Set in Stone
Framing Statement
The way in which we chose to tell the story of our library was through art combined with performance and history. By creating a performance that spreads over all three floors, we explored the concepts of body, architecture and time, and how they come together to create the story of our building.
Our piece took place at the back stairs of the library. Through the use of levels we were able to create a performance that explored how the body and building could come together to create performance. As we were a group of six, this enabled us to be able to explore the whole of the site at any one time; spreading our performance out over all three floors enabled the audience to always be in contact with at least one group member as they travelled around our site, ‘one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly.’ (Borges, 2000, 19). We explored the concept of history and time by using our bodies to appear ‘stuck in time’.
One of our main aspects of our performance was art installation. Through the use of art, that we ourselves created, we were able to install something that we knew would catch attention of the audience; we used mod-rocked body parts and books. We used the installation art both for interest for an audience member when they were watching the performance from inside the space, and also as a device to attract members of the public walking past the library, whose attention was caught by the mod-rock displayed in the window and on the stairs. The idea of institution of those particular things that we created (hands, feet, legs, arms, books and faces) enabled us to explore ways of why the human body is such a relevant part of the library as a building ‘by which the artist contrasts conventional expectations with the newly found possibilities presented with instillation’ (Rosenthal, 2005, 54). Although the majority of the pieces we created were delicately made, we also explored how the use of pieces that were imperfect, also have an effect on the audience.
Analysis of Process
When figuring out a final idea for our site specific performance, our group came to the decision that we wanted to focus on both the history and architecture of the library building. After researching the building itself, we learnt that the library was once a grain factory before it had become part of the university. We felt that this was an interesting point, and one which we could focus our performance around. We therefore began developing ideas and had the inspiration to do a performance based around the people that are part of the library building, by actually becoming ‘part of the building ourselves’. Our main objective was mixing real life with art.
We began to think about what part of the library we felt we could show not only the historical elements of the building, but also focus more on the people involved in the building itself. After exploring the whole library as a site for a while, we focused on the back staircase; finding that each floor had a white blank space on we became engrossed in the idea of a ‘white blank page’ and the amount of things we could do to explore this, almost as though it symbolised something that was asking to be changed, or added to. Our first idea when looking at the blank wall was to explore the ability of actually placing things onto the wall. As we knew we wanted to incorporate real life into art and focus on the body mixed with architecture, we came up with the idea of putting a person onto the wall, and working around that. As Lily from our group had experience with mod-rock, she suggested we should use that to stick one of our bodies to the wall, and from there we thought we could add and adapt other art pieces or drawing and writing around that. We understood that the library would not allow us to impact any damage straight onto the wall, so we therefore wanted to incorporate a large white blank sheet, which would be stuck onto the wall and then onto that would be our mod-rocked body. We began to look at how we could gather the right materials that we needed for this to work, and our tutor had told us to contact the art department to ask about the supplies they had, and whether we could work with them. We met with one of the art technicians later that week and told him our idea, to which he suggested we could come back before we had to present our idea to our markers and the library staff and have a practice at using the mod-rock. We were shown how to use the mod-rock, and made one cast of Ellie’s arm to bring into present our idea. After giving our presentation, we were given the advice to keep the idea of the mod-rock the creation of objects, but that instead of focusing on mod-rocking a body into the wall, as this wasn’t practical, we should explore how else we could show our idea.
After our presentation, we went away as a group and discussed how we could change our original idea into something more realistic and appropriate. We knew we wanted to stick with mod-rocking and created pieces of art, so we instead had the idea to create numerous body parts, as appose to one whole body stuck to the wall, and that we could place them around the blank wall’s on each level but still have at least one person on each level, placed by the wall in a sort of ‘statue’ mode that would allow us to explore the concept of time in the building, and also the allow us to explore the history, almost as though we were ‘stuck in time’.
