recent TEDx tests
|
Test 1: Train footage
“It was the ‘adjacency’ of the seating that did all the work. We just sat down and began to talk. The train speeded us along.” |
|
|
Test 2: Train footage
(Replication Fork diagram) “There are genes, encoded ones, that replicate functional information, and then there are non-coding ones that don’t. It’s tempting to call the latter ‘junk’.” |
|
|
Test 3: Train footage
"... the stationary character of storage did indeed represent common ground between science and art. Who would’ve thought it. Well, we did. Not just while speeding along on a train, but also whilst waiting at stations.” |
|
|
Test 4: Train footage
"Synergy arises where narratives flow without interruption, and activities like art and science love telling stories whilst speeding along together. But this non-coding piece of ex-currency was, quite properly, beyond our synergising reach. It's like a mechanical breakdown ...” |
|
selected audio-visual pieces
Notes:
1) Titian-Tagore-Transition (2016) and Tantra from memory (2019)
This audio-visual sequence served (experimentally) as the curtain-raiser for the conference papers I presented with the Kathakali performer Janaki Nair. We wanted to open our discussion of Philip Rawson’s 1971 Tantra exhibition with a sensory provocation that had both Indian and European roots. Thus Titian-Tagore-Transition begins with Suchitra Mitra performing a song by the celebrated Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore, a recording that dates from the mid-1950s. This is followed by the jazz pianist Zoe Rahman improvising the same song with her brother Idris on Kindred Spirits, a CD released in 2012. Alongside this you also see a painting by the youthful Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) fade into a work painted by the same artist in 1576 at the very end of his long life. There is nothing especially Indian about sixteenth century Venetian art and yet, listening to Mitra sing, we sense that the flute – seen first with the nymph and then with the shepherd – would sadden us profoundly if played. Indeed, the song’s lyrics describe an ‘anxious light’ surrounding and disconcerting the listener as despondent flute music fills the air. Compare this with Titian’s last painting. According to Giorgio Agamben, the artist has pictured the exhausted sensuality and subdued melancholy experienced at the end of history, at the moment when all our anthropological privileges cease to operate (see The Open: man and animal). At this point our lecture would begin. The second part, a recent piece called Tantra from memory, shows me trying to draw the layout of Rawson’s exhibition in the absence of photographic documentation in the Arts Council of Great Britain archives. In the background a BBC programme, Record Review, can be heard on my studio radio. That Saturday morning (7th December 2019) the presenters were comparing different recordings of the Flower Duet from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé.
2) Rituals of refurbishment: remembering/remediating Philip Rawson’s Tantra exhibition (2018)
This audio-visual piece was part of a Dorsett & Nair presentation given at ASA2018: Sociality, matter, and the imagination: re-creating Anthropology, a conference held at Oxford University in September, 2018. At the time I made the recording outside the Hayward Gallery, the original venue of the exhibition, my co-author was in India and so contributed to our debate via Skype.
3) The world is breaking up (2018)
This short video was made in my studio as a reflection on a paper presented at Variations, Rewritings and Adaptations of the Jātaka Tales and Buddhism in India Today (SARI 2016 Annual and International Colloquium, University of Paris 13). My retelling of the jātaka story known as The Timid Hare and the Flight of the Beasts involved a collapsing planet based on a ‘terrestrial globe’ made in 19th century in Orissa (now in the V&A Museum). This representation of land masses, rivers and seas featured in Rawson’s exhibition. My drawings, which feature throughout the video, were folded up into small boxes, numbered and gifted to friends interested in Rawson’s approach to exhibition-making. This idea comes from studying the beautiful Tantric diagrams I first saw at the Hayward Gallery. I’m told they were originally purchased on Indian streets as magic charms and then folded up so that they could be taken away.
