“not just the fear of failure, but an opportunity of failure”

– Adam

“It is both a position to take, yet one that cannot be strived for;
it can be investigated, yet is too vague to be defined” – Lisa La Feuvre’s quote helped me understand the ‘opportunity’ of failure

Chris Burden’s practice responded to a simple question, ‘What happens if you…?’, making the risk of failure as a space for opportunity as he pushed the limits of possibilities.

We were shown various examples of different artists, some which struck me the most were

‘Fourth’ by Tracy Moffatt

She imagined herself to be a photojournalist at the olympics. She was particularly interested in the olympians who came fourth… which she considered worse than coming last. Emotion on failure is more public in this case.

‘The Rehearsal’ by Francis Älys

A car goes up a hill and keeps on rolling back, the sound/music makes it seems like a sisyphean slapstick comedy. It reminded me of William Kentridges endless looped video works which revolve around the absurd nature of futility. For example, the futility of war and the absurdity of human behavior, or the time marching on and the futility of trying to govern it.

‘Piece I never did’, by David Critchley

Critchley points to the difference between what a work announces it is doing and what it actually does. He calls his work ‘Pieces I never did’, yet through the anchorismic nature of the video- he demonstrates them. Here the irony becomes useful for thinking through the failures of intention as there was no gap between plan and completion.

In the end we were asked to make a past work purposefully fail.

‘When art’s a (…) project, when that project meets
with failure, failure must become a subject too’
Chris Kraus’s quote inspired me to take all my failures from a past project, ‘navigators’ and investigate them as a subject. I combined failed handmade papers, unused images on acetate, photographs which never made the final cut, crumpled up frottages, writings which were never meant to be written, destroyed maps, decaying flowers, found objects and a canvas I repurposed from going to the bin. With a subtle nod of inspiration from Peter Beard and Dan Eldon’s journals, I imagined that canvas to be my journal of memories from my experiences of navigating through the graveyard. During this investigation I realised that I took risks I had never taken while making my past “finished” pieces. If I may I would even call it liberating. I thought if the end purpose was to fail and there were no rules then why have any boundaries to what I was doing. I tore, I ripped, I made holes, I burnt.

Navigating through the Graveyard, 2019

The left was my final piece for the Navigators project, however what I created today was unexpectedly closer to what I wanted to portray in the first place without intending to.