Legwork

The following data was generated from the process of forming a submission for ‘Das DING -THING.’

LW_20.4.10_1

[by Egle]

Hello, team!

Hope you are both great… So there is what I wrote.. sorry it’s hectic, but we don’t have time, and — even if I hate it sooooo much when other people start their talks with that remark — but this time I mean it, since Lingua Franca of todays world is not my mother tongue… it’s just not easy to think and write in it about such metaphysical things :)))) BUT THERE YOU GO:::::

Talking about the Ding project.. the three main points are — the deadline is tomorrow, we have to decide what we are doing, and we have to articulate it as a proposal.

Let me remind you very shortly what they stated in the call for participation (I attach the application file just in case, so it’s all there)… I think interesting is the moment of object as/how related to an individual, and also the moment of questioning of ways how things/objects are produced/constituted.

So the suggestion is to take our legwork (especially in it’s starting moment) to discuss it in terms of this particular topic of thing/dinglichkeit, or how Tim very insightfully suggested, object-hood.

Why is it interesting and worth talking about? I think because in this way, through it, we address the topic not from a discursive/conceptual/language distanced way, but from the very core of it’s manifestation in the world. Namely, we do not address it as an intellectual question we all get a quasi sophisticated pleasure talking about, but as something the answer to what constitutes our existence, our materialization, legwork as a body living-in-the-world… [that was my personal suggestion and understanding, you guys are totally welcome to ignore it or denounce it as being a bullshit :))) ]

sooo…. yesterday at our meeting Timmy and I talked about what and how to do, while not ending up at one of those two media — neither at merely an object, nor at merely a presentational articulation of it or of any meaning. one of the answers is actually performance… Tim says this idiom of performance — that’s why we’re drawn to performance, that’s why people are drawn to performance, for it’s positioning in between…

But those are questions of medium of actual presentation, whereas we should first answer the more “ontological” (sorry for the word :)))) question of why we choose it. I think the it is great for us to take the direction of presenting legwork itself as object, with the question, what constitutes the object-hood of legwork? Is it our relations to one another? object of our constellation of three people invested in whatever? Are we presenting the platform?

I liked what Tm said about that we should let the form/medium emerge for the sake of presentation… and for the sake of meeting the term dinglichkeit, object-hood…. which basically shows that legwork can appear in the world as many things, many formats, and that is its discursive power. And as I like as unconventional titles and headlines as possible (trauma of my time spent at he newspaper where everything had to be more than correct and according to the rules), I would see this as even a title (a quote of yesterday’s conversation)

LEGWORK AS THING
it’s Over, OK, Moving On, the Next Thing….

So the real challenge would be for us — if Tobey were willing to participate in this way — to take or “use” (hate that word but you guys know what I mean) that piece Tb was talking about, and find (curate) through the presence of his piece, and the presence of all of us and legwork, the object-hood of legwork. with such a structure we would address the more particular question (which I see actually as the great model of answering the object-hood question at large), namely how we reconcile in presenting the object-hood of legwork and simply just Tb’s object he’s working on alone? and, really, as Tm very correctly said, to a very high extent personally loaded, having it’s own process etc….

That somehow symbolically corresponds to me this very situation of us coming together, from different cultures continents backgrounds biographies etc… but creating a new body together…

No need to remind that to you guys — the application is due tomorrow. I think it would be great if we apply and use it also for our sake — that somehow would help us better to identify what are we doing… And let me come again — I am not really well trained in materializing thoughts… if its a performance — like we thought about being present there and the logo of legwork being present there, and the object somehow (????) incorporated there….. now I am looking in your eyes in my mind and my eyes are begging for sharing thoughts on that.. for help… (and on everything else….)

I cannot believe my mom just send me an email saying that I will have to shorten my visit home due to “someone else has reserved your bed, so you won’t have where to sleep anymore”!!!! should I like go and expire now??????

p.s. I just realized I like how our initials come together TET
love and harmony alllll overrrr!!!!!!

LW_20.4.10_2

[by Timothy]

Team,

Schoen, dass ihr da seid. Happy Tuesday.

There are three approaches I would like to make clear:

1. Legwork as platform as thing
2. Legwork as a collaborative consisting of individuals with individual practices, one of which will be highlighted as thing for the purpose of this proposal
3. Some kind of hybrid of the above

We need to be clear on which of the three we’re actually going for in order to be able to clearly articulate this puppy.

Egle is dealing with a conceptual dualism between discourse as language-based communication and artistic practice as a mere making of things. From the little I’ve read and observed, I am of the opinion that discourse actually constitutes said made objects and their very making. Discourse has the upper hand. Tobey suggested in your initial conversation that discourse is just as behavioral as it is language-based. I agree.

Tobey’s baby is a part of his practice which until this point has transpired independently of Legwork. Legwork is also metaphorically a baby. It is coming into being, and in doing so, accruing objecthood. Youth is always a vulnerable time of negotiation and identity- and practice- formation. It does this only through contact with the outside world, others, and dundundun… the discourse proper to its historical moment. This is a decidedly developmental perspective and runs the risk of lumping narrative that may or may not have anything to do with Tobey’s intention in undertaking the baby thing altogether. This also may not matter. As it stands, it is hard for me to divorce the intention of an individual artist from the larger platform of presentation, and thus, we would currently fall somewhere in option 2.

If we go with something more Legwork oriented, that is, Legwork taken as itself and those who collectively make it what it is, then we could address the platform itself as thing, which I think I understand as a thing of shifting objecthood. Thing as point of negotiation rather than thing-in-itself. That is, we aren’t anything in particular. Until we are. We aren’t anything in particular until a specific context elicits this particularity. Performance tends to be my answer, and it is certainly not always the best one. A performance with a logo, which is an idea I’ll confess to stealing from choreographer Sarah Michelson, could be horrible, or kind of amazing depending on what we actually do in the space. Branding ourselves under the unifying force of the logo will lend the piece a certain gravity around Legwork as us and what we do together, Legwork as a self-generating phenomenon (option 1).

