......art is everywhere?

Public space is where something happens, it is unmappable, it is outside your home, it is outside your territory

.....but I do think, given the fact that main stream art has erased so much alternative or different practices, that its language dominates everything else, so there doesn't appear .....we can't automatically point to or pull off the shelf a vocabulary to make understandable another landscape...        , and it is a project that removes any map we may have used to map previous practices..so it is doubly difficult ....it has to make an obvious change....But we can use this project to revisit the ideas we have, the prejudices we have, look at ..where they have come from, why we are using them..and whether we need to continue using these ideas. I think if we can use the project on this level ..it will offer a useful function.. ?
    ... Which is the reason I want to force myself to use this brittle framework to engage with what a post-autonomous practice may be. And at the end of that period to find whether a post-autonomous practice exists, or whether other frameworks come to light. .... In that respect our thinking is brought to the surface and held in suspended animation.
erm   No, I don't,       I don't even know if it can be pinned, pinned pinned down, I think it might be possible to look at it or it might be possible to try to recognise it from ..       .as if you were sideways to something, so you don't really see it head on but you see its possibility from a different angle       em and i say that because      em I think I think whatever it is if it exists or if its possible -its a glimpse its got to happen
         almost outside of something that's frameable, which brings me on to the idea of something that's post autonomous, and and I am kinda quite nervous about saying that maybe we are already post autonomous, what ever     that     might be?
     so you think there's a similarity between not being autonomous or non autonomous and post autonomous, you think those things are the same things?
.....but that is the problem isn't it;     we have this monolithic idea
em
of       modern art which for some unknown reason has not changed in any     erm    tangible way
ahum
since its inception
ahmrhum
so there is an inherent contradiction              or or phenomenal problem at the heart of framing this notion      the      the programme of events really
yea         yea but eh   a    eh and theres also this very peculiar state where        art    can be anything or      anywhere       to a certain extent      although it isn't             but it is for some people            and I think it's that notion        or that art can be anywhere or include anything, is the Duchampian paradigm which is the core notion of autonomy
     you see that's interesting      but I think I think it's unfair on the former not necessarily regarding erm Duchamp but regarding the idea that anything that theres something wrong with anything I think its what it is you do with something

The bottom line is     whether we can actually             accomplish the core aspect of the project and that is through this very intense erm             research and living with these rm notions and concepts using erm a whole variety of erm means language words diagrams pictures whether we can actually frame erm          in a way that is comfortable for ourselves an idea of post autonomous practices and decide once and for all if it is
   erhum                          you see in what you've just said brings two points to mind: one is that what interests me is this notion of what is autonomy in the city space       I mean that's what I know, that's what I live in, so I just wonder about that, and the second thing is I wonder about the kind of formulation of an idea of means, the formulation of a language, the formulation of definitions, given that          you know           its such a          its like            wanting to define something that     you know -            its like wanting to find a    a        a model , or a      or a mould almost         into which you pour something and out of which comes .....
this idea of post autonomy its this route which he's claiming leads a way or out of the short circuits and cul-de-sacs

yep         what was interesting          you were talking you were talking about a practice       that is quite a particular kind of practice that doesn't have ah doesn't have that doesn't have a doesn't have an object             doesn't have a fixed place       all those kinds of     ideas that you were initially grappling   for in the introduction to the    or in the text introduction that went on the internet at the beginning    you were talking through them by way of more through Luhmann rather than than than Lingner - more his kind of specificity to artistic      hm hm hm                  production           and you were like hr       saying                           being quite     really very articulate about    something     and all of a sudden I realised that I hadn't an idea what it might be it was absolutely other than anything I am aware of and that's is why it was interesting to me that's why it was such a pity (laugh) that we lost it                      but when we talked on the telephone this morning you said that it would be very useful to spend tonight hm really discussing what the project is really about, trying to make it quite crystal clear for people I mean its not that that hr it might be just just useful to mention that we talked to Wim last night         the collaborator in in Holland          who     who you know mentioned people       ah you know that people that people     people      some    there's a very small minority     of let's say ten percent finding it interesting and sticking with it       with it       and because they see it very much as a laboratory.
you mean it is not deterrorialised you mean it is absolutely controlled?
that that's why it is difficult finding a satisfactory project on the internet where you are able to question             fundamental ideas     about    contemporary practice's     that's why I find Clegg & Guttmann                  to a certain extent really interesting                         I eh          III find that that their position     hm position problematic as well it equally throws you off into a wrong direction                     that that this idea new public art which is is er     context practices which is what Lingner and Clegg &




