When we first approached the Collection we were intrigued by both the Collection and The Usher Gallery, however were instantly drawn to the clocks and jewelry owned by Henry Usher himself and the history and design behind each object. The idea of time and the cyclical feel to the buildings allowed us to explore both places with our intention in mind and explore the deeper meanings.
We then moved onto looking at the audience’s perspective on the art within the two buildings, seeing how little things can affect their visit to a museum. We were shocked by the room with the dead man on the floor and had already considered how people would react if one of us just sat on the floor.
Would they assume it was art or a piece of performance? Or would they even stop to consider whether someone was ok?..
We also looked at the seating outside the building and how we could play around with the noticeable glass rooms that stick out of the collection.
Whilst outside we noticed an engagement ring circled around a tree. We found out the idea behind it and fell in love with the story of a marriage bond between us and nature! We liked how this piece of art tied in with our ideas of time and therefore the cyclical feel of time going by.
The concept that the ring could only be revealed during winter when the trees are bare, allowed us to run with the theme of revelations and revealing something that isn’t normally noticed!
When standing on the balcony in the Collection building, we realised that this specific space was unnoticed by the general public. We were out of sight yet were able to look at other people without them knowing. This was very powerful and enabled us to play with the public who were oblivious to our presence on the balcony. We ourselves thought that the idea of revealing a space would be a good start to carry out practicals and form ideas for our performance.
In the initial weeks we spent time exploring spaces on site. Looking round we liked the exhibitions on Time and the four seasons seemed to be a popular topic in the Usher Gallery. We later learned this was because James Ward Usher born in 1845 was a jewellery and pocket watch collector who owned shop which he displayed these goods in, in Lincoln where he took over from his father in 1874. When he died he bequeathed his collection to Lincoln City which is why it is in the gallery today. As for the four seasons, we noticed a large ring on a tree outside, a staff member told us an artist installed it there to show the bond between love and nature. In full bloom the ring was hidden but in winter when it was at its barest it would apparent. This sparked the revelation and concealment idea.
We were also keen to learn about the architecture of the building. Research showed it was founded in 1906. It was very interesting to learn that the building sits on an ancient monument. Where the gallery is situated was once sat the roman and medieval city. Excavations showed that in this area Roman, Anglo-Scandinavian and medieval archaeology would be prominent and that Victorian buildings would previously have occupied the site.
The buildings on site had so much history beneath it! Many a time there must have been the excavating of walls and the demolishing of others, I really liked the idea of our concept being like history repeating itself. Pearson and Shanks talk about the archaeology of theatre related to a space, ‘the stage becomes a place of absolute scrutiny, although it may change in nature, constantly alluding to other times, other places: it might play with notions of hiding and revealing, screening and disclosing, see or half seeing. (2001, p.23) This to me exemplified the idea that site specific performances were conditioned by their very space and should reflect its history.
4/3/13
This week we brought materials that could be used on site to help us achieve our aim of revealing space to the audience. Initially we wanted to use five spaces around The Collection Gallery and have subtle movements going on in each site. We started with the window alcove in the exhibition gallery. We liked this space because of the questions it provoked, such as why were people drawn to this space?
Our materials ranged from army figures, stacking cups and plastic ducks to marbles and balloons. We started playing around with the idea of covering up the space to be able to reveal something behind it. We tried building a wall out of the cups. From our results it proved to be a success as we found the higher we got the more interesting the piece became. However we did find they were far to light-weight and small.
We then decided we wanted to build the wall over a long period of time and in silence to create intrigue and suspense for our audience.
I was inspired by Station House Operas work which, specialize in the building and demolishing of architecture and explore the intimate relationship between people and the environment they inhibit. One of their projects, Dominoes, explores having breeze blocks standing in a line and journeying through a whole entire landscape of the country.
Although on a much bigger scale, the principles were still the same about the construction of something in a public space. I liked the way the audience followed as if on a journey with the piece.
When looking in the main gallery we found inspiration in the Roman centurion’s reconstruction. What interested us was that centuries ago this building used to inhabit the Romans. We had the idea of merging the stacking of cups and figures together to create a battle field scene. This was because we wanted to highlight the relationship between the objects and the space. It became a very intense piece which we responded to by asking questions to each other so we could get a feel for our collective experience.
We also wanted to incorporate words into our piece and in doing so develop the idea of layering and building something up and then bringing it down. This was metaphorical as words overlapping the building of the tower and the construction of the army reflected the building and deconstruction of the wall.
Spending time in the window alcove led to acknowledging the intricacies of things such as the recording on loop. We liked the idea of repetition, using singular words and phrases to create a fragmented atmosphere in the space. This fragmentation is derived from our own interpretations of the recording, writing down our responses in a stream of consciousness form and thus recording what the art provoked from us. This was most interesting for us and something we would later develop in next week’s session.
We wanted to use balloons as a way of revealing something to the audience. Our idea for this was contrived by the concept of posting secrets in balloons and leaving them in a space in the gallery for the audience to pop and hence reveal the secret. We did however decide it didn’t correlate with our theme of space all that well.
