Blogging versus Tweeting?

Rememberance of Plants Past (3), Ink on paper, 28x38cm. 2011

Where am I? Ink on paper, 38x28cm, 2011

Last night I attended a talk at the Peckham Space led by Andrew Bryant on the subject of blogging. The blogger-speakers were Alex Pearl and Aliceson Carter. Long before the talk, and in my own mind, and on Twitter, the talk for me had become a debate on the merits of blogging versus tweeting.

Probably, because, until this week, I hadn't blogged for 158 days. 

In reality it was a talk on blogging, with a couple of us louder audience members pointing out the merits of Twitter, not least, for sign-posting your blog!

In Andrew's Bryant's introduction it was interesting to hear some of the reasons why people read or write blogs today:

'a window onto someone's practice'

'a place for discussion & dialogue'

'a way of reflecting on one's own practice, and also as an extension of one's practice' 

I have only come to Alex's blog 'Redundant Alex' recently, and through his own sign-posting on Twitter. In it he talks about everything but art, except in an off-hand way to comment on the creation or demise of certain pieces - cress-based, and proun to life and death at the whim or forgetfulness of the grower. It is self-deprecating, humourous and, occasionally, reading between the lines of this character, Alex, as he cleans the house, and gets rejected from commissions he was personally rung-up and urged-on to take, poignant and moving.

Alex gave a really good talk: a talk he told us (without irony?) his girlfriend, Annabel, had written for him - in the third person. So, as he pointed out, it was like reading out your own obituary! I was listening too hard to write much down: 

'I don't talk about Art much in my blogs, more about my life around it ....'

'Nowadays it is quite fashionable to think about the back-room place of an artist'.

'I hide behind the pretense that it may or may not be real.'

And my favourite, on the number and variety of blogs: 'They are like me quite unsure about what they are.'

He also mentioned that he tries to end on a cliff-hanger!

Now I will now go in search of Aliceson Carter's blog, which I don't know.

Thinking about the 'me, me, me' culture and the art of self-promotion, it occurred to me that the days of an artist sitting in their studio waiting to be discovered are long gone, now there are so many artists - or would that be: too many artists? As Market Projects recently asked - that artists have been forced to take steps to bring themselves to the attention of others - artists, curators, gallerists, press etc.

A decade ago all the talk was about having a website, now that is so passive (although still necessary) then about five years ago it became about blogging and now it's Twitter.

But the irony is that each one, faster and less labour-intensive then the last, leads one with perfect symmetry from one to another and back again.

An artist makes work, they place pictures on their website, they write on their blog, they tweet a message that they have written a new blog piece, the blog piece links them to the website, and the website provides Twitter/or other links with the artist. 

More recently this has been interrupted with the introduction of pictures straight onto the Twitter site. The end of writing? The beginning of pictures with twitter-length captions - comic book/zine world? Indeed, in a recent Garageland call-out proposal I suggested writing tweet-length answers to big questions, mainly because I wanted to see if it was possible, and what would happen if one limited oneself to around 140 characters? Would ideas become such small nuggets of information, they could only be formed into questions to make any sense, and create the usual Twitter-type banter. I felt rising panic as I pressed the send button, it seems an impossible feat. 

Finally: Why do we tweet? Because it's like texting but better because you have a whole audience!

Why do we blog? Because writing into the silent ether can also be satisfying.

ends

www.annabeltilley.moonfruit.com

twitter.com/annabeltilley

redundantalex.blogspot.com/

www.marketproject.org.uk/

Aliceson Carter: www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/article/1608428

Privilege

On Saturday I was given the privilege of a one hour crit with British artist, Graham Crowley. This much-needed and very welcome initiative came courtesy of Core Gallery, and Rosalind Davis.

Wow, it is seven years since I had a one-to-one crit, with someone who is prepared to look at your work and tell you, honestly, what they see.

I am a great believer in the peer critique, where a group of artists get together and discuss their work. indeed, I ran one called: Talk About The Work at Claremont Studios, Hastings for three years. And it was a great success.

However, the one-to-one crit with an 'art-elder' is something else. Something unique. It is a conversation between two people. And when it works one achieves a momentary intimacy and connectivity, relating to one's own work, that is a rare and wonderful thing. Indeed, the connections, sparks, observations, book recommendations [and temporary euphoria] that arrived out of that hour will nourish me for a long while yet.

Overall, the experience was painful but postively liberating. I now feel energised.

And today, after months of considering: how to emerge? while in actual fact often thinking: what is the point?

I did some things that I didn't know I wanted to do:

I applied for a new open

I sent off an initial-proposal for co-curating an exhibition I have been thinking about for ages

I said 'yes' to giving work to an Xmas Charity auction at WW Gallery, Hackney

I wrote down some tentative ideas for new work

I wrote some lists - always a good feeling!

I allowed myself to consider new directions

What happened on Saturday was a sort of purging. I expressed out loud my doubts, anxieties and hopes for my work.

It was a moment when I physically felt myself turning a corner - away from the dark alley I had become lost in.

