Reflective overview-
Throughout the performance process I have constantly been learning and developing new ideas and concepts about the potential of a site-specific piece. A notion that has been a key interest through the entirety of my research into the site is the varying perception of art and the possible meaning behind the exhibits within the Usher gallery. This is a concept which has been a major influence within the creative process of my own piece, which focuses on the gender orientated ideals within the art industry.
The outline of our piece was to sew the silhouettes of a selection of artists onto a dress and display the finished garment within the Usher gallery, this performance took place on Saturday 10th May 2014. The piece was durational and continued until the dress was complete with an installation then being presented as an exhibit within the space. The audience were more than welcome to join in, engage and ask questions or simply watch as they browsed the artwork within the gallery this decision was entirely their own to make.
The main influences of the piece are Suzanne Stockwell’s Cartographic Dress, The Guerrilla Girls and Lindsay Keating-Moore’s Feminist Montage Dress. These artistic pieces were created by female artists and all portray different attitudes and outlooks on the art industry, Suzanne Stockwell’s artwork is “concerned with issues of ecology, geo-politics, mapping, trade and history.” (Stockwell, 2011) Although she displays a different outlook to our piece she is still an empowering female artistic figure who is voicing opinions about society, which connects to our own outlook. Stockwell also incorporates materials within her artwork that represent “the everyday, domestic and industrial disposable products that pervade our lives,” (Stockwell, 2011) which additionally is reflected within our piece as we are using dress making domestic materials and incorporating them into a performance in order to provoke thought.
The Guerrilla Girls are a self-proclaimed feminist group who perform diverse and controversial pieces in the attempt of provoking social change. Although our piece is less direct and enforcing of our opinions, we present a similar outlook of the gender injustice that is present within our site. We convey this notion by recognising the statistics of female artists presented within the gallery as only 19% and also highlighting the many female artists whose work does not make it into the gallery setting. We present these findings in a visual and informative way however, we attempt to leave this information open to interpretation and analyse the reaction that arises.
Lindsay Keating-Moore’s Feminist Montage Dress helped to give our thoughts vision and progress them into a physical representation by compiling them onto the canvas of a dress. Through the development and the combination of ideas the Stitchouettes evolved in order to question the representation of female artists in the art industry and the documentation of the steps within this process are as follows:
1.) Initial Ideas about the Site and Location…
My first thoughts about the term site specific incorporated preconceived ideas of its definition which have altered and developed due to research into the work of companies such as Blast Theory and Stan’s Café. Their work is innovative and factual and they simultaneously merge statistics and historical knowledge of a location into a diverse artistic piece. The companies engage “intensively with the history and politics of the place, and with resonance of these in the present,” (Pearson, p.9) this idea links directly to our site which is the Collection and the Usher gallery as the artefacts within the site emit a background story and history. Opening tasks were set in order to engage with the city of Lincoln which is the surrounding area of the site.
The task I chose to carry out was to…
- Film/take photos on your way to the Collection/Usher and create documentation of results.
The video clip below is the end product after editing which captures the most interesting snapshots of my journey to the galleries. I started by attempting to follow the route of a cat however this proved an impossible task as they are far more agile and quick. I moved on to follow a passer-by and this proved to be unnerving and a violation of personal privacy, so I shifted to examining details of my surroundings and focussing my personal movements such as my footsteps. As you can see I found some graffiti on a local bridge along the way, the coded numbers were sourced to be from Frequency festival, a digital arts gathering that had recently took place within the city. This development provoked a question within my thoughts surrounding the subject of what is considered to be art and who declares this analysis? My personal discovery through my time spent in the gallery setting so far has been that it is a matter of interpretation and whilst some may consider something as art others may not share the same viewpoint. I then came to the end of filming the route to the galleries, I took the time to pause and watch the people in the city centre. I have edited this footage with a reverse effect to show an entirely new perspective on a supposed framing of an “everyday experience of the city.” (Lavery, 2005, p.229) The clip finishes by speeding the tempo up until the finishing point which was the arrival at the site, by documenting the journey I have been able to reflect upon what was seen and experienced and gain a different perspective of something so mundane and ordinary as the actions of the everyday. This analysis has helped in acknowledging content, pace and human behaviour which has proven interesting and a possible objective for further development within the creative process of my site specific piece.
Video filmed and edited (Haynes, 2014)
2.) The body: and art form of objectified?
