Care + Attend

7/21/2019 Care + Attend

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Care + AttendCurated by Emma Cocker + Joanne Lee

Contributors include:Kate Briggs

Daniela Cascella,

Beln Cerezo

Emma Cocker

Steve Dutton + Neil Webb

Victoria Gray

Rob Flint

Mark LeahyJoanne Lee

Martin Lewis

Sarat Maharaj

Brigid McLeer

Hester Reeve

Lisa Watts


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Care + Attendcomprises a constellation of fragments and extracts - of different

intensities and durations - where the exposition of research emerges as a poetic and

performative event, generating moments of potential resonance and dialogue. This

event explores the theme Unconditional Lovethrough the principles (perhaps even

methodologies) of care and attention, as applied within specific (artistic) practices of

both the everyday and of the self.

Beginning with the observation that both curate and curiosityhave shared etymology

in the term care, Care + Attendseeks to develop a research vocabulary based on

receptivity, openness, fidelity, integrity, intimacy, friendship and commitment (whilst

not ignoring the parallel principles of distraction, inattention, the act of closing ones

eyes or of looking away). Cocker and Lee have invited a range of artists & writers to

share and reflect on their own processes, philosophies and politics of care and

attention, and to present these through live performance, screenings and spokenword. Care + Attendunfolds over a 3-hour period: at times the invitation to the

audience is to sit, to listen and to watch, attending to a spoken presentation or a film

screened. At other times, the invitation will be to change position, to move, to

wander, to encounter performances and actions happening throughout the space. At

times, there will be invitation to browse some of the publications brought to the

event by contributors, at other times, the audience is invited to contribute to the

event in the shared reading of a text. The audience is invited to attend for the full

duration, to be movedby the different unfolding energies and intensities, receptive to

the different relations and connections between diverse practices as they are brought

into temporal and spatial proximity.


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Schedule of Activity

Sequential elements

(Timeline approximate to indicate the duration of each component)

Timeline

00.00 Emma Cocker and Joanne Lee, Care + Attend

00.15 Rob Flint, on the road to your house

00.30 Kate Briggs, On Translation and Table-Making

00.55 Beln Cerezo, How to Open my Eyes?

01.05 Sarat Maharaj, Ignorantitis Sapiens: A Trolls View

01.30 Lisa Watts, 32 Significant Moments in Artistic Research

01.40 Joanne Lee, Surface Attention

01.50 Mark Leahy,flat-head self-tapping

02.25 Emma Cocker,Close Reading

02.35 Daniela Cascella- The attention dwells on the peripheral

02.50 Steve Dutton and Neil Webb, End of Ends

Durational elements: throughout and at intervals

00.00 > Victoria Gray,Berthing Bone

00.00 > Martin Lewis, Perpetual Rehearsal; Boredom 4

00.00 > Brigid McLeer,Isola: Incontro

00.00 > Hester Reeve, I care and attend to the book and the book cares and attends to the we in me.

00.00 > Lisa Watts,Hairbrained+ Studio Activity Sheets


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Abstracts + Biographies

Kate Briggs, On Translation and Table-Making

On Translation and Table-Makingis the title of a book-in-progress on the work of translation: its

rhythms and conditions, its modes of learning and unlearning, the forms of its attention, its

particular articulation of the activities of reading, writing and making. In this presentation I willread from different sections of the book, re-sequencing them in a way that attends to themes of

the session and foregrounds my experience of translating some of Roland Barthess late work.

Kate Briggs is a writer and translator based in Paris. She is the translator of Roland Barthess How

to Live Together(2013)and The Preparation of the Novel (2011), both published by Columbia

University Press. Other publications include: Exercise in Pathetic Criticism(2011) and The Nabokov

Paper(2013), both published by information as material, and Small Hand (a paper-size poem) in

Convolution: A Journal of Conceptual Criticism. She has new work forthcoming in Lesprit crateur (on

practicing with Roland Barthes) and downloadable from the Leeds College of Art Library website

(on what we call by the books name). She is a core tutor on the MFA in Fine Art at the Piet

Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and also teaches at the American University of Paris.

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Daniela Cascella, The attention dwells on the peripheral

Daniela Cascella will present texts generated by a listening into writing/reading into writing

methodology that she has been using while writing her new book,F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages,

Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound. It allows for accidents, detours of thoughts rather than any

assumed core, up to the point when the very core of listening-reading-into-writing becomes what is

normally deemed peripheral. Cascella seeks to reclaim the intermittent incoherence in listening

and reading, and to move through their residual presence into a marginated writing that is edge,

horizon, fuga.

