Tick Tack Tick Tack Tick
(2020)
author(s): Stuart Whipps
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
TTTTT research by Whipps focuses on the persistent dichotomy between art and science with the aim of disrupting it. He has opened up his art practice to inputs from the disciplines of geology, horticulture and dance, combining them in contemporary art settings to create nuanced readings. The resulting productions (artefacts, exhibitions and publications) allow for the emergence of a new sort of puzzle, which materialises through poesis in these different and often unrelated fields.
Whipps developed a co-working methodology that drew on expertise from Dr Andrew Rees (geology), University of Birmingham, Tom Brown, Head Gardener, West Dean Gardens and William Bracewell, First Soloist, Royal Ballet. This methodology was applied referencing a series of seemingly disconnected artistic nodal points, including: photographs taken at a surrealist sculpture garden in Mexico, archival material of the Scottish oil industry, stories of stolen flowers from a garden in North Wales. Using these nodes, plus others, Whipps elicited responses from the experts to inform his findings, which in turn were utilised in the production and presentation of new projections, prints and structural installation. They provided an accessible and common ground between these fields of knowledge, inviting visitors to meditate on the relationships that those fields can create when they collide in the new ways afforded by Whipps’s work.
This research has been enacted through a series of national solo art exhibitions at Spike Island, Bristol, DCA, Dundee; plus international group shows: CAPC, France, and the Irish Architecture Association, Ireland. Whipps’s research has also been disseminated in monograph publications: ‘Feeling With Fingers That See’ and ‘White Ashes Fell’ as well as in a group publication, ‘Le Musée Se Met Au Vert!’ published by Musée Des Beaux-Arts Bordeaux.
The research has been supported through two Arts Council England project grants and the Henry Moore Institute.
Kipper and the corpse
(2020)
author(s): Stuart Whipps
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
‘The Kipper and the Corpse’ (TK&C) borrows its title from an episode (March 1979) of the sit-com Fawlty Towers. Whipps’s TK&C research draws attention to both the social changes wrought by Thatcherism and prevailing media attitudes of the time. 1979 was pivotal for UK manufacturing as the then conservative government sought to undermine labour unions. Against this historical backdrop, the project raises questions about how the living memory of the pre-neoliberal world can be accessed and re-engaged with to bring about a collaborative understanding of present-day discourses around the politics and economics of labour. TK&C also offers a novel approach for paticipative creative activity, inverting the more normal artist-led working method.
TK&C is a unique community-based art project that included the restoration of a 1275GT Mini made in Longbridge in 1979. Through the process of restoring the car, Whipps worked with several Longbridge ex-employees with car production and engineering expertise, social historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. These participants brought specialist knowledge and vocational skills to bear, positioning the artist/researcher, Whipps, as the novice. This reversal of roles destabilised the standard researcher - participant relationship allowing for the emergence of more participative forms of knowledge production and transfer. This form of collaboration encouraged multiple audiences, from beyond the art world, to engage with the underlying context used by the project.
The practical outcomes of TK&C were augmented by information gathered from records at Warwick University, British Motor Museum archives, oral histories, media representations of British Leyland (sitcoms, political cartoons, tabloid newspapers) and photographic documentation.
The project has been supported by Longbridge Public Art Project (LPAP) and featured in contemporary art exhibitions, including touring venues such as the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017), the IKON Gallery (2019), and internationally at Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona (2020).
Translation as a Compositional Strategy
(2020)
author(s): Seán Clancy
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
The aim of this body of work is to explore translation, the act of communicating the meaning of one phenomenon (the source) to another phenomenon (the target) through musical composition. This is illustrated by three related works that translate different events/objects into musical experiences:
1. Fourteen Minutes of Music on the Subject of Greeting Cards
2. Forty-Five Minutes of Music on the Subject of Football
3. ireland england
The intention is to create interesting structures through innovative compositional techniques that may be taken up by others. The act of translation imbues the musical work with meaning relating to our lived experiences. As a result, composition as lived experience becomes the overarching narrative, highlighting a departure from more abstract concerns to hyper-personal ones.
Venice 1629: Exposition of Research
(2020)
author(s): Jamie Savan
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
This exposition takes the form of a portfolio of materials documenting the research questions, methods and processes underpinning the CD production 'Venice 1629' (performers: The Gonzaga Band, dir. Jamie Savan, released on the Resonus Classics label in July 2018). It includes 10 new performing editions, discussion of performance practice issues including rhythmic proportions, ornamentation and instrumentation, alongside the full recording in streamable MP3 format and a fully referenced version of the booklet essay.
Love Manifesto; embodying disorientation through erotohistoriography.
(2020)
author(s): Jakub Jan Ceglarz
published in: Research Catalogue
In her book ‘Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories’ Elizabeth Freeman (2010) recognises the erotic body as a method to speak about non-normative experience of chronopolitics for queer identities. Ceglarz’s research borrows Freeman’s method (erotohistoriography) and applies it in practice-led fine art research in order to materialise pleasurable nooks of time and to create experiences of disorientating interruptions. His research seeks to disjoint the dominant narrative of pain and trauma in discourses on LGBTQI+ identities.
Ceglarz does this by focusing on materialising the experience of melancholy that emerges from the loss of spaces that served and cared for gay erotic practices. His
installation titled ‘Love’ (2019) uses a combination of works that reflect on the migration of these spaces from the partially public sphere into pre-dominantly private. In these works he uses phallic imaginary embedding it with the domestic materialities and practices; from plates, egg cups, table cloths and hand towels that are painted, embroidered ironed and displayed. Accompanying the installation is a performance piece comprised of: reading out aloud the ‘Love Manifesto’ (Ceglarz, 2019); a love letter addressed to ‘My Dear Old Faggots’: and phallic shaped glitter pieces thrown sporadically into the air from a coffee cup with the word ‘Cocksucker’ painted on it. To enhance this experience, Ceglarz also uses the poetry of Jean Genet in his pieces, attenuating the non-chrononormative melancholy that allows for the “collapse of past and future into an immediate intensity” (Johnny Golding, 2013).
The installation and performance piece formed the basis of a solo exhibition in the international artist-run space, Lab155, Bologna (2019), and were part of the international conference ‘Un-tie the Knot: Redefining normativity in Love’ (2019) part of ORGAN VITA arts festival in Croatia held in the Museum of Nicola Tesla, Zagreb.