John Latham - Flat Time House Visit

As part of the elective we are putting on a exhibition at John Latham's  flat time house in Peckham. We did a visit there to have a look around the place and speak to the curators about John Latham and the space.

John Latham was a Sculptor, Performance artist, Conceptual artist and video/film maker who made an impression on the art world from the 1950's onwards. He concentrated his work upon his personal and ethical beliefs and with his wife Barbara, they devised the idea of "flat time" based on the theoretical physics of event structure.  

"the destruction and parody of systems of knowledge" -- Ok, I am not going to pretend I follow this exactly but I do know it has something to do with knowledge being ever changing.  This idea is shown in one John Lathams most famous works when in 1966,  he tutored at Saint Martins College of art. He withdrew the Clement Greenbergs Art and Culture from the library and organised a party where the guests chewed pages of the book, where it was further fermented into mash, distilled, squashed into a test tube and returned to the library. Latham subsequently got fired for this. 

Images of Flat Time House

John Latham used the house as his home and his studio and thought of it as a "living sculpture".  Each room took on a different role of a living organism, for instance the front room is thought of as the mind as it maintains permanent time based sculptures built by John Latham. The front window with the large sculpture of the book is called the face of the house. I

Our final show is going to continue with this concept of the house being a living body. All of us will produce a peice of work responding to this.

Speakers Corner

Speakers corner - a place where you can express yourself publicly and others will listen.

I suppose this comes under the realm of performance art. But a lot of speakers are not performing, they are just speaking their minds. Famous people to speak their are William Morris, Karl marx, George Orwell amongst others.

The corner of Hyde park can be seen as a forum for absolutely anyone to have their say in. It is a London tradition thankfully hasn't died over they years and remains still a tourist hotspot. The majority of speakers talk of religion or politics. From my experiences the speakers there have been very odd indeed....

Heres a small example - 

Vicky Gold

 We had a visit from Vicky gold, a graduate from goldsmiths (actually did she graduate??who knows) anyway she gave us an incite into her crazy work and idealism's. I found the talk interesting because how out of the ordinary it was but if I am being completely honest, I thought the whole thing was a load of rubbish.  It's funny what can be called art these days. I am just not into that sort of thing, the shock factor was good though.

I suppose the main thing was the whole fall in love with tutor/obsession and make art out of it thing. This was really strange....

Anyway heres an example of her work.

Deep Play Dark Play

One day we got set the task of doing a performance.  There were two rooms. One with a camera inside rigged to a television in the other. The class remained watching the TV  in that room whilst we each were asked to go in the other room and do our performance. When asked to do this I honestly thought I would be able to do it. But as the week went on I stressed out so much about the bloody thing that I ended up being a bit of a coward. I decided not to do it which is now a decision I regret, because although weird, I think the results look pretty cool.

Dance Lessons

Mark asked us all to go away and make a film. Whatever we wanted. So I got together with Tom to make this weird film of us dancing then swapping roles to play each other. It all started when Tom began doing his crazy leg dance. Although this wouldn't normally be seen as a great dance move, I couldn't copy it at all. Then began the questions...is there really any bad dance moves?? Anyway when we put all four films together it was interesting to see how they corresponded with each other.

Grannyrose

IMITATION

Mark Set us the task of being a "double agent". One of the most mortifying but also satisfying things I have done in the last few years, I decided to imitate an old lady and walk the streets of felixstowe. It was weird... no one seemed to notice. I fitted in the surroundings......

To be honest the whole time I kept thinking -  why the hell am I doing this? But it was only after when I felt sort of exhilarated that I felt glad I forced myself to come out of my comfort zone.

Grannyrose gets herself mugged

Sophie Calle - Talking to Strangers

Recently I went to see the Sophie Calle exhibit at the Whitechapel Gallery. I found her project quite mesmerizing. Calle's latest peice "take care of yourself'  used a personal email that she recieved from her partner ending their relationship and had it interpreted by 107 women who all are professionals in their field of work. Each used their knowledge to analyse the letter, achieving what came to be a very interesting combination of results. Included in some of the interpretations were women expressing the letter through dance and other mediums on camera. This performance element of the exhibit was particularly effective......

After visiting this exhibit I became really interested in Sophie Calles work. She has spent the last 30 years documenting social interactions often turning real life into something quite fictional. I think the main attraction to her work for me is how it meets the voyeuristic needs of the average person, most people are intrigued by other peoples lives. For example for three months she got a job as a maid in a hotel and used the opportunity to look through and photograph peoples personal belongings. By looking at the mundane and normal objects that most people own she created idea's from her own imagination about who the people were.

Photographs from the project "The Hotel"

I like to dress up boys and make them pose.

Research Homework

I decided to investigate a bit about flash mobs. Having heard stuff about them before I thought the idea was interesting and a great way to experience something a little out of the ordinary. Even if a lot of performance art seems to have some sort of deep meaning behind it, I like this kind purely for the entertainment value. Maybe this is because i don't have a very philosophical brain or something but sometimes it's just plain easier to enjoy something because you find it funny. I think entertainment in art gets a bit lost sometimes in all the debate and depth of thought that goes into it.

