Framing Statement

Site Specific Art

Site specific art and the performances within this discipline explore the boundaries of how the relationship between performance, object, place and performer might be understood. Nick Kaye in Site Specific Art describes this style of performance as being very articulate. It “define[‘s] itself through properties, qualities or meaning produced in specific relationships between an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and a position it occupies” (Kaye, 2000, 1). Site specific art in Kaye’s terms is about relation, and how a relationship to an object or an event combined with the history of said object or event might help to establish meaning which transcends itself into performance. Miwon Kwon provides the view that site specific art takes the site as an actual location, “a tangible reality, its identity composed of a unique combination of constitutive physical elements: length, depth, height, texture” (Kwon, 2002, 2). Whilst these readings of this discipline are broad, it gives us an insight into how site specificity might be understood. Both Kaye and Kwon refer to how the physical properties of the site, determines how the performance is to be constructed. These viewpoints informed our process and our overall theoretical understanding in creating our work.

Our performance was a durational site specific performance situated on the High Bridge, which engaged with the historical significance of the site and audience interaction. Furthermore, we practically explored the materiality of water, through repetition, physical action and meaning.

Our methodology is the value of experimentation through audience engagement inspired by initial research into Forced Entertainment and Carl Lavery to a practical homage based on the works of Kirsten Pieroth and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. We have also engaged with theorists such as Mike Pearson, Nicholas Bourriard and Marc Auge.

Process

Square one

At the start of our process we explored the High Street, examining areas that we have never seen before such as alleyways and places of interest which could be used for performance. Kaye suggests that the city as an urban landscape “offers a profusion and complexity of signs and spaces where the condition of reception… might be countered by an excess of information” (Kaye, 2000, 33). From here we can understand that the city as a space exhibits a traffic of information which overwhelms our reception, therefore the “profusion” of signs, spaces and information blurs into site specific performance and would certainly do so for a performance on the High Street. This led us to look at Marcia Farquhar’s Live Art Tour (2012). In this performance, she explores the use of psycho-geography and layering of history. Farquhar talks about her interest in boredom and how leading an audience through intentional and unintentional objects and events can enhance the performance. From our explorations we found that the most interesting place was the High Bridge. The location attracts buskers, stalls and connects the city therefore providing the most human traffic.

Relations, Signs and Audience

When we were researching into site-specificity we came across Bourriard’s Relational Aesthetics.  He argues that the function of artworks being developed in city spaces “attest to a growing urbanisation” (Bourriard, 1998, 15). Although Bourriard is examining city spaces from a socio-economic perspective, it was interesting to engage with this when thinking about performance. He explained that “it will not be possible to maintain relationships between people outside these trading areas” (Bourriard, 1998, 9), such as consumerist brands and shops. By applying this to our space we realised that our performance needed to fit around the fact that the city is a hustling environment, which could hamper lasting encounters. Therefore, we would need to devise something visually compelling, to be able to draw attention from passers-by.

Our initial experiments were inspired by Carl Lavery’s 25 Instructions for performance in cities and Forced Entertainment’s Nights in the city. Carl Lavery created a list of  exercises to use when creating performance within a city such as to “Sit in a park, café or bar and listen to the stories spoken around you.” or “Create a forest” (Lavery, 2005, 236). This inspired us to devise our own instruction which was to ‘create a sign, write whatever you want and see how people respond.’ The signs we designed had phrases such as “free hugs” and “hi fives” then we stood on the street to see what happened. People responded well, they hi-fived and hugged us whilst engaging with a sign saying “talk to me”. This led us to Forced Entertainment’s Nights in the city, which was a tour of various locations in Sheffield which weaved fact and fiction within their text, for example, “all the streets round here got named after famous football hooligans from history” (Forced Entertainment, 1995).  They began to write over the city through palimpsest, treating the space as layers and the performance “define[d] itself in the very sites it is caught in the process of erasing” (Kaye, 2000, 11), which I thought was interesting as a concept of performance.

This gave us the inspiration to combine the bizarre with our signs. Beforehand we were provoking a reactional response from people and to rectify this I decided to write on a sign, “If Aliens attacked Lincoln, where would they land?”

Although not primarily engaged with site-specificity, people became involved by offering answers such as “the cathedral” or “Tesco’s big car park.” One woman even thought I was part of a cult, which was an interesting response. These experiments, albeit random, contributed to our methodology which was  to immerse the audience through their own personal contributions.  Tim Etchells suggests that the city as a space “is both a map of space and a map of states of mind” (Etchells, 1999, 77). We were not just committed to exploring the space but the opinions and thoughts of its inhabitants. Consequently, we wanted to examine the reactions in order to explore the space and analyse what High Bridge means through the community.

