ARC | robertverrillartist

ARC

"Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time."

"Sexing the Cherry" Jeanette Winterson 1989

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PHYSICAL WORLD?

“How do we understand the material world and our relationship with the things around us and the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, all of which have the potential to either connect us or to come between us, comfort us or leave us feeling isolated and alone?

If we love what we own ….we might take better care of it and contribute less to this insane cycle of production and disposal that’s spiraling us all into such a mess … we need to break this insane cycle of production and disposal”

Amica Dall and Giles Smith of Turner Prize winning collective “Assemble” speaking on BBC Radio 4’s “The Sympathy of Things.” November 2018.

Robert Verrill. Wire: Wood Wharf 2018. Duration 34 secs

These three parallel and mutually supporting lines of research are now :

Live Performance. My emphasis is currently here. My live performances have taken centre stage over recent months as being the most appropriate vehicle through which to explore ideas of transience, examine processes and explore relationships more thoroughly and three dimensionally. I have been particularly interested in ideas of "Action Sculpture" developed in the late 1960's by John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Bruce McLean and more recently by Martin Creed and others. McLean gradually eliminated materials and props, first partially and then completely, in favour of using simply the human body. (See Critical Analyses). This allows an audience to feel deeper engagement in what is becoming a series of unfolding narratives. My performances continue to respond to their siting, by, for instance, using available spaces, surfaces and entrances/exits. Where objects are used these are sourced from the locality and returned there afterwards. In this way my performances are sustainable and unique to the site. I try to minimise the amount that is brought into the site and taken away.
Installation continues to support and augment my performances, again using found, collected objects of site-specific relevance, to comment on or investigate a specific location by re-presenting through re-arranging, re-ordering or re-positioning in minimal ways. An installation will usually comprise a group of relevant objects. These would, a year or so ago probably have been unidentifiable objects relying on mysterious possibilities to animate and articulate them, and never physically amended in order to retain their integrity and entirety. Now, however, objects are chosen for connection to the site though not usually found on the site. They may be used to set up a dialogue with the found location thereby transforming both objects/materials and context and providing insights into their makers and users. Transformation and dialogue is either achieved through display of "relating objects" in a gallery setting or a site-specific interior or exterior location.
Video and Video/Performance. I have continued to develop my site-specific videos in order to explore found materials/objects in found settings, such as the investigative video Wire: Wood Wharf (above), made during my residency at Canary Wharf in the summer of 2018. Movement can imply process, labour and time passing but also accident and chance occurrence. The latter changes the course of an action or intention which is then lost forever and cannot be repeated or restarted. Thus the short video Spillage II (bottom of this section) catches the moment that an intended action - picking up a cup - is interrupted dramatically. The first action is never completed but replaced by another. The unintended consequence thus alters the course of history. My minimal, off-stage presence in such videos led to me deciding to move to centre stage and to the camera being removed to transform the action into a live performance. It felt like a natural development to allow my own presence to become more prominent and for the materials/objects to retreat to supporting roles.

Michel Foucault examines such limitations to our modern taxonomies in The Order of Things (1966) in dealing with how we can absorb and use ideas and information. Being definite – classifying and categorizing – gives a crude, misleading and unsubtle representation of the world. To be indefinite, on the other hand gives a more nuanced, subtle and sensitive view which, crucially for the artist, allows for ambiguity and the complexity and individuality of humans and therefore the world. It leaves grey, shadowy areas and cracks where the imagination can go to work. In short, taxonomy is as likely to hinder understanding as much as aid it.

Robert Verrill

Two early examples of me experimenting with found objects in the WCA studio space to explore their possibilities for expression.

My recent work has continued and developed the notion of being responsive to a particular place or characteristic of a particular place. Thus being largely or wholly site-specific it seemed most revealing to place or re-position objects from a particular site within that site (which is equally found – a found place) by a variety of means – moving by hand, brushing, wiping, crushing or blowing. These found materials or objects could then be filmed in the act of being re-positioned and perhaps physically altered.

The piece shown below from the Relatum Series of Korean artist Lee Ufan has intrigued me for several years. One reading of it has always suggested a frozen moment in time whereby factory workers have left an arrangement of metal strips on the shop floor, half sorted or assembled and awaiting their return. It is a sculpture that speaks of performance more than any other. It has been the one big constant in my work over the last 3 years.

