Transcript of the in-conversation between Alice Channer and Lucy Clout at IPS on the 17th of July 2010. As part of the exhibition “manual non manual manual”. The conversation came out of discussions which took place between us during the week we spent at the Hex summer colony.
Matt Williams introduces the conversation and Rebecca Bibby, who is recording the conversation. Lucy and Alice sit framed by “floor plan one”, the sound of church bells runs throughout the event.
Rebecca; okay.
Lucy; okay so I’m going to introduce Alice who,… I can’t remember what my introduction was going to be? Well I can welcome you anyway. Welcome Alice Channer, sculptor and drawer. I think the first thing to say is that when I asked Alice to do this in-conversation with me, I told her it was because we spend a lot of time talking about art in private and so it seemed it might be interesting to take that conversation somewhere public. Which I still believe is true. But what came out of that discussion was the realisation that though we do talk about making art all the time we don’t necessarily talk about the finished product very much. So maybe today we can have a conversation that is to do with making as well as the work in this room. This show is a lot about making, anyway, welcome Alice Channer.
Alice : Thank you. I think the interesting thing about that is that we were talking about how often when you have an in conversation you’ll invite someone who’s a little bit outside the work, to help you position yourself a little outside of it. And speaking from that position we were talking about trying to include a little more subjectivity in it, which I think is a useful way into the show. So I wanted to start by asking about Her over there (Alice points to video projection) this character in the video work and who she is? What is she and why is she dressed in this way? Is she you?
Lucy; I try to talk about her as Her; she is not me.
Alice; why is that?
Lucy; the video’s came about after a long time of making straight, live, performance. The video here (manual non manual manual) has an obvious historical and concrete relationship to performance but is made to only be shown in this recorded form. And the great revelation of doing that was that the woman in the video work was readable in a different way from the woman in the performance. The woman who is flattened by the video work became a lot more like an object and so, if I understand your question, it’s not a question of character but one of agency.
Alice; how is that different from making live performance?
Lucy; because I think that my primary interest in live work is about an audience’s, or human beings, ability to read bodies and the way that reading reflects back onto the body of the audience. But (and I’ve said this 100 times to you before Alice, sorry I guess that’s going to happen today) but that encounter of reading is so loud that it stops the reading of the nuances of other less charged objects within the work, so within the video I can claim more non-human based nuance and deliberateness whist still able to play with audience relations.
Alice So you turn yourself into an object?
Lucy; I create an object that looks an awful lot like me, which can employ the languages of a humanoid object.
Alice; and what do you do to create it? For example what are you wearing? Describe what you are wearing.
Lucy ; In “manual non manual manual” I have on two pairs of black tights, a black leotard and a black unbranded puffer jacket. And around my neck is a kind of weight, again black, it’s called a bob weight, you use it in the hairdressers to push down your clothes so that the hairdresser can cut a good bob on you.
Alice; what about the haircut and the other elements in the character?
Lucy; The haircut is a good thing for me and you to talk about. Much of the movement in the video comes from small gestures of the head which move the hair, and hand movements which fuss with the hair too. We often get our haircut together, me and Alice, and there’s something in the work which is informed by that that funny intimate experience. It’s a shame this isn’t being videoed because there is a tick in the film which is slightly like a reciprocated tic between me and you about pushing down the fringe. The haircut is really important, a lot of the video is about an HD recording of shiny hair, which is being swished around. There has to be some vanity in this work.
Alice; it’s like she’s really aware of how she presents herself. Or the formalities of, you called it “self presentation”, it’s similar to framing…
Lucy; yeh,
Alice; or making a floor plan.
Lucy; she is attempting to imagine how she appears from the outside, I don’t think she is necessarily doing a perfect job of it. People often don’t do very good jobs of managing their presentation of themselves despite putting almost full time effort into it. There is a framing thing with the hair, haircuts are sold as framing the face, right.
Alice yeh, which relates to this eyebrow work?
Lucy yeh
Alice; In what way?
Lucy; (laughing) You’re good at this Alice, I knew you were the right person to ask.
Lucy; there is a work called “untitled eyebrows” which has various different configurations, which was shown maybe 4 or 5 time in different space and it was essentially a length of mdf board roughly as deep as a head, cut to the width of various spaces, and hung on a set of pulleys,
Alice; it’s like it makes a fringe or an eyebrow for the room. Sort of. What would you say about the style which it has been made, there are many ways to make a fringe or an eyebrow.
