Penny for your thoughts?

Penny for your thoughts?

 

 

After a week of going into multiple banks and receiving a varied range of reactions, when asking to change our collected pounds into one penny coins, we thought about the use of the money outside our art piece. I became increasingly aware of the mass of money we had gathered, mainly because I had carried it! The weight of the endless plastic counting bags other than giving me backache, made me fully appreciate how much money we had collected and needed to complete out piece. Each member of the class had donated a sum of 3 pounds or above to our cause when we realized that our cause was just for a performance, what would you the money do once returned to its previous owner. Would each coin end up taken unexpected journeys like each of us had over the last few weeks, would it be used for good? Would it be put towards some form of regeneration? Or would it be dead money? Lost, stagnant, wasted like The Grandstand current use or like the soldiers, they stood for, majority of who were younger than 25. We felt we wanted to make sure the money wed carried, placed, scoured the banks of Lincoln high street to gather were put back into a project as positive as ours. It was this notion that inspired our question posed to the class, for them to part with their 3 pounds for the contribution of 90 pounds, 9 thousand one pennies, back into the community. We wanted the moneys use to carry on its good will after our piece so we began to research relevant, local charities that we felt were on the themes of women, equestrian, military based, the themes of the whole classes work as it was everyone’s money. We decided to present the charities to the class and see which they were most receptive too.

 

The first charity is; ‘Recycle a Race horse’ which is a Lancaster based rehabilitation center for ex race horses.(( http://www.thoroughbredrehabilitationcentre.co.uk/contact.php))

The second charity is; ‘Bransby Horse, rescue and welfare’ this local, which has two, bases one in Lincoln, that is concerned with providing a sanctuary for abused equine based animals and rehoming them.

((http://www.bransbyhorses.co.uk/home/home%20about%20us%20NEW.html))

The third charity is; ‘Addaction’ a charity that helps transform the lives of people affected by drug and alcohol abuse. Several member of the class has had personal interaction with the charity and some staff that work in center in Lincoln.

((http://www.addaction.org.uk/landing.asp?section=93&sectionTitle=What+we+do))

The Fourth Charity is; ‘Scotty’s Little Soldiers’ after asking a serving pilot for the RAF base Waddington, he felt this was the most worthwhile charity he knew of related to the military in the UK. The charity supports the children of the serving/fallen soldiers. ((http://www.scottyslittlesoldiers.co.uk/aboutus.html))

The fifth Charity is; ‘Be Attitude’ a charity used by the homeless people of Lincoln, which offers them shelter, food, companionship and support. Again member of the class have been and interacted with the staff and users of the site. In close relation with the Local charity ‘Nomad’ The charity itself is almost site specific, based in St. Mary’s church, it was formed through a homeless person knocking on the parish’s door where the idea of the shelter was first formed. ((http://nomadtrust.org.uk/about/st-mary-le-wigford-partnership/))

The sixth charity is; ‘Women For Women’ An international charity, who supports emotionally and financially over 351,00 female survivors of war and conflict. ((http://www.womenforwomen.org/))

The final charity is; ’Raffa’ The infamous charity offering support for the RAF family (ex soldiers and their families.) The national charity helps all generations with a relation to the RAF. ((http://www.rafa.org.uk/Who-we-are))

All of the charities listed have ties to the themes listed above, but more prominantly without realizing all involve and are based or restoration and transformation, whether it of a life, an animal or a worn torn family/village. The theme of change and restoration is so evident in all these charities and the aims of all our pieces, changing attitude towards the heritage surrounding all components The Grandstands past.

The City of Lincoln Brass Band and the Grandstand

I recently went on a drift, out towards the top of the city. Sitting back on a bench looking out over Lincoln, I spotted the grandstand. Almost lost out of view of the busy, noisy city, it looked peaceful and quiet. This observation made me reflect on site specific, and how I think it is our mission to show the residents and visitors of Lincoln, what a beautiful site it is. With such charisma, and history I believe what we are doing as a group, really brings life back into the building and what the audience should feel is proud of Lincoln, proud of the grandstand and inspired.  Having found that the City of Lincoln’s Brass Band rehearse in the weigh room, got me thinking about how the sounds of the city and history are incorporated into the grandstand.

The band is a continuation of the Lincoln Malleable Iron works band formed in 1893. ((http://www.cityoflincolnband.org.uk/Content/History/MasterPageHistory.html accessed: 14th April 2013)) In 1939 the band was disbanded from the Iron works due to the war. After the war the band was almost diminished because of the lack of player and funds available. However with help from Councillor Mrs Mary Sookias, who ‘bought’ the band, set them up with some new instruments and set them up with their new practice room at the Grandstand. 1979 saw the band having to move due to the Grandstand being refurbished, and only in the most recent years have the City band returned back to the weighing room.

