The group decided to attempt to rearrange the furniture and equipment in the seminar and 'common room' at Hebden House, dismantling the equipment and shifting the contents of the room through a 180 degree turn.
Wednesday 7.00 am
(people moving in and out of range of the microphone on the table)
There's a sense in which the dinginess of this space is really different.
This chair was more out, so we had more space and this was closer together.
Let's pull this out and back as far as possible.
I get what we are doing, and then I can't get it. It comes in and out.
Yeah. You come through the door on that side and you feel like you're coming through the door on the other side.
Would anyone like a cup of tea?
Yeah, please.
Chris?
Yeah, I think they're making some coffee out there.
Did you want coffee as well?
No. I'll make Earl Grey in a minute. Are you avoiding that little corridor for health and safety reasons?
There's a gap there.
You shouldn't be able to walk through that bit.
It was more against the wall.
There was a brown blanket.
I'll search for one.
Yeah, there'll be one outside somewhere.
There was a gap there.
Yeah, but not so much.
Because you could walk
You could walk up to the window?
I took that route actually, a few times.
[looking at photographs taken before the space was about to be rearranged]
There were two chairs like that there.
But we also moved some stuff around in the evening. After that photo.
Do you remember sitting there?
But you sat on that side.
No, last night when we were watching the film.
Yeah, this space was
There was one, two, three, four, five - this was here.
So this should move back in the corner back here.
That makes sense also because this is too large.
This seems too
Did anyone sit in that corner? Ever?
No, I think that's the way it was because I remember that gap was like that.
Yeah, you sat there to watch the
I thought I sat here like that? I can't remember what was I don't feel there was a gap there.
I sat there.
Last night?
Yeah, well, I sat in a few places.
Doesn't it feel right?
I'm not sure if there was a gap here.
I don't think there is because I remember remember somebody Lesley, sitting down here during one session but not being
Because it was hemmed in you couldn't get out there.
And not being able to go like this [she demonstrates a movement]. So maybe this wants to come forward.
This wants to come forward?
Yeah, that.
Well, it is true that we've taken up the seminar space to here.
We've gone beyond?
Well, the screen was here, so we've gone too far.
(pause)
In the time after breakfast I'd like to sit down and talk about what we've done.
There was a chair there. I'm not convinced they were turned in like that. But there were a couple of chairs there. I think they were turned out.
Was the screen that high? I thought it had been brought down to make it more
It's the top that's
Yes, it was lower than that. That's how I put it initially and then I noticed that someone had brought it down. Daniel or Lucien.
I'll bring it down and you say stop.
Stop.
( )
It's kind of relaxing, yet strangely unnerving.
Let's just talk now if we've got half an hour.
Will we be near enough to record it if we do it here?
I think so.
These recorders are good aren't they? They take a lot of information.
Were you thinking about it in a particular way as you were doing it?
It's very easy for me to think about it as a kind of anthropological intervention where you might make some change and then see what effect that has, thinking about how people then behave. How quickly do they normalise it maybe? Or what can you begin to think about in terms of how we use space and how we respond to spaces, how we rely on things being as they are?
Do anthropologists make interventions in such a considered way? Or so purposefully?
I think that's the difference. We've done it in a formal way. Maybe more formal than most although someone like Jean Rouch, yes, make very considered interventions in that way, or provocations. But I suppose there's a more general feeling that as soon as you go somewhere and start doing something as an anthropologist you are making an intervention. That's what you are doing, making something visible, even if it's just through your presence. I bet there have been some behaviourist type interventions that could be just exactly this.
Well, there's a cross-over isn't there between some very behaviourist studies of what people do if you put them in a certain situation in a scientific way and the kind done by Jean Rouch
Imaginative provocations.