Lucy; I think the important thing with that is that it’s an oddly discreet object, considering that it is a massive piece of mdf hung in a doorway or over a desk. It’s trappings; the actual rope with which it is hung on (which is sash cord for windows) and the pulleys and the eyelets all could come from any DIY shop any market. And that level of DIY, of things made within the constraints of the body, of what I could do, that I could make this thing in a day and it always related to my body in a certain way.
Alice; one thing I really wanted to make sure of was that we didn’t just talk about the video. So lets talk about the other objects in the show, for example “floor plan one” which is just behind us, you were saying how you made eyebrows related to how you made this. What’s important about the way it’s been constructed?
Lucy; The greatest part of the volume of “floorplan one” is this white painted dowel. Throughout this exhibition and in most things there are these little plays with the language of the gallery directed between the imagined neatness of it and the reality of it. This wall (points to the wall on which “floorplan one” hangs) which is really obviously made of these three and bit scruffy boards, which, of course, still works as a wall, but isn’t an abstract institutional thing, it’s not only made by humans you can really see how they made it (laughs). What I like in other peoples work is when art feels like a space where things can be made, well shoddily is the wrong word but to a low spec, and despite these existing so obviously within a market place they are not focus grouped, not pre-ordained as successful products.
Alice; you told me that when you made the video you did so in front of a mirror. And it seemed really important that it was you looking at yourself. But when I look at the objects in the show, for example “sleepers”, there is something that they do that is to do with mirroring the convention of the gallery. They look like… well they make me more aware of the fire extinguisher.
Lucy; good! Well, the mirror is actually a tv screen, that I have underneath the camera, so that I can make eye contact with the imagined viewer, or near enough eye contact
Alice; so you’re watching yourself
Lucy; well I’m watching myself in reverse, well not in reverse, in this reality that you don’t ever see.
Alice; you’re watching your work being made, as it’s being made
Lucy; yes, but with a funny delay of comprehension. There’s some symmetry in this video, and so a lot of what I am doing when watching the screen is trying to maintain that symmetry. But there is a little moment of alienation when I can’t actually work out which hand is the hand waving in the monitor because I’m not used to it, that’s gotten into the work and I like it.
“Sleepers” stand in for me for the odd objects of a museum, the temperature controls, the bug traps or whatever. The things that maybe one time in ten I will walk up to and peer at to see if it is an artwork or not. They are outside the language of the space, but you are meant to ignore them, and you can kind of ignore them
Alice; it’s like they are pretending to be invisible. In the Art Now space, there’s this huge skirting board that I became aware of, and there are these other things that you became aware of
Lucy; I couldn’t believe that the walls were so crummy, and it made me realise not that those walls were bad, but that the walls were bad everywhere, you become totally blind to these things. It is funny particularly in relation to the amount of time art students spend picking and polishing walls for their degree show. The skirting board was bonkers. So yes, I hoped the positioning of these things would point to the other things that you do and don’t see, fire extinguishers and exit signs.
Alice; When I came into the international project space and sat down to watch the video I had a moment when my feet were on the floor and I could feel there was something under them. You’ve put these lines of tape in front of the chars and I could feel my feet scuffing on it, it’s got a texture, and a self-consciousness. Then I looked at the video and I looked to the side of it, and it was it was as if I was part of another object in the show. Is that what you are trying to do?
Lucy; it is what I am trying to do…. Or at the least those pieces of non-slip tape on the floor refer back to those earlier performances. I can’t hope to know the experience of the audience but I can tug on it (catch it?) in certain ways.
Alice; you could say that it was to do with distancing. It is sort of saying “your feet go here and the work is over there”
Lucy; there is always a distance. There is the distance between Her mind and the one she is imagining in her audience. I have referred to manual non manual manual as a video performance, but visually it is a picture plane really. There are these objects that are more like pictures or words rather than props, a feeling of separation is part of the possibility of communication.
Alice; you have this phrase “self conscious support acts”. when sitting on the chair it was almost like I was one of those self conscious support acts. It’s as if I am in being put in the position of the fire extinguisher or the floor plan.
