Feelings, and feelings, and feelings

Historian of emotions Professor Thomas Dixon explains how looking to the past can help us understand our feelings in the present.

Many of us still remember the images of Paul Gascoigne crying at the 1990 World Cup, Mrs Thatcher’s red eyes on leaving Downing Street, and the national mourning for Princess Diana. Over twenty years later, the tide of tears shows no sign of receding. From public inquiries to primetime TV, the Premier League to Prime Minister’s Questions, emotions seem to be everywhere in public life. With a cool head and some much-needed historical perspective, Professor Thomas Dixon opens the Free Thinking festival 2019 by showing that our emotions themselves have a history.

In recent decades, some scientists have claimed there are just five or six ‘basic emotions’, but the category of ‘emotions’ did not exist until the nineteenth century, and history reveals a much richer picture of passions, affections, and sentiments. Ranging from revolutionary feelings and the sentimental tales of Charles Dickens to the poetic rage of Audre Lorde, Thomas Dixon paints a historical panorama of emotions and ends by asking what we can learn from our ancestors about the value of stoical restraint. The lecture will be followed by an interview conducted by Matthew Sweet and questions from the Free Thinking Festival audience at Sage Gateshead.

Thomas Dixon was the first director of Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions, the first of its kind in the UK. He is currently researching anger and has explored the histories of friendship, tears, and the British stiff upper lip in books Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears and The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003rsw

Start the Week - Emotions at the Free Thinking Festival, Sage, Gateshead

At the weekend Sage, Gateshead was host to the Free Thinking Festival, which this year, was focused on emotions. This week's BBC Radio 4 Start the Week programme, presented by Tom Sutcliffe, explores the art and science of communication. 

The American diplomat William J Burns played a central role in American foreign policy from the end of the Cold War to the collapse of relations with Putin’s Russian, including secret talks with Iran. He explores the language of diplomacy.

Harriet Shawcross is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. She reflects on how as a teenager she stopped speaking for almost a year. In her book Unspeakable she considers the power of silence. Harriet Shawcross talks about how, when one does not speak about emotions, one begins to have a muted emotional experience. Speech makes the experience emotional. When writing a text message or an email, there is a lot of control, forethought and there is no room for spontaneity. She writes about ways to use speech as a cure to selective mutism. She discusses her experience of volunteering for the Samaritans and how volunteers are trained to not respond immediately (somewhat against the trend in social media), but sit with what is being said, not offering solutions, but trying to go alongside someone into the dark places that normal conversations do not normally go. It does not close down the emotion or dismiss it, but acknowledges that it is there and the person is guided through dealing with the emotion. 

The musician and composer Kathryn Tickell roots her work in in the landscape and people of Northumbria. She is the foremost exponent of the Northumbrian pipes, and tells the story of Northumbria with - and without - words.

Thomas Dixon studies emotional outbursts as the director of the Centre for the History of Emotions. He unveils the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of anger and weeping. He talks about the importance of distinguishing between passions that may be troublesome violent and evil and affections that may be gentle and virtuous. We dont need more anger. There seems to be a change in how society judges the actions that we take in a given set of circumstances to what we feel in a given set of circumstances. Whereas we used to judge people on what they did, with the rise of social media we are tending to see the constant re-representation of feelings which might be miles away from any actual feelings. By talking about anger are politicians legitimising anger? 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003t9g

The latest marginendeavour collage development

My brain is turning to mush

Making Art with Frances Morris: Sophie Calle

I recognise that I like to be in control. I often find it easier to respond to instructions or a set of restrictions than I do to be given complete free-reign. Within my art practice (as well as in life), I often devise my own set of rules to follow. For instance, only use the colour white, fill the entire frame with pattern, only use materials that are edible. 

https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/visual_arts/the_artist_dining_room_sophie_calle_supper_club/7618

It is these tendencies that initially introduced me to the work of Sophie Calle, an artist who is famously controlling and who devises and implements "rules of the game". 'Sophie works with real life experiences we can all relate to – the death of a parent, the end of a relationship. Her work resonates with her preoccupations - death, absence, the mourning of the passing of life. "Growth is a series of mournings."

Calle recently produced an album of songs by 40 international musicians, in memory of her dead cat Souris. There’s Jarvis Cocker, Juliette Armanet, Bono, Michael Stipe to name a few. She’s made work out of her mother dying or her boyfriend ditching her. She’s had a job as a stripper, made a crazy road movie called No Sex Last Night. She's contacted everyone in a lost address book she found on the street. She’s asked people to describe their most exquisite pain, invited strangers to attend the funeral of their secrets. She’s asked museum staff to remember stolen paintings, blind people to describe the most beautiful thing they’ve seen. And although the work seems apparently dry - images and texts, books - it's deeply personal for those involved, and for us - the viewer.