Flash mob is a spontaneous gathering of people that assemble in a predetermined location, perform some sort of action then split up and go back to their normal routines. This experience can take people out of the normality of ordinary life even if just for five minutes. 

A group I have looked more closely at are called improv everywhere. They organise events all over the place creating fantastic spectacles and creating audiences from the unexpecting public. Being a big fan of musicals i found this one particularly hilarious.

Lesson with Ana Laura

I felt Ana Laura's lesson's were more formal than Marks, in the way that we learnt more about the different context's behind performance art.  We looked how the way performance has changed through different periods noticed particularly by the varying terms used to describe it ---

LIVE ART 

interaction, participation, particularly connects with minorites
NON ART 

 70's/60's term (quite dated) - everyday art, a younger generation
TIME BASED ART 

a fourth dimension - film - a flexible medium
RELATIONALISED PRACTICE 

 conversation -audience participation - audience make the work
SOCIAL ENGAGED PRACTICE 

 work process

We again looked at what performance art is and then concentrated on our own ways of working by all making a mind map then going around the room observing everyone elses.

My way of working consists of research, talking ideas through, experimenting, more research, critiques and mainly just trial and error.  However, I find performance art more spontaneous than this... I think just doing, creating an audience from the odd glance from a passer by cannot be planned. Besides what plan ever goes exactly the way you though it would anyway.

We did some funny excercises too, like standing in a circle and imitating each others movements.  Strange. I felt uncomfortable but maybe this was the point.Who knows.... I joined this elective to push myself, do things I wouldn't normally do. I find it increasingly hard though to bring myself to do anything! (in the public eye anyway)....

Bas Jan Ader

An extremely influential artist in the strange world of performance art, Bas Jan Ader never completed his final piece "in search of the miraculous" where he set sail to do a west-east crossing of the atlantic and went missing at sea. I suppose this fate contains some sort of horrible irony. But I feel the mystery behind what happened keeps his idea's alive.  Other famous works include fall I and fall II.  He concentrates  a lot on the idea of falling... these films make me feel unstable almost. Maybe it's waiting for the fall that makes the viewer so uncertain when watching.

Introduction video

This is the first day mortification of having to introduce ourselves on camera. My worst nightmare but I did it none the less

 

Rosie becomes an animal

Task : To Become an Animal

For this brief I wanted to do something that related to me, autobiographical almost.  So I thought about what my behaviour was like and tried to relate it to an animals. I thought a lot of how I am a hoarder. I collect so much stuff and surround myself by it.I am an extreme lover of clutter. This lead me to my research on magpies.  Magpies are scavengers often collecting bright shiny objects and using them within the domed nests that they build.

I decided to film myself building myself a nest on my balcony using all the stuff I seem to hoard in my room. The film was too long so I sped it up to about a minute and a half.  I felt the original slower version worked better but the brief was to make a short film.

The film ended up looking like CCTV footage. I liked the idea that I was secretly being watched making my nest. Like a nature programme or something....

What is Performance Art?

...ALL ABOUT TAKING RISKS...

Mark McGowan gave us our first lesson on performance art and I will admit i became immediately sceptical of the whole thing and why the hell i was doing it! I mean his art (if you can call it that) seemed a bit pointless to me, for example eating a corgi in a protest against cruelty to animals or leaving a tap running for a year apparently creating an awareness of water wastage. I liked the guy, I enjoyed the lesson purely from being thrown into something i knew absolutely nothing about and being entertained by the randomness of the situation.

Mark made some interesting points that day anyway, things that have stuck in my mind. Like the idea of embarrassment. He asked whether any of us would feel comfortable getting up and dancing to know music in the middle of the room. Only two people said they could do it so up they got. It was funny to see that everyone else in the room found it really hard to watch, I will admit I was cringing and I don't even know why. They certainly weren't embarrassed to be dancing so why did we struggle to look at them? I found this an interesting concept to think about and left my first elective lesson feeling positive. 

"the power of performance lies in it not really being there" - Peggy Phelan

This is an important quote Mark McGowan enlightened us with. I think it means that the events exist purely on the story that gets told about it.

This lead us onto the conclusion that what you tell people about the events isn't nearly the same as what actually happened. Exaggeration is key apparently and is sometimes what turns the event into a piece of art in the first place ----

    "real is of no significance to man whatsoever"

This highlights the point that it the stories told after the event that create the art. Maybe that why Mark McGowan covers himself in peanut butter and cycles around areas of London on a kids tricycle..... he knows it is likely that people will at least talk about it whether they like it or not doesn't seem to matter.

Performance art is about taking risks. Using live art in a way to communicate an idea. But then i simply wonder if half of it is about being able to shock people. Or even to just entertain them. I have never been that much of a deep thinker, so i found a lot of what mark showed us just plain funny. Or curious. 

For example, he showed us the work of Alexander Brener. No I wasn't impressed by it but it I did want to watch it.  His works involved having sex on city streets, vandalizing artwork and taking a shit at an art lecture. His most famous performance took place when he sprayed a green dollar sign Kazimir Malevich's painting Suprematisme which he ended up going to prison for. Here's him smashing up some gallery. This seems so pointless but i suppose it got a few laughs so maybe it serves a purpose in that respect.