Category: Other things of interest

July-October 2025 became the period when the activities, developments and explorations of the past fifteen years came together as a sense of achievement.

I reached my 80^th birthday; had nine books published as paperbacks and ebooks (with another two in ebook form only); I took over a local community hall and arranged more than 120 works of art (as a display rather than a well-curated exhibition); had a good number of think-pieces written and lodged on this website; had recorded my approaches to writing and my art learning journey as two blogs; had found reasons to wander around a number of cities ….

It felt like a productive stocktake of somehow having reached a point that marked the summation of that phase and a place from which to pivot off in new, different, as yet unknown directions.

The Development Vocabulary was still relevant. The Social Issues were just as pressing. The will to enjoy myself trying out new things, learning, puzzling and digressing felt just as motivation.

Some strands of these new pathways were beginning to form as possibilities:

More on neuroscience. What is going on chemically in a brain that is thinking, remembering, being creative, improvising ….?

Getting to grips with the very basics of musical notation, music theory, the structure of enjoyable sounds ….

Particular focus on jazz – what made some jazz likeable? What goes on in the mind of players who are improvising, in the flow, demonstrating such flexible skills and abilities ….?

Getting more competent at chess, at playing musical instruments …

Finding new reasons to wander in Birmingham and in other cities; absorbing what those cities had to offer …..

Extending contemporary artmaking to include different contents, via different methods such as creative video/ sound art …..

Writings, recordings and art based on places and spaces ….

Networkings and promotions eg of books written, art made, ideas formulated ….

How technologies might develop further, and the implications re social impacts …..

Non-traditional approaches to learning, intelligence, employment, occupations ……

When I was setting out of this great creative adventure, there were a range of social issues that seemed to linger and linger despite repeated commitments by governments, councils and local managers to really tackle the problem.

Listing these at the outset gave me an agenda that I could puzzle over. Clearly these weren’t going to be fixed by me thinking, even over fifteen years. Maybe, though, I could help others think about them differently – through talking to others, through jottings, through addressing some of the issues via my books ….

This was my initial list and. sadly, it remains pretty much the same list fifteen years later:

• Some groups of young people are proportionally underemployed and socially marginalised – with a sense that they might form a ‘lost generation’
• Some poorer people are locked in mechanisms that ‘pump’ money away from them, towards the more rich and powerful: and they are then stigmatised for that
• Many good social intentions fade in their implementation
• Approaches to the provision of sufficient adequate housing don’t appear to offer robust solutions
• Fundamental cultures can clash, intentionally or otherwise, to the detriment of those involved
• Some localities appear to be doomed forever not to flourish
• There are few ways of agreeing about ‘Value’ despite it being seen as important
• Children are growing up negatively affected by poverty – yet few real, immediate solutions seem to exist as widespread practice
• Future risks have been highlighted (re food, water, environment, technologies etc) – but there are few agreed ways forward for dealing with these
• Decision-makers are increasingly distanced from the situations about which they are being asked to decide
• Leaders and managers are expected to operate within contexts that are more flexible and contingent than the situations they have been prepared/trained for: so things don’t progress at the scale and pace possible
• Some ‘wicked’ problems are acknowledged as having complicated, inter-related causes, yet the complexity of solutions is underappreciated
• Learning models lag behind learning needs and learning potentials – with too many intermediary influences interfering with possible progress
• Services are conceptualised, organised and delivered on the basis of what has happened in the past rather than what is needed in the future
• Knowledge of the ‘right ways forward’ is likely to be ambiguous and uncertain – the most that can be hoped for is ‘best yet’ understandings within particular contexts
• Storytelling is a valid way of planning in response to predicaments
• Anti-social activities constantly find new forms; but those responsible for countering it are left using outmoded tools to do the job
• Many things come down to the ‘individualised’ level; but are conceptualised/formulated at the ‘group’ level – whilst solutions may be at the ‘structural’ level
• Notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are coalescing and becoming unreliable in their use

In 2010, to guide me along on my fifteen-year creative project (aka Retirement), I set out a grid of words that seemed most important to me at the time. Some words were linked to interests, some to processes.

Referring back to these words, as things moved forward, gave me a sense of being on track to some, as yet unknown, destination; opened up new lines of thinking; and acted as a very loose form of self-assessment around being on the right track.

As time went on, these words influenced my thinking, my approaches to topics, the subjects of my books, and exerted leverage in a number of other ways.

