CONVERSATIONS WITH ENGLISH ARTISTS
A Politically Personal Afternoon Tea
The Live Art Development Agency, London
30th August 2007
With:
Robert Pacitti
Sam Rose
Rajni Shah
Richard DeDomenici
Andrew Mitchelson
Áine Phillips
Áine
I invited you all to this conversation to discuss what it means to work with personal material in live art and to bring that into a political context. Why do we use personal material in our work and how do we make the personal universally applicable? I have been researching these ideas in my practice based PhD project which has focused on autobiographical performance. I am working on this project since 2005. I am very interested to hear your perspectives as British based live and performance artists. So to begin, how do you negotiate the difference or connection between life and art in your practice?
Sam
I'm interested in bringing everyday experience into the performative space. I change the context of the experience and make the experiences more heightened for audiences.
Áine
Live art is like a re-working of life experience, it sets up new conditions to live out or express new relationships. It transforms real life.
Rajni
In recent work I am making in public spaces, I feel like I can speak to anybody in a way I couldn't in an everyday situation. I wonder why this is?
Áine
It is because of the framing, it liberates you from the convention of the everyday – the taboos, the limits we set to the things we are allowed to do in public.
Richard
It's like being drunk without the expenditure.
Robert
I think it's about agency. For me it's about giving myself permission. I open up another space where I give myself permission outside of everyday life. It's also about how I take responsibility for that. It is empowering.
It's also to do with planning – the careful thinking through of interactions and engagements with people in the performance. In the stream of everyday life, you don't think – you act. In performance it is a conscious deliberation on action, premeditated.
Richard
It is to try to control the uncontrollable.
Robert
Your skipping in public piece in Nottingham was not really controlling and incredibly generous.
Richard
In the piece (Dayskipper, eXpo festival, 2002) I encouraged people to skip through Nottingham city centre in a big group of 30-40. People don't skip much anymore because once you reach adulthood it's embarrassing to skip. But if you do it in a group there is safety in numbers. So we all met and skipped…it was like a herd of wildebeest.
There were all sorts of problems with Nottingham council with health and safety.
I gave the participants stickers so they could in-turn recruit others.
I never want to force people, if no one wants to do it – fine, OK by me.
Also, towards the end of the performance, I left the flock, and let it carry on autonomously. It was an experiment in herd clustering.
The art exchange
Rajni
In interventions, you can't really seek to control, to have that desire. You have to go and plant the seed. I've been working with the idea of 'gift giving' to encourage the receiver of the 'gift' to take that forward and gift give in return. The 'gift' is the moment when I hand the thing or conversation to someone and afterwards the seed grows. I’ve been thinking of the acceptance of a gift as the opening of a conversation.
Richard
People ask me where is the art Richard? I say I don't know…maybe it’s weeks later when someone tells it to their friend.
Rajni
Then that's the moment of contact.
Robert
The strategising and planning is the pay off rather than the final product. There is an expectation in art that there has to be a delivery. I think the planning process, the moment of being tactical, is just as valuable.
Áine
It comes back to the function of the art event. Is the function of art the process of growth, refinement of the idea, or the moment of effect of the work on an audience, the changing effect?
Richard
I have no evidence this ever happens to people! Maybe the seed of uncertainty never germinates. It's impossible to monitor unless you hand out feedback forms after the art work, which kind of ruins it.
The function of performance
Áine
Is your art about the personal process and its outcomes for you or the political effect, the effect on culture, on others?
Rajni
I don’t think it should be one or the other.
Robert
It is a state of flux. I made a piece of work for "Small Acts for the Millennium" 2000, which was an invisible work – spreading rumours. I have no idea whether it impacted or not. I continue to have feelings of guilt about it as the rigour and craft of the piece could not be measured, nothing ever came back into the public domain afterwards.
Rajni
In my work I feel there should be evidence of action, where there remains something behind, to show it happened, a trace. Sometimes this trace remains with me, sometimes out in the world somewhere.
Sam
As artists we are conditioned to evaluate our practice over and over.
Áine
We also evaluate our work to see if it is effective on our own terms, to achieve excellence.
Robert
I have realisations about work from years ago…I realise afterwards what I was talking about, the arse drops out of it. That sort of self appraisal crops up within the practice.
Rajni
It can happen that in writing applications for new projects I gain understanding through examining where I’ve been and where I want to be heading.
Robert
Self evaluation remains solitary for most of us.
The personal in the political
Richard
In art, it should be a mixture of the personal and the political, never one or the other.
I've always been against making purely autobiographical work which may be therapeutic for me but not very interesting for the audience. It should be a mixture of the two.
Áine
There is a danger of art as masturbation, making work about yourself for a narcissistic pleasure.
