Tag Archives: Layers

Janet Cardiff

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After returning to Site with the onset of showing Conan some of the work our group had been preparing, I unfortunately had to take a back seat to listen about the change in ideas that we had been thinking about.

With the ideas of the 1185 earthquake still prominent in our piece I have been researching the basis behind an earthquake, the basic movements and vibrations which must occur for this natural disaster to occur. However I was also intrigued to research a certain artist Janet Cardiff who is known specifically for her work with sound and sound installations.

I have specifically looked at an audio walk formed by Cardiff and Miller named Jena Walk (Memory Field). The basis behind this idea was the audience would listen to an audio piece which would include sound effects from battle scenes as well as excerpts from Louise Seidler’s Diary. Cardiff wanted to use a specific landscape where the Prussians and Napolean battle had taken place 200 years before, this landscape was also a place where Russian tanks did Military exercises and one where Louise Seidler; the painter of Goethe from Jena may have walked. Cardiff took the basis of these historical events to make an audio piece about time and memory, and how one site can hold so many memories yet so many make new memories their every day.  Throughout the audio piece one century slips to another and as the listener walks they begin to become aware of each step they are taking, of where they are, of the site they are walking on just as those have for the last 200 years and the stories from those last 200 years begin to mix. The excerpts from Seidler’s diary are cleverly used as …” a narrative that deal with the physicality of memory”. Cardiff, J. Miller, B.G. (2006)

Our own piece is about an earthquake in 1185 which destroyed the Cathedral, our idea for the audio is to almost relive this with the sound of what could be the rumbles that the earthquake would have made (our own interpretation) and the crashes and movements from buildings around them, until the end at the Cathedral with a newspaper headline read out about the fall of the Cathedral. However could we use inspiration from Cardiff’s work, could we use extracts throughout the piece to vocalise what happened rather than allow our listener to decide everything? Would it be better this way to get the audience thinking about if such a tragedy happened now?

Cardiff, J. Miller, B.G. (2006) JENA WALK ( MEMORY FILED). [online] Available from: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/jena.html [ Accessed 22 March 2015].

Perspectives and layers

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During Monday’s lesson the weather was far from perfect. The wind and rain encouraged us to take our research undercover. We knew that we wanted our site to be around the cathedral so we headed into the cathedral to see if we could overhear some conversations about its history or local myths, as our original performance idea involved verbatim. Whist in there we visited the chapter house, of which the architecture blew me away. Whilst gazing into the phenomenal structure of the building a father and his two young children came bombarding in, with booming voices that caught the acoustics brilliantly. The father was telling his children about the history of the building and how it was used for conferences and debates. However the youngest child wasn’t interested at all and continued to run around shouting and seeing if their voice made an echo. This made us think about the difference in perceptions regarding age. What an adult may see in a building (a structure of history), a child may see something very different (a room to make your voice sound big). We then sat and talked more about this idea of seeing things differently and realised that the cathedral has so many layers of perception to it. We really like the idea of perceptions that weren’t overly thought about. Fictional stories that people think of when they immediately see a site or object. This then brought us back to the Gargoyles that we saw. The facts of why they are there are rarely know, thus people create varying myths and stories about their presence. No two stories are the same; therefore the layers begin to appear.

Initial ideas and sparks of inspiration

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Our fourth time venturing up Steep Hill to our given site, and it was pouring it down with rain. After having brilliant blue sky and sunshine weather for the past few weeks (albeit still being very cold), it is of no surprise that it made us view the site in quite a miserable way. Despite the awful weather, we continued to explore our site and the possibilities of performance. In this session we had formed our groups, mine consisting of: Charlie, Jess, Megan and myself. We had originally tried to write messages and leave them in certain places around the cathedral and keep an eye out for passers-by to see if they would notice and comment about them. However, with the weather clearly not being in our favour and getting harder, we decided this probably wouldn’t work and took our inspiration indoors. It was in this session that we discovered how hard it is to begin creating something for Site Specific Performance – it is so open to ideas, that we could practically begin from anywhere. Struggling to spark initial ideas of where to go and what to do, we decided to think back to previous tasks we had done whilst exploring Uphill Lincoln. We thought back to last weeks session of misguided tours and our individual interests when creating our maps and decided to take a walk round the inside of the cathedral and subtly listen in to various people’s conversations. We headed to an unusual part of the Cathedral that none of us had been in, ‘Chapter House’ which happens to be where parts of the Da Vinchi Code was filmed. Having seen bits of it in the film, it was incredible to see the architecture and its brilliance in real life. We sat round on the seating area surrounding the round room and were commenting upon the organ that was placed in the room and how incredible the acoustics of the room must sound. At this moment when we were discussing this, we noticed a family come through the door: A mum, dad and two little boys. The first boy ran into the space shouting and running to the back wall and it immediately changed the atmosphere of the place we had quietly been admiring. He then sat down at the far side of the room gazing up at the ceiling. The mum, dad and the other little boy sat down on the right hand side of us, explaining to the little boy some history he knew of this room and how people in generations gone by would ‘have discussions’ in the room. We continued to observe the first little boy and began to think how different a child would look at the Cathedral, in comparison to someone of our age. I knew at their age I found places like the Cathedral extremely boring and quite scary places. What did that little boy think?

