Mr. Jizolark's Concrete Data

MR. JIZOLARK’S CONCRETE DATA

MORGAN VENESS

A thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Art

School of Art & Design Faculty of Fine Arts

The University of New South Wales August 2017

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Surname or Family name: Veness

First name: Morgan Other name/s: James

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: MFA

School: College of Art & Design Faculty: School of Art

Title: Mr. Jizolark's Concrete Data

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) Local Jizo shrines dot Japan as places for protection, but in my research they illustrate the sorting of amassed fragmented bits and accumulated pieces into poetic encounters; hauntological gatherings. Thus, Mr. Jizolark, is an amalgamation of Mud/ark and Jizo.Through the action of collecting I have resourced a poetic language and grammar of materiality used to articulate my practice. The history of this process, whether it be the gathering and sorting of shapes, symbols or objects has enabled strategies for working within the hierarchies into which all things are sorted. Hoarding and amassing are involute forms of investigation and the act of presentation rendering them concurrently subject and object. This research is inspired by Kamo No Chomei's seminal essay/extended poem Hojoki with its emphasis on the benefits of renunciation and an awareness of impermanence. My investigation also considers positions located in Walter Benjamin's writing on "aura" and "collecting,'' with the intention of deepening the inherent notions that surround these areas. The aim of this thesis is to reconcile the permanent, or abiding, nature of amassing, physical or digital, by understanding ephemerality (intrinsic to the post-internet world.) The act of gleaning and accumulating objects is continually demonstrated by how we use the internet; we search and store information. Hito Steyerl articulates it as a process of presentation revealing pattern formation, from acquisition to discernment. She places an emphasis upon the constantly shifting digital image and its condition within reality where, "vision loses importance and is replaced by filtering, decrypting and pattern recognition." My strategy regards discarded objects, carried by the tide, and constantly shifting - in their relationship to each other, as aggregates of data. The beach near my studio, on an island in the Seto Sea of Japan, where the water and land meet, reveals what comes and goes, a liminal zone, (a type of screen) it is a portal opening on universal language.

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Date '0.? '-.:::!...... ABSTRACT

Through the action of collecting I have resourced a poetic language and grammar of materiality used to articulate my practice. The history of this process, whether it be the gathering and sorting of shapes, symbols or objects has enabled strategies for working within the hierarchies into which all things are sorted. Hording and amassing are involute forms of investigation and the act of presentation rendering them concurrently subject and object.

This research is inspired by Kamo No Chomei’s seminal essay/extended poem Hojoki with its emphasis on the benefits of renunciation and an awareness of impermanence. My investigation also considers positions located in Walter Benjamin’s writing on “aura” and “collecting,” with the intention of deepening the inherent notions that surround these areas. The aim of this thesis is to reconcile the permanent, or abiding, nature of amassing, physical or digital, by understanding ephemerality (intrinsic to the post-internet world.) The act of gleaning and accumulating objects is continually demonstrated by how we use the internet; we search and store information. Hito Steyerl articulates it as a process of presentation revealing pattern formation, from acquisition to discernment. She places an emphasis upon the constantly shifting digital image and its condition within reality where, “vision loses importance and is replaced by filtering, decrypting and pattern recognition.”1 My strategy regards discarded objects, carried by the tide, and constantly shifting - in their relationship to each other, as aggregates of data. The beach near my studio where the water and land meet, reveals what comes and goes, a liminal zone, (a type of screen) it is a portal opening on universal language.

An analysis of selected artists’ approaches to collecting, as investigations into the ways we perceive and understand our systems of object categorization, is charted along with my current studio research. An exhibition of my work, titled Mr. Jizolark’s Concrete Data will be held at UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 2017.

1 Hito Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition”, e-flux journal #72 (April 2016): 1, http://www.e- flux.com/journal/72/60480/a-sea-of-data-apophenia-and-pattern-mis-recognition/ (accessed 27-04-2016).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful for the kind support I received from staff at UNSW Art & Design, most notably my supervisor, Gary Carsley, for his generous and professional guidance, as well as, my co-supervisor, Allan Giddy.

I owe special thanks to Virginia MacLeod, Edward Giorgilli, Dr Zoe Veness and Dr Christian Tietz.

To my family, Haruka and Karuna, thank you.

I would like to acknowledge UNSW Galleries and the Director Dr Felicity Fenner for the support of my exhibition.

I also want to thank UNSW Art & Design for the opportunity to undertake this research for the period 2015 – 2017.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract Acknowledgments

Introduction. Mr. Jizolark’s Concrete Data

Chapter 1. The Mudlark

In 2016 I relocated with my family to a small Island in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan, where I found a shack that sits at the edge of a beach of constantly renewing flotsam and jetsam, in the context of my research, pure concrete data. I correlate my practice with the ‘mudlark’2 1.2 Chance 1.3 Hauntology

Chapter 2. The Jizo

Local shrines dot Japan as places for protection, but in my research they illustrate the sorting of amassed fragmented bits and accumulated pieces into poetic encounters; hauntological gatherings. Thus, Mr. Jizolark, is an amalgamation of Mudlark and Jizo. 2.2 ‘Aura’ 2.3 Walking as virtual flanuers 2.4 Entreposer3

Chapter 3. Concrete Data

3.1 Apophenia

3.2 Authenticating

3.3 Abandoning

2 Oxford dictionaries (online) https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mudlark (accessed 01-07-2017) states that a ‘mudlark’ is “a person who scavenges in river mud for objects of value.” A late-eighteenth century term ‘mudlark’ was used to describe a ‘wondering outcast making a living by collecting bits and pieces from the mud of a river.’ 3 Reverso dictionary (online) http://dictionary.reverso.net/french-english/entreposer (accessed 05-07-2017) definition of entreposer is to store, to put into storage.

Conclusion

List of Illustrations Bibliography

INTRODUCTION Mr. Jizolark’s Concrete Data

Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same, while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone, never staying for a moment. Even so is man and his habitation.4

Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.5

Central to this thesis is the Japanese expression ‘mono no aware’ which refers to the feeling of impermanence towards things. As a conceptual device this interest in the “sadness or pathos of things”6 stems from my process of collecting, collating, displaying and relinquishing as a sequence of interweaving practices which enables me to locate and express poetic encounters. This paper is a personal narrative, where I discuss my relationships to objects, to better understand the nature of impermanence. This desire to amass is universal, and it motivates my practice but simultaneously I wish to rid myself of these attachments. I begin by questioning why we accumulate, grasp and hold onto what we possess, when we are ultimately forced to renounce everything. With this question in mind I examine the act of accumulating.

Chapter one, The Mudlark, identifies this practice of collecting concrete data; often a dirty enterprise. ‘Dirty data’ has its online equivalent in which “dirty data is simply real data.”7 As I begin to accumulate objects from the shore, where I lived in a beach shack close to the sea, during 2016 on the island of Utsumi in Japan, deep information emerges. (Figure 1) I also sublimate my practice through the pursuit of a simple, quiet and secluded life. I compare this desire for a reclusive lifestyle, with few attachments, to the 12th century

4 Meredith McKinney, Kenko and Chomei Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, trans. Meredith McKinney (UK, Penguin Books, 2013), 12. 5 Tristan Tzara, “Lecture on Dada”, in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. R. Motherwell, (New York, 1951), 248. 6 C.B.Liddel, “Mono no aware: subtleties of understanding,” Japan Times, Jun 6, 2013, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/06/06/arts/mono-no-aware-subtleties-of-understanding/#.WVrovoSGOpo (accessed 01-07- 2017). 7 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 4.

Japanese poet, Kamo No Chomei’s seminal essay/extended poem Hojoki. In the Hojoki Chomei renounced the world for life as a recluse and found a way to contentment; I hoped to emulate this. From his little hut located in the mountains of Kyoto, (Figure 2) Chomei gives us an account of his worldly life, the conditions, benefits of seclusion and insight into the processes of letting go. This is antithetical to the notion of gathering, with its emphasis on keeping or holding rather than relinquishing. Thus the Hojoki supports my research as a framework for a literal abode, but also as an ideal way of life where my impact remains slight. I limit myself in what I can cluster, by the size of my dwelling.

My practice provides me with a structure for organizing this material, separating as Steyerl suggests, “the signal from the noise.”8 What I assemble, is also supported by my research into the work by artist Mark Dion in ‘Tate Thames Dig’.9 Everyday refuse, accumulated at a location is sifted and sorted into some kind of order. Dion introduces a formation whereby collected objects are arranged according to a perceived sense of hierarchy, thereby, directly questioning what we value. Through his work collecting is defined as a process of understanding the nature of objects as artefacts with links to material culture, and the ways this can be interpreted. I also analyse Dion’s distinctions, but with particular attention given to location, conservation and restoration, processes usually considered the domain of the

archaeologist and/or prospector.

Contemplating the process of locating material I consider the development of chance in the 20th century, my investigations indicate the influence of Buddhist concepts that were based upon an interpretation of the law of Karma. I introduce the processes of working with chance, which can be viewed as increasing the “possibility of something happening.”10 I aim to elaborate on this structure, aware of the requirements of patience and perseverance, which, if correctly pursued would yield an understanding of material manifestation.

As well as chance, I realize that my practice can also be associated with the concept of hauntology, as a way to comprehend subtler aspects of materiality, or poetic encounters.

8 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 1. 9 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999, wooden cabinet, porcelain, earthenware, metal, animal bones, glass and 2 maps. Tate Gallery 10 Oxford dictionaries (online), https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/chance (accessed 01-07-2017).

Chapter Two, The Jizo explores the poorly constructed shrines that populate my island, placed to protect travellers, fishermen, women and children. These shrines are small altars that become animated by offerings. I have also drawn a direct link between the Mudlark and the Jizo, in which I see similar qualities. I consider these poor object/constructs and what accumulates around them by underscoring the wastefulness of modern life and comparing these forms to “the trash that washes up on the digital economies shores.”11 Both are poor, simple and honest receivers of concrete data. The Jizo is a stage around which inanimate things gather; both a theatre and a shelf. I recognize the “aura” of both the altar sculptures, and the items they attract. Walter Benjamin’s description of “aura” is discussed in light of the qualities of transubstantiation presented by the Jizo; an article that changes form on the altar. I also consider aspects of expression, through an interpretation of Jizo, offerings and also their placement.