During one of our visits to the Grandstand, Michael suggested having a look at the brass bands repertoire which had been written on a blackboard in the weigh room, to see if I could get hold of any of the music or indeed play it. One of the songs on the sheet was ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’. On our recent trip to the Lincolnshire Life museum, there was a display up about this very song and I was able to source the music from a reliable source as the song is a wide spread March, used up and down the country. The song was originally use by the 10th regiments of the Foot and its successors the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment, known as ‘the poachers’. After this it was adopted by the Royal Air force College, Lincolnshire in 1919 as a quick march. The song is listened to with lyrics or instrumental and all brass bands in Lincolnshire use the well known song, to show and remind themselves of their heritage.

Although I have not found a moment in the performance to play this or indeed a song close to war (the last post) can be worked in, I am sure as the piece develops a clear slot will arise, whether it is in some dead space or enhancing another groups piece. The band itself has been affected by the war, and loss and development and restoration similar to the similar themes we explore in the various performance aspects so i think it would be a huge loss if it was not used. I believe there is something magical about a brass sound hitting the walls of such an historic and quiet building which can bring it back to life within an instance.

The Worth of a Penny

Upon a visit to the ‘Lincolnshire Life Museum’ the underlying theme of our piece appeared to be edited. We were struck by one fact displayed on a board, which sparked the theme of our piece not to be changed, but updated. The fact stated was that ‘Nine thousand Lincolnshire men died in the Great War.’ This statistic resonated with us as a group, although we had been attached and moved by the tale of the Beechey Brothers, we wanted to represent that moving story, but not detract from the sheer amount of lives lost of local men, which we were unaware of. We found ourselves at a cross roads where it appeared we could either pick the personal, infamous story of a mothers loss of 5 sons or focus on the 9 thousand lives lost, we decided not to dismiss either ideas and show both. We wanted to do this in a simplicity way of physically showing nine thousand lives and then also telling the story of the Beechey Brothers. We found an area of The Grandstand, which we felt we could hold an instillation piece in which we could represent the 9 thousand local lives lost. We chose an outside patch which was boarded by a white fence, which we knew to be the ‘ parade ring’ we felt this prominent as we were showing the lives like the horses would have been shown in previous times. By physically having the piece on the earth outside The Grandstand; which was uneven due to the trenches that had been built at a time when the grandstand had been used for military purposes, we felt it created a more honest and authentic piece. The idea of placing something on the ground in which the said men would have walked and trained made the link between the site and our work ever more prominent and reflective.

We noted this meant we would be subject on the day of performance to the elements, we had rehearsals in the snow and severe worry of windy conditions which mean the positioning of the pennies were crucial to hold down the string that would mark our piece.  The environment might oblige you to respond in a certain ways, prefiguring the performance.’(( Pearson Mike, 2010, Site Specific Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillian.))

The idea of using an item or fact to represent the lives lost we found as a medium to link our previous work and our new inspiration, we felt the stories, letters and art work which we had discovered in our research still needed to be staged in some form; so we developed the idea of an installation piece. We decided to use nine thousand ‘something’s’ to create a piece of artwork we had found in our research. A Lincolnshire Solider had created the artwork in the trenches. We wanted an item that was small enough for us to replicate this piece of art by filling it or outlining using all nine thousand of the ‘something’s’. After research we found an instillation piece by the practioneer John Newling. His most recent work focused on the growing of plants and fruit in urban and religious locations. He states on his blog when commenting on his 2013 piece Ecologies of value ‘The first section of the exhibition plays with ideas relating to money and religion.’ ((http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/john-newling-0)) In his exhibition he displayed 50,000 two-piece pennies in a church. This lead us to the notion of look at the value of 1 pennies, the idea of money in an environment which took thousands of bets each race, seemed to link directly to The Grandstand on that level. We also found placing the pennies on the earth caused them to be uneven due to the marks left by tracks of previous tanks and trenches making the reality of the situation and lives lost come to the fore front of our and the audiences mind when replicating the art piece. The coins not only link to the betting side of the Grandstand, but also the constant theme of worth, the worth of the almost retired building, the worth of a life, the self explainary worth of currency, which in todays economical climate regularly fluxgates. We want the process of creating the piece to be interactive and for the audience to place a penny on the art work fully aware it represents one life, it makes the connection personal as well as expressing the magnitude of life’s lost.

Isolation T.A.N.K.

The T.A.N.K. group originally wanted to to represent the claustrophobic environment that the interior of a real tank would have created by performing to a small percentage of the audience at a time. We were going to create a tent-like structure of material in between the caterpillar tracks made of chairs to make the body of the tank. Three actors would have supported this structure while one performed inside to between 1 and 3 audience members, and the speaker would swap with one of those outside each time new audience members arrived.

This idea partly stemmed from a discussion about The Long and Winding Road, a live art project by Michael Pinchbeck; particularly the section where Pinchbeck wrote a one-to-one performance piece intended to take place inside a parked car that had been the center of the project. ((Pinchbeck, M (n.d.) The Long and Winding Road, Online: http://www.michaelpinchbeck.co.uk/installation/the-long-and-winding-road/ Accessed 10th April 2013)) We had information about the experiences of those trusted with testing the first tanks, including the dangers they were faced with, and we wanted to impart that information in a personal and direct way. Inviting the audience into our vehicle to listen at close quarters seemed like an excellent way to create the level of intimacy we were looking for. Continue reading “Isolation T.A.N.K.”

