banff

The last part of the week has been as busy as any other point in the residency. Up to the last day we worked on the support structure of the piece, and we were lucky enough that plenty of people came through the studio to have a chat and some even discussed our work.

Knowing we would not be able to finish the piece, we concentrated on getting it as complete as possible for the sake of documentation. We also came to decisions about how to handle some of the outstanding issues: most of the blue tape, over which we debated as over no other home repair product before, will be removed from the piece in its finished state, with perhaps the exception of a few spots that will connect larger segments of the institution; the support structure will be made up of institutional detritus, assemblages made from furniture and books; lighting will be a combination of lamps used in the support structure and actual gallery lighting. We were always bothered by the floppiness and imprecision of the model architecture, but this will be taken care of when we actually glue up the walls and floors and the whole thing gains a considerable ammount of rigidity (and when it will become a true challenge to ship and store, as it will take up half a container of space.) We also would like to position the piece with plenty of space around it (or at least on 3 sides), which will change the way it relates to the space around it from the way it did to the corridor shape of our studio.

We left Banff on Friday the 14th, having had a last pool-playing and drinks session at the centre’s pub. Many of our co-residents dropped by for a farewell drink. We were sorry to miss those who didn’t. Now the sculpture is in pieces, in storage. Once we have figured where and when it will be shown, we will have to get together a few weeks before-hand to finish our work and install. Perhaps at that point we will pick up the thread of this blog…?

’til then.

The final week is proving a mixed bag. On the one hand, the open-studios event and party afterwards felt like the climax of the residency, yet we are left with a whole week afterwards, nor do the lectures and studio visits stop. So we have continued to work.

We’ve focused on a couple aspects of the piece: the support structure and the lighting solution. We’ve identified those elements of the support structure that work best and we are trying out ways of accentuating those. The more ‘woodshop’ aspects of the structure – those constructions built from strips of MDF and other wood obviously left over from raw materials being chopped up work less well. Also, using entire pieces of furniture is disruptive and looks unmagical, but it turns out that using supports built from pieces of chopped-up institutional furniture works well, especially in conjunction with detritus from institutional contexts – large buckets for food delivery, books cast off from libraries, lighting fixtures etc.

In fact, using lighting fixtures has led to an interesting development to do with the lighting of the whole work. We initially used a lamp as a simple object for holding up a section of the piece, but at some point it got plugged in and switched on. We liked the effect and are working out ways of exploiting it to light the piece. In particular it seems a good idea that the lighting be generated from within the piece, at least in part.

Back to the woodshop to cut up some chairs!

So. A long week finished with a bang, as Friday we had open studios, a performance, a pool tournament and a dance party. Christian went to bed while everyone else stayed up ’till the wee hours. We spent the rest of the weekend recovering and catching up on administrative and design work from home.

As part of the seminar series run by our residency leader, we decided to stage a performative event in the smaller of the two galleries at the Banff Centre. The idea was that we would attempt to funnel the energy from our seminar into a sound based performance in which each resident would fill a 9 minute slot with an acitivity of their choice. The only stipulation was that the activity would produce sound of some kind. Some people played clips of television programmes, some read from books, some played music and/or performed an action. Christian and I felt that the best way to do it was to record an interview with our fearless leader, Jan Verwoert. Admitedly, we thought the interview might also be useful for Bad at Sports, but the impetus for our approach was to have a conversation with Jan, which we hadn’t managed to do up to this point. Please keep in mind we were in a fairly crowded room and using too many microphones.

Recording of our interview with Jan Verwoert

Also, Christian is killing on the Ping Pong table but Duncan has been ruling the Pool Table. (Ping pong has been a consistent and recurring activity for us here, there being a table in the lounge on our floor of the residence building. The rule is generally that we can’t pass this lounge without stopping for at least one game, unless of course the table is occupied. Monday night we checked in for a match at 4:30 AM on our way home.) (The pool gets played at the legion, mainly.)

