the pressures of filming day!

So, it was filming day yesterday. I’ve had to cancel one date for filming already, because I had too many other things to do, what with fundraising, paid employment, and seminar presentations. So yesterday was the last date this month that Alyson could do. I felt terrible about cancelling last Friday; it means that Alyson and Sue came straight from work in the Medway area of Kent in the morning to London in the afternoon. I am very appreciative of them taking the time to help me with this.
The night before at 8pm the actor that I had hired decided that he wanted to do some other work instead, and couldn’t do the performance, even though I had booked him and was paying him, very professional!!!! He said in the e-mail, ‘Good luck with your project…’, this isn’t a project, this is my degree show!!!!! Oh well, at least I know what type of actors I won’t be using again. So at the last minute I had three lovely people fill in, the lovely Elham, Eleanor Fusaro and Nadine Kreter, I am forever grateful to them for helping me!!!!!
So, Alyson and Sue arrived at 3pm. I only had the room booked for yesterday, so I had to get in for 8.30, when college opens. I had two hours before seminar started to lay the carpet, put up the fake wall and arrange the furniture. Then it was three hours of seminar presentations, followed by a quick cuppa, a brilliant tutorial with Georgia Starr, and then they arrived.
So, Alyson and Sue arrived at about 3, and I went to meet them in the Tate, gave them a quick briefing, and took them to the room, ready for Eleanor arrive at 3.30. I staggered the performances; so that we had a bit of time to prepare everyone before hand, time for the performance, then a bit of time after to recover.
The room is set out the same as it will be for the video based installation I will show for the degree show. It is important that the set up that I arranged yesterday will be the same as the installation for the space in which I will show the film. The work looks at the idea of re-presentation, and recreation. The rebuilding of the set will hopefully represent the recreation of a situation and how it will never be the same, how little things will change. It’s the same as our memory and the theme that I work with, the idea that we can never remember exactly what our childhood was like. How it will also be effected by who we are, and the way we remember things.
With all three performance filmed, the task is now to watch them back and work out the soundtrack that I will play with them, I am thinking of playing a different sound over the top of the sound of the performances, but I am still unsure of what this will be.

Georgia Starr

So, I had a tutorial with Georgia Starr, literally 30 minutes before I was filming my degree show performance, and on a very busy day, but I’ve wanted a tutorial with Georgia since first year, so I was determined not to cancel it, even though I was probably a bit out of it.
We talked about the upcoming filming, and what I wanted to get out of it and what themes I was exploring.
Georgia told me about a new project that Gillian Wearing has just finished called ‘Self Made’, where she worked with volunteers and psychoanalysis to make a film. ( http://selfmade.org.uk/about/ )The films explored issues that the volunteers had, from suicide to alcohol abuse. After the tutorial I looked into this and was reading about how she advertised for people to either work on their own experience or act as a character. This links into a dilemma I have had with this performance, regarding how I want the performers to act. I was determined not to use the usual students that I use in my performances, but instead to hire actors. I felt that students would know to much about my work, and this would influence their performance, and make it too unreal. I want the performers to draw on their own experiences of being children, but not too much, because I feel there is too much of an ethical issue here. The ethics of this performance has been an issue for me. If I am to ask performer to draw on there own childhood to act the role of a child in a psychotherapy session, then what’s to say that the session wouldn’t open up underlying issues in there lives. Normally sessions like this would be 10 sessions long and 45minute each, where these issues can be explored. However in this case it will be a one off, 20-minute performance. Whilst I want the actors to draw upon there own experience, I don’t want to open up old issues, or expose anything that would be exposed in a ‘real’ psychotherapy session. Georgia told me about another Gillian Wearing performance where she gave real alcoholics free beer and told them to dance in front of a white screen whilst she filmed them. Whilst there are obvious ethical issues here, they are also consenting adults, who where being paid, so is this wrong or is it justified? It reminded me of a Dave Beech seminar I went to earlier in the year, where he was discussing ethics and participation. I got annoyed, because a lot of people there seemed to view artists’ as some sort of care worker, who’s role was to come into a community and solve all the problems there, and be connected to that community for life. I don’t see why an artist role is this steeped in responsibility to the participant. A musician who does a concert in a poor area, isn’t then expected to provide aftercare to anyone who might have been affected by it. But then again I think that the piece by Santiago Sierra, where he tattooed the backs of the drug addicts, was abusive towards a vulnerable group. Is there a difference between this piece and the Gillian wearing piece with drunks?
I think the difference may be that the Sierra piece is more permanent, and takes advantage of a group is a harmful way, whereas in Wearing piece it is just exaggerating a problem that already exists. But this has caused lots of questions. Because I am now using friends, who are students at Chelsea, in my film, it means that I have more of a responsibility towards their well being afterwards, and therefore I tried to make sure that they acted as children, drawing from what they remember of as being a child, but didn’t draw on actual experiences that they had. They created a character, but worked from there own memories to create this character. I wanted it to be both manufactured and organic at the same time, which is a big, and oxymoronic, ask, but will hopeful mean that my piece will work out how I want it. I think that this ambiguity will link smoothly with the contradiction of reality and fantasy that my film and following installation focuses on.
So, I’ve booked a ticket to go and see the Gillian wearing film on the 31st June.
We also talked about the link between this work and art therapy. I talked about how when I started on foundation I was interested into going into art therapy and wasn’t thinking of doing a fine art BA, but an art therapy diploma instead. But I discovered that I wasn’t as much interested in art therapy itself, but rather therapy as a theme, or rather the institution of therapy as a means of challenging the ways people live. Watching Alyson (the psychotherapist in my performance) doing a play therapy session with the actors, made me think about the similarity between our practices. The way that Alyson plays and talks to the client, but is always in control of the situation, manipulating it in order to manipulate certain aspects links to the controlling aspect of my performance, and the way this control draws out the theme I am exploring. Through this technique she can highlight and cordon off a particular problem areas of the clients persona.
This tutorial with Georgia made me think about the techniques I am using in this performance. It made me consider why I thought it was so important to use actors as appose to students or volunteers. And I think it was all down to an expectation that the actor would be more professional, that they would play down the character, instead of focusing on trait that they thought to be particularly childish and playing these up. It turned out that I just wanted someone with the right personality to act, they had to be quietly forceful with there character, whilst exerting a subtly toward the interplay of there adult reality and their childhood fantasy. What I needed to do was to audition actors. However as luck would have it, three of the most brilliant people volunteered to actor for me and I couldn’t have been happier with how it went. It turned out that the importance of actors who knew nothing about my work, as I discussed with Georgia, was not as important as I thought. And I think my insistence of this stemmed more from a fear that the performance wouldn’t happen as I wanted and an attempt to control it. I learnt from this that I can’t always control and that sometime letting things run the way fate (or just a crazily random sequence of events) intended makes them turn out for the better.

