Our performance took place in the gardens surrounding The Usher and Collection. Our main idea is to place an “anti-gallery” outside the museum; placing lost, broken or abandoned objects around the gardens displayed as art pieces just like you would see inside the museum. We will also use headphones to help guide you round the “anti-gallery”. The audio you will be able to hear through the headphones will be from texts that have inspired us to find the lost, abandoned and broken objects. These texts include The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe, The New York trilogy by Paul Auster, and also our own inspired description of our performance which we put together ourselves. We have been around the city of Lincoln to find all the objects; we managed to find these lost, abandoned and broken objects mainly around the city centre, up towards Portland Street. The objects will be divided in to sub groups and the audience will then be able to decide which group they think they belong to and map them accordingly. The members of the group will be part of the performance by reperforming with some of the pieces we have found.
When looking back into practitioners who influenced us, we found there were quite a few that we took inspiration from. One of the most influential practitioners was Blast Theory; they are a group of performance artists who use different types of technology and media to create different and diverse new types of performance. “Blast Theory is renowned internationally as one of the most adventurous artists’ groups using interactive media, creating ground breaking new forms of performance and interactive art that mixes audiences across the internet, live performance and digital broadcasting.” (Blast Theory, 2014) Their influence came through when we used the headphones. When researching into these practitioners their use of technology really intrigued us. We felt that we wanted to involve the audience so they could fully engage in the performance, like we had seen Blast Theory do in many of their performances such as Rider Spoke, Can You See Me Now and others. The audio was obviously, before we thought about it properly, a major part of the performance. We were happy to use the audio, however when we looked into giving the audio to the audience we felt that it would be difficult to do, as we could only provide them with MP3s. However, we then thought about how our performance could go on forever, so we decided it was beneficial to also use QR codes for the general public to be able to use their smart phones. Blast Theory used interactive media effectively and we thought their influence here helped.
Another practitioner that inspired us was Joshua Sofaer with a piece called Scavengers. This inspired us firstly because it was a similar setting to ours, with it being set at different art museums all over the world. “Scavengers engages its audience in the production of the artwork, using participatory performance to reflect on the ways contemporary art is produced.” (Joshua Sofaer, 2014) He also involved the audience in the making of the artwork by giving them clues which they had to find and then, afterwards, make art pieces with the objects the clues had led them to. We wanted to involve the audience in our piece too, with the use of the performative elements such as asking them hold our hands, or hug a tree or cuddle a teddy bear with us. Also they went out into the streets to find the objects for their art piece, exactly like we did around the streets of Lincoln.
Other practitioners we took inspiration from were Lone Twin, Forced Entertainment and Marina Abramovic. We took inspiration from these mainly because they are all durational performers. Many of the practitioners do durational work and with us doing a durational performance, we wanted to prepare ourselves by looking into other practitioners to see how they handled the situation.
The site we were given was The Usher and Collection. There are two buildings that make up The Usher and Collection, the site is a large and varied space. The Collection houses historical and archaeological exhibits. It’s supposed to be “Lincoln’s history” but has items from all around the world. Its contents consist of things from the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Anglo Saxon, Viking, Medieval and also the Civil War. There are also parts of the gallery that focus on money, trade and farming and food.
Within The Usher building there are mainly pieces of art, such as paintings, statues, pieces of china and grandfather clocks; “The collectable items”. James Usher left this house for the city of Lincoln to represent them; however I want to question why there aren’t more items that represent the Lincoln community. It has items from all over the world but very little from Lincoln and the surrounding areas. More people from the Lincoln area are likely to visit the place and even when tourists come to visit, they must wonder why there isn’t more from the city itself, but of course they will still be able to appreciate the art and history that is on show.
We were asked what our projects were about and given the beginnings of sentences to go off and create a description of our piece; this is what we managed to come up with between us:
“The story we are telling is a narrative behind the objects we collect. The story we are telling maps the lost city. The story we are telling will make you pause. Our actions have changed the way we view Lincoln. Our actions have attracted passers-by to engage differently with objects as we collected our items and documented their responses. We believe that an object placed in the gallery will take on a new function. We believe the lost, broken and abandoned objects deserve a chance to be shown as much as art in a gallery. We believe the streets are an endless source of material. Your presence allows the objects to become something more than just junk. Your presence will become part of the performance.”
