The cover of the second issue of Accent features a colour print representing a sculpture by Lynn Chadwick and the first article describes Chadwick’s transition from architect to sculptor. This issue also includes a duo of articles by Barry Ward (then a student at Leeds College of Art) and Tom Hudson (a former lecturer at Leeds College of Art) who, respectively, detail the design process for a mural in glass fibre polyester and call for further exploration into technical development of plastics as an artist’s material. Tom Hudson provides further reflections from his perspective as an educator in aspects of the teaching of modern art.
An article on the Spanish architect Felix Candela by M.B. Ibbetson foregrounds the problems of integrating works of impressive Modernist architecture with their physical and social environment. Marianne L. Seaman, then Librarian of Leeds College of Art, explains the types and functions of bibliographies and articulates their importance as part of an art college or university education. Peter Bird ponders what 'What lessons' can Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception 'teach us about the normal education of artists without recourse to the use of [such] drugs?' (Accent 2, p.29).
If themes might be drawn from this issue, they are perhaps questions of humanism, materialism and constructivism in art and design, or a desire to disintegrate the perceived boundary between the arts and sciences. These ideas are certainly prominent in the final article by David Lewis and Peter Stead who wrote construction in colour time space, which advocates for the use of these fundamental materials to achieve unity and authenticity in a work of art and it was this piece that prompted third year Creative Writing student Jamie Steele to compose some experimental prose for our online exhibition.
Jamie Steele
Third year BA (Hons) Creative Writing
Response to ‘Construction in Colour/Time/Space’
Image: Left: Article by Peter Bird. Right: Article by David Lewis and Peter Stead.
The writer asks you to imagine you are moving through her writing. She asks you to imagine you are there among the words – that you are sense becoming sense becoming sense becoming sense.
To get to the crux of the matter, the writer starts a new stanza, thus clarifying the ‘fact’ that you are indeed reading a poem (she encourages you to question your definition of a poem indefinitely). Can a moment be a poem? She wonders, whilst lifting her gaze to scan the intrados of this neoclassical compartment. How does one begin to read reverie? She sees the chandelier suspended in the centre. She sees the columns of Swedish Green Marble surrounding her, all twenty of them gathered in communal labour. She titles them The Tuscan Sons of Atlas, as if her words won’t crumble too. The eyes that she has given you are yours now, and as they reach for the light beyond the windows, a sky-blue pool of being awakens each iris. Again, she wonders, who builds the boundary lines between this and that?) She reminds you to recall the etymology of stanza, to trace that six-letter grapheme back to an Italian room of well-decorated-/- highly-celebrated space. [This is all notation, dictation for art-iculations.]
Image: Article by David Lewis and Peter Stead.
As the brackets might imply, the writer’s primary objective is to have you consider the space between x, and y (, and z, and θ), if only to arrive at an agreement: that these semiotic distinctions are merely hypothetical - provisional – and therefore susceptible to counter-definition. (She lives at the fringe of possibility, ever-questing further intoreconsideration. Others call it scepticism, but she believes it’s a little more nuanced than that.) By now, you might be wondering, what kind of Counter-Platonism you’re being subjected to. I get you. I understand you might not appreciate this hyperintellectualised secretion of one writer’s perception. You want something a little more embodied, don’t you? I’m with you. Let’s lower the brow then. Let’s not bow to logocentrism. These are merely words after all – representations and approximations, remnants of negotiations. Let’s refuse to deify these signifiers, if only to approach a new cognition. This is renovation. This is revolution. [And yet, this is contradiction. How fun! How punishingly fun!]
The writer leaves her letters on the page for you. What will you choose to remember? Is it green? Is it blue?
Rationale
"My interpretation of these sculptures is that they are self-aware of the classical conventions they are negating. For this reason, I view these sculptures as proto-Derridean sculptures of primordial protest. (The materials used are basic industrial materials of the day, but the manipulation of these materials is anything but conventional. This dichotomy creates aesthetic tension for the viewer, forcing them to find their own ‘resolution’ - to find their own meaning.) In response to this interpretation, I have attempted to negate the conventional structures of writing in a similar vein to Derrida. My objective was to prompt the reader into reconsidering the legitimacy of aesthetic conventions by deconstructing the writing as they read it. It is self-satirical, and self-divisional. It seeks to a tension between the distance of the highbrow language and proximity of the analysis. It is transparent to the point of tedium, and that’s the point." – Jamie Steele
Image: Article by David Lewis and Peter Stead