Today we concentrated on trying out some options for the support structure that underpins our piece. We decided that what would work best is a combination of constructed elements and found institutional detritus/paraphernalia. Tomorrow is our open studios day, and whatever work we manage to finish today is what we will show, though of course will have to be seen incomplete. The funny thing about it is that there is no set completion point with this piece, only a stopping point. Also, today we had our studio visit with Kitty Scott, which promised much but felt disappointingly like a mere formality.

So this week has been insanely crammed with residency activities, and has left rather little time for us to pursue our work. This is obviously very frustrating, especially considering how precious studio time together is to us. We have lectures, seminars, studio visits and meetings. It must be said that there is an enormous benefit from participating in all these events, but as it stands there is little new work to show.

Three other points from the previous two days: 1) we have both felt like we are neglecting ‘real world’ duties. Email in-boxes are getting worryingly full, prior commitments are suffering and responsibilities are not being fulfilled to the degree they should be. To that end, our schedule was further filled with tending to all these tasks extra-curricular to the residency; 2) we had our studio visit with Robert Linsley, who is currently an abstract painter. His response to our practice was quite general, though always welcome, and his comment that our next step should be to pursue a more serious solo exhibition re-affirmed something we both know and are collectively anxious about, and; 3) my friend John Cussans arrived at the Centre to do a 10-day writing residency, and though he’d been here since Saturday we only bumped into him on Tuesday (yesterday). This meeting had to be celebrated with a few drinks, so we spent some time at the local legion, easily our favourite drinking hole in this mad little town.

Having cleared much of the outside workload today, we hope to squeeze in some productivity between tomorrow’s various planned activities. Hopefully pictures to follow.

Somehow a week has gone by. not sure how that happened. We’ve both been somewhat tired and listless i suppose. Anyway, we begin week 5 with a summing up and some discussion.

* * *

What is an institution? This is the question to which we keep returning.

We started by articulating the institution through an escape narrative. We wanted stage the scene of a break-out from the confines of the institution’s precinct and thereby to evoke its larger structure. Our sculpture depicted the interior spaces that the escapee passes through in their passage from captivity deep within the institution, through the circuitous corridors of its architecture, and out the front doors into freedom. But what kind of ethos does such a sculpture express?

At its most optimistic, the piece assumes a slightly mocking tone towards the trope of freedom, and its impossibility with regard to social structures. Seen as the product of a more cynical position, it expresses a genuine desire for freedom from human collective endeavor which can only stem from a disparaging view of its institutions. Neither of these reads is helped by the proposed rendering of the piece, which left the outside of the architectural path that is traced a uniform white, while the interiors were to be finished to a doll-house level. The problem with this is not that it lodges the piece within the logic of representation, whose operation of deferment of the purely experiential we are happy to exploit like many an artist before us. The problem was that the power dynamic inherent to the scopophilia of the miniature was incommensurate with the questioning we wanted to subject the institution to. To create a perfectly controlled world modeled on the institutional space of society was to enact a false reclamation of that space, a sort of pyrrhic victory. So, having set up the promise of the institution in miniature by making the shapes of its walls and floors, wouldn’t it be more fitting to leave the power relation this promise contained unconsummated, to leave the materials raw and unfinished?

Our first step away from the initial concept was to rethink how we were going to treat the exterior: while initially the outside of the escape route was to be an immaculately constructed, smooth white finish. This was to be suggestive of minimalist geometric abstraction, and referred to a moment in art history when such a language was being developed. This was to tie a certain impulse towards completion (of both a historic trajectory as expressed in the cultural project of Art, but also of that culture’s stance towards the object) to the futile desire for freedom. We realised, however, that in so neatly stitching up our piece, in creating such a balanced arrangement of rationales, we were effecting a continuance of the very impulse we were purporting to dismantle. The outside of the architecture, and the support system used to float it in the gallery space (since upper levels are not supported on those floors below them which are not rendered in the sculpture, since they don’t form part of the route) had to be reconsidered.

