Author: Samuel Mant

The Exhibition is over, pack up, go Home.

Samuel Mant / / Performance process, Rooms

That was, in a word, exhausting.

I know I shouldn’t complain and I know that everyone was in a similar state to me (or worse if their piece was durational), but performing each night was extraordinarily draining. That’s not to say it wasn’t deeply satisfying. Looking over my previous posts, I don’t think I ever precisely outlined the terms of my performance, so I’ll elaborate, now that there’s nothing to spoil for the public.

I was the Blind Curator, a tragi-comedic character – this is a man who lives in abject squalor, in a crumbling room, barely large enough for another person to be in there with him. His ‘collection’ is a banal one – everyday objects, often in a state of disrepair are carefully displayed on the shelves of his room. Here are some of them now:

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A thoroughly uninspiring collection, aren’t they?

But just as the audience think that this room is full of worthless items, of no value, the Curator opens mind to them. To his blind eyes, they are treasures, artifacts. They all speak of places unfathomably far away, even if that place is the one he is in now. Suddenly, to the audience members who choose to engage and see these objects through his mind’s eye, they are amazing, they are beautiful, they are ancient and powerful and magical. Those who visit the Blind Curator’s gallery are swept away to worlds of fantasy and imagination, if they let themselves be.

The piece was designed with a basis in the idea of ‘make strange’ that Gob Squad displayed in their office performance (n.d.). I had gathered from around the house (and some objects from the wider world) objects that were, if we’re being brutally honest here, junk. I collected this rubbish and put it on display. But then I freed it. By being blind, I was able to experience these objects with something other than my eyes. And they spoke to me – they told me to lie. The concept of how long one has to have inhabited a space to lie about it was one of the concepts I’ve toyed with and in this case, not only the space became fictional, so did these objects. I weaved narratives around them, dressed them in mythology, gave them new pasts, new futures and ultimately was a liar. But the audience was given a choice – not obviously, but subconsciously. Would they see my narratives as absurd, watching this blindfolded man witter on about what was patently not true? Or would they allow themselves to believe the lie, just for a little while? Unfortunately, due to my blindfolded state, I couldn’t see this decision play out on the faces of the audience, but I could get a sense of how engaged people were in my tales and, for the most part, the audience wanted to believe.

One of the most interesting things I find, looking back at performance, was the unpredictability of the audience. I was particularly bemused by some of the choices that the audience members made when it came to choosing objects to listen about – here’s a tally:

Lock: 7

Mirror: 8

Stone: 3

Cloth: 3

Keyhole: 10

Jack: 8

Curtain: 2

Cardboard: 2

Soap: 8

Bolt: 4

Box: 5

Key: 6

Alarm: 5

Queen: 2

Splinter: 12

Book: 8

King: 0

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The Unloved King

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The Bizarrely Popular Splinter

Still now, I cannot fathom the popularity of that sliver of wood, it puzzles me and makes me second guess the understanding I thought I had of people. I even experimented with changing its positioning yet still it was chosen repeatedly.

Aside from my bafflement regarding that, the whole performance went off without any trouble (with the exception of one woman who wasn’t tall enough to reach up and trace the cracks of the ceiling with me) and was a deeply satisfying experience. While I’ll not miss my time in the gallery, as in was often cold and always cramped and uncomfortable, I shall look back on it fondly and always try to remember the narratives I wove for it.

References:

Govan, n.d. Revisioning Space, The Place of the Artist, [e-journal] P. 123, Available through: Lincoln University Blackboard: http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk.

Talking Through Tactility

Samuel Mant / / Performance process, Research, Rooms

Everywhere we explore, we explore with our eyes (that is, those of us lucky enough to have eyes). As humans, our primary sense is sight and we define the world around us through vision – everything has to be seen to be believed, after all. Our reliance on visual interaction is doubly apparent when our ability to see is impaired – every single human being has been scared in or by the dark, partly due to the intrinsic fear of the unknown (which our eyes abate by making it known) and also in part due to our inability to see.

