Bella Geldart
DIGITAL SKETCHBOOK
RESEARCH
Tennis as a vessel for performance - thinking how costume, gesture, props, site and identity can be tied to activity
Inevitability of these activities in suburbia as part of British culture, 'background noise'
Performance as a recipe or a set of instructions that can be replicated at any time or place
cardboard, newspaper, emulsion and wire
MDF tennis posts (x2), 1m high, in 5 detachable pieces that slot together
Working towards a flatpack/'build your own' tennis set
Initial performance sketches - visually experimenting with two performers who look alike playing pretend tennis in a green space and a concrete space (Kelvingrove Park and M8 Underpass)
Side on vs face on/behind shot
Both wearing white polo and dark tracksuit bottoms
net net net net net 230m of string had to buy for 4.5m long net about 1m height .... real tennis net was way too expensive and big (12m) and i like the process and imperfections of making something hand made using repetitive actions
net is too heavy for the posts though! must work on solutions so that the posts can stand up far enough away from each other with the net pulled taut
M8 underpass by the Stow Building
Documentation of the posts and net as they are - working on stabilising and balancing the weight of the net so that the posts can be pulled far enough apart and the net doesn't fall in the middle
Pitch build test
Esther Gamsu
Wiebke Siem
Monster Chetwynd
material and aesthetic interests - performance, colour, shape
duality of sculpture and performance
British contemporary culture, the everyday and the uncanny, social and political landscape
caricaturing, parodying
portrayal of sport
'Concrete Pitch', Eddie Peake @ White Cube, Bermondsey
Elmgreen & Dragset
Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson
papier-mâché, size, presence of sculpture, cartoonish aesthetic, sport & game. The playfulness of touch, the action poised in motion and the visibility of the hand-made is what draws me to this work in relation to my own
wood and textiles, design and simplicity - line between use and uselessness, satirical undertones, the uncanny, fashion & lifestyle, fetishised identities, the everyday, 'puppet theatre', ironic in demonstration of socialisation and modernisation, craftsmanship - drawn to aesthetics, idea of costume and work waiting to be activated by people, its relation to modernism
duality between performance and sculpture, time based performance versus sculptural aftermath 'leftover', process and making 'bric-a-brac', absurd and surreal world where these performances and characters exist, choreographing and managing group of participators and performers. I admire Chetwynd's work for its strength in materiality and characters which are achieved through ambitious costume and set
colour - pink, curation, mixed media, tent with naked people dancing, exhibition that transcends time
performance collaboration, theatricality of the every day, 'spectacle', office-wear - referential to 'professional' demographic, reminiscent of 'team-building' exercises, layered sounds and performance, fighting exaggerated gestures. Looking at this work in relation to my own for its use of group choreography and its place in the cultural present - how identities can be politicised by language, gesture, and costume
Map of Glasgow pinpointing tennis court locations
Berlin based collaboration - relationship between art, design and architecture, great engagement with spaces work is shown, use wit and humour to comment on capitalist condition and address social and cultural concerns
THEORETICAL, CONTEXTUAL AND CULTURAL READING
A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism - David Harvey
Liquid Modernity - Zygmunt Bauman
Coping with Post-Democracy - Colin Crouch
Unmarked, the politics of performance - Peggy Phelan
Artificial Hells, performance art and the politics of spectatorship - Claire Bishop
Radical Museology - Claire Bishop
Situation - Claire Doherty (Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art)
The Emancipated Spectator - Jacques Rancière
Culture in a Liquid Modern World - Zygmunt Bauman
Tennis Fashion
Sportswear in Vogue
Olympic videos
Flatpack IKEA Instructions
Happenings and Other Acts
Small Acts: Performance, the Millennium and the
Marking of Time
National Identity
Wimbledon videos
Acting out: the body in video: then and now, The Royal College of Art
SEXUALITY: Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art
Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s
LUX - Humour
LUX - Video Art
Laura Mulvey
'Grabbing the Phallus by the Balls' - Paula Smithard
British Art in the Cultural Field
Metal bar bolted to top section of posts in order to help balance weight of net
Sports and tennis wear throughout history and in the present
IKEA Instruction Manuals - thinking about instructions or 'how-to' manuals in relation to the posts and building a tennis set, performance that can be replicated with instructions
Interested in style of olympic athlete walk out/introduction part before race, might try to mimic with performers and green screen, ultimate 'spectre', pinpoint back to watching olympics on TV, glimpse of patriotism
Try out artificial grass/turf - lay down as part of build up set
Concrete/greyness of Glasgow more absurd and further away from Wimbledon, use of artificial grass more of a parody? Elongate the setting up process
Plans to cast someone as an umpire and add that to performance, construct a platform/chair for them and maybe use them as a gateway for speech/language/orders/a theatrical climax????????