In fact, in our discussions at this time, it became clear to us that we both considered it a problem in our practice more generally that we tend to over-resolution. Perhaps it comes in part from our process – because we live apart, we must do a fair ammount of pre-planning when it comes to making our work. This encourages a tendency to try and work out all the details of a production before we’ve begun to work with material. Also, each succesive project involves the use of different materials and processes, so that we don’t make decisions based on emergent concerns, but rather we are forced to treat the element of the emergent as problematic to our pre-conceived plan of production. But the emergent is the mode in which a work’s life asserts itself. It should be engaged with, not suppressed. So, with regard to the instituition piece, we considered how we might disrupt this over-resolution, which was definitely at odds with the way the piece was growing. But then, just how was the piece the growing, and what did we want the gesture of making it to mean?

What is an institution? Perhaps our original idea was not tenable. There was a certain disengenuiness towards our subject, and a tightness of resolution which belied the complexities of the relationship we were trying to represent. The plan to which we were working began to unravel at this point. What are institutions, and how do we fit within them? If our piece was about the relationship we all have to the institutions in which and through which we live, what treatment of the outside and what rendering of the inside would best realise this relationship?

Having built a rough armature of the architectural spaces at 1:24 scale, and having decided that the outside of the piece, including the support system, would need to encapsulate a level of irresolution, we decided to stack found objects to hold up the piece. Certain institutional furnishings and paraphenalia would help to evoke the sort of spaces we were dealing with, but were also resorting again to a literal logic that tended towards the comfort of solid resolution. Perhaps a more careful but abstract approach is required. A certain level of hermeticism might even be helpful in evoking a sense that there is no knowing what is on the supposed outside of a constructed interiority when it comes to social structures like institutions. So. What, then, exactly, is an institution?

The important features of institutions that we immediately identified were: institutions are emergent from human social activity; they are as much enabling as constraining to human agency; in fact, institutions propose models of proscribed individual agency. This last point is especially important, because it describes specifically the way that institutions are enabling: they establish systems within which certain modes of action become possible. Partly this is through a process of authorisation, but one which is not in itself legalistic. In fact, Deleuze makes an interesting note regarding the relation between institutions and laws, proposing that tyranny is a kind of regime with few institutions, and democracy a kind of regime with many institutions. Oppression, he says, is apparent when laws are brought to bear directly on individuals rather than on the institutions which they constitute. Institutions, then, define realms of possibility. Seen in this light, our piece was beginning to look like it addressed life more generally, that it functioned like an image of a life lived within the structures of society. This impression was reinforced by Frances Stark when she and Stuart Bailey visited our studio.

But it is important in all this that we are not using the institution as a metaphor or an emblem for human life. And if it can’t stand in for human life, why does the life our piece represents move only within the confines of institutional walls? What about the moments of life outside of institutional complexes? Surely we don’t mean to suggest the grim view that all humans are institutionalised creatures because they are dependant on social structures.

Perhaps what the piece suggests is that the categories we use to think of human life – the individual, the agent of a subjectivity, etc – are a form of institution. So maybe in letting the piece speak for itself, take on a life of its own, we have allowed it to answer our question, or at least to propose a possible answer. And although I wouldn’t want to stretch the term ‘institution’ to breaking point by suggesting it simply means the same thing as ‘structure’ or ‘system’, this definition certain resonates with the sense that what can be conciously grasped of a life lived, the segment of existence that be brought to bear upon itself, is itself the result of precisely the kind of enabling that institutions effect. Our piece then, doesn’t represent a life lived so much as the journey of a conciousness, made possible by the institutions we uphold on each others’ behalves.

In speculating about institutions and how they work, it occured to us that we are in some way creating a monument. The idealisation this involves maybe has to do with the ethos our piece is beginning to express: a hopeful commitment to those institutions to which we belong, and acknowledgment of their importance, and an embrace of the possiblities they afford.

