My chosen Space...Hyde Park

After completing my on foot exploration of possible sites to respond to, I am set in the idea that Hyde Park combines all of the elements I will need to develop my concept. All over the city I have seen aesthetically appealing shape, texture and colour; however Hyde Park's sense of calm in the tranquil presence of nature is unique. I tend to draw my inspiration from naturally occurring growth and transformation that are two elements that I feel more in touch with in this site. In the hustle and bustle of the city nature is ever-present but buried beneath the mechanically man-made and the rush of self involved people. I feel that it is important that I can work comfortably here taking sanctuary in the audio of sustainable life, shared public space and the sheer beauty surrounding me. Already i feel a connection to the work of Richard Long in the circular set paving stone and Sophie Calle and her claim of ownership of public space ('Phone Booth'). I see potential for the combination of environmental, public, interactive and site-specific art. I am confident at this stage that the Hyde Park site will not put any constraints on my creative strategy or on the implementation of any idea that I may develop.

Calle and her collaboration with Paul Auster

Sophie Calle’s unsavoury reputations lead to her collaboration with writer Paul Auster in 1992 combining their mutual subject matter of identity and authorship. In Auster’s book ‘Leviathan’, Calle appeared as a character named Maria and went on to create Maria’s artworks such as ‘the chromatic diet’ as described by Auster in the book. Maria was an artist but her work had nothing to do with creating objects commonly defined as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer but in the end she couldn’t be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too unusual and idiosyncratic for that.

In their collaboration, the identities of the author/artist and that of the character/subject begin to merge together creating a confusing post modern outcome. This too is an aspect which I find relates directly to my planned collaborative installation with Zoe Moyden. Although we are both interdisciplinary artists our working methodologies differ and we draw inspiration from very different sources. The final installation will merge together our mutual idea and concept with our opposing influences (hers drawn from architecture and the urban environment, and mine from nature and its influence upon the urban environment). The interactive installation will also merge our methodologies in our individually selected materials, media and processes used to create objects to re-invent the space.

The concept that my collaborative partner and I are currently developing around our intended site specific, interactive installation attempts to break down social restrictions applied to communication. This is one of the areas where I feel that Sophie Calle’s working methodologies inform our concept and practice. In Calle’s collaboration with writer Paul Auster where she responded to his book ‘Improving Life in New York City’, Calle smiled at strangers keeping a record of smiles given and received and inhabited a phone box in the city, painting it, adding flowers, snacks and a pad of paper for people to leave comments.
Our concept differs in that we want to create a comfortable space in an outdoor environment where passers by rarely stop to sit and reflect or interact, and an opposing uncomfortable harsh space in an otherwise tranquil, meditative environment. Differing from Calle’s intentions with the Phone Booth to claim a public space as her own, we want to make a public space more inviting/alluring to alter its use and peoples perceptions of it.

Sophie Calle’s most famous works consist of re-creating moments from other lives. One example of this process documents the artist getting hold of a lost address book and calling everyone inside, asking them to describe the book's owner and then published their answers every day for a month in the leftwing newspaper Libération - to the horror of her victim, who tried to get what he hoped would be revenge by persuading the paper to publish a nude picture of her. She was simply delighted by his response. I like the idea that we could publish or exhibit the final outcome of our installation within the space that we used which will appear as if we were never there. As a record of an event that did not exist to those who were not there to see it, perhaps the documented memory of our installation could provoke just as much of a reaction as the live thing. Ask people who participate if they have an inanimate object on their person that they could leave in the installation space creating clutter like that you would find in someone’s living room.

Sophie Calle Research

Sophie Calle (b 1953) is a French installation/conceptual artist, writer and photographer whose work is distinguished by its use of unrestricted constraints frequently depicting human vulnerability, and examining identity and intimacy. As in the Sophie Calle piece ‘phone booth’ in which she took ownership of the public space, visiting it daily and decorating it to make it homely, I am interested in choosing an outdoors public space to respond to in this brief. The idea of identity is ever present when I consider the city as inspiration for art, as I find the lack of communication and observation within the masses of shared outdoor space to be quite peculiar but very common. The psychoanalysis of this human behaviour compared to the altered behaviour seen in indoor public spaces is fascinating and is of great interest to me.

