Framing Statement –
Site Specific Performance is a difficult to define area of art and performance because it’s definition is interpreted in many different ways, and thus lacks a concrete definition, as Mike Pearson writes in his book Site Specific Performance: “Although the search for a practicable, encompassing definition of site-specific performance has long claimed scholarly attention, it remains slippery.” (Pearson, 2007). However, the practice of site-specific art and performance art has been around since the mid-fifties, starting with “Happenings”. Art pieces such as “Baked Beans on a Car” and “Anti-War” birthed the earliest form of spontaneous, public performance. These works would later evolve into Site-Specific art such as “The Puddle and blue sky – A performance next to Hamburger Bahnoff, Berlin” (2001) by Nasan Tur – a three-and-a-half-minute loop of a performer lying in a puddle. Works such as this have become more and more popular in the twenty-first century and so Site Specific Art and performance has become a more popularised method and style, despite the challenges faced in creating it, which is something we would encounter in creating our own work.
However, this lack of a firm definition to Site-Specific left us all with quite a challenge. We were newcomers to the field and we had very little idea of what site-specific actually meant, but we endeavoured and experimented using the different practitioners that we were introduced to over the weeks. Initially, we were introduced to transactional theatre through Nick Kaye’s book, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation and we developed an interest in it from there, which inspired our early ideas.
Process –
When we started thinking about our project in performative terms, we decided to search the city for inspiration. After all, Lincoln is a city rich in history, both personal and traditional, so we thought we should investigate the city we live in. We explored the city and some of the landmarks that we had come to know in our time living in Lincoln. One of the most interesting things we had to consider a few weeks in was Marc Augé’s theory of Non-Place, which theorised that “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (Augé, 1995) We thought of the high street as a whole as a non-place because we felt that it could not be defined in these terms since we rarely saw people visiting the high street simply for the high street and not it’s shops. However, we felt that Site Specific performance could be something to change that and alter the perception of the public, adjusting the paradigm of the high street as a non-place.
We started to create this performance with the idea of local history and community in mind. Our original plan was an audio-based tour, based off of the work of Forced Entertainment, around an area of the high street to provide new context to it. However, we steered away from the idea of an audio tour when we began to investigate the High Bridge area of the high street.
We discovered that there was a lot of history to this small area of the high street that many would be totally unaware of. After all, there was no plaques or object of that nature to detail its history. During our research, however, we discovered that there used to be a chapel dedicated to Thomas Beckett after his assassination, and then that chapel was replaced by a fountain that gave water to the poorer half of the city. We had already liked the high bridge as a performance space because it received a lot of foot traffic during the afternoon, which meant we had plenty of public interaction when we experimented, using Forced Entertainment inspired questioning to the general public.
This public interaction inspired our first concrete idea for our performance, which was inspired by the history of the place, and combined it with the sense of community that we wanted to elude to. The concept of it was that we were going to ask the public what they valued most in life was, and then write that on a label (attached to a bottle of water) and create an installation piece based on a river and the flow of water. After an hour of displaying this piece, all the bottles would be given out to the general public.
We performed this twice, on a small scale, to see how the public would react to it.
It garnered mostly positive responses in the two runs we performed, though it did still get some negative response from people who deemed us as nuisances. We did, however, always manage to hand out a great many bottles after we had displayed the installations we had created. And even handing out these bottles gave us interesting responses. One gentleman, who was homeless, initially took a bottle that said “Freedom” on it, because he felt that was poignant to him but decided to put it back because he felt that in his position, he was without freedom. But, upon a second search through our selection of bottles and labels, he decided to take the bottle he had originally picked up because he hoped that it would give him some freedom in some small way. This was the sense of community we wished to evoke from our performance.
And yet, upon consideration, we felt that our performance was lacking substance. Instead, we wanted to focus on the basic elements of it, and we felt that awaiting public interaction wasn’t visually interesting enough for our performance. Instead, we wanted to follow on from our aesthetic idea of flowing water, and create something visceral and flowing, and keep the element of water to tie in with our prior research about the history of the high bridge. We decided to make it a durational process, using the water. We explored how visual we could make water, using various different containers, including fountains made of water bottles and dye to try and make it a more visually stimulating performance, but we felt that this overcomplicated our idea.
However, as I mentioned previously, we had explored the concept of transactional theatre performance, and that concept was still stuck in our heads. Some of our early experiments in public interaction took a focus on exchange in terms of conversation and questioning. Though there was no physical transaction or exchange of items, the public was providing us with information, which we would then regurgitate back into our notes to further our own process.
This work was similar to that of Adrian Howells’ performance, Salon Adrienne (2006), the purpose of which was to have a conversation with somebody as he cut their hair, thereby having an exchange of information. Much of Adrian Howells’ body of work revolved around exchanges, including “Foot Washing for the Sole” (2010). Though there was no exchange of information in this performance, it was an act of charity for the audience member and it aided Howells’ work. The general public we encountered during our experiments offered us information, and on most occasions wouldn’t receive anything in return – though we would sometimes engage them in conversation, so that we could unpack some of their answers – which is something that we would change later on in our process.