What can we do when sight is denied to us? One of the first instinctive reactions is to thrust out one’s arms and use a bizarre shuffling gait to move around. We try to feel the world around us and it is that instinct, that reaction that I want to examine.

Our eyes deny us the opportunity and motive for tactile exploration – basic human reliance on sight does away with the need to feel the world around you. But how do we cope when we must explore a place physically? What happens when you only know somewhere by touch.

In the house, in the little ante-room beside the living room, I posed myself these two questions. Blindfolding myself with my scarf, I set about discovering the space with a new pair of eyes – my hands. I was inspired, in no small part, by the work of Mark Wayman, who’s work centres around the idea of the disembodied narrative – as the South London gallery’s website describes it, ‘Monologues, describing the surfaces and architectural features of the room in minute and accurate detail, are delivered by Wayman from hidden or obscured locations within it.’ While this does key in to some of my performative ideas that are brewing (or rather, since this post has been delayed for a while, have already come to fruition), my main inspiration comes from his one-off performance wherein he took a small audience round a secluded garden while blindfolded and described the space in minute detail, entirely from memory.

Mark Wayman describing the minutiae of the garden.

I have attempted this within my little ante-room, with favourable results. Once I was free from the yoke of sight, I could (after a fashion) quite easily explore the space, learning the size of things, the room in which I had to move, the texture of different parts of the walls, different parts of the floor. If I stood still, I could become aware of the draft from the little portcullis over near the floor. The heat (or lack thereof) that denoted certain areas was fascinating; with my hands I could judge a thermal map of the room, finding places where the chill was especially strong, the wall directly opposite the draft. Even in the darkness of the blind, the size, shape and layout of this room became as clear to me as it would be if I used my eyes. While blind, I could become part of a space – so intrinsically linked with the proximity of knowledge (for when tactility is your main means of discovery, being close to your surroundings is inevitably) that I could almost become a feature of it. In performance, I want to be part of this space, not merely some inhabitant of it.

REFERENCES:

http://www.liveartwork.com/dvd/current%20issue3.htm (Picture, accessed 22/03/13)

http://www.southlondongallery.org/page/mark-wayman-shifter (Quotation, accessed 22/03/13)

The Difficulty of Fiction

Samuel Mant / / Performance process, Research

So here I stand, in my gallery (well, that’s a lie, here I sit at a computer screen in the library, but since my piece is based around the idea of perpetuating the fiction of what things are not, then this is fairly appropriate. Let’s close our eyes and imagine I’m in my gallery. Then open them again so that you can read this post. There, that’s better).

Before me lie quite a few things – mundane things, everyday, if we look at them with our eyes. Here’s one now:

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‘Isolation and immobility, then, are the two conditions the imagination requires if it is to be preserved from the ruinous distractions or ‘invasions’ of reality.’ (1977, pp., 41)

Certainly, this applies in the creation of my mythologies, if I write within the gallery, in a place I have re-appropriated as an escapist sanctuary for the purposes of performance anyway, my work is generally more productive, though sometimes the sheer banality of the place works against me. Immobility, too, helps the imagination – my imagination anyway. Blindfolded and tucked away into my little sleeping-ledge it is sometimes easier to let my mind drift and adapt pre-existing pieces of narrative. Isolation though, works not only for me, but for the audience of my piece – the last thing I want in my gallery are the ‘invasions of reality’ as Sturrock puts it. While it helps that the living room tends to be silent as the grave, the space itself has a Spartan cell-like feel to it (indeed, one of my first ideas for performance in there was of me portraying a prisoner within these monastic confines, but the rationale was never truly there) which can only accentuate feelings of isolation from reality. The grate down near the floor that allows a link to reality outside the house seems only to increase feelings of isolation, since even though you have a link to the outside, you feel even more withdrawn from it somehow.