In one Site Specific session, we as class watched a piece of work by Adrian Howells in which he created an artistic piece centrered around a hair salon and explores the bonds that can be made with the clients that visit there. This linked into how our group wanted to explore the people of the building, and the impact an atmosphere from a certain site can have upon people, changing their attitude and behaviour in a certain place. He investigates the relationship between the hairdresser (portrayed by himself as Adrienne) and the client he is looking after. The video shows the break down of certain boundaries we may expect these two people to have; normally at a hair salon there would be a certain amount of small talk between the client and the hairdresser but to a certain point, not usually revealing anything that could be seen as ‘personal’. Adrienne asks the clients to take ‘a long hard look at yourself in the mirror’, commenting that usually people start to describe the superficial things amount themselves such as ‘the bags under my eyes’ but Adrienne pushes them further, getting them to concentrate on the metaphorical things they see when they look at themselves. To enable his customers to share more about themselves, Adrienne will always give something back to them, a personal thing about himself that then creates a bond of trust and respect, meaning that the client can then respond and share something equally as personal. What’s interesting to think about with this video is what effect the piece being set in a hairdresser has upon the performance. Personally, I think that it symbolises how a hair salon can be quite a personal space, where people become very aware of themselves, thinking about both flaws and positives about themselves and how exploring this is important in understanding the mind-set and emotions of people in certain places compared to others. Adrian Howells’ work helped our group to focus a lot more on the individual people that come into our site, why they come here and how they may change the way they act because of the atmosphere of the place they are in.
When looking for inspiration for our performance, our group looked towards performance artist Kira O’Reilly and in particular her performance that surrounded stairs and the exploration of movement on them. Obviously as our chosen space for our performance was the library’s back stairs, this was extremely relevant to us. Watching the performance, it became clear how although a simple part of a building, the stairs can be explored in many different ways. O’Reilly presents this by ‘falling’ down the stairs in slow motion, which creates a sense of pure concentration on each step and the impact that has on her body. A particular theme that I took from the performance was danger and how that fitted in with stairs and the movements we take when exploring that space. I found that the slow motion of the piece really helped to focus on the damage that can be done to a body when falling down the stairs. O’Reilly also interestingly focuses on using the entire staircase, taking particular care to go step by step, touching as much of the stairs and handle rails as is possible with her body. Looking at O’Reilly’s work made our group think about the way in which we could present different ways of moving and exploring the body in our performance. As our performance was on a staircase, it made perfect sense to do this by playing around with how we could move up and down the stairs in different ways. We set the task of trying to see how many different ways we could travel the staircase, from how we normally felt we walked, to more unnatural ways such as crawling or sliding. This impacted the way in which we thought about how we normally move around, which was made more interesting when we added the focus of the stairs, as architecture, and how that impacted our movements. We decided that it would be effective for us to actually incorporate our idea of travelling around the stairs into our final performance. Therefore we chose to split our group of six into two separate three-person groups and concentrate on having both small groups performing at the same time. We thought this would be more effective in portraying to the audience our idea of mixing architecture and the body, by having one group presenting how the human body is a part of the library as a building, and another group exploring how the human body fits into the building and how it changes around it, such as travelling on the stairs.
Another inspiration our group had for our piece was the work of Rachel Whiteread. As an artist that primarily produces sculptures, which mostly take the form of casts, she, and her work were an obvious interest to our group that we felt we should look further into. One of her most famous projects, House, took our group’s interest. House was a sculpture project that took place in East London, with a wide range of views about the project, meaning that Whiteread ‘had won the 1993 Turner Prize, and a gathering of Bow Neighbourhood Councillors voted that House should be demolished with immediate effect.’ (Lingwood et al, 1995, 7). The work was a complete concrete cast of the inside of a three-story house, but with no roof space. This immediately struck our group as something that we could focus around; there were obvious similarities between the work we wanted to produce, using mod-rock and concrete, and Whiteread’s project. One thing I found that particularly linked with our work and Whiteread’s was the fact that we were making nothing extremely abstract, but rather ordinary parts and objects, such as books and hands. Similarly, Whiteread had focused her art around and everyday object, a house. Our work then gave me the particular interest of focusing on how something so normal can be made to look some unnatural and abstract, purely based on the site the art is in. Focusing on placing our mod -rocked body pieces around the staircase meant that it would create interest simply by looking so out of place, and hopefully resulting in the audience being drawn in on why we had done this.