However, though we moved away from public interaction, we still took some inspiration from Howells’ work, and the idea of exchange his body of work engaged with. Exchange as a concept was in our minds as we started to develop the basis for our performance. When we began to develop our new ideas, we knew that we wanted to utilise water, and we wanted an exchange to be involved.
At a certain point, we started to think about the water from the canal and how we valued it, similarly to how we had previously explored the high street as a non-place. The water in the canal is rife with dirt, animal faeces, litter and general filth, and most people wouldn’t want to go anywhere near it. We considered this to be interesting, because it added value to something that most people take for granted, though it adds a negative value, it is value nonetheless. We felt that this should be a core part of our performance and that our audience should reconsider the value of water. We realised that clean water obtains a positive value to a first world audience when it is contrasted with water of a negative value – in this case, canal water. This was inspired by the work of Bob Whalley and Lee Miller, whose piece “Into the Good Night (Go)” also focussed on exchanges of items that are generally overlooked – in this case, they exchanged bottles of urine for various items at the side of a motorway.
We decided that since we wanted our performance to act as a process, to make it become more visually interesting, we would show a process of cleaning the water through different stages. This process using natural material is similar to Giuseppe Penone, who created “Tree of 12 Metres” (1980), which aimed to revitalise a fallen tree back to feeling alive “Penone’s aim was to return the tree to the form it had had at an earlier stage of its growth, making visible natural processes which are normally hidden” (Manchester, 2000)
We intended to do something similar with our work with water, to bring it back to a state where people would look at it with a positive light, like the people who drank from the fountain hundreds of years before. We decided to clean the water – taken from the canal using a bucket on a rope – using a lengthy process, filtering it several times to ensure that the water was thoroughly cleaned, and then purified it. We were then at a loss with what to do with the water once it was clean, which then led us back to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work in Maintenance Art, which had been introduced to us in our seminars. Ukeles’ belief was that everything people do is art and that maintenance shows the work that goes into something created, and renews the excitement to it. “Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight; show your work—show it again keep the contemporaryartmuseum groovy keep the home fires burning” (Ukeles, 1969) Since cleaning this dirty water was something that acted as development, which Ukeles believes is a novelty that wears off, we wanted to add a purpose to the water we were cleaning, and thereby use the maintenance part of her theory. We decided to clean the space that was using, both for sanitary purposes, but also to give the water function, thereby adding further value to it through the process. It also sustained the interest of the general public, which we saw when we were practicing our final idea, and working out any problems we may encounter with it.
The practice of our performance always seemed to draw the interest of small crowds, and we would often look into the café adjacent to where we were cleaning the water to find people watching us from the windows, and oftentimes, when someone would approach us, they would tell us that they’d been watching from the café. This helped us confirm that our work was visually interesting – which was our biggest problem with our original idea for our performance.
Performance Evaluation –
Our performance was on a hot May afternoon, which meant that there was plenty of foot traffic through the centre of town, and that meant plenty of public audience. We started earlier than planned to try and get the momentum of our performance going and to get a real feel for how our performance would go through the day, especially since the task of taking water from the canal was a strenuous one in the heat. However, even from setting up our containers and filter jugs, the public were stopping to see what was going on. Their responses were generally positive and enthused, they asked us questions about our performance and
seemed genuinely curious to discover what our piece was about. It’s rare to see people stopping in the street unless prompted by salespeople, or by another person. However, a sizable number of the general public came to stop and watch us, which we found surprising. It even opened up discussion between other audience members, who were curious to find out what was going on, which harkens back to the sense of community we wanted to convey when we were first creating our performance.
However, there were some negative responses to our performance. One elderly woman seemed outraged that we were cleaning the water, claiming that were takinglife out of the water. Another woman, who was passing by, spat at us. However, these were the only negative responses we actually received.
Overall, we had a large amount of people coming to watch, and we even had a little girl who wanted to take part in our performance. When we transitioned from job to job, we managed to maintain the flow and the momentum of the work and kept the performance visually interesting enough for the audiences to keep watching us. One audience member stayed for several hours to watch, which surprised us above all else.
We also questioned our audience on whether they’d had any interesting experiences with water to try and apply our research into questioning. Audience responses to our questioning was a little underwhelming, though we did receive some interesting responses. One husband and wife pairing told us about how their son had been buried at sea, whereas another told us about how he had dived into the canal to save someone, and how he had to be quarantined afterwards. These were the kinds of responses that we were looking for and the kinds of responses we had hoped to receive from all of our questionings, but unfortunately, it didn’t go that way.
Overall, we were pleased with how our performance had gone. The audience responses we had received were what we were looking for, and our performance was engaging to our audience, which is what we wanted from this performance. It was interesting to see how people responded to our performance, in terms of audience size and how often we received questions.
Video taken by an invited audience member. Peck, B 2016
References
Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
Kaye, N. (2000). Site-Specific Art – Performance, Place and Documentation. New York: Routledge.
Manchester, E. (2000, September). Tree of Twelve Metres. Retrieved from Tate Modern: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/penone-tree-of-12-metres-t05557/text-summary
Pearson, M. (2007). Site Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan .
Tun, N. (2012, March 5). The Puddle and the Blue Sky – Nasan Tur. Retrieved from Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/37951555
Ukeles, M. L. (1969). Manifesto for Maintenance Art.