In the new 2012 program at Arts House in Melbourne, there appears to be a continuation of the type of programming done in previous years with a nod to the UK intimate performance style.
Some works of interest that is being premiered in Australia are;
And The Birds Fell From The Sky
Pixel Rosso
An immersive performance combining ‘autoteatro’ style instructions with film, by artist/devisor and ‘autoteatro’ pioneer Silvia Mercuriali (Rotozaza) and multi-award winning filmmaker and artist, Simon Wilkinson, And the Birds Fell from the Sky casts you as the central character, located at the heart of the story.
Equipped with video goggles and headphones so that sight, hearing and movement through space are hijacked and fully fused with the work itself, get ready to enter a compelling fictional reality that becomes gradually more real and present than the world around you…
Alma Mater
Fish & Game (UK)
A filmic tour-for-one, Alma Mater fuses high-technology with lo-fi charm as individual audience members enter a specially constructed, full-scale child’s bedroom to immerse themselves – via iPad – in the world of a little girl.
An Appointment with J Dark
Triage Live Art Collective
An Appointment with J Dark is a one-to-one participatory performance event, an individual appointment with an enigmatic stranger. In response to a calling card, individuals will rendezvous at an appointed time and place in North Melbourne, with a woman named J Dark. Each meeting becomes a unique and intimate journey – often playful, sometimes confronting and always surprising.
Thinking of going to MONA FOMA in January? Well you might also like to catch Touchy Feely.
Touchy Feely will be five days from January 25 to 29 packed full of artist-led talks, workshops, performances and presentations held at Inflight ARI, Hobart, Tasmania. Curated by Amy Spiers and Pip Stafford, it will bring together a number of interstate and Tasmanian artists – including Lara Thoms, Liz Dunn, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Sally Rees, Paula Silva, Judith Abell, Jason James and Elizabeth Woods – to discuss central issues facing socially engaged, participatory and relational artists today.
Why Hobart?
In recent years Hobart has been the base for a series of intriguing and exciting projects of a relational, socially engaged and live art nature. Recent examples include David Cross’ Iteration:Again and Paula Silva’s “artist-run” CWA branch. For this reason, it seems timely and appropriate to gather together artists in Hobart who are interested in participation and social engagement to meet and exchange ideas, express misgivings about our field and engage in hearty and passionate debate.
Why the theme?
Touchy Feely is organised around a central question: Is socially engaged and relational art too sentimental? As the instigator of this project, I raise this question because “sentimental” and “comfortable” have been pejorative terms used to challenge art I have made, as well as work by artists I like. I have begun to take these criticisms seriously.
Indeed, in recent decades there has been a “social turn” in contemporary art, here in Australia and internationally. This turn is characterised by art projects that emphasise participation, dialogue and community engagement to activate the public. It has given rise to an optimistic notion that art can be marshaled to tackle wider social issues and create emancipatory social relations. These practices take a variety of forms, some more politically overt than others, however what they all have in common is that they are artistic attempts to offer new social models of being and living together.
In an effort to re-humanise and re-connect a society atomized and alienated by capitalism, increasingly artists are adopting socially ameliorative strategies. But has this resulted in a sentimental and friendly artistic impulse, that is at the expense of complexity and criticality?
In response to these concerns Touchy Feely will seek to address the following questions:
Should the “skill set” of art be instrumentalised to make a better world?
Is there a role for hope, compassion and optimism in art, without having to take an evangelical or moralistic position?
In our current situation, is it actually politically irresponsible to creatively express despair, unease and tension?
Is contemporary art marked by a facile cynicism, heartlessness and nihilism?
Or is relational and socially engaged art in Australia too sentimental, ethical and uncritical?
If you can’t make it to Hobart, you can still follow the discussions on our blog: touchyfeelyhobart.tumblr.com. We will regularly post updates and videos of talks during the event.
If you’d like more information or wish to contribute something remotely send an email to amyspiers@gmail.com.
Some months ago LALA asked me to write down my impressions on the League Of Resonance – an ambitious live art project that occurred in Melbourne from December 2010 to April 2011. As I’m a slow writer and pedantic academic, it’s taken me a little time to settle on my response. Currently I’m writing a thesis on participation in art, so I thought it might be useful to discuss the project by relating it back to a concern I have with participatory, site-specific artworks.
Particularly I want to discuss a frustration with the lack of engagement that projects such as League of Resonance receive from audiences beyond the usual throngs of art-goers, a frustration that I know other live and participatory artists share. Despite good intentions to attract participants from the wider public, often the best efforts by artists fail.
It seems that the particular skill set of a participatory artist requires charming, cajoling, arm-twisting and coercing “ordinary” people to get involved in your project, but is this the best way to engage people in your art?
A commission
Live artists Sarah Rodigari, Jess Oliveri and Jason Maling were in residence at the intersection of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets, Melbourne from December 2010 to April 2011. Commissioned by Melbourne City Council, the artists were asked to creatively respond to the area as it was considered to have a “bad vibe”. Or to put it in City Council speak:
“The intention of the project is to appoint artists as an alternative method for Council to engage with the city night experience and explore diverse experiences and views. The artistic outcomes aim to provide a counterpoint to late night culture, and is designed to activate the space with positivity, romance and humour and to create a softer alternative to an area that is quickly gaining a reputation for the inverse.”
Sarah, Jason and Jess’s “softer alternative” manifested in the project the League of Resonance, a series of gentle and playful interventions that aimed to directly and meaningfully engage with the space and the people that move through it. As one League participant describes in her blog, “Jason and Jess explained how the project aimed to take seriously the idea of an area having a ‘bad vibe’ and their desire to investigate all the components of this area’s vibe.” With an upbeat and whimsical sensibility, the League’s website explains how they aimed to uncover “the intangible and barely perceptible” and tune into, collect and combine “the resonance of individuals: their stories, perceptions and rituals”.
One tactic they employed to encourage people to do this was to take them out on dates, a convivial strategy to collect the stories and experiences embedded in the space. Participants were sourced via word of mouth, their website and a one-page publication the League produced and distributed at the intersection, available in three editions, called This Is Townend. Up until March 18th, anyone who had even a passing connection with the intersection were welcome to get friendly with the League. In Edition 2 of This is Townend they wrote:
“If you live, work, or pass through this area please contact us. We would like to meet you, listen to your thoughts and opinions about this place. We’ll take you out for a coffee, lunch or dinner. We’ll go for a walk, and share stories about this area. The League of Resonance is just a good old-fashioned way of trying to make friends in this crazy city.”