Presenting my work

So, the following is the script for my seminar presentation on my practice (apart from the info on my degree show proposal, which I adlibbed…but I written about that else where in my blog…)

As a overall theme my practice explores the discourse and interplay between childhood and adulthood.
My practice explores how we see our childhoods, and how ‘childhood’ as a concept is seen by adults. The diagram here shows a working hypothesis that I use when exploring the themes my practice throws up. I say this is a working hypothesis because I do not claim that it is a complete truth, it is a hypothesis that is likely to constantly change as my work explores these concepts. At this stage this is the hypothesis I work with.
As it shows, our experiences as a child shape are personality as adults. It teaches as norm, beliefs and values in society, and also shapes as into the person we are as adults. The belief that childhood experience effects are adulthood life is a benchmark of Freud’s the theory. However I don’t claim to strongly look into Freud’s theory regarding my work.
as an adult our personality determines the way we view our childhood. What we exaggerate and what we play down. It shapes the our memories.
So it is in a constant cycle.
However our adulthood perception of our childhood is likely to be influenced by TV, books, media and having children of your own as well.
As a overall theme my practice explores the discourse and interplay between childhood and adulthood…it looks at addressing, not so much, what we have lost from our childhood…i.e. the fact that we are no longer children…but rather what we perceive to have lost…how we remember our childhood, how we remember the hopes and ambitions we had, and how we relive memories, shading over some aspects and exaggerating others.
The discourse between actual memory and perceived memory in my work lead to a subtheme that underpins the themes of my practice. This is a play between fantasy and reality. What is fantasy and what is reality. How fantasy can become a reality though the incoherence of our memory. E.g. as a child I always thought the corridors of my primary school were massive, like never ending spaces, with giant stair cases…common sense tell us this is not true, however my memory of my primary is as such, so does the incoherence of my memory make it a reality? If my primary school was to be knocked down, and here was no pictorial evidence of it, then my exaggerated memory of the space become the only interpretation of the space we have, so it become the reality.
The theme of fantasy/reality can be further broken down into two sub – subthemes…which relate more strongly to the technical production of my practice, i.e. performance…these are fantasy and the everyday.. so how fantasy intercepts our everyday lives as adults…and game play and reality…i.e. how we can turn games that we play, or even played as children, into a reality of adulthood.
To demonstrate the theme I have just talked about, I am going to look at two recent performances/ video based installations. The first is a performance filmed in may 2010, and a video based installation installed in December 2010.
The performance was called, ‘Cowboys and Indian’. I did not perform in this myself, I instead used six actors. The performer were asked to play a game of cowboys and Indians in the square of game in Chelsea parade ground. I chose cowboys and Indians as it was a personal favourite game of mine when I was little. I built a number of set pieces to create a staged environment for them to play around. These were all made of 12mm MDF and were 2D held up on stands. There was two explosions, four cacti, two trees and a tepee. The performer were required to play for 10 minutes. I gave three the roles of cowboys and three the roles of Indians. The only rule was that they shout ‘NAME…you’re dead to someone’ if that person heard that they had to lay down and count to ten before they could get up and continue playing. One player was given the title sheriff, and one player was given the title chief. This was an experiment to see if these perform took on an authoritive role. This didn’t happen, and as a result highlight a key difference between children and adults acting as children. the performance was filmed on four cameras at each angle of the square.