In 2025, as this phase of my creative development was drawing to a close and it was time to pivot on to new adventures over the 2025-30 period, the set of words still seem just as relevant as steering references. Only 4 of the original 135 guiding words were dropped (2025, twitter, undertaking, and -Stans). A few others had minor adjustments (‘business models’ became ‘models’; ‘art’ became ‘arts’, ‘potry’ became ‘poetics’ and ‘lodged’ was extended into ‘nested’).

This still gives me a flexible and supportive vocabulary with which to think my way forward towards 2030.

fragments  aspects  flexibility  constructions  linkages  networks    contemporary  arts  writings  poetics  creativity  careers  public  curated    content  transitional  developmental  progress  photography  authenticity serendipity  exploration wanderings  walking  capacities  capabilities    support  simplicity  expertise consistency  aspirations  puzzling   research  knowing  evidence  what might work outcomes  impacts  innovatory    understandings  interpretations solutions imagery   being/doing   models  enterprise conversations  policy implementation   multi)layered  representations  ideas  people  ethnography social practices  emergence  ambiguity  complexity  uncertainty  contingency structurings  regeneration  renewal  reshaping   organisation  leadership managing  places  spaces  locations  neighbourhoods  cities  urban    resilience smart  hesitancy  doubt  maps   landscapes  meanings  sense-making  storytelling meanings  histories  cultures  identities  wellbeing   flourishing  interesting thoughtfulness  reliability  responsibilities  value    gain  changing  thinking forward  differences  worth  reportings    recordings  (non) fictions  archive lodged/nested  pursuit  concern    outputs  eclectic  broad-based  geographies psychological  personalities design  features  electronic  publication  readings peripheral  usability documenting  articles notions plannings   contributions made Birmingham  engaging  globalisation   scale/pace  learning  pull/push up/down/across  shared  existences  alternative  future  picturings   granularity services  employability  caring/careful  quality/qualities    observations  accounts journeying  resource(s)/fulness  state(s)    sides/edges  gaps  changes/changing patterns   range   variety   constellation quirkiness  extending  framework  inter-connected    conceptual  relational  real/virtual  indicators  options/choices.

In 2010 I decided, in the absence of any other idea of what retirement from paid employment might entail, that I needed an interesting and exploratory set of things to keep myself occupied.

I stood a fairly good chance of living to age 80 or beyond. This gave me a 15-year opportunity to see retirement, initially, as a 15-year creative undertaking, steering my life in new directions. My work had culminated in managing long-term extended city-wide projects. There was no reason why this retirement thing couldn’t simply be just one more such project, approached in the same way. I drew up a long-term Plan; established a tentative budget; established some principles and some lines of exploration; created a loose Thinking Framework; and sketched out some possible ways forward ….

This drew on what I was already comfortable doing. Looking back, it was a useful approach for stepping into the unknown.

There was general advice about surviving into older years relatively fit physically and mentally: Connect with other people; learn new things; be active, especially outdoors; be curious; dedicate time and energy to something; get the basics right so time could be focused on more interesting things; see things as an opportunity; have a healthy diet; and so on. Whatever I did to occupy myself would be done within that advice.

My Plan had these as its core, and was developed more specifically around a number of strands:

• Wanting to understand the meaning of concepts such as ‘progress’, ‘contemporary’, ‘value’, ‘usefulness’ , ‘public/private’ and ‘change’.
• Wanting to get a better understanding of the ideas and practices of contemporary art.
• Delving more into how cities work, and the changing nature of urban living. Having a reason to visit cities e.g. to look at how different cities approached their use of public art.
• Thinking about places, spaces, localities and neighbourhoods.
• Thinking about the construction of identities (of people, of places).
• Exploring the different approaches to research, to evidence, to understandings, to learning and to developments.
• Acknowledging that most things might have degrees of uncertainty, contingency and complexity.
• To get more focused on writing in a range of ways and for a variety of purposes – maybe producing around 8 or 12 very different books.
• Exploring ideas, researching in a quite general way, puzzling over some social issues – and jotting my thoughts onto a dedicated website.
• Doing things for enjoyment, in my own ways and at my own speed. So probably not signing up for long set courses. More setting my own wanderings, going where ideas took me, and avoiding doing things for the sake of it.
• Finding ways of doing these things in contact with others, in manageable ways.

Quite a bit of the early time was spent thinking about the elements of a framework that would enable a bit of structure whilst being open enough to let me go off along various pathways.

I thought about all the words that might fit with what I most wanted to do. This formed a development vocabulary (and is described in another section). Revisiting this list of words, from time to time, kept reminding me of the overall directions I wanted to go in, and identified emerging gaps for me to consider.

I listed a number of social puzzles that had intrigued me for some time (also described in another section), Revisiting these helped keep the momentum going.

