Arts House Season One – 2012

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.

Arts House Season One 2012

Who Needs Live Art. An ongoing rant.

Preface.

Barry Laing delivered the article below live in an abbreviated form during a recent public forum called “Who Needs Live Art”. The forum was hosted by Field Theory and took place in the Supper Room at Arts House on August 31st. It grew out of what appears to be a growing desire amongst ‘cross discipline’ Melbourne artists to gather and critically discuss contemporary practice. The title and the function of the forum was intended both as a provocation and a genuine question. Who are we, what do we need and what form should a gathering of this kind take?

The event was attended by approximately 40 people and included a participatory development showing of Strange Passions by Triage as well as Barry Laing’s presentation and much robust discussion. It is hoped that the connections and energy generated by the forum will evolve into an ongoing process.

Jason Maling.

Who Needs Live Art?

from Notes Towards a Collective Rant offered as a spoken provocation by Barry Laing at Field Theory’s Excursion #2, 31st August 2011, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne.

Tonight’s event is titled Who Needs Live Art? On the LALA website, it is also promoted as an ‘Excursion’. To ‘excur’ might habitually mean to wander, digress, run off and escape from bounds. To participate in an excursion might be to linger upon a deviation from a clear and definite path. I intend to wander in order to stay ‘live’ and the performance maker in me suspects that any ‘clear and definite path’ is anyway always and already provisional, and so I’m not sure yet what I might be deviating from. I have no intention of running off – unless you try to hurt me. Really. And so I’m left with an attempt to ‘escape from bounds’…

Who needs Live Art? Escape Artists.

This question ‘Who Needs Live Art?’ troubled me initially. Not sure why. ‘Cause I thought ‘I get it’, the thrust of it. Maybe it’s because it ‘gets me’, catches me, frames me, binds me up. Maybe because it is not mine. I wanted to squirm out of it.

In a piece called ‘A Conversation: What is it? What is it for?’[i], the philosopher Gilles Deleuze says:

Questions are invented, like anything else. If you aren’t allowed to invent your own questions, from never mind where, if people ‘pose’ them to you, you haven’t much to say. […] Objections are even worse. Objections never contributed anything. It’s the same when I am asked a general question. The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it. Many people think that it is only by going back over the question that it is possible to get out of it. But getting out never happens like that…

For example, borrowing from Deleuze, and transposing ‘Live Art’ for ‘philosophy’: ‘What is the position with Live Art? Is it really ‘live’? Isn’t it mediated and mediating like everything else?’ Deleuze says this is “very trying”.

So, OK, if ‘getting out of it’ doesn’t happen like that, how does it happen? Because I like to think of myself as a bit of a contrarian, I’m going to try and escape from bounds, to get out of it, by ‘answering’ the question anyway, but while I’m doing that verbally, I’ll be thinking of another question (which I’ll return to later) and so my ‘answers’ won’t really be answers, but playful and serious offerings of things at stake in a conversation about Live Art.

So who needs Live Art? Escape Artists.

There are plenty of ‘takes’ or emphases possible in the question Who Needs Live Art?:
Who needs ‘Live Art’?
Who needs Live Art? (who is here, even, who is the process for [ie. this Salon], why?)
Who needs (to call it) ‘Live Art’?

So, Live Art, names, definitions, categories – I’ll let you wander between the possible meanings above, I’m going to keep moving …

Who Needs Live Art/names, definitions and categories – who needs ‘em?

Conscientious Objectors and No-one. We’ve heard from my good friend Deleuze on ‘questions’ and ‘objections’ … the thing is to get out of it … questions, categories…of others, left with nothing to say …So, the thing is to invent one’s own categories and questions, from wherever.  Is Live Art a ‘wherever’? Is it our ‘own’? Or does it constitute other people’s questions and objections in the form of art (and there’s plenty in this notion here …in understanding, perhaps, what Live Art was/is in part – the contrariness of refusing other people’s categories and questions)? If it is, or if it does, who needs it? Either way, Conscientious Objectors. Following Deleuze then, that’s No-one, apparently (‘cause objection never contributed anything). And yet the dilemma of ‘inventing one’s own questions from wherever’ remains. Who Needs Live Art? Conscientious Objectors and No-one.

Live Art/Names, definitions, categories … who needs ‘em?

Name Callers (and Their Enemies), that’s who.

I’ve been thinking about the proposition: a dramaturgy, any dramaturgy, imagines its audience/spectators/witnesses/participants (and even, here these four words imagine different dramaturgies and beg the question). Think of ‘dramaturgy’ as all that which concerns the ‘world’, circumstance or situation of an artwork, event, performance or Live Art work.

An Email Exchange on the SCUDD[ii] List (The Standing Conference of University Drama Departments – UK):

“What Knowledge is Here?”
23 March – 24 March, 2009
Simon Piasecki (S.Piasecki@LEEDSMET.AC.UK)

What Knowledge is Here?

At dawn on Saturday 28th March, Simon Piasecki will drag Robert Wilsmore down all 199 steps from Whitby Abbey, in their first collaborative performance for a decade. This action will be documented by Peter Morton and Richard Molony.

Insomniacs and curious bystanders are welcome.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and say – that’s VERY ‘LIVE ART’!

McDowell, Wallace (W.B.McDowell@WARWICK.AC.UK)

Well, whoop-dee-do, for fuck’s sake. Will the dragee be taken head or feet first? Doubtless the next edition of ‘An introduction to Performance head injuries’ will provide the answer.

Dr Wallace McDowell
Theatre Studies
University of Warwick

Simon Piasecki (S.Piasecki@LEEDSMET.AC.UK)

I’m sorry Dr Wallace we’ll write a little play about it afterwards with
lots of witty, offensive language for you to enjoy. For future reference,
please note I have a private email address as well.

Best wishes,
Simon Piasecki.
Course Leader BA Hons Art, Event, Performance
Senior Lecturer in Performance Practice
Leeds Metropolitan University

Indeed, ‘What Knowledge is Here?’ Clearly Dr Wallace is neither an insomniac nor curious bystander. Likewise, he is perhaps not imagined as audience/spectator/witness/participant by Piasecki and Wilsmore.  And so, we could also say, a dramaturgy imagines its enemies, its Other/s, it oppositions.

In case you thought name callers and their enemies only ‘went hard’ in the Academy, consider this from the current edition of Realtime[iii]:

Oscar Redding and Jonathan Auf der Heide are adamant. The only social value of their work is as a useful corrective. “As far as mainstream content goes” Redding says, “it seems that there’s a lot of thought given to presenting material which isn’t offensive. But I’d rather stab myself in the cock with a sharp fork than sit through another play by Joanna Murray-Smith or Tony McNamara”.

Ouch. A couple of names called as ‘useful correctives’ there! Friends? Enemies? Is Oscar ‘Live Art?’ A ‘hater’? Or is he just not particularly fond of theatre?

At least where cock-stabbing is concerned, performance artist, poet and super-masochist Bob Flannagan got there before him, notoriously driving a nail through his penis into a block of wood – as performance.

Ouch. “Why would you do that?!” I can still hear the cringey, whiney exclamations of students of mine perhaps habitually more familiar and comfortable with Murray-Smith’s work than with Bob’s or Redding’s. (Why is that?)

But what was Flanagan doing and why would you do that? Was it called ‘Live Art’ then? Did he need it?

Read his answer to these questions with his performance poem staged as the answer to a question, called ‘Why?’[iv]

Live Art/names, definitions, categories … who needs ‘em? Name Callers and Their Enemies and People who Don’t Mind their Questions Answered with a Question.

Live Art. Who needs it?

Resistance Fighters. James Hillman and I (we’re like that) have argued that in the context of theatre and performance, wherever there is resistance, there is ‘body’ – as in a good red wine. Mmtwuh!  A ‘something’ to push against, resistance, body: within theatre and performance and between ‘Theatre’ and other forms in order that ‘Not-Theatre’ might be given a name. Live Art, anyone? Guillermo Gomez Pena resists in his ‘In Defence of Performance Art’[v]. Not quite Live Art, is it? Or is it? But an art nevertheless full of body, politics, contrary forms and a resistant ‘dramaturgy’ as ‘world view’. I commend to you a terrible piece of ‘Theatre’ and an exemplary piece of ‘Performance Art’ – Gomez Pena’s and Coco Fusco’s Couple in the Cage. Who resists? Who resists what? How? With Performance Art? ‘So yesterday’! With Live Art?  With ‘new’ dramaturgies eg., of the body, of the audience/spectator/witness, of participation, of the everyday, of the amateur (as opposed to the brittle righteousness and self-satisfaction of ‘the professional’ – shit, sorry …am I name calling?!), of place, site, participation, and of the event? Is Live Art the ‘body’ born of these ‘new’ dramaturgies? Born of resistance? Is it the conceptual ‘head’, now, of a series of resistances? Who needs it? Resistance Fighters. Are we?

