The Field
2009 - durational (ongoing)
2010
2011
An art project
A conservation project
Collaboration
The field is collaborative and all are welcome to participate in at least one of its many levels of participitation. There is a core group who have allotments, help with bee-keeping and provide the direction for all other activities. There is a monthly 'conservation day' during the winter months that is open to anyone who wishes to participate. In addition, there is the annual, 'moot point', at which an idea is interrogated or explored both intellectually, through discussion, and through making or doing. Subjects for moot points are decided upon each year and moots are proposed by individuals who have the floor for 10minutes after which all participants contribute. Finally, additional special one-off projects, including outreach projects are also hosted by participants of 'the field'.
Diversity
The field is an exploration and enactment of diversity on numerous levels. Ordinarily, the term is quite reductive, glossing the full range and complexity of human diversity as well as ignoring the complex and mind-blowing diversity within the non-human part of nature. An example might be the idea that 80% of species (or perhaps 80% of life) is to be found under or within the soil. The attempt to understand or appreciate our impact and intervention into nature, not in traditional Romantic terms of human V nature, but in longer historical and archaeological terms, as an interaction, lies at the heart of this project. Taking the perspective of bees (both wild bees and honey bees) helps to shift assumptions about what the flora within this project should look like. Suddenly scrubby wild plants and weeds seem useful, even when they're not useful or beautiful in human terms. Part of the project is to observe what happens, including the feelings of the humans in relation to both the plants and the animals (not to mention the other kingdoms) as life continues.
Intervention
The field is an intervention into contemporary art practice in the context of the London artworld. Since the rise of neoliberalism, the London artworld has been bifurcated on two instrumentalised and problematic lines (see 'This is not art' to be published by IB Tauris shortly). Either art practice is market-orientated and emblematic of the myth of market meritocracy (and generally banal) or it is instrumentalised as social good (and generally mediocre) and little more than the artistic end of a process of (trade and political) liberalization, which all are meant to adopt for our own good. In short, individual art practice and artworld structures readily reproduce power as Foucault describes despite constant critique of this fact. The field is an attempt at negotiating power as Foucault describes, by observation of both its limitations and impositions and by mindfully acting with respect to power. Neoliberalism has included the commodification of every type of human expression, including ideas, rendering even immaterial art (dematerialized art) commodifiable and subject to market operations. The field acknowledges these conditions and attempts, in itself, to work in the interstices. The physical geographical area is privately owned by Alana Jelinek and Juliette Brown, yet most of its components are outside ownership. The migrating swallows and house martins are one example of things of the field project which lie outside.
Art
The field is inspired by a history of art practice that engages with the human and the non-human world in way that is ethical and mindful. It can be seen as stemming from recent art historical practices like relational aesthetics or its precedents, like dialogic practice, conceptual art and Happenings. But it is its own thing and does not readily fit these categories. Whereas relational aesthetics sets up situations in which 'microtopias' might occur, the field is not utopian and it does not encourage the idea of small, one-off relationships with our fellow-humans as a type of utopian practice. Like Happenings, has a potential mindfulness but the field's art does not lie in mindfulness. Participants may or may not be mindful. The field is an art of engagement with ideas, with people, with non-humans, that enacts and enables diversity, despite the inherent difficult of this. It also is a tension between control and letting go.
Wiki link for The Field project
back