Lucy; well you kind of always are aren’t you? The maker of the work and the “you” of the audience kind of slip pass each other somehow. Even when you’re acknowledged it’s never you who acknowledged it’s a generic body.
(matt loudly opens some wine and whispers “sorry”)
(GLUG GLUG GLUG, church bells are still ringing.)
Lucy; erm
Alice; to go back to the body there are loads of things I wanted to ask you about this you have this other phrase “the eloquently ineloquent body”. I want you to talk about that and I want you to also talk about whether the body in the video is gendered.
Lucy; the eloquently ineloquent body…. (laughs) we’ve talked about this phrase
Alice; this is great, it’s funny because it’s never the kind of phrase we would use in conversation, those are the phrases you make up to be able to talk to other people, I actually felt quite privileged to hear you use it because you’d never usually use that with me
Lucy; No I wouldn’t. Alice is the first person I showed this video to. I had no way of projecting it so I made her sit on the side of my bed and watch it on my laptop, with headphones, which was a particularly particular experience, and I just sat next to her and tried to gage what she was thinking about it via her expressions whilst pretending to read Baldessari Tate catalogue
alice; you’re right about it being important that it is an image, because it didn’t feel odd watching it at that scale. Which divorces it further from performance and makes it more of an object
Lucy; yes I think “3 (buh buh buh) proposal for a collating machine”, the video I made before this was more like a performance. The scale of the person in the video was more important, maybe that was directly because there was much more movement in it, where it is mainly the head and eyes that move in this one. The Eloquently Ineloquent Body is a phrase I’ve used since the performance days, it was my dating phrase.
Alice; a curator dating phrase?!
Lucy: for sure.
Alice; I like it. if you think of something like a Marina Abromavic performance there is nothing ineloquent about her body
Lucy; indeed, though that phrase is also about my object work. It’s about thought being lumpy and bodies describing that very well. I don’t want to make work that always smoothes over hesitation, work where you don’t see the …. Err..,.. well the “eeer”.
Alice; we had these parallel educations; Goldsmiths BA, which is meant to be “the conceptual school” and then Royal College Sculpture Department with it’s reputation as this crafty sort of making place, which could be two polar opposites. I always saw that as a division between the mind and the body. That’s been played out in a lot of contemporary art, especially historically, how does that relate to performance? Is that what you’re saying when you were talking about thought and the body being awkward together?
Lucy; Yes it is. That dualism persists and re-emerges in many forms, but I am interested in how that debate is galvanised by a performance practice.
Alice; do you think this affects the reception of the work? I’ve always thought that a legitimate response to your work is to feel awkward or be perplexed and I think that’s because part of what you are interested in is that those emotions are part of human experience. So they are part of what it is for you to be making work with your body. How do you think that influences the reception of the work? For example when we were away at the Hex Colony you showed your video to another artist who didn’t know your work at all and whilst I think he enjoyed watching it and wanted to know more about it the first thing he said about it was “that was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen”.
Lucy; that response is not uncommon.
Alice; because there is an awkwardness in the work.
Lucy; Yes there is, and it is so necessary for me that an audience might have to struggle to orientate themselves within the work. There is also a part of me that personally enjoys the conversation stopping potential of screening one of those videos.
Alice; (laughs).
Lucy; There’s some joy in meeting an audience members eye and realising “oh you thought you were going to get entertained!”. Not that they are all that un-entertaining, there are some jokes even in this video. Though I think that using humour can evoke the same problems oddly, which is an unsureness about the motivation of the woman in the piece. I don’t mind that I often end up having conversations with people about the work quite along time after they’ve seen it. Alice you know I see a lot of humiliation in every day life and if my work can join in with that then I am part of a greater movement!
Matt; if you can amplify that?
Lucy; amplify that. (talking louder) okay
Matt; Yeh?
Alice; which goes back to our discussion that when “manual non manual manual” was being made you were looking into a mirror.
Matt; it’s an exaggeration of the gesture, or amplification of it.
Lucy; oh right, yeh!
Alice; and a relationship to scale too?
Lucy; There is a relationship to the scale of humans. Maybe this is a tangent but there is something about looking at art which can quickly remind me of the scale and potential of my physical self through a feeling of hysteria that I might unconsciously flail and break things. Or alternatively I wonder what magnitude of bodily freak-out would be necessary to dent the thing presented in the gallery.