Guttmann are attempting to address                it it I think throws into contrast the too simplistic position from the institution           as far as I can tell
mine into the power base of how we think about contemporary art
it's a sort of fluid space we're working     in it is gallery space      it's an intermediary space that that didn't need to be an office or a broom cupboard
So yes it's it borrows the language of that, and that's interesting                and I liked the way it kind of       there was a certain sort of non space to it which I liked which you know a certain kind of mediation which I felt was very significant but at the same time it's hard to pin down as a mediation - you        you get on the bus there's a bus control system you get on the tube there's a tube control system you go to the bank there's a system there you go to work there's a system there it          it carried on from that             well you see I am not quite sure about autonomy and I am not quite sure about post autonomy, I am not quite sure if post autonomy means er after an autonomous position, or if it means after the idea of autonomy, and er I still think autonomy is more interesting to to 'we make autonomous decisions every day
well I was kind of interested to open up the idea of autonomy because I think you're making decisions within the planning and layout within your designs that completely refute the kinds of things that you have just talked about
yes      so I am interested in the idea of a practice which is built on the idea of restricted or self limiting limited er                mode of operation or working
we're involved in advertising; forms of mass communication!
on a community that's able to think outside its     it's the space between our ears as you described it, because in a sense you are asking for a different space of    two spaces, two quite different spaces of positioning to occur at the same time, simultaneously and continuously, which is quite a difficult thing to make operative - that of post autonomous and that of whatever it is we happen to be now
we're talking about a theoretical construct               we have to get really real , we have to look at and understand em                   how the reception and distribution of ideas takes place and I think that er Clegg and Guttmann's analysis of that is very accurate and em leaves very little room for manoeuvre       I also think that's why their idea of the theoretical notion        of the disappearance of the art institution as a bourgeois mechanism, is also like a science fiction story or scenario, which is why Lingner's notion of post autonomy is always going to be a blue print; it doesn't mean that it isn't a worthwhile set of ideas to develop for a practice;
          is this a useful direction to be going in
its erm, the Royal Parks are an institution and in themselves the photographs were taken in the park, they are quite controlled spaces, controlled situations that are laid out, paths and ponds and blooms and areas of planting and areas of non planting and the picturesque in the centre of London and em the images were taken three minutes apart and in the space in between I wrote down the sounds that I heard
oh right
and I was interested in              the activity of the park                and       park spaces they are kinds of places that you know they are such open landscaped areas in the city        complete control and yet the appearance of nothing sort of sites for maximum autonomous fantasies or
          public fantasies        private worlds, its also a site where you see lots of      tourists and
lots of leisure activities
yea        that's the reason why I looked at the parks, particularly St. James       because I was interested to know what leisure was, you know how do we describe leisure and why do we think that that's leisure, you know         what is walking through a park          and what is it that makes it leisurely          in a sense I was interested in finding out more than its experience because of its its represen        its visual theme park like thing, I wanted to know what        there seems to be no ruptures in that space          you know it's completely it's       quite       controlled       its other people or dogs or aeroplanes or sirens or something else that rupture time and I was interested in how you experienced time in a place like that as opposed to somewhere else like Bond Street or Trafalgar Square        you know there's little public activity in parks, its all quite private; localised
.yea
and so I put them in because I wondered how can you build some sense of a community within the mailing list, you know how can you build some sense of       position or place       because       I wanted to find a language that is transferable across the platform and that
encourages openness and participation and I keep thinking the city and its institutions is something that people can come together        on       to         dispute       or discuss      or open out      a bit      which is why the park was useful to me      because we all have parks in every city and parks are always landscaped         to a large degree controlled because they have to maintain         the boundaries - one against the other - the boundary of the street against the park        the landscaping, its history             it falls into all the same categories it just does not look to be made of brick and full of files           all that's just hidden in the way it's hidden everywhere else
           Luhmann          wondered whether 20c art could actually be defined by its excessive concentration on the notion of autonomy, so that's a 20c concern, that's a historical concern        I don't know whether that's right or not             I don't know whether we can         move into this project without pinning down the notion of autonomy in a way which is meaningful for a practice and our understanding of autonomy now or historically now, and I wouldn't know quite how to start to do that                  and whether it's foolhardy not to pin that down and go on to try to determine what a post autonomous practice is            but there seems to be some attraction in this very slippery reading Lingner has where he seems to be excavating or removing our understanding of a normalised art practice and if you remove these things you have a gap and it's that gap which I am finding quite fascinating and which is the space where he's claiming a post autonomous practice takes place so it becomes this mirror                 and in many respects it's this mirror on normalised practice but post autonomy is taking place on the other side of that mirror and so in that respect and getting back to Clegg and Guttmann it becomes this institutional critique which is         a critique as an absence, also although it's not an absence because we are using               Luhmann's systems theory to be able to analyse it
we've only barely registered the next stage of the project; that we have these terms, we have to look at whether these term are going to be in our tool kit.