Standpoint

Untitled from Hestia Peppe on Vimeo.


I made a video before coming to work on Art In Motion.  Like the story I posted the other day it functions as some kind of reference point to articulate where I'm coming from and what I bring with me to the work.  My video practice has hitherto been consistently recognisable as an attempt to situate myself, an interplay of objects placed in relation to eachother and the movement of my attention from one to another.

A recent chance encounter with the work of Kay Turner and her book Beautiful Necessity which surveys the tradition of domestic altar making and its aesthetic power for navigating change and continuity drew attention for me to these ideas in my own work.  This video is a sketch in which I consider this consciously for the first time.  For me it is interesting to play with juxtaposition as a way to map relations between objects which may in turn speak of relations between people, meanings and value.

As far as this relates to Art In Motion I am considering this as a strategy of mapping connections within a collaborative process that allows for intimacy and free association and may reveal parts of the process that would otherwise be hidden from the viewer.  In the rehearsal on Sunday I began to work with objects belonging to the participants and with footage from group discussions, searching for layers of the work which may not be visible in the dance and which video might amplify.

JC Fridays

On Friday she is taken out to JC Fridays.  It takes her a while to work out that JC stands for  Jersey City.  JC Fridays is like London's First Thursdays, in that it is a once a month crawl of art openings fuelled by alcohol.  Unlike First Thursdays everyone out for JC Fridays behaves as if they are at an actual party instead of a networking event. A lot of art gets made here, and music and it seems like stylistically this is all notably unselfconscious.  Everyone knows eachother with the distinction that they act like friends as opposed to colleagues and this seems to breed a kind of specifically localised confidence. Chris Kraus' essay on Tiny Creatures from her new book discusses the art/music/community dynamic in LA and there is a sense of that here.  Manhattan's gallery scene seems further away here than it does in London. Everywhere has live music tonight.

She visits two spaces, Art House (The exhibition is called Freeze and is a group show of Jersey City artists, she can't help contrasting it with the infamous London exhibition of the same name in the nineties, not much in common, Art House is a community space in the 'socially conscious' sense.) and 58 (solo show called Pulp by Ken Bastard, paintings in the tradition of pulp movie posters of which the preliminary drawings really shine. with a party in the cavernous back room where the DJ plays The Only Ones the minute she walks in so she has to text Tom and he replies the next day to ask if she was at the hippest party in the nineties-which keep coming up don't they? and it kind of felt like she was) and then what seems like a house party but is something to do with Railroad Studios up a ridiculous number of stairs and then a birthday party for a local hero at a studio space where she watches a band cover reggae from the vantage point of a swing hanging from the roof.  There is a picture of two rhinoceros on the wall that she likes and another one in a kitsch gilt frame of robed figures in the desert firing guns of some kind at the sun. She hangs out on the roof discussing cultural difference and Skins until the wee small hours.

If she had a camera with a flash,  there would be photos here. All these things seem to be documented on the official JC Fridays site which is run by Art House

IN THE FUTURE

I think I will always blog in the third person.

Art In Motion

I went to my first rehearsal for Art In Motion last night.  They have been at it for a while already so I arrive in the full flow of what they have going on.  Before this I have received fragments of documentation, some video, notes on discussions, themes, methods, names and faces are not yet connected and I was nervous going in.  Choreography is a fascinating but foreign process to me, I have come from far away to do this work and I am struck with what might be suddenly at stake.  Beginning with a risk.  This is the lack of proximity at work, I'm transitioning into the locus of the work, becoming close, the contact implicit in working with others is a shock.

From the proposal I wrote toward my part in the project.

For three weeks Hestia Peppe will be present in the role of Artist In Residence with Insurgo Stage Project during development of their group improvised work Art In Motion.  During the part of the development when she is not present she will continue to create work as part of the ongoing collaboration.  This offers the opportunity to consider collaborative methodologies utilising both presence and telepresence and the role of the technologies of telepresence (video calling, email, social media, digital filesharing) in a creative process of this type.

The first piece they worked with yesterday is called 'Pressure', enough said it was spookily appropriate to my mental state.  Seated quietly taking notes I began to gain context, to situate myself.  Later, debriefing the rehearsal into the night I am seized with exhilaration as connections solidify and adrenalin kicks in.  I'm excited now.

The group were incredibly welcoming, names firmly transform into specific faces and later Avianna's insistence that the performers, onstage are specifically themselves, not characters somehow completes my sense that I am in the right place.  This thing is collectively autobiographical.  Individual's stories colliding with eachother.  This is what I wanted and needed.  Avi and I worked on performances together as teenagers in what seems like another world but the old alliance is strong and there is richness in it.

There is so much more to tell! Since I got here I've been orientating myself and as always the rush of over stimulation  needs to be ridden out.  The place and the people are starting to make sense of themselves and I'm so glad I'm doing this. 

street art in Jersey City, photo by yours truly.

prologue, a story.

I was asked to write a story about myself in the third person as part of the rehearsal/writing/development for Art In Motion by Insurgo Stage Project the group I'm working with here in the states, about which much much more to come.  This was written before I came over so perhaps is more about where I'm coming from, prior to immersion in their intensive process.


