Studio Art 01: Negotiating Form

Studio brief

This studio is concerned in particular with the language of painting and sculpture: how we can apply them to better understand emerging questions relating to immersive art practices, movement (on or off screen) and where the boundaries lie in our definition of objects. Where do the boundaries lie in painting? From the traditional rectangular stretcher painting to wherever this tradition can lead us. 

Form here is correctness. Style, choreography. Performance. Completion. Artistic intention. The studio aims to ask lots of questions and set explicit assignments: critical and ideological assignments; technical and practical ones - all  assignments that require negotiation. How do you negotiate making an artwork that then becomes a critical element within a developing body of work? How are specific artistic materials selected by which an artwork can be negotiated? What is thinking through making, exactly? What can you do with photography as a radical and relevant tool within your practice? A tool through which to create outward-facing professional practice? What can you do with photography as a radical and relevant tool within your practice? A tool through which to create outward facing professional practice? Web presence/presentations portfolio? Body of work? Consider the photographic representation of your work as the work itself as sometimes a stepping stone and perhaps a complete work, whether archival, document, negotiating form.

We will also use the photography workshops’ darkrooms as well as all other areas of production and workshops provided by Cass works. This studio will propose where you locate the potential languages of photography in the curation of making art works: the language of production and manufacture, using thinking which develops through actual making. The time that making requires, the strategies and deliberations chosen and the steps into unguaranteed outcomes that you will negotiate.

Negotiating form refers to the changes and detours taken from an initial spark or idea through research testing framing re-framing and resolving artworks as complete, in series, provisional art. We will pose the question of what is a practice and what is a body of work. How does this operate as a contemporary proposition, how do you address and value the necessary professional outward-facing practices, web presence, exhibition making documentation and archival work. Questions about seriality in making art works - individual or unique works.

To keep you continuously in mind of the professional practice and dialogues expected within this studio you will work in association with artists associated with the school via guest speakers, open field artists and Curators.  The studio will engage students with their work throughout the year as they build a new body of work and negotiate practice. There will be key teaching and learning events which may even involve them making some collaborative works/edition multiples Tutorial support will concentrate upon dialogues which come to terms with making conditions essential to particular subjects, genres of practice and criticality. Technical negotiation is not the work of a technician but of a particular mindset strategically organised to enable physical manifestations and resolutions of concepts and ambitions. To enable the making to be the starting point of negotiation without fear. Key texts will run in parallel to the studio practices as they emerge, both motivating and questioning making and the construction of meaning.

Image: Outskirts (2009). Photo credit: Pete Fillingham