High Bridge History

Moving on from these experiments we conducted in-depth research into The High Bridge to see if there was any historical significance. We discovered that there was a chapel dedicated to St Thomas Beckett but was destroyed during the reformation in 1762/3. Incidentally an obelisk was built in homage to the chapel which also acted as a fountain.

This was subsequently removed in 1939 due to fears that it was straining the bridge’s architecture because of the weight. It was reconstructed in 1996 in St Marks Square and 2016 is the 20^th anniversary of its reconstruction. By examining the history of our site, it enabled us to start thinking about how we could use it as stimulus for performance.

 

Bottles and Water

To start with, we explored the High Street, engaged with the public through practical exercises and researched into the history of our site. By March we were set in creating performance. We began to theorise that the High Street could be a non-place. Marc Auge argues non-place designates “spaces formed in relation to certain ends such as transport and commerce, and the relations that individuals have with these spaces” (Auge, 1995, 78). The High Street is primarily a place of travel and so “the traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place” (Auge, 1995, 86). From this, we examined the tacit agreements of the High Street, in which people travelled up and down and entered the stores that they wished to purchase from. From here, we knew we wanted our performance to disrupt the fluid human traffic of the High Street.

We were inspired by the obelisk because of its relation to water and the significance of its history on the High Street.  Pearson and Shanks in Theatre/Archaeology suggested “Do not begin with the question ‘What is it?’ Instead ask ‘What does it do?’” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 53). Using this as a framework, the obelisk was a fountain and therefore contained water, whereas now it is simply just a commemorative statue. This started our explorations into the connotations of water and of the obelisk.

We narrowed our exploration to three themes: Life, Reconstruction and Memorial.  Initially we wanted to create a visual representation of the obelisk out of water bottles but figured that it wasn’t feasible and wouldn’t be an interesting performance. Narrowing our text and explorations further we devised a question to say to the audience. This question was ‘In one word, what do you value most in life?’ However, we still needed to establish an effective way of engaging with our audience.  Bim Mason on audience explains that there are two main approaches to attracting an audience “one is to be loud, large and colourful, the other is to be subtle.” (Mason, 1992, 93). We did not intend to create a loud spectacle but rather a subtle interaction with our audience, similar to what we had been accomplishing with our prior experiments.

We wrote the question on a white board and interacted with the public audibly by asking the question. The way this idea entailed was that upon receiving a response we would write it on a label that was stuck to a water bottle, or if the audience member wanted to they would write down the response and place it down. As you can see from figures 4 and 5 the bottles began in a grid formation, jutting out from the raised area to the centre of the High Bridge.

The use of this allowed people to move in-between the bottles, to view the responses provided by participants. Typically the responses were ‘family, money, education, health’ others were unconventional such as: ‘fifa, eyesight, sex, home.’ This was interesting to view as a lot of the responses juxtaposed those that they were positioned next too, and the formation of the bottles somewhat became an installation. We moved away from this idea due to too many complications. The bottles provided an obstruction on the street and we relied too much on the audience activating our piece. Furthermore, from feedback it was not visually interesting enough, and so we wanted to create something even more visually engaging. Despite this, this idea still impacted on our final idea because of the initial engagement with the materiality of water.

H20 – A final reconstruction

Following our previous concept, we struggled to move on due extensive enthusiasm and passion. I provided the idea that we should hang bottles off the High Bridge with pure water inside mixed with red, green and yellow food colouring – the prime colours. I wanted to explore the idea of purity, however on reflection we would only be un-purifying the water. This led us to the action which formed the basis of our final performance. Bucketing water out of the Brayford. We decided that rather engage with bottled water, we would examine how we could interact with the water under the High Bridge and use that as the basis for performance.

We bought buckets, rope, containers and DIY suits and started work on our final idea. The DIY suits was a choice made by Jace and Tom, as they figured it would be visually compelling if we were to be costumed whilst transporting water to the containers. Our experiments included bucketing water out of the canal, transporting it to a large container on the High Bridge and filtering/purifying it through jugs and smaller containers. The motion of walking with a full bucket was interesting as initially we did not feel that this would be visually interesting however, through bucketing, travelling and pouring the water back and forth, we gathered significant attention.  This idea was not just inspired by our previous idea, but was informed by Kirsten Pieroth’s Berlin Puddle (2001) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Maintainence Art.’ Maintainance Art is:

“Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials. Conceptual & Process art, especially, claim pure development and change, yet employ almost purely maintenance processes.”