Robert
Work becomes live and complete when it is in front of an audience, before that it's plotting and planning. The work I've made in recent years is deeply personal and I would call it socially engaged and political, but I never use the "I" term…"I did, I met…"
I refer to "I" through a filter of talking about something or someone else. I never use character, but a heightened sense of self through a descriptive distance. It's a buffer.
Áine
A device to remove yourself from the work, even if by degrees?
Robert
It compounds the intensely personal and private stuff that would be horrible to watch if I was speaking about it in the first person.
Sam
I use both. I am working on a series of one to one performances, through a research process focused on intimacy. Everything I do has a framework and aesthetic, but I don't know what will happen when someone walks through the door. I never use the "I" word even though the work deals with my own experience. The current work "Melting Point" uses chocolate as an object to describe a person in my life. The chocolate becomes a metaphor.
Áine
In dealing with heavily resonate emotional content; it is useful to be oblique, not literal in the work.
Rajni
The self of the audience is a big consideration.
Robert
We made a piece of work "Forest" where 35 people at a time sit in a circle with three performers. On each chair we leave a crude handmade doll. I wanted to find a way to share information more equitably than audiences being sat in the dark watching action. I wanted to remove the anxiety and ego of the participant/viewer. It was psychologically loaded. Most people projected themselves into the doll. We took it away when we had established trust. The strategy is about respecting the audience's half of the conversation.
Áine
You are then thinking politically, outside of the personal, to the effect this encounter has on another. You have moved away from the effect on you, how you are 'doing' the work, to the action on another – how they receive it, what's happening to them in that act of reception.
Rajni
I believe making performance is a political act and it examines social and aesthetic structures.
Áine
Political art in this context does not mean art about parliamentary politics, it means effecting change on some level in the self and socially. It has the potential to influence and affect.
Robert
The potential to influence is the key.
The expectations of performance
Áine
We have all sat in performances where the audience switches off and waits for it to end. Is there an influence or effect on the viewer then?
Richard
"When the cumulative endurance of the audience is greater than that of the performer – you should leave the doors of the performance space open."
That's my formula for durational work. Often it's when I'm sat in a mind numbing performance, where a man is walking in a circle for an hour and I know nothing else will happen, that I have my best ideas. You're in a creative mood and also bored…
I also use extremely personal truthful things but add complete made up lies to upset preconditions. People wonder what's true.
Sam
I said recently in a performance "I play myself" or am I really being myself?
Richard
I become a caricature of myself.
Robert
I started making performance in the 80's and at that time there was a useful strategy of defining myself as a 'queer' artist. A lot of artistic practices evolved through the civil rights movement for black, women and queer artists. There was an expectation that you would identify yourself and work in the first person. I react against this now as I feel the expectation was imposed. There was a sense of having to step up and be counted. This has changed now, partly to do with privilege, partly to do with being older and the culture has changed. I react against this approach now to make art to drive political issues.
Rajni
In my work "Mr. Quiver", I step into the figure of the Indian bride, an exotic Indian woman. I am playing with those roles, speaking them but also as 'myself'. I work through improvisation, trapping myself in a space between the ridiculous, the beautiful and the unbearably emotional.
I never make people stay in the space, they are there for as long as they want to be with me. It's really not about me so much as my presence as catalyst or problematiser of ideas. When the audience comes they bring their history, hang-ups, emotions, prejudices and body temperature. I respond, it's a conversation.
Robert
It's important that we have as a primary driver, a belief in change. Taking the singular into mutuality. Another drive is about being 'in service' and I don't necessarily mean 'by example'. I am interested in how to force change around an issue that affects me without saying 'this affects me'.
A lab of Dissent
Rajni
One big question for me is how we create the space for dissent, dis-sensus (the opposite of consensus) allowing for differences of opinion. Art often means consensus. I think there is a belief that art should make you feel better. Everyone doesn't have to be in agreement for the piece to be successful and respectful of an audience. But how do we do this without creating work that comes across as alienating, difficult for an audience? How can we create welcoming spaces that truly embrace a multiplicity of views?
Sam
A recent project I facilitated was a DIY (training for artists by artists, commissioned by LADA 2007) on intimacy, with a group of so called 'like minded' artists who all work with intimacy. They couldn't have been more different and divided. I had the idea that they would all get on together. It was challenging to mediate the space because of friction and divergent views.
This offers a parallel to performance where there is an expectation that audience comes to the work with the same understanding and abilities to understand it.
Áine
We need a laboratory of dissent.