* * *

This weekend we went away. Duncan’s wife Joey, fresh from a work trip to New York, joined us, as did two friends from the residency and the Banff Centre. We drove to Duncan’s parents’ condo in Radium and spent a couple nights recovering from the exhaustion we’d built up, and taking a break from working at the coal face of our practice. We are essentially reinventing the whole endeavor, and it is not always easy work. But much refreshed, we came back for the last two weeks of the residency. Within an hour of our return we had our first meeting, this time with Jonathan Watkins, director of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery. The visit went very well, probably because Jonathan is a very encouraging and affable chap.

We had our studio visit from frances (starke) and stuart (bailey), two artists from LA. It went well – they pointed to some perceived weaknesses in the earlier work, and gave us some good directions for pursuing current projects.

We are exhausted. Time for drinks and a film (bruno) at the only cinema in banff.

Today, we pushed hard to get a few elevator shafts and stairs completed, and started to test logics for propping and flying the levels.

We were quite “bitchy” with each other as we struggled with some of the issues that have arisen from changes to the piece we are developing. The key to which seems to be a shift in how we understand the purpose of what we are building and the goal of its production.

Jan’s lecture tonight was about “care” and what it might mean that we care. Reaction was split with one of us being highly sympathetic to his position and the other struggling to find anything usable or re-purposable in the lecture.

Then we continued into the “bitchy” haze and argued over drinks. We went to bed friends and excited about tomorrows crit with Francis and Stuart.

Here at the close of we three, Duncan is looking forward to the Silke Otto-Knapp opening tomorrow at the Walter Phillips Gallery, and the barbecue that will follow it. Christian is going to miss it because he is going camping.

Much of our piece’s initial buildout was accomplished this week. Only the stairs and elevator shafts remain to be built. As for the next phase of development… well, that remains to be seen. We expect that by Tuesday we will have photos of the whole assemblage with the upper floors suspended (or propped) in place, and hopefully a better sense of what the next phase is to be will emerge.

We continue to discuss the work we are doing, to flesh out the pieces that are in progress, and to think about how this will influence our practice coming out of this residency. It is very exciting but very tiring.

Now we’re going for drinks. (duncan returns to the studio from one of banff’s shocking clubs, where christian was painting, and both go home around 3:30.)

After a very productive and active front end to the week, we spent the day tending to our own problems and concerns. It left both of us feeling a little stressed about what needs to be done, not in our practice but in our separate and respective lives.

Our shared life continues to chug forward and we have had some productive arguments about where thing are going. We are working to (re)build a set of shared concerns. The residency has really forced us out of the comfort of our little world(s). Daily, there seems to be some new crisis (actual or imagined) that we need swallow and digest. One of the strangest is that we no longer know what we both “like” or why we like the things we claim to. It has been suggested to us that it is necessary that we have “points of reference” for our creative life. We will let you know when we have a set of “ghosts” that haunt our practice. We have enjoyed a hyper-hermetic practice but we could do with a good deal of opening up to the world and other ideas.

Although, this pause gives us a good opportunity to list the people involved in our adventure.

Jan Verwoert
Stuart Bailey
Frances Stark
Robert Linsley
Jonathan Watkins
Ron Terada
Eli Bornowsky
Anthony Burnham
Katarina Elven
Megan Hepburn
Ivan Galuzin
Joel Herman
Katie Herzog
Dil Hildebrand
Jeremy Hof
Jacinthe Lessard-L.
Roy Meuwissen
Maggie Michael
Mark Neufeld
Beth Stuart
Danna Vajda
Kristina Kudryk
Katie Bethune-Leamen