Erwin Wurm
Lucy McKenzie
Narrow House (2010)
One Minute Sculptures
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PERFORMANCE
Instructions on left to accompany the sculptural elements - how to piece together and use the set
Instructions on right give guide without equipment/set - more conceptual framework and more widely distributable and accessible
Green screen photoshop edits
These pictures were taken in a very low-fi green screen set up in my bedroom, in attempt to transform me into a serious professional tennis player in a variety of tennis backgrounds
Their obvious inauthenticity reminds me a lot of a postcard, or like I could be a sort of sports action figure - as images they are quite comical, posing as a heroic tennis player, a national icon, but i forgot to put my shoes on....
using sports iconography as a spectacle of idealism and seduction, political in its propaganda like format and reference to nationalism
Wurm portrays elements of the absurd, mundane and spectacle of the everyday in his sculptural forms and performative gestures. He cements his works within the infrastructure of reality in order to create a spontaneous, comical and lighthearted depiction of life. Relating to my work in its drive for humour and the need for people to. activate work/sculptures
Documentation of set as it stands so far
Attached net to metal pole - problems with physics sorted!
Roll of astroturf - looking to film performance using this.. roll it out like a grassy red carpet/walkway?
Short video where I have green screened myself, pretending to walk into a match as a professional tennis player, on to the Wimbledon court with a found audio clip of a sports audience
DRAWINGS FROM WHEN I COULDN'T THINK OF ANYTHING ELSE TO DO SO I WAS TRYING TO BREAK EVERYTHING I WAS THINKING ABOUT IN THE PERFORMANCE INTO INDIVIDUAL OBJECTS AND ELEMENTS
Site where I want to do performance - Clydeside Amphitheatre on Clyde Street. Provides structure for audience and defined 'stage/court' VS 'audience' area. Amphitheatres are historically used as venues for performances and sport.
Plans for when workshop opens - making a winners podium and a metal trophy. Interested in structures/objects that invite performance and equate to status/winning/victory. How something can place you on a pedestal
- initial sketches/drawings
- 4 x short performance sketches
- documentation of rackets
- sketches and measurements for posts
- documentation of posts - photos and video
- net drawing
- net documentation
- map of tennis courts in Glasgow
- photos of net and posts installed
- pitch build performance video test
- drawings of detachable posts
- 'Flatpack Tennis 1' performance documentation
- 'Flatpack Tennis 2' performance documentation
- adding metal pole to tennis posts - documentation
- installed post/net/pole/astro in studio
- 2 x instructions for performance
- green screen photo edits, 'postcards'
- green screen Wimbledon intro video
- drawings
- pictures of site/google earth screenshots
- trophy and winners podium drawing
- documentation of making paper-mâché trophy
- photos using available household objects as a winners podium
- gold painted trophy photos
- photos of site
- performance sketches at site
- recording of tennis commentary
- 'Greatest Hits' edited together audio and video clips to fabricate a tennis match
- winners podium sketches, measurements and made
- ball sound tests with contact mic and amp
- 'Ball Bounce' video
- hypothetical mechanics of performance - written proposal
- installation plan sketch
- 'Greatest Hits Bounce Back' video
- Photos of astro box
Making more immediate ad-hoc solutions to plans for sculptures - making a big trophy out of papier-mâché and using household objects that can act as a winners podium. Wanted to make these quickly and easily in order to embed them within performance tests, and when I can use the workshop I am able to make them again as originally planned in sketches above. I am trying to get conceptual ideas off the ground in different ways with materials that are available to me instead of keeping them as ideas and plans
ARTISTS/EXHIBITIONS
Wiebke Siem
Esther Gamsu
Eddie Peake
Elmgreen and Dragset
Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson
Monster Chetwynd
Erwin Wurm
Lucy McKenzie
Bruce McLean
Jeremy Deller
Tania Bruguera
Hito Stereyl
Silvia Ziranek
Lucy Gunning
Aleksandra Mir
John Smith
Jacqueline Donachie
Amelia Tan
Robert Rauschenberg
Franz West
Andreas Slominski
Dan Graham
Gillian Wearing
Martin Creed
Richard Serra and Nancy Holt
Bruce Nauman
Cheryl Donegan
Gilbert and George
Bruce McLean
Tania Bruguera
Jeremy Deller
Hito Stereyl
overview of neo-liberalist ideology and policy and its social, political, economic implications in the UK/US starting in Thatcher/Reagan era
metaphorical overview of contemporary society, distinguishes between modernism and post-modernism, 'heavy modernity' and 'liquid modernity'. I have recently thought about my performance/video documentation filtering and my changing material needs in relation to these metaphorical descriptions of past and present society - what I like about performance and sculpture is its presence heaviness, its reluctance to be anything or anywhere else, where as making the documentation the main source of viewing the work feels like its lost the essence of the work - feels like belongs to someone and somewhere else, part of a liquid modern
characterises society in relation to political engagement, focusing heavily on the inequality of power between the political-economic elite and the general public, and the implications of these dynamics on the deterioration of democracy
focus on liveness of performance, identity of performer - gender and race, audience and gaze
critical analysis of performance art through history and the contemporary; political, aesthetic and ethical context and a range of examples including Jeremy Deller and Tania Bruguera