Robert
"Finale" is a constant show of Pacitti Company, made up of 30 artists. It has a set structure wherever it goes in the world. We facilitate workshops with the artists, over a two week period around a manifesto and the 'explicit body' asking the artists to examine where their work is coming from and why. We look at how we individually and jointly take responsibility for presenting ourselves within the themes of "Finale" which takes drowning as a central image.
There are tow key things. Firstly, I would never call it 'collaboration'. Pacitti Company are delivering the work under our name, getting paid to do it, bringing the theme. I call it coalition. It's not equal.
We find a way to come together, stand shoulder to shoulder and produce something at the end. It's about creative grouping. It's also about how we democratise the material which is always a challenge and sometimes goes wrong. It's about trying to find parity between work that’s 3 days old and work that’s 3 years old. It's about how to democratise equity fro an audience. Like pouring a cup of water into a shape, it goes any way you want.
The principle motive is the creative coming together of a group of artists that impacts on what an audience gets and receives. It is a space of dissent enabled by not controlling what the artistic group presents based on risk within a creative process.
Public/ Private
Áine
What about the difference between public and private. As live artists, we have the experience of being private and making that public in some way.
Richard
Compared to a lot of live artists I tend not to have a theatrical 4th wall in my work. When people start talking to me, I talk back. I don't make a separation.
Robert
If I'm really honest, one of the things I confess to, is the ability to manipulate an audience with music, actions. We have to challenge our craft to develop.
Sam
We are moving and shifting as people, issues that were relevant in the past are no longer so. For example, 10 years ago, I found autobiography a dirty word in art and I rejected it. I would theorise around it and take it into different places. Now I have found useful strategies to work with autobiography and I have accepted that in my work.
Rajni
Art that is solely about the artist on their life journey and doesn't consider the audience makes me angry!
Áine
Performance is very human, it is a human social situation and the same rules apply. In other situations if you are concerned only with yourself, others will be alienated. In performance, people like you or not, are attracted to you or not. But you don't need to be liked for the work to be strong.
Robert
To pick up on the notion of changing over the years…I made a performance and ten years later replaced myself with someone else in the work. The aims and objectives of the work remain the same but I have sidestepped my identity. It doesn't need to be me. The ambitions of the work remain the same over a decade while the tactics we use change.
Feeling typecast…
Richard
Does anyone ever feel a bit typecast – expected to do the same type of work you've been known to do in the past? I just want to paint some pictures of kittens but I am afraid it will not be considered politically subversive enough. My statement may be the problem -
“one-man subversive think-tank"- people take it too seriously.
Robert
I don't have that through expectation but through funding because I am funded through a theatre department and sometimes I don’t want to do theatre, I want to paint kittens!
Rajni
I am very careful to always work across sectors. For me it's about sustaining my practice. I don’t feel pressure to make work of a particular type, just to make the work in response to the time. However, I have no idea what my reputation is, maybe I am too young!
Áine
For you Richard, your characterisation is so linked in with your aesthetic and the work you do.
Rajni
It's the price of success, if you do something that no one else is doing, festivals and organisations hire you in. I get asked to do the same things and get invited because of my work on cultural diversity.
Robert
The nub of struggle around the Spill festival is its success. We will do it again in two years but I also have a work that's been in train for 7 years involving up to 200 people I want to do…how do it all and still have my coffee mornings meeting artists to share ideas?
Another issue for me is getting hustled by other artists because they see me as a Spill opportunity.
Áine
This happens to any artist who works in curation, something changes in the way people perceive you.
Robert
Its not rocket science learning how to present a festival – it's about money.
I spent 20 years giving producers and curators higher status, but I realise it's about being in service to each other, to audiences, to what has gone before and what's coming next.
Curation is for me looking after other artists, democratising culture, serving.
Áine
We support the culture around the practice of performance by curating, teaching. We feed our energies into the culture because the culture feeds us.
Andrew
Isn't producing the Spill festival creating another dimension to your practice in terms or responsibility and agency?
Robert
Yes born out of urgency, but not at the expense of my own artistic practice.
I feel like it's trying to look in two directions at the same time.
Áine
The most difficult work I've made was curating TulcaLive in 2006 the same year as I was performing in it due to an Arts Council Commission. I suffered agonies of division.
Robert
It's the same for many people who have other demanding roles, as parent, partner etc.
Richard
"If you watch the artist he struggles, if you step back he survives"
I heard that once. In terms of curating, if you micromanage it's chaos. Step back and curation works quite well.
To be political what do you have to give up?
Richard
Being an artist is essentially quite decadent. Artist is not activist. The art scene in Baghdad at the moment is not exactly hopping.
Robert
If we acknowledge our privilege, we can still have a deeply political, progressive practice about change. We all work within our own reality.
Can we unpack this idea a little bit further? Do you think we work within a bourgeois frame?
