MEREDITH KENTON

SELECTED WORK

WRITING

ABOUT

INSTAGRAM

23.03.26

Joseph Beuys’ Drawings at Thaddeus Ropac 

  • Beuys linked to Kaprow’s happenings - part of Kunst Aktionen
  • Fluxus
  • Medical interest > Sculpture > Circus where he looked after animals
  • Story about the Tartar’s in his war experience, rewriting one’s own personal history. Owning your version of reality
  • Deciding on your own artistic identity and version of events
  • Beuys graduated at 32
  • Spent time developing artistic agenda
  • Drawings - hermetic, spiritual
  • Anthroposophy - an objective spiritual world which can be accessed by humans
  • 1958 Beuys embarked on Ulysses drawing project
  • 1964 - public Aktion, interrupted and he was punched
  • Created fictional narrative CV - Life Course/ Work Course

  • Teaching is his greatest work of art.


  • “To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to explain yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren’t very important for Me anymore. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it.”

  • Tension, historic document.
  • Documentation versus the real thing.
  • Link to ‘reflex documentation’ (p3) of modern day (Claire Bishop Disordered Attention)
  • Take art outside of the boundaries, live a creative life - eg. making his fake CV Performance, always existing inside and outside of the performance. 
  • Moment of taking phone out, as point of exiting our reality? Exiting and re-entering reality or the nowness? 
  • The puzzle, a thing, not a historic object if it will then be destroyed?
  • The physical thing not being the important thing. How can you think about this in terms of the physical piece
  • Imaginary jigsaw puzzle? Like Annie’s imaginary games. But need a physical task to be done, an ‘in’ as it were.
  • Think about what Pete said about Nina’s work, that it wasn’t too inaccessibly conceptual.
  • Operazione Difesa della natura - Sense of Beuys trying to ‘escape’ art as a formal thing.
  • Trying to achieve something outside the limitations of this as a form, as a thing even.
  • 1982 7000 Oaks - Stones that could be ‘adopted’ by a buyer, then proceeds went to planting a tree - link to the idea of me disseminating the jigsaw at the end of the performance.
  • Dead Hare performance, he let the audience in after 3 hours ** interesting










March - April 2026

Claire Bishop Disordered Attention 

23.03.26

I have started reading Disordered Attention by Clare Bishop and am finding it absolutely fascinating as it has managed to combine so many worlds that I find interesting and tease out concepts and connections in a brilliantly delicate and considered way. 
It really hits my interest in performance and concern with how we align performance with modern-day sensibilities. I have been worrying about my work feeling ‘disconnected’ or perhaps just ‘out of the zeitgeist’ or ‘out of touch’. Not that I am trying to force my work to be anything else, but I cannot sit here and say I do not have a preoccupation with modern affairs, particularly things like the modern mind, our attention spans being one facet of this. I do have a preoccupation and interest in this, an interest in how we forge a new artistic language, or how we use old ones today. An interest also in the way we consume, indulge, visit and hold media, screens, ideas, action and all the rest of it. So the book is brilliant. It is perfect for these.

The more I think about this, along with the collision of Kaprow’s Happenings or Beuys’ Aktions - and the more I remember my bodily experience of seeing the Pete Doig House of Music - the more I am sure I want to escape, or work against the gallery structure as a backdrop for performance. I also think I want to escape the word performance. I used ‘un-performance’ last term to describe the self-portrait exercises, I think I might look for a new word for the jigsaw piece. Performance won’t do.


Immediately I am thinking about bringing my action away from a wall, into the space of the gallery and using things like sound, music, and furnishings to ease the audience’s experience out of the realm of disconnected cold gallery viewer, with all those connotations and assumptions, and instead into the human - into their bodies which they should occupy as much as the space of my puzzle.


Action

Happening

Puzzle

Puzzling

Communion

Event


None of these feel right yet. Action feels closest maybe.


Practice?


I am fascinated by this idea of attention being something that can both be prolonged, focused and also scattered and multiple - Balding talks about how a modern society can have requirements for both - and has also touched on the old model of attention as being one long extended focus, as limiting the way that children nowadays are taught in schools. This has made me think about my tutoring, and particularly one of my students who definitely struggles to hold attention even on one maths problem. I was beginning to think about ways I can tackle this but at the end of the day, he will be required to do an exam and I can’t get him out of that.

This concept of split, and focused attention has much that relates to my conceptualising of performance nowadays, and art. I cannot say that I do not value the ability to hold focus, but I also do see the benefit of multiple-varying and hyper-awareness - and more to the point, I can see how this is going to become the dominant mode of thought as technology and speed only accelerates. In turn this makes catching those more focused moments, even more important. We need the snatches of fixation I believe in order to regulate and moderate our nervous systems as humans - although we are probably seeing the first generations where over-stimulation is regulation.