‘War and Loss’… expanding ideas

Our concept was “inspired by…the characteristics of the place” ((Pearson, 2010, p.148)) it gave us our concept as McLucas comments “deciding to create a work in a ‘used’ building might provide a theatrical foundation or springboard…it might get us several rungs up the theatrical ladder before we begin” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.149)). In terms of Brith Gof’s considerations of the ‘host’ and the ‘ghost’, the building was such an imposing host that regardless of what the ghost was that we brought into the site, the host and the ghost would begin to “bleed into each other” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.149)) and therefore the site would heavily influence the performance. As, even though the site had been emptied of the majority of its paraphernalia which had been left behind when it closed in 1965, there were still a large number of traces of what the race course once was. There still remained the old weighing rooms, and remnants of the old course. These were all part of the “fixtures and fittings” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.35)) and from this we wanted to create something that would become, as McLucas calls it, a hybrid of performance 20 which combines the “performance (ghost), the place (host) and the public” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.143)). We wanted to make the piece specific to the site in some way whether that is in “subject matter, theme, and dramatic structure” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.149)). We wished ultimately to explore the notions of site-specific performance in our work and where our performance could fit into this field. We wanted the site to be a central influence to our piece and using it as our primary stimulus for devising helped us in this. We started our devising process similarly to Pearson’s process with “a process of research, frequently interdisciplinary research: into site and subject” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.151)).

After doing our own separate research and finding key areas of interest, we, as a group had a turning point after visiting The Lincolnshire Archives, ‘of over 50,000 men recruited into the Lincolnshire Regiment during the First World War, almost 9,000 were killed and at least 30,000 more were wounded, gassed or taken prisoner’. The sheer quantity of Lincolnshire men that died shocked our group and we decided to make this our focal point. Researching further we found an estimate of the amount of money which was given to the soldiers as a ration, one penny. Using these two strands we decided to construct an installation piece of artwork with 9,000 pennies, portraying 9,000 lives. We decided to do this by creating a giant Union Jack which was found in the Lincolnshire Archives, the flag was created by a Lincolnshire man; in essence bringing Lincoln’s heritage back to the Gateway of Lincoln.

 

flag

The idea of using the coins also links directly to the site; the idea of placing bets, this although sticking to the conventions of the site also brings fantasy into the piece with the idea of War being a theme, much like Gob Squads work in 1995. We wanted to create an installation piece of work that the audience could be involved with by allowing them to place down coins as well as the ‘performers’ doing it. Whilst doing this we decided to also read out facts that we have researched; The Beechy boys story and the facts about the artwork, this will enable us to create poignancy and much like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Relational Aesthetics below we are placing the lives of the soldiers in a live social context (performed) rather than it being kept in a private space (kept as a fact)

 

“Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Relational Aesthetics” ((Weburbanist.com (2008) Amazing Collection of Artworks Made From Money | WebUrbanist. [online] Available at: http://weburbanist.com/2008/12/14/art-from-money/ [Accessed: 10 May 2013].))

 

 

money photo money photo 2

 

 

Rirkrit Tiravanija is a Thai contemporary artist known for exploring the social role of the ‘artist’ using the ideology of relational aesthetics. The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity, the idea of creating a piece in which the audience can participate is an idea that we want to include. Bourriaud claims “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist.” ((Bourriaud, Nicolas, Caroline Schneider and Jeanine Herman. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002.)) In Relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community, rather than artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija is most famous for installation art pieces where he cooks meals for gallery-goers, reads to them, or plays music for them. However in this piece he used money in order to create a reaction from his audience. Rirkrit’s treatment of money, above, is a perfect example of the examination of human beings in their social context rather than in a private space’. ((Weburbanist.com (2008) Amazing Collection of Artworks Made From Money | WebUrbanist. [online] Available at: http://weburbanist.com/2008/12/14/art-from-money/ [Accessed: 10 May 2013].)) Much like this art work we want to use the coins to send a message – to highlight the vast quantity of men that died from Lincoln to protect our country.

Another Practitioner that we have taken inspiration from for our Piece is John Newling’s ‘Ecologies of Value’ in which he used explored the social and economic system of society with 50,000 two pence coins; much like our installation piece he replicated a static object (a cash machine) but also related his artwork to the act of taking communion in the Christian church. This idea of using two themes relates to our work with the aspects of war and betting creating one united installation. These ideas further link to Higgins and his theory of how artwork links what is understood to what is not ‘The concept is understood better by what it is not, rather than the what it is’ ((Higgins 1969:25)), much like Higgins and Newling the piece is more focused upon conceptual art, as the group is more focused upon the ideas presented compared to the finished article.