Week 3 (8/2/16)
This week began with looking into different theorists and their works. We looked briefly at Mike Pearson’s introduction to Site Specific Performance and picked out some important theorists mentioned by Nick Kaye in the book. Such as:
- Miwon Kwon- contemporary, land and site specific artist. Ideas of community performances. Phenomenological.
- Dee Heddon- Autobiographical works, walking through inspirational landscapes
- Michael Fried- Art and Objecthood. Minimalistic sculpture
- Richard Serra- “To move the work is to destroy the work.”
- Cathy Turner- Palimpsest/overlaying
- Marc Auge- Place/non-place
We also watched a video of Marcia Farquhar’s A Live Art Tour. She creates guided tours for the public and depends on audience participation and interaction for her work to be successful. It involves psychogeography, the idea of ‘drifting’ through and around urban environments. She also included interaction with the public’s senses, by serving them lemonade.
The video sparked a discussion to whether some of the events on her tour were planned ahead of time, or just there by chance. I liked this idea not knowing what aspects of the tour were, so people were more engaged with their surroundings.
We also watched John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum. I really enjoyed this video because it was so simple and took me a while to figure out what he had done to the video. The recording was of a corner of an ordinary street with public walking in and out of shot whilst John Smith voiced over what he wanted the people to do. Such as “I want the man to walk in from the right” … and then indeed a man would walk into shot from the right. It was a really effective piece of work and quite comical once you realised it had been pre-recorded.
Once we had swatted up on various theorists and their relevant works, we split off into our performance groups to discuss any possible ideas. Rolo, Holly and I each swapped ideas of what we wanted to include in the performance and tried to accommodate everyone’s interests. For example, I liked the idea of having an end product from the work we produced. Our first idea was about the social change from the top to the bottom of the high street, which we all found interesting from a previous class discussion on it. I felt we could incorporate the litter problem in Lincoln too, by picking up a piece of litter from the street, which we would replace with a symbol which we would make out of the litter found on the high street. Also by possibly comparing the type and amount of litter from the bottom to the top of the high street. However, this first idea was us just bouncing ideas off one another. Once we had exhausted this idea, we moved onto another completely new idea.
Our second idea which we all preferred was based on Marc Auge’s work on Places and Non-Places. Another discussion we all found interesting in class prior to this group meeting was the question of whether the high street is a place or a non-place. We thought exploring this idea could work. We immediately thought of the archway on the high street as a starting point, as it is the part of the high street everyone remembers. It also has a lot of history linked with it and is a place of transit to get to the top of the high street. However, we thought about how homeless people might not see it as a place of transit, they would see it as their home. So we wanted to explore this idea further and ask our other group members (Franki and Hannah) about this idea and to see if they could push it further.