My date
In late February, I went on a date with the League. Although I had only the most minor association with the site - I have caught the number 19 tram home to Brunswick and eaten a hot dog at Walker’s Donuts on occasion – Sarah Rodigari had asked me to come along as her friend and a fellow artist interested in site-specific and participatory practices.
We met one evening outside Flinders Street Station, by two of the city’s last remaining black and white chemical processing photo booths. Smelling like piss and traffic, this site also conveniently faced right on to the intersection of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets. In addition to Sarah, my date companions were Sarah’s video camera-wielding assistant, Emma Williamson, and Melbourne-based video artist, Salote Tawale. Sarah explained that it was the usual habit of the League to have singular encounters, but as Salote, Sarah and myself were already pals, she had seized the opportunity to have a “double date”.
Our date began with a choice: where to eat? Dinner would be paid for by the League, but on the condition that Salote and I limited our eating options to the immediate area surrounding the intersection, leaving us with an unappealing list of fast food outlets. We chose Pepperoni’s because, as Sarah sagely suggested, it was one of the few places where you could also get a beer.
Pepperoni’s is a place where the city’s late night drinkers go to buy slices of greasy pizza before heading home. It’s not a place you usually eat at sober. As Salote and I tucked into our eating “experiences” among some depressive, unhealthy-looking diners – Salote described our meals as something out of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – Sarah explained the rest of the night’s activities.
Pulling out an impressive display of League of Resonance-branded stationery, we were told that following our dinner we could go for a stroll around the block. During our walk we were asked to tell Sarah any associations or points of interest we may have with the space, and she would note them down on an A5 map of the area.
As mentioned, however, my experience of the area was limited and so my contributions to Sarah’s map were scant. Indeed, Salote too had little to offer beyond tales of late night pizza devouring and running for trams and trains at the intersection. So it was left up to Sarah and Jess (who joined us after our meal) to play the role of tour guides and regale us with tidbits of information they had gleaned from their research and encounters with people at the intersection.
A walk down a stretch of Elizabeth Street revealed to us an overlooked 1950s mural of clinking glasses towering above the 7-Eleven and the smallest shop in Australia – a watch repair stall where customers placed orders via a window that opened onto the street. Down alleyways off Flinders Lane we were offered the chance to go fossicking for kosher bakery treats in Glick’s dumpster bins and shown a line of chewing gum that one of the suited professionals had begun during his smoko breaks. Sarah invited us to add to the line with a piece of gum she had given us after dinner.
Walking back towards our starting point, Sarah shined a dolphin torch to help us spot rats that scurried in the open by Flinders Street Station and pointed out the glamorous Rendezvous Hotel that seemed out of place in a street with rodents and Dreams Gentleman’s Club. Opposite we were shown some underground public toilets that had been concreted over to deter a gay beat that allegedly once existed there.
After a pleasant walk around the block we found ourselves back at the photo booths. Despite contributing very little to Sarah and Jess’s research, Salote and I had still earned ourselves the chance to become members of the League of Resonance. Membership, it was explained, involved receiving our very own League membership card that detailed our personal connection to the intersection on the back. At a later date, we could attend a Swap Meet to meet other League members, collect the whole set of membership cards and exchange stories about the intersection.
Accepting the invitation, Salote and I were both asked to participate in a kind of initiation process. Firstly we listened to Jess sing a song from the Victorian Railway Institute – a men’s club with Masonic overtones who had gathered in halls above Flinders Street Station in the early 1900s – which, I supposed, was an example of a “resonance” they had found at the site. Next, we had our picture taken in the photo booth, to be printed on our membership card. Finally, we were asked to hum a tune into a voice recorder. It was explained that any tune was appropriate, so long as it was associated with what we felt was the resonance of the intersection.
This last request seemed baffling and nebulous, but taking inspiration from a nearby patch of graffiti that depicted a dinosaur with a speech bubble that said “So Lonely,” I obediently hummed the chorus of The Police’s song of the same name and had my photo taken.
It’s not easy to sell friendship
At an intersection that is characterised by a busy tram terminus and train station, a “Barnes Dance” pedestrian crossing, adult bookshops and fast food outlets, the League responded to their City of Melbourne brief by attempting to slow down the impersonal rush of human foot traffic and urging people to look, listen and engage more attentively with their surroundings. They highlighted the overlooked and made conscious our unexamined habits and routines in the area.
However, I couldn’t help feeling my date was an experience that was akin to window shopping. I wasn’t given any genuine or thought-provoking engagement with the “vibe” of the place or the people that move through it, beyond a superficial viewing of points of interest. I imagined Salote and I were like tourists who only had other tourists, Sarah and Jess, to show us around. We all lacked the insight of locals, a personal perspective outside of our experience from people who had a sustained knowledge of the space.
Please don’t get me wrong, I think the project was laudable. It opened up the space for non-object, process-based, site-specific practices to be supported as legitimate public art activities by city councils. I appreciate that it was a brave and exciting experiment that emerged and developed over time. Although there were tensions and uneasy compromises between council desires and artistic control (see Lucas Ihlein’s essay) the City of Melbourne Art and Participation program and the League of Resonance artistic team should be commended for attempting such a project.
As Lucas points out: “The working methods which underlie a project like this are not widely understood. This is hardly surprising – the artists of the League employ a set of processes which are still relatively novel additions to the toolbox of contemporary art.” As socially-engaged and participatory art of this type is arguably new and experimental, it is difficult to find an adequate criteria for measuring its success.
However, I want to begin a discussion about the League’s chosen strategy – making friends and going on dates – by observing a couple of crucial things. Firstly, the League of Resonance was a response to an agenda in the City of Melbourne’s commission, which as Lucas suggests, sought to instrumentalise art as a tool for social change at the intersection. The effect of this was, in part, to predetermine the tone of the project and prevent the League artists from enjoying complete creative autonomy. It’s likely the Council objectives that directed the project “to activate the space with positivity, romance and humour,” also obliged the League to employ a feel-good and ameliorative methodology.