redefining the 'contemporary' and thinking about the role of the museum/gallery
anthology focusing on social, economic, political, psychological context of space, location and environment
spectators becoming participants, democracy and terror, individual vs collective, spectacle of life - enriched my thinking in regards to audience and site
culture and consumerism, the setting of the liquid modern - individual freedom of choice, ever-changing present, 'metamorphis of utopia'
Wimbledon winning highlights - looking at gesture and action, tone of commentary, symbols of 'winning'
King for a Day - one day retrospective at the Tate, produced catalogue of proposals, hypothetical works; interested in putting conceptual works on a pedestal. What has drawn me to McLeans work and driven the way I am thinking about my own is this idea that one can be whoever they want or choose simply through costume and props, in the way I am fabricating a tennis match and pretending to be a tennis player who wins through pose and gesture and objects which directly translate to that
Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008)
Battle of Orgreave (2001)
How Not To Be Seen, A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (2013)
Live performance piece in Tate Turbine Hall - example of delegated performance, casting real policemen using policing techniques to move the audience around the space, blurring art and life, audience are participating - many unaware of being participants in the artwork, replicate power dynamics between people and the state
Video work with satirical instructions on how to disappear and the impossibility of invisibility in the heavily surveilled Western civilisation. Using green screen. I may be able to turn documentation of work into a video work in its own right.
Re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave, the 1984 clash between miners and police. Event descriptive of Thatcher's neo-liberalist policies. Deller uses a mixture of actors and ex-miners as participants in the event, choreographing them to imitate original event. MASS PERFORMANCE!!!
Silvia Ziranek
From LADA, Link: https://vimeo.com/385301529
pairs actions and gesture to language and spoken word, moves with intention, engagement with audience & objects & costume, repetition and variation, aesthetics and colour, giving objects meaning and new meaning
Gold painted trophy and more photos in costume
Photos at site - scoping out different levels and angles to plan performance filming and possibility of audience
politicisation of genre - re-examination of situations, 'indeterminate', theatre, structure, non-matrix
millenium - marker of social progress, naive futurism, champion everyday and personal, experiences, culture and its relation to time, passages of time in performance i.e. clocks, breakfast, 'temporary kingdom'. a lot of relation to my own work, presenting objects in their own political social contexts and their relation to everyday, thinking of time
social, political, cultural identities of European countries, explored through history
RECORDINGS OF PERFORMANCE SKETCHES AT SITE
Testing out how movement/action looks on site, different angles of filming, using racket/no racket (consciousness of props), sketches for possibility of live performance, snippets of film sewn together gives idea of time passing - interesting to explore with documentation, may want to layer it with canned applause or fake audience audio in future
Straight on - doesn't show the architecture of the space so well
Side on - movement looks more interesting, shows the space better
From top and behind - shows likeness to how professional matches filmed, see more of the environment of the space, more audience perspective
Prefer with the rackets, think there is still an unconsciousness about it, feels more free than with the net/posts as filmed before, the white of the racket and the polo stands out against the amphitheatre - visually more interesting
HAND HELD RECORDINGS OF WALK IN TO MATCH AND WINNING MOMENTS - Thinking of these as 'top and tail' of performances sketches of play shown above, these feel more reliant on audience and applause to carry them, feels as though gesture and action can only describe these moments so far, but also has a funny element of awareness of living in covid-19, feels quite tongue in cheek
Recorded audio based on a script that I wrote as commentary. Interested in how dialogue and language can engage with audience and build storyline - we're not actually playing tennis but this can create the contours of the match. Added found sounds of tennis ball and fake audience to create more atmosphere. Hypothetically, I would like to have a live performance at the Clydeside Amphitheatre site whereby the commentators I have used are there with microphones and with language build the contours of the match and amp the audience up
Cut and pasted audio and video clips from performance sketches on site to fabricate a full match or highlights montage from a match. This outlines the type of structure and elements that I want to recreate as a live event - a video sketch for a live event waiting to happen
NOTES OF REFLECTION AT ASSESSMENT:
I see this body of work as the conceptual framework for a hypothetical performance, describing the action, audience and structure of a live event that hasn't happened yet with artefacts, props, video, audio, sketches and writing. These works are descriptive, and although many have become works within their own right, it is important to consider that my intentions have been completely compromised so far - having to use materials that are readily available to me whilst there is still no access to workshops and the idea that this work will result in a live event with an audience seems almost impossible in the current climate. My work is interested in the physicality and ephemerality of performance and the sculpture that may surround that, not video!