(Ukeles, 1969, 2).

Her work highlighted overlooked aspects of social production and questions the hierarchies of different forms of work, especially housework and low-wage labour. In Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside (1973) Ukeles cleaned the stairs and plaza of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. This was one of four works in the series Maintenance Art Performances staged by Ukeles which drew attention to the comparative status and value of artistic and manual labour. We were inspired by this because we used the purified water in sprays to clean the area where the obelisk used to be. This enabled our performance to be not just a piece of art but more of a metaphorical  community service. Pieroth’s Berlin Puddle (2001) explored the materiality of water by physically moving a puddle from one location to another through transferable containers. I was particularly interested in the piece, due to the simplicity. She simply took a puddle from somewhere in Berlin and transferred it to Isartorplatz park via plastic jugs. The use of labour, movement and simplicity heavily informed our final performance, because the act of continuously repeating an action/movement was something that transpired to be at the heart of the final stages of our process.

Reflections

We performed our piece on the 5^th May 2016 from 2pm till 6pm, and on reflection I feel that overall the performance went considerably well.

 

Figure 7: H2O –  Complete process of Performance – with added sound. (Ben Peck, 2016)

Mike Pearson says that Site-Specific performance needs to “invoke a collective identity for its audience” (Pearson, 2010, 177). The audience we gathered from our performance was a constant stream of the general public, and the attention we received came in two forms: visual engagement and practical engagement. Visual engagement: passers-by often looked at what we were doing and even stopping to form a group. Practical engagement, some audience members involved themselves in our piece by asking us what we were doing. When approached, we told them exactly what we were doing in that we were bucketing water from the canal, transporting it to be filtered and spraying it back into the canal. We then proceeded to enquire as to whether this engaged audience had any interesting memories or experiences with water which generated interesting responses. One response we received had an affiliation to water through living on a canal boat for three years. Another response was that an old couple gave their son a sea burial, a sad but interesting response, in how we have often referred to water being a source of life not really associated with death. Additionally, I felt that the weather aided our performance somewhat, as when we were engaging in practical experiments in the space, it was often too cold or miserable; so by performing on a day with excellent weather certainly helped us gather and engage with a larger audience.

Finally, we could have orchestrated some better ground rules for our final performance, such as breaks for a rest as due to the nature of the 18 degree heat combined with constant physical exertion it had certainly taken its toll on us half way through the performance. Furthermore, by having break slots in the performance it might have enabled us to perform for a longer duration which could have been effective visually, as audiences viewing the performances in the morning might view the performance and our physical tiredness and therefore respond differently if they were to return. We could have engaged with more scripted material because we were not prepared for some of the conversations we had and I felt that the dialogue between our audiences was too casual. Which isn’t to say that I wished it to be robotic but I felt that we could have developed this further.

This process has challenged me intellectually and practically as a performer, however I feel that I have learned a considerable amount know that I have been able to grow as an artist. Site Specific is an ever-changing discourse which I would love to explore in more depth.

Word Count: 2644

Works Cited:

Auge, M. (1995) Non Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.

Bourriaurd, N. (1998) Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presse Du Reel

Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment. London: Routledge.

Forced Entertainment. (1995) Nights in the city. [performance] Tim Etchells (dir.) Sheffield: Sheffield, 9 April.

Kaye, N. (2000) site-specific art performance,place and documentation. Oxon: Routledge.

Kwon, M. (2004) One Place After Another Site-Specific art and Locational Identity. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pearson, M. (2000) ‘Bubbling Tom’ in Adrian Heathfield (ed.), Small Acts: Performance, the Millennium and the Making of Time, London: Black Dog, pp. 174- 85.

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 35/3/229-238.

Mason, B. (1992) Street Theatre and other outdoor performance. London: Routledge.

Pearson, M., Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Peck, B. (2016) H2O. [online] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ejgHF15Mpl8. [Accessed 11 May 2016]

Pieroth, K. (2001) Berlin Puddle. [performance art] Berlin: Isartorplatz park.

REcreativeUK. (2012) Marcia Farquhar – A live art tour [online video] Availiable from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Li90TEcsUw [Accessed 7 February 2016].

Ukeles, M. (1973) Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside. [performance art] Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum.

Ukeles, M. (1969) Manifesto For Maintainance Art. Arnolfi: New York.