In this BBC Radio 4 programme, Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern, meets French artist Sophie Calle in her studio in south west Paris.

Experimental collage

The latest marginendeavour work in progress

Grayson Perry: En Garde

In this episode of Archive on Four (BBC Radio 4) Grayson Perry goes backwards in the archive in search of the moment the avant-garde died.

'It's a century since Marcel Duchamp submitted his artwork called Fountain to an exhibition staged by the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Fountain was a urinal -- not a painting of a urinal or a sculpture, just a urinal, bought from a Manhattan hardware store and signed R.Mutt.

(c) Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017 / Photo (c) Tate

The Society of Independent Artists rejected Duchamp's provocation and the original object was lost. Nowadays Duchamp's urinal is canonised as the fountainhead of conceptual art and the high water (closet) mark of the avant garde. Replicas of the Fountain grace museums around the world - emblems of the avant-garde spirit of experimentation and confrontation. Somewhere in the intervening years though, something changed - contemporary art lost its ability to shock and critique. We're still hopelessly drawn to the idea of art that's 'cutting edge', 'ground-breaking', 'revolutionary'. But is that possible at this point -- haven't we seen it all before?

 
Maybe the death knell was sounded when the Saatchi Gallery opened on the South Bank? Or with the advent of protest and radical chic in the 1960s? Maybe it was when the CIA funded the abstract expressionists? Or when the post-war art market began to reign supreme? Or when the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in 1927? Or maybe it was all a matter of style the very moment Duchamp's Fountain was conceived?'

Perry questions whether the avant garde over emphasises the importance of the individual at the expense of valuing the collective.

Can people be accidentally avant garde? One tends to think that people have somehow made a set of conscious decisions to 'break the mould' and do something groundbreaking, but quite often they have simply done something that they find interesting and have not considered the notion of the avant garde. 

This episode features Brian Eno, Kenneth Goldsmith, Nnenna Okore, Cornelia Parker, and Sarah Thornton.

Producer: Martin Williams.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b090v482

Another wunderful evening with team Wunderbar (and Caitlin Merrett-King)

Glasgow-based artist Caitlin Merritt-King is currently doing a residency at the Newbridge Project in which she is wanting to record a new podcast exploring:

- methods of collaboration

- the political nature of working with friends

- friendship as emotional and feminised labour

- how we exercise care and love within art practice.


The podcast is going to serve as an informal archive that will aim to be a useful tool for experimenting for Newbridge now and in the future.

When I saw the 'Call for Ideas' I thought it could be an opportunity for us to share some of the Great & Tiny War experience. I was not necessarily thinking of it as a podcast just about Great & Tiny War, but more about the experience of all of us working together.

So, I arranged for us to meet (well, as many of us as were available), and we spent the evening talk about collaboration, working together, being friends, being women, caring for each other, caring in the art world, the nature of feminine work, Great and Tiny War, Bobby Baker and so on. Caitlin is going to edit the footage and the podcast will be available online in the near future.

The latest marginendeavour work in progress

Mark Bradford - Los Moscos

Mark Bradford
Los Moscos 2004
Mixed media on canvas

I am blown away by the intensity of this work, and am attracted to the complexity of the surface. There is so much depth and detail, and I could look at it for hours. I am paying particular attention to the composition and the colours, and am considering such things in relation to the experiments that marginendeavour have been doing with our collage work.

This large-scale collage includes materials found by the artist on the streets around his studio in Los Angeles, USA. Visually suggestive of aerial maps of sprawling, urban areas, the collage is constructed entirely from paper fragments which, the artist believes, 'act as memory of things pasted and things past. You can peel away the layers of paper and it's like reading the the streets through the signs'. The work takes its title from a derogatory slang term for migrant day labourers in the San Francisco Bay Area, reflecting the artist's long-standing interest in the sub-cultures of the inner city.

Attempting to draw the feeling in my abdomen

The beginning of the next work by marginendeavour

Ongoing studio experiments

The latest from margin endeavour - spot the difference

Ongoing studio experiments

Ongoing studio experiments

marginendeavour work in progress

The background of this artwork is made up of a collage of different samples of white that have been cut out from magazines. It is when the samples are displayed close together in such a manner that one recognises the variations in tones.