martyn coutts

This is the first of four documents I am writing about the project Visible City, a Made by Melbourne Fringe project in 2010. I was the initial concept designer and along with Emily Sexton the director/curator of the work.

These pieces are not designed to be anything but my own reflection on the project and I am not speaking on behalf of anyone else. The four pieces will focus on four key areas raised by the work.

These are;

1. The work.
2. The audience.
3. The space.
4. The documentation.

The Work.

What Visible City set out to do was create a hothouse environment for 11 artists who work in engaged, public work. Most of the artists create work that sits on the boundaries of contemporary practice where funding bodies are either not nimble enough to see what they are doing or are in the process of catching up. The interest for Emily Sexton and myself in the direction and curation of the project was to enable a context (the city) and a timeframe (3 weeks) that would suit the creation of response based practice. The labs and symposiums that have focused around Live Art in the past few years have either focused on bringing out internationals (Exist-ence, Brisbane), created meeting points for artists (Time_Place_Space, Performance Space/ANAT/PICA) or been reviews of work that has already been made (tittrott, pvi collective).

What could be created in the timeframe we had with the resources and constraints of the public space would naturally form a blueprint for  the style of work made. The work would be simple lightweight and deal with the city in a way that was clever and thoughtful.

Without being too prescriptive or generalised I think it is worthwhile looking at the types of work that were made (and also the works that ended up not being made).

Image based – Everyday Celebrity, In the Walls
Providing Space – Indonesian Embassy, Saturday Painting, PUDS
Play – Hopscotch, Height Wall, Walk The Line
Giving Voice – For You, Songs For Cleaners, Today another vessel was found
Performative – PUDS presents, Because You’re worth It, Species of Spaces
Documentation – Better, Toxic

Very few of these works engaged in a hostile way with the city, most of them accepted what was already in place and then either intervened in a quiet way or created a difference that broke up the natural rhythms of the urban landscape. I would posit that this has partly to do with the sensitivity of the artists, partly to do with not wanting to be in the faces of city-goers and partly the structure that had been set up in which the project operated within.

There are two notable exceptions to this and they are both works created by Sarah Rodigari. The first was a proposed march with banners created in Op art style that would be used to intervene into the Australian Rules Football Grand Final Parade. This Parade happens once a year and shuts down the CBD of Melbourne for hours as footballers of the two competing Grand Final teams ride on the back of open topped sports cars around the CBD whilst thousands of football fans throw confetti at them. The intervention was not planned as a violent intervention and indeed probably would have provided much amusement for football fans. As they were all dolled up in the black/white or red/black/white of the two teams, seeing eleven people holding placards that had bauhaus-esque patterns on them standing in amongst the crowd would have been hilarious, and a great comment on what was happening around them.

Unfortunately the Grand Final parade organisers would deem this to be ‘ambush marketing’ and we were advised to not go ahead with this work. This brings up a set of serious questions about people’s rights in public space, if we cannot hold a sign that says nothing on it then how can you call it ‘public space’?

The second thing it raises is that this type of work either sits very well in the context of a festival or it is too constrained by it. I am too enamoured by binaries and so I must refrain from thinking that this issue is as simple as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in a festival context.

But let me at least say this – I think in the context of Visible City, there were some works that absolutely needed the assistance and support given to it by Melbourne Fringe. Through a system of permissions set up by Producer Bindi Green and actioned by Dawn Grealish at City of Melbourne and Catherine Hampstead at City of Stonnington we were able to very quickly ‘book’ a series of spaces. The type of works that this helped us with were
PUDS, Height Wall, In the Walls.

Equally so there were a set of works that were hindered by the process of being in a festival context, Bauhaus Parade, Self Deception Questionnaire, Escalator Work, UJOC all of these laboured under the process of permissions, some of them got cancelled or were moved to areas that didn’t work very well for the idea.

I think given more freedom (and more time) some more pricklier works would have started to come through and push the boundaries a little of the work created. It is entirely understandable that an organisation with Fringe and a body like the City of Melbourne need to think long term, they can’t bank everything they have on one work in one festival, they need to look after every festival that they will ever make in the future. Does this sort of caution align with work that may at times need to site outside the boundaries of what is deemed within a risk assessment?

Sometimes creating a work with all the permissions needed actually destroys the work itself. A good example of this is Willoh S Weiland’s work Boat People (1), which was an attempt to float a nest down the Yarra until she either sank, went out to sea or was arrested. As she said in her statement about the work  – this work needs to be undertaken illegally in order for it to make sense. Asylum seekers or Boat People or ‘illegals’  as they are described in the mainstream media in Australia are under the law illegal immigrants and therefore are arrested and put in detention. This action Willoh was undertaking needed to reflect that in order for it to make sense, otherwise in her eyes it would be an empty gesture, a pretty, but neutered image.

Something that was raised during a number of discussions was  – where is the art in live art? Is the nature of engagement the art? if there is not a strong aesthetic or performative element to the work  – how is an audience supposed to read or experience the work? At tittrott in 2008 a panel that i was speaking on (and included Panther,  pvi collective (Steve Bull) and Sic (Something in Common)), Paul Thomas a festival curator and academic in Perth asked ‘Where is the art?’. I think this is a really pertinent question; Where is it? and how do audience enter it?

I personally find Live Art a practice that is light, ephemeral or as Richard Murphett (my old supervisor at VCA) once put it when describing a work of mine “if a gust of wind blew, it would all disappear”. It is delicate, but sometimes I wonder if it is so self aware and clever that it amounts to being nothing at all. For many of the works I found myself wanting more – absolutely loving what had happened but wondering if they could go further? Now of course, with a 3 week timeline and working with new people and volatile situations it is pretty hard to expect that work is going to be deep, researched and well thought through. But what I found interesting was the feeling inside the room with all the artists that the work only needed to happen once, and that power was lost by works that were repeated. Because You’re Worth It suffered from lack of interest by the creators, as did Hopscotch and I Walk The Line, where UJOC felt difficult and angry for the people on the mic. Is this sort of public work stuck in a strange dilemma where in one instance – the energy of the initial action is crushed by the lack of rehearsal and on the other side  the work is repeated and the passion of the initial drive is diminished by the repetition.

So what then is the point of a work that is ignited, burnt and extinguished all in the space of a few minutes in public, possibly never to be repeated? How can this work be more than just another line in a biography for the artist in question? One thing that was raised in a Salon that was led by Peter Eckersall, was that Live Art has criticality built in to it, that it is a key part of its DNA. I would also argue that Live Art – more than any other form cannot be talked about without talking about its relationship with audience. In many works, the audience and the work are indivisible – if the audience were not present the work could not happen.

So then perhaps if the criticality is happening live in every moment and the ‘audience’ is as much creator as the artist then perhaps this engagement should not be seen as art but as something else. Is this art or is this a social experiment? or merely a conversation between strangers? These are not new questions for this type of practice, it continues to be opened up and wrestled with every time that people go out in public to make work.

In looking at thematic running through all of these works then it is the action of the events that become the most important idea. The medium becomes the message and the artist themself becomes the work. Whatever activity that the general public(s) joins them in is the event and becomes the meaning. The ‘art’ as Paul Thomas questioned is happening now – between us as we interact. As Kerry Ann Lee so eloquently said at the opening of Visible City on the 27th September in the Commons space – ‘as we make this work we are building a moment’.