Richard
I always feel quite guilty as an artist making work and where's the money coming from? I have a lot of activist friends and they won't take money from big institutions, various corporations, they won't fly or travel because of their carbon footprint. It's difficult being a professional artist and not affected by all this.
Sam
It's an ethical struggle being an artist in the current climate.
Robert
I don't think being an artist itself has any loaded value. It depends who the audience is, what the market is. I took money from Barclays Bank one year to make work; it was banned and didn't get shown. But I took the money knowingly, it's how you strategise the economics. For me it's really primary who the audience is, that’s my job. I do feel if I am in service, it's to an audience.
Richard
Who was the audience for the Barclays Bank piece?
Robert
It was a tour of theatres and then anyone who read the Daily Mail or the Nottingham Evening Post for a week! It was badly reported but that sparked off other conversations, polarised other debates.
Richard
Recently I was asked to do a lecture show at a newly opened arts venue. An arts foundation invited me. I looked at their website and discovered their launch sponsor was HSBC bank and I worried about that because theoretically, I'd be taking money from a multi-national bank. Then I remembered that I actually bank with HSBC, and so really…it's hard to completely drop out of this world. Baudrillard said that the only way to disengage from capitalist society is to kill yourself. And he’s dead now.
(Also, the arts foundation didn’t pay me, haha!)
Áine
Do you think artists are essentially classless, not subscribing to the values of class or being outsiders to class pressures or forces. Can we stand outside class because of commenting on it?
Rajni
I don't think that. I find it depressing that a lot of artists I know are doing work because their parents support them.
Sam
For me I have a personal struggle communicating what I do to my family. It's hard to tell them I just got a £5,000 grant for my art and they work at the Co-op. it's difficult to justify being handed the money, even though I work for minimum wage if I added up the hours. It's a personal working class struggle, the displacement of the artist into a classless condition. It's a personal context of discomfort with that privilege.
Robert
Good work acknowledges its' privilege, where ever it comes on the food chain. Being an artist is its' own belief system. We aspire to moving outside of other belief systems that are oppressive or restrictive.
It's about being really engaged not only about being an artist.
Artists Biographies:
Robert Pacitti
Having initially trained as a fine art painter Robert Pacitti began making experimental theatre in 1988. He has since made and shown over 20 award winning interdisciplinary works throughout the world to great acclaim. In the year 2000 he was awarded a One-to-One Bursary from the Live Art Development Agency in London. In 2004 he became the first person to receive a Time / Space Fellowship from King Alfred University College, Winchester. A highly experienced facilitator and teacher Robert continues to lead workshops and residencies worldwide. He is the artistic director of Pacitti Company and the Festival Director and Curator of Spill, London 2007 www.pacitticompany.com
www.spillfestival.com
Sam Rose
Since 1999, Sam Rose has been showing work nationally and internationally working within the fields of live art, visual performance, video, and text.
Her practice is process driven and interdisciplinary in approach, combining theory and practice to create innovative and challenging works that explore themes of the body, desire, autobiography and memory.
She is currently developing a series of one to one encounters based upon the performance of Intimacy. www.samrose.net
Rajni Shah
Rajni Shah is a freelance performance artist, writer and producer currently based in the South East of England. She works across artforms exploring notions of theatricality, gift and conversation and has performed extensively in both the UK and USA. Rajni is also Creative Adviser for Oxfordshire Touring Theatre Company, Project Director for 'Restock, Rethink, Reflect' with the Live Art Development Agency, and a Live Art Development Agency One to One bursary recipient. She is on the board of directors for the New Work Network and is an active member of Alternate ROOTS (USA).
www.rajnishah.com
Richard Dedomenici
Richard, a well known UK live artist who's projects include 'Break-In', a performance attempt to break into Cardiff prison. After this he attempted a series of increasingly ambitious projects, including an endeavor to turn coal into diamonds for the Wellcome Trust, which failed; seeking to train the guns if HMS Belfast onto his mother’s house in Watford, which failed; and trying to design an interface to enable cows to access the internet for the Arnolfini in Bristol, which failed. His experiences inspired the inexplicably popular touring lecture 'Embracing Failure'.
www.dedomenici.co.uk
Andrew Mitchelson
Andrew Mitchelson joined the Live Art Development Agency as Company and Resource Manager in March 2006. Andrew has a BA Degree in Arts Management, and since graduation has freelanced on a number of projects with Royal National Theatre. As a project manager, Andrew was responsible for creating and piloting a Youth Enterprise Programme with the Head for Business project and also produced a European Theatre
Exchange programme to Berlin with Art of Regeneration. Andrew has also previously worked as administrator for Duckie.
www.thisisliveart.co.uk
The Live Art Development Agency, London
30th August 2007
With:
Robert Pacitti
Sam Rose
Rajni Shah
Richard DeDomenici
Andrew Mitchelson
Áine Phillips
Áine
I invited you all to this conversation to discuss what it means to work with personal material in live art and to bring that into a political context. Why do we use personal material in our work and how do we make the personal universally applicable? I have been researching these ideas in my practice based PhD project which has focused on autobiographical performance. I am working on this project since 2005. I am very interested to hear your perspectives as British based live and performance artists. So to begin, how do you negotiate the difference or connection between life and art in your practice?
