How might liveness, presence, and material forces contribute to the co-creative potential of artistic-practice research development? Shuttling conditions produce distinct daily environs that emerge as silent partners impressing their material force upon us – rocky barrenness, blinding light, scorching heat, desolation, expansiveness, dustiness – inviting vitalising disruption, making welcome that vibrant matter, vitalising relations from separated yet connected creative forces.
[Dust] is not about rubbish […] it is not about Waste. Indeed, Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed. The fundamental lessons of physiology, of cell-theory, and of neurology were to do with this ceaseless making and unmaking, the movement and transmutation of one thing into another. Nothing goes away. – Carolyn Steedman quoted by David Williams15
Our actions and movements negotiate the geological forces of water and lava, the climatic forces of desertification, the adaptive forces of other than human species, the mono-species forces of cattle agribusiness. The accumulation of all these forces informs our seeing, listening, and sensing, tracing collective and individual patterns, gestures, and perceptions.
David Williams’s Skywritings incite movement through resonant thematics: to look again, dusting, night, stars, sweat, salt, sand …
A really tiny round grain could have been at the bottom of a lake and then – in the scale of time that only geologists can appreciate – it could have been slowly lifted up into a giant mountain range, and then broken off the mountain, washed down to an ocean, stuck in a deep sediment, turned again into a rock, and so on … – James Elkins quoted by David Williams16
We are individual; we are collective. We are individual creative bodies, a collective body, present and absent bodies. We are a movement pattern through environment, elemental forces, and time and its tempos. Co-creation transpires with all that presents itself; with material and cultural conditions with which we are enmeshed – the indigenous civilisations still present within sites, the preceding lineages of land art and the mythologies of others’ journeys and of other cinematic, photographic, and literary images that colour our perception; with the situations into which we are implicated – the chance associations and happenstance occurrences. We collect an exposure to creative forces for new modes of practice and navigate the agonism of difference and the soporific comfort of consensus, contending with the frictions between one another.
Is the identity of the many based on coercive consensus or radical plurality? Is the one defined by narcissistic projection or an opening out to alterity? […] there is no art practice that avoids all forms of co-option, compromise, complicity. It seems wiser to acknowledge this impurity than to assume that it can somehow be defeated at the level of terminology. – Grant Kester7
Remote-crew artist John Vella has the Shuttle crew completing a daily process of archiving the insects that are killed in the encounter with the fast-moving Shuttle van. Dust traverses the porosity of exteriorities and interiorities. At Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah, the sun and the moon are all powerful at summer solstice, amplified for the delectation of our travelling selves and a group of locals arriving on open-air dune-buggy vehicles. Meredith Rogers has us all constantly aware of the shadows of our bodies, our vehicle, our participation in the play of light, vision, and perception. Mick Douglas gradually invites us to join his daily walks in anticlockwise circles, solitary circles, duet circles, vehicle circles, constellating circles. Sun and moon circle. Our shuttling gathers a plurality of forces into provisional focus, into the live and ephemeral foci in an ‘overlay of time on time’ (Lucy Lippard).8
The setting in motion of and playing out of conditions unfold as valued forms of co-creative practices and research. How might our individualised and collectivised body in motion affect one another’s practices? The performative, and its liveness, augments our practising presence, to dissolve formality, disciplinarity, and prescription. This blurs our cultural, generic, and generational assumptions of practice. We seek to produce and interrogate a set of transcultural practices – practices that seek to transcend rather than translate our cultural and material norms.9
Mick: The individuals are no longer simply individuals. Affects of mutual interdependence are underway. When a change of individuals take place, the remaining social body notes the difference. We are a collective mobile social body of eight parts: of eightness. The social body remembers. One member of the social body departs. Another member notes that we – the remaining social body – feel the loss, as if the collective body memory of all our limbs were the habitual basis of our embodied knowing.