I am loathe, however, to do whatever I am doing, for the time and space of the private view only. This feels very at odds with all of my exploration and consideration about operating outside of the traditional gallery structure, about not forcing a ‘start’ and ‘end’ point onto my work - for really I know these are arbitrary lines drawn around things so it is not all unbearable all the time.

And so, the question becomes, how do I reconcile the un-start-and-ending-ness of art, thoughts and feelings, with the start-and-ending-ness of a piece of work, especially one destined for assessments, shows and likely necessary conclusions?

I expect the notion of snatches and glimpses will help here, and I can see how they might be proactively combined with notions of attention and spectatorship. In a world they can live happily ever after.




March - April 2026

Allan Kaprow  

24.03.26
Allan Kaprow’s Happenings Rules of Thumb
I have finally finished reading the Allan Kaprow extract in 21st Century Performance Reader  entitled ‘Assemblages, Environments and Happenings’ which is in his words a ‘summary of all the rules-of-thumb raised respecting Happenings’ rather than a technical guide or handbook.


He ends the passage by attesting to the limitations of language, particular when writing about art, and closes with the brilliant statement that ‘the only art that is so fractured is academic art.’


In general I found the passage fascinating and thought-provoking in terms of my own thinking about my work. Certainly as the piece continues, I found it harder to keep up with the heavy theoretical layers Kaprow is alluding to - ones he has clearly considered heavily and ones that I am trying to conceptualise through a few (although very well written) sentences.


In general I think I managed to keep a sense of the shape of what he was writing, but this was particularly challenging in relation to his discussions of form, material and the way in which form for a Happening should rise from materials rather than vice versa. I think what he’s getting at, is the notion that actions should neither be too formal (and therefore too limited in their associations) or too vague as to fall into entropy or meaninglessness.


Whether or not I’ve managed to get to the core of Kaprow’s philosophy (one that he admits himself is open ever to change and necessarily so) it has helped me consider the role and purpose of my jigsaw within my work, and how I might play around this, explore around the edges of it, and decided to what extent, how, and in what way I want this physical presence to be involved.


His writing about the way that actions can expand, contract and unify time have stayed with me, as have his notions surrounding audience, performers and readiness.


This is not saying that I wish to style my jigsaw work as a Kaprow Happening - not at all - but I do feel like I want to better understand the philosophy and thoughts guiding and underpinning his practice in order to better understand where my work converges and diverges.


I think I also ought to try out a Happening.


I also know General Idea are due a further research.


I think there is much to be said in the realm of comparing and investigating the overlap, approach and relationship between Kaprow’s Happening philosophy and Claire Bishop’s investigation into modern day attention, performance and audience.


I’m sounding way too academic to write much more right now, I don’t think I have anything else of clarity to say.


Further Reading from Kaprow is in Performance Reader

Plus

Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology

Visit LADA as well



26.03.26

Alan Kaprow’s Art Which Can’t Be Art (1986)


Kaprow says how he has not taken the everyday and given it ‘art value’ by placing it in an art context (like Dauchamp has done) but instead decided to pay extra attention to the everyday.

Relevant to art rather than just sociology - revolutions of modernism allowed art’s dissolution into life sources, eg. urban activities, technologies, body, mind. Relationship between toothbrushing and art is clear.

‘This is where the paradox lies; an artist concerned with lifelike art is an artist who does and does not make art.’

‘Unless the identity (and thus the meaning) of what the artist does oscillates between ordinary, recognizable activity and the “resonance” of that activity in the larger human context, the activity itself reduces to conventional behaviour.’

‘Thus toothbrushing, as we normally do it, offers no roads back to the real world either. But ordinary life performed as art/ not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric power.’

https://primaryinformation.org/files/allan-kaprow-how-to-make-a-happening.pdf

Kaprow’s second rule “Make it unsure even to yourself if the happening is life or art.”

This reminds me of yesterday when I went for a run because I simply could not stand to do anything else. I needed to get out of my brain so badly, so vividly. Out of my brain and out of the flat. It was sunny and windy and the perfect weather for trying to leave things behind, or shut things down.

As I ran, I could feel my brain gearing up, turning over more - somewhat preoccupied by the physical occupation of moving, but churning alongside, rather than stilling. I tried to still my mind and just ‘run’.


I decided to try a new performance: running until my mind clears.

I then decided to try just a performance: ‘running’.

The command was simple, and anything that fell outside of ‘running’ (of which many things arose) was not allowed in the context of this. It was hard, I failed many times, but each time I felt a thought approach, or felt my body try to stop, I thought ‘run’.


I was constantly unsure if the happening was life or art.

This thought came to me yesterday, before I found Kaprow’s words, a good sign normally.

