Doug Bailey – Författare

In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current interpretations of these earliest European architectural constructions.The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the Surface is as much a creative act on its own -- in its mixture of work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery -- as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture. Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.

In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current interpretations of these earliest European architectural constructions.The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the Surface is as much a creative act on its own -- in its mixture of work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery -- as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture. Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.

There is a long history of interaction and collaboration between artist and archaeologist. However, recent provocative work in the field, studio, museum and gallery, has opened new possibilities for radical alliances and creations. Disrupting Archaeology and Art presents the work and conversation of an archaeologist and a contemporary painter who have moved into experimental territories beyond the traditional boundaries of their disciplines. This book presents detailed descriptions of six important works made by the authors. Doug Bailey’s aim is to change the ways that archaeologists engage with the materials of the past. His montages, films, and performance destructions (such as Releasing the Archive) undermine traditionally unquestioned tenets of archaeological action and of the conservation and preservation of artefacts and ancient remains. In Disrupting Archaeology and Art, Bailey describes his reasoning and methods of making three of his more provocative works. Simon Callery sets out to find new forms and functions for landscape-based painting. His contact paintings, pit paintings and large-scale sculptural work (Trench 10) produced in direct response to archaeological excavations in England and Wales, provoke significant debate over issues of time, image, and materiality. In Disrupting Archaeology and Art, Callery presents detailed accounts of how and why the excavation site has shaped his thinking and ambitions for contemporary painting. This book is a conversation between two iconoclasts, placing a first-hand, makers’ views of the creative process, within a wider dialogue about how artists and archaeologists respond to their shared themes of originality, time, authorship and meaning.