Daniela Cascella is a London-based Italian writer. Her research is focused on sound and literature

across a range of publications and projects, driven by a longstanding interest in the relationship

between listening, reading, writing and in the contingent conversations, questions, frictions,

kinships that the three practices generate, host or complicate. She is Honorary Research Fellow in

the School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University; Writing Tutor in the MA Fine Arts, Bergen

Academy of Art and Design; Associate Lecturer in Sound Arts at the University of the Arts

London. www.danielacascella.com

http://enabime.wordpress.com

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Beln Cerezo, How to Open my Eyes?

How to Open my Eyes? exposes the importance of attending to the materiality of photographs

through handling them. It does this through performing different photographic materials (old

photographic papers that have never been used, a book that missesone photograph, Google Earth

and black and white photographic film). Hence, this research/work makes evident a form of

affective encountering with images, which stems from touching them. In regard to artistic

research, this research/work sheds light on a methodology that stems from thinking with imagesin a


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poetic, speculative and essayistic way. First presented as a performance-lecture during the Summer

Lodge, Nottingham Trent University, 2012.

Beln Cerezo is an artist-photographer. Within her practice and research, photography operates as

the guiding notion. Through a focus on the materiality of images, she explores photography

through performance attempting to renovate the discourse on images. Beln Cerezo has just

completed a practice-led PhD at Nottingham Trent University where she is an associate lecturer inPhotography. She is also interested in art education and she co-coordinated the Education

Department for Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain, 2010. Cerezo published the photo-book Somewhere

Better, Nowhere Better in 2009. She had a solo exhibition titled Plastic Peopleat CAB in Burgos,

Spain, in 2008.

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Emma Cocker, Close Reading (Projective Verse)

This enquiry reframes the practice of close readingas a resolutely visual method,a critical tactic for

destabilizing and fragmenting the linear unfolding of text towards an experimental poetics.

Within Close Reading, care and attention is not paid to the sense of words at the level ofsignification, but rather to theaffective and asignifyingregister ofmeaning produced by attending

to the materiality and movement of words close up through processes of visual magnification,

microscopic observation. Here, paying close attention to language does not always clarify any

single, stable meaning, but perhaps counter-intuitively produces further indeterminacy and

incoherence, where the closer something is scrutinised the less it becomes known.

Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Operating

under the title Not Yet There, her research often addresses the endeavour of creative labour,

focusing on models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a stable position,

remaining willfully unresolved. Cocker's writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a

Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of

Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013, and Reading/Feeling,2013. Sheis currently a key researcher on the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line(2014

2016). http://not-yet-there.blogspot.com

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Steve Dutton + Neil Webb, End of Ends

End of Endsis an ongoing project which sits in the background of our daily work. Indeed, its

situation as a form of backdrop is a critical part of its make-up. The project is an invitation to

think and work with a sense of ending. The production of endings, the gathering of them and

showing them becomes a form of soft labour. Perhaps like Arakawa and Gins philosophical play

on their decision not to die, the very production of the list is a confirmation that the list cannotitself ever end, and thus, we too, will not die. www.endofends.co.uk

Steve Dutton is Professor in Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Lincoln. Individual

and collaborative projects have been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, including

The Institute of Beasts at Kuando Museum of Fine Art in Taipei and The Stag and Hound at PSL

in Leeds UK (both Dutton and Swindells ). His collaboration with Neil Webb for the End of

Ends project was originally an Arts Council Funded project for Bend in the River in the East


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Midlands of the UK. He is a committee member of Project Anywhere, Art at outermost limits of

Location Specificity.

Neil Webb works extensively with sound and his practice includes sound installation, film and live

performance. His work often reinterprets elements of film and literature narratives that have

included works such as Far Beneath in the Abysmal Sea (2009), inspired by Tennysons sonnet

and John Wyndhams book The Kraken Wakes. He has also made work inspired by 2001 ASpace Odyssey, titled The Stars In Us All (2007). His work has been exhibited internationally

and he has undertaken residencies in the UK and abroad. He is Senior Lecturer in Sound Design

at Sheffield Hallam University. www.neilwebb.com

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Rob Flint, on the road to your house

... your house

is a blessing and a curse...

...your house

is a figure of speechon the road to your houseis part of a series of works in which the declarative voice is explored

through ideas of faciality. The face is here understood as an intense and condensed

signification, pointing toward its own meaningfulness as an event in unison. The work borrows

from chorus traditions, theatrical and religious, and magical ideas of enchantment, as well from a

lingering cultural need, beyond flickering lit screens, for things to be spoken in order to become

law. Our care and attention is still called for by faces and voices.

Rob Flint is an artist whose work engages with the way sound affects our other senses, especially

vision. He often uses the idea of voice, in spoken, written, and printed form. He is best known

for work with Christine Sullivan, with whom he has created a series of works exploring

description and voice narration, including The Bill Burroughs Memorial Choir, and Conversation Piece

in 'Hlysnan' at Casino Luxembourg, in the City of Luxembourg in summer 2014. Recent solo

work includes sound wall composition Flock Mnemonicsat The Collection in Lincoln in October

2015.

