James Ward Usher was a man who gave a lot to Lincoln, he provided employment with his jewellers firm, he helped establish the strong links between Lincoln and the Imp which drew many tourists there at the time, he was the first man in Lincoln to use electricity and most relevant to the purposes of this blog, upon his death he bequeathed the entirety of his considerable art collection to the city of Lincoln and set aside £60,000 for the construction of a gallery to house it in. It is in this gallery we will be holding our performance, a durational piece which explores the nature of time and the working day, inspired by the fact that a large part of the Usher collection is a variety of clocks. they are in many cases wonderful works of art themselves and are a dominating presence throughout the gallery. I personally feel that a durational piece is the greatest way to honour Ushers legacy through the means of performance as much like the man himself, we will be giving something to the people of Lincoln, or at least those people of Lincoln who will be attending an art gallery on a Saturday! At the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious, the piece will be the art that we bequeath to those people, our gift to Lincoln
The focus of the piece is doubly appropriate firstly for the obvious reason that Usher was a watchmaker and a piece on time and the working day can be seen as an allegory or metaphor of his adult life. The second is that as a Victorian businessman, he was part of a generation of men who did much to lay the foundations of what is now considered a normal working day. Prior to the industrial revolution, a large proportion of the populations work could be described as agrarian, with their working hours dictated by season and available daylight rather than working to a regulated schedule. For them, time was harder to define, it was mainly something measured through natural occurrences. As the majority of the population switched to industrial labour, they went from an environment where time was an intangible presence to one where it was not only easily visible in the form of factory clocks, but where through a series of shift patterns it actively controlled their lives, something which to this day has never truly been changed. Through our performance we will aim to give a stylised version of this, whereby through repetitive actions we explore the tedious, overly regulated actions of a day in the manual labour profession, emphasising the constant dictation of the days events through the constant sounds of a ticking clock being played whilst the piece is being performed. This constant reminder that whatever we do can be quantified in measurements of seconds, minutes, hours etc once again shows how we are constant slaves to a system of our own making. The fact that we have created our own jailer is represented in the fact that during the section of the piece where we represent going to work, we will be constructing a clock. Prior to the performance, we will have created a clock of a different nature which will be projected onto the wall for the performances duration. It shall be a twenty four hour digital clock composing of our own bodies, on one level it will be a constantly changing visual stimulant for audience members in a piece that at times will be undoubtedly slow moving if not downright static, on another deeper one it is symbolic of how we make time ourselves and a clear representation of how it is in many ways a human construct when we attempt to make a measure of it. In this case it is literally time being recorded by people. As the clock slowly counts down to zero, we are shown to be timing ourselves, showing the the self imposed restrictions of our time measurement system but also the way that those systems are as dependent on us as we are on them. On a more aesthetic and less (at least intentionally) philosophical level, this is a direct contrast to the clocks one would usually observe, normally functional items even the grandiose and beautiful ones to be observed in the gallery naturally have a very mechanical style. Through constructing a clock out of possibly the most organic materials possible (the human body), we juxtapose the traditional timepieces, of which there is one in the room next to where the projection will be displayed, with this anthropomorphised clock being beautiful in its own way and just as functional, yet will challenge the perceptions of what is a machine that records time. Is the projection even a clock, as it is a collection of images which project in a pre-selected order as opposed to a machine that will once set up autonomously continue to give an accurate display of time, but on the other hand, if it depicts time accurately at a given moment then there is a strong argument for considering it as a timepiece. Ultimately, until the performance, not all of these questions will be able to be answered but there is a certain level of intrigue as to how it will be interpreted by members of the public and what impact it will have on both their visit to the gallery that day and their general perceptions of time, what it is, how we measure it and how we use it to restrict ourselves and regulate our days and lives.
Edit. I wrote this blog over a month ago, hence the nature of it’s contents and the ideas I express and only realised today I had written it but never posted it