Watch this space…. Live Art in the UK…

Recently Madeleine Hodge visited Lois Keadon at the offices of the Live Art Development Agency to find out what is going on in the UK live art scene.

The cultural landscape in London has shifted in the past two years, in the wake of the appointment of a conservative government and in the following slew of heavy cuts to art funding, live artists are seeking new strategies for survival. Having returned to the UK wanting to get a better sense of this radically altered landscape I went to LADA (the source) to hear the tale, first hand, about the history of the form in the UK and how live art has changed.

Lois Keadon explains that the Agency was set up in 1999. With the support of the Arts Council it was formed as a response to the programming that had begun during her time as director of the performance program at the ICA. It is an art movement that came to currency during the social hardships and politically charged years of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Artist’s were making work that made visible the opposition to the cultural and social politics of the day. “It really came out of the work of a lot of radical artists from the states” says Keadon. In this time artists put their bodies and the political, social and cultural implications of the body at the centre their work. The political movements around Aids and Gay rights initiated by groups such as Act Up, with their “Silence is death” call to arms made this a highly charged time in which to be making work. American Artists, such as Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino, addressed the political body, a body of flesh, blood, sweat and semen. These works implicated the audience and made political engagement implicit in the social relations of the work. Keadon says that these artists were loudly rejecting the social and cultural politics of the time and that she was actively supporting work by artists that were making work about gender, race, religion and identity.

Following this, Keadon explains, with the advent of a new “socially inclusive” labour party and with the guidance of the Agency, live art in England experienced something of a golden age. Companies that started in the 80’s and early 90’s with nothing, surviving on dole payments and working out of garages were now receiving yearly funding that allowed them to take bigger risks. Artists that were marginalised were taken into institutions, they were given serious research positions, there was work in the education departments of major gallery’s, critical writing and academia developed responses to the work that meant this deliberately ephemeral art form had a sort of permanence and new levels of encounter. “We are looking at the end of all that now,” she says.

Along side these developments for live artists England witnessed new sort of visual art projects that borrowed from live arts challenging relationship to the audience yet without the political agency that live art would afford. Lois Keadon describes these projects as “Happy Clappy,” and she singles out one artist in particular, “Stand up Anthony Gormley”. In Keadon’s eyes Anthony Gormley’s 2009 Trafalgar square project One and the other signalled the death of interesting participatory practices. By inviting people of Britain on to a plinth for 100 hours of “real people” time, Gormley’s project highlighted the flaccidity and lack of criticality of participatory practices. His project “allowed” people to have time in the spotlight (on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square) without any particular framework.  Keadon says that works like these remind us that involving people is not necessarily participation. She talks about the way in which these practices mimic rather than challenge the politics of contemporary capitalism. The rise in participatory practices has occurred with out the necessary reflection on what participation is for and why artists are using these strategies, We talk about how this sort of participation with its emphasis on engagement for engagements sake is not so different from David Cameron’s big society, where the illusion of a participatory society is played out in a large scale.  Keadon makes the distinction that involving people doesn’t necessarily mean they are participating, “people think they are involved and actually they are being duped, it becomes a way of silencing people.” (and in the case of Gormley’s project of mocking them). She talks about a site specific performance she saw on a beach in Wales, in the 80’s. The performers kick sand in the audience’s direction and to the surprise of the performers the audience kick back. “Well what exactly were they expecting?” asks Keadon.

She says that with participatory art, artists have moved from the social body to the political body, into the collective body that we inhabit. She sees the creative response to the work of Culture beyond oil and Occupy London and artists that are addressing issues of climate change and capitalism are part of the next wave of live art practices.  She says that she is still concerned that we make time to challenge issues such as race, gender, disability and identity as we still have more work to do, the agency is currently working on a series to address each of these areas of practice that will occur over the next few years. She says artists and small independently run spaces around London (such as LUPA and  [performance space]) are experiencing a new sort of popularity without the support of the major institutions.  The performance matters program, “trashing performance,” addressed a lot of questions about the future of the form, with artists working outside institutions and outside performance. With artists exploring they way in which the internet and new technologies are allowing for new kinds of connection, distribution and promotion of live art projects, and there is an audience as each week live art events are sold out across London.

However she also recognises that without the institutional support of places such as the TATE and the ICA the fate of long-term practices for artists is uncertain.  Artists have long had to struggle with their desire to challenge a system while also developing strategies for survival within it and she is not sure what will happen, or where this younger generation of artists will go next.

The future, as always, is invisible.