All but a few (sorely missed) members of our residency went on a group hike today. We met early, had breakfast, made sandwiches and boarded a yellow schoolbus. A half-hour drive took us to the base from which we hiked to Healy Pass. And what a beautiful day on which to do it! It is early summer in the mountains, and the alpine flowers were in full bloom. We went up through thick woods on an increasingly narrow trail under clear skies. As we emerged above the tree line and into a series of meadows the mountains seemed to rise up around us. But we had our most spectacular contact with the wildlife while resting at the peak of our hike: positioned on a ridge overlooking a wide valley, we were privileged to see a grizzly bear make its way across the whole of the plain below us. It stopped at one point and stood on its hind legs, sniffing the air around. It must have decided it didn’t like the smell of us, because it loped off to the cover of the trees and we lost sight of it. Mysteriously unperturbed by the proximity of the bear, we napped in the mid-day sun and then began our descent. This is when we discovered that perhaps bears aren’t the only worry for mountain walkers: the mosquitoes came out in force and made a feast of us. But is was certainly worth it on many levels: the views, the sighting we made, and getting a chance to talk to some of our fellow residents we hadn’t had the must opportunity to get to know until now.

Today we continued work on the miniature architecture. It is slowly becoming less a model in the usual sense. We have decided to steer clear of the doll-house approach, and also to be open to the possibilities this series of connected architectural space will offer as material for an installation. The support structure has moved from being an engineering problem (“how do we float the upper levels?”) to being an aesthetic one (“How do we pile up objects to support the upper levels in a way that will add to the piece?”). In fact, the support system has become the pivot on which the direction of our approach changed. Now we are concerned with how to avoid a clear binary logic from emerging – so it doesn’t become about ‘inside versus outside’ or ‘architecture versus support structure’. Somehow the interiority we are constructing through the very use of an architecture has to be disrupted. Perhaps the objects on which it rest will stage a revolt and invade?

To explain. We had a week of running on auto-pilot, executing the planned project. We got started building. Then we realised two things: we were running on auto-pilot; and the three rooms we’d built were HUGE, much bigger than either of our envisionings had predicted. Not that they came out physically larger than our plans, just that they looked bigger, and made us realise the enourmous scale of our project. In actually, it’s the first problem that’s bigger. So we did what we do: we argued, we thought about it, we digested and were digested.

After the heroic and exhausting tumult of the last couple of days today seemed restful. Christian was in the wood shop working by 9 and Duncan showed up after he finished his laundry.

We got the lions share of the second and third floors cut out and ready for assembly. Although the emotion burn of the last couple of days “re-evaluation” of everything all the time, we have returned to our task with a renewed vigor.

here is a picture of our setup in the woodshop, and a shot of the piece so far along with a view of the maquette for the whole thing in the foreground.

no premise will remain untouched, no basic assumption unexamined. today we gave up everything.

we had our first meeting with the director of our residency, Jan. He seems very articulate and made some good comments, though he is not sparing with his criticism thank goodness. His main point about our work was to do with it being overly presentation based, and not delivering further interest once the viewer’s attention has been arrested. It was good that he made the comment because it re-iterates one of the central problem we have identified and are working on that comes out of our dislocated dialogic practice. How to not talk the piece to death, then execute? What other strategies are there when we live continents apart? Anyway, it was slightly frustrating that we could not show him and talk about our current ideas, because there is a lag of a year or more between what we plan to do and what we are able to actually do. But the point remains, and we’ll have to find ways of addressing the problem. For now, we are going ahead with the institution piece as planned, but with the support for upper floors constructed out of found materials, institutional sundries, furniture, books, etc. Perhaps the build of all this will lead to some new aesthetic directions or ways of working.

Then folks got together at our studio.

The recurring problem with having a practice that is not based on a consistent means of production is that each piece necessitates learning new skills. While this keeps us entertained, the results of our work are underwhelming until we get a handle on whatever skills we need. Today we started building our sculpture, and not having made a huge architectural maquette, problems immediately arose. Most of these have to do with the engineering of the structure so that it is stable, and the fact that our beautiful 1/8 inch birch plywood is so warped it looks like the surface of a lake. So the latter problem we deferred as we are starting with the ground floor and can use the ground underneath to straighten things out. But as for the structural stability of the whole piece… well, this problem has forced us to think about the conceptual underpinnings of the whole piece: that we are modeling an interior with no exterior is central to the work (we are both formalists at heart maybe). So no visible means of attaching modules are acceptable, nor are ‘legs’ to support the weight of structure, since they become architectural in themselves. Then we hit on a solution that will make the work much more interesting, and represents a new aesthetic direction for us: we will use only what is available, only that which we can find, combine and improvise to support the piece. We realised that paying so much attention to negating the exterior, we were constructing one. This way, the chaos of the object we use to support the pristine interiors contributes to the sense that inside and out belong to different registers, don’t correspond, and have nothing to do with each other. breakthrough!