Who else …?

Academics, Pedagogues, Grant Applicants and Funding Bodies. In other words, Art Industrialists and Knowledge Brokers (and yet aren’t industry, commerce and academic institutions precisely some of what the resistance is all about/forged in opposition to? Wait a minute. Aren’t they our friends? Don’t we make Culture together? Hang on. Are these our questions?).

Yet it’s not all about or even simply a question of ‘oppositions’, but of politics, in the foundational sense of the ‘polis’, and the problem of a polis reduced to the contestations and negotiations, questions and answers and objections, no less, of people otherwise unilaterally grouped together who don’t seem to like each other much. It is a question of how to be here, now, on our own terms, speaking and stuttering and offending and fucking up in our own languages – not those of dead artists or anyone else (except the dead philosopher Deleuze and the dead artist Flanagan, ‘cause they’re my friends). Who’s the ‘us’? Who’s the ‘who’? People. Here. Now. This loner and that family …me and you …us and them …all of the others. In all of this, who needs the name, the definition, the category of Live Art? Do Art Industrialists? – that people might be processed (oh dear, again?), returned to economy, capital and industry that ostensibly also produces ‘Culture’, all the while concealing the means of production. Do Institutionalized Knowledge Brokers need the name, the categories, the definitions of Live Art that, under the guise of ‘new and original contributions to knowledge’ in captial R- Research cultures, the mechanisms of returning dollars to Universities as investment in Research can be enacted as economies of scale? And who needs these guys? Perhaps Live Artists as Grant Applicants and Live Artists as Artist-Researchers need them and the identifier ‘Live Art’ for the same purposes? Hmmm … Excellent! K-ching, k-ching! (Call me cynical. I prefer skeptical.)

Live Art. Who needs it?

I think I mentioned Loners and Family-makers. Have you noticed there’s a lot of solo artists doing Live Art? Very suspect. Loners. Not team players. Then again, groups and collaborations abound. Who’s in the family and who’s not? Gary Winters of Lone Twin, clad inappropriately in an army surplus poncho and hiking shoes, various paraphernalia including a Norwegian hunting horn and a clipboard slung around his neck, spends much of one performance with vertical rows of lights one foot away, sweating profusely, performing a rain dance that looks like dog-paddle standing up. “This is what I do to feel a part of things”, he says. Waddya reckon, a bit whiffy? In or out? What about Tacquacore, hardcore Muslim Punk artists and their fans born of an original fiction in a novel? ‘Family’ mismatch? Mike Parr sewing his lips together in solidarity with asylum seekers. Resistant Live Art political activist? Or just a wanker? I received another SCUDD email this morning, like an exorcet into the hull of my email inbox – a press release for Daniel Ploeger’s Electrode 2011 – in which Ploeger fakes the orgasm of an anonymous subject while an anal probe connected to a muscle sensor registers the activity of Ploeger’s sphincter muscle. The performance installation forms part of Ploeger’s Doctoral research project. A dirty cousin or just a very strange man, likeable, but strange? What of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s claim that the events of 9/11 were “the greatest work of art for the entire cosmos”[vi]. 9/11 as ‘Live Art’ at the limits? Live Art, who needs it? Those having 10 Year Anniversaries – lest we forget. Is Stockhausen in? The Terrorists? Who’s in the family? Yoko Ono and her scissors? Marina Abramovic and her knives and guns? Franko B with his catheter plugs in arms for release of blood using his own body to excur, to escape from the bounds of the body? The lonely, solitary, always moving Claire Blundell Jones introducing tumbleweed into British landscapes with a leaf blower? Gob Squad? Francis Alys? Robert Long? Mother and family-maker Mierle Laderman Ukeles as self appointed Artist in Residence for the New York Sanitation Department? Before Ukeles, perhaps no-one had ever thought of the question ‘Do Sanitation Workers Need Live Art?’ It was her question, she answered it – with art, with performance, with political activism all imbricated, entangled together and continuing until this day…

Who needs Live Art? Loners and Family Makers.

Who Else?

Cheapskates and Amateurs. One reason Lone Twin use walking as their primary modus operandi in performance is because it’s cheap. Accessible. Anyone can do it. It’s free. Sarah Rodigari, walking from Melbourne to Sydney in her faux epic Strategies for Leaving and Arriving Home, understands. Anyone know Rodigari…? You see, cheapskate. Despite the extremely arduous nature of these artists’ work, none of them train. Gregg Whelan (Lone Twin) likes a good lie down when he’s not working and Rodigari once scolded me while working on a creative development for a show with “Training’s for pussies!” How unprofessional!

And then there’s Liars and Dissemblers. Live Art has acquired a reputation somehow of being more ‘authentic’ than theatre and other forms of spectacle. But anyone who has paid any attention at all to the extended family and various lineages knows, perhaps uncomfortably, that Live Art and live artists are just as adept in the art of lying as their estranged illusionist ‘others’, the ones they call names, their imagined enemies. I’m going to lean on Alan Read here[vii], dissembler that he is, ‘cause then he’ll appear to provide an ‘answer’, I get to wiggle out of it and look good by association – I’m such a schmoozer – or bad, depending on your own ‘take’ and objections (remember, they’ll never contribute anything). Read points out that “‘live’ has ‘lie’ within it” and that there’s no greater veracity in Live Art’s claims to ‘truth’ and authenticity than other forms of cultural banditry that deceive in their very capacity to construe the already fabricated world of ‘live culture’ as the (real) ‘true world’. When Live Art claims the title of authenticity, is it more deadly than the dead art it seeks to usurp? Why claim the title when ‘the true’, under this regime, might for all appearances attain little but the same status as ‘the dead’? What image do we have of ourselves that we speak so urgently of ‘truth’? Lying’s more fun, and anyway, argues Read, “the truth is the raison d’etre of the university, not the artist, and live artists in particular should feel no compunction to walk under this sign”. Friends? Enemies? Practice-as Research, anyone? Read turns to the notion of the human and “the promised” and the slippery proposition that “the lies of performance perjury performance” – and herein lies its ‘promise’. We love swearing/promising the truth (eg. in court, in the theatre, to a loved one), and have great pleasure in the pseudo secret knowledge that we will do no such thing, that ‘the ‘promise’ is always already broken, that through playing here at the interstice of truth and lies, we ‘perform promise’. The per of performance carries things through to temporary completion. A living art may convulse the deadly imaginal, political, ideological and aesthetic fields that dead artists inhabit and an alternative might just emerge: born of lies that take exception to the surface of too easily acquired truths; born of the promise of human potential and “impotential”, born even of human failures. Alan Read, Tim Etchells and Matthew Gouish (The Institute of Failure) and a plethora of others understand this major trope in Live Art and performance. What are the limits to action beyond the incumbent conventions of art and culture? What is there to discover in the relationship between “the ‘can’ of performance and the ‘cannot’ of the performer?”

Alan Read argues that what distinguishes Live Art is its exceptionality. He says, “Live Art is barely live and barely art” and is of the order, necessarily, of “exceptional acts in cultures that are constantly concealing their own conditions of production”. So, Live Art as resistant to cultures that “consume themselves” – ie., self-devouring cultures, deadening, deadly and finally dead. Read segues easily between ‘Live Art’ and ‘Performance’. Performance, he suggests, doesn’t “stand (in) for” anything else, unlike a long history of doing so by drama and theatre. It is simultaneous, commensurate with itself, here, and now, without “alibi”, no suspension of disbelief required. If it doesn’t ‘stand in for’ or point to an elsewhere, what does it do? What kind of doing is it capable of? What not? What kind of politics, asks Read (I’m squirming out of it – politics is so un-sexy), does Live Art do? He invokes and extends body discourse in suggesting that it is “auto-biographical” and “bio-political” – not ‘about’ ‘The Body’, but of the body-politic and simultaneously in exception to it. In cultural climates that would do away with exception, “the necessary conditions for Live Art to occur are the arrangement and rearrangement of resistances to conditions of dead art that would otherwise prevail”. Live Art needs Resistance Fighters. I think of a history of Live Art evolving in the UK in the shadow of Thatcher. Here, now, in the wake of the Howard years, what is the name we might give to a parallel evolution?

Who needs Live Art? I’m sick of this question. Should we otherwise say, with Read, ‘performance’? Performance enacted by Liars and Dissemblers and Those Who Make Promises.

