Introduction

The premise for ‘Note to self;’ was born of ‘THE ARKA DREAM FOUNDATION’ 2010. A piece that changed the way I looked at the relationship between a works physical production and classically consequent, critical reception. A blurring of lines and an opening of possibilities.

Specifically sparked by something that happened to me at The UK Dream Conference in an exercise called Dreamwork lead By Hermine Minsk in 2009 and latterly during a one month performance in which, for the 31 days of October I slept in a 1 man tent, in 31 different homes across London. Each day travelling to a Gallery and adding a new photograph of the tent in question to a developing series of documentation, whilst three critical writers wrote alongside its development in tandem.

The Uk Dream Conference 2009

I had a dream, I was in a tent. After waking I was compelled to enact this dream, and had been recently invited to exhibit in a group show in London. I decided to research whether anyone else in the UK was similarly compelled to investigate their dreams through physical action and came across a conference in Durham I scarcely believed real.

Dreamwork was an exercise that required a dream to be shared with the group (The group in question being the participants of the conference, all from varying backgrounds and specialisms) I felt it apt to share mine as it was the impetus for me being there.

After recanting my dream I was told to sit quietly on a chair whilst Hermine walked around the room. Hermine stated “You must choose somebody to be you in your dream” at which I responded fairly quickly saying I don’t know how to make that decision, I don’t know anyone. “You must choose somebody to be you in your dream” Something about the way the question was just repeated so blankly made me decide. I chose a woman called Heather who was the first person I met that day. Hermine went on “heather do you accept” Heather nodded. At this point it is worth mentioning that none of the participants had ever done anything like this before and that Hermine’s introduction involved her explaining that she had just arrived in the UK coming straight from a 3 week event mourning the death of a shaman and close friend in Peru, who’s hat we had all passed around the circle previously. This object now charged with the offered context fell akin to a fascination of mine, that being the invisible histories we project onto material objects, and the stories that activate them.

Each participant was asked to be representative of the various elements of my dream, things that they felt some abstract affinity with, “I will be the mountains, I am the Sea” Each person was then rearranged to map the topography of the dream “So Ben, the mountains were here yes” I nodded. Hermine went on to explain to Heather that she was no longer herself, she was me. Something about her direct manor and assertive practicality had a very addictive logic, one with which each person she talked to seemed to adopt unflinchingly. Heather was prompted to go and lie on the floor, underneath two women posing arched above her who were representative of the small black tent and the beginning of my dream. Heather woke up and began to reenact my dream, which now in some way belonged to everyone in the room. What ensued was the closest I have been to an out of body experience.

Heather got up and started to describe her surroundings, not in a trance or hallucinatory state but one of open possibility, where her imagination was the driving force behind her perception. A new reality had been proposed and everyone went along with it in an exceedingly natural fashion. Heather experienced the elements of the dream as if her own, my own, she was me.

As the dream unfolded before us Hermine spoke in a tone that seemed omniscient, that did not interfere with, or define what was happening but offered possibility. Through this monologue Heather was lead to a reappraisal of the dreams elements, a second chance for the protagonist to understand and contemplate the landscape and feeling of the dream.

Heather discovered things I had not, perhaps she brought them with her, we all bring so much with us when we are present, and this cannot be omitted, nothing has any one message.

As Heather travelled through the implied chronology of my dream and came to rest again in the tent Hermine invited me to step back into my dream. I was hesitant as the whole experience had opened me up in a way I hadn’t been before. Hermine stepped aside and gestured in a gentle sweep, like a matador, to the position Heather had just been. I got out of my seat and moved into the room and lay down on the tight ribbed carpet of the room at Durham University and closed my eyes.