Yet, is it possible that the League’s friendly and participatory model actually had the effect of excluding people? Observing the 70 members the League accrued over three months, it’s worth noting that a large proportion have been sourced from the League artists’ friends, family and interested members of the arts community. Which makes me wonder: what vibes were collected, whose resonance recorded? Is it only those who had the inclination to participate?
Connecting beyond that which we know
From my chats with Sarah, I got the impression that the League of Resonance did not have heaps of success in sourcing dates on the intersection. This might come as a surprise to LALA readers: I mean, who would turn down a free meal and the chance to chin wag with Sarah, Jess and Jason?
Talking to Sarah about the project, she described the experience of trying to involve people on the intersection as a harrowing cold-calling task that was as challenging as a Mormon’s attempt to peddle God to passers-by. In a revealing statement she claimed: “It’s not easy to sell friendship.”
Sarah explained that it was important for the League to involve people who would be meaningfully engaged and invested in the project. Although this makes sense when you require some time commitment to the artistic activities, perhaps this is a big ask in an area that has been singled out for its “bad vibe”? In a space like this there is no sense of pride in the surroundings, no desire for local connectedness. It’s a transitory point between more important destinations with little reason to linger, as is demonstrated by all the fast food that is available. As League Member no. 52, Rakesh, is quoted as saying on the back of his League card, “This is a place where people just get on with their jobs, you don’t really talk to each other here.”
I’d like to suggest then, that perhaps making friends and going on dates may not have been the best strategy to employ? To illuminate my point better I’d like to offer another example of a participatory project that struggled to attract a plurality and diversity of participants. Some years ago, I developed the project, Agents Of Proximity, for the 2008 Next Wave Festival with writer Victoria Stead. A localised, artist-run travel service based in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick,Agents Of Proximity, like League Of Resonance aimed to explore urban space via the stories and experiences of the people who shared it. It was an exploration of the ways in which the rituals and mindsets associated with travel could be applied to the streets we walk down daily and the places that we think we know.
In the months leading up to the 2008 Next Wave Festival, the Agents of Proximity took people from Brunswick on travels within their own neighbourhood. These tours usually involved two participants at a time, where one person took the other to their personal sites of significance in Brunswick. We documented the encounters through a series of postcards and the production of our Brunswick Travel Guide, which we launched during Next Wave.
Our starting point was our curiosity for the area – which we both called home – and a desire to explore it in ways that moved outside the normal social circles and circuits of bars and cafes where we spent our time. We specifically wanted to engage with people and places who were not normally part of our Brunswick experience, and give agency to others to do the same. We tried to attract participants to the project through a number of ways, including beginning with people we already knew and spreading out via word of mouth, posters and flyers. However, at the end of the project Victoria and I both felt we had only marginal success in attracting participants. Victoria reflected on this in an essay that accompanied our Travel Guide:
“It’s uncertain to what extent we succeeded in what we set out to do. In trying to traverse the myriad subjective experiences of this place where we live, the experiment we initiated was an ambitious one, perhaps more so than we realised when we began. After months of tramping through our suburb searching for participants, we have not succeeded in moving as far beyond our own worlds as we had hoped to do. Negotiating points of disconnect, though, is an unavoidable part of navigating the plurality of shared space. Tensions and disjunctures are always present within such spaces, essential even …
One night, many months ago we got talking to two men at the RSL on Sydney Rd. We were putting up fliers on the lamp post near the balcony where they were standing with their beers. They wanted to know what we were doing and we started trying to explain. They were bemused, mildly intrigued, but ultimately had no interest in participating in our “wanky art shit”. They did, however, talk to us at length about their experiences of Brunswick over the span of several decades …
We would have loved to have initiated a tour led by those men, through the Brunswick they knew. But ultimately they had better things to do than indulge us in our artistic meanderings, and we couldn’t really blame them. If nothing else, the fact they didn’t participate is testament to the limitations of our own experience; our own capacity to connect beyond that which we know.”
We wanted to open up possibilities for individual people to re-view and recreate the spaces in which they move. It was a nice idea, but only for people who were interested in doing so – those people who were like-minded and interested in “wanky art shit”. As Victoria observed, the barriers to human connection run deeper than the lack of opportunities to connect: “They are cultural, social, linguistic, emotional, aesthetic. Some of them are imposed; others are created and maintained through choice.”
Documenting disconnect
Perhaps, if the success of projects such as League Of Resonance and Agents of Proximity is to be judged on the participation of an extensive number and range of people, it could be argued that more time, or perhaps by more effective cajoling, would produce a ‘better’ work. Spending extra time in the site talking with the people who live, work and play there, may allow the trust and interest of a diverse range of participants to be gained. It could be argued too, that a project’s design and methodology should be more attuned and relevant to the targeted site.
However, I think the more interesting point here is that as live artists (as well as funding bodies and arts organisations) we shouldn’t assume that an open call-out for participation automatically results in inclusiveness, openness or an equal representation of a site or community. Often these methodologies attract a certain type of person – a like-minded coterie of people who have a common interest in art and social engagement. The selection and creation of a group of participants necessarily involves an inability to connect and inadvertent exclusion. This is as much a part of a participatory work as its moments of surprising engagement.
The concern is that many participatory projects only structure into the work the experience of connecting. They document just those people who were comfortable and eager to participate – and then attempt to claim that these contributions are a sufficient representation of a “vibe” or area. But what does not rate a mention are the points of disconnect – which are, arguably, as (if not more) thought-provoking and unpredictable as the moments of engagement the work attempts to facilitate. Surely it is these dead ends and failed moments of connection that tell you a more complex and interesting story about a place?
The task of involving people in our work is a worthy one. Perhaps we just need to engage people with greater sophistication and thematise these problems in the work – allowing for disconnection, fragmentation, friction and lack of interest to have an impact on the outcome.
