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Text
http://clockwatching.net/~jimmy/eng101/articles/goffman_intro.pdf
'The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life' is a text written by American sociologist Erving Goffman in 1959. He uses a dramaturgical approach to analyse human interaction. By describing the individual as an actor, he highlights the heightened awareness and performance of everyday behaviour. The individual will try and control or manipulate a social situation by both conscious and subconscious actions.
Video clips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbWBrlT1NBA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89d4jnbfzi4
This clip shows a 13 year old contestant being eliminated from the American 'X-Factor'. Her reaction is that of a bitterly disappointed child. She cries loudly and falls to the floor. I am interested in how for a moment the scripted 'reality' that is presented in gladatorial manner to a live studio audience as well as millions of viewers is for a moment disturbed. The host and judges slightly panic as they seem to be more aware of how the incident could be reported in the media than any genuine concern for the child. She quickly regains some amount of composure by the end of the clip, thanking her fans and exclaiming that without them she is nothing.
A work
In 'Die Familie Schneider' Gregor Schneider produced a disturbing experience by installing actors into neighbouring terraced houses and creating in detail physical surroundings that are uncannily real? The audience can only access the work by collecting keys from the ArtAngel office in pairs. They have ten minutes to go around the house individually, then they swap keys and enter the neighbouring house. Each house appears identical. A woman washes the dishes, a child sits in the corner of a bedroom with a bin bag over his head, a man masturbates in the shower. The viewer is always ignored by the actors (who are identical twins). The viewer becomes acutely aware of their presence in the house as a voyeur to this depressingly mudane and painful repeated domestic scene.
1. ‘THERE’ 2. ‘EXAMINATION’ 3. ‘(FUTILE) FACILITY
THERE
FIX 13 Live Art Bienalle, Catalyst Arts, September 2013
An intervention taking place on the express bus route from Belfast to Larne. The bus left at 5:15pm on Friday and the journey lasted one hour The target audience was the unsuspecting passengers on the left side of the bus. Forty participants wearing identical clothing (a red woollen hat, a grey t-shirt, black trousers and black shoes), were located along the route on the left side of the road. They performed various actions to be seen by any passengers looking out the window. As the journey progressed the type of actions changed. They began as casual individuals, then appeared in groups, in the middle became theatrical and then finished by again behaving casually.
The project was part of Catalyst Arts Live Art Bienalle ‘FIX’. We gathered the forty participants using social media sites using limited information so the bus route would remain unknown to the public. On the day of the intervention all forty participants met at Catalyst’s gallery at 3pm. They were each given a map with their location, a time to be there, an outfit and a driver if necessary. The FIX ‘writer in residence’ and I then got on the bus - acting as inconspicuously as possible. I secretly filmed out the window through a small hole in my handbag. Directly following the bus in a car was a photographer and an assistant, to document the participants and then text them to let them know they could now leave their position.
This intervention was inspired by taking the bus to Glasgow from Belfast countless times. I wanted to experiment with the captive audience that regular passengers on express bus journeys could be. It was essential for me that they would be an unsuspecting audience, and that they would not easily be able to find an explanation for this elaborate spectacle (why?) The form/content (i.e everyone being dressed identically) of the intervention was based on the idea of reverie. Daydreaming whilst gazing out of a window, projecting yourself onto a passing landscape.
EXAMINATION Platform Arts Belfast 2013
Outside the gallery is a waiting area with five blue seats with writing desks. A receptionist asks the audience "Would you like to see the doctor?" and then instructs them to fill out a form, with information such as marital status and national insurance number. They are then invited into the gallery, alone or in small groups, and the receptionist gives the 'doctor' the (patients) form. The room is decorated like a modest office with a suspended ceiling, light grey walls and a beige carpet. Six large framed drawings resembling inkblot tests and distorted female genitalia hang on all four walls. A CCTV monitor in the corner shows the waiting area outside. A tall bearded Scottish man wearing a doctors coat, plain women's clothing and red lipstick sits in the corner of the room. He informs the participant he will be with them in a minute and tells them to make themselves comfortable, (however there are no seats provided). He then informs them he will ask a series of questions, which they must answer with either TRUE or FALSE. All of the questions relate to shame, morality, disgust and secrecy and have been taken from tests such as the MMPI-2 which is used by courts and employers to ascertain the mental state of an individual. A video camera is set up in the corner of the room to record the experiment. The 'doctors' is softly spoken yet cold throughout and he does allow participants to deviate from the questions. (He appeared to be writing down their answers on a clip board) Although the audience has been primed with simultaneously sexualized and clinical imagery. The questions themselves never directly referred to sex or gender, but questioned the participant’s moral opinion. By only allowing a TRUE or FALSE answer to questions which are purely subjective (the tests the questions were taken from allowed a 1-10 scale of agree or disagree), the test investigated how people would feel about choosing a definitive moral stand point. Elements such as filling out the form, the CCTV, the camera and the verbal questioning, probed into how being viewed/recorded might alter how they answer.(something about people answering the way they think they should, the being viewed/tested in social and institutional settings).
Another possible way of writing about this piece which would be accompanied by images and/or video
THEORY:
METHOD:
RESULTS:
3. ‘FUTILE (FACILITY)’ – A beige bedsit with four zones (bed, kitchen, living, office) was constructed in the Ulster Museum. For 28 days I inhabited it. I wore only beige clothes and ate beige foods. I constantly watched documentaries on televisions built into the furniture units. The public were allowed to enter the space and converse with me. The space began ordered and became progressively more chaotic as I made drawings, diagrams and maps on the walls and fabricated ‘people’ and objects using only beige materials. A daily blog recorded my activity using the headings ‘television viewed’ ‘food consumed’ ‘gifts received’ and ‘knowledge gained’.
How???? – Artist in residence? Why? – Experiment on myself – investigating colour, stimulation, media, discipline, interiors, learning.