User:Spong

"Exercise Book" or "The Fourth Notebook"

A 20min film in black and white, which may be re-edited in the next three weeks to be around 30min. The first shot is of a metal sculpture on which a cockatoo sits. The camera pans around this tableau, the cockatoo following the lens of the camera. The next scene shows a male dancer slowly rotating his torso. The camera tracks his circular movement and pans back to take in the whole space, which is a black theatre box that also contains two large canvases with black shapes stamped onto them that hang from the ceiling like theatre backdrops. The rest of the video uses the camera to track the sculpture, the bird, the dancer, the backdrops and the space. Laid over the top of the video is the voice of a woman reading a French text. If you don’t understand French you might still be able to comprehend the odd word, but the rhythm may become more important than deciphering meaning and your body might acclimatise to the particular pace of the speaker. If you do speak French the text might seem a little odd, with meaning coming adrift because sentences are built around the technique of ‘clanging’ where words are associated based on sound rather than concept. At some points the movements of the dancer and certain words in the text meet through the poses of particular animals described in the text such as rat, bee and chat, concepts which are translated and enacted by the dancer through static poses.

The film originated in a letter written in 1919 by the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and collated in a book called "The Diary of Nijinsky"; a text that documents the experience of someone entering the early stages of schizophrenia. This letter, called ‘Letter to Mankind’, was read out and recorded as a simple means of creating a score. I worked with a dancer to transcribe/translate this score into movement. The attempt to translate this text became a conversation about the impossibility of translation, and the need to avoid a translation that had a singular form, instead working with ‘attempts’ at translation; smaller exercises or approaches that might present multiple ways of accessing the text. These attempts were developed into choreographies—some simple, others more complex– that were then filmed in a theatre space.

The piece was an exercise in translating something from one form (text) into another—in this case movement.

The Stranger's House

The Stranger's House is a single piece of fabric with no seam lines, 12 metres across and 4 metres high. The fabric is a natural canvas that has been painted with black paint, using large, thick brushstrokes. The brushstrokes form an image that is abstract, and because of the use of black paint on un-primed canvas the image appears as a drawing, having no colour blocking, only outlines. There are also drops of black paint that have been roughly covered over with white paint. These cover-ups are visible when one moves close to the canvas, but disappear when the canvas is viewed from a distance, which the space the canvas is hung in enables a viewer to do. The canvas hangs about 10cm away from the wall, and is attached to the ceiling of the gallery. A chain inserted into a seam at the bottom weights the fabric and ensures that it hangs completely flat with no curves or buckles. The canvas is positioned between two doorways, meaning the viewer must walk past the work to enter and or exit the space.

The painting of this backdrop was executed by a theatre scene painter, using an A4 scan of a sketch for a theatre design by the artist Sydney Nolan. This scanned drawing was re-sized using photoshop so that it would fit the dimensions of the space once it was up-scaled in the process of transferring it to canvas and paint. A decision was made to replicate the drawing in its entirety—including the wings and floor—on the one surface, rather than just extracting the backdrop. The completed backdrop was installed using techniques identical to those that would be used in the theatre.

A few years ago, I came across a design for the stage set of the Ballet Russes' 1940s production of Icare by the Australian painter Sydney Nolan. The design itself was never realised as Serge Lifar, the director at the time, was put off by Nolan's concept of a stage set that the dancers would potentially become lost in through the use of black and white abstract patterns on both backdrop and costumes. While Nolan was hoping to explore the point at which distinctions between static art and dance might collapse, Lifar was still obsessed with the primacy of dance. Recently I was asked to make a show for a gallery in Sydney. My initial plan for a performance fell apart due to the failure of myself and the dancer I was working with to find a productive space between 'art' and 'dance'. While reflecting on this failure the Nolan design came to mind and I decided to pursue this connection. The gallery itself has a contemporary collection that is heavily represented by male artists, Nolan in particular. This also influenced the decision to take something from the practice of an iconic Australian male artist in a way that could read like the breaking and entering of a stranger's house—taking something that was not my own and pulling it into my own practice. This idea of 'breaking and entering' is reflective of how I sometimes feel as an artist who happens to be female when considering the history of art as one dominated by western males. I was also interested in the idea of a backdrop—a thing that is almost a painting, almost an object, in need of the presence of a body to activate it, to fulfil its use function, to complete it.