Tiny Stadiums is over for yet another year. This year the festival began at PACT in Erskineville on the 4th May with the opening nights of Applespiel’s Executive Stress/Corporate Retreat and Nat Randall’s Cheer Up Kid and culminated in a weekend of Live Art on the streets of Erskineville on May 14 and 15. If it is boring to talk about the weather, please let me bore you for a moment. Sydney had been drowning for months; thus it was some kind of supernatural inspiration that provoked us to move Tiny Stadiums from March to May for the first time this year. The festival culminated on two of the most spectacular days of the year. Bright blue skies, crisp air, warm sunshine: perfect Autumnal weather for wandering around a small village and engaging in all sorts of live art.
LIVE ART WEEKEND:
The Live Art weekend is the defining feature of Tiny Stadiums. We curate the festival with small works that you can engage with simply if you stroll down the street. We love the fact that we drag the art community out of the gallery and into the sunshine. But the really fun thing about the festival is the surprised responses from locals who do not know how to engage with the work because it entirely out of context.
This year the festival’s epicentre was the Town Hall with Dan Koop’s Wish We Were Here project, Lara Thoms’s The Experts Project, Amy Spier’s Meeting Point, Jen Jameison’s popchannel, and Beth Arnold’s Transplanted Surfaces all situated in the hall’s immediate vicinity. While Just down the road we had New Planes Zine Cart, and Keg de Souza’s Gigloo (The Gigloo unfortunately only made a brief appearance, replaced by Drop-in Book Club on Sunday; a marquee in which Applespiel interrogated locals about their favourite and least favourite books). We didn’t have any big performances on the street as in previous years. Most of the works enabled a sort of interesting form of hanging out near Erskineville Town Hall. Meeting Point enabled you to meet people, The Experts Project facilitated conversation, popchannel lured you into a trance and The Gigloo and Book Club allowed you to chill out in the park.
But the festival looked much more static than it was. Lucas Ihlein’s What lies beneath (small soundworks for the sleepy), along with Arnold’s and Koop’s work offset the simplicity of this basic layout. Ihlein’s work found its way into the bedrooms of local residents: they could download sound-art alarm clocks on their smart phones and be woken to the sound of industrial noise. So Tiny Stadiums literally got into bed with its audience this year! As well as this, Beth Arnold’s work was spread out over the entire suburb and a walking tour was required to engage with it. So Tiny Stadiums made its audience do some sight seeing and exercise this year! In Wish We Were Here, Dan Koop hand delivered postcards from festival attendees to anyone within a five-kilometre radius of the Town Hall. So Tiny Stadiums managed to engage and audience of people who didn’t even know about the festival! All in all the Live Art weekend was a great success, and lured hundreds of people outside and onto the streets of Erskineville on a majestically sunny weekend in May.
PACT PERFORMANCES:
This year we tried something different with the work down at PACT; the season of shows was longer and had more performances. We treated it more like a traditional theatre than a space for Live Art performances. This gave the shows room to settle into the space and for word of mouth to spread around town before the shows were finished! Applespiel’s new show, Executive Stress/Corporate Retreat, was essentially a corporate skills development conference in the form of a performance; they investigated the hilarious and terrifyingly empty rhetoric of corporate motivational workshops, and built a show on that special kind of spin. It was an experience to participate in a performance like this. But, Applespiel’s show divided the audience in two: those who took part in the Elite Program and those who just watch. Those who take part in the Elite Program are involved in about 90% of the performance and those who watch can be as involved or as passive as they like. On opening night we had a pack of drunken hecklers who felt left out of the Elite Program. But on the second night, a small audience meant that there was no one else to heckle and all the audience was participating in the program. This show divided the audience in another way. Of the people I spoke to, those who participated in the Elite Program were thankful that they weren’t made to undertake tasks that were too traumatising and humiliating. Where as the passive spectators essentially wanted to see dancing monkeys; in other words, they were sometimes disappointed that Applespiel didn’t make the Elite Program participants work harder on the stage. This was the first outing of this great new show, on an important contemporary issue, hopefully it will get further air time around the traps in the coming year.
The second show in the double bill was Nat Randall’s Cheer Up Kid: four short, thematically linked monologues and four different characters (I’m counting the ‘Nat Randall’ character too!). A hybrid of devised performance, traditional character acting, and stand up comedy, this work had audiences crying with laughter and then almost crying. Plenty of people left the show saying it was both completely hilarious one of the saddest shows they’d ever seen. Randall’s performance explores, complicates and (I would say) critiques the distinction between being a child and being ‘childish’, and also by contrast being an adult and acting grown up. Randall has been testing these characters out around various performance mic nights, and this was the first time they all came together under the one neon sign. This work will be seen again around town, to be sure, and keep your eye out for it. One local artist declared ‘Everyone I know should be here seeing this tonight’. We would agree; it is a very clever and unique show.
Australia Council announced today their new Live Art touring initiative Hopscotch.
This pilot initiative supports national or international tours of innovative Australian live art. Your work must be tour-ready and you must have confirmed tour presentation spaces.
Objectives
This Australia Council initiative aims to increase national and international touring opportunities for Australian artists to:
extend the life of Australian live art works through touring
build knowledge, expertise and networks for touring live art
increase artists’ income levels and diversify their income streams
maximise visibility, audience knowledge and appreciation of Australian live art.
Scope
This fund provides support for the following activities:
one-offs – defined as one or a series of consecutive presentations of your work in the same city, town or presentation space
tours – defined as a series of at least three consecutive presentations of your work in three different cities, towns or presentation spaces.
You can apply for up to $10,000 to tour your live art work to presentation spaces which may be regional, interstate and/or overseas. Requested funds can be used for travel and freight costs only.
Background information
Live art is a term used to describe work in which artists explore the live experience of artistic processes, pushing conventions of theatre, performance art and site-specific work. It may also engage local communities and diverse audiences to develop, create and participate in the live event.
Recently the Australia Council has supported live art initiatives including the Visible City laboratory with the Melbourne Fringe festival, the P4 (Pilot) project with Performance Space, PICA and pvi collective, and the upcoming Live Art Cultural Leadership program with Field Theory and Performance Space.
This is an Australia Council Market Development initiative, in partnership with the Inter-Arts Office.
Arts Development
Market Development aims to increase the visibility and viability of Australian arts with programs and initiatives that complement the sector plans of the artform boards. It is responsible for:
connecting Australian art with markets and audiences, nationally and internationally
building knowledge via research and evaluation
strategic investment and initiatives to help artists reach their full potential.