Contemplating these qualities, I return to the nature of holding onto things and the inevitability of decay. I discuss the kind of topology created by processes of walking, searching and scanning the shore – an essential element of my daily routine.

While grappling with the requirements of storage, I reflect on the habits associated with occupying space and the limitations of space. Through an examination of the artist Mike Nelson, whose experiences invest displayed pieces with notions of storage, subsequently linked to memory, I substantiate the view that storage and the object share common ground.

The things, that I am able to locate, contain an auratic quality. A feature that originates not in any emotional value, but as historical reminders embodying time, attained from their location. It is not necessarily the ties to individuals or the ghostly bonds these fragments contain that I am interested in, but rather it is the significance that the objects form in our memory.

In Chapter Three, Concrete Data I examine the collected pieces and trace ways to organize, display and relinquish them, out of their immediate environment. I look to forms of categorization and discover that I prefer the poetic combinations that these found objects

11 Hito Steyerl, “In Defence of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal #10 (November 2009): 1, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in- defense-of-the-poor-image/ (accessed 27-04-2016).

present. However, I discuss the methods I experiment with: data collection, expressed as explorations that investigate specific processes located in cataloguing, registration, and data processing. I analyse ways to arrange these works and how certain artists practise displaying what they collect, in order to indicate these deeper intentions.

I gather related connections and broaden the scope within my own practice by highlighting supplementary processes. I discuss time spent sorting through second-hand book shops to discover and arrange material for mixed media works with which I emphasize additive and subtractive processes. By photographing passing ships that I spot from the shore I accumulate shipping news. These are practices included in collecting, collating and display, relinquishing. My exhibition comprises an installation of various collected material scavenged from the shores of a Japanese island. Mr. Jizolark’s Concrete Data at UNSW Galleries from August 11 to 26 represents the complete synthesis of my research for the period of the M.F.A from 2015 to 2017.

Figure 1. A beachside shack somewhat reminiscent of Chomei’s Hut was offered to us on the island of Utsumi, Japan, 2016

Figure 2. A replica of Kamo No Chomei's hut at Kawai Shrine, Kyoto, Japan. 12

12 Photo credit: http://www.deepkyoto.com/the-hojoki/ (accessed 01-05-2017)

Chapter 1. The Mudlark

We are increasingly used to thinking of our world through objects. This may seem counterintuitive in a time of screens and files, which pretend to be immaterial and untactile, but in fact it seems clear that these interfaces, as our primary methods of organizing and interacting with the world today, have made it easier to think of the world as an enormous assemblage of objects, including ourselves. 13

While surveying the shore Mr. Jizolark ponders….Why do we accumulate things when ultimately we are forced to renounce them? What is the point of all this grasping?

In 2016, surrounded by a sea of octopus traps below a clear cool blue sky, I arrived with my wife and daughter in a bleached white Toyota taxi on the island of Utsumi, in Fukuyama, Japan, on the Seto Inland Sea. (Figure 6) Over the course of 10 years we had lived in other parts of Japan and we had always intended visiting or living in the Seto Inland Sea region, now, our chance had materialized. Later, I would be reminded of Fukuyama’s essay, The End of History, in which he states, that “in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”14 For the island was history; it was a time slip, asleep in the middle of winter when the land feels defeated.

In the 12th Century the Japanese poet/recluse Kamo No Chomei wrote an essay/extended poem titled Hojoki or An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut. In this work he embraces the loneliness and austerity of life as a recluse. Chomei purposely constructs a small mobile hut far from the city, from which to ponder the advantages and pleasures of a life of solitude. In pursuit of non-attachment, he suggests that the shack should be light, so that when it is dismantled movement is a simple process, and that possessions should be few. He admits that he begins to love his small hut, however, and is quick to reproach himself, reflecting that,

the Buddha’s essential teaching is to relinquish all attachment. This fondness for my hut I now see must be error…How could I waste my days like this, describing useless

13 “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” Artievierkant.com, (accessed 03-10-2016). http://artievierkant.com/pdfs/vierkant_october_155_2016.pdf 14 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, (Summer 1989): 25, https://ps321.community.uaf.edu/files/2012/10/Fukuyama-End-of-history-article.pdf (accessed 05-10-2016).

pleasures?’15

This idea of reconciling the permanent or abiding nature of collecting, suggesting relinquishment, is something I sought to investigate, and with its parallels in the sea; the tide and the shore where things come and go, “like Michelangelo.”16

A beachside shack was offered to us on the island Utsumi and it was somewhat reminiscent of Chomei’s Hut. Displaying its humble qualities, it fitted with his analogy of the hermit crab, “the hermit crab prefers a little shell for his home. He knows what the world holds.”17 The crab is a solid analogy of a collector as perhaps echoed in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in which he writes, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws. Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”18 Thus, the sea, the shore and the hut became three pillars for my practice, supporting the action of collecting concrete data.

In the sea everything is in a flux and particles collide. On the shore in front of my shack I began locating, assembling and then reformatting ceramic shards, terracotta pieces, broken tiles, fishing paraphernalia, flotsam and jetsam. (Figures 3, 4, 7, 8, 9) The debris were carried and stored within a simple space, a six-tatami mat room, almost identical in size to Chomei’s whole hut. (Figure 5) In this space I began the process of reconstructing vessels into hybrid forms. I poured backwards through history for clues to their significance and simultaneously considered their relevance in a post-digital world, in which the terms, “old’ and ‘new’ media no longer exist as meaningful terms, but only as technologies of mutual stabilization and destabilization.”19 It became clear to me that this material represented part of the scramble to adjust to a post-internet future, where we find ourselves looking backwards in order to move forwards. As Vladimir Nabokov stated, “the future is the obsolete in reverse.”20

15 McKinney, Kenko and Chomei Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, 18. 16 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S.Eliot,” Poetryfoundation.org, (accessed 03-10-2016). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/44212 17 McKinney, Kenko and Chomei Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, 16. 18 Poetryfoundation.org, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S.Eliot,” 19 Florian Cramer, Le magazine, “Post-digital Aesthetics,” (blog) posted May 1, 2013, (accessed 03-10-2016). http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/05/florian-cramer-post-digital-aesthetics/ 20 Brian Dillon, Ruins of the 20th Century, “Present Future,” (blog) posted June 18, 2012, (accessed 05-11-2016). https://briangdillon.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/present-future/

Figure 3. Collections 1, various pieces on studio floor, Utsumi, Japan, 2016

Figure 4. Collections 2, various pieces on studio floor, Utsumi, Japan, 2016

Figure 5. My studio, my ‘six tatami mat’ room, Utsumi, Japan, 2016.21

My practice resembles that of a beachcomber but I prefer the mudlark. For the most difficult thing to do is to locate specific finds, to search for, what the Japanese call ‘mono no aware’ as a ‘sense of the transience’ or ‘the passing’ nature of an object. In the present the mudlark could be poor, surveying the shore or surfing online, sifting and sorting items of value; a collector, a hunter, a screen saver, a salvager, a searcher. Acquiring new meaning from the matrix of our industrial and post-industrial discards: refused, emptied and washed up on the shores or lost in the virtual mud around us. This simultaneity of searching the shore, and also online, inevitably resources the other and it is this data that is significant. “In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource.”22 Everybody

21 A standard room size in Japan is six tatami mats, traditionally made of rice woven straw, in a chevron pattern, the length is twice the width or 85.5cm x 179cm. 22 Yuval, N. Harari, Homo Deus, A brief History of Tomorrow, (London, Harvill Secker, 2016), 341.

16 collects but not everybody questions the items they value; at least, not as deeply. The life of a mudlark is one that understands waste and just as “strong poets are condemned”23 it all starts by being alert to our mudlarkness and a small space to reconsider our things.

I have conflated the mudlark with the local Jizo shrines of Japan. The Jizo statue is a very small, public Buddhist shrine that exists to guide us through another type of matrix; that between birth and death, towards liberation. An altar that becomes animated by offerings, it is through these contributions, these pieces, that a way could be found. These material articles can be gathered, positioned and addressed specifically through this ‘poor’ Jizo, firstly, as an organizing factor in the search for meaning; secondly, as a displayed or constructed presentation of data; and thirdly, as an experience of renunciation. In essence these altars are crafted as signifiers where information corresponds to location. Often, the message is unknowable and mysterious. It is this sense of mystery, the uncalculated aspects or the poetic connections within data, that I was drawn towards.

One of the first pieces I happened to collect was a ceramic shard, weathered with a delicate design, a faintly discernable pattern or runic inscription. Worn at the edges from constant rubbing against the sand, it felt smooth in my hands. As I surveyed the shore I began to notice the accumulation of flotsam and jetsam, washed up pieces that had been or were in the process of breaking down. I saw these discards as “ancient forms, incorruptible and eternal forms – anyone of them might be the symbol that I sought.”24 They lay randomly, once part of a whole, but clearly exiled for their imperfections and utterly forgotten within the sea, destined to be ruined and sun bleached, returned and remade, in a rhythm restoring them back to their origins. The decorated pieces were suggestive, important parts of a puzzle, indicating to me that they were worth gathering. They were also accompanied by various other materials that cohered into a continuous narrative of activity and history. These were poor objects, useless and futureless. Nobody cared for them; they were in essence nothing much.

23 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, A Theory of Poetry, 2nd Ed (New york, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), 10. 24 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Trans. Andrew Hurley, (USA, Penguin Press, 1998), 101.

When the artist Mark Dion led his volunteers to explore the banks of the river Thames for his project, ‘Tate Thames Dig’ he had no idea what might be found. “In the tradition of beachcombing, or London's mudlarkers, Dion and a team of volunteers drawn from local community groups, combed the foreshores of the Thames at low tide.”25 However, Dion knew that whatever was to be found would be valuable, for it was all valid; what was to be discovered would become ordered and “arranged in rows like words in a sentence.”26 Dion’s sense of value was contingent on the object’s placement and the relationships formed with other pieces. Dion intuitively selected and placed items, highlighting their visual or material qualities, while destabilizing the established hierarchies of value in which utility and intactness are ascendant. Dion’s,

work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world…appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ‘subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences.27

Dion’s aim is to destabilize perceived modes of order within systems of cultural categorization. He reviews archival methods through investigations that revolve around aspects of historical reconsideration.