She wanted a cat. It wasn't too much to ask. She thought about it a lot, which meant she talked about it a lot. She really wanted one. Some people didn't seem so sure it was a good idea, "after all you spend half your nights with your boyfriend." True, it would have to be a grown cat, and her housemates would have to be ok with it. Her housemates were ok with it, even the one who is allergic to cats, even the one who claims he doesn't like cats.  She has five housemates.  They were all ok with it. She wondered if she could train the cat to go back and forth up the road to her boyfriend's house with her.  A cat she had had years ago at home with her parents had been hit on the road and died and she had stayed home from school and cried for a week and the cat they got after that (after an appropriate mourning period had elapsed) had been with them fourteen years before he died of old age last winter. He used to meet her at the top of her parents lane where her Dad parked the car whenever she came home to visit them.

The people at the cat rescue place sounded like they thought it was a bad idea too. "We take prospective cat owners lifestyle into account when considering possible cats." "How many people live in your house?" They come round and inspect the home to see if it is suitable for cats.

She was scared of the home inspection, maybe it wasn't a good idea, maybe her lifestyle wasn't appropriate.  What if she finally was given an opportunity? her art career might materialise.  What if the cat was hurt or lost and her heart broke?

Weeks before she got up the guts to let the cat rescue volunteer come and inspect the house she wrote in her sketchbook: GET A CAT AND CALL IT RISK. 

After the inspection she lost patience after two days and called them, "Can I have a cat, have you decided?".  They said they had two that might suit her.  Not the pretty kittens or the dainty mama cat, two ex-strays, tough gangster boy cats from the streets of Peckham.  The first one they showed her had lost half his tail in an accident, the rescue vets had amputated it.  It didn't bother him they told her, not Disco, they said, they smiled when they talked about him.  She took him home. Risky Disco, only half a tail. 

Risko went missing a month after she brought him home, in the snow just before Christmas.  Every night for a week in the dark cold she walked the local streets calling.  She told herself the cat didn't belong to her anyway.  If he wanted to be a stray again it was up to him.  She went out again, just to see. 

After Christmas, the snow melted and that day Risko came back of his own accord.

post hiatus difficult post

So last night i was looking at the horizon and decided; I'm just gonna do this like I do when i haven't seen a real beloved old friend for a long time and we meet and it all comes out haphazard to start but we get there and the stories gradually gain coherence they didn't have before.

I'm in New Jersey, just over the river from Manhattan in the house of a dear old friend, I got here three nights ago and it's time to start talking about what I'm doing.  Bear with me as the fragments find their narrative.

Live Drawings

8.11.10
During 'Future Plan' a conference at Southampton City gallery concerning curation and the National Collection.

10.11.10
While considering work for an exhibition in Dublin at Rua Red Gallery in April.  Ideas around bonfires, beacons and telepresence.  Listening to news of the student occupation of Tory HQ millbank (Daniel Trilling).

18.11.10
During Thursday Club at Goldsmiths curated by Gabriel Menotti on VJing.

About Go and Mathematics.

I set myself the task of integrating my intuitive drawing practice with programming via an exploration of the ancient game of Go.  The results of these processes have been rich and here I hope to summarise them.  For me, programming is still painstaking and slow with limited visibilty of the way ahead, I am learning my way for the first time and progress is anything but intuitive. I feel my way, testing as I go and assessing each new situation as empirically as I can with digital subject matter.  The preexisting structure of the game of Go has space for intuition built into it and so out of rigid structure it produces complexity, infinite outcomes. With this in mind I force myself to understand the practicalities of its simplicity for the sake of building this instance of it, so I can play with it and thereby learn.

As I struggle with programming booleans and tidying up loops I am also presented with theoretical problems.  I am concerned that i am guilty of cultural piracy, utilising another culture's
artefacts in my own way, never having been and witnessed them in action, in context.  I wonder why I am drawn to these things, to Go, to Origami, to the I Ching, why do I want to work with them?  As Carl Jung disarmingly states in his Foreword to Richard Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching (a mathematical technology at least as old as Go and originating in the same culture ) "Since I am not a Sinologue, a foreword to the Book Of Changes (the I Ching) from my hand must be a testimonial of my individual experience with this great and singular book".  I must make the same claim for this work.  I was drawn to Go as a formal construct and as such I have explored it in my own way.  Cultural context is of enormous value in helping to understand it but for that in this instance I have relied heavily on the experience of experts d such as Richard Wilhelm and Oscar Korschelt to provide me with it.  I hope this is something that can be remedied in the future with firsthand experience and research in China and Japan.  It is a testament to the strength of these cultures that they have created  lasting, essentially mathematical structures which can in some way transcend cultural difference and be appreciated as forms outside of language.

As Alain Badiou sets out to prove, mathematics has this brilliant ability to describe things before or outside of language or philosophy; as he puts it "Ontology is Mathematics". In his collected "Theoretical Writings" edited by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano he describes 'being' as best described by itself and that it does so using mathematics not language. Describing his ontology he says, "philosophy must enter into logic via mathematics, not into mathematics via logic".  It is this function of Go as a mathematical construct and the facility of programming to explore such constructs in which I am interested in this work.  I am learning to program, I am learning to play Go and from this, with space left for the intuition I know well from my drawings come patterns, come signal outcomes which I can use to facilitate further development as a programmer-artist.

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