Collecting has been the biggest part of the project, it being the foundation of the piece, with the whole point of collecting lost, abandoned and broken objects being to display them. With five of us in the group collecting it should be easy, or so we thought, we have found that it’s a much bigger task than anticipated. We started off on the University campus, knowing full well it might not be the best place to find things because it gets cleaned, but we did manage to find objects behind buildings such as the LPAC, The Engine Shed, Architecture and Business and Law buildings. We found most of our items in the area around the LPAC/Engine Shed and found things such as a broken chair, a ball and tyres etc. We then decided to move further into the town and look in places such as the centre of the city and up and out towards Portland Street and further afield. We managed to find quite a lot more objects than anywhere else around these areas. We also have looked around the areas of the Brayford, outskirts of Lincoln and Cathedral area. We have pretty much looked around the whole of Lincoln and its outskirts and managed to collect a whole range of objects. Some of the most impressive items are a wedding dress, full vinyl record sets, guitars and keyboards and also things like the televisions. We are continually collecting right up until our performance day, as we are hoping to have lots of different objects to show people when they go around. With collecting taking up lots of our time, we have to work twice as hard and have learnt to appreciate the stuff on the street as lost, broken and abandoned objects.
Definition – “Psychogeography is an approach to geography that emphasizes playfulness and “drifting” around urban environments”.
Our performance incorporates Psychogeography, with us mapping the city of Lincoln through the lost, broken or abandoned objects we have found. We decided to use mapping within our performance because we have found objects all around the city of Lincoln and outskirts. We thought mapping it all down would help us to show where the most of the stuff had come from and also if there were other connections between the objects, apart from the fact they`re lost, abandoned or broken.
“Concealed by the functional drudgery of city life, such areas of psychogeographical research were seen as the ground of a new realm of experiment with the possibilities of everyday experience.” (Plant, 2002) this shows that basically we have found these objects in what people would say are unwanted or unusable condition; but we are giving them a new purpose in a gallery setting.
When collecting, the most important part of the whole process is the items themselves because without them we wouldn’t have our gallery. Each object has a story behind it to why it was broken, lost and abandoned. We wanted the objects to fit into a few different subheadings, so that when we give the audience the opportunity to map their own path out, they will all have different ideas about where to place the items. The subheadings will be: Familiar Findings, Adults Forbidden, Cyborg Particles and Protectors. It will be up to each individual to choose where they think it should go; for example items like the television could come under two different subheadings, either familiar findings or cyborg particles. People may see it being one and some may see it see other, that’s why it’s so interesting and means that people’s views are taken into account.
Do they have a specific meaning?
People may wonder if they have a special meaning behind the objects, they haven’t apart from them being classed as lost, abandoned or broken and being thrown out for us to find. We originally thought about giving the objects a description; however on reflection we then decided that maybe it could be misleading, also it would give ideas on what people should think about the objects and we don’t want that. We are allowing people to see the objects how they want to see them.
Our performance took place on Saturday 10th May. We made sure we were ready and prepared for the day by arriving at the Usher Gallery and Collection one and half hours before it opened, so that we could set up our exhibition. We then had the long process of setting all the objects out in to the exact places we had previously put them in, which is something we had planned in advance. However, we still had to set out our objects in a presentable way just like you would see inside a gallery. Some objects took more setting up than others did, for example our umbrella tree. This took the most time to set up because we had to climb up into the tree and tie the umbrellas to the branches, making sure it looked effective. However, when it was finished it was one of the most commented on pieces of the day.
