Overview of Reading Group Session 4 (16th October) - Judgement and Purpose by Joel Fisher

This text is about anaprokopology - meaning an area where success is not achieved. Basically meaning failure. The writer asks why we are always surrounded by the potential of failure? He also asks if failure is imaginary or real... "There are many ways to fail, it seems, but success is singular." I feel that I can relate myself to this particular quote, I always get that feeling of failure when creating something, or half way through a project, I lose motivation and I don't know why this happens; maybe I need to find something to make myself feel good about what I am doing? I don't think that I have always felt like this, it might have stemmed from when I lost a huge amount of my artwork in a large fire - I sort of felt that I had failed when it was all gone and I had to completely start from scratch again with everything. It seems to be for me that everything gets in the way to make that 'singular piece of success' happen. It's like there's one way to be born, but so many ways to die (which is the same concept). "It provided a frightening inventory of all the ways a birth could go wrong. There were dozens of chances for disaster in contrast to the essentially unmentioned possibility of a living, healthy baby." - page 117.

This image often makes me feel slightly upset; I took many images on the day of the fire and I tried to create it into an artwork and document the whole thing, however I guess this photograph means the most to me. The window that is open is the exact place I left probably over a hundred hours of work (I tried to add up everything I lost after the fire, so that I could remember and also never forget what I originally had). Art is something you can never create exactly the same again. I try to see this as a positive, however still find it difficult to comprehend what happened, even though it's now two years on. There is a story that came out of it though, which makes me feel as though I have a huge connection with my favourite artist, Tracey Emin.

'Dear Tracey, Eight Years On' - 2013 by Laura Collins (myself!)
Tracey Emin's tent 'Everyone I Ever Slept With', was destroyed in a warehouse fire eight years ago. Emin was my inspiration for creating a ten-foot high knitted tent. In a dramatic twist of irony my performing arts block was struck by lightning and my tent, after Emin, was destroyed in the fire. Ironic really. Sadly though, I don't have many pictures of my tent in it's completed format.

"Often one anticipates failure as the logical end of the path one is following and, when such a situation is sensed or recognised, the path can be abandoned. Perhaps that is why unfinished work used to be seen as a form of failure." - page 117. The writer is suggesting that if someone feels that something is not going the way that they anticipated, the motivation to finish whatever it is suddenly becomes lost and this creates the feeling of failure - however, he later on goes on to say that "We no longer need to face the unfinished with a negative prejudice or a suspended judgement. We have begun to look at a work as somehow complete at every point in its development." During a tutorial I had with some of my classmates and my tutor, it was suggested that I think of my work as an artwork whilst it seems like it is in an unfinished state. I do a lot of crochet and knitting work, so this is really quite time consuming and I felt frustrated that I couldn't do as much as I wanted to because of the time frame. I just didn't really feel that convinced that it would ever go anywhere and that's probably why I felt that I had lost my motivation. My classmates liked the idea of presenting lots of unfinished artworks, so I'm going to try and get it into my head that my work can be ever evolving and can continuously be added to and never be finished. This, I believe will help me to get the sense of failure out of my head and hopefully allow me to be feel motivated more often.

"With some artists, and in some works by all artists, such clarity never appears. Instead, we feel a chronic, nagging suspicion about these works. We are never certain whether they are the best or worst things we've ever seen, and we suspend judgement. Most often artists hold back such works for future consideration." The writer also tells us about Picasso and how he kept a piece of his artwork rolled up under his bed for many years. Sometimes we need someone else to prompt us and actually tell us that what we've done is actually pretty good and worthy. This is probably what happened to Picasso; he didn't know whether to think it was a failure or not.