Art Writing

After some enriching conversations during catch-ups at events celebrating Hugh O'Donnell's life, I've been thinking in depth about art writing practices and the ways we engage with art for ourselves and how we communicate it to others. Explaining my Arts Council England-funded Developing Your Creative Practice project to Brian Patterson and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach of Bbeyond was hugely helpful in nudging me back on some sort of track with things somewhat derailed between mothers flinging themselves about with bone-shattering consequences and friends taken from us far too soon. With everyone's memories of Hugh flowing, my own encounters with him came to the fore, and so I'd like to add to my previous post another instance of where cause, effect and encounter led to my own early experiments with blurring the boundary between written documentation and live performance. 

I may well be misremembering and misattributing as it was nine years ago, but let's run with it. There was a Bbeyond performance monthly meeting at the Lawrence Street Sculpture Worskshop in December 2013 with a rake of associated artists and friends having a good old play in the surrounding entries that were grungy from the dank on-off rainy conditions of a Belfast winter solstice afternoon. I remember this one fondly because I was working my arse off at Queen's at the time and this meeting was the first real respite I'd had after a full-on semester in which I convened and solo-delivered three modules by day and completed my manuscript for Old Borders, New Technologies by night and weekend. I was done in by this point, but my head was swimming with ideas after teaching modernism, film aesthetics and documentary for twelve weeks while polishing my research on film and visual culture in post-agreement Northern Ireland. The mix of stuff was spilling over and out. 

I had been to the monthlies for the first time that July and August when I moved back to Belfast after six months in Aberdeen. Katrina Sheena Smyth interviewed me as part of her MFA research and we became fast friends. She encouraged me to experience a monthly  and I was welcomed by others who, although I was peripheral to their actions, made me feel part of things. 

Back when Twitter wasn't a complete and utter trash fire of vile nastiness and when hashtags helped find useful information, I often integrated it into my work as a teaching tool and as a way of microblogging about art and films I'd been to see. I even set up an account just for performance art that hasn't been used for a few years but can be found here, and I used a site called Storify to make what we would now call threads. 

Wanting to be more than just a spectator and having read widely on the topic of performance documentation and writing for my PhD, I started playing with photographing and live-Tweeting from the monthly 2-hour sessions in which artists would gather in a set place and time and either bring stuff to work with or work with what they found around the area and see what happened. These were always public interventions, although some felt private and intimate if the location itself wasn't that public-facing. The time at Lawrence Street is an example of the latter.

Wall with lists of words written in chalk, Lawrence Street Sculpture Workshop, Dec 2013

I remember Hugh being at that one because I remember having a big chat about my chalk scribbles by the fire with a cuppa in the workshop after we'd finished. Again, I may be misremembering this, but Hugh - or someone - had brought or found chalks and quite quickly left them aside and started doing something else. My blurry BlackBerry photos remind me that Hugh found a discarded broken umbrella and pottered around with his backpack on and jacket hood up flinging and twirling and dragging and dropping the mangled former umbrella, getting it wet and grimy inside and out (what even was the inside or outside of it anymore?). An umbrella no more, it became a performance prop that made shapes and noise while its destruction as an umbrella gave way to its construction as an object of fascination and a tool with which to interact with a sodden world and the other weirdos doing weird things in the entry.

Image from Bbeyond Performance Monthly Meeting, Dec 2013 (Hugh O'Donnell on right)

I remember this day well because as I say it was the first time I passed through the spectator-artist/artwork boundary to produce something, or contribute to the little pocket of madness. It was in my own quiet way on the edges as usual. I lifted the discarded chalk and started writing on the walls. Some of it documented things I noticed: our rhythm was maintained by a metronomic drip from a gutter, beside which I simply repeatedly wrote 'drip' down the wall; a temporary document of a temporary yet no doubt recurring happenstance. I pushed further and wrote about things I was thinking about triggered by what I was observing. I took some photos which are viewable from my Facebook page, and there might be some better ones by Jordan Hutchings in the Bbeyond archives. I can't remember exactly what I was at, but Hugh very generously approached me after we stopped to tell me he found what I was doing really interesting. We talked about it at some length. I wish I could recall more details. I wish I had had more discussions with him. I wish I'd talked to him more recently for the podcast because he and his work should have been known more widely. 

The impulse to write that day and the chat with Hugh about it after formed a kernal of what I seem to have meandered into doing with my writing practice with more certainty over the subsequent decade. At the time, though, it came to a head as I embodied a blend of critic/documenter/found object/live subject in Katrina's final MFA project 'Between Frames'. Here my live writing was absorbed back into the ongoing performance as well as going out as a separate entity on Twitter and my typed-up notes that Katrina printed out in an accumulating booklet. 

I used chalk again in the really big performance monthly at Custom House Square that coincided with an international performance art symposium at University of Ulster in April 2017. At this I used chalks to write and mark on the paving stones, some of which explained to the public what was going on and they were welcome to join, and some documented what the artists were doing, or that I couldn't explain what they were doing, or just drew around objects where they'd landed. These trace documents were more temporary than I'd hoped as I learned when the meeting was over that Belfast City Council still considered chalkwork as littering and we risked being fined even though rain and footfall wouldn't be long dispersing the dust. And so began an extended cleaning performance with Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell and the creation of many smudged messes the cleaning trucks would be less irked by. 

What I'm inching towards is that art writing very broadly and loosely describes what I've been dabbling with for some years now. To me it goes beyond criticism, which refers to the part of the spectrum that includes journalistic reporting, reviews, and more research-based academic critical analysis. But what I was trying back then was a blend of those with art practice itself, the making and the writing about the making finding points of convergence. What I'm working towards currently is a similar blend, but of memories of encounters with artworks informing the processing of life experiences and working through of traumatic and difficult memories. 

My thinking is abstract at the moment. It's happening in images or identifying themes with little of more substance. I'm finding it tough but necessary to be kind to my struggling brain. I'm of an age that is on the brink of major hormonal changes. I had a desperate Covid infection two months ago. I had a nervous breakdown six years ago. There are significant family stresses at the moment. I miss my partner. For what it is, I miss my workspace. Every potential choice feels like the wrong thing to do. I'm disoriented. It's freezing and getting colder. My cognition simply isn't that strong anymore and that's just how it has to be. If I end up being more poetic and it works, then I'll be open to it. If I need to write in essays rather than longer-form prose, then great; essays are a fascinating form. If I keep getting rejected, then fine. My latest rejection encouragingly quoted Sylvia Plath saying that she loved it when the rejection slips arrive because 'it reminds me that I try'. 

This line of thought is to remind me, and hopefully you too, that we should keep trying. Hugh, like my dear friend Sally Madge (I enjoy imagining them meeting in an afterlife having a gas together) placed value on life's debris and detritus. He found uses for discarded, broken things. Stuff. I'm a broken thing to be valued and out of which something can be created anew. A performance artist's body is their primary material, their subject and their medium simultaneously. My experiment now is to channel that to see if I can capture that liveness and presentness in art-based memoir with myself in those roles.

 

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