I drafted some general topics that I had kept coming back to before retirement. These acted as some kind of matrix for me to think within.

Taken together, this created a flexible framework for steering my way forwards into the unknowns of retirement. Flexible enough to give me space to do things in my own way and at my own speed; robust enough to give the whole undertaking some momentum to carry it through over fifteen years; and interesting enough to keep me engaged.

Books on modern art often have a number of things in common. They have primarily been concerned with European and American art. They also have a tendency to be historically structured around named art movements and the personal histories of recognised artists.

If we reject the notion of discrete, hermetic, self-contained, clearly identifiable movements, and get beyond the individuality of the genius-artist, we are able to condense the history of modern art into gatherings of ideas that were constructed within changing social contexts.

This then opens up the possibility of reflecting on the extent to which those outline ideas can feed through into thinking about contemporary art.

(As reflected in relevant articles, books, texts and exhibitions)

This exploration into the language of contemporary art has a number of origins and was done for several reasons.

Its origins stemmed from my decision, several years ago, to delve into contemporary art: in terms of trying to understand it better; in terms of trying to get a sense of how it was being talked about in articles, books, exhibition texts etc; and in terms of wanting to test out my own capabilities in ‘doing art’ and ‘making art’.

The starting framework for this was also a deep interest in modes of learning, and how a particular outcome might be got to by various routes – including putting together my own art curriculum (culled from the Foundation, Degree and Masters curricula of a range of universities in this country and elsewhere – selecting the elements and approaches that I felt most interested in personally pursuing in my own ways and against my own timescales). This is described elsewhere. One unit of my constructed self-learning programme was a better understanding of the language of art, in general, and contemporary art in particular.

A further driver was an interest in language and its uses. My own inclination was less in terms of looking to establish precise dictionary-type definitions, and more in terms of the flexible (and often contradictory) ways that words were used in practice. This looked for an opening up, rather than a defining down, of understandings. A specific example of this was my doctorate in sociology, which looked at the ways the concept of Community was constructed by various groups (residents, community workers, local politicians, national policy makers, academics, writers) and how various elements of meaning were differentially strung together as chains of understanding by these different groups – and how these understandings could form broad constellations of sense-making at different times or in different contexts.

In practical terms, I had to hand 50 pieces of written material from art exhibitions across the past 25 years; more than 100 newspaper and magazine articles from across the period from 1990 to the present; more than 100 books on art since 1945; a watch-later library of more than 40 YouTube videos on aspects of contemporary art –  ie a rich and varied source of ways that people wrote and spoke about late-modern/contemporary art.

The job was to make some sense of all of this, for my own better understanding.

This was primarily done to fulfil part of the learning commitment I had made to myself, and also for the sheer enjoyment of attempting to think through some new topic.

A second reason emerged the more I thought about things. This was to see if the various statements gleaned from the numerous wide-ranging texts could suggest any recurring categorisations that could be used as headings to make some initial sense of things, The headings I used thus arose out of the thinking being done. These broad working categorisations, which were by no means mutually exclusive, were:

Artistic Approaches

Contents and Intentions

Artistic Mechanisms

Curating and Exhibitions

Identities and Portraitures

Narratives and Meanings

Ambiguities and Realities

Cities and Places

Memories and Histories

Fragments, Layers and Multiplicities

Each section contains numerous phrases that were things in the articles/books that struck me as interesting. These are fragments and part-phrases rather than full sentences. These listed phrases-of-interest are not in any specific order. A number of the phrases could equally be relevant to other headings. Sometimes phrases clumped together, more often they did not. They are certainly not intended to form a linear narrative, but simply to sit as fragments, any of which might trigger some response in the reader. There are many fragments, so many possibilities for thoughts being triggered – so any reader might begin to construct their own chains of ideas, building into a potential narrative that begins to make some sense to that person.

The fragments and the headings then became some kind of Thinking Framework – something that would spur further intellectual exploration – or that might trigger ideas to inform my own making of art.

This is my interpretation of the information from my particular set of sources. Others may construct things differently, from other sources. Another approach might throw up different headings, different ways of selecting and arranging phrases, different chains of meaning and different constellations of understanding. This is my constructed thinking tool It is up to me to make of it what I can. As I scan through it from time to time, certain things catch my eye and set trains of thought going. Similarly, it is up to other people to engage or not; and to make their own connections, linkages and uses.

What follows is my first attempt at putting the Thinking Framework together. It can be considered as an act of creativity at a number of different levels. It is a work in progress. As I read more, more ideas will seem worth including, but I don’t aim for it to go on forever. I am more interested in getting to a sufficiency level, where it can be something adaptable, yet fit-for-purpose, for me to use in various ways in order to progress my own learning about contemporary art and, potentially, my own practical art working.

