Its taken me ages to get this post up, too many applications, interviews and proposals have stood in its way.. ive been writing this for weeks, adding a bit at a time when ive thought about it long enough. Its meant as a response to Steve's birdland post and now there's the turkey image in between and a dead woodcock. i suppose now its just a post but really it talks of things connected with a post 2 or so ago. Sorry to back track.

In Clare Bishops - Artifical Hells she talks about how its the multiple parts that make the complete Jeremy Dellar Battle of Orgreave artwork: the performance itself; the Figgis film; the double archive of actual miners things and Dellars 'making it' documents; the published oral history of miners stories; the hire of the re-enactors; Dellars commentary before, during and after etc etc - basically one element is not an artwork made. Bishop also draws our attention to this work being a contemporary history painting - a moment of a narrative captured. So whats my point? That Dellars piece deserves the recognition it got/gets, that Bishop is astute and on it, the works a picturing not a comment...? Or rather, is it that multi-modal pieces with dense layered folded meanings, and not yet understandings make a work more slippery, harder to pin down, but made all the better for it?

If so then what I've done, by using the Dellar example, is reinforce what Steve has said - that the Birdland anthology has the potential to build on and fatten an understanding or experience of landscape or landscape derived artworks. Perhaps then this new amassed collection might take us somewhere precarious, a place a on the edge, a space we didn't know - meaning wise - we can always hope.  But all this talk of multiplicity leads me to think of the single, aura laden, coherent, perfect, succinct, poetic, elegant artwork  - and what they offer? There was a woman at RCA in Photography whose phd study was based around the possibility of photographers making a single photo rather than a series - a common strategy. I suppose in part she was asking a question about the critical mass creating the complete meaning. Of course though, those single one off pieces - the Don McCullin photo, the small Barbara Hepworth sculpture we saw at in Wakefield, the Grayson Perry pot in Leeds - are of course not really singular items; they are a selected highlights, moments within the timeline or the critical mass of practice. They are pinnacles, curated to form a new mass. As Giambattista della Porta said: these links between all entities proceed so strictly that they appear as a rope stretched from the first cause as far as the lowest and smallest things...if we touch one extremity of that cord it will make tremble and move all the rest. Basically all things are alive and communicating with each other. So when we looked at the Beuys and it caused the 'whats of value' part in me to tremble/resonate at a higher frequency, i understood more clearly what makes it a great artwork - one that is unilaterally of and in the world alive and relevant, with me, all of the time.