Thus in video works such as as Wire: Wood Wharf (above) I used the opportunity of a guided visit to the 37th floor of a block of flats to record and draw attention to some found wire off-cuts, left lying around, by filming a small, impromptu ordering and re-presenting process. The foregrounding of normally marginalised, redundant materials, and the consequent reversals of scale, changes perceptions and power relationships.

Lee Ufan. From Relatum Series 1964 - 1993 at Tate Modern

Ways of Working

Time to ponder and turn ideas over, often at the same time as manually toying with found objects, is vital to my work. I need to be in a place where physical elements of object and place can come together with emerging ideas in unlikely combinations. However, by early 2019 I felt that my studio was becoming just an expensive storeroom so I gave it up. This has freed me from too much accumulated "stuff" and enabled me to identify what is really important in my practice. My studio had served its purpose by moving my focus onto working directly in my environment, whether inside or out.

Ideas as to how to solve a problem in my work, or how to move on more generally in my practice, often surface whilst I am looking at other artists' work which may be only tenuously connected. Such events cannot be forced or predicted. A light bulb moment is as likely in a supermarket or on a bus journey as in an exhibition, theatre or cinema. These, often long, periods of gestation are vital to me as they clearly have been to artists such as Tacita Dean, Cy Twombly and Claes Oldenberg. Ideas are left to emerge into the light when their time is right.

Tacita Dean still from video Prisoner Pair

SUMMARY OF MY JOURNEY TO THE PRESENT

From collecting, sorting, displaying and sometimes videoing found material, mediated in only modest ways, I have moved through animation of the objects as detached, sculptural forms to using the objects and materials to pursue issues around time, process (either its futility, absurdity, comfort or beauty) and our relationship with our world.

Gradually I have moved from being a peripheral enabler to being the centre stage "character" and protagonist. This has in turn necessitated me using direct, live performance for my larger, more ambitious work which now derives more and more from specific sites. My relationship with the performance space cannot adequately be captured on video but must be experienced live.

Nevertheless I do not see my practice as a linear development but rather one that progresses cyclically, laterally or along parallel paths. So installation, video and performance will remain equally important.

COLLECTING, CHOOSING, USING AND PURPOSE

I continue to use the collection of found, chanced-upon materials though these must now derive, as far as possible, from the public or semi-private/communal space in which the installation or performance is sited.

Gathering of such objects is a form of forensic activity akin to archaeology or CSI such that the materials provide evidence of local, human activity which my work mimics, celebrates or transforms in some way, re-presenting it to the users of that space.

This provides evidence of, and insights into, our behaviours, individual and collective. But it also throws up the significant question:

When an object is found and collected or retrieved does it alter our perception of that object, of the person or people who we conjecture may have once owned, used and discarded the object and of the culture is springs from?

My purpose in finding and collecting has therefore been refined at the moment to those objects that can inform and help expound my ideas and concerns through performance most effectively . This has led me to focus on the humble, ubiquitous corrugated cardboard box.

I will however return to other ways of collecting using chance finds determined by a randomly designed system when I develop my long-term "London street-walking" project post-graduation. I elaborate on this in Professional Showcase.

Robert Verrill. Dust Lines Made by Sweeping 2018

Dust lines made by site-specific performance of this work

at Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art 2018 during the PV of the exhibition The Art of Making Sense.

This work combined an installation of part of my studio collection of found objects and a live performance of Dust Lines Made by Sweeping thus creating two dust lines, at right angles, representing the footprints of the two "missing" studio walls.

Claes Oldenburg in his Manhattan Mouse Museum examining, cleaning and rearranging.

Collecting is an area of human activity which seems to be a way of possessing and understanding and controlling a small part of the world but artists have many different approaches and reasons for doing it. These include :-

Mark Dion – to question notions of historical archaeology and curation and to shed light on environmental issues which threaten all our futures
Tacita Dean – to bridge a gap between, and challenge conventional assumptions of, the disciplines of still life and landscape through film.
Paul Nash – The act of finding and simply displaying, on car roof or country lane, for him was enough to link still life and landscape.
Julie Becker – to bring some stability, continuity or meaning into a shifting, unstable lifestyle.
Claes Oldenberg (see photo above)– famous for oversized sculptures he has always collected small ephemeral, disposable objects as a resource in his Mouse Museum – but he has to find them. Anything found and donated by others is respectfully stored out of site. He is a master of the metamorphosis of the insignificant. As Tacita Dean says in her Collected Writing “Though his finds are of the moment that made them … stranded out of their time and apart from their context they can transform from negligibility to autonomous grandeur.”