“H: Just take you’re time to situation yourself again.
BJH: It’s strange because of the relation to how I felt before. It was a very personal thing, and in making it very public I was worried I would feel like in some way it would be fetishized ... in sharing it with someone and playing out something that was very personal, but I didn’t feel that at all. That sense of comfort I had in the dream continued and became a lot broader, because as I was looking around as well some people had their eyes closed and some people were staring in the middle distance. That’s something I’ve never really thought about before, that potential to share that feeling.
H: If you are still in the dream, though, because you are also aware of people sharing with you in the dream. How does it feel being back now in your own dream space?
BJH: I think straight away I’d like to just lie down [laughs]
H: Do you want the tent?
BJH: It’s a very comforting feeling altogether. I don’t feel like I’ve had to escape from the other situation that I felt uncomfortable in, but it wasn’t me feeling uncomfortable, but more of an inherent sadness, of all those creatures writhing about.
H: Can you try and get back into the dream and feel what it was like to be in the tent again, just for a moment?
[Long pause]
BJH: It’s a very surreal thing to do. I’ve got a very vivid imagination so it wasn't hard to do again.
H: So what came up?
BJH: That I was in the tent, but there wasn’t any water, and I was on the shore, and that all of you were sitting as you are on the beach in the clothes that you are in, in a half light, looking down at the ground from your chairs, comparing the situation, and that felt quite timeless, like an accepted thing that would always be the case and there wasn’t much that would ever change.
H: Being on the shore?
BJH: With all of you. I think right now I feel very happy to be in the place I'm in and comfortable, I don't have an urge to explore or revisit any of the places I saw before, but then we’d be sitting here forever.  
H: You don’t need to go to another situation; it’s good you can be here in the landscape of your dream?

BJH: I sort of feel like I wouldn’t need to have anything to do with anything ever again, or think about why that was. It’s quite a lovely thing.”

Ben Jeans Houghton/ Ending of Transcribed dictaphone recording from a process called DREAM WORK led by Hermione Minsk at THE UK DREAM CONFERENCE 2009

The following excerpts have been taken from arkaanalysis.com, where a group of critical writers have written, before, during and after the making of Field Work One. A month long performance, in which the artist slept and dreamt in a hand made tent, in a different location each night, travelling across London. All activity falls under the ARKA DREAM FOUNDATION.

EXCERPTS FROM ARKANALYSIS.COM

A Beginning

So, we all know criticism is in trouble. And theory for that matter. The arguments are infinitely interesting. Remarkably cyclical. I could talk about criticism. But I’d rather write. And sometimes you need to be asked. Ben Jeans Houghton asked me to write this. We thought it might be useful. Over several coffees and several beers, we had several conversations.

Amongst other things, such as archives, allotments, antlers, objects, skips, postcards, metro tickets, tents, dreams and Darwinism, we talked about art. His enthusiasm is infectious.

Amongst other things, he makes art which transcends the conventional gallery context. Art which lives outside its walls. Which continues. For Jeans Houghton, the gallery is a kind of depository, where objects, archives and artifacts evidence ongoing artistic endeavours. Jeans Houghton explores the everyday. Every day.

He hunts and gathers. Seeks and selects. He saves the stuff we leave behind. Adopts the things we no longer want. Or no longer need. He conserves and considers them. Salvaged from streets or scavenged from skips, these orphaned objects are revived, renewed and re-displayed in carefully coded, artistic contexts. Ripe for reconsideration, incidental items such as tickets, trinkets, tools, toys, slides, stamps, coins etc., swell with potential narratives. Possessions that were once personal are reclaimed. Absent histories are archived; creating cryptic collections of written records and oddly articulate, aesthetic arrangements.

The familiar and quotidian is rescued and revitalised. The things that clutter and animate our everyday lives, transported with care and unwanted attention to the sanctity of the art gallery. Material residues of experience, ownership and history become relics of Houghton’s artistic adventures.

Amongst other things he’s a collector. A forager. An archivist. A rescuer. A redeemer, of sorts. An analyst. An avid experimenter. A social spectator. A sort of scientist. A deep, deep thinker. And for his forthcoming piece, Field Work One, a sort of snail, it seems.