We feel ourselves suffering the experience of the ‘phantom limb’: of remembering our lost limb that is no longer present. The wound of the absent limb and the presence of a new limb present challenges: how can the collective body knowledge integrate not a prosthesis but a fully functioning limb that has simply been absent from the experience collected to the present? How do the dominant body and the alien body negotiate their mutual presence? We are temporary residents-in-motion, making passage through the habitats of other composite bodies. The multi-legged bodies of the tarantulas and scorpions do their best to assert their rights upon us in Santa Catalina. We observe social bodies patterned along lines of standardisation, repetition, and common purpose in cattle yards and peopled highways and the not-always-visible but omnipresent military-industrial complex. We witness the exception to the rule, the aliens within, the incohesive assemblage. We experience the responsibilities of negotiating the formations and transformations of our relations, of the individual and the collective. Like the tarantula, our body needs to shed its exoskeleton to grow.
As a crew from diverse disciplines and backgrounds on the threshold of contingency and multiplicity, shuttling assembles preparedness for movement beyond pre-established practices. A social dynamic evolves through the adaptation of individual and collective practices and associated movements – transgressions of practised histories, roles, and positions. Gestures, actions, and improvised instantiations shuttle through the familiar and unfamiliar to affect and sometimes efface others.
If art is understood as an expression of autonomy and unity (the unity of authorial intention and of the work itself as semantic construct), then any concession to contingency and multiplicity will be perceived as a transgression. – Grant Kester10
Groupings form, reform, and are transformed by processes, creating a constellation of patterns subject to the conditioning of one another, of the social, and of the entanglements of more-than-human elemental forces. A vibrant matter,11 our sustained doodling. We cultivate the emergence of other practices through social encounters and through more-than- and other-than-social encounters, encounters outside our collective of bodies in motion, whether that be the expansion of our material environs or through interjection from our ‘remote crew’.
Doodling can be anything and doesn’t have to be on paper: it could be on the body, with the body, in the sand, on the car etc. It could be about itself as exploration or it might allow some of the themes of the journey to be translated … – Annalea Beattie12
In this landscape of living and working, our travelling praxis enfolds through daily tasks of moving and movement – arriving, departing, making, sorting, packing, unpacking, camping, decamping, getting into the Shuttle van and getting out of the Shuttle van, knowing how and surrendering beyond know-how. The pragmatic and playful emergence of multiple, mutating partnerships form dancing duets and transcend classification. Enfolding our practice and processing through repetition of encounters, we adapt to changing unknowns offered by sites, transits, and situations. Practices aggregate and re-distribute the mobile collective – walking, drawing, encountering, documenting, collecting, spatialising, assisting, exploring – inflecting and mutating as we adapt, reject, transform, and are subject to creative processes. All that is at play is appropriated: our physical and conceptual cargo and the baggage journeying with us; creating and expanding webs of shared experience; shifting our affinities to disciplinarity, expertise, capability, and senses of the possible. Shuttling with all that, and through the twenty hands of the collective body.
If oneness in art inevitably implies the use of force against the many – phrases like ‘mastery over materials’ in aesthetic criticism betray this state of affairs – then it follows that the many must also fear oneness. - Theodor W. Adorno quoted by Grant Kester13
Beth: Conditions becoming the co-creators, the silent partners and collaborators, in our work.
Shuttling from front seat to middle to rear, from edge to middle, from driver to passenger, from planner to participant.
Shuttling motion shakes off preconceptions and practices of a controlled laboratory, shifting focus to co-creating voices of landscape, flora and fauna, heat and light, the rocks, and emptiness, and the backlog of history pushing forward … shuttling motion shifting focus to the legacy of artists whose spaces we move through, whose practices move us, move again through our movements.
I move around and through, linger with the works of Smithson and Holt, conversing across time, inhabiting the same lines in space through my embodied drawing.
My conversation with this work entangles with seven other lines of conversation, lines in space. My practising making, un-making, and remaking space co-creatively entangles with environmental and domesticating practices remote and recent (pioneers, Judd, Zittel), and with those present here, now.
Performing being in real time, with accumulating bodily memory, with sensing and sorting through, processing and responding, with physical objects that have category problems, with starting and stopping times, with weather (or was it climate?), with altitude, bees, transparent scorpions, mist, with decision negotiations, with latent and restless ambitions and desires, with window drawing, with 4300 pounds of steel, cargo and beings, with culinary preparations, with being engulfed and peripheral, with spatial choreographies, with haziness, with lingering sensations of vehicular motion, with brightness, glare, with the great yawning silence that was in fact full of wind and insect wings’ vibrations, with the thread that ties our being together for this time, with emptiness and the eighty-mile stare.