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Victoria Gray, Berthing Bone

Conceived as a durational series of miniature performances for the hands, Berthing Bone(2014)

explores incipient action; the affective experience of movement before movement takes form.

Through corporeal and moving-image based strategies of stillness, slowness and close proximity,

the work advocates heightened modes of attention to micromovements at the borders of

consciousness, occurring in moments of hesitation. In turn, somatic modes of attention are

proposed as an activist practice; a 'quiet theory of loud mobilization' (Sloterdijk, 2008). Berthing

Bonewas filmed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Longside Gallery, Wakefield. Performance and

direction by Victoria Gray. Camera and post-production by Orillo. Funded by Arts Council

England through the National Lottery. Supported by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Arts

Council Collection.


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Victoria Gray is an artist, writer and practice-led researcher. She has presented work in the UK,

USA and throughout Europe. Often durational, her performance and video work is concerned

with affect and kinesthetic experience, integrating affect theory, process philosophy and somatics.

Recent publications include articles inJournal of Dance & Somatic Practice (2012), Choreographic

Practices(2013) and The Drama Review(2015), and, chapters in the edited books Kinesthetic

Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (2012) and forthcoming, Experiencing Live: Liveness,

Eventness, Nowness and the Arts(2015). Victoria is a PhD candidate at Chelsea College of Art &Design, University of the Arts, London. www.victoriagray.co.uk

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Mark Leahy, flat-head self-tapping

flat-head self-tapping engages with speaking in public, with being on show, with being heard, and

with displaying coded behaviour. Taking elements from Bells Standard Elocutionist and from online

dictionaries, the performance assembles fragments, word lists, letters, and gestures into a display of

awkward flapping interrupted by gnomic expulsions. The performer receives instructions, phrases,

or data via headphones and then repeats these verbally and with gestures to the audience. As the

material is delivered randomly to the performer, he (like the audience) doesnt know whatscoming next.

Mark Leahy is a writer, artist, and teacher, operating among textual practices, performance, and

installed arts. He works with the body as sensing and as affected, using language, models of

perception, and objects of everyday use. Including spoken word, task-based actions, and digital

operations his performances address the body as a site of inscription and activation. His textual

practice utilizes constraints, structuring rules, and operates to cross or question category and genre

divisions including around identity and agency. He is based in Devon, and teaches part-time at

Falmouth and in Plymouth Universities. www.markleahy.net

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Joanne Lee, Surface Attention

Surface Attentionpresents a photographic series developed during a research residency at the

former Spode Works in Stoke-on-Trent, UK; this 10-acre site was acquired by Josiah Spode l in

1776 and ceramic wares were made there until the companys bankruptcy in 2008. The projects

methodology takes up historian Joseph Amatos suggestion that we ought to concentrate on

surfaces, and pursues the close rather than deep reading advocated by Caroline Levine.Surface

Attentionis a form of quiet, curious and repeated looking... Elements of this work appear in Pam

Flett Press #4 Vague terrain.

Joanne Lee is an artist, writer and publisher whose research attends to everyday life and the

ordinary places in which she lives and works. Much of her activity emerges through a serialpublication, the Pam Flett Press, which explores the visual, verbal and temporal possibilities of the

essay, and via the opportunities for production that arise in dialogue with creative and critical

friends. She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and Associate Lecturer

in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. www.joannelee.info

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Martin Lewis, Perpetual Rehearsal; Boredom 4

This current series of drawings, of which this is the fourth rehearsal, are attempts to encounter

profound boredom, and what may be experienced during these attempts. The drawings enact

banal, repetitive and durational tasks, using sound as its material and the site as its ground.

Perpetual Rehearsalsare a series of performance drawings whereby any completion of the work is

unresolvable or unattainable. The work is in a continuing state of incompletion. Because of its

unwillingness, reluctance and under-preparedness to reach a satisfactory ending the work cannever be staged as a fully formed event.

Martin Lewis a Nottingham based artist and teacher. He has been engaged in a drawing practice

since 2009. Lewiss focus is on the act of drawing, paying attention to the mutations and

deviations that occur during the transition between the cognitive and the somatic. His recent

exhibitions include: Drawology(Part1, Bonnington Gallery Nottingham. Part 2, Lanchester

Gallery, Coventry).Alignment,at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham and Insisting Over Skin, Drawing After

Surfacewith Robert Luzar at the Kingsgate Gallery London.