we have our first meeting Jan, the director of our residency. So we are doing a first hanging of prototypes for our piece titled (tentatively) ‘alphabet’ or ‘all the letters of the alphabet rotated 360 degrees’, or a combination of those.

This was our first weekend here. It’s clear that we are no longer at the start of the residency, but rather mid-flight. Over the past two days, between the two of us, we have processed 1 1/2 hangovers, a revised (and final) set of schematics for the piece, 3 pieces of 1:24 scale furniture, 1 trip to canmore (nearest town) for supplies, 1 walk up Tunnel mountain, 2 lunches, 4 dinners and no breakfasts. This week, it’s time to start the build of our piece.

today we drove to Calgary, the nearest city to the banff centre and the place both of us grew up. Calgary. What can i say about it? it’s a broken city, full of blocked flows and stymied energy. Money is much in evidence, but mostly in the way it creates hyper-growth of the sprawling developments of huge houses, enormous roads (that don’t work, traffic crawls along while there is no viable public transport infrastructure), and tank-size cars. It’s a misnomer to say that the place is dominated by suburbs because it IS suburbs and nothing but. The people are very friendly, but the place itself is a train wreck.

Duncan bought birkenstocks, fearing he’d lost his credibility and his soul. I think they look comfortable. We then spent hours getting plywood and other sundries for our sculpture, then were glad to leave the city and get back to the mountains.

Above is an isometric projection of the piece we are working on. It is a model of only those interior spaces a ‘subject’ would pass through in their escape from a large unspecified institution. Sections will refer to different institutions – school, hospital, corporation, prison, library etc. No outside architecture will be modelled – only the interiors experienced by the ‘subject’.

day 3 of the residency went by like a flash. transitioned from moving in to being here. drank with the residents ’till late.

day 4 has been the first proper day, no orientations or structured activities. People on the residency seem a good bunch – there are 19 of us. Varied work and practices.

Today we sorted out that we would indeed go with 1:24 scale on the piece – the added patheticness of the slightly smaller-than-grand maquette is attractive to us. also means the end product will weigh less, take up less space, which is a bonus. We’ve also decided to focus on 4 rooms of the interior: the holding cell, the lobby, the classrooms and the central hall, in that order. We’ll see how far we get on them, but if we could get at least these done it would be enough to photograph the piece and give a sense of the finished product.

We did yoga today and got off-campus for dinner. Change of scene was nice (and after only 4 days!)

We got into the studio today.

Another twist was taken as we pushed our way through the “build drawings” and after some beer aided chatting a further reduction to the scale of the piece was made. We are now working at 1:24. The primary concern for us was showing the piece. Our original drawings called for the piece to be mounted and staged in a space that was in the neighbourhood of 35′ x 45′ and that just felt unwieldy. The other concern was that we need to maximize our time together on this residency and we wanted to make some head way on a few other projects.

Images of the piece and the studio will come tomorrow.

We are going to try and have more photos the flickr stream rocking by sunday. We are just going to host them locally but we should still have them up and running by Sunday.

and then we argued. as per usual.

the first thing to go great was deciding that the huge ammount of planning and preparation we’d done for our sculputral project needed to be thrown out the window. Our architectural model was in 1:18 scale. Now it needs to be in 1:20 scale. When you are collaborating between london and chicago, there is a fair ammount of error than can creep into the process of developing a complex architectural work. oh well.