I'm also trying to work out what I meant by some of my notes - in particular what I meant by BAF Syndrome - if you have any idea then please let me know.....edited to add at 17.45 - BAF stands for Blue Arsed Fly as I have been running about like a blue arsed fly most of this week. Anyone who knows the origin of the phrase - please do tell me.
It's been a really busy week not helped by feeling under the weather and waylaid by appallingly bad stomach ache either but I feel I have got a few things done this week - namely got some printing done with the help of the chap deep down in the bowels of the college - I printed or rather had printed some 7 images that I'd taken (2 digital - one of me and my husband at the top of a car park in Manchester taken in January and one of the view out of the window of the Chapel in St George's Fields taken last summer when the university very kindly gave me access to it, and 5 on film - 3 on colour film at Temple Newsam taken just before xmas and two of the same film image of a bench in St Marys Churchyard one inverted and one normal taken last November.
It was interesting to see how the different printing methods each changed the way the same image looks - the inverted black and white digital images look okay on canvas but the colour ones of flowers look like any of the canvas prints you can now pick up for cheaps in Ikea or Wilkinsons (not that there is anything wrong with that but I want my images to stand out not blend in with commercially available homogenised ones) plus canvas is quite expensive to print on.
The ones on matt A4 paper again look okay but nothing special but the ones printed on tracing paper (which joy of joys is the cheapest to print on) look by far the best - they have an ethereal translucent quality to them which I love plus they will look good either just hanging or up against a window or a lightbox and I am now planning to rescan the original negatives of them so I can get them printed to AO size without losing any of the quality of the original image.
Think I will also have to try and retake/ remake some of them on 120 film aka medium format using my favourite camera - a Nettar Zeiss Ikon from 1956 which both looks fabulous and is a joy to use. Fingers crossed they will come out okay though...aah the unpredictable joy and difficulty of using film without that handy screen on the back of the camera reassuring you that yes it's working or immediately telling you no, it isn't so change your settings......
I also experimented with different shapes on the surface of the paper (circles, squares) and am v pleased with the circular one - though part of me is thinking maybe I should have left it in the sun a little longer but it clouded over and I thought I saw a spot of rain on the window.....and of course it brightened up again whilst I was washing it but a chum has said it has an opening credits of Bagpuss quality about it, another has said it looks v victorian and another said 'they have a very errie quality-a bit like what might stay with you after waking up from a dream' which pleases me enormously, plus hopefully once they are dried and framed they will look even better. I have started saving the dying petals from the bunches of flowers I have to go in the frames and I intend to pick some site specific flowers too if possible.
So lessons learnt - different papers/printing surfaces make a massive difference, I need to curb my impatience, practice at drawing/painting a circle and not to lose sight of the fact that this is the best photographic fun I've had in ages and as much as I love the college darkroom I'm happier at home where I'm in as much control as I can be of the process - ie no-one except a cat walking past to look at what I'm doing and no-one to dry or drain anything else on top of what I'm trying to do. Plus I am loving it's haptic hands on physical interaction as opposed to just clicking a button on a machine - though to be fair that is involved too, either with the original image or transferring it onto acetate to then put on the cyanotype paper.
Plus as I said before cyanotyping is a victorian process in origin and it was popularised by a woman called Anna Atkins (details about her here) so it warms the cockles of my victorian era loving feminist heart. However the irony of a self proclaimed goth and lover of the darkness being dependant upon strong sunlight to create the images I want is not lost on me....but then aside from a love of gothic literature and lovely old black and white horror films and a fixation with graveyards I'm quite a crap goth really and even my hair isn't as black as it could be as it's a while since I dyed it and I haven't had chance to redye it and now I'm waiting til I get it cut or else I'll have to do it twice .....and it was a music subculture when I first came across it in my tender and impressionable teenage years and I am much much happier listening to lovely 1930's and 40's big band swing, or Frank Sinatra's greatest hits.......
But I am excited about seeing Laibach* in a few weeks and read with interest an interview they did for Louder Than War earlier this week (full interview here) (and I am writing this blog post whilst listening to Spectre and whilstling along v badly indeed..) and I was most struck by their response to the question about them being provocative:
'..We like conflicting situations, but we never provoked for the sake of provocation itself; we did it out of necessity, because by definition a work of art is no good if it doesn’t provoke – and that is a vital rule, valid in any political system anywhere.'
and there is a lot of food for thought in that for me......not that I think I am brave enough to provoke....
