I enjoyed The Late Shift yesterday evening, and it’s given me a lot to think about. Watching performance – I like it, I realise, and what I respond to is the sheer ephemerality of it as a medium. As someone who has never been very good at picking up plotlines, I sometimes struggle to get to grips with what I’m actually seeing, but once I get it (or someone gives me a clue) I can find it the most evocative and haunting of mediums; something to mull over and hold in the shifting container of memory; maybe for just a while but maybe, if something resonates, for ever. Documentary photos can help to keep the memory going, or can stand up in their own right, but I’m not sure how far they can reconstruct the experience if you weren’t there.
For me as an artist, there’s a complexity here in that I tend to prefer private performance which would I suppose be better described as intervention. And yes, the ephemeral nature of that appeals to me greatly, too. Also the idea that people *might* notice what I’m doing or find the things that I leave for them to find, but it’s all quite subtle. At this stage I know this approach partly stems from my own shyness – I can’t imagine having the guts to ask people to sit or stand around and watch me doing something. But at the same time I’m trying not to beat myself up about it even though I’m aware of my limitations and how they affect the way I plan my work. I do actually like making subtle interventions, and they are, I think, appropriate to the subjects I explore.
It won’t, therefore, come as a surprise when I say that I didn’t actually hand my Howe flyers to anyone yesterday. However, I did leave them on tables, on sofas and at the reception desk, and I was happy enough that I was able to do that. I can tell myself that it’s consistent with my practice anyway!
Today, I’ve been revisiting the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Elfin Hill. Just two translations seem to be readily available, but some of the differences between those translations are interesting in themselves. I think of the way tales change subtlely as they are repeated backwards and forwards over time – perhaps back and forth across the North Sea. It reminds me, too, of the way hill names may have changed as word of mouth turned tricky Scandinavian words into something more homely. Potato Hill, anyone?