Through further time and research into the artistic pieces within the galleries I have discovered that many of the females within the art pieces are unclothed and also that the majority were made by male artists. I have become especially drawn to the space within the Usher gallery and I am beginning to envisage different ways of utilising the space in a less generic matter. Many art pieces seem to focus on objectifying the female body in a derogatory way, however a piece that denies this outlook is Liz Kay’s ‘I Am a Woman’ it instead focuses on the role of a housewife from a personal perspective. It reveals the hard work and graft that a woman faces and juxtaposes the other artwork within the space. These findings meant that I was instantly drawn towards the room which contained this art piece and many other eye catching pieces. I also began to ponder the matter of how the female body is perceived and analysed other artistic pieces such as the Venus and Cupid statue which further highlights the depiction of the female form and gender roles as well as the use of levelling, which could be an element to consider exploring.
“Everything we know about the body – certainly as regards the present – exists for us in some form of discourse; and discourse, whether verbal or visual, fictive or historical or speculative, is never mediated, never free of interpretation, never innocent.” (Suleiman, p.2)
This analysis of how we perceive the body shows how it is placed upon us by society and that we subconsciously make these assumptions and perceptions. I consequently began researching into the differing stand points on the subject matter of the female body being captured within the male gaze and double standards within society. This aspect is reflected through the research carried out by Martha Meskimmon, she conveys how the objectifying the female body was as much a relevant topic within the Victorian era as it is within contemporary society. Meskimmon focuses on Emily Mary Osborn’s art piece Nameless and Friendless, Osborn explores “the lives of women and their struggles for independence.” (2003, p.75) She is displaying the perceptions of the female figure and retains focus on “one particular ‘body’ – that of the woman artist,” (Meskimmon, p.75) this shows how the female body has a historical significance of being objectified and this is an issue that would be a major focus within the development of my piece.
3.) The shifting of perception
To connect further with the site we carried out a task where we had to choose an exhibit within the museum and interpret a performance from the perspective of the art piece. I chose to portray ‘tide,’ the recycled chandelier that hangs from the ceiling of the Usher gallery, I expressed the objects viewpoint through a letter to the museum. The piece captured my attention as it’s not made of conventional artistic materials and fits with the idea that “Garbage could be Art.” (Edelsztein, 2007) We performed our creative pieces in the museum space, our group’s piece was spoken underneath the ‘tide’ art piece and this task gave us the opportunity to explore the potential of the site. It also helped us to recognise the issues that needed to be addressed such as where to position ourselves without blocking accessibility for museum visitors. This practical piece gave us a chance to observe the audience behaviour and their reactions to the performance and an insight into the array of possibilities.
As we developed our ideas into a group dynamic we began to focus our collective ideas surrounding the idea of the female artist’s position within the art industry. We pitched the idea of printing sourced reactions and quotes onto an item of clothing however, the technical elements were a concern as ink is not allowed in the museum space. We also needed to discover a more direct approach into getting our message across and therefore we plan to test and develop these starting ideas.
The final task that we chose to carry out during the further research section of this process was to count the number female artists work presented within the gallery, this task is similar to the ‘weenie count’ a task carried out by the artistic group the Guerrilla Girls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They counted the number of females and males that were naked within the art pieces and drew conclusions from the results of possible gender injustices within the art industry setting. Through undertaking a similar analysis we have created a resulting statistic and plan to present this finding within an installation of our final piece in an attempt of provoking a diverse interpretation and thought process of the museum setting.
Sourced on Google images, 2014
The letter pictured above is another piece by the Guerrilla Girls, they are abruptly addressing the gallery in order to raise this idea of social injustice and due to this feminist approach much of their work has caused major controversy. The only insight you gain about the artists are that they are women, this is due to the guerrilla masks concealing their identities and therefore protecting them from possible stigma that may be caused through the courageous decision to make such bold statements. This concept of sharing opinions and viewpoints, however, within a controlled environment is something that we’re considering incorporating into our performance in an attempt to portray an array of perspectives on a similar subject matter but without proposing an ideal. The guerrilla girls although anonymous display the opposite of this attitude as they are blunt and straight talking about the inequality that they feel is within the artistic industry and society itself. The views and the beliefs that they withhold have through their hard work however been accepted into the institutes that they have criticized. They are activists and are seeking to project and influence others with their radical viewpoints, this altering of perceptions is a concept we are focussing on achieving within our own piece by incorporating performance and visual elements into the artistic piece.
4.) Aims & objectives of the piece…
After further research into influential performances and the development of previous ideas we now plan to sew silhouettes of female artists that have been represented within the Usher gallery within the last three months. The piece aims to give recognition to female artists who have been accepted into the gallery setting and also to those whose efforts have been rejected in order to highlight social injustice within the art industry and alter the way that spectators interpret the site and the exhibits. The piece will be durational and the finishing product created by our hard work and labour will symbolise the struggle that female artists face. The purpose of this is to show spectators within the museum how female artists strive to create artistic pieces and are often overlooked and excluded due to gender stereotypes. We seek to highlight the injustice through emitting this information into a visual display. The piece is in conjunction to the style of the Guerrilla Girls work and other artistic pieces such as the Feminist Montage Dress created by Lindsay Keating-Moore, pictured below.