Shit. I think my questions, and categories, and calling of names and objections are starting to leak, to signal what I would otherwise answer to the Salon question if I were to proceed sincerely, seriously … as if I was not implicated, as if I was not always and already caught up in this thing called ‘performance’ – if not Live Art – where the telling of lies in face of clear and present tyrannies may just be the means of getting at some possible and promising truths.

Who needs Live Art? Listmakers.

Escape Artists
Conscientious Objectors and No-one
Name Callers and Their Enemies
People who Don’t Mind their Questions Answered with a Question
Resistance Fighters
Art Industrialists
Institutionalized Knowledge Brokers
Live Artists as Grant Applicants
Live Artists as Artist-Researchers
Loners and Family-makers
Cheapskates and Amateurs
Liars and Dissemblers
Those Who Make Promises
Did I mention Listmakers

Now, my ‘secret’ unspeakable question (lest it become a question not of your own invention)?

‘How might we have a conversation and not a series of questions, answers and objections?’

© Barry Laing 2011 geeuphorsey@hotmail.com

Excursion #3 – Dance Dialogue

LALA invites you to take part in a meeting of minds.

Lucy Guerin Inc. hosts a night of work called First Run. This night is for dance work or movement-based practice being developed to be shown and then discussed by an interested audience. First Run is hosted by Brooke Stamp and Luke George.

First Run is a bi – monthly event, hosted by Lucy Guerin Inc inviting artists working in and across the field of contemporary dance to share new explorations in their current practice. Performances could involve a segment from a work in development or an investigation into a particular working method, (such as solo practice, improvisation, collaboration or dance on film). The intention is that the work shown is rough, raw, full of possibilities and open for discussion from which it may develop.

LALA will lead an excursion to First Run to view the work and also take part in the discussions afterwards.

LALA is interested in the ability for work to be discussed with criticality whether the viewer has the experience in the particular artform. How can we view work when we are not educated in the specifics of it? What does that do to the nature of feedback and critique? How can we continue to open out the dialogue around practice so that it can be accessible? Or does the nature of developing work mean you need to shutter yourself inwards?

TIME: OCT 3, 2011, 6.30pm
PLACE: Lucy Guerrin Inc. Studios, 14 Batman Street, West Melbourne, Victoria
RSVP: hey@lalaishere.net

This Dance Dialogue is a part of Excursions, a collaboration between Performance Space in Sydney and LALA.

Entertainment is Not a Dirty Word

Hey Bron, You are about to premiere you new show that includes your parents as performers. What was the impetus for this work? What are some of the processes you use working with non-artists?

The idea for this work really started when my company The Last Tuesday Society staged an interpretation of Nick Enright’s play Blackrock. I chose a section of the script that dealt with the immediate aftermath of the rape and murder of one of the characters and recorded my parents reading it on camera. Initially I was interested in how the interpretation and literal content of the dialogue changes when you place the words of teenage rapists into the mouths of sexagenarians- but it started to become about so much more than that.

It became about our relationship- my parents relationship to me as well as their relationship to each other. My parents aren’t artists or performers, they’d never read the play or seen the film, but they read that section of the script simply because I asked them to. There was something incredibly humbling and trusting in that- and they were hilarious and brilliant at it. So I decided to do a whole show based on the three of us discussing contemporary art and theatre and their perspectives on it all.

By using non-performers, the show (Sweet Child of Mine) investigates what is captivating about the individual and how raw openness and honesty can transcend formal training. I am fascinated by my parents performance quality: It is completely natural, devoid of the tropes and tricks a trained actor uses to engage and manipulate an audience- yet it is endlessly more captivating. I am using tasks to generate material, giving them writing exercises and things to do- and I am completely prepared to be upstaged by them!

Sweet Child Of Mine teaser

Your work is often described as comedy. Can you tell us a bit about navigating the comedy world? What was it like thinking about comedy in an academic sense at the various conferences you recently attended?

Trying to straddle the theatre world and the comedy world can be quite frustrating at times. When The Last Tuesday Society has been staged at arts festivals, we’ve found that we’re too ‘funny’ to be arty and vice versa, in a comedy environment we’re often perceived as too ‘arty’ to be funny.

Whilst curating The Last Tuesday and engaging with the artists we produce, I have become increasingly fascinated by the lines between comedy, art and theatre and why so often one precludes the other.

I presented a paper entitled ‘Entertainment is Not a Dirty Word: The Amalgamation of Comedy and Theatre in Contemporary Australian Performance’ at The Australasian Humour Studies Network’s annual meeting in Hobart at the start of 2011. The paper attempted to investigate the murky middle ground between comedy, theatre and art through interviewing hybrid performance artists such as The Suitcase Royale and The Brown Council. I also attended humour studies conferences in Hong Kong and Zurich last year which analysed humour in a much more academic context.

But critically discussing comedy can be a double edged sword. There’s a famous quote frequently attributed to both British comedian Jimmy Carr and writer E.B White that goes: ‘talking about comedy is like dissecting a frog- no one cares and in the end the frog dies’.

Which is true to an extent! But I think stand-up has a bad reputation in an ‘art’ context because a lot of theatre makers don’t see it as theatrically rigorous- which to be fair a lot of the time it isn’t. But what I’m interested in is contemporary comedic work that draws from theatrical or performance art traditions and stretches the boundaries of what can be defined as ‘stand up’.

You just returned from the splendid inter-disciplinary arts lab – how did the collaborative and site-specific emphasis of the lab make you think about developing new work?

I haven’t made much site specific work but it was very inspiring to see the work of artists such as Craig Walsh who beautifully integrate the site into the final piece so it adds another layer of meaning- instead of something just being arbitrarily plonked into another context. It’s something that I will definitely consider for future projects and I am actually currently conceptualising an outdoor performance work for the end of the year.

The Splendid Lab was wonderful and intense all at the same time. It forced you out of your comfort zone on several levels- you’re away from home, working and living with all new collaborators and engaging with art-forms that aren’t necessarily part of your ordinary practice. It was our task to develop project proposals for next years Splendour in the Grass festival and I think that the ideas that were generated out of the lab will bring exciting contemporary work to the 2012 festival.

It was so inspiring getting to know the other artists on the lab and our provocateurs (established artists across a range of disciplines) were diverse, challenging and endlessly supportive. It’s easy to start to feel isolated or jaded when you’re an independent artist but The Splendid Lab infected everyone with enthusiasm and motivation. It’s a great program to be a part of and I hope it continues to provide opportunities for artists in years to come.

You also play the role of artist as organiser. You curate the Last Tuesday Society, a night of short works from artists across disciplines that shifts depending on contexts and themes. How does this influence your practice and how do you like to diversify the event ?

One of the reasons we (co-producer Richard Higgins and I) started the Last Tuesday Society was as a generative exercise, so we could have a public forum for experimentation and exploring new ideas. We offer other artists the opportunity to extend their practice, to try out an idea that may not fit into a full length show and to stretch the perimeters of what’s possible in a live environment. By having a regular performance outcome to work towards, it stimulates creative investigation and The Last Tuesday has certainly helped me to develop my own sense of aesthetic and personal body of work.We have presented The Last Tuesday in spaces such as pubs, nightclubs, warehouses, circus tents, theatre restaurants and city squares. By re-contextualising performance beyond the traditional black box theatre environment, it creates unique opportunities for interaction and dynamic performer/audience exchange. In this way, presenting The Last Tuesday Society in places like pubs and nightclubs creates more of a live ‘gig’ atmosphere than a formal theatre ‘show’. 

 

One of the things we do at The Last Tuesday is provide thematic perimeters, so that all the content responds to a particular framework. For example our 2010 Next Wave show was called Comfort Zonesand all the artists involved had to perform something that was out of their realm of practice. So we had a poet doing circus, a musician performing stand up comedy, dancers singing and actors making stop motion animations. I personally had to pass my grade one saxophone exam live onstage after three months of lessons- which I ended up spectacularly failing in front of 300 people! We’ve also had a plagiarism edition of The Last Tuesday, a Jagged Little Pill night (where all the acts interpreted one song off the famous/infamous Alanis Morissette album) and we also do a Christmas Special every year.

Inviting different artists to present work at The Last Tuesday ensures it remains a live and diverse theatrical experience. Although at times it can be difficult to sustain the creative integrity of the show- because what distinguishes your event from other performance nights is the maintenance of a certain aesthetic. But what really excites and motivates me about producing The Last Tuesday Society is providing the opportunity for other artists to explore ideas and present exciting new work in front of an audience.