Readers should feel free to use this Thinking Framework in whatever way they may find helpful. Its source should be quoted whenever it is shared with others.

(Note: The source of each phrase is not listed. This is a personal exploration not an academic article requiring specific references. Nor is it an attempt at originality, attempting to pass other’s words off as my own. The whole basis is that these are fragments of words as used by many others – few of which are specific insights unique to that writer. In a small number of cases, the artist source in included in brackets, simply for interest).

The challenge was to create a simple object to be placed in a public setting in a way that could interact with an existing sense of place, and potentially prompt new perspectives for users of that space.

The place chosen was a major public square in central Birmingham (UK). This acts as a place for occasional protests and demonstrations, as well as being used for events and festivals. Generally, though, is simply a place to move through on the way to somewhere else. Conceptually, it is an enclosure and a container of things whilst, at the same time, being a void, a gap between buildings, an emptiness needing bodies to bring it to life.

More importantly, it is a point at which three overlapping versions of the city meet each other as three sweeping clover-leaf segments.

One broad view takes in the School of Art, the city’s Education Department; some art galleries and the city museum; a major convention centre; the theatre; the library; the Council House and other impressive buildings from the Civic Pride era of the city’s history. This is the city as art and learning.

Turn through an arc and the view is of shopping centres; major streets of city-centre stores; the city’s developing metro tramway line; and some railway stations. This is the city as retail and transport.

Turn again and the third view from the square is the district of banks, insurance offices and corporate headquarters; and the historical Jewellery Quarter. It is the city as finance and trade.

Each aspect has its own set of histories, its own ever-changing present and its own possibilities for the future. There is a point in the Square where these three segments come together. Pasts, presents and futures collide at that point.

So, it is a layered, contemporary place which can be understood in various ways. People often have little sense of the square’s intricate history and give even less thought to its potential futures. For many, it is a place that simply exists; that is simply there – where a version of the present is constantly being constructed and reconstructed.

It is a square that houses a number of different works of public art. These are monuments or large-scale pieces by commissioned artists. Putting a work of art of my own alongside these would change the location very slightly, might influence how people use the space, and could be a prompt for conversation or reflection.

Finally, the Square was often a place at which people take bearings, consult maps, admit to being a bit lost, and ask for directions. It was decided to build on this and to install a signpost at some significant spots in the Square. Rather than direct people to physical locations, this signpost would have arms pointed to ‘the pasts’ and ‘the presents’.

In another piece of writing, it was suggested that elements of thinking about art would need to be viewed within some understandings of the contemporary context. What is it about society today that shapes how art is produced, exchanged and consumed? What is unique today about the conditions within which artists work and audiences approach the art made?

What follows are some facets of the contemporary that have been proposed as defining our age (eg the period from the past few decades up to the present). Some of these might also have been put forward as descriptors of earlier periods (eg 1900-1940, or 1960-1980), but what is different now is the scale and pace associated with those elements. Other things are clearly new to the contemporary, with its electronically-driven processes.

These observations have been grouped into three broad groupings that have a high degree of interaction across each other.

Art theory, like art history, is often presented in terms of sequences, schools of thought, or key individual thinkers– looking both for unique perspectives and for linkages between these.

Art theory has also tended to be Art Theory ie a bundle of expert knowledge, to be taught and written about; usually treated as a summary. It is less seen as art theorising ie a process, open to many, with ‘maybe’ and ‘good enough for now’ tentative aspects to it. From this second perspective art theory is less a canon of ideas to be applied to art; and more of an emerging, loose, adaptable framework within which art can be considered and within which things might be thought through.

What is suggested here is that art theorising is a process of reinvestigation, of reconstruction, of regeneration – using elements of previous ways of theorising. The kind of thinking imagined is along the lines of hinging fragmentary understandings together in ways that make personal sense – a kind of ‘build our own theorisation’ process.

Setting these thinkings within considerations of the nature of contemporary society, may allow people to follow their own theorisations about art in the current context: what art is; why it is; where it is shifting; and what this means for society in general.

For the purposes of this piece of writing, art will be restricted very largely to painting and performance art of Europe and the US. Some references will be made to art from elsewhere, particularly when considering the broadened art world of contemporary art practices. Identity will follow the lines of modern sociology (in which identity is taken as being created at the meeting place of subjective processes inscribed within the way people live, and the social narratives that position us towards particular ways of being). Within this line of thought, the individual is shaped by genetics, environment, upbringing and life-choices but in conditions that are largely socially prescribed at the time.