An essay explaining my intentions.
Firstly, I think it’s appropriate to start this essay by explaining what my practice is. However, I don’t know how to because I’m still not sure what my practice is yet. All I know is that I want to combine performance with art.
Therefore, for the rest of this essay, I’m going to discuss three theories that I try to incorporate into my work. These theories are: ‘Anything That Conveys Feeling is Performance’, ‘Association Theory’ (John Watson, 1913) and ’Performative Acts’ (Judith Butler, 1986)
‘Anything That Conveys Feeling is Performance’ is a statement I created myself during the LOFI/HIFI project. I began to think about performance in these terms and came across a Polish theatre director named Jerzy Growtowski.
He believes that there is a “rich” and “poor” theatre. ‘Rich Theatre’ (Growtowski, 1970) is “contemporary theatre that heavily relies on artistic kleptomania”, for example: props, lighting, make-up, costume, set, puppets and animatronics.
Whereas ‘theatre can be stripped down to its bare minimum’, meaning that performance doesn’t need anything more than a ‘relationship between actor and audience’ - which has become to be known as the ‘’Poor Theatre’’ (Growtowski, 1970).
Therefore, HIFI performance is performance with added ‘’kleptomania’’ (Growtowski, 1970) to become known as theatre- meaning that, LOFI performance doesn’t need those added effects.
Once I had learnt this, I started to question what LOFI performance could be. I started to draw on my GCSE drama experience and thought about how our performances were simple. Our production of ‘’DNA’’ by Dennis Kelly relied more on tone of voice, gesture and moving. Which are all types of movement.
Gesture and moving around can be classed as performance because you are physically moving you’re hands and arms to convey a certain emotion. Which is similar to moving around a space, people move in a certain way to convey a specific character.
I decided to think of tone of voice as movement because to control this you use your diaphragm which causes a change in pitch and your voice goes higher or lower. Thus suggesting that the voice can be moved around.
This then meant that I was thinking about performance as the study of movement. Whether that’s physical movement, facial expressions or mark-making.
When I create art, I move my hands to make something. Therefore, I can argue that my art work is performative because I am moving my hands to create something that shows emotion. Which was something I tried to implement into my varied practice.
However, before I could fully use this theory that I created. I needed to understand how to do so in order to strengthen the production of my work.
‘’Performative acts and Gender Constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory’’ by Judith Butler uses Edmund Hersserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and George Herbert Meads ’phenomological theory of ‘acts’’’ (Butler, 1986) and Simone de Beauvoirs theory ‘’one is not born, but rather, becomes a women’’ to explain how ‘gender identity can be classed as a mundane performance act’. Thus suggesting that our body is a basic form of performance and that gender is a product of our performances as humans. Meaning that gender is a performative act as we have little things that show who we are.
However, if you disregard gender. ‘’Performative acts’’ (Butler, 1986) can be any small act carried out by the body (Gesture). Which is why I chose to investigate mark making as performance.
There are two examples of this in my work for unit 2.
The first example is two different types of mark-making. One style of mark-making used colour. I got different types of pen and ink and began using different types of hand gesture but I felt that the results were being too easily manipulated by colour. Therefore, I chose to do a similar experiment but only with black and white materials.
The second example was origami pinhole photography.
I adopted a very experimental approach to the pinhole photography. Instead of using an actual camera; I took photographic paper and scrunched it up so that the light sensitive side of the paper wouldn’t be exposed to light. Then before making an exposure, I ensured I cut a hole or a small shape to act as the pinhole.
This can still be classed as performative mark-making because I was using a ‘’performative act’’ (Butler, 1988) to physically create the pinhole camera and I was using light to mark-make with. Also, the results of the second example, produced marks that looked like other forms. For example a bullet hole.
Both of these experiments were key to my final performance piece for the LOFI/HIFI project, for two different reasons. However, for this essay, I think it’s more appropriate to discuss the latter even further because of its relation to ‘Association Theory’ (John Watson, 1913).
As I previously stated, the origami pinhole outcomes looked like everyday forms (bullet hole etc) but I wanted to understand the relationship between the outcome and the gesture.
So, according to John Watson, the brain makes associations through ‘’Classical Conditioning’’ (Watson, 1913) which happens in three stages.
‘Stage one: unconditional stimulus (event) + neutral stimulus (instant reaction) = unconditional response (work created).
Stage two: the unconditional stimulus and the neutral stimulus combine together to create a conditioned stimulus (feeling).
Stage three: conditioned stimulus (feeling) + unconditional stimulus (event) = new conditioned response (act carried out e.g mark making).’
Therefore, in relation to origami pinhole photography, ‘’classical conditioning’’ (Watson, 1913) is a chain reaction, thinking about an event causes an emotion which creates a response. So emotion then becomes associated with the event. Resulting in the association between feeling and event when creating work.