Inter-Arts Office
Part of the Arts Funding division, Inter-Arts supports new artistic practice that does not fall within the existing funding guidelines of the artform boards. This includes creative processes such as interdisciplinary and hybrid arts, and experimental projects involving artists and practitioners from other fields.
When lala (live art list australia) started it felt like an important thing to do – something necessary in the ecology of those artists who as Jason Maling put so beautifully in his essay sit ‘in-between‘.
In recent times I have begun to wonder if this ‘live art’ thing is another fad, like the ‘locative media’/'tactical media’ fad of 4 years ago.
If you title something ‘live art’ will it get picked up by the Inter-Arts office? will it be seen as cool by visual artists who are sick of static installations and performance artists sick of the rigidity of the theatrical formula?
This is a pretty sobering thought, and considering the title of this weblog I am actually questioning my own existence.
After discussing this with some colleagues there were some pretty interesting comments ranging from “I am sick of the term, it is overused and no longer representative” to “I am glad there is a banner under which we can all stand”.
Both of these are actually true, some people need something to grip onto, they struggle with the idea that there can be an experience that you have to negotiate as you view it.
At the same time for both the Next Wave Festival and for Melbourne Fringe Festival these delineations are made by a combination of both staff members and artists, without a clear understanding of what live art is.
For artists such as Madeleine Hodge, Sarah Rodigari, pvi collective, Unreasonable Adults and Jason Maling who have all been a part of the live art scene in the UK and Europe it must feel very strange to be hear the term being bandied around so much here.
Personally in putting together lala (live art list australia), the question always with everything i do is ‘is this live art?’. Sometimes I don’t know, sometimes it is just a feeling, sometimes I look back at a work or an artist and think – that ain’t live art…
Perhaps like a lot of our food and coffee influences in Australia we have to accept that a replication of UK style live art is not realistic here and that the type of interdisciplinary, conceptually driven work that is happening here is not live art but antipodean live art. Just as we have taken in influences by the diasporas from Europe, Asia and Africa, so we also have done in contemporary art.
Influenced by the Japanese body methods that Sydney Front and Gravity Feed were using in the 1980′s, pushed by the injection of video and interactive media as well as Indonesian installation art in the 1990′s and fed by the explosion that has come out of PACT and Performance Space in Sydney and the Next Wave Festivals of Marcus Westbury and Jeff Khan, this antipodean live art scene is unlike any other in the world and perhaps I personally need to let go of the ‘looking to the UK’ for guidance in what we are doing and embrace this bulging scene as something that has its own journey.
Martyn Coutts
Martyn Coutts sometimes calls himself a Live Arts practitioner.
lala asked Melbourne based (via New Zealand) artist Jason Maling to explain just what he meant by Inbetweeness in terms of his practice.
In-betweeness
I was talking about love the other day. It was with a stranger. We had veered into the territory via a discussion about cutting the fat.
We spoke about defrauding someone, about not giving over. Do we demand a sign of love before we surrender? Without a sign, do we remain calculated and reserved? She wanted to be carried beyond all calculation, to arrive somewhere having never considered the journey.
I thought about this conversation a lot afterwards and I believe it has something to do with art.
The conversation took place in a small office on the second floor of a convent. She was there because a friend had told her to come. She did not know who I was or what I did, but she was there anyway. I was there because she had asked me.
It sounds contrived and from my point of view it was. What isn’t contrived is why I needed it to be that way.
It has occurred to me lately that I am no longer prepared to give myself away. I want a little of the big C(ommitment) before I subject myself to the big A (rt).
At what point did I become so demanding?
As an undergraduate painting student in New Zealand I was indoctrinated with modernist mythology. The artist functioned on the periphery of society, sending cryptic dispatches from frontier towns of the imagination. The act of presentation was sacred and a resolute nonchalance to audience dialogue was the preferred pose.
I tried very hard to be a believer. We joked about taking our vows with a prideful zeal and submitting to a life of impoverished isolation. I did my time in the studio and began developing a finely distorted vision of my own self-importance. I had gallery shows with things that people looked at but increasingly I found myself hanging around watching how people engaged with the work.
I made notes but kept my distance.
Frustration at a lack of direct feedback was too articulate a description for my naiveté at the time but I can remember feeling severely contained by a model that others found endlessly liberating.
I flirted with performance, and I did feel a little bit closer. The thrill of the live moment made me feel special but my audience was still over there somewhere, boxed up, and named.
Back in the studio I began nullifying my self-importance with banal repetitive tasks and arbitrary reasoning. My days became exercises in accidental aesthetics and punitive process. Why couldn’t just ‘doing’ be enough?
My rules weren’t playful they were belligerent. I demanded meaning, as if by sheer persistence I could elevate private action to social commentary. It made complete sense to me that if people were going to ‘get’ what I was doing they had to do it too.
A lack of willing ‘players’ as I so benignly called them simply reinforced my perception of a culturally ingrained passivity. A privilege of presentation over process.
I rationalised the conceptual sadism of my ‘games’ through my own subjugation – “look I’m going through it just like you”. I wanted people to give over completely. Sure, I was functioning in the same system but there was mostly just using and not much listening.
A particular schizophrenia had begun to set in. On the one hand I wanted an elegance of composition born of sensitivity to the potential nuances and infinitely variable elements within a system. On the other I longed for complete immersive disregard.
The notion that a meaningful live exchange might be something a lot more subtle and complex took a while to filter through.
Attempting to position the work somewhere between theatre and the visual arts began to feel like an excruciating family function.
On one side were the visual artists, all post-situationist ideologues and 70s conceptualists. They were a sulky lot, totally prepared to get naked and dirty. They put on records nobody liked and stared down any objections. On the other side of the family were the theatre makers. This crew were charming but I was never sure what was for real especially when they were telling me stories about really real reality.
Gallery audiences frowned at humour, thought far to hard about everything and kept their distance. Theatre audiences expected a show, obsessed about the text and always needed to be told what to do.
I was trying too hard to please disinterested parents. So I moved out, indignant about replacing a viewing box with some sort of magic circle of free play.
Of course nothing smells more like art than the anonymous public anomaly, especially if it has matching uniforms.
