John Wood and Paul Harrison are collaborative artists from Bristol I saw their exhibition in London. They make these performances but prior to them making and filming the performance. Like me they make films of the performances along with their own props on the left you can see the drawings they make that direct their performances. The gallery space was surrounded with TVs this is something I need to think about how I display the performances I’ve made.
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“JW: I’m John Wood. PH: I’m Paul Harrison, and we’re in our studio in Bristol. I guess you could describe it as being a very nice workshop and a very cheap TV studio – that would be the… it’s a very kind of basic space, and we’ve been in here about five years, six years? JW: Ten. PH: Ten years? JW: Yeah. PH: Ten years. JW: We kind of see it as a big garden shed, where we come and potter about. All our videos are shot in here, we construct different sets and change it and adapt it to whatever the video that we’re shooting at that time is. When we began, it always had one or both of us doing some kind of performative action that was often to do with the architectural space that we were in, and it first began much more geometrically, using sort of objects that we’d built around the human figure, and what boxes you could fit in, or what happened if you stood on a semi-circle, and things like that. To then how a person interacts with an object – it may be in a different way, whether it’s a plank of wood or a chair hitting you. The work in the Tate Collection is called Twenty-six drawing and falling things, which we finished in 2001, and it’s a series of 26 videos based on the human figure interacting with everyday objects… PH: …or architectural spaces. One of them was shot in the back of a van. It was us two sat on two office chairs. We built out the back of the van so it looks like a kind of cube space. JW: We slide around in it, sort of crashing, banging into the walls. We did it across Bristol in the kind of, you know, everyday traffic, which turned out to be slightly suicidal. And we’d thought of it… and first of all it was hysterically funny for us, and we’d spent – just kept laughing and unable to keep straight faces, because it was a weird sensation to be sliding around in a vehicle as it was moving. Until a bus pulled out on us, and we – I sort of smashed my head and neck as I sort of flew down [laughing] the van. But after that it became not fun to shoot it at all, and it was just like let’s just get it really quick and get out of here. We are always trying not to repeat ourselves. We’re always trying to push either how stripped down that we can make something that is still watchable, or how densely we can push ideas into one piece of work. PH: Pretty much all of them start with a drawing or a series of drawings, so there’s this kind of whole editing process of deciding what the overall structure of the video will be, and what goes in it, and what doesn’t go in it. So there’s this whole kind of filtering process through drawings. JW: The filming process will take us a long time, either through getting a take that we’re happy with, [Sound effects] or getting a take that actually works, and at that stage it’s very often slightly like an ordeal, trying to get it right.” (http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/john-wood-and-paul-harrison 2007
Michael Dean is known mainly for his sculpture work but I found this performance which relates to my performance Stretch. The shouting and Crowd control is something inspiring. This is something that I can take reference from. The performance is very simple, there is not a need for costume nor is there a need for props other than the book itself. It related in the crowd communication and the exchange that is present within the performance. There is something about an exchange within my work.
“Dean’s work deals with text as an interface between his experience and that of the audience. During face, he hands out single pages of a book with a recurrent text, before speaking and shouting , until the meaning and form of the words become distorted and abstracted.”
(Kunsthalle Basel. (2017) http://performanceaspublishing.com/contributors/michael-dean/#events/kunsthalle-basel/)
Tar and I. (2017) Post Trump 2017.
“After a stop at a nearby wharf to pick up a barrel of tar (at some point, down-filled pillows, perhaps taken from Malcom’s own house, were also collected), the crowd, which now numbered more than a thousand people, hauled Malcom through the snowy streets to the center of town, where after three “Huzzas,” they loaded him into a cart parked in front of the Customs House. Almost four years before, this had been the site of the Boston Massacre, and as a consequence the building was now referred to as Butchers’ Hall. Bonfires were common in this portion of King Street, a 60-foot-wide plaza-like space in front of the Town Hall paved with seashells and gravel where the stocks and whipping post were also located. One of these fires may have been used to heat the stiff and sludgy pine tar (a distillation of the bituminous substance that bubbled from a smoldering pine tree) into a pourable black paste.
It was one of the bitterest evenings of the year. Boston Harbor had frozen over two nights before. Malcom was undoubtedly trembling with cold and fear, but this did not prevent the crowd from tearing off his clothes (dislocating his arm in the process) and daubing his skin with steaming tar that would have effectively parboiled his flesh. Once the feathers had been added, Malcom was clothed in what was known at the time as a “modern jacket”: a painful and mortifying announcement to the world that he had sinned against the collective mores of the community. Tarring and feathering went back centuries to the time of the crusades; it was also applied to the effigies used during Pope Night; several Boston loyalists before him had been tarred and feathered, but none could claim the level of suffering that Malcom was about to endure.”
Bunker Hill: a city, a siege, and a revolution. Philbrick, Nathaniel (2013)
The above has been taken from Philbrick. He describes a tar and feathering. I had mentioned earlier in this blog about public torture as being a public event something that allowed the public to ‘rebel’ here is an example of the public (Boston America) rebelling against the king almost (?) it was aimed onto a rather unpleasant but not evil man John Malcom. A shoe maker saw him arguing with a young boy upon intervening Malcom hit the shoe maker on the head knocking him out. A mob was brought together and took Malcom away from his wife and kids and inflicted punishment on to him. The shoe maker tried to stop them but was unable to do so. Malcom ended up this way in the end for not relenting or apologising.
I used:
Ritz Crackers
Custard
fishbowl
I thought of the items as boring British items following the instructions given to be about the routine of British prisoners by Micheal Foucault I washed my hands and face in custard. I proceeded to cover myself in Ritz – a symbol of the bread given in a catholic service. Allot of what we know about institutionalizations comes from monastic routine and monasteries. I did this nude as i had my identity stripped away from me, clothing symbolised for my identity in our world.
The fish bowl is a symbol of how i look out on the world, just watching without much control.
the custard was just custard this may need to be changed.