For 31 days and 31 nights Jeans Houghton will travel around London with a backpack, 2 pairs of clothes, a tent, a sketchbook and a camera. He will sleep somewhere new each night. In his tent. Carrying his home on his back, Jeans Houghton will set up camp in 31 different domestic spaces and photograph himself daily. The exhibition opening of CrASH, in Camberwell, South London, will display a small series of images documenting the beginnings of the project, along with a series of blank, wooden boards ready to receive the rest. As the project develops, the artist will return to the exhibition space every few days and add the most recent photographs. He also plans to add or bring back items from his travels. Bits and pieces, drawings, objects, responses and personal interpretations. The traces of an ongoing experience, safely deposited in the gallery.

That’s the plan anyway. It might change a bit. I’m yet to see the work and the artist is yet to make it. But we’ve had several conversations about it. I could write about Field Work One in a few weeks, or a few months. When he’s done it. When I’ve seen it. I could attempt to analyse the artistry of the photographs, critique the concept, write my reaction. Or I could work the way he does. Concurrently and instinctively. Alongside. Before, after and in-between, I’ll use Jeans Houghton’s work to trigger thought and interpretation. To write critically and freely. I won’t see it all anyway. Despite the conceptual parameters Houghton has set himself, and the evidence of experience he’ll display at CrASH, Field Work One admits and exposes the impossibility of documentation. Of ever encountering everything. So, this isn’t really criticism. Or collaboration. Field Work One is indefinite and fragmentary. Like I said, it continues. It encumbers criticism because we can’t really see it. It’s co-dependent and capricious. It’s a process in progress.

12/10/2009 EMMA CUMMINS

Beginning to Regret

I was stood outside King's Cross station. I watched a student with an absurd haircut trying to convince people to sign up to a charity. For a moment he stopped to contemplate his failure, rubbing his head and chewing his lip. Ben arrived with a large ruck sack and we went back to my house in east London, where he was to spend his first night for Field Work One. As he was complaining about the weight of his back pack, one of his straps broke and I began to laugh hysterically. He looked me in the eye and said, please don't put this on the website. And I carried on laughing.

I have seen him twice since. Once when he came to pick up the wooden panels upon which he would mount his photos, and once more at the opening of the show. At the show he looked upbeat, happy that his strange and abject mission amounted to something physical. When he arrived to pick up the wood, he was in the midst of a crisis. He was out of money and physically exhausted and wondering why he bothered to come to this stupid city. By this time he had transferred all his possessions to a large, wheeled trolley. I tried to reassure him that it was going really well, but as he was leaving it started to rain.

Durational Nonsensical

Why bother? Why not just sleep in a bed? Or stay in one place for a few days? You could even take the picture of the tent, and then sleep somewhere else. No one would know. No one would care. These questions haunt work that exists 'in the real world'. Veracity is just a charade. Authenticity simply a pretence.

Idiot Hero

Unfortunately for Ben, he won't use these conceptual escape ropes to pull him from his discomfort. He will carry on sleeping on floors, fixing his tent, and wheeling round his blue trolley like some colour coded art-tramp. Neither of us have a reason why he shouldn't just sleep in a bed, fake the photos and have a relatively comfortable time while he stays in London. But we both know he won't. And in this there may be no real struggle, just a bit of sleep deprivation and possibly some public transport based stress. But there is simplicity in the routine, and a sort of aesthetic quality that faking it would never have. Faking it would raise too many questions. It would be art about art. Rather than art about a dream.

He dreamt of this tent, before he made it. In the dream he was perfectly at peace, completely satisfied and perfectly still. In dreams you don't need a travel card, or bin bags for your trolley when it starts raining. I am still laughing.

14/10/2009 MATTHEW DE KERSAINT GIRADEAU

“For I see, since I am asleep, that I dream while I am awake.” Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Life is a Dream, 1636)

Ben Jeans Houghton is a nomad. In a double sense. He is both a nomad of the physical, waking world of London streets and transport systems (what Jung may have termed the “objective” world) and of the immaterial, interior (“subjective”) world of his dreaming.

