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An audience’s reaction

 

 

 

I asked my partner and some friends to come to The Collection. I merely said we were going to look around the museum and meet them there, I said I would meet them in the café.

 

 

I wanted to find out their reactions without expecting some sort of performance.

 

 

When they spotted me outside of the café, I kept one eye on them. They looked at me in confusion and looked around the whole “exhibit” until they clocked that it was a performance.

 

 

I asked them after it was finished what did they think and did they understand what we were doing.

 

 

My partner agreed with Dan’s criticism and said the mimic up top didn’t seem to be part of it and she didn’t understand what was going. She did however once looking around notice it was an exhibit, and I was a piece of art.

 

 

When I asked my friends they agreed with the general observation and they said once they stared closely at Jennifer and I they noticed we were mimicking the people inside the café.

 

 

My partner as a person, who is not interested in drama in the slightest, said site specific was highly interesting.  They have never been drama people but they understood that what we were performing was the location.

 

 

As Kaye (2000, p220) said, “Finally, it is to this end that site-specific art so presciently works against its own final or definitive location, as, though this wide variety of forms and strategies, it speculates toward the performance of its places.”

 

 

Even people oblivious to drama and was site specific is understood that we were an art gallery showing café culture and understood perfectly what we were trying to do.

Bibliography:

Kaye, N., (2000). Site-specific Art. Oxton: Routledge p220.

Gabriel Davies

A few days after our piece I have now sat down to recollect about the performance, I went through all my old blog posts as well as the people in my group, and sat down to really think about the progression and final result that was our performance.

 

 

Looking back on our piece I see a lot now that I would like to improve. Though I enjoyed our piece, I felt we strayed away from our painting. We were more focused on showing Café culture, though I felt that was very well done for a site-specific piece, I would like to have seen more of our painting in the performance.

 

 

Though we wore white shirts to match the people in the painting, I felt that was the only thing that happened to be from the actual painting, everything else was more focused on the site. Which is not a bad thing but I would have personally enjoyed to have put more of the painting into our performance.

 

 

 

 

In our original idea, we had the tree in the outside area serving as the flowers. We also had string tying up the buildings to represent the stitches, and the idea that like the people in the painting the buildings were bound together.

 

 

Due to many complications such as unable to get the okay in time for us to tie up strings, we ended up having to take the string out of completely and tree just didn’t quite fit into our new idea. If I could go back and get the time to practice with the string I would have liked to add it to our piece, to make it part of our exhibition.  I also believe it would have made our piece much bigger. We were quite subtle in our piece and I would have enjoyed the string to catch people’s eyes then bring them in to us actually performing.

 

 

I also would have if I had no expenses and money wasn’t a problem, I would have enjoyed putting myself, Fran and Jennifer in glass boxes, so we mimicked our small exhibitions.

 

 

 

I felt that would have really given the exhibition feel to us, so we melded more with the pieces.  One criticism that Dan said which I agreed with was that our pieces did not fit like a jigsaw, there seemed to be three different parts. With Holly and Shellie upstairs, Us three downstairs and then these art pieces.  I felt any passer by wouldn’t see it all as one performance. I think if we were in glass boxes then we would have look all the same, (with everyone in glass boxes).  Considering Holly and Shellie, were in a glass window, which looked like a glass box, if us three down on the ground were in boxes we would have looked more together.

 

 

I think we improved on our original piece by moving outside, in between the café and the museum, and becoming a melting pot of the two rather than staying inside the café. By moving outside we also had a lot more movement and freedom of the whole space.  Even getting to make our mimic stronger by instead of just being in café with a special board, we got to make our own and enforce what we were trying to do. Which was turning the café culture into an exhibit outside. In our original piece we also had no props or extras being in the café itself but by moving outside we got to add the small exhibits such as the cake stand and the tea. I believe those small props made all the difference. People generally do not like to notice someone acting strange, but they had to come near us to view the props, and that is when they started to notice that we were chatting away to ourselves. I think having the props greatly improved more people noticing the piece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Though I believe our performance was a big success and I did thoroughly enjoy it, I wouldn’t mind going back and improving on it. Looking back on my blog posts you can see how vastly our ideas changed and we ended up doing a completely new performance. Performance wise I wish we would have had some consistency and some reminisce of our original idea in our piece.  Though in the end I really did enjoy our performance and would more than happily do it again, merely for my own enjoyment of seeing people react to the piece.

 

 

Gabriel Davies