 

What do you think of the term ‘live art’ – for me the term is not important, I am interested in exploring work that doesn’t always fit into typical categories or spaces. I loved how in a recent performance you took out an ad in the local paper to emphasise a story – it is details like that go a step beyond our expectations in a sit-down show.

That’s the thing about working across platforms and genres- you start to inevitably fit into numerous categories! I think the term live art is really interesting as it starts to talk about projects that are not necessarily performative in the traditional sense but have a live, ethereal presentation.

 

I am always trying to add something extra to my work that takes it a step beyond the expected and humour is just another dramatic tool to attempt this. Whether it’s a multi-media element or a song or choreography- a little twist that presents another spin on something. Working across genres gives you the scope to do that- otherwise I think I would get bored! 

There’s a lot of comedic artists who are doing shows about attempting to learn a skill or achieve something in real time. This is a performance art convention- it adds a real element of risk and jeopardy to the performative situation.

Celia Pacquola did a show a couple of years ago about attempting to learn a complicated piano solo as a non musician. I saw a show in Edinburgh last year by UK artist Alex Horne about his golfing quest to hit a hole in one. Every time he teed off for a whole year he filmed himself taking the swing, just in case this was the magic shot. If this has been staged in a gallery instead of a theatre and the footage shown as a video art piece and not as an illustrative, humorous documentary it would have been considered art. But because it was Alex’s intention to make people laugh while relating his story, it was perceived as not art. It’s formulaic inconsistencies like this that make me frustrated!

Can you describe an artwork that you love?

 

I saw a piece in the Melbourne Festival a couple of years ago called An Anthology of Optimism by CAMPO which is Belgian artist Pieter De Buysser and Canadian Jacob Wren. It was a performance/lecture type work about an optimist and a pessimist having a philosophical discussion about the merits of both stances as a dominant world view. It talked about this idea of ‘critical optimism’ which is an optimism that recognises the limitations of the situation, a situation that may seem hopeless or overwhelming- such as climate change, but still attempts to engage with it optimistically.

I was reading an article by one of the artists and he said ‘anything where you are in a room with other people pretending to be somewhere else is just old-fashioned’. That was just like a lightbulb going off in terms of my own practice. I realised that I want to explore and make work that generates collective experience, because for me, that’s what live performance is all about. Otherwise you could just stay at home and watch a DVD.

 

Acknowledging who’s there in the room with you is so important in generating a dynamic live atmosphere. You can hide back behind the fourth wall once you’ve broken it, but for me, that initial audience contact is so important. I suppose that’s why I’m attracted to live mediums such as stand up, because the performer/audience relationship is so immediate and vibrant.

 

Apart from their theatrical manifesto, I admired their elegant approach to performance making. It was simple without being simplistic, made complex philosophical theories entertaining and accessible and was a tender, funny and thought provoking meditation on an idea everyone can identify with.

What is next for you?

I actually just received some Australia Council funding to work with a company called The Neo Futurists next year and to also study at The Second City School of Improvisation which is a unique comedy training institution in Chicago. I am excited about combining the theoretical with the practical at The Second City and learning from the innovative and prolific practice of The Neo Futurists. That’s if I survive the Chicago winter of course!

It’s not easy to sell friendship: On participation and audience engagement

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 18^th, 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.

Amy Spiers.

Excursion #2 – Who Needs Live Art?

We would like to invite you to the second LALA Excursion. The excursions will be a series of sojourns into art and non-art related research.

Excursion #1

Who Needs Live Art?

A salon featuring the first development of Strange Passions by triage, a rant about Live Art led by Barry Laing & Jana Perkovic and the start of a lineage process for Australian hybrid art forms.

7 – 10pm Wednesday 31st August
The Supper Room (in the basement)
Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry Street
North Melbourne

Bring some wine and a plate to share

Kindly RSVP to jasonmaling@gmail.com

You Got Me But Baby I Got You

Responding to Thrashing Without Looking.

A feisty party game I got to play twice – first as what I’d call ‘predator’, and then second as ‘prey’. The audience is divided and there are no spectators here – except perhaps the Aphids crew, who bring us twelve-at-a-time into their latest private experiment in live cinema.

The four predators convene around a high table of champagne glasses, perched anxiously on bar stools with no idea what we’ve just walked into. We make small talk about awkward first dates before our mischievous host brings us back to the menu. We’ve each been given a smorgasbord of hypotheticals about our ideal first date, and begin to make choices that we’re quietly sensing might be about to become realities. Would I go for table tennis, or dinner, or just kissing all night long? I can see a packet of tic tacs sitting discretely on the table.

We’re making a karaoke video clip and the four of us are about to play starring roles. Our host introduces the crew and the cameras. The eight people I just stood next to in the foyer are now stranded in the middle of the arena, strapped into video goggles and unaware – or all too aware – that they themselves are being watched. I just filled out a list of my preferences, but I was certainly not in control.

It’s the racing mind that makes Thrashing so titillating. As prey I felt like the butt of a cruel joke,  learning very early on that you’re one of the singles  in the video, consciously being picked or not picked by other audience members. As potential dates quickly came and went, giving me champagne and then taking it away, the desire in me to maximise each moment waged war with the self-awareness that made me constantly adjust my posture and retreat  into my shell. The hollow sensation of unrequited romance washed over me in glorious slow motion.

But as predator it was bewilderingly fast. Acting on snap decisions and looking only for immediate gratification I made the worst small talk, danced dirty against unwilling strangers, and did indeed kiss all night long. Our conquests were documented and fed live into the goggles of our prey – we were making this video for our own entertainment.

From either side – and much like most first dates – it seemed impossible to win. The twelve of us had completely different experiences of this work, and the gulf between me and my date could never really be crossed. When the goggles came off we all rushed to shake hands, and swap stories and  internal monologues and half-dreams. Thrashing is a filmically mediated reconstruction of the dating game, mixing volatile intimate encounters between strangers with that slightly numb feeling that comes from the realisation that your dream date is the stuff of stock footage.

At the shows finale I slow-danced with a stranger who couldn’t see me, but held me close. We  swayed softly together to the music of Wendy Mathews. Later that night I shared an awkward gin and tonic with a stranger as we sat listening to the very same song, in French.

Thrashing Without Looking saw me coming.

Mark Pritchard lives in Melbourne and makes theatre. He trained at the VCA, UOW and PACT, and is a Kickstart artist for the 2012 Next Wave Festival.

Thrashing Without Looking was presented by Aphids at Artshouse.Created by Martyn Coutts, Tristan Meecham, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Thoms and Willoh S Weiland. Sound design by Alan Nguyen.

www.aphids.net

Photos by Bryony Jackson

triage live art collective to Radical Moments Festival

Melbourne collective Triage will take their new work ‘Strange Passions’ to Berlin for the Exchange Radical Moments Festival. You can support their project here: http://www.pozible.com/index.php/archive/index/1272/description/0/0

Rate of Exchange

Field Theory was dreamed up by a group of artists with varying interests and practices.

It is fair to say that all of us are interested in different ways in which to engage people in experiences of meaning. If that sounds a bit vague it is because the actual parameters of the work that we have carried out is so broad and does not follow a simple and easily definable pattern. If one was to look at what we have created separately in the past year, (beyond the Field Theory funding model) it would look something like this;

- researching an underwater choral work about coral
- undergoing a year long investigation into what it takes to be an expert
- directing an 11 artist collaborative project which yielded 40 new works in 3 weeks
- creating a socially engaged project with the City of Melbourne to enliven/activate an area of the CBD for a transient local community
- creating an interactive tug-of-war on a train

And that’s just a couple of the projects.

SO with such a wide variety of interests what is it that has brought us together to create Field Theory?

Field Theory is an alternative funding model, an attempt to try to enable the type of projects that we are interested in to continue and thrive. It came about through a filtering of discussion around how to fund a project like Jason Maling’s three year The Vorticist. Funding bodies are not set up for an ongoing or iterative project like this and we are not artists who can claim triennial funding or the like.

So we created a model that uses crowdfunding. This has precedents in organisations like pozible in Australia, friendfund in Germany and The Awesome Foundation and Kickstarter which came from the US.

The main differences to those projects are that we maintain curatorial control over the artists that are selected to be funded. The reason for this is that we want to engage in a more personal or intimate exchange with the community that are supporting the projects.

Each supported artist is asked (in return for the $5000 that they will receive for their project) that they will send one gift to every Field Theory member (The Field Theory organisers assist with the sending of the gift). This then cements the economy of exchange that will be built up over the period of the membership.