A space not often noticed by the public is below the galleries. This space was interesting as it was ultimately ‘dead space’, deserted and unknown. One thing we observed was the acoustics, they created an echoing effect, and the colour of the walls- a deep red added to the atmospherics.We decided to use the marbles and drop them down the stairs in a sequence that would build with pace. This showed how we we’re filling the space and also how we were adding to the space as one marble following another created a rush of sound which intensified rapidly.
We then repeated the action again and involved one of us acting as if running away from something. The sounds of the marbles helped create this illusion and atmosphere. We concluded this experimentation would not aid us in our development of revealing space, although it proved useful in helping us explore spaces and narrow down our focal points. Further exploration showed there was a parallel window space like the window alcove, in the opposing space which we wanted to use. Our ideas were starting to become more finalized now. We’d gone from many spaces to two where we felt we could concentrate on the idea of empty space and yet still be able to reveal something in it. Susan Bennett suggests Kirschenblatt-Gimblett argues today’s museum is a ‘theatre, memory place, a stage for the enactment of other times and places, a space of transport, fantasy, dreams’. (2013, p.4). This demonstrates the links that can be drawn between the Theatre and the Museum and that they’ve gone from two separate forms and now can interlink together in a very modernist way.
Our practical exploration proved very successful this week as we were not only able to narrow down our ideas but also develop an understanding of how we could create something in the space by the window. Our main focus would now be building a wall in the space. From our exploration we learnt that we would need something on a much larger scale, therefore our choice will now be cardboard boxes.
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Works cited:
Bennett, Susan (2013) Theatre and Museums, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Pearson Mike and Michael Shanks (2001) Theatre/ Archaeology, New York: Routledge.
Station House Opera (2009) Station House Opera’s Dominoes…(part 1), Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XlEKesUDAX8 (accessed: 1st May 2013).
So as our ideas are in need of us using university owned ladders and its getting a bit late in the day we are beginning to see how unimportant the stringing of the buildings now is. We have defiantly strayed from our original ideas but I am enjoying the idea we now have.
To begin with I didn’t really like Site-Specific but now I am enjoying the freedom to create that we truly have. Maybe it would have been easier on ourselves to have started with this idea originally but I think we needed to go with the direction our previous ideas took us on to get to the end result.
We are now planning on taking the gallery outside and creating our our exhibition filling the space that is empty between the gallery and the cafe with our art. Our art is inspired by the cafe itself and is a instillation. We are hoping to do it for an extended amount of time to allow the audience to wander in at their own leisure to discover what we have to offer. We hope they will interpret our piece in their own unique way and take something away with them.
Our performance is taking place at The Collection Gallery on Danes Terrace in Lincoln. We are going to be presenting our gallery between 12pm and 2pm on Saturday the 4th of May. Feel free to come along and experience our exhibition.
Focusing our work on clocks and time, we are in the process of creating our own digital clock to project throughout our piece onto the doors of Gallery 3. We photographed ourselves in the positions of each number from 0-9, and using an animation software, these photographs will become a clock, ticking down from 24 hours.
The reason for us wearing white is in order for our clock to stand out against the midnight blue of the Gallery’s interior. The digital clock will contrast the traditional Grandfather clocks which are present in the Gallery, and will structure our piece which represents a 24 hour day. Our piece is also physical with lots of mime and movement, so making a clock using our bodies will be an interesting visual addition.
We were inspired to create this from watching similar work by other artists, finding it both interesting and highly effective to watch.
This is a statement from Golda Meir, a Prime Minister of Israel about how life has so much to offer us and we have so little time if we work to keep in time with the clock. Instead, we should embrace what we want to do, when we want to do it and dictate to the clock how fast or slow we want time to go. Clocks are a man-made object that were created in order to structure a day according to the sunlight so this poses the question Does time really exist? We were born and educated to recognise that time exists in our lives and this is passively accepted by everyone so we unconsciously live in the control of time.
Our performance has a main focus around clocks and time which is why I found this a particularly interesting concept to consider. We are controlled by the sound of a ticking clock and move in time with this through our condensed working day. This is emphasising the way in which people can become consumed with their daily routines and captured in mundane repetition every day because they are focused on keeping up with time.
In reality, we go through the day doing the things we need to do at specific times and constantly looking at clocks, whether they are watches, digital or analogue, without actually taking notice or questioning why we do this. The argument could be that we get older as time goes on and the years pass so time is one of the only things we can be sure of. On the other hand, clocks are a machine the human race created to measure time so did it exist before the creation? Or is it a concept we created to make some sense of the world we live in?
Dr Robert Lanza, a scientific officer at Wake Forest University of Medicine, has some interesting notions about the existence of time and space and claims that “space and time aren’t physical things. They’re forms of animal intuition. They are modes of understanding, part of the mental software that molds sensations into objects.” This supports the idea that time does not actually exist but has been created as a way in which people can structure their days and measure the period of time a process takes. For example, the length of time it takes for an ice cube to melt, or, in the case of structuring the day, when to meet for lunch ‘2:30pm’.
Time is such an intriguing concept to consider as it is naturally an extremely important part of our lives no matter what lifestyle you have. There is strong evidence supporting both sides of the argument but what do you think? Does time really exist?
Works Cited:
Lanza, Robert. (2012). Does time really exist?. Available: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201202/does-time-really-exist. Last accessed 17th April 2013.
