Development Plans: Tacturiency (Structures + Propositions)

Statement of Intent: Gallery as gymnasium; residency as rehearsal; charged site for working out, for flexing mind & body through process-based tasks & exercises. Artists as operatives engaged in ambiguous tasks, whose visual poetics reside between séance, shiftwork & training circuit. Interlocking sculptural apparatuses create conditions for performed action, from repeated falling to acts of conversation. Performance documents operate as propositions evoking action, activating space in the live body’s absence.

The Italic I: a figure repeatedly falls. Attempts to slow & extend the event of falling: moments of flight, lightness – endlessly grounded. Games of Resonance: two figures meet in mute dialogue; their gestural language (heightened/economic, minimal/baroque) reflects upon the desired points of tension within collaboration. Few words; instead, bells, bubbles, resonating glass. A muted palette of nude & neutral grey, heavy linen, satin folded pleats. Props create leverage for potential action/reflection: scaffolds cut diagonal lines in space against which a body dangles, tilts, arcs; wooden structures curve to support artists & audiences stretch, recline. For future residencies we proposes to newly focus on: Latency/activation: how props/workstations might be animated (publicly) through live action/performance propositions (sound/video/image); Live/mediated: blur between live/recording, proposition/document, private action made public real-time via a lens; Digital/analogue: camera as witness, as generative constraint, recursivity/feedback loops; Discursivity/dialogue: generation of content through performance/lectures and readings for publication.

Workshop: Summer Lodge July 2013

During July 2013, Cocker and Thornton have been developing work and ideas from within their ongoing collaboration, Tacturiency, as part of Summer Lodge, an annual workshop event in the fine art studios at Nottingham Trent University. 

With thanks to Christine Stevens and NTU studio assistants.

The Summer Lodge workshop provided a context for Cocker and Thornton to begin an initial test of the idea of 'studio/gallery as gymnasium' - a charged site for 'working out', for testing mind/body through a series of staged exercises (which they hope to now test more fully as a public proposition through residencies). Sculptural components were conceived as a set of interlocking or modular apparatuses, points of leverage or provocation for a series of propositional performance actions. Photographic and time-based documents (including sound and video) were used as 'propositions', intimating towards both past and prospective action (how the space might be activated) in the absence of the live body.

Proposition for repeated action (acoustic event) - through their experimentation during Summer Lodge Cocker and Thornton have started to explore the differences (and discrepancies) between audio and visual documents of the event of falling: if the photographic record captures the body in flight (as aerial, even ethereal) then sound recording attests to its weight and density, the inevitability of gravity and the return of the body to ground.

Proposition for repeated action (recursive loop) - this experimental body of work-in-progress (below) develops Cocker and Thornton's interest in the different registers of repeated action operative in the work - (1) as witnessed in the photographic capture of motion (as chronological or sequential frames); (2) in the similarity between images from different falls (difference and repetition); (3) as a form of recursivity - the production of feedback loops. This body of work also begins to explore the role of analogue means of capture (indexicality, witnessing, being there) and the sense of how certain technologies can operate as constraints that determine the specific critical frame or conditions within which to work. The idea emerges as a collaboration between the body, situation and the lens. The images below show a work-in-progress proposition - Proposition for repeated action (recursive loop) - which Cocker and Thornton now propose to test further through future residencies.

Summer Lodge (2013) provided a context for clarifying the concerns of Tacturiency and for developing ideas for future residencies. It enabled us to refine the visual vocabulary of the work (specifically its muted palette of nude & neutral grey), as well as reflect on the role of visual documents within the project as propositional, provisional, repeatable, replaceable elements. Whilst Summer Lodge has enabled us to develop the visual language and initial concept for Tacturiency, we now wish to develop this further through more sustained opportunities for working together, in the form of public residencies.

The Italic I

Vertigo looms, on the way to syncope. No longer the disordered vertigo of the first discomfort, not the ground falling away. It is a voluntary vertigo, radiating control. Catherine Clément, The Syncope of Rapture.