WAYS OF THINKING

My fundamental aim is to produce art which opens up new possibilities and readings as opposed to closing down and limiting them. Thus I have been interested to read of Gilles Deleuze, discussed in Deleuze Reframed by Damian Sutton and David Martin-Jones (2008), using the analogy of the rhizome to describe the development of an artistic world as an ever-expanding labyrinth without centre. This allows art to be capable of opening up new horizons (or conversely closing down possibilities).

This implies the need to consider the worlds of thought, time and action (art) as non-linear. This is precisely how the worlds, (both fictional and real) of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway), Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry and Marcel Proust (first part of Remembrance of Things Past) operate. They collapse time so that their characters not only move seamlessly and rapidly from one “time zone” to another but can actually occupy all three zones simultaneously. They continually merge and coalesce physical and emotional time. It was Aristotle’s idea that time is change. To be able to access past time we must use memory – which recalls emotional time, or change, mixed and supported by physical time (change in the world around us, as well as our own bodies).

My engagement with found objects is a way of triggering a collective memory since the objects are not personal to me, but are symbolic signifiers of our shared existence. This works through our links with those unknown and unseen people who made and used these objects.

Whilst the humble found cardboard packaging box, in all its forms, interests me because it is central to the functioning of our materialistic, globalised and transport-reliant culture. But also because it carries great significance socially, psychologically and historically. In this regard the ideas of Roland Barthes on semiology (Elements of Semiology 1964 and Barthes: Selected Writings Ed Susan Sontag 1982) have been useful in considering hidden meanings. In particular Barthes makes clear that what is signified by a cardboard box (the signifier) can have an existence outside of language and social construction.

There are many ways a particular signified could be expressed in language or by categorising objects (dividing them up). None of these ways is ultimately superior to the others. There is nothing in a particular signifier which makes it naturally correspond to a particular signified, or meaning. The division into categories (or the way we read an object) is always a process of social construction. Therefore the significance of an object such as a cardboard box can be many-pronged.

Furthermore, all signs depend on the entire system of signs. None have meaning aside from the system. The categories of language determine how people divide up objects into types. Even actions become mediated by language. Every act is at once an act (signified) and a sign of itself (signifier). It becomes hard to unpack the act from its meaning. All acts convey meaning whether we intend it or not which clearly has implications for my performances. Since ideas come from language (or actions) then every movement or inflection of a performance carries weight.

Copy of Nobuo Sekine Phase Mother Earth.

Nobuo Sekine Phase Mother Earth 1967

TRANSFORMING WITH AMBIGUITY: DEVELOPING INSTALLATION

Transformation continues to be central to my work and my approach. It is important for me to make work specific to the site of its manufacture and to use materials found in or close to that place. Metaphorical light is shed on materials and processes by using uncomplicated, visible ways of filming as with the gathering or dispersal of dust, or in implied ways such as by merely relocating an object to alter our reading of it. The less that is shown the greater the ambiguity and the scope for the viewer to complete the work of art in their own minds. I want the objects that I choose to retain their essential integrity and visual associations. Their transformation remains subtle which avoids losing sight of their “thingness”, to use Lee's concept developed with the Mono-ha group.

Members of this group, active in East Asia in the latter part of the last century, particularly Lee Ufan and Nobuo Sekine, continue to influence me. Part of Lee's long-running, many-faceted Relatum series (shown above right), which I first came across at Tate Modern in 2016, I have recently been drawn back to it by its powerfully symmetrical yet casually placed appearance. It is both mundanely industrial yet mysteriously ambiguous and suggestive of some unspecified ritual or game. This carefully laid out yet hurriedly and rather untidily put down arrangement of near identical aluminium strips leaves much to the imagination and so continually bears repeat viewings.

I continue to produce installations such as Alter (see adjacent image) which are influenced by Lee Ufan's Relatum series and Jiro Takamatsu’s Slack of Cloth (1970) shown below. Here Takamatsu lays out a large square of cloth crumpled upwards in the middle giving the impression of a hidden object and implying a landscape which deforms and distorts the gridded map of the cloth. I am attracted to the imaginative possibilities that this work throws up.

