I managed to make it to Ryan Durrant‘s show opening at Temporary Contemporary last night and had a quick chat with him. It’s not directly related to my residency but something I’m planning to do after is meet up with other artists working in rubbish and undertake some unstructured ‘interviews’ with them. Ryan’s show is great. There’s a lot of resonance with my own work whilst not being too alike: Ideas of repetition and motif with process and material being central concerns.
Then I went to an event at Cafe Ollo: THINK GIGS | Psychoanalysis & Improvisation hosted by Hoot. It was a lecture by Tim Moss: “a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in the NHS & in private practice. Previously he was a performer & then an academic lecturing in drama, theatre & performance. He still plays with Huddersfield based band Kelter.” Followed by a sound performance by Napolean IIIrd.
Tim’s lecture was surprisingly relevant to my rubbish residency (I had actually gone with a Dwell Time hat on, if these things can be compartmentalised). He talked about the transitional phenomena of objects and space (ref: Winnicott). Transitional space he defined as being situated between internal and external reality – not necessarily physical but this could be in the mind too. (He also referenced Cohen and the Uncanny relating to this liminal, inbetween space.) The notion of transitional objects I’ve understood from a child psychology basis of a ‘comfort object’ that the child focusses on in times of transition or change, but this notion of transitional space is interesting and perhaps relevant to my residency work of being rubbish-not rubbish, in the skip, hooked out and sent to the charity shop, photographed and thrown back in the skip. Is it rubbish or not? A lot of my previous work has played with this notion of the uncanny and inbetweenness and this new work is no exception. Also part of my exhibition will be situated in the transitional space of the corridor between the library and the art gallery: Not quite in the library and not quite in the gallery but in this inbetween the two.
Tim also talked about restored behaviour and that all performance behaviour has been performed before (ref Susan Foster: knowns and unknowns of improvisation performance) and the ‘recycling’ of performative behaviour. I’m not sure Tim used the word recycling but that’s what I have taken from his talk: performative behaviour is repeated and recycled, whether consciously or not, within normative social constructs.This recycling of performative behaviour was really interesting and also the question of how much improvisation can I allow myself in my performance? In previous performances I’ve often prepared a script and mostly stuck to it but I feel this won’t work with a guided tour that’s interactive. I had thought about preparing components for my performance and improvising the order depending on audience engagement. I will have to think some more about this.