The idea that we can have unmediated artistic encounters maybe a pretension but it is often our most incidental interactions that relate us directly to our world.
Finding oneself within a set of conditions that become artistically meaningful without a set of prior expectations or contextual associations can be disorientating. The sensation of having fallen into something can leave us feeling foolish and a little manipulated. But it is precisely this mental state that becomes the platform of exchange. The tricky thing is that the artist needs to fall in there too.
I was looking for a mutual space that was fluid, dynamic and responsive with a shared sense of vulnerability. It needed to be both presentation and process at the same time and it wasn’t necessary to be aware of ‘the work” or even consider it art.
It’s messy and complicated. It’s not you it’s me. Didn’t Saul Bellow say any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately?
It’s an in-between space. Somewhere we are happy to be lost.
Having spent years making claims for my practice in the margins of visual art and theatre funding categories. I now find myself in the curious position of arguing its Inter, Hybrid, Community, or New Media worthiness. In-betweeness has become a category and categories require definition, hence the evolution of terms like participation, agency, and interactivity. These words outline an interdependent relationship between the artist, the work and for want of a better term, the audience. But what if by trying desperately to acknowledge and define in-betweeness we are making it harder for it to exist? Like too much personal information on a dating website.
The nature of being in-between requires us to step away from the edges that define it as one thing or another. The fear is that we no longer know where we are yet that fear is vital for the development of new forms of artistic exchange.
I believe many of my contemporaries would argue that their work is determined by the conceptual necessities of generating this mysterious in-between space. They are tired of audience relationships that feel like one night stands. Forgive us if we have evolved some convoluted strategies for falling in love.
Gifts, games, tricks on trains, everybody hates audience participation yet we still love to play. Does creating an in-between space have something to do with how we enter it and negotiate a relationship rather than predetermining it with roles?
In the Japanese martial art of Aikido there is the notion of blending. The energy of an attack is not countered it is utilized. For an Aikido practitioner to successfully execute a technique they must receive a committed attack. An attack is the willing gift of energy that allows both practitioner and attacker to gain an understanding through mutual movement. If there is no energy given there can be no blending. If that energy is hesitant or doubtful the practitioner has nothing from which to generate the movement and the art becomes meaningless.
So yes I am demanding. Perhaps I need to be.
If I’m going to be in this space I need you here with me and if it’s going to matter it’s got to be true love.
Jason Maling is a Melbourne based artist currently engaged in a three year process as The Vorticist. www.thevorticist.com
lala invited Suzanne Kersten of bettybooke to interview director and
performance-maker Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy about three live art events she has created in 2009.
Suzanne – Hi Katerina, can you tell me a bit about your relationship with live art, and some of the work you’ve made this year?
Katerina – I’ve been intrigued by live art for a long time but didn’t consider myself a ‘live artist’ until recently. Having said that, I’ve always considered the meeting with the audience as the central ‘event’ of my work. I also value ‘unfinished’ or provisional work for its permeability – like a garment with its seams showing, a kind of rough draft that seems to hold the possibility of an unpredictable encounter rather than being a closed system. I think that’s probably the essence of live art for me. At the VCA I made a number of small works that played with this indeterminate zone between theatre (as we normally understand it) and encounter – in which the structure of the piece and the performers allowed themselves, their tasks, to be interrupted and influenced by what happened with the audience. So some of these interests are 15 years old. But the big shift occurred recently – in 2006 when I collaborated with you and bettybooke to create an audience-interactive work that embraced a fictive text, improvisation, and performer/audience conversations within a series of encounter-options. This represented a conscious break from the text-based work I was trained in. I’m also fascinated by the dramaturgical challenges posed by live art. How to design an event in order to cue the audience into the ‘game’ and the possible options that a moment, their choices or their interventions might allow for. This ‘second-guessing’ on behalf of the audience is a bit like locking yourself inside a cupboard and trying to work your way out from the inside – it’s crazier than directing a play that’s for sure. So the problem-solving aspect of live art can seem even more intense than directing (if that’s possible) because the constant to and fro of making the event and slipping into the event as a pseudo-participant are so vital to the development and success of the work in terms of designing the audience’s journey. This year I’ve been involved in making three works; 1. My Masters work, The House Project – which was a re-mix of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler using live art, solo performance and feminist perspectives as key strategies; 2. As a dramaturg & performance consultant on Tamara Searle’s project in the absence of sunlight for Melbourne Fringe 09, a solo performer and solo spectator piece, and; 3. Once, a prototype live art work that I’m developing for Punctum’s live art In Habit residency at the Abbotsford Convent in February 2010.
Suzanne – OK, can you say a little about each one?
Katerina – The House Project was informed by the question of how to take an inherently radical work that’s been made bland by a century of BBC costume-drama-style approaches. And this is not a fixed position by the way, it’s not an either/or situation, because I know that realism and naturalism can deliver profound results in the theatre – but it’s more about how I see myself as a different kind of audience member. I want to experience things differently – as do many others – hence the rise and rise of interactivity. So my intention was to turn up the volume regarding Hedda’s representation as a monstrous, bad, mad woman. I wanted to find a way of re-engaging audiences with this woman in a way that would not easily allow them to distance themselves from her, or be able to say, ‘that’s not me’. I hired a house in Hawthorn and I worked with 18 young trainee-performers to create a work. It had three parts: In part one the audience of (28 – 35) came to the house in which a party was in full swing; lounge music, canapés, wine, and lots of talking etc. They were then taken ‘under the wing’ of a performer-guide (one of the 18 Heddas) and told a version of the story from the perspective of this performer. In addition their performer-guide confessed aspects of their personal misdemeanours/transgressions (thematically linked to Hedda’s); such as the betrayal of a lover, a moment of revenge etc. The audience members were also asked personal questions in this extended conversation that I termed, The Intimate Welcome. In part two the audience was led in smaller groups (of 4-5) throughout the 7 rooms (installations) in which a different aspect of Hedda’s nature was explored; some of these ‘Hedda portraits’ within the Hedda portrait gallery were more interactive than others but in essence each event was open to the audience’s involvement. The work concluded with a coda (part three) in which we hosted a brief game-show-style Q&A session where audience members were encouraged to ask and to answer questions that were revealing and confronting (once again based on Hedda’s actions in the play). A couple of examples being; ‘Have you ever destroyed something precious to someone else?’ and ‘Have you ever slept with someone you didn’t love, or even like?’
