The Free For Arts Festival is going on in Manchester at the minute and has been an opportunity for This or That Eagle to take our own approach to creating and distributing work.
As a group we had difficulties with overlaying too much of a curatorial proposal on top of our work by any one group member. So in the end a ‘street residency’ was decided on. This enabled us to free up our working methods and concentrate on what work would be interesting in the street ‘non art’ environment. We didn’t want to create work that could be created easily anywhere else and so have been taking advantage of aspects of alfresco and unscheduled conditions.
“Working in spaces we feel we can’t or shouldn’t, we aim to rethink arts relation to a public whose feet hurt. We aim to create a space in which people can talk about what connects them at a time when this feels like the last thing they should do.”
For me “rethinking arts relation to a public whose feet hurt” has been a prominent thought and has been something i have been thinking about during my time working on ‘Flyering’2010. For the past 4 days I have given myself a time slot of between 1-2pm where I have stood out on the street and flyered the passers by and the shoppers. The flyer itself depicted and promoted the act that just happened between myself and the ‘participant’. I found this piece summarised a lot of the issues surrounding artists and the public that I have thinking about. It is amazing to see people’s faces change from thinking someone is wanting something from them to just having been given something aiming to add to their day positively. The other side of this experience is seeing that people sometimes get angry when unknowingly participating in something that may be seen to be useless.
These reactions brought about questions of authority and the position of the artist within their work. For this piece of work in order to create an experience a social situation is manipulated. A real time tension is created and the results are unpredictable. In the words of Ian Curtis ‘She’s lost control again’.
