Author: James Barker

Art is something that is subjective in so many ways and almost impossible to define. The formaldehyde preserved animals of Damien Hirst and the unmade bed of Tracy Emin are in some ways less complicated than a Caravaggio or Michelangelos David, but in others infinitely more so. Some pieces scream out their creators inner torment, others the creators peace with the world and appreciation of nature and beauty. The Usher gallery houses art of many schools, but the question I find myself asking is this. Can our performance be considered a piece of art in itself. On the level of personal reflections it may perhaps fail, certainly it is not an expose of the groups minds, no insight into tortured souls or placid contentness, yet on another level it was never intended to be. As an insight to the condition of humanity, the time driven, regulated nature of modern working life being the focus of the piece, it spoke not a truth about the individual creators but rather one about western society as a whole. It shows how as a society founded on the principles of freedom and democracy we are still slaves to one thing: ourselves.

Another objection that may be given about our piece is that its legacy could be considered to be short lived. Unlike the Greco-Roman sculptures situated on the floor above us after we performed, our piece will not be there generations after our deaths, it was not even there after the gallery closed that night. Yet I do believe that it would be unfair to argue the piece had no legacy. If one person who viewed it walked away with a changed thought process then the legacy of the piece is undoubted. In the words of Henry David Thoreau “It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see.” As a physical piece, what you see (or saw) will have changed depending on the timing of your visit to the gallery. Yet as a multi-faceted exhibit, I would be forced to argue with Thoreau partially and say that what you looked at will have been key to what you saw. To look at the decaying pineapple may have inspired feelings of the awareness of ones own mortality, to stare at the ravishing effects time has upon organic matter. The human clock on the other hand shows how time can preserve someone, how through the create of something simple, you can become more than just yourself, something that is separate from you, a legacy that time can’t take from you, something that is yours after you are gone. To observe us, the performers could envoke feelings of ennui, even despair as the pointless, repetitive, circular nature of the day is played out, perhaps even striking a realisation that the lives being portrayed are likely similar to their own. Or you could see none of these things. But the possibility of there being these reactions and indeed that there was negative and positive responses heard throughout the day shows that thoughts could undoubtedly be provoked.

Of course, following these arguments, you could say that any public displays are a form of art. A premiership football match can invoke strong feelings of passion, stirring people to emotional highs and lows that are disproportionate to an event they played no part in. Similarly, the novels of a great writer or the food of a great chef or the buildings of great architect can all stir emotion. Yet I believe that they cannot be considered art, whilst the collection of possessed time can be. The aforementioned events do not aim to provoke the thoughts of their observers and participants, whereas that was our aim from the start. Had we failed to excite the thoughts of our audience then our purpose would have failed, whereas all of the above could still consider themselves a success.

Another somewhat crude argument is that we were displayed in an art gallery, that alone making us considerable as a piece of art. Then again, it could be counter argued that the Vatican is almost as far removed from an art gallery as it is possible to be and yet the Cistine Chapel most be considered amongst the finest art work in the world. Many pieces of modern art are utilitarian items simply displayed in an unusual or unconventional context. By this measure, anything can be considered art so long as it is presented as such. The role of the public is also an important one, for should a thing widely be considered to be something, then generally it will be held up as such, regardless of it’s original context. Here, one is reminded of reader theory in literature which argues that a piece of writing is no longer the intellectual property of the author as soon as he or she has written and published it. Hopefully a fate that will escape this blog as one only wonders at the sort of individual who consider this trite exploration of artistic preferences suitable to intellectually commandeer!

Ultimately, as I said at the beginning, to define whether a thing is art in itself or not is a nigh on impossible task, ultimately it comes down to two people. The viewer and the attempted artist. I am personally unsure as to the exact nature of what we created, but I do think it had a beauty, a relevance and a grace that some art pieces I have seen lack. So perhaps I am an artist, or perhaps I am a pretentious fool with delusions of grandeur and a blog to write. Ultimately, the decision is out of my hands.