Research processes lead to works that invite viewers to think about the past; to make connections between events, characters, and objects; to join together in memory; and to reconsider the ways in which the past is represented in the wider culture.28

The juxtaposition of materials and our associated understanding are linked to conditions of representation as we are offered renewed opportunities to investigate constructed possibilities. Through these destabilized substances Dion seeks to reorder them into a linear reconstructed system. I am interested in this concept of reordering, but suggest an alternative view, whereby the offering of data can also highlight what was missed.

25 Iwona Blazwick, “Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Feb 24, 2001): 105, http://art310-f11- hoy.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/Mark+Dion's+Tate+Thames+Dig.pdf (accessed 05-07-2016). 26 Ibid 27 “Mark Dion installation at Bartram’s Garden,” Artdaily.org, (accessed 25-05-2016). http://artdaily.com/news/24841/Mark-Dion- Installation-Opens-at-Bartram-s-Garden#.V0TyipF97IU 28 Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October Magazine, Vol. 120 (Spring, 2007): 142, doi: 10.1162/octo.2007.120.1.140 (accessed 10-05-2016).

Additionally, we can compare these ‘poor’ objects that are collected and displayed. Just as Steyerl suggests, when extracting “information from truckloads of data,”29 we can delineate what is ‘signal’ and what is disposable ‘noise.’

Figure 6. Utsumi island, Seto Inland Sea, Japan, 2016

29 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 1.

Figure 7. The Shore, Utsumi, Japan, 2016

Figure 8. “the trash that washes up on the digital economies shores”; Flotsam and jetsam coming ashore, Utsumi, Japan, 2016

Figure 9. Driftwood, flotsam and jetsam, Utsumi, Japan, 2016

Chance

Dion also “established a methodology for exploration … where to look, for how long, how deep to dig, and what to collect”30 In doing so he utilizes the paradigm of ‘prospecting’ when contextualizing his process of collecting. He seeks discards, as a prospector sifts for gold. By undertaking daily walks or paddling along the shore I was also ‘prospecting’ for pieces to take back to the six-tatami mat room. Pieces would be slowly cemented into place and overtime something would emerge, acquiring visibility and critical agency within a matrix of non-material associations. This process contests the primacy of consumption, activating Walter Benjamin’s statement,

through non-linear processes, when obsolete technologies are taken up again, they can become charged historical reminders underscoring the wasteful and inevitably destructive cycle of production and consumption at the heart of the capitalist system31

30 Nicholas Felton, Mark Dion, “Mark Dion's Wunderkammern,” (blog), posted July 27, 2010, (accessed 11-06-2016). http://www.printmag.com/design-inspiration/wunderkammern-mark-dion/ 31 Walter Benjamin, Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, (ed), ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellegentisa’, Walter Benjamin: Select Writing, 1898–1940, (USA, Fellows of Harvard College, 2006), 229.

Once a sense of value in the process had run its course I would return to the shore, seeking discards, and to see what else could be remade from this historical cycle of production and consumption.

The concept of excavating is astute because there is even the possibility of finding real gold, real treasure and even precious metals; metals are embedded in our technology. The practice of prospecting is a methodology for accumulating concrete data. It is not the basis for the laying of claim but rather a way of schematizing poetic happenstance.

This process of unearthing also led me to scrutinize old media, in second-hand book shops, where I rummaged for the faded historical reminders of Japan. Temples, statues, towns and people were the images on pages that I chanced upon. These sheets, in turn, became resources, old media rotated into mixed media, a facsimile of my historic surroundings. I constructed literal screens, acting as concertina dividers, natural to Japanese rooms but also able to collapse or expand the files on a discarded history.

The Thames is a unique site, it holds items that have been castoff through the centuries and which over centuries it has hoarded. The mud keeps items from completely deteriorating and one can find contemporary trash, possibly lying, next to something from the Stone Age. The probability or chance of locating something interesting in a rich field such as the Thames site is relatively high; it is a prime mudlarking location. “Throughout July and August 1999, working at low tide, Dion and his crew sifted through the flotsam and jetsam of the muddy beaches at each location”32 Working with chance Dion found “the parameters are very narrow on knowing what is worth having and how those things generate meaning; it’s very precise.”33 Chance has its own system that cannot always be quantified or systemized; it is a process like sifting.

George Brecht (1966) a member of the Fluxus movement, introduced the term “chance imagery,” which he applied “to our formation of images resulting from chance, wherever

32 Blazwick, “Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig,” 105. 33 Joanna Marsh, “Fieldwork - A Conversation with Mark Dion,” American Art, Vol. 23, No. 2 (The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution, Summer 2009): 45, https://doi.org/10.1086/605713 (accessed 03-04-2016).

these occur in nature.”34 Brecht also felt that artists needed to work with probability, rather than against it, he states that as “art approaches chance-imagery, the artist enters into oneness with all of nature.”35 Brecht maintains, on the basis of chance imagery, that the receptacle of forms available to the artist thus becomes open-ended. The element of possibility was initially explored through the Dada artists, such as, Duchamp, Arp, Ernst and Tzara when seeking to loosen structure, “as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not.” 36

Chance collecting conveys, generates, and signifies something meaningful. The emphasis is placed upon a sense of understanding value in knowing what has worth, what is worth keeping, and where to find something. Perhaps one solution is to be found by “drawing connections and conclusions from sources with no direct connection other than their indissoluble perceptual simultaneity.”37 The mere act of locating brings connections and attention to other possible areas; for instance, where borders meet, lines are drawn and data is accumulated. By narrowing down the possible location to the liminal zone, the tidal area, I increase the possibility of locating something. The tide reveals things, and an object of no value is subsequently repositioned to gain value. Working with arbitrary information is nothing new, Cramer suggests, that “the first modern artwork based on a computational process and arbitrary input data dates back to 1923,”38 the period of Dada.

Brecht quotes Tristan Tzara stating, in a “Lecture on Dada” from 1922, that, “Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference.” This belief in indifference was attributed to the growing awareness of

34 George Brecht, Chance Imagery, (New York, A Great Bear Pamphlet, 1966, Ubuclassics. Editions, 2004), 4, http://www.artype.de/Sammlung/Bibliothek/b/brecht/brecht_chance.pdf (accessed 03-04-2016). 35 Ibid., 7. 36 Marcel Proust, Swanns Way, ed. Drew Silver (Devon: Dover. Thrift. Editions, 2002), 36 – 37. 37 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 2. 38 Florian Cramer, Words made flesh, Code, Culture, Imagination, (Rotterdam, Piet Zwart Institute, Williem de Kooning Academy, Hogeschool, 2005), 76, https://monoskop.org/images/e/ee/Cramer_Florian_Words_Made_Flesh_Code_Culture_Imagination.pdf (accessed 03-04-2016). Tristan Tzara’s advised to make a Dadaist poem as follows: Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Buddhism and specifically, “the non-traditional, highly Americanized Zen of Daisetz T. Suzuki.”39 It was clearly evident in the ideas surrounding chance production and “observed in the adaption of the Dadaist random montage music in the “indeterminist” music of John Cage.” 40 Furthermore, Suzuki conveys the feeling of ‘mono no aware’ by describing the sense of transience and the value of simplicity, when he states:

There is something divine in being spontaneous and not being hampered by human conventionalities and their artificial hypocrisies. There is something direct and fresh in the lack of restraint by anything human, which suggests a divine freedom and creativity. Nature never deliberates; it acts directly out of its own heart, whatever this may mean. In this respect Nature is divine. Its ‘irrationality’ transcends human doubts or ambiguities, and in our submitting to it, or rather accepting it, we transcend ourselves.41

In the early 1950’s Cage began to observe random associations rather than focus on a structured linearity. Cage felt indeterminacy provided a broader relationship for locating meaning, “accepting chance,” Cage stated, “makes prejudices, pre-conceived ideas, and previous ideas of order and organization disappear!” Art should “preserve us” from “logical manipulations.”42

Cage was also an avid mycologist; he would often go walking with a basket to gather mushrooms. For Cage, mushrooms “represent a disordered freedom from determination and meaning - they escape his erudition” and “rid the world of old rubbish.”43 Similar to the function of the mudlark, proceeding to rid the world of some old rubbish while returning a sense of significance to them.

Suzuki included the minimalism of the tea ceremony space and its ability to convey the ultimate state of mind as a practice on emptiness. The tea ceremony space itself is very small, perhaps four and a half tatami mats in size, and it is mostly bare. An example of this space (Figure 10) can be traced to the Mahayana Vimalakirti Sutra, a discourse on

39 Ibid., 77. 40 Ibid 41 Brecht, Chance Imagery, 4. 42 Edward Rothstein, “Sounds and Mushrooms,” New York Times, November 22, 1981, http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/22/books/sounds-and-mushrooms.html?pagewanted=all (accessed 25-05-2016). 43 Ibid

emptiness, and the origin of the standard hermit’s hut. Interestingly, the Mahayana Vimalakirti Sutra is associated with “the very beginning of Buddhism in Japan.”44 The tea ceremony space is a private room for the practice of contemplation and it became a requirement in the development of pure thought. Suzuki felt that it was through the practice of contemplation that one achieves insight as "nothing can be really learned until it works through the nerves and muscles."45 Considering the pieces that I had collected on the shore in my own small tatami room, I felt contentment.

Figure 10. Taian Tearoom, Se no Rikyu, Myokian Temple, Kyoto, Momoyama period, c. 1582.46

44 Kumar Manoj, D.T. Suzuki’s Understanding of Tea Ceremony：An Analysis, (第36号平成17年10月), 339, http://repo.komazawa- u.ac.jp/opac/repository/all/29337/rbb036-18.pdf (accessed 15-05-2016). 45 Daisetz T. Suzuki, The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, (Boston Rutland, Vermont Tokyo, Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc. Edition, 1994), 38. 46 Image credit: https://au.pinterest.com/pin/432486370442787381 (accessed 01-07-2017).