I remember seeing a film of an anthropologist working in a village situation, marking out the distances, by walking, the foot measurements, marking out the distance between the kitchen area, who slept where, which hut was here, which hut was there, to piece together I suppose some kind of understanding of where space said something about culture I mean I suppose partly I was interested in the way this space we have been using functioned. Not so much in the way it looked, but the way it looked from the function. So when we were turning it around, I was possibly more interested not in 'the screen sits where it sits because we remember how far away it was', but because the kit fits to the projector, so it's relational. But at the same time it became relational because we had different ideas of what was important. So like just now about where these chairs were, you had a photograph, you had a memory, and the photograph, you couldn't quite ... it looked like it was against the wall, but you remembered walking round the back of it, so it's a really interesting interplay between the visual component and the physical
Embodied memory.
Also, how you receive information when sitting there and how you remember how you had your legs, so you could sort of figure out if that couch is getting together in the right way or not.
For me it was not so much that but where this was because I could see just between this there was somebody's head was last night, so I knew that was ok.
So there is an analogy with some kind of representational process where we've shifted stuff but altered it?
Well we've shifted stuff mostly to recreate what it looked like rather than recreate the function of it. Presuming that the look of it had the function embedded in it. So there isn't a door although there is access to it and we could have done it it could have been seen that this is a leisure space, that's a more formal space, there is a door, there is an entry, how do you enter, how do you use the space, there's a top of a table a bottom of the table, and those things are there but that wasn't the primary way of working. It seemed to be a more visual way of working.
The idea that it would be a mirror image made it a visual thing for me and also a mathematical thing that I found hard. But things like 'where was that chair' I remembered through an affective thing because when Lesley sat there I was concerned. And as you say you might be working on a visual basis at one point and then something feeds in and takes over. And so you're using those things together or playing them off against each other.
I think the process also starts off fairly systematically but then it's interesting when it breaks down and you try to retrieve it.
The difficulty of making it a mirror image.
But it would have been an interesting exercise, certain things would have been easier if we didn't have any photographs, and made a point of having to remember at every stage
Just remember?
Try and retrieve these corners fairly vaguely, remember engaging with them, which was the case some of the time because we didn't have the documentation.
That idea of shared knowledge if we'd split up the movement of the room, so different people remembered different things and then see if it actually fitted.
It's like that game Memory or Pairs where you put down pairs and you have to turn them up and remember where they are positioned.
Isn't that what anthropologists do in fieldwork quite a lot of the time, because instead of recording some mirror image of everything you are trying to reconstruct stuff at a later point based on certain bits you do remember.
Yeah, memory is a really crucial thing and also it's a transformative thing. So what I've written about Tracey and Cherie who I was working with has changed each time I've written it, I mean massively, and I'm really aware that I come at it from a different place each time and that's what it's about the interplay of my memories and emotions at the point at which I'm thinking back to it more than, or as much as It's a relational thing that continues through memory and becomes a fantasy.
It's quite nice that at the same stage that we were able to set everything up more or less as it was, you can do as we're doing now and actually sit and remember like last night I was watching some films, I can remember Erika sitting here and at one point being over there and reading that Superflex Book and trying to really pay attention to where I put the book back and so on. It's a replication, it's not trying to remember the actual thing it's trying to restage it.
Would you want to sit here and read that book again? Because what I'm finding is that I'm feeling really different in this space partly because my back is turned to over there I think. The space feels more exclusive.
So you never sat on that side of the couch?
No, I didn't.
I didn't sit there or there or there. But I am sitting close to where I would have sat if we had done more of a different sort of reflection.
So it's not a mirror image, it's turned. It's copied. You know what I mean?
So is this a mirror image?
No, it's not.
That's why I couldn't get my head round it.
That's probably my dyslexia that made me insist. That's why everyone was going alright, ok but I think my mind went to a simple solution, because if we had made it truly symmetrical we would have had to replace everything on the table, you would have had to have shifted everything on the table.
That's when it came up, that's when you thought of it.
It was a quick route.
Because I said 'what about the table? Are we going to mirror those as well?' and you said, 'we can just turn them.'
It would have been complicated because it would have had to be that there and everything else gradually ...
So the room was actually swivelled!
It would be impossible because everything would have to be written back to front.