TO our surprise (delight and consternation) there were some very enthusiastic Field Theory members who once they had given their $100 to the cause then also wanted to come and be in every work and support in other ways. Part of our theory was that there was a crowd of people out there who were eager to take part in some activities that were art related and we were correct, however we were not ready for the response and this presented a challenge to us.

If we are to throw open the doors to people having a stake in a work then how far does this go? In films when there are large funders or backers for a project there is some influence these fat cats will have. What about the thin cats of live art funding? What is the rate of exchange for Field Theory?

I guess this is something we will continue to investigate as we move forward into our second year.
We are a few weeks away from completing the final Field Theory project for its first year. Very soon after that we will put the call out for the next years members. Please stay tuned to the Field Theory website over the next month.

fieldtheory.com.au

Martyn Coutts is a
Field Theory organiser.

Bedding down with Charlie Sofo

Charlie Sofo is a visual artist based in Melbourne, however his recent B.E.D. project, a project that has people sharing their bed with Charlie for a night, moved into the realm of live and participatory art practice. I recently wrote an article that discussed B.E.D., and Jason Maling’s project The Vorticist, for un magazine 4.2 (which you can download here). For lala, Charlie and I decided to have an extended conversation about the process and thinking behind B.E.D. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Amy: So have you gained any benefits or insights by doing the B.E.D. project?

Charlie: In the beginning I didn’t know or expect there’d be benefits. I knew it was going to be awkward, but after doing 14 sleepovers, I realise every single interaction has been beneficial in some way. I don’t know about insights, but there’s been friendships formed. For instance, if we think about you and I doing the project… well, here we are.

A: Being mates now.

C: And that’s what has happened in a few other cases as well. The benefits have been, simply, closeness. But I’m ready to be proved wrong. There’s always the potential for trauma. Awkwardness is good, as well as hitting up against the limits of my ability to be social: to deal with the complications of intimacy. But so far that hasn’t been necessary.

A: The interesting thing is that you are going in blind. Usually, if you share intimacy with someone you have some history to refer to, but in B.E.D. you are activating an unmoored kind of intimacy. It is a strangely vulnerable and intense one-on-one situation, which often leads to an unusual bond forming between you and another person. I wonder what we can learn from that?

C: Perhaps it’s about tracing borders, finding that fine line between being intimate and not being intimate with someone. It’s incredibly fine. I have thought about it in relation to sex work, how you’ve got a particular structure that you set up that allows for intimacy. There’s a conventional perception that intimacy is hard to achieve, but it’s a lot simpler for people to do, given the right structure.
I’ve noticed that people I’ve gotten into bed with immediately talk about personal things. I share too, as well as listen. But almost without exception everyone has talked about private things.

A: Yes, I remember we talked about relationships. Maybe it’s the site of the bed? For me, the project signaled a lot about my own boundaries. Normally you share your bed with someone who you have few physical and emotional boundaries. It’s odd to try to sleep beside a stranger, so maybe you are drawn to talking about the people you normally let into your bed?

C: I think you’re right. It is an issue of boundaries. Definitely. I like that other people have done the groundwork, they’ve had to trust and approach me.

A: A lot of the participatory projects I do involve approaching people in the street and trying to convince them to do something. I like that your project involves an open invitation on your blog, so people must choose to get involved.

C: Yeah that’s nice. I think the thing about inviting people has something to do with my personality.

A: You don’t want to be the person who does the convincing – “Hi, I’m doing this B.E.D. project. Would you like to get into bed with me?”

C: When I hear other people talk about it, sometimes it sounds sleazy and I don’t like that. It’s pretty important that the invitation was written by me, in my own words, so my intentions are clear. But I guess you can’t avoid how people construe things, although I get paranoid about it.

A: It’s an open invitation, however you are not particularly interested in getting into bed with a complete stranger. You insist on having a coffee with them beforehand, or at least getting a recommendation from a mutual friend.

C: Which probably differs to how you’ve done projects; which is a direct engagement with the public.

A: Some years ago I had an open call out offering to take people’s portraits. Participants were able to dictate how and where the portrait would be taken. I accepted anyone who showed interest in the offer. It got a bit weird because I’d find myself in strangers’ lounge rooms taking photos of naked men. But for me it was important to not refuse anyone. It’s different in your case. You are putting yourself in a particularly vulnerable position and so a bit wary.

C: Yeah, I’m managing that vulnerability. It’s highly managed, to be honest. I don’t want to refuse anyone. I’m trying, where possible, to follow through but there are limits to my capacity.
If I felt really uncomfortable I’d probably have no qualms refusing. There are people I know socially, who I’d be nervous about sharing that level of awkwardness with. You’ve got nothing to lose with a stranger. Getting into bed with someone you know can be a bit harder.
My third B.E.D. participant, Matthew, talked about the importance of actually spending the time to relate to new people; that when you are out socially people really appreciate it when you make a bit of effort to get to know them better. I realised how little I do that and how I had to invent this very formal project to begin to start to do it. It’s associated with my nervousness in life. What Matthew said really underpins some of the goals of the project.

A: A lot of my motivations for doing social art projects is to do with my frustration with social boundaries. Often the motivation is to get direct communication with someone else. But do you think this kind of project just works on a therapeutic level for everybody?

C: No, not when you ride past their house in the morning and drop in for a coffee. It’s not therapeutic, it’s enmeshed in your life. Something has been gained in it. There a therapeutic elements in it, definitely. But I guess we all go into these things in the hope that some of it will last. You don’t make social art, or art that is about testing boundaries, without wanting to have real change.
I don’t think this project could have been possible without the internet. Over the past year I noticed there was interest in things that I was writing on my blog and discussion around my own practice, and I started to change what I was doing. Instead of just discussing what I was doing in the real world I would actually formulate things that could engage people, and also meet the people…

A: The people who were reading your blog? Your audience?

C: Yes, that’s the thing. Break down the idea of an audience, because that’s useless, no one wants that. We all want peers. An audience is like a dead thing.

A: So you were after something more responsive. You don’t want people to just view your art, you want people to involve themselves in it?

C: There is that tendency to use your audience as the content but it probably has to go both ways. If you are going to require something of people, you probably should give something back, especially if it is quite risky. That is why I haven’t documented B.E.D. And by not having documentation, it’s putting all the emphasis on the action itself. It’s placing more meaning on an interaction, as opposed to the object afterwards.

A: As artists we are often quite conscious that we are asking people to do things for us, so we try to be respectful. And yes I think that is a better way of getting more participants and more people comfortable about it…

C: But it isn’t a complete solution. I don’t think it’s the right strategy for every artwork.

A: No not for every artwork, but that’s the strategy that you feel comfortable with?

C: Yep. There’s that artist who deals directly with exploitation, Santiago Sierra. I feel ambivalent about his work… I’m not sure if I’m coming from a prudish or judgemental perspective…

A: How about ethical?

C: Actually maybe it is. I can’t disassociate from that…

A: I don’t think I’d make work that necessarily exploited the participants, but I am interested that there are a lot of self-imposed rules in participatory art. We often go to great efforts so that participants aren’t made to feel uncomfortable or manipulated – but couldn’t that make good, complex, critical art?

C: Well you could say that you are always going to exploit people. It’s a fact. But I think you might want to work out strategies to mitigate the damage.
I worked it out for myself back in art school when I was doing photomedia. I realised that taking photos of people was immediately exploitative, so it had to be about acknowledging that and working out what kind of engagement I wanted to create. Maybe a negative or angry interaction might sometimes be the right solution.

A: Currently there seems to be a lot of work by live artists that aims to achieve a deeper level of human connection between people. It’s almost formulaic how many projects create situations where strangers come together in a heightened sense of intimacy. I just wonder how much more ground is left to cover on this theme? Is there more to learn?

C: Yeah, I know what you are talking about, cause on the one hand it’s symptomatic – why are people trying to reach out, why are we trying to create these situations? Is it because there is a deficiency in how we live? Is it a societal thing? I’m not entirely sure. I think any artistic or cultural thing is about building, building on a way of relating, or redefining it.

A: I’m interested in the people that you end up in bed with. They are people like you, sourced from your social circle or friends of friends. Was it your intention to go beyond that and sleep next to people that you wouldn’t normally meet?

C: No initially I didn’t really want anything from it. I guess there’s more to gain the less I know a person, so seeing how it’s progressing definitely makes me think about broadening the scope of it.
Since starting the project I have been told about various artists who have done something similar. But the projects have all differed. Gillian Wearing, for instance did a project…

A: Take your top off – where she got into bed with transsexuals.

C: And there was this stark photo of them both with their tops off.