Sam
I'm interested in bringing everyday experience into the performative space. I change the context of the experience and make the experiences more heightened for audiences.
Áine
Live art is like a re-working of life experience, it sets up new conditions to live out or express new relationships. It transforms real life.
Rajni
In recent work I am making in public spaces, I feel like I can speak to anybody in a way I couldn't in an everyday situation. I wonder why this is?
Áine
It is because of the framing, it liberates you from the convention of the everyday – the taboos, the limits we set to the things we are allowed to do in public.
Richard
It's like being drunk without the expenditure.
Robert
I think it's about agency. For me it's about giving myself permission. I open up another space where I give myself permission outside of everyday life. It's also about how I take responsibility for that. It is empowering.
It's also to do with planning – the careful thinking through of interactions and engagements with people in the performance. In the stream of everyday life, you don't think – you act. In performance it is a conscious deliberation on action, premeditated.
Richard
It is to try to control the uncontrollable.
Robert
Your skipping in public piece in Nottingham was not really controlling and incredibly generous.
Richard
In the piece (Dayskipper, eXpo festival, 2002) I encouraged people to skip through Nottingham city centre in a big group of 30-40. People don't skip much anymore because once you reach adulthood it's embarrassing to skip. But if you do it in a group there is safety in numbers. So we all met and skipped…it was like a herd of wildebeest.
There were all sorts of problems with Nottingham council with health and safety.
I gave the participants stickers so they could in-turn recruit others.
I never want to force people, if no one wants to do it – fine, OK by me.
Also, towards the end of the performance, I left the flock, and let it carry on autonomously. It was an experiment in herd clustering.
The art exchange
Rajni
In interventions, you can't really seek to control, to have that desire. You have to go and plant the seed. I've been working with the idea of 'gift giving' to encourage the receiver of the 'gift' to take that forward and gift give in return. The 'gift' is the moment when I hand the thing or conversation to someone and afterwards the seed grows. I’ve been thinking of the acceptance of a gift as the opening of a conversation.
Richard
People ask me where is the art Richard? I say I don't know…maybe it’s weeks later when someone tells it to their friend.
Rajni
Then that's the moment of contact.
Robert
The strategising and planning is the pay off rather than the final product. There is an expectation in art that there has to be a delivery. I think the planning process, the moment of being tactical, is just as valuable.
Áine
It comes back to the function of the art event. Is the function of art the process of growth, refinement of the idea, or the moment of effect of the work on an audience, the changing effect?
Richard
I have no evidence this ever happens to people! Maybe the seed of uncertainty never germinates. It's impossible to monitor unless you hand out feedback forms after the art work, which kind of ruins it.
The function of performance
Áine
Is your art about the personal process and its outcomes for you or the political effect, the effect on culture, on others?
Rajni
I don’t think it should be one or the other.
Robert
It is a state of flux. I made a piece of work for "Small Acts for the Millennium" 2000, which was an invisible work – spreading rumours. I have no idea whether it impacted or not. I continue to have feelings of guilt about it as the rigour and craft of the piece could not be measured, nothing ever came back into the public domain afterwards.
Rajni
In my work I feel there should be evidence of action, where there remains something behind, to show it happened, a trace. Sometimes this trace remains with me, sometimes out in the world somewhere.
Sam
As artists we are conditioned to evaluate our practice over and over.
Áine
We also evaluate our work to see if it is effective on our own terms, to achieve excellence.
Robert
I have realisations about work from years ago…I realise afterwards what I was talking about, the arse drops out of it. That sort of self appraisal crops up within the practice.
Rajni
It can happen that in writing applications for new projects I gain understanding through examining where I’ve been and where I want to be heading.
Robert
Self evaluation remains solitary for most of us.
The personal in the political
Richard
In art, it should be a mixture of the personal and the political, never one or the other.
I've always been against making purely autobiographical work which may be therapeutic for me but not very interesting for the audience. It should be a mixture of the two.
Áine
There is a danger of art as masturbation, making work about yourself for a narcissistic pleasure.