Reflecting on research:
Looking back at the research as a whole I've been trying to work out what draws works and readings together, what I am interested in and how this relates to the work I am making. I have been able to identify some overarching themes that drive my research across artist works, exhibitions and thematic and contextual resources, which motivate my studio practice in different ways, they are as follows;
The portrayal of society, specifically British or Westernised culture, often politically motivated, critical, parodying or tongue in cheek. Picking apart material fabric of society, or looking at work and its relevance within the context of post-modernism; ranging from Bauman's 'Liquid Modernity' which describes metaphorical shape of modern civilisation, referring to 'heavy modernity' versus 'liquid modernity', their symptoms and their political and social relevance, to Tania Bruguera's 'Tatlin’s Whisper #5' which playfully replicates the divide between civilians and the state, using real policemen to explore our willingness as audience to accept existing power dynamics. Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson are a performance collaboration that within their work 'Public Relations' use language and costume to give the performers a professional/business identity that refers to a specific demographic of society and the politics behind their identity, therefore setting a context for the work.
Aesthetic qualities and interaction with space - material, shape, colour, craftsmanship, audience, gesture, documentation of performance - its relation to reality and time e.g. how would you place it within our visual understanding of the world, how do you interact with it? is it familiar and everyday, is it uncanny or alien? If I'm drawn to something in its aestheticism is it because it stands out against our surroundings or it draws attention to and frames something in our everyday? Erwin Wurm's work takes aspects of our everyday life and makes them absurd through changing shape/making them a sort of caricature (e.g. Narrow House), looking at books such as 'Tennis Fashion', 'Sportswear in Vogue' and watching videos from Wimbledon and the Olympics help me to understand the aesthetics of sports throughout time, which informs decisions about my work in my ability to mimic, parody or reject them. 'Small Acts' looks at the work of artists in the turn of the millennium, looking at objects that mark time, champion the everyday and personal.
Sport as a vehicle to explore ideas and performance - this is specific to this current body of work and is what drew me to the idea of tennis as performance. Lucy McKenzie using sport to discuss ideas surrounding the body and feminism through image and text. Esther Gamsu presents hands boxing as iconography through an oversized suspended sculpture, cartoonish in its form and colour, presented poised and ready to fight.
Lucy Gunning
Aleksandra Mir
Jacqueline Donachie
Andreas Slominski
John Smith
Girl Chewing Gum (1976)
Robert Rauschenberg
Open Score (1966)
Amelia Tan
Dryer Gesticulation (2018)
Franz West
Adaptives
Looking at sport and behaviours perverted out of context, manipulating cultural representations, post-structuralist thought (questioning binary), finding space outside of masc/femme polarisations. Made me question behaviours and performers in my work in a wider context - sport meeting with women, british awkwardness
based on Bruce McLean's 'pose work', thinking about 'performance in the everyday world of social interaction', walking in and out the frame, with Sister - different physicality based on illness - dependant on what disability could allow
collecting trophies, installation plans?, looking at double meaning - coveted symbol of accomplishment vs mass produced item of very little value
actions and interventions, 'pointless' or 'long way round', absurd, humorous, eg. in 1996 got Giraffe in Munster zoo to lick postage stamp
illusion of control, commanding/puppeteering, thinking about powers of live vs powers of recorded and the altering of perception, looks at everyday actions recorded objectively - neither dramatises or glorifies. The action of speaking before the action occurs means that the audience are left wondering whether the action is a response
sound, action, everyday encounters and behaviours through performance
looking at tennis in the context of theatre and as a form of movement, controls lights and sounds, FM transmitter fit in handle of racket to sound a bong every time it's hit, each bong turns one out of 48 lights out. When dark infrared light and TV pick up movement from 500 people on stage. Chain of events encompassing sound, movement, light
Found objects coated in plaster, beautiful materiality, shape and colour, in between of sculpture and performance, changing behaviours through human relation to sculptures, awkward interactions, playful, slapstick, thinking of form and function
winners podium sketches for building out of wood
BUILT!!!! is made up of 3 plinths:
20 x 50 x 40 cm
40 x 50 x 40 cm
60 x 50 x 40 cm
then bolted together
Using a contact mic connected to an amp to explore possibilities of sound - making sound live, plan to match up with pretending to hit a racket, trying to reverse video sound effects into live performance space
Testing out bounce sound whilst pretending to swing racket
Full written proposal of hypothetical performance and what it would look like in an ideal world.