I’m going to reframe my time at the coffee shop in these terms - maybe not every time but maybe for a few shifts, maybe for all the shifts until the end of explorations (so about three shifts in total, not very long) - see what I can draw out.

In a funny way, this harkens back to my Nauman’s Tautology coveralls that I created right at the very start of Foundation - where I had ‘done the maths’ to prove that what I was making was art. In a way, I am playing with the same ideas, but I’ve removed the bounds of the coveralls. The coveralls were a type of safety net for me, a shorthand that let me relax. Now I’m ready to do the actual investigation it would seem.








Ryan Trecartin
  • Viewing films as able to encompass lots of different points of view, rather than needing to have one bound up message? Not how I feel about films
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdmItKVe2rU
  • I find him very boring and hard to listen to
  • I also don’t like his work, it’s too chaotic but it’s also film very much - even if what happens has some chaoticness, I can’t help but see all the effort and contrived elements going on
  • He does use lots of actors, approaches sculpture in the same with, with a host of characters
  • I find it hard to follow, not engaging and overwhelming
  • Use of repeated words ‘glitch’ like, where characters jolt
  • Physicality of the people in his films is very distorted and disjointed
  • Mixed media, video tape, digital. Posting clips out of order on his Vimeo
  • https://vimeo.com/399047340
  • “posting these clips out of movie order .... editing a bunch of whether line movies right now, these clips are from 1 of the movies — the one that was in milan �� ❤️ � all the thank you to FONDAZIONE PRADA �”
  • ^^ interesting to think about the way that your work is put out into the world, and on the internet, can also be part of the work - my thinking with Instagram/ YouTube/ utilising the way it is posted
  • Would like to be more purposeful in the way that I post on my own Instagram, but maybe this will be easier to define when I have a project. Question of whether you make a page just for that project - if that is part of the work
  • All the components of the work is actually the work - eg. props are also sculptures, not raised in value because just of their position as part of the film, but because of their own value
  • Glitching as well, characters getting line timings wrong - it is very conscious of the medium in which it is being created
  • It is too much like theatre to me
  • Maybe the camera is the thing that I want to be pushing the performance, or pushing the moment, or stretching the fabric of what I am doing 
  • Can see the relevance in a way through, they are all there for the camera, talking to it - so glad that it is there


    • This reminds me of my thoughts the other day about how for me, a camera is able to give meaning where they may not have been any before - whereas in Ryan Trecartin’s work - it is still chaos, if anything perhaps more so - for all the characters pandering to the camera. The camera is part of the chaos rather than providing order. 

    ‘Gender as an inventive space’ ‘You do not need to be consistent in’ - ‘it is as fluid and lubricating as language’ ‘it’s magic… that then creates a reality’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_j1lpPFmIc

    ‘Moment’ ‘intersection.. Pivot’ - in the movies - an expression, not a grounding

  • Getting easier to consume the more of it I watch - maybe there is an element of you needing to be conditioned to watch it




Amalia Aulman
  • When you google her, you aren’t quickly shown images of her collected work, nor does her website present it in this way - immediately I realised that my instinct was to look for the ‘curated’ gallery version of the artist. To make a quick snap judgement about their work, how it looks and what sort of artist they are. Amalia’s internet footprint resists this, it is hard to get a sense of what sort of work she makes - things don’t seem to be easily available or easily accessed and viewed, other than writing about the work. There is a sort of great gap where the information should be. In a way she has tailored and curated her own digital presence as another part of her practice. 


    What would it mean, as an artist, for your Google search to show up only one thing for a period of time, and nothing else? 


    How do you go about clearing up your digital history and footprint? I have lots there.


    What does it mean for the way you exist, or the way that periphery information about you exists on the internet, what does it mean for your practice? 


    Is it good to have control, is it better to relinquish it? I think it’s best to maneuver it to your designs.


    What does it mean for an artist to not exist on the internet? Like in writing, for elements of the artist to slip through. To acknowledge that the internet cannot capture all of it. Well of course it can’t’. It can’t capture what it must be like to stand and laugh next to the artist. What it might be like to graze a hand against them, to feel their hair. To celebrate your birthday in their company. The internet is no truth, as nothing is. 


    In the writing of my manifesto, or perhaps my ‘anti’ manifesto, I would like to think about the way that I exist on the internet - but I am not sure it will be something I come to a conclusion on quickly. Much like working towards, or even working around a piece of work or a topic, I think the process of discovering how I want to exist as an artist will also entail a conscious consideration about how I want to exist on the internet as an artist. I would like to play with this - just like I would play with editing, or paint, or charcoal. Play. 


    (In a way I realize I have started this already with my ‘selfie’ post from last term, it is probably something that will happen organically and so it should, rather than necessarily needing lots of pre planning)

BACK TO TOP