We faced many challenges on the day, the main one being the weather. Of course, when you know you are performing outside, you always check to see what the weather is going to be like. This enables you to prepare yourself and change things if necessary. We thought about how the weather might affect us when we saw that it was forecast to rain on the day, so we tested out the gallery setting beforehand, whilst it was raining, to see how it worked. We found it wouldn`t be a problem if it did rain on the day; however one thing we did not prepare ourselves for was the wind. We had never tested our gallery out when it was windy, so on the day we had to work around it the best we could. We had to stop things getting blown away, so we weighed down the wedding dress with heavy bits of stone. We also weighed down the vinyl record cases with bits of jewellery we had found and that solved the problem. However, with putting light objects around the gardens we did, throughout the day, have some mishaps. Some of the actual vinyl records blew away and pots that we thought were heavy enough to withstand the wind fell off the statue; I don’t think it hindered us a great deal, in fact in some cases it helped. The video tape we had wrapped around the staircase bannister broke and the pieces of tape were flying in the wind, which created a beautiful image for our gallery. There were also children playing with the pieces of tape and therefore changing how it looked essentially.
We had previously tested the gallery setting twice. The first time was to check to see what it looked like, where we would place objects and to see if it worked. The second time it was more like a dress run of how it would actually go on the day. We found that this helped us to be better prepared, as we knew what it was going to look like; we also knew how long it would take us to set all our objects out. We only left minor improvements till the last day, which were things like the video tape, which actually improved the gallery. Furthermore, whilst testing out the setting, we were able to experience how it worked in different weather conditions. One day we had sun, the other day it rained and on the actual day we had rain, wind and sunshine. However, although the weather made a massive impact on the day, it was not the only challenge we faced.
People were another one of our challenges as we didn’t know exactly who or how many to expect. We did prepare for a range of ages and people’s needs; knowing that the gallery is a public place which attracts a large variety of customers, we felt we needed to accommodate everyone. We had tasks for people to do whilst they were going round the gallery. We had audio to assist people as they went around; the audio was a combination of pieces of text from the New York trilogy by Paul Auster and other texts we had we created ourselves with inspiration we gained along the course. There were also instructions at the end for people to return the headphones. Audio was an option that was mainly taken by single people and couples. When families came around we presumed that they wouldn’t all want to use audio, we didn’t think the children would understand, or that it was practical for a family to all listen to the audio. However, they could do the psychogeography part of mapping the lost city by taking a map and using the coloured stickers to map where certain objects were. This was a task that mainly families did, as they could do it together. Initially, we thought we would be able to give everyone both the audio and the mapping task, but we didn`t realise how difficult it could be for some people to do both. Therefore we ended up giving people the choice of either one and if they wanted both, they could do both. Although we did have some people who just wanted to look round without using either. On reflection, we would have made it clearer that they had a choice. Even though we spent a lot of time and effort creating these tasks we felt that we should have worked on this part more, although having options proved to be a good idea.
Another challenge we came across was the performance element of the day, we hadn’t practiced sitting, standing or walking in these positions for a long duration. We had practised in stints. However, the only issue I found was that my body wasn’t well prepared to be able to sit crossed legged for hours. I think I tackled it well on the day and overcame the uncomfortableness. This performance definitely gave me new found respect for performance artists and durational performers. Also interacting with the general public was a challenge when you are asking them to hug a teddy bear that we found on the streets. Not all of the public wanted to participate so I decided that as the adults weren`t very keen then I would ask the children instead, they seemed far more excited and interested in doing it.
Overall, I think the day went very well. Taking into consideration all the challenges we faced with the weather, people and performance elements, all our hard work paid off with the many positive comments we got off the general public.
Works Cited
Blast Theory (2014) our history and approach. [Online]Brighton: Blast Theory. Available from http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/our-history-approach/ [Accessed 1st may 2014]
Joshua Sofaer, (2014) Festival Scavenger. [Online] Joshua Sofaer. Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RYWAvVwn1g [Accessed 14th may 2014]
Joshua Sofaer, (2014) Scavengers. [Online] Joshua Sofaer. Available from http://www.joshuasofaer.com/2011/06/scavengers/ [Accessed 2nd may 2014]
Plant, S. (2002) The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age. 3rd edition. London.Routledge.