We have decided to name our piece ‘Mapping the lost city of Lincoln’, this is because ultimately we want our piece to be guide around Lincoln where we highlight the hidden treasures that we have found. The basic idea is to turn our site (the outside surrounding the museum) into a walk way through Lincoln. We will be taking the pieces of ‘junk we have found and present them as ‘art.’ We will do this by framing them as such; buy either placing them on plinths or latterly framing them and giving them explanatory panels, mirroring the actual pieces inside the museum. For we have found a collection of records abandoned, in a dumpster round the back of a charity shop. The covers of these records feature a repeated image of artist Mario Lanza. With this we want to frame them and place them in a similar fashion to a pop-art piece in the museum that uses prints of Marylyn Monroe by Andy Warhol.
Nick Kaye’s Site-specific art speaks of Wolf Vostell’s ‘dé-coll/age happening’ here, “Collages from the street and torn posters, were presented in ways informed by abstract expressionist and tachiste painting” (2000, p.115). Our piece aspires to do a similar thing, by replicating something the audience member might have already seen, or will about to see (depending on whether they are entering or leaving the museum) we hope to make them question the pop-art inside. we are replicating the actual piece inside, but taking away the very image is displays. Therefore our piece becomes a type of anti pop-art. In a piece called Soap, artist Allan Kaprow presented the participants with a variety of instructions that were dispersed across a New York City and, simultaneously, a farm located in New Jersey. These instructions played through out the day and are alternative to each other for example, one instruction was:
“1st morning: clothes dirtied by urination
1st evening: clothes washed
(in the sea)
(in the Laundromat)” (2000, p.109).
These type of instruction were set to be performed in isolation away from other pepole’s instructions yet these instructions were aimed to happen in relation to each other and it was up to the participant if both or one or any at all were followed through. Nick Kaye suggests that, “Kaprow draws the participant into a network of related and often thematically linked activities yet disperses these activities in order to call its formal frame as a work into question” (2000 p.110). What this reminded me of straight away was the audio tours you can purchase at some. If we feed the participants a variety of instructions that involve how to view specific pieces and in what order to view them, it would aid us in creating a specific mapping experience, by guiding them around Lincoln in what way we wanted. Also it would throw participants into reflecting how they view museums and how museums are traditionally viewed.
Kaye, N. (2000) Site-specific art. USA: Routledge
BBC (2011) Modern Masters exhibition opens in Lincoln’s Usher Gallery[online] London: BBC. Availble from http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/72218000/jpg/_72218160_f43cb71e-d2ac-4df5-b261-0df32d67bc27.jpg [Accessed 29 May 2014]