That’s it. It’s over. The Site Specific performance has been completed and it simply remains to thoroughly analyse it and its effectiveness as a performance and any changes that I personally would implement should its performance be required again. I felt one key feature on the performance day that we had not previously experienced was the quantity of visitors (having only rehearsed on the much quieter weekdays) and the observation of audience reaction gave a fascinating insight into our pieces effect on the general public. Interestingly it was children who were most engaged with several aspects of the performance, particularly the part I consider to be the most visually striking: the human clock projected on the closed door. One little boy in particular seemed fascinated, excitedly chiming “look Daddy, the clocks them!” That such a simple visual tool could bring excitement to those of all ages I think validated its use in the performance. The other projection, that of a pineapple decomposing before coming back to life, is perhaps up for more scrutiny. On a personal level, I believe it was a powerful display of how time is not only something which dictates the working lives of human, but its power as a natural force which will ultimately claim everything. The use of the pineapple I felt to be a nice homage to the pineapple bowl in the display case and the juxtaposition between the two (one preserved to highlight the function of the pineapple bowl as likely to decay as the china it is displayed alongside, the other ravaged by time to show its true short lived nature) helped to highlight our ideas about time being both natural and a human construct. However, it could also be argued that this is hard to see for one who has not been involved in the pieces meticulous planning but is rather just a casual observer. Also we must consider the location of its projection, with it having been projected onto the wall underneath a display case instead of the clearly superior door where the human clock went. This was due to technical issues as opposed to artistic preferences and in this respect; the limits of the space did impact on the performance. Sadly, I cannot see how this could be rectified, but I believe the pineapple still has a place in the performance, particularly as it is the only side which explores times effects on the non-human factors, if anything this side could and perhaps should have been explored more.

 

I feel that the pieces durational nature influenced the audience and their reactions to it. Due its length, nobody stayed to observe for the whole running time, but many came back several times throughout the day, showing we had captured their imagination and provoked thought. Again it was parents and children who seemed most drawn to us and I see this as proof of the piece working on multiple levels. For the children, it was visually striking, with six adults acting in a manner that they would not normally see, dressed (or in Shanes case undressed) in a variety of ways and with the two constant projections on, there was enough to strike up an immediate curiousity after a casual glance. They may also have emphasised with some of the activities that we carried out, the putting together of a jigsaw puzzle and the mimed actions will be features of their own lives that may have pleased them to see done by adults. The parents too seemed intrigued, perhaps empathising more with the portrayal of the tedious, almost mechanical repetition of the working day and the pointlessness of the task we had assigned ourselves for that part of the performance (when the clock puzzle was successfully constructed, we simply dismantled it and started again).

Of course, not all audience reaction could be deemed as positive, but this was something we had prepared for. Due to the relatively enclosed nature of the space we were working in, contact with visitors was going to be inevitable. From the earliest rehearsals, we had encountered members of the public who viewed our activities as a hindrance to their viewing of the exhibits with one gentleman being almost openly hostile muttering for us to “get out my bloody way”. On the day we fortunately didn’t experience anything quite like this, but it is fair to say we did not reach every visitor to the gallery that day. Some were undoubtedly surprised to see the room inhabited. Others were questioning the relevance of the piece, with one woman springing to mind who asked her husband “Is this even worth looking at?” I found reactions such as particularly intriguing, it was the manner in which people spoke in clearly audible tones about the piece, almost disregarding us as individuals and viewing us as an exhibit ourselves, albeit one they may not have cared for. I find it interesting that the comment I found memorable was a question rather than a criticism. Were we even worth looking at? This in my opinion can be viewed as a sign of the pieces success, that we provoked questioning, even though it was sometimes negative, shows that we actually caused audience members to think and have an opinion. All art should, if it is successful, do this. Even if it is hated or reviled, indeed I personally believe that should it fail to encourage thought or an opinion, it has failed in its purpose as a piece of art, a fate that we seemed to avoid.

Practically, the piece was not without its hitches, the most notable being the failure of our alarm clock to go off at the performances start. Inadvertently though, this showed the point the entire pieces point in one unplanned disastrous moment and revealed the truth of our performance: we are ruled by time and clocks and the failure of an expected alarm to go off threatened to throw the entire performance out of kilter. On the whole though, I feel we recovered well, our performance got across our key ideas as we intended it to and it grew as the day went on. As to improvements we may have made, perhaps we should have offered something that would have been more of a direct engagement to visitors, maybe encouraging them to assist us in the construction of the puzzle or join with the miming and rhythmic walking. However, this could be seen as a more childlike activity and as already mentioned; children appeared to be the demographic who most engaged with us. Overall I feel the collection of possessed time to have been the culmination of many interesting ideas and a pleasure to have been involved with.

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