Hair, Pastry, Tobacco

This is a series of objects, each made from a single piece of marble and a single piece of white, air-dried clay. These were positioned on the walls of the gallery at varying heights: two positioned close to a corner roughly at eye level, the other close to the ground. The forms vary in size, but each lies somewhere between 40cm wide and 30cm high. The marble acts as a support for the clay, and has been cut from white marble in lines that curve in half circles, or something that looks like a wave or perhaps a stylised cloud. The edges of the marble are smooth and sharp, and each piece is positioned tightly against the wall. The clay sits on top of the marble, and mimics its contours, however, there are gaps between the marble and the clay, where the materials no longer meet. These gaps make the relationship between the clay and the marble appear rather precarious, and there are parts where the clay only just balances on the marble.

The marble forms were taken from collages that explored the translation of movement and gesture into form. The resulting shapes cut from paper resembled a sort of script or hieroglyph. These forms were scanned and turned into vector diagrams and then cut out of pieces of white marble. White, air dry clay, cut into long rectangular strips, was laid over these marble forms and left to dry. This drying process took about a week, during which time the clay shrank, pulling towards itself and away from the marble that had been acting as a support structure. Gaps opened up between the two materials, the clay only now balanced on the marble at various pressure points.

I was interested in creating objects that used a hard surface to support a soft surface, which could also be read as a soft surface mimicking a hard surface. At the same time I was writing instructions for a performance and was thinking about the motifs and ideas present in these texts—the translation and mimicry of objects and phenomena through movement that might trace an empathy between things, patterns of breathing that might be part of this process of translation, and objects and phenomena from the park surrounding the gallery the work was being made for; in particular rocks and clouds.

Rocks in The Sky

A score made from 7 pieces of A3 white paper, on which a text has been photocopied. These pages are of portrait orientation, positioned side by side, horizontally across the wall, using clear plastic stationery pins. The first page carries the title of the work and so could be read as a title page. In three of the pages two bodies are identified as Dancer A and Dancer B, using the pronoun ‘she’ or the possessive form ‘her’. These bodies are described as enacting three different performances that transcribe a movement through the gallery and into the gardens outside. The last pages present instructions for breathing exercises that appear directed specifically to the viewer. These text pieces use a type face that has been interrupted by marks made in pen using proof-reading symbols, additions, and patches of black that delete portions of the text. There is also a thin line that looks like a hair in the last three pages, appearing in a slightly different position each time.

I wrote texts or directions for five different performances, or actions that could potentially take place in the gallery and surrounding gardens. These texts developed out of a site visit to the space where I spent time walking in and around the gallery and the gardens. The final texts were typeset with the help of a designer and then printed out. I discovered mistakes and changes in these print-outs and with the designer's suggestion I corrected these printouts in pen using proof-marking symbols. These were then photocopied onto A3 sheets of paper at my local photocopy shop. When I looked through the photocopies I saw that a hair belonging to the girl copying the texts had been left on the machine. This appeared as a thin black line whose position shifted slightly with each new copy. I had run out of paper and had no time to buy more, so ended up deciding to use these ‘failures’. The girl still charged me for these copies.

The ideas present in these texts had been talked over with the dancer I was working on to create a performance for the gallery. When this collaboration fell through I revisited the ideas through text. My initial idea for the performance had been based on an anecdote I heard about Colin McCahon, an iconic New Zealand modernist painter, getting lost in the gardens and being found a day later in another park with no memory of what had happened, or how he had got there. I had hoped to extract something from this anecdote by working with the dancer on a piece that explored simple ideas of walking without a set direction, the convergence of outside and inside and the border of a performance—when it might begin and end. These ideas were carried into the potential performances described in the texts, coupled with ideas influenced by an exercise described in Simone Forti’s book Handbook in Motion where Steve Paxton attempts to mimic a rock, and Merce Cunningham’s description of choreographing Beach Birds for Camera, where he explored how a rock formation changes and becomes animated through the shifting position of the person looking at it.