Hauntology

Cramer draws on the philosopher Jacques Derrida, quoting the author Simon Reynolds, to describe the term ‘hauntology’ for the work of artists who “trawl through charity shops, street markets and jumble sales for delectable morsels of decaying culture-matter.”47 This practice of ‘hauntology’ was integral to the actions I was undertaking as these pieces themselves articulate an invisible cultural narrative; a historiographic turn. Second-hand books, ceramic shards, broken roof tiles, sections of pots, metal pieces and discards related a story that in itself was broken and re-recorded like “the remixed sound of crackle from old vinyl.”48

The shore provides ‘reverberations’ where the disparate elements of haunted pieces, are rearranged or reassembled into new expressions that, nevertheless, remain lost in transition. Patterns developed under the surface of the sea, readymade, misplaced, and remade, mimicking configurations seen within the screen. I depended on encounters with these remains, their umbra and the portals they could open. They may be aligned to some meaning, some word or a hidden language that I wished to know, just as “the ambitions and poverty of human words— all, world, universe— are but shadows or simulacra of that Word which is the equivalent of a language and all that can be comprehended within a language.”49

This shadow of an idea has a transitional or transcendental quality that often acts as a counterpoint, a counterpart or a signifier to further meaning. A signal separated from the static or noise of evidence. As the semiotician Massimo Leone (2014) maintains,

a paradoxical consequence of transcendence being evoked as shadow, as the hidden face of the moon, is that no representation of transcendence is possible without materiality, that is, without an immanent counterpart. Unlimited semiosis needs to start from exceeding a representamen, from conceiving what this representamen is not, and from imagining and desiring what hides behind the materiality of the sign.50

47 Florian Cramer,“Post-digital Aesthetics”. 48 Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 42– 55 ISSN 1947-5403 ©2013, https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/viewFile/378/391 (accessed 10-10-2016). 49 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Trans. Andrew Hurley, (USA, Penguin Press, 1998), 573. 50 Massimo Leone, “Signs of the Soul: Toward a Semiotics of Religious Subjectivity,” Signs and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and Brandeis University, Spring 2013): 5, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670169 (accessed 15-04-2016).

The action of amassing, data retrieval, or scanning brings forth the entity and the possibility of conceiving the materiality of something whole - the sign. Ceramic shards are gathered from the shore and possibilities are conceived. (Figures 11, 12, 13, 14)

Figure 11. Morgan Veness, Twin Peaks, Two Bowls (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 3, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, epoxy adhesive, shoreline marine ply, 20cm x 70cm

Figure 12. Morgan Veness, Twin Peaks, Three Bowls (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 7, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, epoxy adhesive, shoreline marine ply, 20cm x 70cm

Figure 13. Morgan Veness, Twin Peaks, Two Bowls (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 2, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, epoxy adhesive, shoreline marine ply, 20cm x 70cm

Figure 14. Morgan Veness, Twin Peaks, Two Bowls (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 1, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, epoxy adhesive, shoreline marine ply, 20cm x 70cm

Chapter 2. The Jizo

Objects and their arrangement express not only relationships as they are but as they were and might have been.51

A Jizo, a small locally constructed kind of shrine, is ubiquitous across Japan. The Jizo figures stand or sit upright on a stage where they collect concentrated hopes and contain them. The Jizo itself is usually quite a small sculpture - often of stone - placed as a simple Buddhist shrine to provide sanctuary and ward off danger, by virtue of prayers and offerings placed at its feet. It represents a fully enlightened being - Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva, or the ‘original’ Jizo who supported beings seeking liberation. “It is associated with a variety of roles such as reviving believers from death, salvation from the hell realms, a protector of crossroads and travelers, a protector of women and children, and a healer of a wide range of diseases.”52 And since this was a fishing village, Jizo shrines located throughout the island, are associated with protecting fisherman.

A Jizo is called a ‘poor’ shrine because of its simple construction, its raw fabrication and its easy access. The shrine’s basic material properties and its humble appearance sparked for me associations directly linking it to the mudlark’s ‘valueless’ collection, gathered from the shore. It also reflected in miniature, the austere abode that Chomei alluded to in Hojoki, “thus as old age draws on my hut has grown smaller and smaller.”53 The Jizo corresponds to what the artist Abraham Cruzvillegas terms ‘autoconstrucción’ or ‘self-construction,’ its home is a dynamic motif or a bricolage, a basic conglomeration of materials put together seemingly by happenstance. I was attracted to these qualities that alluded to raw re- configurations and I could see a potential in combining the Jizo and the mudlark; hence, Mr. Jizolark.

I started to think of the Jizo as a benign example of a Horcrux, “the word used for an object in which a person has concealed part of their soul.”54 Marcel Proust stated that,

51 David T. Humphries, “Collecting as Modernist Practice by Jeremy Braddock, Review by: David T. Humphries,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 46/47, No. 2/1, pp. 167-171 Midwest Modern Language Association (Fall 2013 - Spring 2014): 170. 52 Fumiko Miyazaki, & Duncan Williams, “The Intersection of the Local and the Translocal at a Sacred Site: The Case of Osorezan in Tokugawa Japan,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3/4, Local Religion in Tokugawa History, Published by: Nanzan University, (Fall, 2001): 407, https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2759 (accessed 03-04-2016). 53 Meredith McKinney, Kenko and Chomei Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, 22. 54 Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, (London, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2005), 464.

there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being…in some inanimate object, and effectively lost to us until the day…when we happen to pass by…to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison.55

I was able to sense all the energy that people had invested in or put into these small sites on the island. These objects had become powerful receptacles, which had accumulated data. They exist as locations of information that also operate as in-formation; “information is attached to a stratified notion of space, whereas in-formation is connected with a smooth, de-territorialized space of drifting signs and bodies.”56 The shrine offers itself up as a universal receptacle, a simple construct able to fit in anywhere, a ubiquitous data collector. Many display a combination of ‘signs and figures,’ often within a makeshift concrete cubicle. (Figure15)

Figure 15. A Jizo Shrine in Yokoshima, Hiroshima, Japan 2016

55 Marcel Proust, Swanns Way, 36 – 37. 56 Eric De Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,” Grey Room, No. 25 (The MIT Press, Fall, 2006): 37, doi: 10.1162/grey.2006.1.25.32 (accessed15-04-2016).

Figure 16. Collected stones, 2016, painted driftwood, stones 90cm x 70cm

On the island, I also came across numerous time-worn stones of carved granite, quartz, or shale of various sizes; some were very large, others quite small, but often with a carved hole located at their center. (Figure 16) They seemed to have been used for some purpose, but their form and placement, here and there along the roads and pathways, seemed random; a mystery lingered. I thought they were perhaps discarded but later realized they belonged where they were. At the local museum I saw many more of these stones exhibited in simple schemes, or assembled with various fishing-related paraphernalia; nets, hooks, pots and fish traps. They were historical reminders and documents of the island’s collective past. As Steyerl states, “A thing is never just an object, but a fossil in which a constellation of forces are petrified.”57 These stones were weights for fishing nets, they were tied to the edges and dropped into the sea, but now they had become a defunct technology. They were forgotten and so were the social histories once attached to them. I wished for one, and within a week one of these precious objects washed up onto the shore in front of my shack.

It is not uncommon to locate a Jizo in the alcove of a wall, within a small cave, or on a plinth by a door. The significance is embedded in its location, dependent on its manifestation it

57 Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” e-flux journal #15, (April 2010): 8, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-you- and-me/ (accessed 10-04-2016).

becomes its own museum, over time. A small stage of hidden power, or a thing that exists as a permanent fixture, based on reasons linked to its conception. It became my intention to display the refuse that I had assembled from the shore, not as souvenirs, but as forms of time-treasure, embodying the history of place and the expression of an alternate reality. These objects were endowed with auratic qualities.

‘Aura’

‘Tokyo Sky Tree’ is a newly engineered communication tower built not far from the center of Tokyo. It is 634 meters tall and dominates the horizon. Without explanation, it has a new Jizo Shrine located at its base, but there are no signs to direct you there, you wouldn’t know it existed. Over time, this shrine, has morphed into a template, cut to order; accentuating the offerings of gaudy items of no material value. It is the template of this little temple that perhaps echoes the ‘feeling’ of the very original, the very first, object. These sculptures were once hewn by hand. They were carved and shaped with a feeling of gratitude, they contained an individual sensibility that contemporary machine made one’s are unable to convey. Just as, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ has been upgraded to the unconscious of computational image divination.”58 Old statues may contain an “aura” perhaps from their umbra, a weathered appearance, or an authenticity that can be reconciled to their maker and their location. For example, Ennin, a popular ninth century Japanese monk, constructed a two-meter statue of Jizo at Osorezan, a volcanic mountainous region in the North of Japan, which still attracts pilgrims.

Walter Benjamin’s description of “aura” identifies the power of the original object or its uniqueness. “The aura is an effect of a work of art being uniquely present in time and space. It is connected to the idea of authenticity.”59 Critical theorist Graeme Gilloch is quoted by Jergenson discussing The Arcades Project in which Benjamin, “charts a natural history of the commodity…where the inscrutable fetish and stupefying spectacle of the recent past is demystified and rendered legible.”60 Jergenson explains that,

58 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 9. 59 Andrew Robinson, Ceasefire magazine, “An A to Z of Theory | Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura and Authenticity,” (blog), Posted on Friday, June 14, 2013, (accessed 01-07-2017). https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity/ 60 Cassey Jergenson, “In what direction did lost men veer?” Late Capitalism and Utopia in The Road,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal Vol. 14, No. 1 (Published by, Penn State University Press, 2016): 125, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.14.1.0117 (accessed 01-11-

the fossilized material object, formerly fetishized as a commodity but now demystified and reduced to its sheer materiality, bears witness to the mutability of its epoch’s material and ideological orders. The demystified past demystifies the present; it compels the subject to historicize the present by reexamining its relation to the conditions that produced it.61

This transubstantiation of the Jizo is matched, or combined, with the acceptance of its repeated form and yet it retains its mystery.

I began to consider the everyday offerings that surfaced in and around the shrine. They were usually small, nothing more than dishes of fruit, bottles of juice, beer, plastic flowers, plastic leaves, plastic figures, porcelain cats, coins, bowls, disposable lighters, incense and incense burners. Most of these items had little utility in the presence of the Jizo, only minimal thought was given to them or their placement around it. This was an interesting discovery because they revealed a sense of presentation. This idea of a theatre, a small stage, a cave or a shelf on which to display concrete data appealed to me. Laying the collection on the tatami mat, like treasure in my cave, I could see how this might present itself. (Figure 17, 18)

The Jizo like the sea through its shape shifting and its sorting offers multifarious adaptions, presentations, and representations, where data can be stored and retrieved. These pieces represented segments from life, offered and available for viewing. Handling is not encouraged and they maintain a distance. The collection exists in a kind of ultimate liminal zone, seemingly reflecting on what comes or goes. Like the flotsam and jetsam, reaching for the shore; the threshold, from imagined to materiality and back again. It is as if deep ocean currents or the night tide reveals something that we can only glimpse, perhaps in the moonlight, remaining undefined and illusive of easy categorization.

