Step by step instructions Bunting

Sound Journey at The Edinburgh Do with Sarah Boulton

How to mend a jumper in pictures - From Sunday at the Edinburgh DO

 

 

 

Crochet at the Edinburgh DO

Pollination board and skill web board at the edinburgh do

Images made in the Edinburgh Do and pinned on to the structure

Testing out the Library Structure

Skill Exchange structure at the Edinburgh DO

Making the pollination board

to collaborating with sarah boulon in the future

This guy, Bill Drummond (he's from Wales - he's great).

(It was here he first became involved in performing as a musician working initially with school friends including Gary Carson and Chris Ward.[5] He attended Northampton and Liverpool Schools of Art from 1970 to 1973). Following this, he decided that *** "art should use everything, be everywhere" and that as an artist he would "use whatever medium is to hand".[6] He then spent two years doing various jobs including being a milkman, gardener, steel worker, nursing assistant, theatre carpenter and scene painter. *** LETS DO THIS. When we graduate from Slade and Amsterdam, lets just get jobs and make in our conditions that surround us!!

No worries!!

SELF-INSTITUTIONALISATION For good and ill the process of institutionalisation has become internalised says Jakob Jakobsen 

Art Monthly 2006
 
'I began to use the concept of ‘self-institutionalisa- tion’ during 1998 and 1999 in relation to the establish- ment with Henriette Heise of a project space, Info Centre, in East London (see review in AM224). For us this was the start of a series of practical experiments with the construction and use of institutions. Info Centre was a combined exhibition space, archive and bookshop. The first ‘info sheet’ of the Info Centre stated: ‘We are committed to an understanding of art practice that is not exclusively related to the making of art works, but also includes the establishing of institu- tions for the experience and use of art and generally the making of institutions for human life.’ - Jakob Jakobsen 2006

 

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'We saw this self-institution as a parallel to other institutions in society, particularly art institutions. But inevitably we soon found that our institution made materially more sense to us in our everyday life than most of the other institutions we encountered. We were not interested in being perceived as an anti-institution, because we had no interest in positioning Info Centre in relation to mainstream institutions or the dominant culture, which are usually so closely tied together. And we did not view mainstream institutions or the dominant culture as necessarily being in opposition to us; we simply refused them in their totality. The construction of an institution was not intended as a critique but instead as a means to take control of both production and distribution. It represented an escape from oppositional institutional critique through the total refusal of the dominant institutions’ monopoly of power'.'

 

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Traditionally institutions deal with confinement or detention, for example, hospitals, prisons, schools, barracks, the family – and the art museum. Michel Foucault described societies characterised by these kinds of closed institutions as disciplinary societies – a form of society that dominated during the 19th Cen- tury and the first half of the 20th Century. Institu- tions in disciplinary societies operated as closed systems: their primary function was the production of normality: they made everything cohere, they organ- ised time, they organised space and they established a specific public sphere. Thus in the disciplinary society institutions had a normalising function and this oper- ated mainly through physical constraints: they isolated unfit people from the public sphere by means of con- finement in mental hospitals and prisons, and like- wise they kept art, education, upbringing and work within very specific frameworks. When growing up people move from one closed system to the next: first the family, then the school, the military, the universi- ty, and the factory, and so on. In the same way the white cube of the modern art museum represents a similarly closed system. The institutions of discipli- nary society had a suitably robust and conservative architecture – they were brick-based institutions.
  

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After the Second World War discipline started to break down as new powers slowly entered the frame. New systems of dominance came into force, as Gilles Deleuze described in the 1990 text Postscript to the Con- trol Society. In this text – which this analysis draws upon – he writes: ‘We’re in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement – prisons, hospi- tals, factories, schools, the family.’ Here we would add art museums: ‘These institutions are in more or less terminal decline. It’s simply a matter of nursing them through their death throes and keeping people busy until the new forces knocking on the door take over.’ 

