The Auditeur

Trying to be lucid

2011-11-28T03:58:00.001-08:00

The artist’s job is to stay alive and awake in the space between conviction and certainties. The truth in art exists in the tension between contrasting realities. You try to find shapes that embody current ambiguities and uncertainties. Whilst resisting certainty, you try to be as lucid and exact as possible from the state of imbalance and uncertainty. You act from a direct experience of the environment.

Anne Bogart (2007)' And Then You Act: Making Art in the Unpredictable World. '

Conversations

2011-11-26T08:20:00.000-08:00

So many conversations.

Walking between sites and between art works.

Considering the late night performances or the day long actions.

I have sold an hour of my time. My time to relay the voices of the market place - into a gibberish mish-mash. I voice the voices myself.

I have listed to an oration - words of American presidents perhaps? Made (non)sense by the interventions of unknown scribes and script-makers.

Conversations about the disembodied voices through radio. Where are we given permission to intervene? to tune into the voices we choose - or not? Who is curating these voices?

Dialogue forms in the between spaces. The importance of cups of tea and taxi rides to create small moments of 'stopping' that allow for 'being'. The driver tells me of his quest to know the city - 'Leeds born and bred' he tells me. He has visited all the major galleries and museums. He loved art at school he tells me. We both wonder why we unlearn the pleasure of creativity as we grow older?

City Sense

2011-11-26T04:37:00.000-08:00

I wake up to the sound of heavy traffic beyond the hotel window. I am immediately reminded of the process of walking through that traffic on the Sound Walk yesterday.

I join a group to walk across the city. We are instructed to walk in single file where we can, to maintain a reasonable pace and gap between us, and to walk in silence.

I am feeling ambivalent, I know how far we need to walk to reach our destination, and wonder what route we will take. We set off – immediately exposed to the incongruity of the sounds and smells of the Christmas market. ‘80’s pop songs (‘Your too shy-y’) and the mechanics of a fairground ride.

Is this derive an overt or covert intervention in the city? We consider our sensory awareness and that by a simple gesture of ‘framing’ we are able to re-focus our attentions and notice the detail of things. We enjoy walking in the footsteps of others, liberated by not having to worry about where we are going, and so freed-up to ‘read’ the surroundings as we travel.

As we walk the traffic noise dominates every street. It’s just past four pm, and the night rush hour is building. There is a peeling, stripping sound with every wheel passing – the rubber adhering for a moment to the wet tarmac. A bus releases its air brakes and I feel anxious. A plane cuts across the tops of buildings. Is this walk an act of transgression? Are we, as a group, intimidating to onlookers, or do we blend in and become part of the streetscape?

We meander through a poorer shopping area, and I start to notice the signage – printed, corporate, handwritten or graffiti. This is a literary landscape. Navigated by the literate. How the visual dominates our sensory orientation and belonging.

Voices pass by – often on the phone – disembodied. ‘I am interested in like freelance…’ ‘Beyond and beyond…’ ‘Not my sort…’ In a church garden a blackbird ‘chuck-chucks’ and later I make out the sound of starlings in roost, behind the traffic drone. There is laughter on the pavement, and laughter from a child, hanging on her father’s arm, dashing through an arcade. The city is defined by its occupancy and not simply by the architecture. How are these ‘edgeland’ sites, so attractive to artists, also inhabited by others? Is the artist the only person to make these poetic or spiritual spaces?

I wonder how many urban planners work with the desire lines of inhabitants before setting in stone (literally and figuratively) the routes we should take. The city is (or should be) a form of collaborations, dependent on a level of tacit conformation and understanding. What happens when an artists transgresses the boundaries and territories of public and private? Is this a gendered site? A woman dashes by, and the other women in the group are reminded of the vulnerability of the individual that architectural space induces.

I become aware of my own humming. Singing to myself as I tune in and out of the city. This is a kind of choreography, our movement determined by the architecture of buildings, the plan of the walkway and the movement of the traffic.

Finally, we arrive at St Mary’s Lane, and I look ahead at the group not going in. A little huddle has formed in the yard and as I move nearer I realize that we are standing around a manhole cover. Someone is lifting the cover and we all peer down. I hear distant running water, and smell a faint stink.

The practice of the Urban Explorer seeks to subvert the access to forbidden, abandoned or inaccessible sites. We talk about active intervention and exploration of vertical space.

If walking as research is aspirational, and the exploration of space stretches the boundaries of our understanding, whom are we addressing? Who benefits? Who is made aware? Where are the decision makers in this process?

We consider the artist intervention as a catalyst, prompting shift. The outcomes of reuse and re-inhabiting do not have to be commercially driven.

