gave us on parting was: consider the context, consider the rules, but watch the law.
I

Just as I was leaving the gallery I bumped into Jean, whom I recognised from an earlier talk. She told me how she loved the Beuys season and had visited on several occasions. Jean wasn't sure we need to understand everything we see, 'getting it' can often be illusive and transitory; the most important thing for her is to keep coming back and allowing the work to take effect. We discussed how the show taps into what matters generally in life; the importance of connection, to other people and the consequences of our actions, be they personal, local or global.


Thanks once more to Rohan, and all those who were involved in the gallery tour. Apologies for omissions. You are very welcome add any comments if you weren't at the discussion but are interested in the themes.