The tent, his central vehicle for both journeys*, represents the most basic form of (portable) shelter. The image of the tent resonates to themes of shamanism (or possibly alchemy), of movement and of a life lived on the margins (both socially and geographically). Personally, I also associate tents with childhood, with the home-made retreats and dens into which we would crawl...behind the sofa, under the kitchen table, inside the bath...to hole-up in our imaginary worlds of pirates, teddy bear picnics or dragon's caves.

I wonder how the tent will appear in Ben's ongoing dreaming?... With the physical strains and ordeals of the project will his subconscious evoke tears and holes in the fabric of his shelter?....Or will it, as with that first dream, remain a constant source of comfort amongst and ever shifting landscape of turmoil?...

*Though undoubtedly a hindrance to the physical journey, having to be wheeled from place to place...

23/10/2009 IRIS ASPINALL PRIEST

R.E. Rebels of the subconscious and (to some slight degree) Dreams and Empiricism

Throughout the country (and possibly much of the surrealist-weary world) Fine Art tutors are letting out a collective, despairing sigh as yet another student enthuses about their next project/ topic of research is going to be the (crisis word) dreams. But I think - as Ben Jeans Houghton, psycho analysts and all the contributors to this blog would probably agree - dreams and dreaming are still very salient and legitimate topics and processes for examination and art making (beyond the now antiquated or unfashionable cliches of the Surrealist movement)."

28/10/2009 IRIS ASPINALL PRIEST

The Art of Science

In previous works On the Ark and I and Dear... (BALTIC April – September 09) Ben Jeans Houghton collected, collated and presented an idiosyncratic taxonomy of found objects and artifacts. These works were all enclosed by the pseudo-scientific processes and diffuse, personal categorizations imposed by the artist/collector. In Dear... the found objects were submitted by members of the public, gradually building up a panorama of the contemporary audience and the context in which the collection was assembled.

In Field Work One it is the process which is foregrounded. The 'field' or context which confines and informs this survey is London...The capital city and, crucially, an intensely distilled environment for the social/anthropological/archaeological survey of this “sort-of-scientist” (Emma Cummins). The parameters (sometime constants) of this experiment (31 days, 31 nights, 31 domestic spaces, one tent, one camera, two changes of clothes) are adhered to – like a latter day beatnik Darwin or Tesla – assiduously and absolutely. What he collects on this journey, any analysis or synthesis of the data and conclusions arrived at, will be dictated absolutely by these parameters and by his own processes of selection and preference.

Collections

Whilst in Victorian times the British public looked upon museums such as The Hunterian or The British Museum as offering an objective, scientific window upon the world (and history) through their collections of ethnographic and archaeological objects, in reality what they demonstrated was a world view refracted, filtered and assimilated via the perspectives, personality and inherent attitudes of the colonial explorer. Similarly to the bias at work in those early collector's expeditions, so Ben Jeans Houghton's collections are likely to – no matter how objectively he may try to behave – be under the invisible influence of personal selection, the effects of exposure to the overarching culture (or any cultural dominance) and by the social circumstance of the people he meets and stays with.

Le Objet Trouve et Le Idiot Savant

In a linear trajectory from the collections of old to the Duchampian 'Ready Made', objects have been found, selected and appropriated by collectors and artists and, once displayed in the formal gallery/ museum context, elevated to the position of art objects to be re examined and re learnt.
When B.J.H. Adds a dye-cast toy donkey, a torn sepia photograph or an un-smoked Marlboro to his collections, once on display, he is elevating these pieces of everyday debris to the status of art works.

But part of what makes B.J.H.s work compelling for me, is not just his ability to select an incredibly telling and diverse array of objects/ minutiae which reflect the Zeitgeist from which they have been garnered but it is the risky processes which inform these bodies of work and the emphasis upon the living, dynamic aspects of art making. 31 days and nights is surely a project in endurance?... 31days of finding ways to afford food and transport....31 nights of dreaming, and of requiring your psyche to conjure images, scenes and events worth recording seems (even for an imagination as extravagant and prolific as B.J.H's) like a difficult task...

