Soil and Salt

My second performance work within the Sculpture Instillation room was performed using the left over trace of the previous performance. The soil which had been left in a line through the centre of the room was left for the remainder of the week so that it could inhabit the room and I could witness the soils power diminish over time until the soil was moved and controlled by passers by. This performance used the soil which was already there, the development of ideas and the movement of the emotional drive for the work lead me to this work which was in all ways a development of the last work and an extension of it. Like the previous work, I added tables and chairs and the substance salt to the room and than began the work by clearing a space to work in and setting up the tables and chairs. All of the setting up was in fact what made up the actions of the performance which left me feeling that this work was quite similar to an instillation and in fact I left this work up for the rest of the week also to be viewed in an instillation state.

In the same way my first cleaning performance had no specific position for the audience other than to stand where I was not, in this performance the audience lined the walls all the way around the room, only avoiding the middle where the tables and chairs where. The size of the room meant that the audience could barely avoid stepping on the soil that was on the floor. The audiences position was one I had never witnessed in this room, which so far had only housed performances which faced the entrances and which made a clear orientation which left the performer on one side of the room and the audience on he other. I felt the positioning of my objects and the positions the audience took up broke down the barriers in some small way between them both. The audience where circling me and facing, looking at each other in unspoken dialogues. I personally enjoy the audience to be able to move around and interact with the performance. Having an audience around you makes the work three dimensional, the actions can be focused on and performed within a spacial relationship which encompasses all the objects and spaces rather than being directed towards a single faced audience.

As in this performance I had moved in and out of the room a few times to collect different objects and move others out, when I finished and left the audience didn't know whether I had finished or not. My video documentation shows a space of time where the audience watch the door for my possible return, and then look at each other, questioning as a group whether the performance was 'over' or not. With one student clapping as in customary in M.A.P when a performance finishes (that is a performance which follows conventional performance scripts such as leaving when the performance is over) the rest joined which I found amusing as I had left the vicinity and was on the other side of the campus. It seems that my exit was not obvious and once the audience had come to the conclusion as a group that the performance was over, signified this by clapping which touched me through it's respect for a performer who wasn't there. The exit which was not obvious as such was one of my favorite performance moments. It's a disappearance, a nonchalant abandonment of the past moments which are left to the remaining audience to do with as they wish. I remember at the time I had in my head the end of John Ford's 'The Searchers'(1956). The ending of this film isn't the same as the ending to my performance nor does it mean the same, but it does involve a character leaving a room full of things happening, unnoticed to carry on drifting and searching for some home.