Robert
Work becomes live and complete when it is in front of an audience, before that it's plotting and planning. The work I've made in recent years is deeply personal and I would call it socially engaged and political, but I never use the "I" term…"I did, I met…"
I refer to "I" through a filter of talking about something or someone else. I never use character, but a heightened sense of self through a descriptive distance. It's a buffer.
Áine
A device to remove yourself from the work, even if by degrees?
Robert
It compounds the intensely personal and private stuff that would be horrible to watch if I was speaking about it in the first person.
Sam
I use both. I am working on a series of one to one performances, through a research process focused on intimacy. Everything I do has a framework and aesthetic, but I don't know what will happen when someone walks through the door. I never use the "I" word even though the work deals with my own experience. The current work "Melting Point" uses chocolate as an object to describe a person in my life. The chocolate becomes a metaphor.
Áine
In dealing with heavily resonate emotional content; it is useful to be oblique, not literal in the work.
Rajni
The self of the audience is a big consideration.
Robert
We made a piece of work "Forest" where 35 people at a time sit in a circle with three performers. On each chair we leave a crude handmade doll. I wanted to find a way to share information more equitably than audiences being sat in the dark watching action. I wanted to remove the anxiety and ego of the participant/viewer. It was psychologically loaded. Most people projected themselves into the doll. We took it away when we had established trust. The strategy is about respecting the audience's half of the conversation.
Áine
You are then thinking politically, outside of the personal, to the effect this encounter has on another. You have moved away from the effect on you, how you are 'doing' the work, to the action on another – how they receive it, what's happening to them in that act of reception.
Rajni
I believe making performance is a political act and it examines social and aesthetic structures.
Áine
Political art in this context does not mean art about parliamentary politics, it means effecting change on some level in the self and socially. It has the potential to influence and affect.
Robert
The potential to influence is the key.
The expectations of performance
Áine
We have all sat in performances where the audience switches off and waits for it to end. Is there an influence or effect on the viewer then?
Richard
"When the cumulative endurance of the audience is greater than that of the performer – you should leave the doors of the performance space open."
That's my formula for durational work. Often it's when I'm sat in a mind numbing performance, where a man is walking in a circle for an hour and I know nothing else will happen, that I have my best ideas. You're in a creative mood and also bored…
I also use extremely personal truthful things but add complete made up lies to upset preconditions. People wonder what's true.
Sam
I said recently in a performance "I play myself" or am I really being myself?
Richard
I become a caricature of myself.
Robert
I started making performance in the 80's and at that time there was a useful strategy of defining myself as a 'queer' artist. A lot of artistic practices evolved through the civil rights movement for black, women and queer artists. There was an expectation that you would identify yourself and work in the first person. I react against this now as I feel the expectation was imposed. There was a sense of having to step up and be counted. This has changed now, partly to do with privilege, partly to do with being older and the culture has changed. I react against this approach now to make art to drive political issues.
Rajni
In my work "Mr. Quiver", I step into the figure of the Indian bride, an exotic Indian woman. I am playing with those roles, speaking them but also as 'myself'. I work through improvisation, trapping myself in a space between the ridiculous, the beautiful and the unbearably emotional.
I never make people stay in the space, they are there for as long as they want to be with me. It's really not about me so much as my presence as catalyst or problematiser of ideas. When the audience comes they bring their history, hang-ups, emotions, prejudices and body temperature. I respond, it's a conversation.
Robert
It's important that we have as a primary driver, a belief in change. Taking the singular into mutuality. Another drive is about being 'in service' and I don't necessarily mean 'by example'. I am interested in how to force change around an issue that affects me without saying 'this affects me'.
A lab of Dissent
Rajni
One big question for me is how we create the space for dissent, dis-sensus (the opposite of consensus) allowing for differences of opinion. Art often means consensus. I think there is a belief that art should make you feel better. Everyone doesn't have to be in agreement for the piece to be successful and respectful of an audience. But how do we do this without creating work that comes across as alienating, difficult for an audience? How can we create welcoming spaces that truly embrace a multiplicity of views?
Sam
A recent project I facilitated was a DIY (training for artists by artists, commissioned by LADA 2007) on intimacy, with a group of so called 'like minded' artists who all work with intimacy. They couldn't have been more different and divided. I had the idea that they would all get on together. It was challenging to mediate the space because of friction and divergent views.
This offers a parallel to performance where there is an expectation that audience comes to the work with the same understanding and abilities to understand it.
Áine
We need a laboratory of dissent.
Robert
"Finale" is a constant show of Pacitti Company, made up of 30 artists. It has a set structure wherever it goes in the world. We facilitate workshops with the artists, over a two week period around a manifesto and the 'explicit body' asking the artists to examine where their work is coming from and why. We look at how we individually and jointly take responsibility for presenting ourselves within the themes of "Finale" which takes drowning as a central image.
