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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018
JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018
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Interview with Alice Bonnot
By Alice BonnotAbstractOur guest editorial takes the form of an interview between the JAWS editorial team and independent curator Alice Bonnot.
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Towards an archaeology of gesture in Kurt Schwitters’ ‘Pointless’ collage (or how I ‘learned’ about Schwitters’ work through painting leftovers)
By Heather RossAbstractThis article will discuss how an analysis of the readable gestures within the work of Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) can provide a new way of experiencing his artwork in the present. Specifically addressing two artworks by Schwitters, Merzoil (1939) and Untitled (with Porcelain Shard) (1946), the article will use theoretical and art-practice-based methods to analyse the ‘stain’, to provide new insights into his working processes, relationship to materials and site. This research is aimed towards a better understanding of Kurt Schwitters’ final ‘Merzbau’ the Merz Barn Wall (1947) situated within the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.
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‘Linguartistics’
More LessAbstractAn attempt to define my artistic practice would be fine art calligraphy or lettering art. Drawing with words or writing drawings has become a way of explaining my research. In fact, text IS my practice and the dialogue between text and image is very real: the text is image and the image is created out of text. One does not exist without the other: they form an entity that develops a connection with myself and ultimately the viewer. Art as Text as Art is the venture of ‘linguartistics’.
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Justice for Magnitsky: Staging the material document in Elena Gremina’s One Hour Eighteen Minutes
By James RowsonAbstractThis article investigates the relationship between Russian documentary theatre and the Kremlin’s manipulation of justice and the legal system through close analysis of Elena Gremina’s One Hour Eighteen Minutes (2010). By tracing the genealogy of documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia and framing the play within the context of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, this article contends that the act of documentation and the privileging of the document is a vital feature of documentary theatre in Russia. It argues that Gremina’s staging of material documents is key to understanding how Russian theatre makers have employed the aesthetics of the ‘theatre of the real’ to undermine the official discourse of the Putin regime and provoke their audience to consider their own role in challenging these manipulated judicial narratives.
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How do non-places affect our identities?
By Jaya ModiAbstractNon–Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995) introduces readers to a curious notion of spatiality, wherein Marc Augé describes non-places – spaces where interactions, existences and experiences are regarded as temporary and unreal. This article aims to interrogate the subtleties and loci of such non-places to better understand how they affect or alter the identities of people submerged within them. In considering the notion of non-place, this article establishes boundaries between simulated spaces and non-places, and further discusses the possibilities within such places offered by psychogeographic mapping and geosemiotics.
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How to create a metaphorical body from a cardboard box
More LessAbstractThis article is an instructional, narrative and illustrated guide that articulates a creative process from a body of work in my practice research. The body of work is the Boxing Series (2015–present); artworks in this series develop ideas through consecutive performances, building on experience, technique and exploratory innovation. The set of instructions detailed in this article enable the creation of an artwork done in this specific invented style, through a process termed ‘boxing’. The instructions are a guide in order to experience the process of making, and to also experience a metaphorical and sculptural body, one that embodies and reflects something other or something unknown prior to the undertaking of the making process. This is to say that a metaphorical body may emerge for the maker from the instructions provided, using materials and tools listed, key characteristics, reflective considerations, sculptural and improvisational techniques. The artworks from the Boxing Series originate from a cardboard box that is covered/fortified with a latex skin and then wrestled with in an improvisational technique. This intuitive process of making is also a deconstruction, transformation and collaboration (with the material). The event of the ‘boxing’ uses a premeditated theoretical structure for making, but the process is un-choreographed, involving spontaneity. This article is fashioned after a specific artwork from the Boxing Series, Animalia Interruptous (AI). AI, was an intervention, a performance or rather a ‘making intervention’ that replaced the format of a traditional academic presentation. It was presented at the 2018 Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) postgraduate symposium titled Materials and Materiality: How do they Matter? held at Central Bankside, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama on Friday, 9 February 2018. The symposium sought to investigate the roles and significance of the various materials that are around us and that make up or are negotiated in theatre and performance practice and research.
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Artistic devices and the ethical nature of recycling: Burning as détournement, destruction as materiality
More LessAbstractMany artists use recycling as a didactic tool and as a form of activism. In my practice I make use of both but the core concept is that the destruction we are inflicting upon our world, through the destruction of our natural environment, it’s ceased. I call it the Destruction of Destruction, in which the act of destroying turns against itself. Through artistic devices such as redundancy and détournement, the materiality of the artwork becomes imbued with energies that come from actions. This article explores some of the contextual remits of my art practice in the context of socio-political actions, materiality and immateriality, but also from an individual point of view: the forces that move me as an artist to make art.
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Mixed fibres: Human and non-human collaboration
More LessAbstractEphemeral and durable; humble and ubiquitous – paper is a complex material of unique necessity in human lives, treading a line between climatological pariah and saviour. It degrades, rots and burns but can outlast our ephemeral bodies, spending its days withdrawing beneath our activities. This article considers a performance practice with paper in response to the new materialist theories of Karen Barad, as more than the continued instrumentalization of a pervasive yet passive material, but an artistic collaboration. This acknowledges the more-than-human relations we are part of and how we must find ways to work together in consideration of feminist and eco-critical concerns.
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