The effect of the expansion of this art form from UK and North America into other countries and social political areas, can only serve to further the cause. Live art has had a series of iterations in different parts of the world and the way in which it moves, mutates and changes depending on the location seems particularly suited to the “liveness” of the form. Lois says that in particular artists in Britain are very connected to Australian artists, with ongoing dialogue in both directions. She says that almost each week an Australian artist will visit the office of the agency, they have coined a phrase “this weeks’ Australian”’. I guess this week that would be me.

Lois Keadon is a great person to talk to, she is very engaging and as she talks she repeatedly gets up and goes to the bookshelves as each point in the conversation is punctuated by references to publications the agency has produced and artists she admires. These are artists with whose names I am familiar, and whose names I have heard frequently over the last ten years, she refers to Joshua Sofaer, French Motteshead and Franko B among others. She speaks about their work and the community that exists around the agency as one that is generous and open and engaged with ethical encounter. But it does make me wonder about the next generation of artists that the agency might support, I ask about this about what is next and about where these younger artists might progress and she says … “watch this space….”

Madeleine is an artist, writer and researcher living in London, she has most recently been working in Spain with Banana Asylum to provoke new discourse between artists and the world through anthropological practices. She is a former Panther, founding member of field theory and she promises to write more for LALA in her role as foreign corespondent.

Links

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/

http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/

http://www.thisisunbound.co.uk/

http://www.performancespace.org/

https://www.facebook.com/LUPA.E2?sk=info

(Funny youtube clip from Mayor Boris Johnsons introduction to a One and the other.)

Live Art Almanac, Volume 3 – Call Out

The Live Art Development Agency has put a call out for writing related to live art or radical performance practices for their Live Art Almanac Volume 3. Deadline is January 31, 2012 – get yer skates on..

See below;

We are seeking recommendations for material to include in The Live Art Almanac Volume 3. What articles or reviews have you read, what new stories have you spotted, what emails did you receive or forward to a friend, what blogs have you visited, what texts crossed your path? Did they engage you, provoke you, amuse you, or make you rethink Live Art and radical performance? If it caught your eye and had something interesting to say then we want to know about it.

We welcome all kinds of submissions for The Live Art Almanac Volume 3 – from more traditional forms such as journal essays, newspaper reviews, transcribed interviews, symposium papers, public lectures or book chapters, to digital forms such as blog entries, Facebook pages and Twitter conversations, to even less conventional forms of “publishing” such as emails, diary entries, and letters. The submission must be engaging, provocative, and thoughtful writing on and around the contemporary cultural landscape in which Live Art practice sits and must shed light on the various debates and ideas in circulation within that landscape.

For more information please download a copy of the call out PDF here;
Live Art Almanac Call Vol 3

Residence in Bristol

SPILL Stings – writings from SPILL

The SPILL Festival of Performance is an international festival of experimental theatre, live art and performance presenting the work of exceptional artists from around the globe. At the Barbican from 18th – 24th  April.

SPILL Stings are a collection of commissioned critical writing on the festival by Theron Schmidt, Mary Paterson, Johanna Linsley and Madeleine Hodge (lala foreign correspondent) .  Our responses will be posted online here throughout the festival – before, during, and after.  As writers, we are interested in the way that this work gets under our skin: the sting of it, and its itch.

The writing, then, is a kind of scratching….

http://www.spillfestival.co.uk/programme/spill-speak/spill-stings/

Language on the edge

Aaron Williamson

A language in search of its meta language.

Tate Britain, 4^th February 2011

A few years ago at the 2007 Anti Festival in Finland I saw, or more precisely, heard a work by Aaron Williamson. In this work, the artist lies hidden for an entire day, on an island just a few hundred meters from the docks of Kuopio.  He lays in the grassy rushes on the edge of the island and with help of a megaphone yells back to the shore “I am an island…. I am an island…. I am an island” over and over and over, until his voice is hoarse and then he yells some more. Audiences hear him yelling in the distance, the voice is haunting, sometimes audible and other times it seems to get caught on a wind and disappears, the artists body and voice becomes a proxy for the island and the island becomes an expression of the artists isolation from the audience. The thing that makes this performance or act resonate with more clarity is that Aaron Williamson has, for the past twenty years, been slowly becoming deaf, and so over the course of his practice, he has been experiencing a transformation which must have at times been experienced as a sort of islandisation. At least that is one way to understand not only the performance but also the experience of deafness, and so the artist becoming the island, the island becoming a man and the disembodied voice all serve to pose questions about how we relate and how we hear each other.