On the shore I located an elongated, triangular, worn black stone of almost supernatural appearance. Was it a Horcrux? It had the ‘aura’ of an ancient blade; it was unique. This piece stood out, it had a momentary sense of value as treasure. At other times I was able to locate numerous old patterned shards of glass from broken window panes, all beautifully

2016). 61 Ibid., 126

34 smoothed by the sand. I was reminded of the artist Simryn Gill, “a true scavenger of migratory beach debris.”62 Like my own practice, that of Gill was also to, “beachcomb, at low tide along the stretch of white sand between the mangroves and Shell Jetty.”63 Scanning on the beach is a meditative practice. The process gives clarification or meaning while simultaneously emptying the mind.

Figure 17. Morgan Veness, The Jizolark’s Cave (1), 2016, deep sea detritus on tatami mat, 90cm x 180cm, installation view.

62 Simryn Gill, Here Art Grows on Trees, Edited by Catherine de Zegher, Text by Kajri Jain, Carol Armstrong, Ross Gibson, Conversation with Brian Massumi, (KUNSTHALLE, MER/PAPER, 2013), 36. 63 Ibid

Figure 18. Morgan Veness, The Jizolark’s Cave (2), 2016, deep sea ceramic and terracotta shards on tatami mat, 90cm x 180cm, installation view.

The Jizo and its accumulation are kept or conserved by somebody. I am unsure if the objects are ever rearranged but they remain and are maintained, never becoming obsolete. This is perhaps indicative of what art critic and philosopher Boris Groys terms, “art technology,” for conserving and restoring, or as Groys elaborates, technologies or approaches that bring, “the remnants of the past into the present and bring things of the present into the future.”64 A similar process is reflected in the method by which I collate and assemble the accumulated material located on the shore.

64 Boris Groys, “The Truth of Art,” e-flux journal #71 (April 2016): 4, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/71/60513/the-truth-of-art/ (accessed 27-04-2016).

For example, in my practice I take care to place or cement individual discarded ceramic shards beside each other in a form of mock conservation and restoration. The process of joining individual fragments together conjures a new future based upon what and where they have been. By comparing characteristics such as patterns, edges, weathering, cracks, stains, curvature, weight, and material, the fragments are deliberately brought together and reconfigured. The artist Artie Vierkant maintains that this process is “akin to producing cultural objects not intended as artistic propositions.”65 Hence in the role of the artist, the Jizolark, my method of collecting and collating could be compared to that of the archeologist, working at conservation and restoration. However, the object’s utility is only partially returned; as a form it can be suggested that it is caught in a type of dream, just as “Google researchers call the act of creating a pattern or an image from nothing but noise ‘inceptionism’ or deep dreaming.”66

Objects are placed and they become a display, a humble collection of obsolescence. Quality remains irrelevant; relevance is seen in what is presented, while reverence is to the individuals who formed it. Just as Vierkant suggests, it’s “not the nature of the art object but the nature of its reception and social presence.”67 The Jizo holds things, if anything it is an offering of temporality, a possible pause within a domain that endures longer then we do.

I felt that there was a problem with the action of accumulation and the processing of ever more ‘stuff,’ however, I often felt that seeking things out was enough, for what was the point of all this accumulating? The conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote in 1968 (and it is difficult not to agree) that “the world is full of objects, more or less interesting, I do not wish to add any more.”68 Collecting, placement, and presentation are participants in, an ‘essentially nomadic’ field, as art theorist Rosalind Krauss put it. So how does one remain nomadic with the need for storage? How was I to reconcile this desire for less while accumulating more? I had to find that balance.

65 Artievierkant.com, “A Questionnaire on Materialisms”. 66 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 9. 67 Artievierkant.com, “A Questionnaire on Materialisms”. 68 Craig Dworkin, C. & Kevin Goldsmith, ed., Against Expression, An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, (Evanston Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2011), 43.

Walking as virtual flanuers

In seeking itself, the ‘expanded field’ attempts to demonstrate progressive tendencies and conditions that, as Krauss maintains, “provides both for an expanded but finite set of related positions for a given artist to occupy and explore.”69 Comparatively, there is the practice of mapping which is,

a kind of math in motion; it focuses on relationships of juxtaposition, proximity, and envelopment, but also on the possible ways of traversing the edges or moving between points within the complex spatial figures of grids and networks. The topologist, therefore, may be compared to a voyager. Or rather, as some math books propose, the topologist is like a traveler on a strange road.70

When investigating, selecting, gathering and sorting I am “traversing the edges,” while simultaneously considering this “strange road.” The Jizolark, like the “topologist, will typically inquire “which way do I take to get there?” rather than “how long? Or how far.”71 Thus the Jizolark attempts to make the invisible visible, through the act of foraging and perhaps ultimately by adjusting storage. This is a process reflected also in our online searches. As virtual flanuers we are constantly acquiring an infinite historic collection and stowing the data in some field or it is being warehoused for us. I had to find a balance in searching with storage.

The process of walking and searching (inwardly and outwardly) is a significant part of my daily routine, it is a walking practice and just as pilgrims are known to locate meaning through the hard practice of continued ambulation, I felt absorbed in this process of retrieval. A similar process was documented by the artist Stanley Brouwn, in walks that he undertook between 1960 to1964, “consisting of a largely ambulant practice of ‘constructed walks’."72 Brouwn’s aim from these ‘constructed walks’ was to provide a continual display of relayed data to the gallery space. Data was manufactured through a process of walking along set lines or constructed directions, in an area, somewhere, which was then processed as information through sign posts, locations or places, via a telegram which the audience

69 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979): 42, http://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz/assets/images/reading/Krauss.pdf (accessed 07-03-2016). 70 De Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,” 41. 71 Ibid., 42. 72 Ibid., 32.

was left to interpret. The artist Richard Long walked with stones, while the artist Miguel Angel Blanco creates boxes that contain substances from his strolls, which act as “a small recondite sanctuary, a sancta sanctorum. Sealed with glass, hermetic, to preserve its contents, it is at the same time ark, essence-container, shrine and crucible.”73

The artist Gabriel Orozco attests to the significance of walking and observing for the poetic encounters he then exhibits,

walking and observing are an important part of Gabriel Orozco’s practice, and in his many photo series too, mundane motifs are often emphasized—objects that most of us do not notice at all in daily life, but which have great poetry and significance.74

The German term spaziergganswissenschaft describes the process where the body is used to measure time and space through the act of walking. Walking is creating knowledge. Rambling, probing and gathering provide me with a way to quantify and to understand the poetic nature located in the fractured waste. Therefore, embedded in the acts of locating, retrieval, amassing, sorting, storing and remaking there is also the factor of movement measured through time and space. Nevertheless, this action process also requires moments of nothing, there is the requirement of stillness, because I am aware that “the masses contribute to the loss of aura by seeking constantly to bring things closer.”75 Perhaps, a way around this dilemma is to see oneself, not as a collector, but as an accumulator, providing space for eventual dispersal.

Entreposer

I have long struggled with storage and the idea of storage. My preference is to let go, as I am always on the go. This small space, the sea-side shack, and my lack of room naturally influenced my practice; I felt compelled to work slight. Again, I found solace in Chomei’s Hojoki when he states,

73 Miguel Angel Blanco, Library of the Forest (blog), posted August 17, 2014, (accessed 10-11-2016). https://territoriesofarttherapy.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/miguel-angel-blanco-library-of-the-forest/ 74 Gabriel Orozco, “Chicotes,” e-flux journal, (September 9, 2013), http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/32220/gabriel-orozco/ (accessed 20-10-2017). 75 Robinson, “An A to Z of Theory | Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura and Authenticity”.

in this little impermanent hut of mine all is calm and there is nothing to fear. It may be small, but there is room to sleep at night, and to sit down in the day-time, so that for one person there is no inconvenience.76

I was also forced to store things well. My practice reflects this tight living condition where space is constricted and the mind solves spatial problems ingenuously.

Assemblages inevitably involve captivity. The Jizo has its stage or its house. Dion states that he has “work collections, which are always growing…and always having to store them in different places.”77 I am quite limited in what can be stored and I have to choose between things to keep, disregard, or displace. Andy Warhol’s solution was easier. He made,

a habit of emptying the contents of his desk into cardboard boxes, along with objects, both significant and common, that he purchased, made or souvenired. In sealing these boxes, sending them off to storage and calling them Time Capsules, his collection became art as well as archive.78

The artist Mike Nelson creates installations that simultaneously house what he collects; similar to a Jizo’s space. Nelson arranges materials into narratives that link entities to ideas, formed through memory. “Nelson's installations, laborious, meticulous and painstaking in their physical construction, and fragmentary and nebulous in their photographic documentation, persist in the memory.”79 The former lives of things are brought back to life, they create opportunities where “audiences are compelled to explore…the viewer is positioned as one searching among the remains for clues to the former occupants’ identities and narratives.”80

Nelson explores the boundaries of installation in works that are essentially theatrical. The audience is repositioned to explore the objects significance, within a reconditioned space, thereby losing all sense of time. Art theorists Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, highlight Nelson’s ability to provide substances with a sense of “stickiness,”

76 Meredith McKinney, Kenko and Chomei Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, 20. 77 Joanna Marsh, “Fieldwork - A Conversation with Mark Dion,” American Art, Vol. 23, No. 2 (The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution, Summer 2009): 12, https://doi.org/10.1086/60571312 (accessed 03-04-2016). 78 “Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules,” National Gallery of Victoria, March 2005, (accessed 30-05-2016). https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/andy-warhols-time-capsules/ 79 Nicholas Cullinan, “Mike Nelson's 'The Coral Reef' (2000),” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 150, No. 1268, Sculpture (Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd, Nov. 2008): 764, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27823150 (accessed 02-03-2016). 80 Jim Drobnick & Jennifer Fisher, “Mike Nelson: Amnesiac Hide,” The Senses and Society, 10:1, (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, published online, 2015): 101, DOI: 10.2752/174589315X14161614601367 (accessed 02-01-2016).