How might I share this? Could this be distributed as a set of instructions?
Useful document to pick apart elements of performance - what is realistic in the context?
Installation plan sketch - astro/tennis court floor with physical aspects of performance on show i.e. trophy, rackets, maybe costume, with sound playing through the space and videos and photos from the performance on the wall. Audience can negotiate their way around the space. Relationship between the event and the installation shrine - event in suspension, not sure whether it's actually happened
'Greatest Hits Bounce Back'
Dan Graham
Past Future Split Attention
experience of time, never in the present, psychologically restructuring time, focus on mannerisms and behaviour, performance/performance to camera
Gillian Wearing
Sixty Minute Silence
Dancing in Peckham
blur of public/private, ordinary British people, behaviours out of context, cross-section of time, politics of gender, sexuality and ethnicity, everyday existence
Martin Creed
Work no. 850 @ Tate Britain Duveens Gallery
site specific, out of context, no separation between viewer and runner, physical experience and everyday life - basic human activity
Richard Serra and Nancy Holt
relation of dialogue to image and sound, analyses its own discourse whilst being formulated, liveness, physicality and experience of language and sound, isolated TV experience
humorously takes on literal role of object, playful, reminiscent of nude statues on decorative fountains, subverting conventional definitions of objects and art
Boomerang
Bruce Nauman
Self Portrait as a Fountain
exhibition catalogue focusing on performance to camera/video work, video's relation to mass culture and TV, its immediacy and capacity to be easily reproduced, 'post-minimalism' and the active role of the spectator, body/gesture and its relation to chance, sexual identity, desire, behaviour, psychological, political and social context
Gilbert and George
Singing Sculpture
Cheryl Donegan
Head
sexual desires form making of visual imagery as well as formation of institutional power structures relating to visual culture, political arena in which sexuality functions, woman as spectacle, social construction of male and female identities, voyeurism made immediate via internet
taking on identities, satirical play, the everyday and society, personal and profound
popular and political culture, immediacy, narration and articulation of representations
male gaze in film, active male and passive female, led by sexual instincts and ego libido, 3 different looks/voyeurs: camera, audience, characters within screen
social experience of sexual politics in New British Art, using humour and parody, disrupted dichotomies of masculinity and femininity, social conventions/behaviours perverted or disrupted, question conception of femininity, direct engagement with social activity, destabilise and highlight gender binaries
mass-observation, artwork within an interconnected continuum encompassing material and non-material civilisation, social eye
sexual identity and fantasy, male gaze, performance to camera, low-fi, voyeurism, time-based duration clear set before/after
using self as object, durational performance, playful and absurd, putting self on pedestal, theatricality of everyday expression, reminiscent of street performers but put in new context
Crit feedback key notes:
- Audio/visual playing and hitting ball interesting, creating a rhythm, how it sometimes is exact and sometimes doesn't align - tension
- Social and cultural being performed, performing Britishness
- A performance within a performance
- Deconstructing itself
- Relationship between live and recorded
- Intentional inconsistencies
- Stereotypical actions and poses
- Comment on elitism of sport and art
- Male gaze of commentators
- What would happen in different space? i.e. gallery
- Unveils the seriousness of art
- Feels quite resolved as a work
- Lack of audience feels quite relevant
- Think about who takes control, take it beyond control so it destructs
- Political and philosophical ideas - sport, win and lose, identity, male vs female binaries, perverted behaviours out of context
TAKING IT FURTHER/NEW PERFORMANCE IDEAS
- Durational performance at different sites - winners ceremony with podium
- Deconstructed live version of match - player, commentator, ball bouncer, clapper/audience - negotiation/tension between them... who has control?
- Test out using live feed - camera wired up to projector - relation of live/digital image
Astro box for ball bouncing