Currently, I still have a couple more narratives to write fully but I have forsaken some last sessions within the gallery to visit home (ridiculous, I know!). I wonder if I will still be able to create absorbing legends when I don’t have access to the isolation and immobility the gallery can provide to me. I worry that my current narratives will deteriorate over time and not cling to the meaning they once held, or never held at all. I wrestle with the idea that meaning is fluid or completely unnecessary and that all I provide as the blind curator is an alternative viewing of the real, wrapping it in the fictional, the escapist. However, in the end, it may just be out of control – reading Borges own works of fiction, I am struck by this particular passage from The Library of Babel in relation to my own worries about the contents of my gallery:

‘Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes of inexhaustible stairways for the traveller and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.’ (1964, pp., 79)

Now, I cannot knowingly cite my gallery as the work of a divine entity, but this passage shows me that ownership of the gallery is not mine, not even close – it exists ab aeterno and will show me in time what it wants to say.

References:

Borges, J. L., 1964. Labyrinths. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd.

Sturrock, J., 1977. Paper Tigers: The ideal fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Play.

Samuel Mant / / Performance process, Research

I had a lot of fun today in the house – I much prefer to work practically when I’m there and then reflect later, though the writing tasks we receive often unearth things I wouldn’t have thought of. However, today was a day of practical work and, to that end, I played.

Firstly, I was displaced from the Fisherman’s Shed by necessity of being caught on the camera, so I had to find an unpopulated space to unlock my writing from Friday. Partly out of practicality (as no one seemed to have chosen it) I chose one of the liminal spaces in the house – the stairs. Now, the memory which I was attempting to activate was that of playing on the stairs at my mum’s workplace so, I began experimenting, trying to find different ways to ascend and descend the staircase (bearing in mind the ideas of making strange the everyday that we had discussed earlier). First, I bumped down the stairs on my bum, which was slightly painful – Louise, who was working on the landing at the time, joined in on that one. Then I started to get a little more dangerous. As children, we are all told (I assume) not to play on the stairs, as it is a tad risky. I’m sure in the minds of most parents, if they see children playing on the stairs they immediately picture horrifying images of broken bones, concussions and trips to the hospital after a tumble down them. However, today, there were no parents – of course, there were doubters, wondering at the danger of what I was attempting but I (foolishly perhaps) refused to listen and went about my experimentation. I slid down the stairs on my front and back, jumped up the stairs, increasing the amount of steps I jumped up them every time, crawled up them (a rather pedestrian attempt), walked down them backwards and walked up and down them with my eyes closed (this after discussing with Louise and Angela the horrible feeling of thinking there’s another step and there not being one there, and lurching forward into the dark). Sliding down on my front is my new way of traversing the stairs, so none of you be alarmed if I do it again.

In the end though, the stairs couldn’t yield up any more interesting ways to use them so I went in search of something else. I found a feather duster.

Initially, I took the duster because it entertained me – it was large and inherently quite a ridiculous thing. But then, when I took it upstairs I had a bizarre urge to dust at all the cameras. In the beginning, it was just because the idea of a big feather duster slowly creeping up onto the camera amused me greatly. But, slowly, as I went round all the cameras grinning, I started to think through and rationalise my actions – there was a method to my madness. When we’re in the house, the CCTV tends to fade away into the background (as a few people have mentioned already). What I wanted to do, with my rituals of cleaning (first the duster, then spray and cloth, and finally the hoover) was to make obvious the cameras. With my escalating cleaning rituals, I separated the CCTV from the rest of the house, isolating it and inverting the focus in each room.

Eventually, however, I ran out of cleaning implements and had to find another way to amuse myself. This is when I truly settled on play. Before now I’d been playful in my exploration, but I’d not truly played as a child would. So I became a pirate.

The idea of setting sail on the seven seas and becoming a scurvy sea-dog came to me in the bathroom, when I was changing the toilet roll as I noticed the current one had been finished. Through the eyes of a grown-up, t’was but a simple cardboard tube. However, through the eyes of a child, it was a telescope! Next, I turned my child’s eye towards the bins just outside the toilet. Bins? No, they aren’t bins, they’re my pirate ship! (Though, size-wise, it was more like a little pirate dinghy) And what’s this? One of the flappy bin lids came of? Well, that looks rather like a pirate hat to me! Unfortunately, sailing the seven seas may be a bit hard without a sail… But, luckily, I found a handy oar in the form of a fire extinguisher!

