Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth

Neville Wakefield: How did you start your collaboration and what was the first piece that you did together?

KC: We met in 2003, when we had recently graduated from Edinburgh College of Art. We set-up a series of video and performance events together, and Jenny joined me, and some others in organising exhibitions at my flat under the name Magnifitat. We then set up an artist-run gallery, The Embassy, with another group of people. In our art, however, we were working separately. Then we got the opportunity to make a performance for Late at Tate in Tate Britain’s Making British History room, a gallery focussed on warfare painting. We collaborated on Demonstration (2003) where, with a group of others, we created a simulated atomic bomb using a parachute, light effects, glow-in-the-dark confetti and live sound from a friend’s band. It was a highly choreographed performance involving lots of people. Our most recent performance, with the Boyle family (2008), was actually also a collaboration involving many people but had a different relationship to choreography and participation.

JH: No, not at all. We both made light-based installations, but only started making performance after college.

NW: At what point did you move from strictly time-based performance work to creating pieces that were performance-based but which also contained a residue or presence that either invoked the performance or became a participatory presence?

JH: We wanted to make work that underscored the importance of every element in the performance – from the concept behind it to the performativity to the documentation. We moved away from focussing the spectacle of the choreographed performance towards setting parameters that allowed for random outcomes.

KC: We have been making videos which often involve us performing; having a sun bed or bleaching someone’s hair. The videos document an effect of the light but also capture unforeseen results such as how the camera’s aperture reacts to the fluorescent tubes of the sun bed.

JH: And then we were able to concentrate on the idea of what’s choreographed and what’s not, on when people are acting or not acting or acting themselves.

NW: It seems there’s an interesting tension in your work between this highly structured formal aspect, which draws on mirrors and surfaces and different types of reflection, and the highly unstructured, performance element.

KC: We are interested in that tension and have been building on this way of working. We might set up an effect with a mirror in a video but also include in the course of the video how this effect was assembled and dismantled: first it’s messy, then it all comes together, and then it collapses again.

JH: Another formal aspect within these works is the continual cycle of the loop of video, and contained within those cycles is the making and breaking of an illusion.

NW: I’d like to talk about the theatrical aspect of your use of light, which invokes the quasi-mystical son et lumière performances and séances of the Victorian era.

JH: Artists have always been fascinated by light: it’s intrinsically linked to how we see, to how cameras work and subsequently to the fundamentals of representation and perception. We’re interested in playing with ideas of what’s real and what’s artificial. At the moment we are using techniques referencing the mirror tricks of Claudian landscapists.

NW: Are you also projecting in time? With the Boyle family, for instance, you were re-enacting a performance that had already taken place. This seems consistent with the problematic that you’re describing of how you create spontaneity in a contrived environment or contrivance in a spontaneous environment?

JH: So much of the Boyle Family’s work is to do with random outcomes and replicas. O What a Lovely Whore (1965) seemed the perfect performance to re-enact, particularly as there was a score of instructions left by Mark Boyle¹ and since it could never be a strict re-enactment because we were working from anecdotes and obscure, grainy black and white documentary film. Of course, these happenings do have a somewhat mythical status, and people who were there have spoken about what went on at them, but you can never really be certain exactly what occurred. The original participants, who were told they had to make the performance themselves, were surely acting in the way people felt they should behave at a happening, and the audience/participants in our re-enactment knew they were acting out the part of a participant in a re-enactment.

NW: I was thinking about that in relation to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, according to which you can’t measure one entity without affecting another. Your relationship to previous performances – whether your own or someone else’s – seems to confuse the relationship between the observer and the observed.

KC: Relationships between the observer and the observed may become confused in Players, our project for Frieze Art Fair. Through creating a viewing platform, and by placing CCTV cameras round the fair and projecting the footage, we hope to alter these relationships and heighten visitors’ awareness of the way people ‘perform’ socially within a non-performance arena. Players will equally be an exploration of how perception can be altered in an environment. We’re drawing on the approach of film director Jacque Tati – the work will aesthetisise everyday, often over looked elements in the fair.

JH: I think that showing this footage of the overlooked spaces of the fair will heighten the audience’s understanding of the potential dramas that could unfold within any of the different roles that people play. It also underscores the notion of the fair as a fake environment – where people go to see and to be seen – which is an important element of the project.

KC: We will be focussing on such innocuous moments as a gallery assistant moving a picture frame, a waiter serving champagne, a visitor twiddling with her earring or a reflection of a gallerist in a mobile phone; it’s going to be difficult to decipher who are the performers.

NW: The form of the installation itself reminds me of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison design: there’s a position from which you can see everyone else but can’t be seen yourself.

JH: Yes, we had thought of that, but we were also looking at the sorts of quirky pavilions you find at seaside fun fairs housing sideshows or a camera obscura. We enjoyed working closely with the architects for the fair, Caruso St John, to create a structure that incorporates many of the motifs and designs used in the rest of the fair. The idea was not only to invert aspects of the fair through our videos, but also to create a pavilion to house the work that would be a muddle of the visual design of the fair.

NW: Your project effectively turns the entire fair into a stage on which everyone present becomes a performer. Do you see the audience in this case as your collaborators?

JH: This is the first time we’ve made a work that’s really mixed the audience’s actions with our own contrived performances and effects. We hope that it’s quite a generous work – something that people will enjoy being a part of – and that they’ll enjoy viewing the fair from a different angle.

JH: The videos will be edited, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be cutting out any random interference: the random interference could be the best thing we capture on camera!

KC: We’re looking forward to seeing what we’ll find in the footage. We’re hoping for lots of happy accidents.

Notes

¹ For the event ‘Oh What a Lovely Whore’ Mark Boyle and Joan Hills invited an audience to make a performance themselves using materials provided for them. The original instructions for the performance which Mark structured and wrote up were as follows:

1 Prepare a wide range of activities with maximum participation incentive.
2 Light them with two or three (i.e. not enough*) spotlights on stands with wheels, so that the audience can control them.
3 When the audience start to arrive hold them in a screened off area until they have all gathered.
4 Announce that you're not going to do any event that night and if they want an event, they'll have to do it for themselves.
5 Open screens or curtains.

* The lighting is crucial to the success of the event. There should be a few strong spotlights and that's all. So that people can begin to do things in obscurity if they want to. Then as other members of the audience are controlling the spots they will suddenly find themselves- spot-lit and this heightens their activity.

Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth

Kim Coleman
& Jenny Hogarth