Monday 27 June 2016

sketches - table, iron, shiver


Thinking about possiblities of table - body action shiver, shake, wet. Ironing with hot iron onto the wood veneer of the table.

Friday 10 June 2016

Kitchen Drawer. 1.


Spoon
Scoop
Stirrer
Spatula
Ladel
Slotted         spoon
Runcible      spoon
Measuring  spoon
Mixer
Paddle
Whisk
Fork
Prong
Skewer
Knife
Blade
Peeler
Parer
Corer
Grater
Dibber
Dabber
Dipper
Spreader
Sieve
Sifter
Slicer
Skimmer
Brush
Turner
Tong
Masher
Pin
Press
Frother
Squeezer
Cutter
Shaker
Cracker
Server

Serve


In response to Action Poetry: Karen MacCormack, and Steve McCaffery. OUI Performance. York. 9th June 2016, and thinking about Martha Rosler.




Wednesday 8 June 2016

House as performance archive


June 1st 2016
I listened to Mike Pearson at York University last night Professor Mike Pearson ('Revisiting Theatre/Archaeology' Humanities Research Centre). He spoke of theatre and archaeology, and it made me consider the house as site, and for the performance research to be an archaeology of sorts in the way that the house becomes a live archive of the activities taking place there, and of the associative memories and meanings that are indexed by the house in all that entails.  I was interested in his consideration of the forensic – that in reading a site we sort through the ‘garbage’ to filter the ‘evidence’. I reflect on how I am approaching the house as a site of research.  How do I distinguish the evidence from the garbage?

Is the home an inviolable object – impregnable - not to be dishonoured?
Does it reflect the social milieu of its inhabitants?

What then is the performance in / of the house doing? Taking Pearson’s understanding of performance as ‘doing’ (here he makes reference to Butler) I reflect that the actions of research that I make are largely going unrecorded: moving around the building; looking ‘differently’ at things I have thought of as familiar – cracks in the ceiling, the fall of curtains, the play of light on the wall. I do activities that are housework cleaning, cooking, making beds, but that ‘slip’ into the frame of artwork through the presence of the camera, or simply the added awareness of self-observation.

I start to think of the house as an archive. The performance then becomes and action of ordering, curating, managing the archive. Engaging with the place cannot be only in the material but in the representational– what the house ‘represents’. In Pearson’s terms of the archaeological this process is a re-articulation of the past. But for/ of whom? Is this a past that actually ‘resides’ in my bodily experience and therefore is not of the house, (as Andre Lapecki might suggest – the body is/ as archive), or is it something that exists / is traced in the material of the house – in those cracks in the plaster and folds in the curtains? In a sense, by moving house we bring with us all the archive of previous houses – previous homes. This house is a palimpsest of all the houses – all the homes. (Activated by the transposing of furniture or belongings from one house to another – where ever I lay my hat…). But also in the sense that this house contains the layers of activity of many, multiple occupancies, reflected in traces of it’s previous form – the remnant of wallpaper revealed when a fixture is removed, dents in the paint work, or large architectural interventions of loft conversions and garage extensions. The house morphs, adapts to it’s inhabitants but nonetheless remains fixed, installed and rigid.

I become interested in the cracks – as metaphor for decay and in their actual physical appearance. They are drawings into the surface. They are fissures. Fragmented, fragmenting.
Pearson suggests that the fragment always implies the archaeological – that the fragment traces the aftermath of the event –it is a document. These documents stand in for the past.
It becomes a kind of material matter – that ‘matters’.

Pearson suggests that the site operates as a mnemonic – assisting the remembering of incidents and events past. I suggest that it is also a score – directing future incidents, offering rigid direction to the activity – and therefore the performance ‘doing in the house. For example, the stairs can be negotiated in the conventional way  - walking up and down, or I can experiment with pace (run) body orientation (slide head first) or intention (stop on one step), but inevitably the staircase itself dictates a direction of diagonal travel, or ascent or descent. It also references every journey on the stairs (sitting playing as a child, falling down with a full tea cup, running for the bathroom, sliding down on your bottom…). These are the quotidian events that mark the house as ‘home’. They reinforce presence in and in turn belonging to the home.