Similar to though superficially the opposite of Takamatsu's work, my piece is a large, heavily-worn found piece of canvas apparently draped over an object whose existence is only made evident by the raised, flat, square section of canvas visible approximately at its centre. The identity of this object is unclear but a connection to the church is suggested by the possible homonym of the title Altar. There is also a conversation established between the smooth, manufactured appearance of the flat, raised square and the rough, irregular surface of the cloth.

Robert Verrill.

Initial practice assembly in the artist's studio for the fish box column prior to installation at the Crypt show as A Part of the Main.

Robert Verrill

Extract from sketch book showing evolving ideas about Crypt exhibition piece.

Robert Verrill

A Part of the Main completed and in situ in the Crypt Gallery for the exhibition Who Will Provide?

The finished, installed work (above right) A Part of the Main was well suited to its alcove and Crypt location for several reasons:

Being placed at the front of the alcove it was possible for visitors to walk around it to view it in 3D against the context of the Crypt affording a slow reveal to the visitor as they moved around the space
I achieved the impression that it was part of the Crypt's structure, which in a minute way it actually was.
The fish boxes exuded a classical, stone appearance belied by the references to the fish industry and graffiti.
The references to fish in the Christian Bible (ichthys symbol, fishermen disciples, loaves and fishes story) became more apparent once installed
The connections between the possible distant origins of the rough sleepers outside in the local area and the faraway locations of the fishing ports
The tomb/sarcophagus-like nature of the individual boxes - coffins for fish.
The whitish, bleached appearance hinted at bones and shrouds.

Robert Verrill. Alter 2018

Jiro Takamatsu

Slack of Cloth

1970

This work was conceived several weeks after the piece A Part of the Main (see below) had been created for inclusion in the Crypt exhibition (see Case Studies below). I had intended the canvas to be shown in some way at the Crypt, having been found on the pavement outside the Church. But in the event I did not show it. However the work Alter now forms a companion piece to A Part of the Main.

I had given myself the task of creating a site-specific piece for the Crypt which utilized material found in and around the Church. But, though I found material such as plastic waste cardboard boxes and developed several ideas for creating a penetrable, immersive labyrinth there seemed to be practical problems with installation. It was some time before I, reluctantly, decided that there were many reasons to use the polystyrene fish boxes that I had been collecting for some time. These I tried to use in several ways to create a room as a form of sanctuary, accessible and comforting to visitors (as in Helio Oiticica’s work Tropicalia, Penetrable PN2 shown below). But the notion of a more conventional classical column carried more interesting references – from Christian Biblical stories (the loaves and fishes and the symbolism of ichthys - the fish), to providing sustenance to local homeless and disadvantaged people, to playing with the thought of the material being mostly air yet able to help support the church structure, albeit to a very minimal degree.

This, together with references to the modern-day fishing industry (linked to the biblical fishermen disciples) and to the far-flung places that both the fish and many rough-sleepers in London have left. I realised that stripping away superfluous elements to leave a relatively uncomplicated sculpture could create more room for the imagination and allow in more references.

Helio Oiticica.

Tropicalia, Penetrables PN2 "Purity is a Myth" 1966-67

Robert Morris , photo of 1971 participatory exhibition at Tate

In 1970 Robert Morris (above) filled a room at Tate with large, roughly made wooden objects that the audience were invited to “play” with following instructions stuck on the gallery walls. Needless to say perhaps, the visiting public took to this, for the time, unusual invitation in an art gallery, with gusto. But not in the way intended as they interacted with the equipment in such an over-enthusiastic manner the exhibition closed for safety reasons after only 4 days. The intention was to see how visitors would experiment with sculptural space and their own bodies but in fact the exhibition showed how inventive people can be when given the opportunity.

Joan Jonas. Except of Film Wind 1968

Duration 1min 5secs

This early film shows absurd, out-of-place activities being performed on location, yet exploring and reflecting the extreme, site-specific conditions

The contrast between live and filmed performance was brought home to me by watching several of Joan Jonas’s films, at a day long screening of her film work at Tate (Mystic Knots), and then seeing her performing alone and with others live in the Tate Tanks. Her interest in cross-referencing varied media, objects, ideas and subject matter so that the whole gallery space becomes a single artwork entity is instructive. I discuss Jonas's work further in Critical Analyses.

There is another related form of performance, which I have recently begun to investigate in my own work, where audience members are immersed in the work and therefore unwittingly become performers. Recent work shown by Anthea Hamilton and Josiah McElheny at Tate Britain and Hayward Gallery respectively (see left) have explored this approach to performance.

