There
has been much talk amongst us of the 'Materials' project being a raw encounter
with stuff. And many of us seem to have adopted this in our art practice: the
unfolding process of working through stuff. Being in conversation with it as
John Crossley once said.
I
did take that away with me, but even more so it was an encounter with bare
unvarnished time. No prescription made as to what to do with it, how to fill it
— and can filling time really be our job in life? That sounds as off the mark
to me now as the idea, strangely prevalent in other parts of the sculpture
school, as filling time, or life, with sculpture.
It’s
something that seeped in gradually, the desire, need, to work in and with time.
There is no stuff to it, in fact stuff gets in the way. I remember well the day
I realised I preferred my studio empty to anything I could put in there. Empty,
I could watch the day. But how to make it visible to a viewer, bring to
consciousness something intangible that is always in background? It’s the
medium in which we live, we swim in it without noticing. It seems it would have
to be theatrical, like Waiting for Godot which I saw at the time.
 |
| Sheila Ross, Chicken Wire in the Locked Room, 1970 |
Theatre
has a captive audience, voluntary but there for the duration. We also were a
captive audience: an audience to ourselves, each other, the long unfolding of
the days; and as I now appreciate, the tutors were also audience to the rolling
out of their unscripted play, and to their own moment by moment responses. And
all of us were audience to the complete impossibility of setting these basics
in our minds as something knowable, plannable, foreseeable. Because one morning
after having worked for over a week with wire and tin sheet, we went in to find
the studio clean and emptied of all traces of our work, with just 13 blocks of
polystyrene wrapped in brown paper.
It’s
interesting how many people went on to work in the time-based mediums of film
and video: Tony Hill, Andy Darley, Nick May, Tom McPhillips, Tim Jones, myself.
Who else?
And
I still try to create the basic situation for myself: an empty room, nothing extraneous,
where I can encounter myself and all the parallel worlds of time in which I
live. And the big question: How to leave a trace of that experience that is
really true to it, so that others can witness it and so witness themselves?
Sheila
Ross, April 2018
Sheila makes an interesting observation - I think many of us reacted to the situation by making stuff where time was incorporated - we submersed our things in water, we poured plaster, we built stuff that was deliberately unstable and declared the point of collapse as the finished point, we set fire to stuff,...
ReplyDeleteAnd you went on to work in film and video and stage lighting.
ReplyDeleteSheila,
DeleteYour thoughts remind me of the work that Robert Irwin was doing in the 70's. He was very curious about the A Course when I spoke of it to him during my term as Visiting Professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (Spring, 1972). Irwin was in Minnesota on his speaking tour of Art Colleges.
Also, at that time as a result of my speaking about the A course, I began a collaboration with a colleague who was on the faculty at the College (Barry Kahn). We made three drawings together during my time in Minneapolis and later worked together in public on two installations, one in London at the Battersea Arts Center and then in 1979, a six week long collaboration in the Museum of Fine Arts in Minneapolis. We had "rules" that were largely drawn from the materials project. I have some documentation including images that I could dig out and share if anyone is interested.
Garth Evans.
garthevans.com
I am interested in your images and other documentation from your Minneapolis project. I think it would be really interesting to see the effect the Locked Room had on you guys as well as us students.
ReplyDeleteSheila Ross
Humm..... I should have been a bit more careful - I don't think I have images in a digital formate. I will see what I can do, be patient....
DeleteSheila,
DeleteThe images I have of my collaboration with Barry Kahn are all color slides that I need to get digitized.
At the end of our exciting but failed six week attempt to produce a collaborative work in public in the Minneapolis Museum of Fine Art we produced a slim booklet documenting the project. I have scanned the two pages from this booklet that list the "rules" we began with. It is clear that they are heavily dependent on procedures drawn from the A course.
I will send them to the blog manager and see if they can get posted.
Garth Evans