Of course it's impossible, but I initially drew in the diagram, you know we had the axis here and then this is the projector and this was the Bolex or whatever camera, and I was like turn, turn, turn, and then you said, 'no'.
Yeah, exactly and I was completely wrong, but there's something about seeing that, I don't know if you can see it, but that's the mirror isn't it? Wave your hand. Is it the mirror, or that?
Mathematically, if you do where's a bit of paper
We would have to turn everything round but also switch the position of everything.
This is how I understand it if it's a mirror image - that's reflected there and that's reflected there.
So we couldn't physically have done it we were trying to be
Well we would have had to
If it was the mirror image of this book.
But then you take everything as formal aspect, you don't turn it around.
Well isn't it that?
No, it's a reflection.
It doesn't actually turn. So it would look like that.
But put the book in the mirror image, you can't, right?
You can look at it in a formal way.
In terms of mass.
So what did we do, we flipped it?
We swivelled it, which I really like, because we were talking about being swivelled by both art and anthropology, being shifted or re-orientated.
How much have we done it it sounds like it's quite good we've done it for ourselves because it's made us think through all those things. What do we think it's done or is going to do for the others? Will it do the same thing? It's an exercise for us...
But that's where for me it becomes you used the word 're-staging' and that was the original didn't you say something about restaging? I don't know we could go back and check the record, but that's a term isn't it? I don't really understand what 're-staging' means, whereas I can understand this as an intervention that would cause some shift in people that I could then, if I was interested, observe as an anthropologist. I'm interested in it - like this as a formal thing we've come up with
It's interesting, the first collaborative piece that Bik Van der Pol did together was The Kitchen Piece (1995) [www.bikvanderpol.net] and it was a mirror image really actually a real mirror image, but taking it freely so we didn't copy the booklets and so on. And the kitchen was at this end of the room, in a niche like this and here you had to enter and the space was 20 metres long. In the middle was a glass partition. So here was a door and we built the copy or the mirror image of the kitchen exactly here. And the backside was bits and pieces of wood like a theatre set so you had to walk around it somehow, very complicated, you opened the door and there's this wooden structure you don't know what it is etc and then you find yourself within the two images you know the real and the mirror image. We organised open evenings. Usually we did parties but then we thought maybe like an intervention we do something else because we want to archive intensively this experience somehow. People were just walking around the wooden bits and; pieces and they were like 'hi' and then after two hours or something they were ahhh!
Slowly somehow.
I don't think people noticed it.
People maybe thought we'd rearranged it to do a projection or something and then they really look at the fact that everything's been swivelled.
Especially if nothing special happens. Just the normal things happen in the rehash, the restage. I think for me re-staging is just a very self referential act. That it makes the construction of the space much more apparent. And a conscious placing so that as you come through again, it's the same but you have to find your space because you ask 'where is it in relation to where it was yesterday?' So in a way we do create a bit of a puzzle or a conundrum for everyone to experience. They have to re-find something. They think 'I put my notebook there, so where's my notebook it's over there, that's odd.'
This is so funny. So you put them all back?
Not all, we couldn't find them all.
I think that thing of having to retrieve the past but in a really mundane way, is quite an exercise. In a way we don't normally have to pay attention to these things. So people today will be expecting, who normally sat here or wherever, they left their stuff without really having to think, so it's a bit like doing a drawing where you really have to pay attention to something.
What do you mean by 'exercise'?
Just that, normally, you wouldn't have to do it, it makes you think about the past, it's like re-staging, you really have to think about that original event. Not in an abstract way but in a really concrete way, a specific way, to do with real things and spaces.
I suppose I mean, as an artist, how might you use 'exercise'?
I don't know.
Do artists do exercises?
Yoga if I can in the morning!
So you're not using that as a particular terminology from your profession?
I mean, terminology, I don't know if we share terminology particularly, because 're-staging', the way you are talking about it here suggests you feel we have a shared terminology using 're-staged' and actually I think we all had different ideas yesterday of what that might have meant.
But at the same time you might all use that word. You might all use it in different ways but within that you have a shared recognition I mean I'm not sure I've ever used that term, 're-staging'.
