Workshop + Training
'To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or wirtten, or even thought out.'
Marcel Duchamp
Practice does not come from thought.
It is a physical encounter with the world.
This is the key to practice: it is not reflective, it is active. It is 'seeking a way out'.
Attempts to modify the primiitve and intuitive nature of practice (by attributing it with reasoning or rational thought) will always fail, because whatever it is that arises from such changes may well be of interest but it will not be practice.
The spectator is the one who encounters the result of practice, who actually creates it in effect. The spectator can talk with complete authority about their experience of the work, and can have opinions as to the work's value, impact, meaning and so on.
The practitioner on the other hand, the one who produces the work, brings it into being, can do none of these things.
The creative process is a matter of being lost one minute, and suddenly finding yourself 'in the clearing' the next.
Knowing what you need to know and what you can never know is important. You could call it intuitive ignorance.
Workshops and residencies range from single lecture demonstrations to residencies lasting several weeks. Workshop / training initiatives are run as a stand-alone project, or linked to performances given by Optik, or linked to performances given by the workshop group itself.
UK One day workshop and training projects
Montreal workshop : participant artists' responses
Varna workshop : preparatory notes
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