Option 3, which is also exciting, might look something like a hybrid between the two. Presence of baby + presence of Legwork.

Also, the baby musn’t function representationally and probably shouldn’t.

LW_20.4.10_3

[by Tobey]

TEAM:

First off, I’m sorry I wasn’t at the meeting yesterday. I did however finish my paper at 5:35 AM and beat the deadline by 25 minutes. Yes! Yet, I’m sure it would’ve been more productive if I were there.

It seems to me like the thing that is legwork, at the moment, is data. Most of our forces [as three] have collected on or around the website and via emails. When dealing with presenting performance in the thing context, data is primary. The typical photo/video/text accompaniments usually overwrite the performance as its essence becomes a little Benjamin hologram that giggles to itself quietly… meaning that after the shit happens, all you have are the pictures and memory. I struggled with this in school as I tried to make the performance, or situation primary, by refusing data. This was great regarding my ongoing project of talking my way through my final year, and not really making any art, which was evidently some sort of quasi-spiritual-self-realizing pursuit that I desperately needed. My point though, should be realized when I admit to wishing that I’d taken better care of my performances and did let them continue to breath… even if as secret data. [This has simply been a personally historical contribution that might be useful for the overall generation of this thing.]

But, since the legwork efforts need a reservoir to collect in as we figure out how to reassemble the parts for time&site-specific situations, I suggest that the ‘meeting room’ be used in this way. We could just make specific posts and have comment streams of exchanging thoughts and whatever. Perhaps, we should go ahead and do this with these emails and whatever notes you’ve been taking?

I brought up the baby because of the incredibly charming way I saw it relating to this legwork thing. Buuuut, I’m more than happy to have the group adopt my baby. I even like the allusion to the social mechanism of this type of nurturing gesture. And, as it [the baby thing] is super personal, I can’t help but to relate this intimacy to that of the mother/child relationship. I’m totally incapable of having this experience, as my gender fails me and fate simply says otherwise. This has little to no bearing as to why I am making it though, and will remain only as something that I mention to you, in the passing of this message. The process actually entails me making the thing in my own image, with the help of a ‘how to’ video that I bought from this doll making company. Totally fucking weird, low-budget beauty. Yet, the object is itself intended to have a performative essence, as I wanted for the thing to be carried about by the gallerist, and others, on opening night. Additionally, it is also intended to be an object that develops its own narrative and receives all of the various projections of meaning that such a sign might, and then through the gentle parenting of its creator, act accordingly. I have more involved plans for it, but I’ll leave it here for now. Oh my.
Unfortunately, I’m still in the beginning stages of its construction [which I’m going to refer to as pregnancy], but I do have this drawing that I made back in the fall [attached]. Perhaps there is someway of composing a performance that grafts the emergence of this baby thing, inside the gallery scenario, within a common domestic scenario. This aspect of supposing that the psychology of a space can take on the properties of an intimate family gathering is one of the questions I’ve dreamt up with the help of the little shit. Keep in mind, that several potential aspects of this thing have now taken form via this discussion, so if we use him, and what we do with him, are both very open-ended. I suppose this is a long way of saying SURE!

I’m also more than willing to work out an alternative [and ooooh, I just got Tim’s updated message!]

Looks like we’re all thinking along similar lines, which is extremely helpful in the beginning of something like this. I’m more than willing to contribute to the exhibition design and spatial reasoning that would go into materializing the group in an alternative fashion. Since the group is/has a brand, a similar graphic language could be applied to any space that may or may not help in the actualization of the place as stage. Remember, the logo has a built in pluralistic form, so making sense of nearly anything is possible, as long as you stamp it with the logo. Of course, this has specific connotations that might want to be worked on or around later.

LW_20.4.10_4

[by Tobey]

LW_21.4.10_1

[by Egle, Timothy, Tobey]

OBJECT:

Our baby is a baby doll made from a Tasha Edenholm reborning kit. A reborn doll is a manufactured vinyl play doll that’s been transformed in order to achieve as much realism as possible in order to resemble a human baby. The doll is made from Tobey Albright’s individual art practice and is made in the artist’s own image. This baby is a performative work intended to embody the organic nature of discourse as it renders metaphorical relations and their correlating conversations part of the object.

500 characters

Possibly usable:

For instance, on the occasion of inclusion in Das DING – THING, legwork will adopt the baby as their means of identifying the birth of their organization.

THING:

The object inheres not in itself, but as an attempt at its own articulation and materialization. With the object of the baby, Legwork builds its collective history through the idiom of performance, where our very practice is the object of inquiry. Legwork is an object that, with a certain self-awareness, leaves itself open to its own constitution as elicited by a particular frame or context, as these inform how Legwork manifests its practice in the world.

465 characters

DESCRIPTION:

On the occasion of inclusion in Das DING – THING we propose an individual event. Legwork will adopt the baby as their means of identifying the birth of their organization. The reborned baby as becoming social object appears ritualistically in the performance as a metaphorical condensation of our becoming a group, while retaining our singularity. Through performing lifelike social scenarios (for example, preparing dinner, taking pictures, talking about the baby’s appearance and our hopes for its future, taking and streaming home videos), we produce our relations to it, through it, and one another.

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Various levels of objecthood are at play: the performance as object that materializes in the gallery, Legwork as social relations that become a temporary object in the project, and the vinyl baby object as point of negotiation.

Participation in G.A.S. platform would further our growing objecthood.

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