Taking the people who work and study here (Liverpool art & design academy) as my audience, I have made ephemeral interventions in the building to illustrate what I see as a problematic divide or separation between an arguably autonomous art world and a globalised Neo-liberal economy.
By employing a local painter and decorator I found in the yellow pages to re-paint all the interior walls in the building a slightly different tone of white, I wanted to give Mike the ‘painter’, a contradictory role, arguably an ‘artist’ or ‘civilian’ in society.
This was a way to understand how a real world exchange like this, and the paint job that came out of it, could be valued in an autonomous art world which seems strangely separate and disengaged from the political realities of the everyday. Equally, it was to see how my artistic intervention into the environment could be elaborate yet had little effect on the perceptions of the people who inhabit it, except for the fictitious rumors / Chinese whispers that have emerged as to the actual paint used and whether or not I had actually done anything at all. What followed was a few difficult conversations with the building managers and a bizarre decorating job being awkwardly played out in the fashion of a conceptual performance piece.
The document of this is a film, also concerned with situations (SI), documentation, and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of a supposed ‘hyper-reality’
To gain permission for my project to go ahead at all I presented one version of my plans to the director of the school and made an agreement. The university pays for the paint job if I agree to use the same shade of paint as on the walls originally. I agreed, but instead used the funding to buy a different shade of paint.
This was a decision to lift the ‘site’ of my work, or the knowledge of the buildings new colour, from any physical space (the exhibition, performance, installation, video, or even the walls themselves) solely into the exchange of information passed around the community of students and staff in the building via the rumours I invented. A placebo effect. On the release of the degree show publication the text describing the project served a similar purpose. I moved the significance of my work from the painting itself to the mediation of it. It also gave all meaning to the 3 hour long film were my audience were literally watching paint dry.
The ‘delivery of paint’ installed in the lobby caused the operations staff daily consternation. The weekly routine of painter-decorators as a ubiquitous presence in the building acted as visual reminders to the project. In group crits, conversations, confrontations and through anecdotes, my answers to questions about the project frequently changed even to academic staff. Through the rumour I gave the project form and meaning until the truth became irrelevant. This rumour or mediation was intended to investigate both the current ‘site’ of art production and its reception. It also investigated the threshold between a reality and its re-presentation, which has arguably no real definitive point of transition anymore.
me on the mike, everyone starting to lose the will to live.
someone else says something interesting, everyone a bit more cheery.
