‘RE-ACTION’
Flashmob in Northumberland Street, Wednesday the 23d of March 2011
A simple action that borrows its format to flashmobs phenomenon, it is an action that re-enact a fictional but familiar gesture, an event re-appropriating and embodying dramatic images. This is part of a series of small actions called:
‘RAW ON RHETORISM’
First of all, a small Wikipedia definition for those who haven’t heard of this term yet:
A flash mob (or flashmob) is a term coined in 2003 to denote a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment and/or satire. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails. The term is generally not applied to events and performances organized for the purposes of politics (such as protests), commercial advertisement, and publicity stunts, which involve public relation firms, or paid professionals.
For further historical details click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob
LOCATION OF THE FLASHMOB: Northumberland Street, it seems to me to be a busy consumerists street in which it could be fun to perform.
DATE: the 23d of March 2011
TIME: still has to be defined accurately but it should be around 3.30 pm. for beginning of action, and probably 3.10 pm. prior to the action to gather everyone to agree on the action before spreading out (more info to come in few days).
DURATION (depending on chosen action): 1 to 3 minutes long.
DETAILS: Following a talk (for students only), I’ll give at the University of Newcastle on the 23d of March; I would like to invite ALL those susceptible to be excited by the idea of doing a Flashmob on the same date. It supposedly would start at 3.3Opm. But it means that we would need to gather all the people willing to participate at least 15 minutes beforehand. I would suggest meeting behind the Church of St Thomas, by the monument facing Newcastle University. This way we could all agree on the Flashmob action we would perform few minutes later. The action remains to be defined with the students participating to the “Video Forum Programme” organised by Neil Bromwich.
It should be filmed in order to keep traces of this event but also to allow a projection time from which we could all share our thoughts.
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| Untitled#8 (Fall series), 2002, digital print, 40x60cm |
BACKGROUNDS: I like the idea of creating a ‘work’ of art with limited means and in a short period of time. Even though I have been playing at trying to be an artist for a long time now!
I am also interested in the idea of making art as an unproductive activity.
As a visual/performance artist, I am combining and concentrating on the appropriation of material symptomatic of both Art history and popular culture imagery.
My will to gather a group of people to ‘perform’ a Flashmob comes initially from the interests I had in ‘moving’ my studio practice hors-les-murs (outside of the walls). It seemed to me, at that time, that performing OUTSIDE of the usual ‘comfortable’ place housed in a School or part of an Art institution could challenge my practice and therefore would question its ‘validity’. From my backgrounds in sculpture, I’ve worked with a wide range of mediums (from plaster sculpture, installations to photography, video) but I am still interested in using my own body as a medium that I can manipulate as an object.
Not in heroic gestures, nor necessarily within a spiritual quest similar to a ‘leap in the void’ of Yves Klein, I like to explore experimental but also pragmatic ways of understanding the world, taking the action as a device used to experience various situations in a desperate search for an adhesion to reality, as a child who is constantly discovering new sensations.
In this sense, it is an attempt to explore a re-disposition within the world.
By occupying public spaces, taking the city as a big playground, I was aiming to propose different ‘use’ of these spaces by trying to regain control over an environment usually impersonal. I tried to challenge our everyday behaviours through the use of various small actions: falling, running back and forth on a pedestrian path, trying to walk through a glassed entrance as if I was a character controled by the joystick of a video game player.
My focus were and, I suppose still, are to explore the way ‘we’ can transform the perception of a space (especially if this space depends on regulations and on specific rules) within the realm of fiction and absurdity in order to challenge our mundane, everyday dictated behaviours.
Using elements barrowed from movies, systems inspired by public manifestations (strikes, protests…), or simply using a strategy of interruptions, and glitches inside the ‘Matrix’; I often deconstruct actions as part of aesthetics depending on the very process of editing, manipulating and shifting between IMAGES.
It means that these actions can also be performed as if they were pre-recorded actions, examples: doing the same actions back and forth, walking backwards, walking in slow motion, etc… eventually creating a conflictual perception of the body, between its physicality and its image, a tension between the volumes, the movements of the body and its projection, its story.