to experience an object as being affective…is to be directed not only toward an object, but to ‘whatever’ is around the object, which includes what is behind the object, the conditions of its arrival. Such stickiness involves a contextual connection to ideas, values, and things.81

This “stickiness” is also distinguishable in the bits and pieces housed by the Jizo, as emphasized by the spirits they conjure. In Nelson’s Gang of Seven82 (Figure 19) he exhibited materials that he had scavenged from the wild shores of the Strait of Georgia, Canada, which included:

logs, ropes, slabs of concrete, chains, wires, cloth and torn paper, which evoke a misguided expedition to some derelict place…the installation's mood is melancholy and eerie, conjuring all sorts of ghosts, past and present.83

Similarly, I felt these same discards can be collected on the shores around me or housed in Jizo like caves, suggesting that “both nomadism and amnesia offer a kind of post-identity existence, in which lives are unencumbered by former events.”84

Mike Nelson’s composed paraphernalia is driven by investigations into science fiction. There is the feeling that a protagonist in a story has only just recently departed the room. While these aspects are not a requirement in my own process, I am interested in the approaches he manages to conjure for the audience, where he highlights the destabilizing effect of memory. For example, Nelson states that,

in the work in Venice there were tens of thousands of objects, which I had found, sourced, chosen myself, and then articulated as part of the architecture that we built…After its duration it would disappear, it would only reside within the memories of all the people it had affected.85

These are memories that entertain scenarios procured from an understanding or a sensation

81 Ibid 82 Mike Nelson Gang of Seven (2013). 83 Mike Nelson at Gallery 303, New York, January 27, 2015, (accessed 01-07-2017). http://www.303gallery.com/attachment/en/5576fee507a72c0678771e53/News/56f43ff659a8377668e17039 84 Ibid., 8. 85 Gavin Wade, Objects with presence that talk about absence, Mike Nelson interviewed by Gavin Wade, Transcribed by Beth Bramich, (January 2013), https://cdn1.eastsideprojects.org/wp- content/uploads/20161007144744/MIKE_NELSON_2013_GAVIN_WADE_INTERVIEW.pdf (accessed 25-05-2016).

of disenchantment, lacking clarity they disorientate us.

The past of the things poised around the Jizo and the “sticky” features of the haunted articles that Nelson amasses are one and the same. Nelson disorients an audience through the rooms he constructs, while the shrine scatters meaning throughout its locations. They are disembodied haunts that hark to some momentary phenomenon. At once apparent these places present little, if anything more, than a place that has been formed to inform and scrape our memory once we have left it or it has been disbanded. In The Amnesiacs (Figure 20) Nelson forms a fictitious bikie gang to carry forth his ideas of an abandoned future in which substances are collected for their ability to unite, harkening to a distant past while simultaneously revealing themselves as a possible future and hence a forgotten aspect of our coming formations.

Nelson is able to demonstrate what things accumulate and convey as an essential meaning, “the lowly combines with the ritualistic.”86 Furthermore, Nelson maintains that,

art is a belief system, the same as heroin or Islam or the biker gangs or the stoners or the failed Mexican revolutionaries. These are systems that apparently lie beneath the surface, lurking in suspension, and only alerting us to their presence when they come into conflict with each other. 87

This placement of various items, on a stage, demonstrates the power of a communal belief system or bond. Just as a system of belief supports the Jizo with its objects positioned, deposited, housed, contained, shipped and filed in forms of memory.

86 Jim Drobnick & Jennifer Fisher, “Mike Nelson: Amnesiac Hide,” The Senses and Society, 10:1, (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, published online, 2015): 101, DOI: 10.2752/174589315X14161614601367 (accessed 02-01-2016). 87 Nicholas Cullinan, “Mike Nelson's 'The Coral Reef' (2000),” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 150, No. 1268, Sculpture (Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd, Nov. 2008): 764 http://www.jstor.org/stable/27823150 (accessed 02-03-2016).

Figure 19. Mike Nelson, Gang of Seven, found objects, mixed media, Installation at 303 Gallery, New York, January 17 - February 21, 2015.88

Figure 20. Installation view of Mike Nelson, Amnesiac Hide, found objects installed at The Power Plant, Toronto, 2014. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

88 Image credit: http://www.303gallery.com/artists/mike-nelson?view=slider#12 (accessed 01-07-2016).

Chapter 3. Concrete Data Apophenia

Doesn’t it look like a shimmering surface of water in the evening sun? Is this perhaps the sea of data itself? An overwhelming body of water, which one could drown in? Can you see the waves moving ever so slightly? I am using a good old method called apophenia. 89

Documenting my findings photographically and filing them by date articulated what was of interest. I could identify certain patterns; to see apophenia, “in the sea of data.”90 I had also begun accumulating books from second-hand book shops, for their visions, and to compile layers, an investigation into additive and subtractive processes. By sorting these matters I became aware of combinations. Patiently analyzing these possibilities, the patterns in the material slowly manifested, “for the maker, new forms are constantly emerging from old ones. I wanted to give these objects another life. This act of redemption feels like an artistic practice, or part of my artistic practice.” 91 I discovered and utilized the data stored within these phantasmagorias, redeemed as “poetic encounters.” 92

The persistent search for items resulted an amassing of data. Data is often associated with companies in the form of bookkeeping, logbooks, or declarations. Also, the outcome of data collection often undergoes a licensing process, to prove its worth. For example, fishing businesses have data stored on logbooks that,

contain detailed information on individual fishing operations, including fishing grounds, type and duration of operation, catch by species and other types of data relating to weather and sea conditions. Landings declarations usually deal with grouped data presented as summaries of fishing trips and catch by species.93

As a business practice, this process was natural, but by utilizing similar data processes would I be demystifying the artistic process? For me the joy of the search overwhelmingly

89 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 2. 90 Ibid 91 Richard McCoy, “Exploring the Freedom to Re-Present Value: A Discussion with Theaster Gates,” (blog) Art 21 Magazine, April 29, 2011, (accessed 03-10-2016). http://magazine.art21.org/2011/04/19/no-preservatives-exploring-the-freedom-to-re-present-value-a-discussion- with-theaster-gates/#.WVjdToSGOpo 92 “Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms,” guggenheim.org, (accessed 01-10-2016). https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/gabriel-orozco-asterisms 93 “Data Collection Methods” FAO Corporate Document Repository.org, (accessed 05-11-2016). http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/x2465e/x2465e09.htm

compensated for any lack of results. I was not interested in tallying statistics, but I wanted to evaluate what I was gathering. I looked at methods of data registration, to log my processes, to locate something that may be imperceptible.

The size of the bits and pieces was determined by what I could carry. I started arranging my work into clearer units, while allowing room for potentiality. It was not in my interest to stifle the collective process, but a photographic organizational structure was useful in schematizing the incoming debris. Formatting the objects allowed me to see clearly what it was that I was looking at. This photographic method of cataloguing my collections was a type of registration so I looked to museums as a model for taxonomic displays. The British Museum’s description of cataloguing states that,

the standard method of registering objects...is to give each piece a 'registration number', consisting of the year of accession, followed by the month and day, and then the number of the item accessioned that day, for example:1999,9/15.1.94

I applied this method with mixed success. Cataloguing this way supported my routine, until it began to seem like a production line.

The curator Dieter Roelstraete maintains that,

there can also be no archeology without display – the modern culture of museum display (if not of the museum itself) is as much ‘produced’ by the archeologist’s desire to exhibit his or her findings as it is by the artist’s confused desire to communicate his or hers.95

In the process of tracing and accumulating artifacts, I felt responsible for arresting their natural course towards oblivion, despite the fact that they were disregarded and unwanted. Roelstraete states that artist led archeological experience is an investment in obsolescence, he calls this a historiographical ‘turn’ that hints at the evasive qualities of our current culture of “here today, gone tomorrow” because we are, “growing up in a culture of accelerated

94 “Cataloguing,” britishmuseum.org, (accessed 26-05-2016). http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/departments/ancient_egypt_and_sudan/facilities_and_services/study_room/cataloguing.aspx 95 Dieter Roelstraete, “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art,” e-flux journal #72 (April 2009): 3, http://www.e- flux.com/journal/04/68582/the-way-of-the-shovel-on-the-archeological-imaginary-in-art/ (accessed 10-04-2016).

oblivion.” 96 This desire to hold and convey meaning had led me to organize these gatherings in some way, but it was easy to feel stifled by this process of documentation.

I felt comparable to the artist On Kawara painting his Today series of monochrome text, titled ‘Date Paintings,’ (Figure 21) with its “strict adherence to an elaborate, self-imposed system of production.”97 I tried to maintain a rhythmic structure and attempted to work within this process of registration. Ultimately, I found it burdensome and restrictive. When considering ways to document the course of collection I began to move away from creating lists of sizes and types and eventually applied simpler methods that assigned only a date. I agreed that in order for apophenia to work its natural course, “the hope is for a pattern to emerge across different datasets, without actually checking how or if they correspond to any empirical reality.”98 By replacing the paradigm of ‘data’ with, ‘materially similar’ or ‘commonly shaped things,’ for example, I could begin to see how this process could serve as a more appropriate method to presenting my work.

It was actually while reordering certain characters into a system of codes, by seeing a shape or by recognizing something I had seen in the combined pieces, that a lexicon of meaning was developed. The pieces together formed a measurement of significance and it was this working through them that mattered. Handling the objects was a vital process. The need to work with the material also reinforced a deeper understanding of the connections inherently expressed within the material. There were links, subtle filaments that gave communal sense to possibilities of identity and social relationships. Formations concealed within these substances could then be reviewed, and re-read. As an example, literary critic David T. Humphries quotes the claim of art theorist Jeremy Braddock, that,

the arrangement of things - texts in an anthology or artworks in a gallery - creates formal relationships that can be read, while the choices made and practices employed create social relationships that can be read as well.99

96 Ibid., 4. 97 Jung-Ah Woo, “Kawara's Date Paintings: Series of Horror and Boredom,” Art Journal, Vol. 69, No. 3 (College Art Association, Fall 2010): 63, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2010.10791384, (accessed 11-12-2016). 98 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 5. 99 Humphries, “Collecting as Modernist Practice by Jeremy Braddock, Review by: David T. Humphries,” 168.