We shuttle out of our studios and universities – our spaces of habitual and institutional practice – into other spaces dislocated from our comfort zones, homes, and fixed place. From homeliness toward something other, something intensely strange and uncanny.
It is not a matter of choosing sides – between models of nomadism and sedentariness, between space and place. […] Rather we need to be able to think the range of the seeming contradictions and our contradictory desires for them together; to understand, in other words, seeming oppositions as sustaining relations. – Miwon Kwon17
How can we practice what Miwon Kwon calls ‘sustaining relations’? The Shuttle crew respond to offers received from local hosts and surprise instructions from remote-crew members: at times to embrace, enact, and embody that which is offered or instructed; at times resistant yet surrendering to the provocations. Words are enunciated from these distant partners, words that have been culled from yet other creative processes and sources. Remotely, they take action through propositions on our practices as we journey and interact over time and space. Remote articulations from afar overlay the nearness of the mobile crew’s presence. Take sets of six Shuttle postcards produced by remote-crew member Neal Haslem that present archetypal images made from his own journey through these same landscapes two decades earlier. Drawings, collages, and scribbled missives gather on these postcards affording us to make connection with our environment and, by return postal journey, to local hosts.
New encounters and practices open up with displacement and defamiliarisation. A foreignness takes place in an encounter; we are foreign to one another, with one another, with place. As individuals gathered shuttling, we are privileged with the capacity to self-authorise this mobile enquiry.
Boundaries of spatial and social practice reveal how subjects are controlled in community formations. The policing of boundaries exposes and interpellates the individual through a habitual set of institutional, local, and global relations: surveilling and measuring actions, ethics, and sensibilities. Such practices can too often enable a double movement: a refusal to see the other and also an appropriation of binary logic, a duality that exposes neo-colonial imaginings and practices of othering when we navigate and name our spaces of encounter.
In the National Parks we visit, the invitation to enter is clear yet there is the command to ‘leave no trace’. Is this possible? Travelling through new spaces of encounter, we confront and question the contradictions of place making and trespassing. Deep colonial histories of experience and structure are reinscribed by a globalised mobility of enquiry: ‘one place after another’. Moving through the spatial and material tensions of the borders and boundaries around otherness, other states of being and personhood accumulate. One asks oneself, ‘how are we to enter this foreign space?’
James: In Gàidhlig, a conditioning mother tongue for my voice, doing and making are the same word (dèanamh). Dè tha thu a dèanamh? (what are you doing/making?). In an embodied sense, this socio-linguistics manifests a praxis of doing-making and conditioning for imagining and co-creating the everyday. Imagine the cèilidh above, that iterative practice of visiting, togetherness, sharing, and doing-making culture through bodies as space making: a phenomenological cycle of tradition and creativity through sensorial emplacement. This is also what I mean by that double ontology of practice, of doing-making the contradictions held in everyday life-being. Jane Bennett invites us to consider the ecological sensibility of ‘vibrant matter, which stretches received concepts of agency, action and freedom’.14
For the ethnographic spect-actor, the unarticulated artist, this also brings us to think on what Claire Bishop flags as a broader question for social practice – that is, its limits – and the paradox of how to (or not) re-present, document, and disseminate such a transient and transversal but ultimately material practice.
Didier is our youngest Shuttle crewmember, perhaps the smartest and most articulate one. We had our daily routine of moderating one another, through shared visitation, cèilidh, almost without words. Within this we shared our prosaic alliance of matter-energy negotiations: marking our bodies within the collective, sensing the visible and invisible, mapping time, space, and identity. Without words, we’d play with and practise our emplacements; we'd align our tents in the sand, site our bodies on the horizon, present our touch or glance as a joke, all within sensorial imaginings of space. Culture is ordinary. Is this tradition or creativity? We oriented our bodies to co-create and communicate presence and assurance. How does one capture ephemeral, improvised acts, the touch and trace of emplacement, to articulate our co-creations of space? There is something anthropoetic that is required.