Alice; do you mean as a viewer you are confronted with something that’s really awkward?
Lucy; yes and that the awkwardness would be yourself and yourself in relation to a valuable set of things…
Alice:… and conventions
Lucy; it’s yourself in an exceptionally mannered situation
Alice; I think that’s what your work does: I think you’ve just summed it up.
Lucy; great, about time!
Alice; so lets go back to that moment when I sat down on that chair with my feet behind the lines.
Lucy; I think you have a particular understanding of this. You are very sensitive to the manners of a place and the conventions of expressing how you’re meant to behave. I tend to be compliant and I think you are less so, but it is the constant reading and internal negotiation with those mannered situations that I am interested in.
Alice; I think that the show as a whole is a lot about what it is to make a show and what it is to make a show here. And you being very aware of what the conventions, rules and responsibilities are and trying to highlight those. It is incredibly simple, but that’s relative to what it is to be an artist and turn up in a space and put on a show, but it is also about what it is to be a human being and get up in the morning and get dressed and constitute yourself and speak.
Lucy; yes it’s about a basic, the most basic, language; creating yourself and feeling out the possibilities and boundaries of that.
Alice; but are you romantic about that? because I think artists have often thought “can we go beyond that and be our true selves…”
Lucy; (laughs)
Alice; (laughing). Okay there doesn’t seem to be anything of that in the work but then neither do I find it….
Matt; subservient.
Alice; yes.
Matt; there’s kind of an awareness of gallery etiquette, that’s what I think…. It’s about etiquette as much as anything else.
Lucy; sometimes the gallery feels incidental to it, like the gallery is just the place where I can have this conversation I want to have. But the why and the what of the fact that this conversation is possible only here is part of the language that the conversation is spoken in, and that is exciting.
Alice did you see the John Baldesari show?
Lucy; no, I read the catalogue whilst you watched this video though!
Alice; so what does it mean now to be an artist making work that points to the conventions of making an exhibition? Is it site specific for example?
(All laugh)
Lucy; it’s language specific, but it can’t be Site Specific, that’s a historical term, and those conditions have passed.
Alice; But I don’t think it’s just to do with the gallery, or what it is to make an exhibition I think it is to do with what it is to be a human being, and that’s why it isn’t to do with gender. It is to do with being a human who happens to be a woman.
Lucy; but then we’ve just talked about being acutely sensitive to the way any object describes norms and expect behaviours. People exist in my work only as socially mediated beings, even in something like “eyebrows”, people are kind of acknowledged as separated individual readers but they are also negotiating their place within an audience. We might not be able to step outside the subjectivity we started out with to understand what is common, and that is understood within the video pieces, but I experience the manners of things very often in relation to expressions and expectations of gender roles.
Alice; I think she is a human first and a woman second
Lucy; I think so too. But maybe I would never know.
Matt; I was just thinking about the relationship between the video and the structured forms of the “studs” drawings. When you were talking about the stripes and how they suggest of control the viewer, it seemed like a passive aggressive kind of thing. The way the space is being controlled by these recognisable objects and the framing of the drawings are this passive intervention, can you just talk about that. sorry to interrupt.
Alice; everything in them is foundational, the vertical page the black line, they’re small but the things that are drawn, like a bracket or a hinge, or a hook, these things are foundational. They hold things together
Lucy; yes they do. I think they are foundational, bit in here they are also inactive and so become decorative.
Alice; you mean that’s what happens when you put them in the drawings? They are not drawn in a decorative fashion, they remind me of the curtain
Lucy; There are a few black lines in my work. There is a piece called “a sculpture and some prints” in it a 6ft yellow dowel wobbles between two painted black points on a wall and a viewer can line it up or not and the black lines of “studs” relate to those in a certain way, they are the parameters of something. They obviously relate to the floor things too, they are things that keep things in their place.
Matt; formal ticks?
Lucy; yes those are the formal ticks
Matt; which I guess relate to the frames and the eyebrows.
Lucy; that’s true
Matt; I guess we’ve some to a natural full stop, thanks you very much Lucy Clout, thank you Alice Channer.
Rebecca; okay.
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