After spending around 5-10 minutes in Chapter House, we decided to go to the Cathedral Cafe and listen in to more conversations. Whilst we were there, we found it quite hard to listen in without seeming overtly obvious. Instead, we began to write down any ideas or places that seemed to spark any of our interests during the day. Here are some of the things we listed to look at or research further:

  • Looking at the space with a child-like mindset – interview children about some of the pictures (below) we have taken surrounding the Cathedral?
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Photo Credit: Charlie Roberts, February 2015.

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Photo Credit: Charlie Roberts, February 2015.

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Photo Credit: Charlie Roberts, February 2015.

  • The Archways around the Cathedral – Stepping back in time, like a time capsule: the old and the new.

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  • The Hut, or ‘pixie’ hut as we referred to it outside the Cathedral – what myths does it have. Could we combine fact and fiction into our piece?

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  • Alfred Lord Tennyson statue – research some of his poems and reflect them back into the space in some way.

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  • The picture of the man’s head coming out of the wall. What is his story?

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  • Layers of perception – photo within a photo idea from our previous session.

Our job now is to do further research into these ideas and see which one sparks the most interest.

 

Thinking about Performance Documentation

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Whilst exploring Philip Auslander’s The Performativity of Performance Documentation, it made me begin to question what really counts as a ‘performance’. He splits performance documentation into two types: Theatrical and Documentary. Auslander describes ‘documentary’ performance as the traditional way of performance art – being performed there and then, with people witnessing or recording it actually happening. However, ‘theatrical’ is almost the second hand performance. Although in the final performance documentation, it may look real – this type of performance is staged to look as if it really happened, but actually didn’t happen. Only in the final documentation (the photograph) is when you can see something happening. This made me think of our present day society. How do we know what is really real, with editing apps such as photoshop and green screen to make film settings and imagery look more enhanced? What is the original picture or performance art – taking the original photo, or adding to it to make it something different? The power of photography and camera works is something that particularly stands out to me.

Auslander uses two performance art works by practitioners Chris Burden and Yves Klein as evidence of these two classifications. Chris Burden’s 1971 performance art named ‘Shoot’, fits into the category of ‘documentary’ performance/body art. In this performance, Chris Burden is shot in his left arm and we can visually see and hear him being shot on the recording. (Waldir Barreto, 2008). Although it is clear he was definitely shot, who are his intended audience? The people who were present at the onset of the recording, or us, the viewers watching through the recording? In this sense, body art performance works needs the photograph to confirm its having happened: it is an ‘anchor for its indexicalities.’ (Auslander, -). Without the recording, Burden would only have the people present at the time to vouch for the shooting happening. Secondly is that of Yves Klein’s ‘theatrical’ performance documentation called ‘Jumping into the Void‘. In this performance art, Klein intended to generate a piece of art which would have some sort of ‘social impact of mass media as a means of persuasion.’ (Zone Zero, -).

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Klein was actually only falling onto a padded matt beneath him and then the photograph was edited to put the outside photo with the upper part of the photo. This is why it is so contrasting to see the man on the bike acting so casually. This photo can completely alter someone’s view of that space and time. As stated by Klein, he believes that ‘man will only be capable of conquering space after impregnating it with his own sensitivity.’ (Klein, 1961.) 

When using this knowledge of what is the real, authentic act of the performance, Auslander talks about audio recordings, using The Beatles as an example. When they record their music, the instruments do not always play with them, they play separately and are then added together to make layers of music that mould together to make one. Therefore he makes the reader question whether the music we listen to really is true or authentic. During one of our sessions, our group decided to use these theories as a possibility for performance work, playing with the idea of complexities of photo’s within photo’s. Whilst sat in the cafe, we took this photo using multiple devices, which could then possibly carry on if people were to take a photo of ours and so forth. Here was our experiment in performance documentation: Photo within a photo

 

Works Cited:

Auslander, P. (-) The Performativity of Performance. 

Waldir Barreto (2008) Chris Burden : Shoot, 1971. [online video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE5u3ThYyl4 [Accessed 12 February 2015].

Zone Zero (-) Jumping into the Void. [online]. Available from: http://v1.zonezero.com/magazine/zonacritica/saltaralvacio/index.html [Accessed 12 February 2015.]