Outside the traffic drones on.

Intimacy of engagement

2011-11-25T11:58:00.000-08:00

We are invited to sit. Around tables littered with apples, and sweets; ‘snap’ cards, and luggage tags; videos and books.

Without introduction we are led into dialogue. What is our understanding of the intimacies or generosities of performance?

We are not permitted to take notes; the memory cannot be added to with the written. Our aural and oral are the only processing mechanisms allowed. There is an inflection in the voice. It is about ‘being here’; the temporal space is not suggested to stretch beyond the here and now.

And so we begin. I wonder how much or little to say. Slowly a discussion emerges around our table; about art experiences. Being audiences and being performers. We negotiate our knowledge of each other. Confidence and confidences build.

There are naked performers, and performers in hotel rooms. There are encounters with the body and with the site. Experiences are mediated and in the ‘real’. There is one-to-one and the ‘micro-audience. Intimacy is not a given. Generosity is not automatic.

I speculate as to why a theatrical institution considers this remarkable, when surely the visual artist has been dealing with the intimacy of engagement for centuries? (Consider, for example Éntant donnés’ by Duchamp circa 1946-66)

How does intimacy provoke the ‘disarming’ of an audience? It is not then about ‘shock’ per say. Rather it is about the slippage from the usual. Creating a situation in which both artist and viewer agree a mutual (unsaid) condition of engagement.

Can ‘generosity’ exist in a performance work? Where is the capacity for a completely altruistic action, when expectation for audience to ‘appreciate’ exists?

Then, sitting in a circle group we listen to an artist’s stories of intimacy through the everyday and the creative act. Is this an indulgence where we listen and they talk? How is this an act of generosity? Can intimacy be created by this one-directional ‘sharing’? I wonder… We are complicate and happy to go along with the instructions. We are keen, motivated, engaged. Sitting in silence, Quaker-like, to consider our thoughts.

I think about my own ‘indulgences’ as artist or pedagog. I want to take audiences to new views, and alternative sites. I want to bring delight and upset to the everyday. I ask people to hear what I say and listen to my experiences. I ask for participants to ‘bring their baggage’ in order to read what I have to say, and share their interpretations with me.

We are left with a wall of ubiquitous post-its. Little labels of thought.

Later I delight in the ‘intimacy’ of shared knowledge when discovering that one of my group works in the same institution, in the same field of research. The ‘four degrees of separation’. Where in I-know-someone-you-know opens the possibility of confidence and trust.

Starting Out

2011-11-25T04:26:00.000-08:00

I've picked up my Delegate Pack, and walked from the town centre to the Patrick Studios, past the new O2 Arena site and the performance of construction. A rainbow is coming and going over Leeds as the weather turns from sleet to rain to sun.

Seeking Council

2011-11-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

We are exploring the chamber as a place for speech making.

This is not the work itself of course, but the 'before the work', the preamble, the preface. Whilst the artist, curator, technician, manager, collaborator, debate the practicalities of the site I think about previous times I have been in an assembly room. Waiting for the master of ceremony, or the chair, or the council leader. I count the embossing on the light fittings. I count the benches in the chamber. The pillars to the ceiling. I listen to the sounds of the corridor and the street.

How we deal with the waiting is part of it - the live thing. The commitment comes long before the action starts.

Compass Live Art

2011-11-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

25th - 27th November.
www.compassliveart.org.uk/

Lodestones

2011-11-04T09:06:00.001-07:00

A compass does not tell you where to go. Nor does it tell you where you are. Instead it indicates a course of direction in relation to a (abstract) fixed point.

A lodestone.

An instrument containing a freely rotating magnetized pointer to show the direction of magnetic north (not true north).

We are in the 'true' north - the north of England. We are northern.

Take bearings from the surrounding landscape, the surrounding voices. Navigate space in time in relation to where we have been, imagined and real.

We need to be 'freely rotating' in order to do this. Orientation is in accordance with new, and previously mapped routes or experiences. As pathfinders we spread out, split up, to venture beyond our comfort zones. We refer back to the place from which we came. We are breaking new ground, and following long trodden paths. We are invite intimacy with strangers, and create distance from the familiar.

We regroup at a pre-agreed locus point; compare notes, share reconnaissance. With this collective knowledge we re-define our landscape, name things; know things.

Throughout the process of navigation which is the Compass Symposium Gillian Dyson will be Auditeur, a listener - a ‘sounding board’ to promote discussion and disseminate ideas. Acting in some sense as the personification of ‘genius loci’ Dyson will channel the voices of delegates and participants in a number of visual, written or behavioral statements.