A: Gillian Wearing is conscious of the exploitative potential of her work, so if she asks someone to take their top off then she’ll take her top off as well. I like that she makes the transaction explicit, and the photos are quite beautiful.

C: Yeah they are very raw and tough. It’s a very tough project. It’s about your own capacity and what you are able to do. You have to do the best you can with your own personality. When I started doing B.E.D. and saw the Gillian Wearing work, I realised I couldn’t take a photo. Wearing’s were really strong photos, and I really don’t know what mine would be saying, other than “this happened”.

A: And you can say that just as well in your diary entries.

C: Or even right now. That’s the other thing; all the outcomes of the project have come out in these kinds of conversations, some of them formal, some of them informal. So when you initially asked about interviewing me for lala, I thought this was the best possible forum to have the work exist anyway. Because if you turn up to a gallery what are you going to find out?

A: The fact that you aren’t documenting B.E.D. means it becomes about the enigma of the experience. Do you like the fact that there are people out in the world retelling their experience with you?

C: I wonder what they say actually. I’m interested.

A: People are so curious about what goes on. When I did the project with you everyone wanted to talk about it -“So, what did Charlie wear? What was it like?”

C: Yeah, it’s interesting people do that cause it seems so everyday and quite simple. It’s probably that the possibility of intimacy is there and people are into that – tabloid style… I do wear a standard pair of boxer shorts.

A: The project boxer shorts?

C: I didn’t want an outfit. I just thought I’d wear what I normally do.

A: But that’s what struck me about your project – it’s not a performance. When I was writing the un article and talking to Jason Maling about The Vorticist, it was clear his project is a performance of sorts, he plays a role. But in your project there is no structure or uniform or role played, it’s just: “Hey, I’m Charlie in your bed.”

C: Well yeah it’s about barriers again. We are always playing roles, but I guess I really want to alleviate the pressure of having particular roles. I want to minimize the dynamic of artist and subject – take that away. That’s another reason why it’s not documented – I don’t want it perceived that I’m somehow ensnaring a person or placing them in an artwork. Instead we are both getting something out of it.
I’ve tried to neutralise the whole idea that I have power by constantly playing up my vulnerabilities. I’ve almost done it to excess. But it’s somewhat necessary to balance the power.

A: I think again of The Vorticist. In that project you go into Jason’s office, and although there’s efforts to minimise the difference in power – the space is neutralised to a point, like an office is neutral  – but you are still entering his space. But you put yourself at risk because you go to someone else’s private space. I like that the siting is in a participant’s own home.

C: Yeah, practically I find that really interesting. I didn’t realise how interested I was in people’s little domestic routines. It’s something you don’t fully appreciate by having a coffee with someone or going over to dinner.

A: Do you take that information away and know so much more about a person?

C: Yeah, totally. That’s half of it. This mundane shit is incredibly interesting.

A: Yet you aren’t doing anything with it, are you?

C: Well I just jot down a little diary but I don’t want to do anything with it.

A: So you aren’t going to exhibit what you jot down?

C: I’ll work it out in 2 years. You never know.

A: So what’s in the diary? I thought it was just a date and a name.

C: And I also just have a brief description of what happened, just for my own records. Like you’d have in a personal diary.

A: It would be interesting to see Charlie’s observations of all these stranger’s rooms.

C: It’s true. That’s why I reckon if I read the diary in a couple of years I’ll work that out. I’m not feeling rushed about it.

A: That’s what is nice about talking to you about your project. You didn’t go in there with an idea of an outcome. It’s more about starting with a question. I know Jason talks about The Vorticist in the same way. For him, it was really just a question of who would respond to his invitation, and it still interests him why people continue coming to him for this strange interaction. I guess that’s part of the answer to the question; people are interested in a one on one experience even though it’s unclear and ambiguous.

C: I often wonder what people are expecting actually. And it’s possible they could always be disappointed – “This wasn’t interesting. He isn’t the person I thought he’d be”.

A: People go to it with their own questions. What would it be like? What does this mean for me? It’s that mutual uncertainty that makes it interesting.
Do you think you’ll get to the point when you are so good at it that it loses the point? At the moment it makes you feel vulnerable, it takes risk, but once you’ve done it a lot you’ll lose that. Is that the time you’ll stop?

C: Exactly. That’s why I have resisted doing them back-to-back. I’ve taken them slowly and they’ve all been really considered. Each one has it’s own requirements.

A: Do you feel this project has made you think of other projects you’d like to do? Will you continue making live art?

C: It’s probably been one of the most personally meaningful things I’ve done to date. It’s also made me realise or underlined a particular motivation in my practice. It’s bared my own intentions to me.

Roarawar Feartata Collective

At the recent LIVEWORKS at Performance Space, I interviewed Roarawar Feartata (Benjamin Cittadini and Craig Peade) from Melbourne, who were there developing a work I Luv Amanda Crowe 4 eva.

Here is a very small portion of that interview, covering a number of previous works that happened in Dandenong and Frankston, which are outer suburbs of Melbourne;

MC – Tell me about the works you did in the suburbs?

BC – In Dandenong , it was almost a year spent out there doing things

MC – Just off your own bat?

BC – No we got some money I was doing a masters…

MC – At VU (Victoria University, Melbourne)?

BC – No at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) in Public Art funnily enough but I already had…

MC – What’s that course like?

CP – Shite

BC – I didn’t even realise public art was visual art

CP – It’s ‘art in public spaces’

BC – Basically just design and architecture and visual artists who want to make money, they do art in public spaces, you know giant sculpture things, but I was amazed there was no performance art. I couldn’t believe it but um but I was going to do this stuff in Dandenong, anyway I started doing stuff out there,  We had done stuff in Frankston before that and we started using ‘surveying processes’ on the street – we had a complaints table , we just took complaints, well Craig did in Frankston on his own.

MC – Were they good complaints?

CP – Well you get good um

MC – Did people think it was part of the council?

CP – Some people did yeah, and then you get conspiratorial nutjobs you don’t know what their past is, who are absolutely paranoid , what was that guy? That guy was South American? We didn’t know what his relationship with government agencies was, he had a problem with everything, you know the cosmology of the universe….

MC-  hahahaha

CP – It’s a beautiful moment it starts getting…

BC – The point of engagement for the complaints is that we are taking complaints,  they are like “whats this for?” you go – “nothing, we are just taking complaints do you have a complaint?” And then the decision gets made (in their mind) do I want to or not?  And the majority of the time they are like ‘fuck it, I’m happy, any opportunity I get!’

MC – To have a complaint

BC – To have a complaint

MC- It’s a very Australian thing

BC – But then you also – it frees it , and then you might actually learn something but that’s something we did with our surveying as well , the design of surveys  – fairly passive questions you do a lot of research about the place, what the issues are there , you try and ask the next question that never gets asked on the survey, you know or you try and jump ahead and use the whole survey process…

Cp – It’s a totally open process…

MC – For the purpose of being there, for ‘opening a space for people to…’

BC – Purpose of engagement – whats this for? , just for us and you to talk and you do a survey and you create this space once or twice over a few days and you start creating your own thing and people get used to your traffic…

CP – even enjoy it,

BC – Then you set up a complaints table and they come back for more , you use these things, you know because we were working for the council and we made it quite clear we are not going to give you anything but still in the back of their mind they (the council) are thinking  – oh we might just get something because  we don’t know what the public think, we ask them a million surveys a year and we still don’t know what they think.

So you sift through the mountain of material and you can find questions like How often do you think about God? cos we had gone to a there was a interfaith meeting in Dandenong, there are a lot of cultures in Dandenong we went along it was quite tense we were quite struck about this thing so we only gave them a few choices on the survey

[polldaddy poll=4350720]

One person answered OFTEN almost every single other person unflinching, almost deriding looking at us going ALL THE TIME

You know by the end of the day right we are losers for one you know because in my mind there were four choices but there was never going to be four there was only ever really one choice ALL THE TIME  – everyone around you was thinking and talking about God

MC-  That’s amazing

BC – Pass that on to council and go ‘you want to know you want to provide for something, here you go – GOD!’

CP – Transcendental hub

BC – Yeah its not a transport hub the community needs it’s a Transcendental hub for fucks sake

MC – hahahaha

BC – Let’s think big here lets stop fucking around

CP – What was the other question? Tying into that about If you could be in anywhere now you could be in Dandenong, somewhere else (another city) or Heaven and the majority of ppl wanted to be in heaven. I found that deeply disturbing because that meant, kind of, dead.

