Half the Work

by Ruth Barker, 27 Jan 2010

Hello,

ok, so I want to describe a scenario for you: An artist makes a piece of site specific work. It’s a performance. But when the time comes for the public to see the work, something happens – something wholly unexpected – and the work is suddenly relocated, so the audience encounter it in a different location. The site specific work changes its site. What’s the result?

Well, a week ago I would have said that the work would have lost part of itself. Perhaps, thinking of my one-time tutor David Harding, I would have said that the performance had lost exactly half of itself (‘the context is half the work’, after all). Now I’ve been educated, by an unexpected event that suddenly changed the site of my public Rough Mix performance at Dance Base last Friday.

So, what was the result? Not quite what I’d expected, actually – but perhaps I should have known, logically, what the upshot would be. The work was removed from it’s intended site – true. And with that ousting – also true – it lost part of its previous self. BUT. The work was also re-placed in another site. And so developed another context, aquiring in turn another ‘half’ of itself. The work changed – it wasn’t the same work any more – but it was still a whole work. It was perhaps more interesting because it had taken a step away from my explicit intention and moved instead into the realm of happenstance.

Anyway, just a thought. Perhaps everyone else could have told me what would happen, but it took poor old me a little while to figure out!

More later,
R.

oh, and do I hear you asking what the most recent image is? Ha! It is of course a Google-grabbed pic of The Poetry Path, by David Harding himself. The piece was developed in collaboration with poet Alan Bold, in Glenrothes Scotland, 1977.