Figure 21. Left: On Kawara, DEC. 29, 1977, “Thursday.” New York, From Today, 1966–2013, Acrylic on canvas. Pictured with artist-made cardboard storage boxes. Private collection. Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York, London / Right: On Kawara, MAY 20, 1981, “Wednesday.” New York, From Today, 1966–2013, Acrylic on canvas. Pictured with artist-made cardboard storage boxes. Private collection. Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York,London, All images courtesy of Guggenheim Museum.

This ‘arrangement of things’ communicated through my collated relics acts as a unifying system of material relationships that offers further possibilities, moving beyond objectification, to possible histories, places, wonder, and invented narratives. The artist Hiroshi Sugimoto states that, “the artifacts speak to me, and I listen. I ask what it is that they need.”100 These artifacts spoke to me too. They became versions of artifacts valued together as constellations from landscaped time. As data sets these timescapes were my own logical interpretation, just as, “constellations were expressions of a physical logic. The patterns were projections, not reality.”101

In Orozco’s installation Asterisms102 (Figure 24) he plays on the arrangement of stars, represented as found substances gathered from,

100 Megan Fontanella, “Visions of Modernity, Hiroshi Sugimoto on Collecting,” Deutsche Guggenheim Magazine, Issue 21, (Winter 2012): 16, https://www.absoluto.de/kunden/guggenheim/assets/pdf/DGM21.pdf (accessed 09-02-2017). 101 Steyral, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 12. 102 Guggenheim, “Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms”.

a playing field near his home in New York and a protected coastal biosphere in Baja California Sur, Mexico, that is also the repository for flows of industrial and commercial waste from across the Pacific Ocean.103

Orozco arranges and displays his objects in taxonomic classification to reveal “traces of erosion.”104 My collected workings also conveyed or displayed processes of ‘erosion’ suggestive of the history and time they have endured ‘at sea’. What Orozco understands as a type of “morphology” is the natural encounter between forms that meet and change one another, where control and form lose order. This rubbing away of the material offered itself up as a sense of loss; a hauntological representation.

This Jizolark, a drifter, paddling in search of isolated shores to locate consumer relics is aware of the swell, the peace, the smell, and also the slow movement. I did not expect to find such characteristic ceramic slivers on sands further away but there they were unexpectedly waiting. The delight of being on your own on a shoreline, able to pick up castoff consumables and returning to sort things out, undermining consumerist tendencies and replacing them through presentation was pure poetry.

Authenticating

Concepts centering upon consumerism flowed from these cast offs. The verb ‘to consume’ came to resonate with a broader meaning,

In the 19th century, the term 'to consume' was used mainly in its negative connotations of 'destruction' and 'waste'. Tuberculosis was known as consumption, that is, a wasting disease. Then economists came up with a bizarre theory, which has become widely accepted, according to which the basis of a sound economy is a continual increase in the consumption (that is, waste) of goods.105

The waste was emphasized by these objects, and apparent, in the detail that they were once engaged as containers for palatable consumption. I could almost taste something. I was able

103 Ken Johnson, “Swimming to Shore ‘Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms’ at the Guggenheim,” New York Times Nov 15, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/arts/design/gabriel-orozco-asterisms-at-the-guggenheim.html (accessed 05-11-2016). 104 Ibid 105 Petr Skrabanek, The Death of Humane Medicine and the Rise of Coercive Healthism, (Suffolk, UK, The Social Affairs Unit, 1994), 29, http://euract.woncaeurope.org/sites/euractdev/files/documents/resources/documents/thedeathofhumanemedicineandtheriseofcoercive healthismpetrskrabanek1994.pdf (accessed 14-04-2016).

to relate these unwanted discards, to the food that had been gathered on the islands. In my work they became islands within islands. (Figures 22, 23)

This visual vocabulary could also be traced within the data. As Steyerl suggests, “vocabulary deployed for separating signal and noise is surprisingly pastoral: data “farming” and “harvesting,” “mining” and “extraction” are embraced as if we lived through another massive Neolithic revolution.”106 There is, moreover, the words ‘net’, ‘trawling’, ‘surfing’, ‘portal’ and ‘deep viewing,’ indicating that, “nautical/sea imagery has been central in conceptualizing the Internet from the beginning.”107 This vocabulary from the internet operated in the sea, in front of me. Additionally, while I was mining this data, and extracting its social histories, my bond with the internet was accentuated. I had assumed I was performing unaccompanied, on this island, and yet I had an open connection to the world that existed through the portals of email and Skype.

Figure 22. Morgan Veness, Concrete Data (islands within islands) 1 (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 1, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, coral, tiles, stones, collected shore detritus, concrete, lacquer wear tray, various sizes.

106 Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” 9. 107 Regina Schober, “The World Wide Sea: Oceanic Metaphors, Concepts of knowledge and Transnational America in the Information Age,” Review of International American Studies, Vol. 7, Number 1, (2014) http://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/article/view/3985 (accessed 01-07-2017).

Figure 23. Morgan Veness, Concrete Data (islands within islands) 2 (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 2, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, glass, tiles, coral, collected shore detritus, concrete (2) pieces 45cm x 25cm each.

My research also needed to clarify aspects of presentation in a way that took into account the delicate nature of my collected bits and pieces. They had endured the coast line, but when reformatted within my studio they became fragile; they were easily broken. In Dion’s work “you were allowed to explore drawers and examine objects, but had to put them back.”108 (Figure 25) Dion offers his works to be handled and viewed, then placed back within the museum context, as if they could be tasted. This tactile availability of the displayed objects was appealing but the fragility of my artworks would not allow frequent handling. Thus, I turned to consider the work of the artist Haris Epaminonda. (Figure 26) Her exhibitions are just as carefully controlled, yet they often deal with a level of preciousness; procedures that pay heed to Duchamp’s last lesson, “pay attention. The way things are exhibited matters.”109

While Dion has been known to display his excavated collection enmasse, Epaminonda is selective with what she chooses to display. Epaminonda deals with “stuff she finds in the

108 Mass Moca, “Letter from Lund,” (blog), (accessed 05-06-2016). https://bjornandannette.wordpress.com/usa/mass-moca/ 109 Elena Filipovic, “A museum that is not,” e-flux journal #4 (March 2009): 18, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/04/68554/a-museum-that-is- not/ (accessed 01-05-2016).

50 world around her. She is a consummate and possibly obsessive collector of rarities, curiosities, and seemingly random, mundane ephemera.”110 By locating the poetic juxtaposition that is attuned to an object’s significance, Epaminonda attempts to dislodge our sense of history, inadvertently, reconnecting us to a sense of wonder. These objects I selected from around me also emitted a sense of wonder, as foreign pieces, discarded ephemera. They provided an endless puzzle, or a continual game of problem solving; this was the form of display I was after.

For the artist Song Dong, it was the collected mass of another person (his mother) that attracted his attention. He was able to form an exhibit, titled Waste Not111 (Figure 27) which he based on the complete contents of his mother’s household,

technically one work, it consists of approximately 10,000 belongings of every imaginable domestic kind – pots and pans, umbrellas, clothes, bedframes, chairs, old tea canisters and even the frame of the house where the artist was born – brought together in a bewildering maze of objects that surround you at every turn.112

Dong’s interest in the articles was articulated by the way he decided to parade them, he was already was very familiar with the items.

What started as an overwhelming mass of disparate objects was eventually transformed into a meticulously ordered presentation in which items were carefully grouped by kind – stuffed animals with stuffed animals, plastic bags with plastic bags, bits of soap with bits of soap – creating a stunning classification of types.113

Thus, Dong was careful to maintain the integrity of individual objects. Their spaces were carefully attuned to each other, so that the placement in the collection served as a signal for the very act of accumulating. Dong,

arranges the objects with a curator's care, but defiantly not an interior designer's eye. Beauty is not the point. Not one of these things had aesthetic value even when new…..items are grouped on the floor by use, not colour, shape or texture. Each is identically spaced from its neighbour: kitchen stuff here, living-room stuff there. A

110 Kaelen Wilson–Goldie, Haris Epaminonda, “Haris Epaminonda,” (blog) posted spring 2010, (accessed 05-06-2016). http://bidoun.org/articles/haris-epaminonda 111 “Song Dong, Waste Not,” hereelsewhere.com, (accessed 01-07-2017). http://hereelsewhere.com/see/song-dong-waste-not/ 112 Ibid 113 Ibid

bed, laden with carefully folded clothing, surmounts a veritable car park of trodden- down shoes, touching in their decrepitude, and in the fact that all are still in married pairs.114

The zones between the various exhibited items, the gaps, were like pauses in nothingness, reflecting Dong’s loss. This gift of the gap is integral to the formatting of Dong’s collections. While it holds a direct significance for the departed, I felt that this sense of loss could also be translated through my collected substances; not necessarily as personal attribution but as a hauntological reference within the objects’ accumulative history.

The artist Sarah Goffman is “an inveterate collector.”115 She salvages used plastic containers that are then imprinted with “tropes of decorative design”116 appropriated from Japanese and Chinese ceramic traditions. While reflecting upon the value of packaging she seeks to answer the question: “where do things go when they are tossed away?”117 Goffman re- positions refuse and examines discarded things with a sense of their inherent possibilities, enjoying “the process of taking an object away from its manufactured purpose – polishing, embellishing and rearranging them.”118 Goffman traces the awareness of the manufacturing component in an object’s existence. In her exhibition I am a 3-D Printer,119 her love for beauty is expressed in the process of transforming rubbish. It is through this act of discovery, located in a materials possibility, that she provides a space for intuitive reciprocity. This process is further evident in the way she displays her work on shelves and table-tops. Goffman places her discards with an awareness of their relationships to each other. Her work is enhanced by the attention she gives to the objects’ characteristics and the narrative that is created by certain combinations she selects.

114 Jenny Gilbert, “Song Dong: Waste Not, Barbican Curve, London,” The Independent, (Sunday Feb 19, 2012) http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/song-dong-waste-not-barbican-curve-london-7167891.html (accessed 01- 07-2017). 115 Jacqueline Milner, Artcollector, “Sarah Goffman,” (blog) (accessed 05-06-2017). www.artcollector.net.au 116 Sarah Goffman Exhibition “I am a 3-D Printer,” Wollonong Art Gallery, 11 March – 18 June, 2017, (accessed 06-06-2017). http://www.wollongongartgallery.com/exhibitions/Pages/Sarah-Goffman-I-Am-A-3D-Printer.aspx 117 Ibid 118 Ibid 119 Ibid

Figure 24. Gabriel Orozco, Asterisms, 2013, (Detail) various collected and assembled objects that washed up at a coastal nature reserve. Credit Photograph by David Heald, 2012.