Later in December I used the films to make a video based installation. I want to highlight a key point here, that I was not just showing the videos of the performance. I make a strong point in my work that the videos I make are not just film of the performance they are a new genre of art, and as such need to be view in a different light. Themes and issues brought up in the original performance may be different in the installation following it. The installation was entitled ‘The Good, the bad and the Chelsea’ and looked at the domestication of the games, or more specifically the way that adults still play the games we played as children, just in a more controlled environment… a more mature setting for the same game play. The set pieces for the performance were turned into furniture, the explosion into a cupboard, the trees into a hat stand and the cacti into a coffee table. The video were played at random timings on four TV, so that all the sound overlapped each other and create a sound like a children playground. It gave the effect of looking onto the performance, but not knowing specifically what was going on. It made you feel like an outsider…or a grown-up watching children play.
The second work that I am going to look at is a performance filmed in march 2011, and a video based installation installed in the same month. The performance was called ‘A124 School’. I did perform in this one and took the role of teacher in a school that I created. It was based roughly on my secondary school, and looked at a childhood desire I had to be the teacher…mainly so that I could write on the whiteboard and tell people off. I used four actor to play the roles of students. There were four lesions, each an hour long, they were English lit, art, languages, and history. The performance lasted from 9.45am to 3.45pm, and was filmed on one camera, first at the back of the classroom, then at the front. The room was set up very specifically to resemble as class as possible to a classroom.
The video-based installation, installed in the same space a few day after the performance looked at memory of my time at school, and how there memory were rose-tinted and uncertain. It also looked at how these memories influenced the ‘A124 School’ performance. There were five videos in the installation. One in the classroom, that you could listen to through headphones that was an edited film of the ‘A124 School’ performance. On the teachers desk there was a laptop playing a video off ‘you tube’ of my secondary school in 1998 that someone had filmed…(these was two years before I started there). In the store room, (which was blacked out) was three video, one was me talking about memories of school, one was talking about facts about my secondary school these two were played at the same volume over the top of one another, the last one was me sitting at the teachers desk listening to Jerusalem, my old school hymn. This was played at top volume so as to drown out the others. The difference in volume was to highlight the uncertainty of the memories.
Jessica Voorsanger is an artist that we myself and Natalie did some work with in December 2010. we participated in a video that she was filming for a commission at Peckham space called ‘Peckham Heroes’. We sang karaoke dressed as famous people from Peckham…
Her work has influenced my recent work, but not so much the work I am heading toward for degree show, more work I am produced separate to this…however technique I like the approach she takes to her work, and the way her work has a light heartedness to it.
The following is a clip from the channel four comedy ‘Smack the Pony’.
I’m showing this because It works as a major influence on my work…maybe not that obviously, but I think it’s the subversion of the everyday with the un-ordinary.
This is a screen shoot from my blog, which talks about my work and its development…I try not to focus on research or influences on this but rather focus on how my work is progressing and the technicalities of make it…
This is my research facebook page. I use this to write about influences and exhibitions that act on my work…it is also a place where I can write about exhibitions and books etc, which helps to get to grips with them…I used facebook as it is a good communication tool, and it means I can get feedback etc from other people.

Set backs and solutions...

So, I phoned round timber yards to find out how much it is going to cost to build the room. I need 10 panels of 8X4 12mm MDF, 184 feet of 2X2 timber, and 32 feet of 2X3 timber...the total cost of all this is about £350, which is way over my budget...although I don't want budget issues to get in the way, I really can't afford this and be able to pay my rent. So I decided that I am going to focus more on the furnishings of my room. This is more apt for my piece anyway, as it is about re-presentation, and the inconsistency of memory. The troubles in recreating my set continue the concept I am exploring, out of the boundaries of the physical performance.