This is for me a way of poetically transforming the time scale of a situation, this is also a mode of acknowledging how our gestures are nourished and influenced systematically by our ‘image society’.
Here are few links if you are interested and also tired of my pompous discourse:
PROPOSITION: THE ACTION ITSELF
(all participants are doing it at the same time):
· The first that came to my mind was TO FALL ‘DEAD’/LIE DOWN (for 3min): it does appeal to me because it seems to be a dramatic interruption in the flow of shoppers walking by. And I am particularly interested in the fact that it is an action contradictory in itself, a non-action; falling dead is a sudden absence of movement, but it is still a gesture! No matter how people will interpret this gesture, it does carry a tragic effect; some people might find very offensive the vision of many ‘dead bodies’ in a street. I like it though; on one hand it reminds me of this TV series called Flashforward [1] for its connotation of the fear of a sudden end of the world, it is also similar to other fictional stories as in the music video for ‘Just’ by Radiohead (as suggested by Will Strong). On the other hand, it resonates with the recent events and give some ‘volume’ to over saturating images that are ‘flat’ to a point where as Paul Virilio put it in Open Sky:
“...The real is hidden in the reduction of images on the screen. Like a woman worried about putting on weight, being overweight, reality seems to apologise for having a relief, any kind of thickness. (...)”.
· The second idea for an action was TO FREEZE. Again, it is a sudden interruption of movement but which is also imitating the medium video; marking a break as if someone pressed the button ‘PAUSE’ on a hypothetical remote control… remember The Matrix?
· TO WALK/ACT IN SLOW-MOTION would be another possible action that I would find amusing to see in a cityscape. This a bit more difficult to perform, and it does require a lot of concentration…
· I have other suggestions like LAUGHING or of course, as a counterpoint, CRYING for 2 minutes, but these types of actions need to be rehearsed and require a lot of energy, and it could be probably too theatrical… maybe for future actions?
[1] FlashForward is an American television series, adapted for TV by Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer, which aired on ABC between September 24, 2009 and May 27,2010. It is based on the 1999 novel Flashforward by Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. The series was cancelled in May 2010. The series revolves around the lives of several people as a mysterious event causes nearly everyone on the planet to simultaneously lose consciousness for two minutes and seventeen seconds on October 6, 2009. During this "blackout", people see what appear to be visions of their lives on April 29, 2010, a global "flashforward".
It was announced in June 2010 that ABC would not be renewing FlashForward for a second season. (Wikipedia)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I am fully aware that there is nothing new about this Flashmob action, but I am not proclaiming a revolution in the art world! More modestly, I suppose, I would like to gather some people who are kin to try to experience the city differently; by participating to this small gesture YOU will have a chance to appropriate it, and to project your own meaning to it.
‘If art can change life, this is not the role of the artist to change the life of individuals’.
To me, a work of art has to be inspiring; one way to know if it is successful is to measure how much it does affect me, reflect on me and how much it does give me the will to be creative.
When Joseph Beuys says: “everyone is an artist” it doesn’t mean that we all have to be painters, sculptors and so on, but that in our everyday tasks, no matter what we are doing, we should be creative, imaginative.
To continue on famous quotes, I would recall Robert Filliou with this slogan: “art is what makes life more interesting than art”.
This flashmob is a potential and temporary ‘space’ of emancipation. It functions as an opening to imagination or even a ‘glitch in the Matrix’! I am interested in the experience of the participants as much as in the feelings and interpretations of the observers.
Maybe, it is also playing a counterpart to what artists _ if supported increasingly by private funding _ will have to produce: ‘marketable’ objects…
Maybe this is an interrupted action, a waste of time and of energy, a gratuitous act, a non-productive activity.
Maybe this is a will reconnect with nature and the adventurous, ‘heroic’ figure of the romantic artists, or with the playful gesture of the situationists…
Or maybe, this is just not art.
Arnaud Moinet
19 March 2011