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Sarat Maharaj, Ignorantitis Sapiens: A Trolls View

What forces and factors attend the transmutation of London todays skyline of cranes from a

post-colonial city into a post-imperial, global realm? Why are we bovvered? A process of mapping

the emerging designs for living of the new urbanity from my kitchen and rooftop labs. They

overlook the demolition/construction sites in my patch of London the Knowledge Mecca of

Bloomsbury. A glance at the clamber up and down the ladder of attentiveness of enlightenment

(Buddhi) and ignorance/foolishness (Buddhu)?

Sarat Maharaj is Professor of Visual Art and Knowledge Systems, Malmo Art Academy/Lund

University and Research Professor, Goldsmiths University of London where he was

History/Theory of Art Professor (1980 2005). He was Rudolf Arnheim Professor, Humboldt

University, Berlin (2001 02). He was co-curator of Documenta XI, 2002, Farewell toPostcolonialism, Guangzhou (2008) and the 29thSao Paolo Biennial, 2010. He was chief curator

of Pandemonium art in a time of creativity fever, Gteborg, 2011. His specialist publications

cover Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce and Richard Hamilton, visual art as non-knowledge and no-

how, textiles, globalization and cultural translation.

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Brigid McLeer, Isola:Incontro

This durational video work was made while on residency at San Servolo Island, Venice, Italy in

2007. San Servolo was the former psychiatric hospital for the Veneto Region until it was closed in

the 1970s. The work is often accompanied by the drawing produced (as seen in the video), which

is 7.5m x 5m.

Brigid Mc Leer is an Irish artist based in London. She trained in Fine Art at NCAD, Dublin,

University of Ulster, Belfast and Slade School of Art, London. She works in various media/modes

including video, durational performance, photography, and drawing/writing. Recent solo

exhibitions include One + One, at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda and Wexford Arts Centre,

Ireland, Horizontal OntologiesArt Currents Institute, New York, Isoli [cont.], Lanchester Gallery


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Projects, Coventry, and Vexations, Site Gallery Sheffield, UK. She is currently studying for a PhD

by project in Fine Art (Photography) at the Royal College of Art, London. www.brigidmcleer.com

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Hester Reeve,Attendez: I care and attend to the book and the book cares and attends to the we in me.

This action embodies and makes explicit a pivotal research methodology in my practice as anartist: reading philosophy. Reading philosophy is not a straight-forward matter of gaining

knowledge, instead it affects a capacity to craft thinking as a type of matter for art making.

Simultaneously, reading certain philosophical texts addresses the self as a dynamic potential with a

capacity to be carved from without. This is not self-indulgence, caring after the techne of being a

me is always on behalf of the we. On a more prosaic level, this action reflects my concern to

create through manifestation and not communication and my use of the visual motif of public

protest, a placard, to protectnotions of experimental practices of existence and transformation.

The book I am currently reading and affected by is You must change your life!By Peter Sloterdijk.

Hester Reeve explores art as a species of philosophical agency, invested first and foremost in the

task of thinking and thinkings relationship to the body and matter at large. Working with action,writing, sculpture, drawing and Bohmian Dialogue, she chooses to operate via HRH.the (a

conceptual persona), an intellectual and fantastical strategy by which she navigates her complex

relationship to the world. Recent venues showing her work include Yorkshire Sculpture Park,

Tanzquartier Vienna and Tate Britain (under the umbrella The Emily Davison Lodge, an on-

going collaboration with Olivia Plender). Reeve is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam

University.

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Lisa Watts, Hairbrained, Studio Activity Sheets + 32 Significant Moments: an artists practice as research

This research focuses upon the messiness found in the middle of making. Whilst most dialogues

concerned with artistic processing derives from artists interviewed once the disorderliness and the

blankness is over, Hairbrained in contrast, offers a view of the intensity, care and attention of the

working artist and their solo thoughts. Studio Activity Sheets, created by the artist, provide a close-

up diary of detailed thoughts, actions, revelations and accidents, along with notes for future

action, lists, memory jogs and questions They were used to develop the book 32 Significant

Moments: an artists practice as research.

Dr Lisa Watts is an artist with an eclectic practice of performance, sculpture, photography and

video. Recent projects have included Skittish, a UK touring gallery exhibition for Spacex, Vane and

The Tetley, which exhibited Watts live work together with other artists sculptures that

culminated in a symposium, Puff of Smoke: curating live art/performance in the gallery (2014). A

documentary about her facilitation/ visual art methods has been recently launched, for the AHRCBirthproject,titled, Mothers Make Art(2015). Her book 32 Significant Moments: An Artist's Practice as

Research(2014) presents a close-up, detailed view of some of her artistic processes.

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Care + Attendis curated by Emma Cocker and Joanne Lee. We hope that dialogue generated

through this event will be developed through future projects and publications. For further

information or to offer questions, comments or thoughts on the programme please contact either

Emma Cocker [email protected] or Joanne Lee [email protected]

Care + Attend

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Transcript of Care + Attend