There are tow key things. Firstly, I would never call it 'collaboration'. Pacitti Company are delivering the work under our name, getting paid to do it, bringing the theme. I call it coalition. It's not equal.
We find a way to come together, stand shoulder to shoulder and produce something at the end. It's about creative grouping. It's also about how we democratise the material which is always a challenge and sometimes goes wrong. It's about trying to find parity between work that’s 3 days old and work that’s 3 years old. It's about how to democratise equity fro an audience. Like pouring a cup of water into a shape, it goes any way you want.
The principle motive is the creative coming together of a group of artists that impacts on what an audience gets and receives. It is a space of dissent enabled by not controlling what the artistic group presents based on risk within a creative process.
Public/ Private
Áine
What about the difference between public and private. As live artists, we have the experience of being private and making that public in some way.
Richard
Compared to a lot of live artists I tend not to have a theatrical 4th wall in my work. When people start talking to me, I talk back. I don't make a separation.
Robert
If I'm really honest, one of the things I confess to, is the ability to manipulate an audience with music, actions. We have to challenge our craft to develop.
Sam
We are moving and shifting as people, issues that were relevant in the past are no longer so. For example, 10 years ago, I found autobiography a dirty word in art and I rejected it. I would theorise around it and take it into different places. Now I have found useful strategies to work with autobiography and I have accepted that in my work.
Rajni
Art that is solely about the artist on their life journey and doesn't consider the audience makes me angry!
Áine
Performance is very human, it is a human social situation and the same rules apply. In other situations if you are concerned only with yourself, others will be alienated. In performance, people like you or not, are attracted to you or not. But you don't need to be liked for the work to be strong.
Robert
To pick up on the notion of changing over the years…I made a performance and ten years later replaced myself with someone else in the work. The aims and objectives of the work remain the same but I have sidestepped my identity. It doesn't need to be me. The ambitions of the work remain the same over a decade while the tactics we use change.
Feeling typecast…
Richard
Does anyone ever feel a bit typecast – expected to do the same type of work you've been known to do in the past? I just want to paint some pictures of kittens but I am afraid it will not be considered politically subversive enough. My statement may be the problem -
“one-man subversive think-tank"- people take it too seriously.
Robert
I don't have that through expectation but through funding because I am funded through a theatre department and sometimes I don’t want to do theatre, I want to paint kittens!
Rajni
I am very careful to always work across sectors. For me it's about sustaining my practice. I don’t feel pressure to make work of a particular type, just to make the work in response to the time. However, I have no idea what my reputation is, maybe I am too young!
Áine
For you Richard, your characterisation is so linked in with your aesthetic and the work you do.
Rajni
It's the price of success, if you do something that no one else is doing, festivals and organisations hire you in. I get asked to do the same things and get invited because of my work on cultural diversity.
Robert
The nub of struggle around the Spill festival is its success. We will do it again in two years but I also have a work that's been in train for 7 years involving up to 200 people I want to do…how do it all and still have my coffee mornings meeting artists to share ideas?
Another issue for me is getting hustled by other artists because they see me as a Spill opportunity.
Áine
This happens to any artist who works in curation, something changes in the way people perceive you.
Robert
Its not rocket science learning how to present a festival – it's about money.
I spent 20 years giving producers and curators higher status, but I realise it's about being in service to each other, to audiences, to what has gone before and what's coming next.
Curation is for me looking after other artists, democratising culture, serving.
Áine
We support the culture around the practice of performance by curating, teaching. We feed our energies into the culture because the culture feeds us.
Andrew
Isn't producing the Spill festival creating another dimension to your practice in terms or responsibility and agency?
Robert
Yes born out of urgency, but not at the expense of my own artistic practice.
I feel like it's trying to look in two directions at the same time.
Áine
The most difficult work I've made was curating TulcaLive in 2006 the same year as I was performing in it due to an Arts Council Commission. I suffered agonies of division.
Robert
It's the same for many people who have other demanding roles, as parent, partner etc.
Richard
"If you watch the artist he struggles, if you step back he survives"
I heard that once. In terms of curating, if you micromanage it's chaos. Step back and curation works quite well.
To be political what do you have to give up?
Richard
Being an artist is essentially quite decadent. Artist is not activist. The art scene in Baghdad at the moment is not exactly hopping.
Robert
If we acknowledge our privilege, we can still have a deeply political, progressive practice about change. We all work within our own reality.
Can we unpack this idea a little bit further? Do you think we work within a bourgeois frame?