Sourced on Google Images 2014
Additional influences for our piece include Yoko Ono – Cut Piece and Suzanne Stockwell’s Cartographic Dress which is a piece within the Usher gallery, both of these artistic pieces focus on the use of clothing and express motives that are similar to ourselves. We also looked into the work of Danica Maier a local artist who uses cross-stitch in her pieces and this research aided in the development of incorporating sewing into our piece. We are creating an aesthetic representation of the artist’s pictures and conveying biographical information through dialogue in an attempt to give them the recognition they deserve. The silhouettes will be stitched by hand onto a dress and a sash will also appear on the final installation to complete the look of the dress and reflects a suffragette style. The finished garment will then be set up within the gallery space as an installation for people to view and help them to gain more of an insight into female artists who would possibly otherwise remain unnoticed within the gallery space.
Our final rehearsal within the space gave us the opportunity to interact with spectators and discover the way in which our feminist piece may be perceived. It was also a chance to get feedback from peers, who helped us to make improvements in the set up of the piece and also with the performance elements. Conclusively we had to make adaptations within the space due to elements outside of our control such as the art pieces within the space changing. Therefore to ensure that the piece still connects with the art work within the space we are incorporating the mirror that is situated within the space in order to reflect on the ideas and information that we are presenting.
The Performance–
The final performance of our piece was a rewarding experience as it was great to see people interested and engaged with our developments and extensive research into the site. The piece was centred within the space and the mannequin was raised in order to capture visitor’s attention and draw them into finding out what our piece was about. A wide age range of people visited the Usher gallery and there was no specific demographic that came to talk to us which was very insightful. As we situated ourselves in a position where people could move around our work and watch us creating the garment from their own comfortable distance and personally decide whether to become involved, however we engaged and explained our rationale when people became interested to find out more.
There was a constant flow throughout the duration of the piece of people enjoying the space and engaging with our performance, we found that there was an influx of people within the afternoon and many became involved and engaged with us in conversation. We also successfully managed to source 4 participants who joined in and sewed a section of the silhouette, they included: two children and a male and female teenager. We found that people were drawn into the relaxed and general approach that we took as we didn’t force ideals onto people we gave them information and let them make their own interpretations by giving them a diverse perception into the gallery setting.
If we were to perform again we would have definitely filmed the making of the garment and set up the footage on a screen next to the installation of the finished piece to show the process to people who did not get the chance to see our earlier performance. This entire process has given me an advanced and more developed understanding into the potential and the effect that a site specific piece can withhold and also how connecting with the history and dynamics of a space can enhance a performance.
Harriet Haynes and Sophie Grayson, 2014
Harriet Haynes and Sophie Grayson, 2014
Harriet Haynes and Sophie Grayson, 2014
Photographs taken on 10.05.14 (Grayson and Haynes, 2014)
The documentation above shows how we chose to situate our piece in regards to the space and also displays the way that we presented the installation of the finished garment. The piece constantly connected with the dynamics of the space by using levels and engaging with the mirror that was situated within the art exhibit. We also used vocals within our performance by reading allowed the artists name and information before we began to sew their outline and every hour we spoke the artists that had already been stitched and then arranged the pictures back around the mannequin. We did this routinely to keep reflecting on the artists identities and also to show the steady pace of the process which continued over a durational time span. The progression that we have made throughout the process has developed my outlook as a performer and our focus and determination to finish the garment was worthwhile and rewarding as we got to exhibit our hard work within the Usher gallery.
Bibliography:
Haynes, H (2014) Discovering Lincoln. Taken 06/02/14
Grayson, S and Haynes, H (2014) Documentation of the Stitchouettes. Taken 10/05/14
Eldelsztein, S (2007) Perfomancelogia, Online http://performancelogia.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/about-action-art-museum-and-object.html?m=1 (accessed 2 March 2014).
Lavery, C (2005) ‘Studies in Theatre and Performance.’ Intellect Ltd
Meskimmon, M (2003) ‘Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics’ Routledge: Psychology Press
Pearson, M (2010) ‘Site Specific Performance.’ Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Stockwell, S (2011) Susan Stockwell, Online http://www.susanstockwell.co.uk/about.php (accessed 9 May 2014).
Suleiman, S R (1986) ‘The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives’ United States of America: Harvard University Press.