Whilst Field Work One will be mapped and the traces of the project displayed in the gallery space (the photographs of the tent, his drawings or recorded thoughts/dreams and the found objects), much of the real work is happening now, as lived experience. With that in mind, where are the boundaries of this new work set?... Throughout these 31 days and nights, as he pulls his tent through the streets of London, will a stop at Mr. News become art?... Will a delay on the circle line – if it impedes his journey – become part of the piece?... And what about the objects, images and dreams he rejects or edits from the final selection because they are too grotesque, dull or telling... will these too (as part of the process), still be considered part of the piece?....

29/10/2009 IRIS ASPINALL PRIEST

What May

"Ben's tent came from a dream. It was a place where he felt comfortable, and felt like he did not have to leave. In reality, Ben's tent provides him mostly with discomfort and the certainty that he will be leaving his camp, to move on to a different place. Field Work One is an attempt to transpose his dream upon reality. Instead of becoming real, these dream-objects rub up against reality, they grate and confuse and combine with the everyday. The failure to feel the same way as he felt in his dream, the failure for that dream to be real, is the moment in which his dreams become creative production. This is no mere illustration, but is in fact, a testament to the failings of illustration, and a hopeful gesture to what may lay beyond."

01/11/2009 MATTHEW DE KERSAINT GIRADEAU

Field Work One

On its opening night, cRash revealed a series of 12 photographs and 19 identically sized blank, wooden boards. The images depict a standard black tent in 12 domestic situations; in the living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens of people’s private homes. Field Work One’s grid like display stresses seriality and nascent narrativity. It suggests a story.

For 31 days and 31 nights, Ben Jeans Houghton will sleep in this tent, in 31 different domestic environments. The 19 blank boards that wait patiently beside his photographs will soon be filled with similar, serial images of the same tent, in new places. Each day a new image is added. It’s happening now. It’s present. And progressing.

But without text or description, or a visit to this blog, this isn’t entirely evident.[i] Yes it’s implied. It’s latent.[ii] But the wider context is deliberately withheld, and the viewer is left to search for conceptual significance, or seek symbolism. Meaning and metaphor is rife, yet decidedly ambiguous.

However, the visual effect is really quite powerful. And the strength of the imagery somewhat surprising. Because, whilst I know these images belie a bigger story; the casual viewer probably doesn’t. Not yet anyway. Importantly, Field Work One is supported by the information in this blog - a collateral project which clarifies, contextualises, and comments upon the artist’s current practice. An appendix which allays the ambiguity of work. After we’ve seen it.

But, at first the immediacy of the imagery is quite disarming. Field Work One is deceptively dense. And difficult. It gains complexity the more we know learn about the project, and the artist.

Occupying a grey area between experience and representation, Jeans Houghton’s piece “admits and exposes the impossibility of documentation.”[iii] Of conveying a distinctly personal encounter. So what’s missing in its immediate reception is the currentness of the project. His effort and exertion. (Brilliantly described in Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s blog post on 14/10/09) The ongoingness of it all. The artist's commitment.

Without context, Field Work One becomes more about imagery. And less about him.

I thought the images would provide photographic evidence of a very particular, project. That they may prove slightly secondary.
True they “evidence [an] ongoing artistic endeavour”[iv], but they do more than that.

They stand alone.

They’re really quite iconic. And so carefully composed. The tent is perfectly centered in each photograph. Whether in line with walls or door frames, or perfectly posited on top of a bed, the imagery satiates with symmetry and pictorial precision. The simple seriality at play has subtle, slapstick undertones. There is a sense of a humour. Of subversion. The tent is peculiar and out of place. At once idiosyncratic and ironic.

The first image is particularly striking. Squatting amongst chairs, bicycles and household implements, the tent is slashed with strips of light and framed by two sky blue doors. Light floods into the room. Indoors and outdoors become interchangeable, existing in a strangely, sinuous state of flux.