In turn the objects of the home are a shifting private history. The performance, in the forensic metaphor, becomes a sifting and filtering process – allocating additional value to the souvenir, tool and furnishing. I say souvenir in the sense that Susan Stewart uses the term in On Longing. She uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytical approach to understanding the objet in relation to the body experience, space and time and memory, but also psychoanalysis to discuss to the object as fetish or the desired. I am interested therefore in the transference of signification that occurs in the process of performance; that the performance action ‘lifts’ the object (indeed the whole house) away from the role of commodity, social anthropology or decorative, into something other.

If as Pearson suggests the art object is the interface of archaeology and culture (Pearson Shanks 2001: 33) is the performance art ‘object’ also such an interface? Is then the ‘method’ here one of auto-ethnography where I unpack the process of performance as an uncovering? Does this performance action alter what is valid – does it shift the focus of the forensic way from the evidence and towards to garbage?

Action response
Taking Pearson’s notion of the archaeological I am going to conduct a survey of the ‘pre-historic’ inhabitants of the house through an investigation of the cracks, marks, traces of previous presences. My research question is – how does the haptic exploration reveal something unknown of the building and therefor my relationship to/ with the building?
I will do this through drawing, movement. I am looking for the unexplainable, and the unfamiliar.


Vacuum



The old vacuum cleaner is broken – I have been meaning to replace it for weeks. A new one, ordered on the internet, arrives. I unpack it in the bedroom. I notice the amount of eco-friendly packaging stuffed into the box, spilling out, contributing to the mess on the carpet that already needs cleaning. I notice the weight of the parcel, tape to cut with scissors, the oblong packaging that describes the height of the machine inside. The packing material has moulded itself to the form of the machine. I lift out the vacuum cleaner: plastic; red and grey; wires and tubes and cylinder. It needs a screwdriver to fix the handle to the casing, which I do. I plug it in. The noise is satisfying indication of motor, drive belt, brush. A less satisfying burnt rubber smell begins. I push the vacuum across the bedroom carpet. I feel the weight of the machine and the resistance of the carpet. The motion too and fro speaks of pacing – impatience, frustration, indecision. I manoeuvre around the bed and the piles of clothes, lifting something, pushing something else. A pleasing amount of dust and dander is gathering in the see-through cylinder already. I go round the edges with the small attachment then give the carpet one more ‘push pull.’ Stripes appear on the carpet like the pattern of a mown lawn. I stop and unplug. I coil the power cable in its convenient cleat. I disconnect the cylinder and scoop the grey formless cloud of dirt, hair, skin and fibres into a jam jar. I tip out the last part – some falls back onto the carpet. I screw on the jar lid.

Tuesday 7 June 2016


29th May
I have been thinking about  the chatlelaine -  a housekeepers chain worn on the belt that carries a variety of objects such as small scissors, keys, an aid memoir notebook, a coin purse, etc. Can the chatlelaine be extended as a metaphor? I suppose that it has become the contemporary handbag in function – the portable identifier for the woman. A mother’s bag containing a purse, Tampax, lipstick perhaps, a mobile phone – but also baby wipes; children’s snacks in a Tupperwear; a rattle. Indeed the phone itself becomes that chatelaine – the smart phone containing all the devises for daily function – the aide memoir notebook, the small map, the spending App. But how is chatelaine a stand in for the identity of the wearer? The chatelaine was a ‘badge of office’ not only the actual keys to the house, but the signification of authority in the household; the ‘purse strings’? Is it a synecdoche – a figure of speech to mean housekeeper and household? What would my chatelaine be?

Friday 3 June 2016

Storm - Moortown


31st May
I have slept badly and awaken already exhausted. My eyes are heavy – perhaps I am getting a cold. The wind has built up over night and the atmosphere is stormy, expectant. I know I need to work but cannot settle so instead, after breakfast I set out to walk the streets near my house.

My intention is a wandering.  I decide to walk for an hour with my phone-camera in my hand. I decide to record things I notice. I realise that I have never walked around my neighbourhood, only perhaps a short and direct trip to the shops, or a café. I have lived here for almost three years and have not yet mapped the through ways and cul-de-sacs. I have noticed specific houses as I have driven by, but not stopped to really look, to see what it is that draw my attention to them in particular over their adjacent, near identical neighbours.
My photographs are of leaves on the path, of individual stained glass window-panes, abandoned toys in a drive, builders waste. Of course I am seeing more than I photograph, feeling more that I recall. It is 9am but I hardly meet anyone else. A dog walker, a couple of builders, a woman washing her car an a couple pushing a pram. That is it. Everyone is at work I think.