1) Titian-Tagore-Transition (2016) and Tantra from memory (2019)
This audio-visual sequence served (experimentally) as the curtain-raiser for the conference papers I presented with the Kathakali performer Janaki Nair. We wanted to open our discussion of Philip Rawson’s 1971 Tantra exhibition with a sensory provocation that had both Indian and European roots. Thus Titian-Tagore-Transition begins with Suchitra Mitra performing a song by the celebrated Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore, a recording that dates from the mid-1950s. This is followed by the jazz pianist Zoe Rahman improvising the same song with her brother Idris on Kindred Spirits, a CD released in 2012. Alongside this you also see a painting by the youthful Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) fade into a work painted by the same artist in 1576 at the very end of his long life. There is nothing especially Indian about sixteenth century Venetian art and yet, listening to Mitra sing, we sense that the flute – seen first with the nymph and then with the shepherd – would sadden us profoundly if played. Indeed, the song’s lyrics describe an ‘anxious light’ surrounding and disconcerting the listener as despondent flute music fills the air. Compare this with Titian’s last painting. According to Giorgio Agamben, the artist has pictured the exhausted sensuality and subdued melancholy experienced at the end of history, at the moment when all our anthropological privileges cease to operate (see The Open: man and animal). At this point our lecture would begin. The second part, a recent piece called Tantra from memory, shows me trying to draw the layout of Rawson’s exhibition in the absence of photographic documentation in the Arts Council of Great Britain archives. In the background a BBC programme, Record Review, can be heard on my studio radio. That Saturday morning (7th December 2019) the presenters were comparing different recordings of the Flower Duet from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé.
2) Rituals of refurbishment: remembering/remediating Philip Rawson’s Tantra exhibition (2018)
This audio-visual piece was part of a Dorsett & Nair presentation given at ASA2018: Sociality, matter, and the imagination: re-creating Anthropology, a conference held at Oxford University in September, 2018. At the time I made the recording outside the Hayward Gallery, the original venue of the exhibition, my co-author was in India and so contributed to our debate via Skype.
3) The world is breaking up (2018)
This short video was made in my studio as a reflection on a paper presented at Variations, Rewritings and Adaptations of the Jātaka Tales and Buddhism in India Today (SARI 2016 Annual and International Colloquium, University of Paris 13). My retelling of the jātaka story known as The Timid Hare and the Flight of the Beasts involved a collapsing planet based on a ‘terrestrial globe’ made in 19th century in Orissa (now in the V&A Museum). This representation of land masses, rivers and seas featured in Rawson’s exhibition. My drawings, which feature throughout the video, were folded up into small boxes, numbered and gifted to friends interested in Rawson’s approach to exhibition-making. This idea comes from studying the beautiful Tantric diagrams I first saw at the Hayward Gallery. I’m told they were originally purchased on Indian streets as magic charms and then folded up so that they could be taken away.
recent folded drawings
|
|
click to zoom
Wallet (my operational animal-thing) and Ten Pounds (the pleasure of the holder)
A ten pound note has remained in my wallet throughout lockdown. Something changed for me when payments went contactless. Two hundred years ago, David Ricardo recognised that the value of paper money only remains stable when banknotes can be converted to gold at ‘the pleasure of the holder’. These days, this pleasure is auratic. In my leather wallet, the banknote has been bundled up with some tiny drawings I made on odd scraps of paper. Somehow it seems to have converted itself into an artwork. Holly Dugan, who writes about material culture in the early modern period of English history, has described a certain folded vellum manuscript in the British Library as an ‘operational animal-thing’. I’m inspired by this description. Vellum is calf skin, so its aesthetic status is troubling. And yet, as the manuscript is opened and viewed, each concertina-like fold seems to reanimate the creature’s lost life. Perhaps my folding drawing, the one I call Wallet, ‘operates’ like this as it reveals the inanimate banknote inside.
Pencil on 85gsm bioprima paper, series G polymer £10 note, vellum reinforcements, conservators' cotton tying tape, linen hinging tape, archival negative folder.
status: currently on exhibition at The Wall North Contemporary Gallery
seecard: 21.06.21
tlsref: 6168.19
https://vimeo.com/568610819/8e76c45b45
https://vimeo.com/568628465/537a9e2917
|
|
click to zoom
Open Letter (the harmed calf)
This is number 2 in an ongoing series of ‘open letters’ to the Art, Response, and Responsibility panel convened at the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists held in March 2021. The piece is formed from a single sheet of paper which has been folded and cut seventeen times. Its overlapping and manoeuvrable sections are covered with pictorial jottings made during the panel presentations. Much of the imagery refers to Holly Dugan’s 2019 article Early Modern Tranimals, from which the ‘harmed calf’ epigraph is derived.
Pencil on 85gsm bioprima paper,
vellum ties and hinges, archival folder.
status: unfinished
seecard: 21.05.21
tlsref: 6148.11
https://vimeo.com/551896008/fc53c629b1
|
|
click to zoom
Open Letter (Catesby's serpent)
This is the first of my ‘open letters’ to the Art, Response, and Responsibility panel at the Association of Social Anthropologists 2021 conference. The piece, which is based on the drawings Mark Catesby (1682-1749) made of North American fauna, featured in the video that accompanied the final passage of my paper.