MC – Hahahahhaa

CP – Not to say that was about Dandenong it was just about

MC – I would rather be dead than in Dandenong

CP – I want to be in heaven

BC – That was my moment, from that we took our point of departure ok well lets work from this point that everyone thinks about God all the time, thats where we went with our next thing. We did a book of prayer.  I just put suggestion boxes in the library with little dockets saying write a prayer down, donate  a prayer we are going to make a book, do it anonymously , I didn’t really know or think what was going to happen, but they were prayer machines! stuffing the box with very few jokes most of them were…

MC – From all faiths?

BC – Yeah of course some of them disturbingly honest which is what you were going to get – luckily they were anonymous.

MC – So you made a prayer book,

BC – Yes and we got them made and gave them away for free, put stacks of them in the library so people could take them with photos I had been taking everytime I went out there.

Dandenong was being flattened and rebuilt. Sorry – ‘renewed’. So I was trying to document all the shit that was there. Trying to give the council a picture of what Dandenong is – it may not be the kind of picture you want to see or have projected, but it is compelling as any other.

We also created a performance intervention where we wanted to do our own ritualised act of the place that had given us this opportunity and also just provoke it a bit putting ritual fair and square on the street even if it wasn’t a specific ritual it was alluding to something other – so we walked on our knees from Dandenong station to the plaza we had bells we were doing some things prostrating ourselves in order to show that the body creates space not just architecture all these things that are part of what which is what doing performance is all about, body creates space, you can lie down anywhere and it does that…

MC – What was the response?

BC – Well it was amazing, it wasn’t lots of people flocking to us but you had these few engagements where people were going what are you doing? So enthralled by it but wanting it to be for a specific faith “if this was Christian, I would call all of my friends now” that’s what one guy said which I was almost tempted to go “okay”

MC – hehehe

CP – Then there was also you know “what are you fucking doing? My dog shits on that footpath” because we were on our knees and had been for an hour and they were cut up and shredded…

BC – And also there were some boys on BMX’s who rode up and said “hey what are you doing”, “oh you know doing this stuff” and we had been going for an hour and we were on our knees and they were all torn and stuff and we were carrying bells and everything and they went  “ok cool, see you later” and that was sweet, I love that!  Just take it in, let it go, let it be what it is…

Roarawar Feartata are a collective operating in Melbourne.

atlanta eke – intimacy in dance

tell me a little about your performance background,

Growing up I played a lot of tennis and my point of difference as a player was that I would, more often than not, win a match if I was being watched – by my dad, other parents, passers by. In a match situation when there was no one watching me play I would have to imagine there was in order to win. I began to perform, always, audience or not, performance has become something I tend to practice a lot, perhaps always. As for performance in dance, when I was 6 years old I performed my first solo in the rap section of a piece called ‘Things That Make You Go Mmmmm’, at the chadstone shopping centre. The ‘running man’ was a dance that naturally resonated in my body at the time, I could do it well and this was something I wanted to show – since then my interests in ‘showing’ what I can ‘do’ have faded and my attentions are directed more toward the relationship of myself to the audience through questioning what it is to perform and why.

and you performed a piece recently as part of the next wave festival in melbourne that appeared in private dances curated by nat cursio as part of the dance program?

This piece was titled You and Me. I was interested in making an experiential piece to fit the context of private dances. I thought the set up for private dances was very clever. The audience was entering an unfamiliar space in which to experience dance performance but were completely nurtured and made comfortable by the lovely guides and the quality and generosity of the food and drink provided.
I also think that the concept of the night was very strong in setting up a framework for me to really think about what dance could be in this environment. It was a situation I felt completely supported within but with freedom to make my own clear choices.

It made sense to stage some sort of situation.
I was not interested in producing entertainment or performing a three minute dance routine – to have an audience member sit in a tent and watch me execute ‘dance moves’ seemed simplistic.

You and Me was such that as the audience member entered the tent they were confronted with me standing there in a gorilla suit. I would watch them as they would watch me. Within moments a gentle love song would begin to play and I would move slowly toward the audience member offering my gorilla hands, which they would take and we would look, or not, into each others eyes. As time went on I would begin to slowly dance with the audience member, drawing them closer to me, the gorilla, for a romantic intimate dance.

After some time I would unzip a screen separating two areas of the tent and it would be revealed that there was a third person in the space viewing the entire experience from behind the screen. I would then let the viewer out the back of the tent and the audience member would be sat down to watch the next person come in and have the same intimate dance with the gorilla, and so the cycle continued every three minutes for two hours.

when you put it together you talked about how you have been influenced by feminist theory and the idea of the male gaze, for me this was a fantastic merging of ideas and practice, how did this come together in your head?

I am often considering what it is to be watched when performing – how people look at my body on stage. It is inevitable to be subject to the ‘male gaze’ and objectification as performer, so I try to work at dissolving opportunities for this asymmetric power relationship between the viewer and viewed.

I recently read an article written by Elizabeth Dempster – Visioning the Body, Feminism, Ideokinesis and the New Dance, in the 1993 Autumn edition of Writings on Dance. She presents arguments about how ocularcentrism, a vision centered world, produces a “phallocentric perspective”.

The theory, as I understood it, was that when sight is the dominant sense of how we consume the world (which I think it is – especially in western societies where the saturation of images within mass media nourishes capitalistic consumer society) it inevitably positions females as lesser than males – the image of the female body exists as a castrated version of the male body. I don’t necessarily agree with this theory but it became a good starting point to think about how to pervert the sensory experience of the audience member within the tent, where the seeing of the performer would be in close proximity.

Initially I was keen to remove the sense of vision from the performance all together and stage the piece in complete darkness – to produce a sensory experience that emphasized perhaps more maternal senses such as smell and touch. – I think this is where the idea of gorilla suit began, generating a new textural surface for the audience to experience through touch. I wanted to create a close physical connection with the audience whilst manipulating levels of comfort and intimacy through what they were hearing, being a love song.

But instead of taking away vision altogether I wanted vision to become the perversion of the experience. So instead of eliminating the opportunity for the position of the ‘male gaze’ I wanted to transform it and decided to create a space where the audience member could notice it for themselves – and even perhaps elicit a ‘female gaze’ – where the audience member coud feel burdened by the position of looking in on a private, intimate experience, and becomes uncomfortable even reluctant to gaze at all.

As well as this, by placing the audience member in the situation before they viewed it was to also stimulate an empathetic relation to the performance and to manipulate their memory of what they had just experienced which then affects how they see. ‘Seeing’ with memory/empathy – subjectivity instead of objectivity.

the first part of the work created really different feelings in audiences, some people seemed to enjoy the closeness of the experience whilst some were very very confronted, i wonder how much of this was the suit and how much of it was the act of close dancing?

The face of the gorilla was a little confronting, I would have preferred a softer expression but the costume shop didn’t have any friendly gorilla heads, -but this was a nice challenge for me to override the intimidation of the mask with gentle affection and reassuring love, though sometimes I just felt like a creep, especially with younger girls – girls my age. I felt like I was in some way assaulting them, I would imagine myself as some slimy guy hiding in a gorilla suit in order to feel up girls.

Within the three minutes, after initial reactions to the confrontation of the gorilla suit, I would notice people progress through different levels comfort, there was a lot of awkwardness and shyness, resistance and even disgust, though some times there was an instantaneous freedom and release. I found it difficult to dance with tall men, especially if they became really into the experience and would start controlling the situation. – this made me feel like a prostitute. I began to question whether this situation I had set up for You and Me was not so far removed from prostitution and more generally is performance just another form of prostitution?

I preferred short women that would continuously alternate from a hysterical giggle to a released softening into the experience. On the opening night a woman entered the tent and we danced to elvis preselys love me tender. As we danced she began to cry. I began to invent all different types of scenarios in my mind as to what must have been happening in her life a this time for her to respond in such a strong way. and felt terrible that I had to reveal to her that some one was watching us together and she was about to do the same.
It soon became apparent that this work would be quite emotionally draining for myself. Every three minutes for two hours, I would try to fall in love and give to that person what they needed and would respond well too. I found mimicking the body language an effective starting point. It seemed that my timing was very important to this piece, and some love songs were more affective in assisting gentle gradual allurements, with both lightness and depth, forward yet non-intrusive affection, being transparent and fun but deeply passionate. The few times where I felt the piece worked was when there was a sense of joy in the intimacy paired with an awkward, even horrific unease – I think in the context of Private Dances it made sense to try and evoke these things.

many ppl thought you were a man – which i think is quite a flip in terms of the male gaze stuff you were talking about…

my ‘male gaze’ investigations are applied to the thinking about audience and performer relations regardless of sex, but more as noticing positions of power. But I did try to become and man or women depending on whatever I imagined the audience member desired and would fall in love with.