Figure 25. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999, wooden cabinet, porcelain, earthenware, metal, animal bones, glass and 2 maps, 2660 x 3700 x 1260 mm. TATE Modern

Figure 26. Haris Epaminonda, Untitled #07. 2009, collected items Photo by Serkan Taycan. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul

Figure 27. Song Dong, Waste Not, 2012 (Detail) Various domestic items including pens, wristwatches, shoes, furniture © Song Dong 2005

Abandoning

My practice also involved the process of gathering photographs of various ships and boats that cruised, motored, or slipped through the channel between the islands that lay in front of my shack (Figure 28, 29). They were set against the backdrop of the landmass that lay beyond and the detritus that floated up, by, or around them. They were mostly container ships destined for dockyards, where they would be repaired, repainted, and refitted. It took time for the value of these things to materialize, for now it remained opaque and unwitting, on the margins of my essential practice of amassing. Grasping for my camera whenever a ship steamed by, I found that this practice lent itself to and joined the located object as another potential. “Every signifier is also itself a sign. Erasures obliterate, but they also reveal; omissions within a system permit other elements to appear all the more clearly.”120 The signifier was revealed as the vessel, displayed in front of me, while I surveyed the remnants of its cargo.

The moment came in which I needed to relinquish my own load as I began to contemplate what I needed to take back to Australia. This revealed the possibility of abandoning most, if not all, of what I had collected during my time on Utsumi. I had gathered pieces of driftwood, timber planks, jetsam, and concrete forms. These driftwood assortments, panels, and planks had deposits of torn paper and paint added to them, then systematically removed from their surface. Also, running concurrently, drifting, and slipping was the additive and subtractive process I utilized with the pages that I had gathered from second- hand book stalls. I would apply and erase these sheets, then scrape them back, removing the collected surface. This process mimicked my intentions of accumulating and renouncing; a ‘rub on, rub off’ process. It made me reconsider the methodology of On Kawara’s date paintings, with his process of continued daily application. I used mixed media or painted layers to supplant dates, opposed to his approach, in which “numbers and letters fuse their symbolic, representational purpose with their function as visual shapes.”121 It was this additive and subtractive process that traced the ravaged effects on collected concrete data

120 Craig Dworkin, No Medium, (Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England, The MIT Press, 2013), p.12, https://chromographe.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/dworkin-craig-no-medium.pdf (accessed 11-12-2016). 121 Anne Rorimer, “The Date Paintings of On Kawara,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Art Institute of Chicago, 1991): 137 https://publications.artic.edu/sites/default/files/file_assets/Rorimer_Date_Paintings_of_On_Kawara_AIC_Museum_Studies_1991.pdf (accessed 10-11-2016).

55 and simultaneously alluded to the processes of leaving things behind.

Figure 28. Glocal Bulk, passing container ships, Utsumi, Japan 2016

Figure 29. Binan Development, passing container ships, Utsumi, Japan 2016

Conclusion

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.122

Mr. Jizolark’s Concrete Data is the result of the practice of amassing and organizing found objects. Just as Chomei understood that one should “relinquish all attachment”123 in order to free oneself from the misery of grasping after things, it has become easier to articulate this process by working through it. This method evolved as a very personal investigation into the attractions of living simply and met with the challenges of maintaining a working system as an amasser.

My processes are an “inter-netted,” interlinked, interwoven system that ultimately transforms or exposes concrete data as an ephemeral poetic experience. It is through this sequence of interlaced practices that I express poetic encounters and reconcile the permanent or abiding nature of collecting, physically or digitally, to the transience and ephemeral, located in the post-internet world.

Mr. Jizolark renounced virtually everything; most of what was collected and the opportunity to live on the island of Utsumi in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan. Living close to the sea in a beach shack in 2016, I could concentrate on amassing waste while pursuing a quiet and secluded life. And through this understanding of a reclusive lifestyle, with few attachments, I was able to compare it with that of the 12th century Japanese poet Kamo No Chomei, as depicted in his seminal essay/extended poem Hojoki. Chomei was successful in forsaking the world, living in a small abode in which he realized contentment. For a short time I understood this to be an ideal living condition that enabled one’s imprint to remain light. The impulse to collect remains, but my research has shown that one can trace and profile concrete data to achieve insight.

Over the course of research, I contextualized a broad range of theorists, philosophers, and curators, to focus the structure of what is essentially an impermanent activity. By investigating the work and the act of collecting through the artists Mark Dion, Mike Nelson,

122 Roelstraete, “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art,” 3. 123 Meredith McKinney, Kenko and Chomei Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, 18.

Gabriel Orozco, Song Dong, On Kawara, Haris Epaminonda, and Sarah Goffman I was able to appreciate some of the distinctions involved in exhibiting these found things.

Particular thought was also given to supposed archaeological practices and prospecting that utilizes chance. The influence of Buddhism and the development of chance as an art process shaped and supported this notion of collecting, as a dual practice of learning to let go; due primarily to storage or rather the lack thereof. The term hauntology was used to underpin the subtler aspects of comprehending collected materiality, through poetic encounters, and it corresponded well to the Japanese expression ‘mono no aware,’ which refers to the feeling of impermanence towards things. Finally, grappling with this nature of grasping after things and the inevitability of decay, I considered my practice to be a type of hauntological appreciation for the significance demonstrated within the representations of concrete data.

List of Illustrations

Introduction.

Figure 1. Figure 1. A beachside shack somewhat reminiscent of Chomei’s Hut was offered to us on the island of Utsumi, Japan, 2016

Figure 2. A replica of Kamo No Chomei's hut at Kawai Shrine in Kyoto, Japan. Image credit: http://www.deepkyoto.com/the-hojoki/ accessed 01-07-2017

Chapter 1. The Mudlark

Figure 3. Collections 1, various pieces on studio floor, Utsumi, Japan, 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 4. Collections 2, various pieces on studio floor, Utsumi, Japan, 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 5. My studio, my ‘six tatami mat’ room, Utsumi, Japan, 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 6. Utsumi island, Seto Sea, Japan, 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 7. The Shore, Utsumi, Japan, 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 8. “the trash that washes up on the digital economies shores”; Flotsam and jetsam coming ashore, Utsumi, Japan, 2016

Figure 9. Driftwood, flotsam and jetsam, Utsumi, Japan, 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 10. Taian Tearoom, Se no Rikyu, Myokian Temple, Kyoto, Momoyama period c.

1582. Image Credit: https://au.pinterest.com/pin/432486370442787381 accessed 01-07- 2017

Figure 11. Morgan Veness, Twin Peaks, Two Bowls (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 3, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, epoxy adhesive, shoreline marine ply, 20cm x 70cm. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 12. Morgan Veness, Twin Peaks, Three Bowls (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 7, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, epoxy adhesive, shoreline marine ply, 20cm x 70cm. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 13. Morgan Veness, Twin Peaks, Two Bowls (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 2, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, epoxy adhesive, shoreline marine ply, 20cm x 70cm. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 14. Morgan Veness, Twin Peaks, Two Bowls (Utsumi, Seto Sea) no. 1, 2016, deep sea ceramic shards, epoxy adhesive, shoreline marine ply, 20cm x 70cm. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Chapter 2. The Jizo

Figure 15. A Jizo Shrine in Yokoshima, Hiroshima, Japan 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 16. Collected stones, 2016, painted driftwood, stones 90cm x 70cm. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 17. Morgan Veness, The Jizolark’s Cave (1), 2016, deep sea detritus on tatami mat, 90cm x 180cm, installation view. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 18. Morgan Veness, The Jizolark’s Cave (2), 2016, deep sea ceramic and terracotta shards on tatami mat, 90cm x 180cm, installation view. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 19. Mike Nelson, Gang of Seven, found objects, mixed media, Installation at 303 Gallery, New York, January 17 - February 21, 2015. Image credit: http://www.303gallery.com/artists/mike-nelson?view=slider#12 accessed 01-07-2017

Figure 20. Installation view of Mike Nelson, Amnesiac Hide, found objects installed at The Power Plant, Toronto, 2014. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/mike-nelson-amnesiac-hide accessed 01-07-2017

Chapter 3. Concrete Data

Figure 21. Left: On Kawara, DEC. 29, 1977, “Thursday.” New York, From Today, 1966–2013, Acrylic on canvas. Pictured with artist-made cardboard storage boxes. Private collection. Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York, London / Right: On Kawara, MAY 20, 1981, “Wednesday.” New York, From Today, 1966–2013, Acrylic on canvas. Pictured with artist- made cardboard storage boxes. Private collection. Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York,London, All images courtesy of Guggenheim Museum. http://www.widewalls.ch/on- kawara-guggenheim-silence-2015/ accessed 01-07-2017

Figure 24. Gabriel Orozco, Asterisms, 2013, (Detail) various collected and assembled objects that washed up at a coastal nature reserve. Image credit: David Heald, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/arts/design/gabriel-orozco-asterisms-at-the- guggenheim.html accessed 01-07-2017

Figure 25. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999, Wooden cabinet, porcelain, earthenware, metal, animal bones, glass and 2 maps, 2660 x 3700 x 1260 mm. Image credit: TATE Modern, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dion-tate-thames-dig-t07669 accessed 01-07-2017

Figure 26. Haris Epaminonda, Untitled #07. 2009, collected items Photo by Serkan Taycan. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul. Image credit: Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul, http://bidoun.org/articles/haris-epaminonda accessed 01-07-2017

Figure 27. Song Dong, Waste Not, 2012 (Detail) Various domestic items including pens, wristwatches, shoes, furniture. Image credit: Song Dong, https://www.barbican.org.uk/media/upload/artform%20news/0Song%20Dong%20Image%2 0Sheet%20[Pre-installation].pdf accessed 01-07-2017

Figure 28. Glocal Bulk, passing container ships, Utsumi, Japan 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

Figure 29. Binan Development, passing container ships, Utsumi, Japan 2016. Image credit: Morgan Veness

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