‘The Good, the Bad, and the Chelsea’

So, I have finally reached the point where I feel I can exhibit the work that I produced in May. Back in may I did a performance based on the children’s game Cowboys and Indians. It took place on the square of grass in the centre of Chelsea parade ground and I used six performers, three of whom where given ‘cowboy’ roles, and three of whom were given ‘Indian’ roles. The performance lasted 10 minutes, and was filmed on four cameras, each one at a different side of the square. The performers were told three rules. One, that they can shout ‘NAME your dead’ at someone to shot them. Two, that if they heard someone say ‘THEIR NAME your dead’ then they had to lye on the ground and count to ten before getting up again and continuing to play. And three, that one performer was ‘Chief’ of the Indians and one performer was ‘Sheriff’ of the cowboys, they were not told that these two were in charge of either group though. The reasoning for the third rule was to see if, having been given these roles, these people took charge. This didn’t happen.
I had made a number of set pieces for the performance to take part around. These were two explosions, two trees, four cacti and a tepee.
I couldn’t exhibit the videos in the exact place that it took place as it took place outside. So to exhibit it I moved the set piece inside. However I feel just resetting up the ‘stage’ in which the performance took place inside would be pointless. So instead I domesticated the ‘stage’. If the ‘stage’ is moved inside I must make the ‘stage’ environment suitable for an interior space. The cacti have been turned into the legs of a coffee table, the two tree have been joined together to make a free standing coat stand and the explosions make the front and back of a cupboard.
I struggled for a long time on how to exhibit these videos. The original thought was to present them as projections in a blank, four walled space. Each projection on a different wall, and all in time, so one by one the video came on and played showing each angle of the performance, then turning off one by one. However the more I thought about this, the more it seemed like trying to recreate the performance, instead of seeing the videos in there own merit. So instead I decided on this domestic environment. However I also decided against the idea of showing them in sequence, as again this didn’t feel like it added anything to the original performance, and if this exhibition is not going to add anything to the performance in May then what is the point of exhibiting. So in the end each video was played at random at differing levels of sound, so no sound could be heard completely, but there was definitely sound of some sort. This worked rather well in the end too, as it created a sound not dissimilar to a school playground, which evoked the memories that this game should provoke.
So the exhibition consists of the furniture made from the set pieces four televisions, a red sofa, and a coffee table book, as a catalogue of the original performance.

So, these are some photos from the actual cowboys and indians performance, taken by the lovely Svetlana Khachatryan...

this product is brought to you with the quality guarantee of JOE

So we’ve been asked to give presentations in seminar as groups on how each of our works link…I’ve been grouped with the lovely Jess Fisher and Jeewoo Chang…which I very happy with because I really like both their practices…so it makes it a bit easier…after a meeting talking about how are work linked we came to a standstill. The most obvious way our work links is that we all use humour, but the problem is we all use humour in such different ways. So we talked about various other ideas, before deciding that we all do performance in a rather authoritative way, so this is an element we should present. This is in the sense that we all maintain a lot of control over our performances, and don’t tend to leave things to chance…so we came up with the idea of doing manuals, to instruct the seminar in how to construct our work and make their own version of it.
I will be making an ‘IKEA’ style flat pack instruction kit, instructing the user on how to put together the set pieces for a performance, and then instructing them on what game to play in this created environment. The game I have chosen is ‘sleeping lion’, where one person is hunter and the rest are lions. The lions have to lye on the floor and pretend to sleep and the hunter has to try and make them move without touching them. The set pieces I have design are a giraffe and a small version of ‘pride rock’ from ‘the lion king’. All they will have to do is attach the stands to them.
The presentation went well. My participants managed to put together the set, with only a little bit of my interference. Then our seminar tutor, Gill, encourage the whole seminar to play the game, with me as hunter…which I wasn’t very comfortable with, as I don’t like performing myself, but it was good fun anyway…we talked about it a bit after, and I talked about how the manual was in essence me, as they took the role we would take in a performance (i.e as more of a director than performer). But I also talked about how I didn’t like the lack of control giving power over to a manual gave me. We also decided that talking about the presentation was counter productive, as everyone got an understanding of our work but ‘making it’, which is what we wanted, so task completed.