When I saw that this very same Aaron Williamson was presenting a “performance lecture” on language at a late at the Tate event, I gathered a few friends and went along not really sure what to expect. The performance takes place in an auditorium perfectly suited to a lecture, it starts a few minutes late, but in an evening of interventions and drinks after work this is not really surprising. A young woman comes on stage to introduce the lecture and explain that Aaron is stuck in traffic and running late and again in London’s world of tube disasters and city gridlock, its not at all surprising. And so we sit back and wait while this lady from the Tate’s public engagement team reads from an impressive list of fellowships and achievements that she tells us she has sourced from Aaron’s website, “a useful resource for those interested in performance, language and live art”. A British Sign Language interpreter is translating the performance and I spend much of this introduction not really thinking about Aaron’s lateness, but wondering about the shapes of empathy apparent in sign language, or is that just this woman’s way of expressing herself?

Soon Aaron enters, he is carrying a small travel suitcase and as he arrives on the stage the young public engagement lady excuses herself. Aaron is dressed in a tweed jacket and white shirt and with his greying hair he is a quintessential Englishman/professor. Aaron doesn’t begin straight away, he is clearly distressed and he mumbles an apology and then we wait as he is fitted with a microphone. Then he looks through his suitcase and pulls out a laptop, all the time he is sort of grunting or almost muttering to himself. He is flustered, his face is red, he finds a place for the laptop, he tries to connect it, and cant, the performance still hasn’t begun.  He turns to us and says something about a book that he is writing, it’s a book about aspect ratios, (perhaps this is the beginning now) and then he says that in order to show us this properly he is going to need to show us his film, which is on the laptop, he calls for some help, a technician comes back to the stage and tries to connect the laptop. All this time time we are waiting for him to begin to command our attention, to describe the premise of the lecture, to take control, to “perform” and as I struggle with this feeling of complete helplessness in the face of his distress, I wonder what I really want from this performance or indeed any performance or any lecture.

The technician says the connection should be working and goes back to the booth we presume to make it work. It clearly isn’t working. The audience are on Aaron’s side, we fidget, call for help, we turn to the back, look at each other, wonder what we can do to help him. I even wonder very briefly if it would help if I got up to tell a story, perhaps I could tell the story of the island, and the man in the rushes while he works out how to play the film. He is alone on the stage again, he calls the technician back down using the phone on the lectern, they arrange to screen the film from a disk that he finds in the suitcase, he pours himself some water from the jug on the table where there are a stack of plastic cups, water spills on to the ground, on to his feet, the audience groans, this is all he needs. The technician says something from the back of the room, the film is not working, and the disk will not load. The film wont work, he will describe the film he says. He begins to do this, shouting loudly into the auditorium above our heads.

He bangs on his microphone, he wants the technician again he has another idea about the laptop, there is a sonic element to this whole experience, I realise, a series of splutters and half starts and the longer it goes on the more I recall the stories I have heard from ex students and from friends of Aaron’s who describe him as the least helpless person or artist they know. This is a man with a wicked sense of humor.  I realise with a growing relief that this performance of half starts and non-beginnings is the language searching at the edge of its frame for a meta language. He has created a series of accidents out of the idea of being late to the tate with which to explore the dubious form of “performance / lecture” and the experience is nothing less than genius. The work is artfully participatory, a live art work that comments on itself and its frame and in doing so comments on us, on our strange prejudices and our sympathies and misunderstandings about deafness. It comments also on the failure of lecture or performance to adequately describe anything without an embodied transaction, which Aaron engineers beautifully.

The lecture turns again as he describes his interest in frames and aspect ratios by adjusting the curtains at the back of the room with the help of the technician. For some time both he and the technician are in a cupboard on the side of the stage moving the curtains between 16:9 and 4:3. He has found the right shape, the right frame and he begins to speak from an impossibly large pile of notes. Its funny now, the audience is more comfortable, laughing, we get it, or do we? Its still so awkward, I’m still not sure that there is a right way to view this performance, where is the edge of this meta meta? Are we going to keep “getting it” as we consider this man, this act, when we finally continue our journeys into the night?

The performance is ending, the artist stands paused in the middle of the stage, in the middle of the frame he keeps banging on about, the light of the projector and the laptop desktop covers his face. There are notes on the desktop that feel like clues, one file name “the collapsing lecture” is whispered across the rows of the audience. He is paused, the translator tries to get him to finish, shows him the time… shows him the time again… there is a long pause he stands very still, poised on the edge… he yells….

“Don’t go”

Don’t

Go

Aaron Williamson describes his practice thus…

“As an artist my engagement with performance, objects, place and space is entirely transformed through the experience of becoming profoundly deaf over the course of some twenty years. Informed by this radical personal alteration, my art practice takes an interdisciplinary approach. Hence, my artistic projects remain open to innovation according to circumstance and I have explored working with performance, installation, photography, video, sculpture, text, choreography and digital art – often combining elements within one work.”

http://www.aaronwilliamson.org/html/cvbio.html