Les Bicknell Artist Lecture

13th May 2013

http://lesbicknell.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.axisweb.org/seCVPG.aspx?ARTISTID=230

http://thelibraryoflostbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/les-bicknells-book.html

Les Bicknell gave us a great lecture, very generous in detail and illustrations, about the concepts he works with, and then about his own practice and artworks.
He described the ideas of bookness, and was very convincing in how to see the world through the prism of bookness, whether through text, through folding, layering or other equivalents.
Books are materials, pages, inks, words, and also conceptually interesting.
A book can contain the entire world.
The book becomes you.
Stacks of bibles - power, knowledge and control.
Does text make it a book?
Text on buildings - reading buildings.
Text on roads.
Chapter headings, pages, logos, tattoos - Farenheit 451.
Becoming book - bookness.
Tally sticks, record sheet.
Each family has its own pattern - test identifying.
Do you need paper to make a book?
Could folded clothes be a book?
Containing / binding make it a book.
Page and text remains.
Graffiti text.
Wall with bricks - Carl Andre's equivalent.
When a man dies, a library is burned - Jewish.
Collection, bookness, unfinished book, newspaper - sequential.
Time and book sequence.
How you read, not quality of the book.
Book of stone - in statue.
Opening hands - like book, sense of revelation.
Fish, gills, revelation and display.
Zoomorphology. Ideas in nature - design and art.
The door - a huge page.
Books - spaces organised in time.
Blind- folded book.
Roofs -opened book.
Book structures - fan, codex, concertina blind.
Christos running fence.
David Nash- like codex book.
Appropriation.
this has bookness or not.
Production of a book is collaborative - writers, printers, binders, paper ink skins.
Inject printer - now individual production.
Context of distribution.
Library - place of the book.
Ipad, etc, back to medieval manuscripts - icons without text - an international language.
Where does book begin and end.
Cast knowledge out of book, into self and out.
Large sculptural books, log book, found material.
Edges of books - lines in landscape. Micro/macro - sedimentary layer.
Books as machines, only exist as 3D pictures.
Divides space - close up fold flat - packaging, container of text.
Complicated book, multiple text and structures.
Voice talking out different points of view.
Men role, lack of role.
Work for gardens - plat labels, reading like gallery.c 500 sticks of text.
Text - book - garden.
Time - halting, controlling.
Archives - find place, image.
Images overlaid in time.
Memory of place all that's left.
Reframe changes, change contrast.
Fold and pleat, hidden, within.
Venice - dubious, hidden.
Flowing, virtuous, smoking, poor.
clothed buildings - construction netting.
Book - touch relationships, sublimation printing onto veil.
Layers, veils. hoardings.
Old maps and leaves.
Book as narrative.
Bring book together.
Titles create narrative, nonlinear narrative.
A book anyone can pick up and get - no one can get it wrong - always open and closes differently.
Can often touch books at collections at galleries and museums, etc.
Every artist sees the world through their own prism.
The prism of view - 30 years of thinking , distilled huge ideas.
Proposal like a reflective journal, also preparing a lecture.
Collecting image.
What is our job, artist - the real job, work it out, point stuff out. Reflection.
Landscape and layering.
Site specific works, qualities of spaces, walking sense of space.
Enlightenment, world as a book.
Birdline - Sebastian Faulks novel.
Individual in landscape, signposts.
Clouds remind of steam, writing itself. Skies.
Books to read only through an xray machine - sealed but text in wire.
Scale of book 1-1000.
Altered books.
Sceptomorphology. New with element of the past, eg first TV in wooden cabinet.
Hybrid - past and future.
New language for ipad, etc.
Google glasses - augmented reality - future of knowledge and communication.
Book form - blank pages.
It's content and concept which makes it a book - intention.
Appropriated art as bookness - sequence.
Are there books that aren't books - impose bookness onto things.
A book not a book - acetate, folded bond, transparent.
Light - reflection, shadows - only evidence of book existing. Presence.
Multiple images on top of each other, all Mona Lisas etc - artist?
Phil Baines - typeface, read abstract text.
http://www.csm.arts.ac.uk/research/staffresearchprofiles/professorphilbaines/
Grayson Perry - Hang it up, smile, be on time.
Keep at it.
don't get sidelined.
Keep on making.
Know what you want, mentoring. don't forget to ask.
Just ask.
Invest in yourself as a small business.
Be particular, not blanket coverage.
put work out - show people - AN, AXIS.
You never know when it's the right time - being ready for the moment.
Pricing work - do I want it, have I learned from it.
If still need it, keep it, if not, let it go.
Value - what is morally comfortable.

Reflection
This was a faced paced lecture full of wonderful ideas, about bookness, and about seeing the world totally through an artistic prism. Very enthusiastic tip and encouragement about life as an artist. It's a long game.

24th June 2013