What happens on Wednesday afternoons at the Poly?.........

 I think David asked this question as a provocation to get us to think in response to notions of play - i know this because when i replied to his email containing this question  I said Not Sport and he responded with:  It's a question about the place of work, and the place of not work (aka play) at the Poly. And before you two go collapsing things, think of the place/ploy of play at the Poly first.

My not sport comment of course references the Wednesday afternoons at uni/poly/college - a time to down tools to engage in competitive team based activity -in other words sport. As an art student, i never did this; it seemed like an odd past time with people i didn't seem to like - competitive game playing and physical running ......its just not my thing. Why be out there in the wet/hot/cold when you can be in a smokey studio talking crap and drinking tea - a different type of competitive game playing perhaps, but at least it didn't have the sprained ankles and i liked the folks more.

Of course David's question was about play and not about sport, but it does seem pertinent here, before i talk of play or perhaps its improvisation, to be clearer about what the Poly-Technic is, or rather what its not. It is not trying to be an alternative to anything although it might look at times a bit like a studio group or like a new artist art school. The name perhaps makes people think of university alternatives, where wednesday sport might be normal. But instead its a mindset, which sounds perhaps like dematerialised conceptual art bollocks, when what we are trying to do is be active, not fixed to a space and fleet of foot. We want to be able to asks difficult questions of givens, offer a critical space for us and others to be involved in and respond to need and changing times - as Steve's holding form described. We rely on our own agency. Perhaps we are doing, given present times, what Kim [Steve's wife] told us to do - Adapt or Die

I am going to liken us to this bag of potatoes, recently found under my stairs. Straining to survive and reproduce by squeezing their sprouts through the tiny air holes at the bottom of the bag, like us we are finding a way. The potatoes are playing serious games to get going and i think this mirrors what the poly-technic aka kate and steve are doing. We have knowledge and skills and experience and personalities that lead us to this place, but ultimately we are building and growing, we are being malleable. All of which is improvising...we are thinking on our feet, using tacit knowledge to make as we go.

However this only perhaps talks of strategy and not of content and i wanted to point out that the "making it up as you go along" reflexive working is to the core. There are no end points to get to or work back from, we are open to where we go, although need is a driver. I like how we are building a way of working and combined practice that asks difficult questions of our selves, art and those also of the Wider World. Perhaps its as Amanda Ravetz would say - Rule finding rather than rule following:

 I guess in such a rule-finding age, friction seems increasingly important because in an unfolding situation it is through the frictions and negotiations that a new kind of (partial) knowledge is made. For friction to happen there must be substance, for de-centering there must be positions, for the workmanship of risk and rule finding there must be long, long hours of practice, mistakes and frustration. There is a temptation to think that the difficulty of marshaling what one does into one concept, one description, one statement of practice reflects the end of discipline–based expertise. But I think we are encountering the development of new forms of expertise. Which while they are more fluid and improvisatory are still rooted in very particular kinds of activity and ways of thinking and knowing. Perhaps if the emphasis is now on ‘making it up as we go along’ (being reflexive not reflective) then expertise is about entertaining a more contingent ‘self’ that relies in turn on having its boundaries and identities challenged?  Amanda Ravetz: Number 1: Were having trouble describing what we do.

The next questions we've been asked to talk about is:

The Polytechnic is an artwork. If it was collected by an art gallery to be accessioned into a permanent collection, what form would it take?

Amanda Phillips. Leeds Art Gallery