[extract]
... which brings me to Holly Dugan’s ‘Early Modern Tranimals’. The context of her research is ‘cultural studies’, and the political frame, contemporary ‘trans-activism’. But the subject is a seventeenth century manuscript in the British Library known only by its catalogue number - 57312. Like most of my new ‘artworks’, it’s a folded vellum object, and Dugan wouldn’t achieve the levels of analysis she does without taking into account its biological substance. It’s made of ‘calf skin’. She calls 57312 an ‘operational animal-thing’. ‘Operational’ because the “concertina-like” body into which it has been folded has to be manoeuvred in order to view its content. And, in doing so, its richly illustrated surface becomes visible, and then is animated, in various ‘transformational’ combinations. So, an image of Adam ‘transitions’ into an image of Eve, and Eve turns into a picture of a Siren and the Siren becomes a Snake, and so on. Consequently, the condition of ‘tranimality’ takes on ‘a semblance’ of ‘life’ before your eyes. Your ‘unfoldings’ and ‘refoldings’, resist ‘historically defined’ categories. And the significance of this ‘loosening’ of definition stems from the ‘pliant’ skin of the ‘harmed calf’ who made 57312 possible. Dugan advances our ‘threat awareness’. She moves our attention back and forth across the boundary between object and animal. A ‘consensus’ is challenged. Our sensibilities are re-distributed. We encounter ‘the damage done’. These are the ‘aesthetic responsibilities I’ve tried to be ‘sensitive’ to in this presentation. And I’ve done something else. Through these various descriptions I’ve spoken up for the snake I found dead one morning on the road that runs near my studio. Thank you.
pencil on 85gsm bioprima paper, 18th century vellum document.
status: archived
seecard date: 27.03.21
TLS ref: 6148.11
https://vimeo.com/539033599/d3a958b54c
|
|
click to zoom
Bookmark and Open Letter
My folded drawings are made to be archived but can be included in exhibitions. There’s always a small hole punched in one corner from which it is possible to hang them on a wall. Very few are rectangular and so each one dangles in an unpredictable way. The effect is awkward, as if the drawing doesn't really want to be exhibited. It doesn’t - the primary experience is in the action of unfolding and refolding. I got this idea from the mysterious Tantric diagrams one sometimes comes across in UK museums. These were folded because, having been created as magic charms, they were kept privately about the person rather than openly displayed. Another influence was Laura Marks’ essay A Noisy Brush with the Infinite (2015), which also explores the aesthetics of ‘enfolding-unfolding’.
I make short videos too. This one documents what happened as I worked on the drawings in the Northern Lights exhibition. You hear lots of ambient noise and encounter my connection-building during lockdown. For example, an article in the Times Literary Supplement made me re-read Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. Some of what passed through Clarissa Dalloway’s mind that June day nearly a century ago was triggered by the 1918 influenza pandemic. As I folded up my drawings for this project, Woolf’s stream of consciousness haunted every move I made.
Pencil on 85gsm bioprima paper
status: sold
seecard: 12.05.20
tlsref: 6113.16
https://www.wallnorthgallery.com/chris-dorsett.html
My folded drawings are made to be archived but can be included in exhibitions. There’s always a small hole punched in one corner from which it is possible to hang them on a wall. Very few are rectangular and so each one dangles in an unpredictable way. The effect is awkward, as if the drawing doesn't really want to be exhibited. It doesn’t - the primary experience is in the action of unfolding and refolding. I got this idea from the mysterious Tantric diagrams one sometimes comes across in UK museums. These were folded because, having been created as magic charms, they were kept privately about the person rather than openly displayed. Another influence was Laura Marks’ essay A Noisy Brush with the Infinite (2015), which also explores the aesthetics of ‘enfolding-unfolding’.
I make short videos too. This one documents what happened as I worked on the drawings in the Northern Lights exhibition. You hear lots of ambient noise and encounter my connection-building during lockdown. For example, an article in the Times Literary Supplement made me re-read Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. Some of what passed through Clarissa Dalloway’s mind that June day nearly a century ago was triggered by the 1918 influenza pandemic. As I folded up my drawings for this project, Woolf’s stream of consciousness haunted every move I made.
Pencil on 85gsm bioprima paper
status: sold
seecard: 12.05.20
tlsref: 6113.16
https://www.wallnorthgallery.com/chris-dorsett.html