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When we as consumers move through daily life our behaviour is increasingly being observed and recorded as we take part in electronic transactions: when we use our mobile phones, when we use our credit/debit card, and when we use the internet. An electronic logbook recording many of our activities is gradually being produced. The control is not solely external, existing in the public sphere, it also pervades the body and the mind and unfolds through language, communication and social rela- tions. As Cornelius Castoriadis has described it in World in Fragments, 1996: ‘Individuals become what they are by absorbing and internalising institutions. This internalisation ... is anything but superficial: modes of thought and action, norms and values, and, ultimately the very identity of the individual as a social being are dependent upon it.’ The institutional system is becoming like a gas we inhale.

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Self-institutionalisation can be viewed as a kind of exorcism, a kind of externalisation of this internalised control. This is perhaps one way to describe the ambitions lying behind many of the new self-organised institutions which continue to emerge in various cultures around the world.
At least it was the ambition that encouraged Heise and myself to found the Copenhagen Free University. We did not want to base our institutional building on a direct opposition, but on a refusal of the dominant institu- tional mode of production, an evacuation of its basis through the construction of an alternative. The con- struction of this alternative was based on taking power – but also on a refusal to become government.

Nevertheless, there is a world of difference between practices of adapting oneself to the existing institutional arrangement and contesting the institution by occupying it differently. Art’s existing institutions can be reused independently if they are treated as contested spaces. Independence, resistance and dissent have to be manufactured. Flight from trouble is not always an effective technique for generating radical independence. Establishing a physical distance from the existing institutions often turns out to be a red herring, failing to guarantee independence in a fuller sense. It is clear that a number of artist-run spaces are set up entrepreneurially to catch the attention of the market and art’s leading public institutions. Such spaces may be funded and managed as independent concerns, but they are in no way ideologically or culturally independent of art’s institutions. A stronger brand of independence would entail some substantial divergence from business-as-usual. The first condition of art’s independence is not art’s isolation but its contestation of the cultural field, either by setting up alternative spaces or by occupying existing spaces differently.

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Info Centre, a project space set up in East London by Henriette Heise & Jakob Jakobsen in the late 90s, broke the taboo on art’s institutionalisation through what Heise & Jakobsen call ‘self-institutionalisation’. The first info sheet of the Info Centre stated: ‘We are committed to an understanding of art practice that is not exclusively related to the making of art works, but also includes the establishing of institutions for the experience and use of art and generally the making of institutions for human life.’ This statement by Info Centre attests to the need to institutionalise alternatives in order to care for them. The taboo on institutionalisation in art is effectively the refusal to underwrite alternative practices with the institutions that they need and deserve in order to thrive. We do not need to avoid institutionalisation, we need fuller, wider, and more diverse forms of institutionalisation. Institutionalisation for the few needs to be replaced by institutionalisation for all.

- Dave Beech

help exchange on facebook

Presenting an event

Presenting an event

Pollination Board and Skill Board

I have been asked to create the Pollination and Skill Bord for the Edinburgh DO.

correspondence with Katie for its creation

í Pollination í

This is a space for you to open up your ideas for projects and initiatives to others for exploration, development, feedback and collaboration.

If you have a project or initiative write it out on a branch and attach it within one of the tree squares on the pollination board.

If you are interested in one of the projects on the branches, attach a leaf with your name written on it.

That tree square corresponds to a workshop room where you and others interested in a particular project can come together between 2-3pm daily to discuss it.

The action needed to take the project or initiative further and beyond the Edinburgh DO can be then advertised on The Skill Web on a yellow ‘request card’.

Here you can also take the opportunity to link yourself up to others who are ‘offering’ and may be interested to get involved 

Hi Jessica,


This looks great - I've only made minor changes. Thanks so much!


Katie xx



This is a space for you to bring seeds of ideas, initiatives, projects - and to seek collaborators, to brainstorm, cultivate and share creative thoughts.


If you have an idea, project or initiative write it out on a branch and attach it within one of the tree squares on the pollination board.



If you are interested in one of the projects on the branches, attach a leaf with your name written on it. Take note of your tree - it is the name a workshop room where you and others interested in a particular project will come together between 2-3pm to cross-fertilise.



The action needed to take the project or initiative further and beyond the Edinburgh DO can be then advertised on The Skill Web on a yellow ‘request card’.



Here you can also take the opportunity to link yourself up to others who are ‘offering’ and may be interested to get involve.

 

Painting the library structure

Decided to create blackboard exterior so that messages, instructions, adverts, etc can be inscribed.