On hearing some feedback I do not know if I was successful in obliterating the ‘male gaze’ in You and Me, and perhaps I even unintentionally put myself in this masculine position instead. One audience member said upon entering the tent he felt that he became the performance, even before he knew someone was watching him from behind the screen, he felt that he was being watched by me – hidden safely behind the mask of the gorilla, this made him uneasy and feel himself objectified – this was not my intention to reverse the situation for potential objectification, but to find a place in between, or to produce a to and fro of perception and responsibility within the staged experience.

It seemed obviously pleasurable for some audience members when they realized they were to view an intimate dance. Most people liked that they couldn’t be seen – I find this disturbing. But it is how audience is conditioned to behave. Others I think were left confused about what just happened to them and it was clear some felt upset, because the becoming audience and being given the space to notice ones ‘male gaze’ it completely perverted the reality of what they just experienced.

do you feel like dance has the opportunity to cross over into different audience/performer relationships such as this or is this a specific thing to private dances?

Dance performance always exists in a relationship to the audience. I am there, the audience is there, we are sharing space in real time. but this is a relationship where we know our roles very well and behave accordingly. I am interested in redefining these relations by diminishing the opportunity for an audience member to sit passively in the darkness of the theatre and expect to be entertained by spectacles. I think people want to be entertained. They want to be separate from – they want to admire skill and virtuosity from a safe distance. The interactivity of You and Me and Nat Cursios decision to position performance inside tents, where there was nowhere for the audience to hide, were affective strategies in dismantling conservative formats but I think it is also possible and fun to work within the existing conventions of presenting dance in theatre -in order to break them.

A current incentive to produce work is to find strategies that allow audiences to activate themselves and their own perceptions of what the experience is. I don’t want to do it for them, and I don’t want to bore them with a performance in which I ‘show’ what I can ‘do’ with my body, inferring perhaps they ‘cant do’ and so there – having a pacifying affect. The context of Private Dances gave me the space, whilst feeling totally supported, to exercise these curiosities

where can you see this kind of work going in your practice, is it something you will continue with?

I will continue to experiment with ways to allow for the production of meaning in my work that is outside conventional representation and I am interested in experiential work, but not necessarily interactivity on a physical level. What performance can produce conceptually is central to the way I work, but it is through the ‘doing’ that the concept evolves and I hope to continually undo the way in which I do every time i do do – as to keep things interesting for myself and audiences.

Follow me – Michael Yuen

lala was in Beijing in the minus 10 degrees snow of late 2009.
Michael Yuen was in the scorching Adelaide heat of January 2010
This interview was conducted between these two temperature extremes

lala: In talking with you and looking at your website, I am really intrigued by how diverse your work is, recently I have been observing this flexibility or adaptability to be something that Australian contemporary artists are quite good at. I know you spend your time between Adelaide and Beijing now, do you think this is something that is a cultural thing or is it something within you?

MY: For many architects flexibility is about a structure with multiple uses or something that can be reconfigured. Its about options and change and possibilities. In art, maybe it is a willingness to explore–a trait I enjoy. It is about tackling issues with imagination.

Diversity? During the boom years of Asian art, I noticed a rush for artists to find their iconic thing, the thing with which curators could identify them with. This style of working did produce some significant works especially by those artists that were considering the way in which they were working. But, it was also very destructive–especially for young artists. Curators need to share the responsibility here too. Time and again, we see curators arriving in Beijing to ‘touch the China thing’. They produce a show out of complete ignorance after a week touring studios. And, it happens all across Asia. This is a phenomenon that has pushed a lack of diversity in people’s practices.

Horses for courses, we say! A different racehorse for a different racetrack. I don’t see my practice as particularly diverse, but I’m probably too close to it to notice. Look at someone like Yayoi Kusama. Her practice involves museum installations, public sculptures, video, painting, photography, mobile phones, clothing, cats, etc. That’s diverse. Well actually, yes my practice does involve a similar variety of things, but I guess there is such an enormous amount of possibilities to imagine.

lala: And the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art – how did this come into existence?

MY: To explain a little about DICA, DICA is an artist run space I run with a friend Yam Lau that exists on the back of a donkey and travels around the streets of Beijing.

Yam and I were chatting about Beijing’s porous boundaries. Beijing is a city that is especially difficult to define with its change and growth. The city doesn’t just expand outwards. The countryside reaches inwards: farmers bring their produce in; rural style villages exist well within the city’s limits and reforms from the 1970′s left behind green patches inside Beijing–a concept that was being explored in other parts of the world as an antidote to the excesses of modernist urban planning.

These days a donkey is still a common sight in Beijing, not a foreign object. They aren’t really allowed inside the fourth ring, but we often see them inside the second ring. In fact, donkeys can be dangerous amongst cars getting spooked and charging down the road. In this way, we are always very mindful of the donkey’s safety.

Yam and I met in the summer of 2008. It wasn’t until the following summer that DICA had its first outing. Maybe a project like this will be full of false starts, but I should mention that the opening was delayed by a week because our donkey was arrested before the first show. The traffic police impounded her for a week when the owner took the donkey to a part of Beijing it wasn’t supposed to go. We helped the farmer get the donkey out but not in time for the opening. With the help of artists Ma YongFeng and Shen Yi and her SUV, we tracked down another donkey hours before our first outing. Fun memories.

lala: The idea of ‘slowness’ and also of meandering encounters with its audience seems important to you in the DICA and also in other works such as Follow (2007/8). Is this some need in you as an artist to shift the paradigm in which an audience views work? Or is it a want to create a more personal interaction?

MY: The idea of speed is important in art, as important as scale or colour or form.

Would I say that I’m interested in shifting the way audiences view work? Perhaps, not. But, there are many ways to view, interact, engage with art. I’ve personally seen the process of some museums and galleries going through exploring alternative ways for audiences to view art, but in the end they remain at their core about collecting the object. It’s a contradiction.

This might sound strange for me to say–because I’m often working with public–but we need to question why we want public involvement. In truth, do we really need the public or are we using the public to speak about unimaginative things? Or to look at it in another way, I’m amazed at how the public is so often used without consideration of what public might be.

The appropriation of theories by artists always strikes me in the current art climate. Too often, artists place themselves in the position of being sales people for such and such a theory or idea–a go between from the idea’s originators and the broader public. But, in the end, does this add to life and knowledge? Even Plato, who thought art was the betrayal and distortion of Ideas, knew this.

So, what I’d want to say is that I like imagining again what public is, and even more so what the city is. And, Beijing is a very interesting place to think about these things.

lala: You have been working in Beijing and mentioned to me that you see this as an amazing opportunity to witness the ‘birth of a nation’, does the extreme difference in culture between Adelaide and Beijing feed you as a person and an artist?

MY: I got my start in Adelaide particularly with a project with the Adelaide Festival of Arts. In this way, Adelaide holds very fond memories.

Now, I spend my time between Beijing and Australia without having put my roots firmly down anywhere particularly in Australia. Standing across two cultures is something that I enjoy, not quite local and not quite foreign in both. And, in Beijing life is quite rich with all its charms and vices.

Birth of a nation, yes. Beijing is at a unique point in history. It is a cliche to say everything here changes very quickly but there are serious repercussions when a city like Shenzhen can be built in 15 years. For instance, it means that an entire city of 5 million are nearly all migrants. We can feel this too in Beijing, whose population has also exploded. It’s also cliche to talk about the scale of China in numbers, but at the moment my favorite China-scale statistic is that the Chinese local and central government spend an estimated 30 billion US dollars on cars every year.

But, to answer your question more directly, being across to cultures, countries, naturally places me as an outsider in both but with a familiarity that’s beyond the exotic. I like to point to others who have worked across different cultures: Samuel Beckett, the Irishman that wrote Godot in French or perhaps Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who wrote so insightfully about American democracy.

lala: And now you are moving to Melbourne for a while – what sort of life and practice do you see for yourself here now?

MY: I’m in Melbourne for three months. I’m looking forward to some quiet time in Melbourne and a break from shows. And, there will be some time to work on my amateur cheese making.

lala: Thanks Michael.

Michael Yuen is an artist that works between China and Australia.
http://www.michaelyuen.com.au/

Inbetweeness

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

Jason Maling – The Vorticist

One of the most interesting and underground artists in Melbourne is Jason Maling. His three year project The Vorticist is so secretive that you need to be part of the experience to understand it fully.

Lala invited Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy to interview Jason Maling, a Melbourne based live artist currently presenting The Vorticist, a three-year durational appointment-based project at the Abbotsford Convent.