As France's most famous conceptual artist, Calle has narrated to her audience depicting stylised portraits of her own life and images of the lives of strangers for the past 25 years which has been greeted by French critics with irritation and enthusiasm in equal measure. With our intended public interaction I find Sophie Calle’s narratives of strangers’ lives inspiring. To alter the atmosphere and use of the public space we have chosen, audience participation will be essential to achieving our conceptual communication. Documentation of the public interaction within the space will provide the evidence to further explore our concept, and I think that we could use some of Sophie Calle’s methods of interaction. As part of the Pompidou exhibition Calle exhibited ‘The More Painful The Break Up The Better The art’ documenting herself telling strangers about her traumatic break up in return for their stories about the worst thing that has ever happened to them.

Calle Said: ‘The stories of other people's distress are captivating - beautifully and movingly written - and they save the project from being merely contrived and pretentious, or an exercise in self-indulgence.’

I think that the interactions with the public within our installation need to be recorded or at the very least-documented in order to achieve the same integrity that Calle describes. The intention is not to merely place home comforts in an outdoor space for effect of the transformation, the depth of the work will lie in the audience interaction and how much of an insight we can get into their perceptions of the site from the new perspective we are offering via the installation space. I think that we need to develop a dialogue for communication with our audience that will help them to observe and experience the site in a different way to how they usually do in order to receive insightful feedback.

To bring a sense of tranquillity to the hustle and bustle of Leeds City centre will hopefully allow people to slow down the pace of the urban rat race and take in their surroundings with time for thought and reflection.

Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle 'PhoneBooth'

Durational Sound Installation

(94 Speakers, Mini Disks & Circuit Boards)

by CutUp Collective

CutUp Public art and Installation

More recently CutUp have started other projects such as replacing small buss shelter advertisements with a drilled sheet of wood. The illuminating back lights that turn on at dusk revel an image as the many holes light up against a dark background. The concealed advertisement is still partially visible adding to the traceable memory of the buss shelters transformation. Working in public space seems to be and important conceptual element of CutUp's work, however my attraction to the group stems from a fascination with their use of existing platforms to display works and inspire ideas. In particular i am interested in considering how i can incorporate lighting in public spaces into the Site Specificity brief.

Although CutUp mainly deal with art on the street, the group have also created installations, including setting 96 different alarm clocks one minute apart and other sound installations, made up of 94 speakers, mini disks and circuit boards.

'Self Portrait' by Chuck Close.

Site Specificity Research 'CutUp'

CutUp is a group of London based artists, whose work mainly revolves around the manipulation of billboard advertisements. Their first works consisted of removing a billboard, painstakingly cutting it up into roughly 4000 small rectangles, each one in essence a pixel, and then reassembling the billboard. This fragmenting devision of a whole image re-invents each rectangular segment as a tone to define the surrounding 'pixels' forming innovative imagery and text. Addressing the issue of in-your-face advertisting as a prominant influence upon popular culture, CutUp provokes their audience to question mass media advertising by abstracting it directly from its source reaching as many viewers as the original advertisement. Taking billboards as an example, the impact of persuasive imagery to advertise is deliberate in its entirety. From colour scheme, type face and text; to scale location and visual stimulants advertisers use every available element to manipulate their target audience. It is by breaking down these ideosyncratic elements that CutUp creates a re-invented impact of art on the street replacing consumerism.

Aside from the obvious similarity between cutups billboards and pixelated digital imagery, I feel that the aesthetic impact of these works resembles that of the fine art portraiture paintings by one of my favourite artists Chuck close. He too constructs imagery through a devided grid of shapes and tone, expanding the boundaries of hyper-realism by working from photographs to paint roughly executed regions of colour consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background. Each devision is intended to contain a percieved 'average' hue which makes sence from a distance. The result is eye catching and as with the CutUp billboards the finished images seem to carry more information and underlying meaning through the abstracted devisions.

Richard Long

I recently saw this piece at Liverpool Tate and it instantly popped into my head when I was sitting in my space. I am interested in the idea of natural stone being cut, re-arranged and re-defined by man. In a way we claim ownership over many of natures materials simply by manipulating them to fit a purpose. In doing so I think that man and nature combine in construction and technological advances, in that new structure and form cannot exist without the collaboration of the naturally occurring and the man-made.

Tate Liverpool (2010) Richard Long 'South Bank Circle' 1991[Online Image]. Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/. [28/04/2010]

Joint Installation Mind Mapping

Starting Point

“A building no matter how beautiful is a dead space compared to the outside”.

Andy Goldsworthy

My immediate response to the site specific brief was to explore potential outdoor spaces around the city. I find it very predictable that artists usually respond to such briefs by looking at derelict or run down areas addressing memory, loss and repair. However i favor making works based around the people who inhabit spaces and the existing collaboration between the man made and the natural environment.

April Suzanne.