Suzanne – Where did the idea originally come from?
Katerina – It evolved out of my research and out of my interest in combining live art practice with a textual influence & that doesn’t occur a lot. But it came from my desire to minimise the distance audiences can feel in relation to a canonic text/character such as Hedda Gabler by transforming the play into an event. I was struck by Tim Etchells’ comment that for him ‘the text is the event’ or something like that. One of the things that interests and inspires me is this idea that we’re changing; that human beings are changing their composition. Again, I don’t want to generalise, but I do think that we want, even crave engagement. Sometimes I wonder if this could be a response to, or a rebellion against, the loss of time/intimacy/engagement in aspects of our lives. It may well be a reaction to the moves we’ve made towards/into technology/anonymity and to the specific forms of isolation that can generate. I actually vividly recall a world without the net! And that amazes me. Can you remember life without it? That’s weird because it’s so very recent; something that entered the mainstream culture about 10 years ago is now almost impossible to imagine living without. So the short answer is – although I love words, poetry and form – I think I love relationships more. My passion for interaction and dialogue is related to my shift towards live art.
Suzanne – What responses have you had to the work you’ve made?
Katerina – Many and various, ranging anywhere from audiences being excited, moved, confronted, offended or bored.
Suzanne – What do you attribute these responses to?
Katerina – A few things: For one, I think that some people come to a performance event essentially open to that event, i.e. not hankering after something else or wanting something to conform to a set of predetermined rules, aesthetics, etc. I had assumed, especially in a live art context that that would mostly be the case. Of course it isn’t the case and so there have been many responses. This is one of the reasons I have been really excited about the lala blog – it’s so valuable to have a forum where people can find out about live art events, have a chance to discuss works, to respond to posts, do interviews etc. I’m a bit over the notion of The Critic, partly because we have so few informed and intelligent performance critics. I’d love to institute a code of ethics whereby if you haven’t made a performance you can’t write about one. That’s an Ariane Mnoushkine quote and I love it. It seems particularly important for an art form like live art to encourage and foster conditions for good writing; thoughtful, informed and engaged writing. The opposite of ‘how clever am I’ writing; the sort of critique that is curious, rigorous and perspicacious.
With in the absence of sunlight, what were the challenges of creating and performing a work for just one viewer? I mean is that even an audience?
I’m not sure I’m happy you asked that. The short answer is billions of tiny issues arising constantly and still arising. In 2008 Tamara Searle generated the concept, text and first version of the work using a short story by Marjorie Barnard. We had a Punctum seedpod in June this year and I was there as a dramaturg and for performance feedback. For a small work I have to say it was a total time pig. I’m sure our friends were heartily sick of hearing about the endless tweaking of this miniature work. But in having a constant flow of conversation; ‘yes, but’ and ‘do you think?’ and ‘maybe we could…’ Tamara, Xan Colman and I were able to keep refining what was a difficult and challenging performance experiment. It took up an inordinate amount of time in terms of the second-guessing I mentioned before – of constantly putting ourselves in the place of the participant, of working those issues over and over again. But at the same time it was fascinating and engrossing. I realised at one point that we weren’t setting out to make a work for ‘people like us’ (because let’s face it we’re pretty weird) but rather the person who enjoys going to see something different. I think a lot of performance-makers (myself included) can be a total pain in the a*** to make work for, but your curious punter off-the-street (whoever that may be) can get real pleasure from something that we might otherwise criticise into oblivion. That always gives me pause.
Suzanne – What inspires you to make this kind of ephemeral, interactive work?
Katerina – I love people and I love audiences; it’s a very daggy thing to say but it’s true. I’m in awe of people’s capacity to remain open to the beauty and strangeness of life. That’s the kind of person I make my work for, that’s my ‘target audience’ – I loathe that term but I’m happy to use it to say that. When I make a work I’m often struck by the resistance of some participants but I must say – my faith in human nature is always restored by those who are open to engaging with what they don’t understand, don’t like or don’t even feel comfortable with. I think some people have the capacity to dream along with you, whilst others will fight you to the very end.
Is audience-interactivity and permeability of form, likely to remain your focus in terms of future projects?
Absolutely. At this very moment I can say that I’m very bored by notions of acting; that could change of course. I’m capricious. And I’ll admit that Shakespeare could always tempt me – somewhere in the back lot of ‘my ideas for projects’ there’s this plan hatching to do the Bard alla Forced Entertainment. I mean how perverse and gorgeous and awful could that be? But in the meantime I plan on making events for and with people. Events that might help to remind us of what’s important – of what we might miss if we get too caught up with unrealities.
It is interesting to see that the Melbourne Fringe Festival, a Festival that Creative Producer Emily Sexton is calling an ‘Open Access’ Festival has delivered a new live art category. I was intrigued that a large and uncurated festival had such a thing.
As the Festival launched this morning I was interested to hear what were the reasons behind this – here is an interview with Emily taken before the launch;
lala:Hi there, I know you are about to launch the Melbourne Fringe Festival program and you are beyond busy so its nice that you could do this for lala. I am interested in this years program and the live art feel that has permeated the Fringe, can you tell us a bit about the Fringe events that you have partnered with or have championed for 2009?
ES: It’s an interesting question from a number of perspectives. Introducing a live art category into the Festival this year has raised a number of questions in my head about the process of categorisation itself; at what point it occurs, what value it has for artists and what value it has for our artforms. Obviously it’s partly a marketing decision (“where will my audience look for my work in the Festival Guide?”); but it is also a decision that affects future professional development opportunities, because artists are selected for awards based on the category they choose to be part of. I recently attended a talk by China Mielville, who falls within a genre of fiction called “New Weird” (it’s a great term). He’s a Marxist who writes part science fiction – part fantasy – part dystopia – etc. He noted that the human brain is a machine, and it’s in its nature to loosely categorise. He suggested that as literature evolves and borrows from many different traditions, there have been a number of people who have sought to categorise literature not according to genre, but rather as “good” or “bad” – likewise we could think of live art (because it is here that some of the most interesting cross-artform discoveries are made) as just “good live art” – “or bad live art.” He disagreed with this statement; that to categorise hierarchically is a mistake, and the expectation of audiences to wade through the thousands of works deemed ‘good’ is also unreasonable. I really like this approach.