In its wider context, Field Work One is about endurance and research. About absorbing an alternate, temporary mode of existing. Of living, thinking and dreaming. It’s experiential. Empirical. And it continues.

But it is also a collection of iconic images, which are enduring in themselves. Which impart the artist’s ephemeral experience, whilst also managing to resonate on a purely visual level. Whether we know the story or not, Field Work One is a memorable motif, which transcends the gallery walls, and befits them. Beautifully.

[i] Contextual background and information about the project is found in this blog and not in the gallery space.
[ii] 31 days equals one calendar month and suggests the passing of time.
[iii] Quotation taken from my previous blog entry posted on 12/10
[iv] Ibid.

02/11/2009 EMMA CUMMINS

Psychotic, all too psychotic

The problem of authenticity raised by Matthew obliges us to consider the ‘reality’ of the work in question, not merely the physical manifestation of the task; but also the relationship of that performative act and its associated metaphysical premise to the piece as it actually exists. Is it possible that the substantive nature of the work itself may in reality be an act of deception?
If that is the case does the deceit serve to obfuscate meaning or enable access to another less comfortable paradigm?

Does the artist’s ‘confessional cheque’ indeed bounce or is it the integral nature of the work itself that generates the inevitable deficit between expectation and outcome?

As Matthew has said, “Why bother? Why not just sleep in a bed? Or stay in one place for a few days? You could even take the picture of the tent, and then sleep somewhere else. No one would know. No one would care.”

 In this instance it is not the answer to this question that is of importance, but the very fact that the question now exists, not as an external response to the work but as an integral element of the piece itself, that while alluding to the possibility of a deception Matthew simultaneously attests to the validity of the project; as with an elaborate confidence trick: the genuine act of travelling through London and sleeping in a tent diverts attention from the real fallacy at the very heart of the piece.

Another indication of this underlying artifice is to found in the two diagrams posted by Iris. The second image is said to allude to a desired model of artistic invention, it appears to depict an entirely shattered subject, the mental state implied is a nothing short of a catastrophic rupture of the self, as the fundamental premise of this model (the Borromean knot) of the self (at least as utilized by Lacan) is that the whole falls apart in the event of any of the links being severed: "each term is sustained only in its topological relation with the others" (Lacan S11 89, qtd. in Evans ix).

What then should we take this diagram as representing? Is it a depiction of the artists’ current mental state? Or is this a rendering of a psychotic model of creative intensity beyond all strictures of social propriety: an engine of a truly transgressive counter systemic fluidity akin to the Deleuzian schizoanalysis? Again it is the question itself that serves to misdirect the viewer: it is the positing of this impossibly dysfunctional archetype that betrays the true nature of the present work and in doing so provides a greater purchase on Ben Houghton’s wider practice.

If we take as given that the artist is not the deeply fractured individual depicted, we must conclude that the current dialogue is not as assumed a response to the work and the artist: THE CURRENT DIALOGUE IS THE WORK AND THE ARTIST. In a very Real way what is absent from ‘Field Work One’ is Ben Houghton himself, a lack of presence that is aggressively asserted through an apparently incomplete series of images; the works impossible premise appears to collapse before our eyes, but is this collapse or compression? The geometry of absence, fractured, fractal, infinite: the logic of the sequence is progression towards obliteration/disappearance. Black canvas triangles stare blankly back at us, amassed pupils of so many catatonic patients. Locked in. Silent. Vacant. We are unable even to extract meaning from the assembled gaps; inevitably an implication of obscenity, orifice, womb, the mouth, the death drive? Light is torn form the orbit of each room. The lipless lips laugh (our own laugh), parasitically assimilating external preconception, imperceptibly appropriating the audience's expectations and integrating into its lamellar folds our very reading. It is now that the violent assertion at the heart of the piece is apparent: this isn’t about Ben's dreams at all! “…And if you gaze for long into the tent…the tent gazes also into you.”

Cai Nyahoe/ Writer/ Artist 08/12/2009