Christian Boltanski investigated similar territory in his recent show at Marian Goodman gallery though without using performers. Here the audience became performers, pushing through suspended strips of shiny plastic hung in a darkened room illuminated only by dappled, flickering film of butterflies. All this accompanied by a chattering soundtrack. This I think of as “participatory installation”, and is also represented by Brazilian Helio Oiticica's Penetrable series work Tropicalia and Julie Becker's work, whereby audience members can physically enter, participate and become part of the work - the missing human presence which is implied but absent. Indeed, the viewer is essential to complete if not wholly create the work. I discuss Julie Becker's recent ICA show in Critical Analyses below.

TRANSFORMATION AND THE BEGINNING OF PERFORMANCE

In parallel with my installation and video work (in which I may appear but only peripherally) I have been making performances in which I am the focus. Thus the experimental piece I performed for the Postgraduate Forum (shown below) involved running two related activities consecutively :–

rearranging a collection of assorted cardboard boxes and other containers in a random, improvised manner with no obvious point to it and with no logical beginning or end and
Mopping the floor around the rearranged boxes.

The first activity developed into my performance work "Boxit" for Unit 2 Assessment. This is discussed further below along with a video of a trial version of "Boxit".

My move into performance was a necessary development when I decided that I wanted to place the actual found objects/materials in the same space as the audience. This was partly to make clear the ordinary, commonplace existence of these things since I felt that on video they would only be experienced at a distance with the screen and technology intervening. Objects seen through the filter of a screen appear unreal, glamourised and somehow remote. However, in occupying the same physical and temporal space as the performers an audience feels a connection with live performance that a recording loses.

I’m particularly interested in following the “less is more” principle to see how I can say a lot with minimal action and props. For instance both John Baldessari in his film I Am Making Art and Bruce Nauman in his series of “moving round a square films” such as Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Round the Perimeter of a Square" (see below) use only their bodies to express their point; Baldessari to illustrate Duchamp’s statement that if the artist says it’s art, it’s art; Nauman to explore how even within the confines of only moving in a geometric square one can introduce all manner of variations, invention and expression. The rigid control of the square only serves to concentrate and enhance the slightest nuance of his movement.

Robert Verrill (above) Video of a trial performance of an idea to take a seemingly mundane, everyday activity (moving/tidying/rearranging boxes) which is simultaneously reassuring and familiar yet ultimately pointless.

I was interested to assess the audience's reaction and the seeming randomness, unpredictability and futility appeared to render it watchable. The baffling, ambiguous nature of the activity was its strength. It threw up other areas of interest:-

The rhythm of the movement - premeditated but unchoreographed - appeared to enable the viewer to identify with the performer thereby drawing them in.
The variety and labelling of the commercial packaging commented on the ubiquity and plethora of such items in our lives and invited us to reflect on their necessity or otherwise.
The beginning and end were denoted by my donning and removing a cap - appropriate for a manual activity.

Bruce Nauman Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Round the Perimeter of a Square 1968

Anthea Hamilton The Squash 2018 (left) at Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain.

Derived from 1960's reimagining of early native North American art and dance, it is interesting to me for the way

dancers in vegetable character occupy the same carefully designed, domestic scale gallery world set in a classical context. This whilst moving in an improvisatory human manner.

Josiah McElheny

Interactions of the Abstract Body 2012 (right) seen at Space Shifters exhibition, the Hayward Gallery 2018.

Similar to Hamilton, McElheny's dancer moves slowly along a predetermined route, aided by assistants, this time reflecting visitors back to themselves and others, whilst herself being replaced by reflections of those visitors. This effectively unites visually the audience with the performers.

PERFORMANCE TAKES CENTRE STAGE

By early 2019 my performances were the main strand of my work and the box was the symbolic "prop" - the signifier. Motion and process was taking over from more static performance. My performance work "Boxit" (shown right) involves a vaguely plausible yet ultimately pointless and absurd cyclical process. The performance process begins with a cap being donned and a cassette tape player being visibly switched on followed by a work table (decorator's table) being set up and two large boxes (full of smaller boxes) being set up one each side of the table. I proceed to unpack each box onto the table, mixing them up in the process and then re-packing them in a different order and replacing everything in reverse. The performance ends with the switching off of the stream of disconnected instructions issuing from the tape player.