Neither have I.
I haven't either.
Oh, you haven't!
It's not a word we use either.
Ok.
I use it quite a lot.
Do you?
Chris, you were the only person in the room last night who understood what it meant!
It was one of the things that Alfred Court Haddon (1855-1940) did in the Torres Straits.
I suppose I do understand it in that context.
So Haddon, this famous anthropologist who did work on the Torres Straits expedition, created a key moment in defining anthropology. One of the things he got people to do was restage myths, so someone said there's this story, he said let's go out and restage it. But they'd do it on the actual spot so there'd be this thing of pretending to be this figure. And they did drawings and photographs of it.
How would you define forensics then. The police are recreating the aspect or a certain situation that they think should have been like this and find out who might have done it?
Well forensics what they do, when they photograph a certain object is
Sometimes they replay
The Battle of Orgreave by Jeremy Deller is perhaps the re-staging that we're all aware of as artists. [link]
With the interventions of the film team and so on.
Isn't that contained within the idea of re-staging? That of course it has to contain
the presence?
Yes. The re-staging says that it's not just, it can't be what it was
The way I think about re-staging in relation to this, is not what we've done now, it's what people will have to do when
Yes, what will happen.
Sitting here they will have to rethink how they occupied the space maybe that's not re-staging though?
Or will they? Will they?
They will just occupy it, come in and..it is for us more interesting to see what they are going to do I think, whether they come in and just sit in the same place. If we wouldn't have changed it everybody would have sat on the same place, I will be interested to see what they do.
But also if they sit in the same place in a mirror way or a swivel way because I'm sitting in a very similar place in a mirror.
But I also see you as sitting in a similar conceptual space in relation to the openings. And you're like at the head of the table welcoming. You're in a position to be able to see everyone and the exits and entrances. Which is the same as when you were sat at the top of the U arrangement.
Aren't you more in that space at the moment?
Well, if I'm leaving the space I'm going up here. So if I'm coming into this space I'm seeing you. And I'm not necessarily
Then is it important like you were saying, what happens next, its interesting.
You mean how we present, whether we ?
Whether we need to I think we've done. But there is also this question of how people react. And I'm interested if a work is going to have an action, how are we going to know that it has had an action? Do we trust that it does? Do we need to be there when it does? Do we have to record it when it does? Do we have to have a conversation about it? And I think that's maybe about if people ask you "well how do you know if your work works?" And I'm always left wondering how I'm not really sure how and may be that's not really important for me how an audience responds.
It's also about how to surprise people.
Presumably after breakfast people are going to start wandering up here.
We all have projected ideas about how people may respond. Whether they'll come in and occupy the same conceptual space or whether they'll come and completely work with what there is
[whistling]
Keep it under their hats.
It's funny, you could almost just unconsciously justify it as a health and safety thing, there's like rational explanations that you could use.
Do we have to put it all back?
Not really. When we booked the space they asked how we wanted it we could have had it any way really.
If you think of it in terms of anthropology we've been doing a kind of metaphor for anthropology.
Why?
Because we're not copying things but we've shifted things around. Made people think about those connections.
I think it could be a metaphor for lots of other things too. That's one thing I could bring to it but I could bring other things to it as well. I mean I do think its about where you see it from, what place do you see it from.
Do we ourselves already accept this as totally normal?
It's familiar and unfamiliar. Even after we've done it and there's time to have got used to it, I'm still aware of it.
From the other position many more people could see the clock and that was very important.
I think it might be a bit impractical with people going in and out of the kitchen.
Now you can shout 'make us a cuppa' because you can see them making something. It's more like when you come past that screen, it feels to me like you're more contained in this space. To get out, if you walk off to the toilet there, everybody sees you walk off and out. You can't slope off from the back of the room.
I didn't notice there was a door there before.
I only noticed it when Adrian and David started using it to get up and down.
After a while you just stop worrying about where things are, but I think that initial thing of having to pay attention is quite interesting. It's a thing that applies to lots of different disciplines, having to focus on something.