Eye Projects
Ken Turner & Jane Beech
Eye Projects is an attempt to translate or transpose philosophic constructs through an accessible or 'Universal' language of performance, in this sense the earlier 'working notebook' from 2002 represents this experimental phase of the work, and where the artists involved have worked sporadically, yet persistently, and through a number of phases, as a result of this approach.
The website and specifically the archive therefore, is a 'canvas' or portal for this experience, and as much as for the performers, as for the 'audience'. The artists involved, have at differing stages and from their own perspectives, furthered their own ideas through this vehicle of the 'imaginativeeye'
Eye Projects therefore, is a new direction, in that 'the projects' visualised and completed, have been inaugurated in the light of the 'The Whatever' investigations.
'Eye Projects' has been established specifically to realise a creative space that sits beyond what is already imagined in any collaboration or configuration. It is therefore always in a state of preparedness for action. A form of will to action, vita activa, and the Get in the Ring collaboration as a result of the NSA commission is no exception. On my part I would like now to clarify the approach to research in a poetic sense for the project and this is important. Whilst the protagonists, supported by the Arts Council have had some instances of exchange in terms of identification of constructs and ideas that elicit similar enthusiasm in terms of interest in these ideas and the boundaries created by investigation particularly in performative terms and in the “text” that is produced as a result, that is where the story ends in terms of how the protagonists have come together as artists and for the purposes of the Kick Boxing project in the gallery. I am purposely now keeping to as clear a train of thought as I am able as my Academic work as a lecturer in Performance and in terms of what “I do” for work and within which my economic stability resides is often a leveller in terms of what I consider I have produced in earlier incarnations both collaboratively and singly as an “artist”. As an artist I think that I have been responsible for not only rigorous challenges to the prevailing systems of thought and practice but in a chaotic and as gut a feeling as is needed in order to make the work exist and thus change not only my perspectives and perceptions but those of the prevailing audience or public for the work. I am concerned now that my reader might be already putting this book pressing the pages on either side in order that the spine gives a little /thinking, “well get on with it then, we are waiting what is it that you are trying to say, spit it out!” Those more patient individuals will recognize almost immediately the hesitancy and uncertainty of someone who doesn’t quite know what they are going to say next or do they?
This hard won freedom from the current exegeses, is not to suggest that this forms of academic work that circulate in and around the performative constraints of Live work and performance art and its visual and demonstrative manifestations are lacking somehow, more that an opportunity such as the one offered by the Exchange Gallery to invite or select NSA members to operate under the aegis of the “collaboration” banner, and its metaphoric hat Double Vision, is an opportunity or has been an opportunity to think of the Gallery as a place where the public will go and willingly to take part in an event that brings together and gives airtime to artists who otherwise would remain confined to the bowels of the building metaphorically, where the” Head” so to speak, is not so concerned with imaginative flights and poetic missives, but remains locked into the more mundane reality of the “supper on the table” daily routine, (for some at least). Anyhow, what am I saying? in this reflective analysis about what art, work, and the academic have in common and where the research required for the Kick Boxing event represents a natural progression towards the resolution of its component parts. A kind of physical and mental audit then of fitness, as Ken would suggest for purpose.
I want to pause a moment there in order to just focus a little better, focus on this difference, or in the différance and to recollect what in fact was the originiary remit (apart from the opportunity presented to reconstruct the research as research in its own image so to speak). In this sense my own self inflicted remit and as I had briefly spoken with Rebecca, only on meeting in the event of the Live Art in Falmouth Festival in 2008, and prior to that at the NSA show of 2007 and the celebration of 50 years of the NSA with our own contribution again inaugurated by Ken Turner and in a Performance that presented the perceived ‘Shifts in Perception’ that the Newlyn School of painting endured and enjoyed at the turn of the twentieth century and in ‘collaboration’ with developments on the Continent, in the works of the Impressionists and specifically in the interpenetrable construct of phenomenology, that arguably led in this context in the concerns of the perceptual frameworks that twentieth century visual and conceptual art developed to the impasse of deconstruction, “textually”.
Perhaps I am already running fairly humourlessly and overtly seriously into a brick wall, metaphorically this is just that not a metaphor at all just a brick wall. So brick by brick and argument by argument I have attempted in my own academic research deconstruct the frameworks within which these development in perceptual thinking have taken place and where the opportunity to both work with Ken Turner and at the Newlyn Gallery under the guise of not only the Transitions events of 2003/4 but the NSA shows mentioned above. Get in the Ring therefore, and I am getting to it now, represented therefore this opportunity that is so cherished by the artist to galvanise and both synthesise the effort to make present, to manifest to give voice to, further develop, call it what you will, this work of the past 8 year collaboration for myself with Ken Turner of the NSA group. In this instance therefore I have seen the Exchange Gallery and the Newlyn gallery as a place where, not a free rein, but a contemporary audience in the form of the gallery itself and the idea of the fiction of what I have perceived in contemporary developments in art practice has been enacted and particularly where my interest has poetically fallen to its own examination in a form of argumentative gymnastics and in an engagement with philosophy through my original exchange with Ken in the specific value that philosophic thought can bring to the construct of Performance and Live Art practices.
How far we have run the line of this thinking is represented on the current web-site for the imaginativeeye a project for the web set up for the specific purpose of documenting the conscious and unconscious procedures of this form of working.
‘Get in the Ring’ therefore is a bit like the book mentioned in its making snapping firmly shut. Where the people and the audience, have at least spoken, made their point. Seen the evidence of the culmination of the profound experience of the sensibility represented by Ken’s ability to bring this project in to the gallery and to a deadline, localised and supported by the research procedures that were formulated around this will to action.
In this sense having briefly and quite randomly lighted upon Hegel’s construct of Rhetorical Fiction, I can hold my hand on my heart and swear that this particular remit to juxtapose/the kick of art with the kick of the boxer, to the simultaneous metaphor of the body really and in action was indeed a kick, that revealed the inner workings that I am trying to get at here.
The Get in the Ring through Julie and Nathan’s expert care and attention to the detail of their action in situ, revealed what Hegel originally suggest in 1828 is the living work of art. This Hegelian construct of living history, co-incided not surprisingly with developments in scientific cognition and the constrct iof consciousness and self consciousness perceptively newly emergent and a parallax tp the invention iof photography as positoned historically in hegels lecture series on the Fine Arts his last lectures in Berlin by Paul Delaroche.
The idea of gymnastics of the mind however is an age old form I suggest of the dramatising of the question, in this sense the performative function of rhetoric and the rhetorical which resonates with Julies original question on her agreement with ken to engage with the project in that the digital is now a all pervading form of perception in terms of how we might see the worlds. The opportunity
To draw and to create the communiqué to draw represents a dynamic convergence, a form of life-blood in the rending of the current obsession with the text and its visual counterpart in the image.