You may be wondering what exactly the point was in all of this seemingly pointless play. Earlier, we talked a great deal about the idea of ‘making strange’ a place – mainly how Gob Squad’s Work ‘sought to ‘make strange’ the activity’  (Govan, n.d.). When you’re looking through the eyes of a child, mundane household objects can become magical, fun and strange. In that way, I played my pirate game to fully experience the making strange of the house and to observe the reactions of everyone else. First of all, I simply played on the landing in my bin-boat, but I wasn’t really engaging anyone that way. So I began a hunt for treasure. Understandably, considering where we are, treasure was hard to come by, even through the eyes of youth. I systematically went through each room (with my bin lid hat and cardboard telescope to make it quite clear I was a pirate) searching for the elusive treasure. Then, in the reception/waiting room, I found some shiny gold tacks! I even found a treasure-chest facsimile to put them all in (I haven’t a clue what it was, it was a strange folding silver thing). Now that I had succeeded in my pirate’s quest to find a buried treasure, I decided on philanthropy so that I could involve everyone in the house – I went room to room offering everyone some of my treasure. I was genuinely surprised by the result though – pretty much everyone accepted my offer of treasure, even though the treasure was clearly just drawing pins and a few other brass bits and bobs. The only people in the house who didn’t accept my offer were those in the CCTV room – except Lizzy, but she was outside the room at the time. This got me wondering, is there something about the CCTV room that separates you from the rest of the house? Because within the room you observe everyone else’s actions, do you feel apart from them – it’s an interesting idea that whenever you watch people through the CCTV you feel detached from the house.

That or they just didn’t want any of my treasure.

References:

Govan, n.d. Revisioning Space, The Place of the Artist, [e-journal] P. 123, Available through: Lincoln University Blackboard: http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk.

Shed

Samuel Mant / / Rooms

This space – which I’ll call ‘The Fisherman’s Shed’  to avoid confusion – seems to me like a substitute. The West Parade house unfortunately lacks a cellar, but this shed gives some of the impressions of one. While it is not oppressive like a cellar, as it has windows and its odd little slapdash hole nestled in the wall, it has a very bleak feeling to it, a stark loneliness brought on (most likely) by the colours, the decay and neglect and its sheer bareness. However, the shelved anteroom in the living room (side note – what do we mean by living room – where we live most? Where there’s more living to be had?) exhibits these qualities too but doesn’t have the same feeling about it. I think it may be all to do with positioning. The side room of the living room (another meaning – is the living room exactly that – alive?) is next to the beating heart of the house. This shed however, is entirely separate (doubly so, as it is next door’s, but I’ll talk about the notion of trespass later). The dynamic I see between attic and cellar is that while an attic is part of a house, a cellar is part of the earth. It doesn’t belong to what is above it and is potentially infinite – especially in darkness. The shed, to me, is the house’s cellar facsimile – something other, not belonging and so, clothed in mystery. Its Spartan features speak of a fear to populate and furnish it – the house is not comfortable to populate and furnish it. The cobwebs and decay show that this space truly belongs to the outside world. Creatures inhabit it, alien to us in their ways; ‘The creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious’ (Bachelard, P19). Time and the elements have ravaged it – a pipe is torn from the wall, the paint flakes, a socket raped mercilessly by the onset of rust – this place does not belong to humanity, we are merely tolerated.

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(The Fisherman’s Shed)

The other unsettling feeling here is the feeling of trespassing – not just in the florid and prosaic sense I just wrote about, but literally – this is next door’s shed. There is something fundamentally wrong about the feeling of trespassing, even if it’s legitimised somewhat in this situation. In the same manner that a burglary violating your home gives you an awful feeling of vulnerability, trespassing makes you vulnerable from a different perspective. A fear grips you – the fear of discovery. I think what it really boils down to is a human desire to belong and when we trespass – not necessarily into areas, but into groups or conversations as well, that need to belong isn’t being fulfilled.

References:

Bachelard, L, 1969 The Poetics of Space: Boston Mass: Beacon Press, p. 19. Available through: The University of Lincoln Blackboard website <blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk> [Accessed 25 January 2013]