The performance evokes the transience of life (people and goods) as represented by boxes in Julie Becker's work, but also industry and a certain alienation linked to the dehumanising production line and consumerism. The labourer controlled by the start and stop of machines beyond their control or comprehension; perhaps broadcast instructions. This presented in a rhythmical dance-cum-ceremony which is clearly to be repeated.... constantly. I began to be aware and reflect on the quasi-religious allusions - altar-like table with containers of precious goods, background accompaniment (a choir?) and repeated mystical, ambivalent and arcane actions. I explore these ideas more consciously in my degree work as discussed below.

This work seems to deal with ideas addressed by Roland Barthes again, in his essay "The World as Object" from "Barthes: Selected Writings" intro by Susan Sontag 1982. He writes that the rise in importance of the object (merchandise) in modern acquisitive society, taking the place of religion, is elevating it to the level of subject or controller of humankind. As objects, we now have more and more of our time, money, investment of status and effort demanded by subjects - the consumer goods we crave.

Robert Verrill Preparatory performance of Boxit 2018. Duration 8min 32 secs.

The final performance included the unpacking of the table, boxes and tape player from a large storage cupboard in the studio performance space and the setting up of the table. Also included was the packing away of the same at the close of the performance and the donning and removal of a baseball cap to signify the beginning and end of the performance.

However, exhibiting at two shows now required that I experiment further with installation works:

POSTOPIA Show at Lucky Duck, Bermondsey, London.

I took the opportunity with this very large group show in a very large exhibition space to to build two variations on my Crypt Show piece A Part of the Main.. In the first, The Watchers Will Also be Watched, (see below) I abandoned my rule of trying to use only locally found materials, due to the short lead-in time and access issues, and made a watchtower that could be entered in order to survey people in the gallery but, unexpectedly, being required to view yourself also in small broken, found mirror pieces.Though a reference to Oiticica's Tropicalia people were unsure whether they could enter and it was too dark to find the entrance easily.

More successful was the stack of large, flattened or partly opened cardboard boxes reaching from floor to cross beam which appeared, as with the Crypt piece, to be supporting the roof. The haphazard structure looked more engaging and the advertising symbols on some boxes seemed to reference ancient hieroglyphs with mysterious messages.

HOLLOW CHAMBERS: CRYPT WORK RE-CREATED AND RE-IMAGINED

This exhibition, again in St. Pancras Church Crypt, was a chance to re-create my earlier Crypt piece A Part of the Main in the same gallery but in a different location and, crucially, in response to a different brief. This show re-imagined the space as a cave system throwing up many possible references and ideas. I built another, near identical fish-box column which this time alluded to geological strata, buried/fossilised marine life and the relationship between the oil (plastics) industry and the sea. It showed the versatility of a minimalist use of materials and form.

DEGREE SHOW WORK - Stages of Development and Influences.

Following these excursions into experimentation with installations I returned to the main highway of my practice - performance art - for my degree show work. Feeling I wanted to work in a confined space (influenced by Oiticica and Becker et al) my initial thought had been to use a large, found object/container to perform in, such as a shower cubicle, but that proved inappropriate and with too many unwanted connotations.

I then remembered some advice given by Frances Scott, that when space is at a premium, as in a degree show, look for exhibiting locations that are not normally utilised. In discussions with tutors three tight spaces emerged - stairwell, DMC entrance area and old entrance foyer. The added advantages of such places is that, if they are available, no one else will disturb you there and you will be able to plan your performance well in advance. Two of these spaces, stairwell and foyer seemed to have the greatest potential for performance and I could introduce a procession between them of some kind. The height of the stairwell and the enclosure of the small "porter's cupboard" gave particularly interesting possibilities.

In addition, the foyer space had an interesting feel as a transitional space, an interstice between inside and outside, past and present, artworld and non-artworld. looking forward and back, Janus-like. And off this small space, a space within a space - the tiny porter's cupboard. This sequence of spaces seemed ideal. The smallest room, I felt, could be a beginning and an end points for a cyclical journey with the dropping of boxes its zenith and nadir only a second apart. The bizarre procession between these points can take inspiration from the spaces and artworks it will pass through.

I also realised that I would be able to control the lighting in the porter's room and foyer to a greater degree than elsewhere in the show, adding another dimension to my work.

Taryn Simon An Occupation of Loss. Performed in Islington, north London 2018

On four levels of darkened galleries in an unused subterranean car park/shopping centre, groups of professional mourners from many cultures lamented and grieved for unknown souls. Audience members were required to explore to find, piece together and create their own performance drawn round only by dim lights and eerie sound whose direction it was difficult to determine. Every visitor would thus make their own experience.

Performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's modern opera Donnerstag aus Licht at the Royal Festival Hall.

Bas Jan Ader Still from short film Fall 2, Amsterdam. 1970

Artist Influences - Bas Jan Ader, Taryn Simon, Martin Creed and Bruce Nauman

My aim was to look for artists' work that could help me develop performance ideas. I went back to Nauman's early body performances and realised that if I was to extend the performance beyond the 7 minutes of Boxit and keep moving for much of, say, 10 mins covering some distance, I would need to vary the sequence of movements and pay close attention to every action, inflection and motion.

Bas Jan Ader's early short Falling films, such as Falling No.2, Amsterdam (see above) in which he rides a bicycle off a street into a canal, suggested that a way to use the stairwell height could be to introduce a few moments of accident, chance, surprise and perceived danger by (safely but unexpectedly) dropping one or more small boxes vertically down the well of the stairs.

Thirdly, reflecting on witnessing the extraordinary Taryn Simon performance work, An Occupation of Loss, I decided that I should actually occupy the tiny porter's cupboard and also try to take the audience with me on my procession between spaces.

Most recently, seeing the series of Martin Creed's performance works, Songs, at Hauser and Wirth raised several relevant points:-

1. The importance of precise, deliberate and choreographed movements

2. The need to consider the audience's viewpoint at all time

3. How to signal the beginning and end and how to make an entrance interesting and perhaps surprising to get attention in a crowded gallery.

4. What you wear matters.

Marcia Tucker, writing about Bruce Nauman's :body works" in Bruce Nauman, Hayward Gallery 1998 says:-

"It is characteristic of Nauman's work that he has always used his own body and its activities as both the subject and object of his pieces .......this is use of the body to transform intimate subjectivity into objective demonstration. Man is the perceiver and the perceived; he acts and is acted upon; he is the sensor and the sensed. His behaviour constitutes a dialectical interchange with the world he occupies. Merleau-Ponty ..... stresses that man is in fact his body, despite the essential ambiguity of its being at once lived from the inside and observed from the outside. These works are meant to be encountered privately by one person at a time. Where earlier the artist was the subject and object of recorded situations, now it is the spectator who becomes both the actor and observer of his own activity ..... and he makes a simple, repetitive activity seem very important."

This dissection of Nauman's approach to his use of his own body was reflected by Bruce McLean in the way he also, around the same time in the late 1960's and early 1970's, decided to use his body. But whereas Nauman was all about movement, McLean used body poses as a form of "action sculpture". I discuss his influences on my work at greater length in the Critical Analyses.

Other Important Influences

Scaling up from Boxit to Drop Box has given me the opportunity to work with a variety of spaces enabling me to introduce the dimension of movement between spaces and thereby incorporate a greater range of activities and ideas. It was very apposite that I should see Karlheinz Stockhausen's Donnerstag aus Licht very recently. This in turn brought back memories of experiencing Taryn Simon's An Occupation of Loss. This because they both make excellent use of given (and chosen in the latter case) spaces and atmospheres.

Stockhausen's multi-media opera involved acting, dancing, video, recorded sound, laser show and backing choirs, as well as all forms of instrumental music and sound, performed in three separate locations within the Royal Festival Hall and outside.

Simon's work performed in an abandoned, subterranean, brutalist, concrete car park/shopping centre this was an inspired location for such a performance. The chiaroscuro of light and dark spaces in this multi-level, complex space allowed the choreographer to play a film noir game of hide and seek between mobile, yet trapped audience and small groups of professional mourners chanting and lamenting simultaneously.

The manipulation of the audience was equally subtle in the improvised sound "happening" I witnessed at John Latham's former house, Flat Time House, performed by David Toop and friends. Here the performers simply began gradually and seemingly spontaneously to make their intertwined soundscapes amongst the already busy rooms leaving the visitors to react as they felt appropriate. Finishing and fading away as "naturally" as they had started apparently using simple, domestic-scale objects that could largely have been found in the house. The intimate, domestic scale of this work was an interesting counterpoint to Stockhausen.

Somewhere in between were the performances "Songs" designed by Martin Creed as part of his exhibition Toast. Here a singer (seen in photo opposite), in Creed-designed attire, repeatedly entered, performed in, and exited the single, fairly small gallery space. The performances, seemingly as odds with the mundane, depressed content were delivered by the opera singer whilst variously walking, lying face down or facing the wall, sliced through the audience physically and sonically, interpreting the space very inventively.