So – for the benefit of audiences, for the benefit of the shape of the Festival, for the benefit of the artists in our Live Art category – I called it, and our Live Art category was born. What is challenging is that of course, the ideas and concepts that drive live art as a practice have circulated and existed for many years in Australia, driven by a number of vital institutions – particularly Performance Space, but also PVI Collective and the Judith Wright Centre as well. Real Time as a publication has been very important too. So whilst this is a new category of art within my 2009 Festival – and we are one of the first major Festivals to showcase work in this way – the artform itself is by no means new.
It’s important to note however that for the majority of people encountering my Festival, it is new. And perhaps the live art practice in Australia has emerged to point where in 2009, we can confidently categorise works as such.
There’s six works in this year’s Festival that I would classify as live art. Not surprisingly, they differ widely, coming from dance, visual art, theatre and sound backgrounds.
We are co-producing a major public performance intervention in TAKE OFF YOUR SKIN (TOYS), with WELL and Full Tilt at the Arts Centre. Inspired by Yasuko Kurono, the work will see 100 clones of Yasuko quietly and beautifully infiltrate the streets of Melbourne, culminating in a mass clone explosion on St Kilda Rd. It’s a very interesting work. Then there’s Willoh S Weiland’s The Mapping Room; eight different artists and arts collectives will be mapping the Festival and its participants from intriguing perspectives, producing an evolving installation throughout the Festival. The Betty Booke are back again (is that a song? It should be.) – which makes me very happy. Their work en route promises to be yet another sophisticated iteration from this collective of very intelligent practitioners; it’s a series of audio tours throughout Melbourne’s cafes and laneways that act as an aural soundscape and intervention into any casual city scene you may encounter. 24003 is a mobile performance venue produced by Dan Koop, Thomas Henning of the Black Lung, and two designers/landscape architects. They’ve created a durational performance that includes the evolution of a built space – it’s happening alongside our opening and closing night events, and should be quite extraordinary. Then there’s Letters to Isaac, a poly-platformed text-based work in which audience members sign up to receive a short letter each day of the Festival, via a range of technological mediums, culminating in a secret live performance event on the Festival’s last weekend. Lastly, I’m really looking forward to hosting the Sydney-based quartet Tiger Two Times at our Fringe Hub, and their work Nature League in North Melbourne, an installative green-house that you’ll have to see to believe!
lala: Do you think it is difficult to pin down what live art is? and are you aware of the context it sits in or is it more aligned to work you are interested in?
ES: Personally, the writings of Joshua Sofaer have been very useful for me in pinning down this area of art-making. I guess it is difficult to pin down to a degree because ultimately it’s a mistake to consider it an artform; as I’ve said above, live art works are made by dancers, by theatre-makers, by animateurs, by visual artists, by sound artists… for this reason it’s more useful to think of the works collectively as those that are interested in ‘liveness.’
I am acutely aware of the context of this work; and it’s aligned to what I personally am interested in! Increasingly so. I have been hugely stimulated this year in collaborating with the live arts collective GAMESHOW (with Clair Korobacz, Olivia Crang, Tristan Meecham and your fine self, Marty Coutts). I am very keen to create work with people that is thoroughly researched and rigorously informed, but also is more interested in structures, constraints and conceptual drivers than in achieving a specific outcome. I am also very bored by Acting, particularly my own Acting. So it’s nice to perform but with only arguments, rules and structures in mind – rather than “character.” I find the process liberating and very intellectually engaging. It also flows nicely from training I did with the SITI Company in late 2007.
lala:I know you made a work called Lulu vs Jack the Ripper which was a durational performance installation that asked different things of the audience/performer transaction – is this the type of work you would be making now if you didn’t have a massive festival to run?
ES: Possibly, yes. Lulu vs Jack the Ripper was a dance, text, sculptural and video installation staged by Kumquat Theatre as part of the 2007 Melbourne Fringe Festival. We had over 20 performers, male and female, each dressed as modern iterations of Louise Brooks, or Lulu. It was fascinating to stage what was very experimental work in the context of the Fringe Festival, as we drew over 700 audience members over six shows – exposing many of them to a type of art they had not known before.
Massive Festival is correct; 314 shows in 2009. Yikes!
lala:How do you see live art developing in Melbourne and what is the future for programming/curating it for a Festival like Fringe?
ES: We are currently developing a major live arts project as part of our 2010 Festival, that will focus on the future of the artform in Australia, and quite deliberately expose discussions about the artform’s evolution into the wider public sphere. It should be a lot of fun, and as is ideal for a Festival context, gather a number of key practitioners into Melbourne to look across and witness each other’s work.
And that’s all I will say about that at this point!
Regarding live art’s future within this Festival: I’d say that the beauty of an open-access Festival is the immediate representation and response to current artistic trends. My approach to this Festival’s shape and direction is underpinned by the philosophy that a healthy independent arts ecology requires a combination of freedom and provocation. Independent artists, operating and creating freely without the constraint of a theme or the wait to be curated, should determine, lead and shape contemporary culture. It should not be bureaucrats, administrators, venue managers nor any other kind of gatekeeper that collectively decide what’s vital for audiences to hear or see. At the same time, artists also need provocation: to be introduced to new concepts, exposed to artists and practices they may not have encountered previously. The arts sector more broadly requires a similar approach; although that provocation can come in the form of celebrations or highlights of certain artforms – which is what we will do with our live arts initiative in 2010. I think that open-access Festivals like Fringe are absolutely essential to the ongoing vitality of our arts community and artistic output – I think they go hand-in-hand with what makes Melbourne a great artistic city. So open-access Festivals are one of the best opportunities then to see what shapes, trends and forms our contemporary practice currently takes; as is the case in 2009 with our live art category.
lala:Thanks so much and good luck with the launch on September 1.
ES: No worries Martyn, thanks for facilitating this discussion, it’s very important! If anyone on the lala list has thoughts on any of the above, I’d love to hear from you. I can be contacted via emily@melbournefringe.com.au.
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