Our group took an interest in both Traci Kelly and Rhiannon Jones and their work they created together that centrered around a staircase. The performance art is similar to the work that our group were investigating, regarding mod-rock surrounding the stairs. What was particularly interesting was the way the concrete used in the performance appeared to have been crushed down so that it had become dust that was spread over the stairs and surrounding area. The artists had then stepped in the concrete to create footprints that were leading up to a pair of shoes. What I liked most about the performance art was the simpleness of it. In the photographs the crushed concrete appears to lie naturally on each step with only a few materials added in to enhance the performance.
Studying this particular piece of work gave us the inspiration to explore not only the art that we created, but also the excess parts such as the broken down clay or the parts that had been crushed and how that could possibly be added into our performance. We decided that instead of keeping a ‘clean’ performance space, we would embrace the ‘mess’ that was created when positioning our art around our site, we did not want to give off an ‘art gallery’ sort of impression, but instead focus on how the mess created would symbolise the fact that this building has always revolved around work, and aiming to create something; ‘Processes from drawing, printmaking and sculpture seemed to find purchase on living physicality’ (O’Brian, 2014). By showing the effect of our broken down pieces of art, we felt this created a sense of ‘work-in-progress’ art, that highlighted an intention of the building, to provide a place of work for the public. We also thought that audience members would be drawn in by the imperfect pieces lying around as it is not something one would expect to see in instillation art, which would be expected to be of a perfect standard, ‘plaster casts were […] not in themselves objects of serious study in the way that original pieces should be’ (Frederiksen et al, 2010, 189).
Another aspect of our piece that we developed was the sound used in our performance. We recorded what sounded like mechanical machinery to play constantly during our performance, we used this to symbolise the history of the building, as a factory and warehouse, and also to explore the concept of the stairs as a piece of architecture, and how easily sound travelled through the space.
Performance Evaluation
As our performance was split into three twenty minute slots, this surprisingly created a sense of three very different performances. As previously mentioned, our group was split into two and in the performance as three of us would act as human statues, with one or more body parts embodied in mod-rock, the other three would be roaming the staircase in different ways. This meant that the audience members we had, had multiple things to focus on as they went up and down the stairs. It was interesting to discover that audience members would actually almost be travelling with us as we explored the staircase. As we had three of us moving around, it meant that at any point an audience member would be walking on the same set of stairs as one of us, meaning there was entirely no fourth wall for any of our performance. It was interesting to see how the audience reacted to our performance, especially the more deformed looking pieces of art, which got a lot of reaction.
What stood out in the reaction to our performance was the feedback we were given after our second showing; our markers had noted our work with the body parts, but wanted us to explore the concrete books that we had created even more. This meant in the break between our second and third performance, we had to discuss what we could add to the performance to put more focus on the books used. As we had positioned the clay books around the windowsills, to look like book shelves, we decided that the group that were wondering the staircase could perhaps be moving up and down the stairs, whilst carrying books, taking them off and putting them, on the shelf, to impersonate how library users collect and return books. This had a huge impact on our performance, and allowed us to be even more creative through improvisation, resulting in the final performance being our most effective one, which was proved as some audience members stopped to record or photograph our work.
If performing again, I would suggest that our group had incorporated with moving the books, and other objects, around in all three performances, rather than just the last. This would have improved not only the appearance of the performance but also furthered our understanding of the body and we can explore when moving around.
My engagement with the site specific module, and the theories studied, has helped me to understand the ways in which performance can be changed and altered depending on the place it is set in, and the impact this has on the piece. For example, our performance would have had an entirely different effect if we had presented it in another site. Bringing together the context, architecture, history and the people within a place in a performance gives the audience an entirely different look at a piece of work than any traditional piece of performance that they may see in a theatre.
Words Cited
All photographs are groups own.
Borges, J. (2000) The Library of Babel. Michigan: David R. Godine.
Lingwood, J (ed). (1995) Rachel Whiteread House. London: Phaidon Press Limited.
Fredericksen, R., Marchand, E. (2010) Plaster Casts. Germany: Walter de Gruyter.
Rosenthal, M. (2005) Understanding Installation Art. London: Tate Publishing.
O’Brian, M. (2014) The Art of Kira O’Reilly. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 19 (4) 85-87.