Most recently, and lastly, I have begun to investigate the work and ideas of Alfred Jarry. I have been drawn into his world particularly by his use of puppetry in his Theatre des Pantins (see poster opposite). He used puppets, in his heavily censored age, as a way of avoiding some censorship but also because, as an anti-establishment, absurdist director he could be in total control of puppets in a way not possible with actors and large theatres. He was able to co-opt the role of court jester from bygone days to convey serious messages. This chimed with my mildly anarchic, absurdist approach to using performance to address serious environmental and socio-political issues.

Having a succession of spaces to link together in my Drop Box performance has enabled the exploration of process and transience for which I looked back to Michael Landy's 2001 work Breakdown. This was a reaction to the excesses of the consumerist society and questioned whether we really needed most of the material possessions we seemed unable to avoid accumulating. The elaborate and absurdly detailed manner in which he destroyed the entirety of his possessions via a complex, industrial-scale process emphasised our conspicuous over-consumption. These issues seem even more pressing today as subjects for comment. This influenced my decision to incorporate additional props such as an exercise treadmill to jokingly refer to industrial conveyor belts and also the growing leisure industry which has developed in parallel with our sedentary consumerist lifestyles.

Robert Verrill Spillage II 2019

Finally - IN CONCLUSION - to return to my developing realisation that our modern desire for, and worshipping of, conspicuous consumption - luxury goods, houses, holidays, body beautiful, online self promotion, self loving and loathing - has replaced the needs previously addressed by religion.

So, as already briefly discussed, in my work Boxit I began to see references to religious rituals, objects and performances and I have developed Drop Box more consciously to comment on the new religion of conspicuous consumption. This now promises a wonderful yet never-quite-attainable divine existence - always tantalisingly just out of reach.

So we seek satisfaction and fulfilment in the contents of one cardboard box after another. Drop Box suggests religious salvation is perhaps at the end of the treadmill of life. We are not sustained any more by a promised, distant, unseen afterlife if we would only believe, but by tangible, material wealth right before us in the here and now if we could just grasp it.

Martin CREED (1968 - ) Performances at “Toast” Exhibition, at Hauser and Wirth Gallery

This small show contained a great number of varied works, including the regular, sudden appearance and disappearance of a performing operatic singer, in just one moderately-sized room. The performance both melded the show together and delivered its own messages simultaneously in several ways:-

The performer announced the beginning of her performance by starting to sing as she entered the reception area from a private room which alerted visitors everywhere to her presence, though at this stage those in the gallery would be unaware of what that presaged.
The performer entered at a corner of the square gallery and proceeded to move through the room in a variety of ways, dividing the space differently each time.
She paused briefly at the entrance to the gallery to announce her arrival and allow visitors to turn and engage with her.
Speed, direction (diagonal, parallel to walls and curved) and method of travel were all utilized effectively.
The relationship of the performer’s movement and specially designed costumes to the words of Creed’s songs was carefully planned. For example in “Glissando I and II” the performer’s voice rose and fell in volume and pitch as she moved between walls. Surprise elements such as suddenly lying full length on the floor to deliver one song reflected the content.
At other times the contrast between her apparently uplifted voice and the depressed, despairing content was unsettling and perplexing.
Her steady but unrushed progress meant that visitors to be drawn into the performance

Alfred Jarry Poster for Theatre des Pantins. 1898

Parallel Exploration of Chance and Accident

In order to complement and contrast my major performance piece, two of my short videos will show another aspect of my practice. The Spillage videos (one, Spillage ll, is shown left) deal with time in a different way to my performances. They show staged (and practised!) accidents or chance occurrences (staged rather like Bas Jan Ader's Falling 2: Amsterdam shown above) which draw our attention to otherwise unremarkable events (drinking) because something has malfunctioned, broken or "gone wrong". This is often the only situation when when we notice the existence of mundane things and are thereby suddenly aware of change ...or time passing. Though paradoxically these instances are very sudden and traumatic in a minor way and actually give the impression of time frozen.

They will be shown on small, domestic-scale commercial digital photo frames sited either on small incidental tables or in inconspicuous, ancillary spaces. These works reference Duchampian ideas of the importance of chance and accident and also Bas Jan Ader's focus on how accidents insert significant interruptions that can change direction in both small and big processes.