Richard
I always feel quite guilty as an artist making work and where's the money coming from? I have a lot of activist friends and they won't take money from big institutions, various corporations, they won't fly or travel because of their carbon footprint. It's difficult being a professional artist and not affected by all this.
Sam
It's an ethical struggle being an artist in the current climate.
Robert
I don't think being an artist itself has any loaded value. It depends who the audience is, what the market is. I took money from Barclays Bank one year to make work; it was banned and didn't get shown. But I took the money knowingly, it's how you strategise the economics. For me it's really primary who the audience is, that’s my job. I do feel if I am in service, it's to an audience.
Richard
Who was the audience for the Barclays Bank piece?
Robert
It was a tour of theatres and then anyone who read the Daily Mail or the Nottingham Evening Post for a week! It was badly reported but that sparked off other conversations, polarised other debates.
Richard
Recently I was asked to do a lecture show at a newly opened arts venue. An arts foundation invited me. I looked at their website and discovered their launch sponsor was HSBC bank and I worried about that because theoretically, I'd be taking money from a multi-national bank. Then I remembered that I actually bank with HSBC, and so really…it's hard to completely drop out of this world. Baudrillard said that the only way to disengage from capitalist society is to kill yourself. And he’s dead now.
(Also, the arts foundation didn’t pay me, haha!)
Áine
Do you think artists are essentially classless, not subscribing to the values of class or being outsiders to class pressures or forces. Can we stand outside class because of commenting on it?
Rajni
I don't think that. I find it depressing that a lot of artists I know are doing work because their parents support them.
Sam
For me I have a personal struggle communicating what I do to my family. It's hard to tell them I just got a £5,000 grant for my art and they work at the Co-op. it's difficult to justify being handed the money, even though I work for minimum wage if I added up the hours. It's a personal working class struggle, the displacement of the artist into a classless condition. It's a personal context of discomfort with that privilege.
Robert
Good work acknowledges its' privilege, where ever it comes on the food chain. Being an artist is its' own belief system. We aspire to moving outside of other belief systems that are oppressive or restrictive.
It's about being really engaged not only about being an artist.
Artists Biographies:
Robert Pacitti
Having initially trained as a fine art painter Robert Pacitti began making experimental theatre in 1988. He has since made and shown over 20 award winning interdisciplinary works throughout the world to great acclaim. In the year 2000 he was awarded a One-to-One Bursary from the Live Art Development Agency in London. In 2004 he became the first person to receive a Time / Space Fellowship from King Alfred University College, Winchester. A highly experienced facilitator and teacher Robert continues to lead workshops and residencies worldwide. He is the artistic director of Pacitti Company and the Festival Director and Curator of Spill, London 2007 www.pacitticompany.com
www.spillfestival.com
Sam Rose
Since 1999, Sam Rose has been showing work nationally and internationally working within the fields of live art, visual performance, video, and text.
Her practice is process driven and interdisciplinary in approach, combining theory and practice to create innovative and challenging works that explore themes of the body, desire, autobiography and memory.
She is currently developing a series of one to one encounters based upon the performance of Intimacy. www.samrose.net
Rajni Shah
Rajni Shah is a freelance performance artist, writer and producer currently based in the South East of England. She works across artforms exploring notions of theatricality, gift and conversation and has performed extensively in both the UK and USA. Rajni is also Creative Adviser for Oxfordshire Touring Theatre Company, Project Director for 'Restock, Rethink, Reflect' with the Live Art Development Agency, and a Live Art Development Agency One to One bursary recipient. She is on the board of directors for the New Work Network and is an active member of Alternate ROOTS (USA).
www.rajnishah.com
Richard Dedomenici
Richard, a well known UK live artist who's projects include 'Break-In', a performance attempt to break into Cardiff prison. After this he attempted a series of increasingly ambitious projects, including an endeavor to turn coal into diamonds for the Wellcome Trust, which failed; seeking to train the guns if HMS Belfast onto his mother’s house in Watford, which failed; and trying to design an interface to enable cows to access the internet for the Arnolfini in Bristol, which failed. His experiences inspired the inexplicably popular touring lecture 'Embracing Failure'.
www.dedomenici.co.uk
Andrew Mitchelson
Andrew Mitchelson joined the Live Art Development Agency as Company and Resource Manager in March 2006. Andrew has a BA Degree in Arts Management, and since graduation has freelanced on a number of projects with Royal National Theatre. As a project manager, Andrew was responsible for creating and piloting a Youth Enterprise Programme with the Head for Business project and also produced a European Theatre
Exchange programme to Berlin with Art of Regeneration. Andrew has also previously worked as administrator for Duckie.
www.thisisliveart.co.uk
