How To Make a Chair

by ruth barker, 11 May 2009

Hello,
After grumbling yesterday about the injustice of hailstorms in May, I’m writing today from my South facing Glasgow flat with the blinds down so as to see my screen in the otherwise glorious sunshine. Hurray for Summer!

I’m off to meet Susan Christie from the Inverness Old Town Art project soon. I’ve arranged to meet her in the Tron for a coffee and a wee chat and catch up on the IOTA project, seeing as she’s in town. After that I have a Glasgow international- related meeting, for which I’ll be wearing my other hat as curator for Washington Garcia Gallery, Glasgow. It occurred that each of these (Gi, WG, and IOTA – bear with me on the accumulation of acronyms here) is in many ways a collaboration, which in turn got me thinking about some of the ideas I hope to be able to raise in our first PAR+RS themed season, starting next month.

Picking ‘Collaboration’ as our first theme seemed important because PAR+RS itself is an essentially collaborative enterprise, which couldn’t live without You, the people who read the articles and use the site. This isn’t to say that it’s a free for all, and neither are the other collaborative examples I suggested above. How can that work, then? – that mix of the egalitarian and the curated, the democratic and the selected. I’m not sure, but perhaps we can aim for the best of both worlds – the open energy of a place where people are free to contribute their thoughts, and the careful structuring of a thoughtfully collected train of ideas.

I’m hoping to start getting the first of the Collaboration-related submissions in to the editorial in-box soon, but this is a wee reminder that there’s still time to put something together if you fancy. Just drop me a line. If Collaboration isn’t quite your bag then don’t worry – the Autumn season will start in September, so I’m already starting to plan for that, with more updates on the Autumn theme to come. Though I don’t enjoy looking forward to the lengthening September nights when I’m only just emerging from the winter, it is useful to think about how Public Art Scotland can continue to enquire into the field that surrounds us, and the many forms it can and does take. I hope you agree with me.

Back to that idea of collaboration, I thought I’d share a quote from a talk I gave a few years ago, when I was part of a collaborative group. Perhaps it goes some way to describing the (perhaps utopian) process of making something together, as well as the ineffability of that process and the way I felt about it at the time.

“The most elusive part [of making a sculpture collaboratively] is how the piece evolves from an abstract verbal sketch to a physical object. A large part of that happens through drawing as the idea moves towards concretion but there’s also a very fundamental play between the internalised image and the externalised production.

“For example, if I asked each person in this room to imagine a chair, the mental images would probably all be quite similar, but still different. We can try and get them closer together – is your chair wooden or plastic? Does it have four legs or a swivel base? Is it painted? Sanded? Varnished? It goes on and on, but eventually through discussion we would all have roughly the same chair in our heads. If we tried to then make that chair together, we would be taking the object out of this very mutable abstract sense and turning it into something that you can feel and see, touch and sit on.

“That’s as close as I can come to describing the process that we go through as a group, but with the added reminder that rather than reproducing a pre-existing object that we have all seen before, we are trying to make a new object that none of us have seen.”

Is this how something like Gi comes into being? Or IOTA? A series of conversations that come closer and closer together in an attempt to reach a point at which they consolidate and communicate a singularity? I don’t know. As I get older, I start to think that perhaps the spaces between the conversations – the points at which the images of the chair diverge – may be far more interesting.

More later,
R