I’m thinking about Bill Beckely’s 2001 The Sticky Sublime; the suggestion that
‘The sublime is not simply sublimity – it is loss of a self, which first must be acquired – through study, connoisseurship, through one’s varied relations to other people – through the impulse, memories, principles, and energies that evolve into a sense of self.”

I wonder how this applies to an exploration of the suburban neighbourhood – how this walk away from the home as defining self, and into a ground that is somehow about absence, might inform my practice-based research?

The walk I take is a Dérive – an unplanned route through the suburban landscape. A drifting. As Guy Debord defined it the derive as a ‘mode of experimental behaviour… linked to the conditions of urban society.. .a passage through various ambiences…’  As Debord might suggest I am directed by the feelings evoked. A derive is performed – it is a doing action. As such, without conscious planning I act on the suburban street. I find myself attracted to certain features in the terraine. I notice the contrast of colour between the pavement and a bright purple leaf. Later, a bright purple sweet wrapper is framed on green grass verge.

Unlike Debord’s observations I do not see change between a few streets. The architecutral and landscape themes are consistent. Public space –road, path, grass verge, is varyingly sculpted but generally in good repair and maintenance. Edges and border are defined according to the function of the roadside. I follow the paths and roads as routes of least resistance – going with the curve of pavement into a dead end, or following a drive way to cross a road. A boundary between the home / house and this public space is described by a fence, hedge or wall  - or a combination of all. Almost without exception the gateway to the property is open onto an expanse of drive that is described in tarmac or block paving.

I wander / wonder in the lack of specificity of this and how I am mapping in my mind a psychogeography that is probably as much to do with the orientation of my body as it is a visual guide to the streets.

I am not sure that I want to change the way I look at the space – I think I already know how I look. Neither am I seeking to disrupt. Indeed I feel self conscious, like I am ‘casing the joint’, and feel relieved to see ‘For Sale’ signs which in my mind legitimise my intrusion onto the empty paths to stare at the vacated properties.

My photo taking describes me as a ‘creative’ I think – something I can explain away if confronted- though I am never confronted.

I notice the attempts to delineate boundaries between the domestic space and encroaching nature. I see bags of garden waste that tells of recent pruning and clipping. There are carefully groomed lawns and pot plants adjacent to tufts of weeds or swathes of uncut grass.  Similarly boundaries between public and private are interrupted. In places people have placed large stones (often whitewashed) to stop other people parking on ‘their’ grass verge. Whilst at the same time households have paved over front gardens to turn them into carparks which in turn blur the distinction between (public) roadside and home side.

There seems to be a continual process of repair and rebuild underway. Of the few people I see most are builders. They are replacing driveways, window frames, roof tiles. They are fitting bathrooms, refurbishing extensions, installing sheds. Property is in a state of flux, never finished – always paint peeling,

I turn to Wrights and Sites as a reminder of what the walk is – can be.

The spaces that are the house exteriors seem to be in a constant battle with change –change that is permitted, invited, managed; change that is unsolicited, fluid, unkempt. It is the negotiation of this troubled (in)balance  that seems to be the sub – below, under. The under is revealed in the change and struggle to manage change. The placing and removal of objects of the house. The planter, the garden chair, the kids trampoline. I am reminded of the language of  Dada – of every product of disgust – the peeling, cracked, weed-infiltrated, stained thing becoming as much part of the suburb as the pristine render and mowed lawns.

http://www.391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html#.V012zNcoLhN

The walk reminds me of the small things –the ordinary. The attempts of the house-builder/ DIY homemaker are interventions to pause, place, frame that have no effect at all in the bigger picture. The actions serve to perpetuate a market economy. Not of ‘home improvement’.

Beginning

This blog is an attempt to make visible my research thinking - to myself and interested third parties. I do this partly as a way to order my thinking, to reveal the connections and key themes that are emergent in the research. It also operates as an archive - a way to record the content of practice be that performance or writing, or indeed media, drawing or sculpture.