A diagonal helps to temper the excessiveness of the One. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

In this body of work, Cocker and Thornton explore the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. The studio is approached as a gymnasium, a training space for rehearsing, isolating and interrogating distinct moments or stages within falling. No longer considered an event to be avoided or protected against, falling is apprehended willfully and consciously as an exercise of both mind and body, tested out in physical and cognitive terms. By repeatedly staging a series of falls, Cocker and Thornton attempt to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes:

* Softening the Ground – setting up the conditions

* Preparing to Fall – warming and flexing

* Entering the Arc – trust, twist, torque

* A Commitment Made – working against impulse

* Letting Go – a liquid state

* Voluntary Vertigo – ilinx, inclination

* Becoming Diagonal – the italic i

* Touching Limits – tilt towards (the other)

* Ecstatic Impotency – the jouissance of impuissance

* Folding of Attention – heightened interiority

* Embodiment/Disembodiment – mind body partition

* Breathless – ventilating the idea

* Formless – horizontality

* Voluptuous Recovery – return, yet charged

* Recalibrate … Loop – desire to repeat

The Italic I reflects on the capacity of voluntary falling for inoculating the body to the imagined threat of the fall and the experience of uncertainty and disorientation therein. Falling is instead considered as a kairotic site (of opportunity) for producing the vertiginous pleasure of unexpected forms of embodied knowledge and augmented subjectivity, activated in and through active inhabitation of the perceived passivity and impotency often associated with the fall.

Specific Outcomes

Artists' Pages in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think

The productive and generative potential of falling is approached as a physical and linguistic exercise: a photographic document depicting choreographed extractions or scenes in a purposefully unsettling non-linear flow, presented alongside textual reflections on the different states within the event of falling.

On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) will draw together a number of contemporary thinkers from a range of disciplines along with artists to explore the place of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process.   It is conceived as an examination of the subject through practice and theory and will include both written essays and artists’ projects. The state of ‘not knowing’ or engaging with the unknown is a clearly acknowledged important aspect of all research. For artists it is crucial, as during the making process they may move between a strong sense of direction and a more playful or meditative state of exploration and experimentation. Within this process a sense of not knowing what it is they are doing can be as important as clear intentions.  The book will examine states such as ignorance, wonder, awe, potential and recognizing the new, as well as reflect on how artists formulate strategies of not knowing and ‘play’ within their decision making process. Contributors include Professor Gary Peters (York St John), Associate Professor Rachel Jones (George Mason), Associate Prof Neal White (Bournemouth) and Dr Jyrki Siukonen (Finnish Academy) as well as artists Cornford and Cross, Sonia Boyce, Karla Black and Phyllida Barlow. The publication builds on a symposium held at the invitation of Kettle’s Yard, to accompany the exhibition Material Intelligence in 2009.

On falling, Fall narratives: conference

Cocker and Thornton’s proposed conference paper, The Italic I, has been accepted for the forthcoming conference on falling, Fall narratives: an interdisciplinary perspective, 18th-19th June 2014, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. In this proposed performance lecture the artists explore the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. 

Pamphlet - The Italic I
Cocker and Thornton are currently working with designers Joff+Ollie on an artists' publication which develops the concerns of the artists' page produced for On Not Knowing.

Folding of Attention

Folding of Attention (proposed residency on Davaar) (currently seeking funding).
This proposed body of work (conceived as a residency on the Scottish tidal island of Davaar) moves Cocker and Thornton’s enquiry from the studio (as gymnasium) into a littoral landscape, a unique location of whose geographical and visual attributes have been specifically identified as reinforcing the poetic vocabulary of the work around thresholds of understanding, the interior and exterior landscapes within collaborative practice. The Scottish tidal island Davaar (known for its caves) is approached as a live site for further investigating and experimenting with states of separation/connection; interiority/exteriority; spatial immersion/openings, and the figure of the bubble/pocket. 

The cave/island motif will be pressured through a series of live performances; actions performed at specific geographical locations on Davaar including at cave mouths, coastline and the causeway between the mainland and the island. Performances will develop the ritualized vocabulary of heightened gesture that Cocker and Thornton initiated during a workshop at Summer Lodge, 2012  — using glass bells, bubbles, and resonating objects for producing sound — for reflecting on the conditions of doubling; mirroring and echo; harmony and dissonance operative within collaboration. As part of this proposed site-specific residency, Cocker and Thornton intend to develop a new series of actions choreographed around a bespoke, designed ‘tipping table’, a furniture piece with tilting oval mirror embedded in the table top. By attending to the line of tide and horizon, the actions open outwards from an interrogation of the threshold between self/other towards self/world.