As well as printing, personal tutorials and attending the last of the very informative Leeds In Your Lunch Hour lectures at Trinty Church by Dr Kevin Grady of Leeds Civic Trust I also attended the Feminist Art Event at Leeds Library yesterday which sadly due to stomach ache becoming intolerable I had to leave at lunchtime, but which featured entertaining and thought provoking presentations from Casey Orr whose portraits were a joy, Jo Hassall made me chuckle and think with her presentation which featured a hostess trolley and a scab picking finger ( I would kill for a hostess trolley)and the talk by Melanie Maddison about her feminist zines Shape and Situate and Colouring Outside The Lines was both enlightening and empowering. I bought copies of all her lovely zines and the Home Rules presentation by half of Bristow and Lloyd was also a joy - but the morning was also beset by technical difficulties with the projection equipment and Kiff Bamford's talk about a photograph of a vulva by Henry Machionne as discussed by the french philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard left me completely cold. Partly because he read out his slide - admittedly it was in french but even so I can read and do not need someone to read things out for me - translate yes, but not read.
There was also mention of Derrida and (my beloved) Barthes which made me feel like it might not have been very accessible to folks who are not familiar with either of those I've just named, and also like it was bit of an exclusive club and I'm not sure how I feel about that except it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, even though thanks to my recent reading I have some understanding of the ideas and concepts and so am on the edges of that group. Is it being on the edge that bothers me? No because my discomfort is not about not being fully part of it but being fully part of it.
Which in turn makes me worry and think is it inevitable that we all become what we most fear and more than occasionally and possibly unfairly deride?....
And speaking of intellectual approaches, was chatting with a chum who is working on the last song for their third album (and who have also kindly provided me with a soundtrack for a piece of visual work I am hoping to start work on when the weather has improved a bit and so it won't be too horrible for my long suffering ever patient and lovely husband to lie down on the ground and pretend to be a corpse for me) and you can check out examples of their fabulous work here and how hard I am finding it approaching art from an intellectual angle as opposed to an immediate emotional response and how yes it does deepen understanding, change the way I look at things and think about them and think about creating them and what I am trying to achieve with them but how it also makes me think of my chum Jon who when watching a lacklustre phoned in performance from a band at a festival pronounced it ' a dry wank'.
And this is what I fear an intellectual response to artwork may become - a dry wank of a response trotting out standard philosophical approaches as opposed to something immediately heartfelt and visceral.
What else - earlier in the week I met the external examiner for the course who seems a thoroughly nice chap (and no I'm not just saying that because at some point he'll probably read it) and who gave me some useful reading recommendations and we also talked about the uses of flowers in memorials and how they differ from culture to culture - how they are mostly used to signify a death in the UK but how they are used as offerings in other cultures which them lead to a discussion about what we have left on graves and what we want left on our own. I once left a toblerone on my Nana's grave as she didn't like cut flowers (what use are they, you can't eat them) though she loved flowers and had a kitchen and garden full of them but she did love Toblerone so I left one of those on her grave instead. My husband said I'd made a tramps day....
I'm not sure what I would want left on mine.....what would you like left on yours?
I've been dared to put a picture of Peter Cushing in my next presentation which is easy as I've done that so far anyway but the sting in this tale is that it has to be a picture of Peter Cushing from At The Earth's Core which is not one of my favourites of his as he looks nowhere near as dashing in it as he does in The Curse Of Frankenstein. But never let it be said I don't rise to a challenge so will have to find one I like and one which will fit in context.....
I've been writing this for over 2 hours now and my prints are almost dry but not quite......I'm just too impatient.....
*I think Laibach are responsible for the most beautiful cover version EVER - namely their version of Across The Universe though I am also a huge fan of their more stompy dance music too - and just hearing the beginning of Tanz Mit makes me want to put on very big boots indeed....though my fave stompy big boots dance tune is still Lass Uns Tanzen by Scooter which I absolutely adore as it reminds me of dancing about in Whitby with good chums and also my lovely much missed friend Henry who translated the lyrics for me and they mean 'let's dance or fuck or both as we will all be dead tomorrow'. Fairly good advice there I think.
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