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Background
Roger Steve Clíodhna Alan * & Val make a diagnosis is a response to a brief created by the artgroup SIX. Thanks to our fellow member of SIX, Megan Calver, we were provided with an open ended statement to use as a starting point for a project to be published on our website:-
"20 thiNgS eaCh is a hook for artists of SIX to hang their work on. An excuse to make new work, gather small starting points and languishing leftovers. A means of developing and disseminating their individual practices whilst donning an identical over-coat."
Working with such an open-ended brief - to collect 20 things and fashion them into a statement - was exciting and at the same time challenging: where to start? The clue for me was Megan's phrase "languishing leftovers". One leftover I had was an interest in how as individuals we influence and make each other: in makerS (2008) the names of all those that appeared in my logbook for the period during which I was studying for my MA - October 2005-March 2008 - were printed out. This was an attempt to acknowledge all those that had contributed their ideas to the making of my ideas as my studies progressed. It was, of course, a futile exercise as only a fraction of the people who contribute to the shaping of my moment-to-moment narrative will ever appear in a log or diary. However, looking at this in late 2009 a possible theme for 20 Things Each emerged.
 photo: megan calver
 photo: megan calver
makerS (2008)
Peninsula Arts Gallery, Plymouth
photo: lloyd russell
What would happen if I began with a fixed set of makerS and a fixed number of happenings or memories which related to them, and tracked the evolution of the story that resulted?
Process
Memories 3 Games Roger Steve Clíodhna
As memory constitutes everything apart from what we are experiencing from our being-in-the-present-moment. (memory-test (2007)) I began by identifying memories that were based on a sense of playfulness.
Three games came to mind: the first was one that Roger Bassett and I used during our relationship in London in the Seventies where the outcome of each meeting had an element of chance thrown in. By meeting in different locations and getting on the first bus that came along we jumped off at the number of stops we had agreed on the bus journe.
The second was a trip that I made through Alberta, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State with Steve Tourlentes in 1995. Having met at a residency in Banff we both had a few weeks of free time and decided to take a road trip. To finance it we planned that we would pay every second bill. I got caught for a speeding fine outside of Pomeroy, Washington the cost of which was obviously non-negotiable but every other meal, motel, petrol station was the cheapest that either Steve or I could find.
The third was a strategy I used to get my three year old granddaughter, Clíodhna O'Connell, to walk long distances; by using the detritus on the street as clues we moved from "clue" to "clue" and made up a story as we walked. It became an effective method of encouraging whinge free walking with a small child.
Selection 1 New Game - Alan
Taking these three memories I mimicked a characteristic inherent to the functioning of memory by overlapping aspects of each to form the basis for a new "game"; this would involve taking a predestined bus route, going a chosen number of stops, taking a selected direction and then picking up every second clue to use as stepping stones for a 'story'.
By doing this I had a new game that depended on chance - what would the first 15 items be that I would find in the 'present moments' after getting off the bus? And what would they immediately suggest to me?
As my starting point had been how we influence each other it seemed logical to ask someone else to choose the required elements for me. Alan Ramsay chose Bus K, 17 stops and a left turn.
Clues 15 Game Tokens ***************
The clues were collected on April 16th 2010. Finding them was very straightforward and involved picking up every second object, one after the other, as I walked along Pinhoe Road and then Exhibition Road in Exeter. These I sealed in plastic sleeves and kept in the order that I found them. This was important as the plan was to use them as a metaphor of how each day we come across particles of the existence of others, whether through conversation and the exchange of news and ideas, articles of matter left behind by other lives, via media outlets, etc, and the subsequent influence these exert on our view of ourselves and the world around us. Keeping them in order was necessary as obviously the order in which we come across "things" influences how we see and engage with them. And my plan was to create a new 'thing' by combining revelatory
facets of each object into an ordered list of words or phrases.
Diagnosis 1 Endgame Roger Steve Clíodhna Alan * & Val
Sitting in my studio I looked at the first object - a cigarette butt - and quickly jotted down the words that occurred to me. As soon as I got to the stage where I was consciously aware of trying to think of additions to the list I stopped. And then continued to do the same for the other 14; at the end I had 15 short lists.
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Outcome
Surprisingly, on reading the book a week or two after it was finished I thought it was possible that some people would read it as an anti-smoking polemic. This was not my intention, as even though I am a non-smoker my attitude to smoking is one best described as laissez-faire. Instead the words of the final section - Diagnosis - allude to my relationship with my father, and the endlessness of an after life in a world where makerS are believed in, and an all seeing Maker in charge of a space where we all will go after death is absent; instead 'afterlife' becomes something which at the same time is both more ephemeral and more immediate. Once more, and in keeping with the cover image, circularity became apparent as I remembered writing as part of my MA project Temporary Orifice/s (2008):
"I am trying to suggest that we are created in the space between individuals...Is it possible as a Westerner to give up this idea of the being isolated within its own skin? It seems that I can go so far but always end up falling back on old habits - me/you. Think I am trying to grasp and show the non-ownership of this interiority through using the surgeon's presence in the body as a material manifestation of inner bodily territory being altered and known by an other; this is an extreme example of how we may be better served by seeing our being as the conduit for the placing of quotations into a contuining discourse which inevitably happens at that time and in that place, but which resonates in the make up or compilation of a continuum of experience, both ours and others. For me this is more hopeful then imagining a more corporeal/lived in afterlife as promised by many religions. The model that I am beginning to see suggests to me a more social existence where each gesture, and utterance contains its own after-life (in the sense of Bakhtin's silent responsive understanding) and if we have any legacy it is these mini afterlives and only these afterlives."
log October 2008
My hope at the end of this project is that it demonstrates how ideas erupt from within a network of intersections and associations, and authorship is an activity born out of an accumulation of memories, interventions, imagination and reason all of which owe their impetus to activity in the 'social' space between "me" and "you".
Finally, and as in most cases, the title came last. Although I knew that it was going to include the makerS names - Roger, Steve, Clíodhna, Alan and myself - I had forgotten about the unknown, the wildcards * (people, birds, trees etc) who had deposited fragments of their lives for me to pick up and include in my story.
And the final piece of the puzzle, the use of the word diagnosis drifted in from another project I was beginning to plan out (selves-portrait (2010 - 2011)). Even though I had been thinking about diagnosis only in its medical context for selves-portrait it became apparent that its usage made sense in relation to the webbook if considered as being an analysis of the nature of a situation. The final gathering of the words and phrases thrown up by the objects is the result of an analysis of how we make our narratives through the merging of memories and chance often mediated by the actions of others.
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thanks
For their help and support with Roger Steve Clíodhna Alan * & Val make a diagnosis, I want to thank:
Artists Support at Exeter Phoenix
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