I have been on a treadmill - making work, just for the sake of it.

When actually, a bit of quiet reflection - in or out of the studio - will probably pay equal dividends.

To end on a more amusing note: thinking I was being professional, I have recently begun to paint the edges of my stretchers .... something I now remember from art school that is extremely uncool! And, for all that was said in that one-hour crit, that was the only cringe-making moment. I didn't mind that three months of work was slated, I could see it's unrelenting vacancy, it's pointlessness.

But to be caused to cringe at one's own mistaken, petty vanity .... now that was hard. 

Title: ‘The blindman said, ‘we’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. ‘Press hard,’ he said to me … so we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.’ Extract from Cathedral by Raymond Carver (1983)

Artist: Annabel Tilley.

Acrylic and ink on calico, 2010. 

www.annabeltilley.moonfruit.com

Graham Crowley's paintings can be seen at: http://www.grahamcrowley.co.uk

Core Gallery, Deptford

http://coregallery.co.uk

On Winning!

Footnotes: the emerging artist


'Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins'.

[Mies van der Rohe, 1886-1969]

On winning - albeit unexpectantly!
Last week I won a Deptford X Fringe Award for my latest project Drawing the likeness of brick.  There were ten contenders for three prizes and when I looked around, everyone elses work looked so much more sophisticated! And, despite, three male judges, all three winners were women. It was funny winning an award and knowing virtually no-one. I sat next to the artist Mark Titchner, his partner and five-week-old son who were lovely, and immediately turned to congratulate me. Titchner was saying how the whole Turner prize experience, and all the demands that come with it [he was nominated in 2006] can actually de-rail your life for a couple of years. Sort of like winning the lottery but not! An article or a book about the whole 'Turner' experience would be interesting. Liz Harrison won the overall Deptford X 2010 award for a sound piece in Deptford Station of birds singing.

On the Folkestone Triennial 2011
A couple of weeks of ago I attended a symposium at dlwp, Bexhil, where Andrea Schlieker, Curator of the forthcoming 2011 Folkestone Triennial, spoke engagingly and amusingly about her innitial reservations about 22 internationally-renouned artists showing their work in town called Folkestone - where was it anyway? That was back in 2005/6 for the first 2008 triennial. And what a success it was! I A thoroughly unexpected uplifting experience, as map in hand we wandered purposefully around the faded Victorian grandeur of Folkestone searching for obvious and illusive artworks. A great feeling of bon homie existed among visitors, but more than that .... a sense of wonder.
Schlieker mentioned the phrase 'civic pride' a number of times in her talk, and it's true, living in the neighbouring seaside resort of Hastings, I understood, what a leap of faith and yet, conversely, how visionary the whole project was.
However, and here's a suggestion: alongside the hand-picked, well-paid international triennial artists [the famous names, that bring in the crowds] how about an open submission exhibition for professional, regional artists in the southern region area [Kent & Sussex] so that less well-known but equally talented artists can appear besides and gain recognition from the crowd-pulling 'names'. If you are reading this Andrea .... what do you think?

On the Eighteenth Emergency - Core
I enjoyed Andrew Bryant's curated exhibition: The Eighteenth Emergency at Core Gallery, Deptford. Particularly Daniel Lichtman's 'Untitled' - extracts from an adolescent boys diary, the death of his grandmother, the daily monotony of school life and the discovery of girls. Presented as series of printed texts on a dvd screen, in an appropriately deadpan manner, it was both funny and poignant.
Burcu Yagcioglu's film entitled: I would swallow you whole, was also moving - the intimacy of watching a women [or the artist at work] as she sculpts her own hair into a a type of scarf or veil. The result, for me, was not a political work alluding to women covering their heads in Muslim societies but a much more poetic work referencing medieval images of men and women in tight-fitting black caps, their facial features exaggerated by the puritanical nature of the object.
I saw the exhibition through an informal, but thought-provoking walk &  talk event led by Rosalind Davis and Andrew Bryant. Where we discussed the importance of titles, and how the idea of the title can change depending on the context, and the message you want to get across. It was refreshing to hear about Andrew Bryant's own bout of 'title-anxiety', and the fact the title for his piece 'My Black Ball' had changed several times during the exhibition. The piece was literally a huge ball of black plasticine - with an ominous, brooding presence, yet filling the viewer with an unquenchable desire to kick it across the space, or pet it or pat it ... but just to look down at it was not enough. The feeling of engagement with the object was almost primordial - an inverted black whole - the void that we fear, filled?

Image: Drawing the likeness of brick, brick drawing 5x3cms, ink, acrylic and coloured pencil on paper



Links
Annabel Tilley www.annabeltilley.moonfruit.com
Core Gallery  http://www.coregallery.co.uk /
DeptfordX  http://www.deptfordx.webeden.co.uk /#/fringe/4543169484
Daniel Lichtmanhttp://www.danielp73.com/
Burcu Yagcioglu  http://www.burcuyagcioglu.com/
Andrew Bryant http://www.an.co.uk/artists_talking/article/41767...