Which explains how I was influenced by my environment when creating the origami pinhole work.
Initially, I scrunched up the photographic paper into a ball, which is a gesture related to anger. Therefore; I was thinking about an event that made me feel angry, which manipulated how the light hit the photographic paper. Resulting in an outcome about the emotion and the event.
For example, I could have been thinking my own experiences with the army cadets. Which caused me to automatically scrunch up the photographic paper to create an origami pinhole photograph that looked like a bullet hole.
However, my brain cannot make the same associations as others. Meaning that the final outcome could mean different things for different people. Which shows that ‘’association theory’’ (Watson, 1913) works in two ways.
As part of an extended experiment, I began using other gestures. Instead of scrunching up the photographic paper before I exposed it to light, I started folding and tearing the paper. Which produced something that resembled the female form.
Personally, I associate the tears and folds with trauma to the body. However, other people would not have gone through the same things as me. Thus, they would not be able to see the same things within my art work. Proving that each person has a different association between the outcome and what story they think of.
Showing that ‘’association theory’’ (Watson, 1913) and ‘’performative acts’’ combine together to create art that makes people think of their past events, memories. Memories can be classed as performance because they make us feel.
Therefore anything that conveys feeling is performance. So, once I had proved this, I began working towards final pieces based around memory performance. Memory performance, plays with the idea that spoken word causes associations to memories, that are a sequence of images played through in someone’s mind.
‘’I guess being in the public eye, I found it hard, There are moments when going through a difficult time at home- you get a lot of backlash.
People were making stuff up about our marriage being on the rocks, it was complete nonsense. Once upon a time, I might’ve struggle being a single mum with a string of broken marriages and children who suffered because of them but that doesn’t mean that my new marriage is going to be the same.
I’m not my sister; I don’t get everything handed to me on a plate, I work 5 days a week! I don’t get to go jet-setting off with my designer bags so I’m going to be a little bit stressed out.
Of-course she’ll tell you that I’m just intimidated or jealous of her but that’s only because she doesn’t want to let anyone know she’s hurting too..
It was 5.15pm on the 9th February 1988 and her daughter was due home. Gale-force winds had been going for most of the day so naturally we all wanted her home safe but she never showed. At 9.30pm she was reported missing to the police, ‘please help’ my sister begged.
At 4am; a car pulled up but it was just the police asking for more information and photos, then the next thing we knew it was all over the tv. No-one wanted to believe it but according to the police, she made her usual journey home and just vanished.
Eventually, the detectives did show up with one of her earrings that she was wearing that had been found in a car boot.
They’d also found traces of blood in the car.
Blood-stained clothes were found in a canal.
Even her favourite green mittens showed up
But never a body.
To this very day they have never been able to find her body.
How is she supposed to say goodbye?
How is anyone supposed to say goodbye?
If we can’t accept the things that have happened to us, how are we supposed to move on? If my sisters bullshit is her way of healing then I’m okay with it…
because
I’ll always love my sister.’’
For this spoken word poem, I used the process of erasures. As I wanted there to be an emphasis on the language. The words used needed to be powerful and emotive, in order to ignite the association to someone’s repressed memory. I felt that my own style of language wasn’t enough, so I got some magazines and selected articles I felt worked with appropriate themes for people’s repressed memories. Then, I read the articles and got rid of the unnecessary information- which led me to my sister. Which is about sisters who don’t get on, but one of the sisters puts up with the others bullshit because it turns out that the other sisters daughter was killed.
I made the choice to have the piece about death, family and love because these were three common themes that came up in a questionnaire I sent out. Which was asking for people to recall difficult memories and I feel that this brings in an element of truth to something that is fiction to me. I choose to work with fiction, as not everybody can relate to my experiences. Which would make it harder for people to make associations to their own memories.
In the beginning, my character speaks with a lot of disgust about her sister which I related to a triangle shape. Then my character starts being a lot more honest about what happened to her sisters daughter, which I related to a square. This actually creates the shape of a house, so I got some black and white washi tape to stick on the floor of the space I was using. As I was using the tape as a path, I created a visual method for people to associate with. Meaning that, both shape and language caused associations to people’s memories about love, family and death.
However; I had no way of recording what was really happening in people’s minds, which is a stage I would like to try and develop next.
Therefore in conclusion, I have started to explore Memory Performance through LOFI techniques that incorporate :‘Anything That Conveys Feeling is Performance’, ‘Association Theory’ (John Watson, 1913) and ’Performative Acts’ (Judith Butler, 1986).
BOOKS
Grotowski, Jerzy. (1970) Towards A Poor Theatre. 1st ed. New York: Simon and Schuster. P15-27
Butler, J (1986) Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomology and feminist theory p.519-521
Watson, John B. (1913) Psychology as the behaviorist views it. p158-177.
Kelly, Dennis (2008) DNA
