Appendix 2 (receipts)

12/10/15 11:24 (How did we do today?)

 12/10/15 14:08 (Terms and conditions apply)

  

13/10/15 14:34 (Heavy product. Please handle with caution)

 14/10/15 11:25 (Let us know)

 

 14/10/15 11:45 (Don't miss out)

 

Bevis Fenner & Noriko Suzuki-Bosco for TANTEO 2015 - What happens when you see a place through someone else’s eyes?

   

Based on the understanding that tourism offers a way of shaping people’s experience of reality through narrative, this one day project questioned the definition of authentic experience when a place is seen through someone else’s eyes. It also brought into question the notion of authorship in tourism and art. Specifically referring to Foucault's concerns about who authorises the author within 'the functioning conditions of specific discursive practices', we attempted to facilitate an imaginative environment in which participants were able to mediate between personally authentic place meanings and those authorised by cultural and institutional discourse to develop their own versions of the truth (Foucault, 1998). Indeed, our belief in narratives or histories as absolute truths, limits our experience of reality. Experiencing a place through someone else’s eyes not only questions the authenticity of experience but also allows us to engage with reality as imaginative play. Through processes of deconstructing / reconstructing 'reality' and authoring / de-authoring 'work', the project attempted to facilitate walking practices that would enable participants to move beyond representational discourses and to re-negotiate new 'truths' of place. We also set out to consider Foucault's question - 'what is an author?' via the nexus of conceptual and material praxis and through the collaborative, artist-led
process itself.

The project began with two groups of participants those from TANTEO and
others who were Bournemouth residents. There were also two sets of guided tour
'scripts' to hand out to participants:

• The first set of 'scripts' were historically 'accurate' documents given to the
residents to guide them through an area of Bournemouth. It was their role to
modify, adapt and personalise the texts by re-writing them as their own
'truths' of Bournemouth. This was done by re-writing the 'scripts' in the form
of written narrative and / or photographic representations or 'texts'
comprised of more open visual and literary forms such drawing, painting,
performance, experimental photography and poetry / poetic prose /
'pwoermds'.

• A second set of 'scripts' had all historical details removed, leaving only
fragmented lexical, syntactical and grammatical information. The new 'scripts'
were be given to core TANTEO participants to carry with them on their walks.
These participants will then use the 'scripts' as structural guides to develop
imaginative narrative responses whilst walking. These new 'truths' will then be
used by participants to generate literary / material / performance responses
of their own.

Participants from TANTEO project

Reflection

Our aim for this project was to use the prepared text/script to open up alternative ways of engaging with place and its’ historical narrative and to question the authenticity and ‘truths’ of such experience. The texts provided structure and anchor point for the participants to imaginatively engage with historical truth to generate subjective freedom and to add a layer of personal narrative.

Note: Majority of the people taking part in the project were ‘visitors’ hence the feedbacks mainly reflect the use of the second set of text/script.

Findings:

Both group of participants decided not to use the prepared text/script very early on in the project. Many found it ‘boring’, ‘too arduous’, ‘too formal (to find your way in)’, ‘difficult to engage with the actual experience because too busy thinking about the words to fill the gaps with’, ‘tourist texts are only skim read anyway’, ‘historical information about historical places are not personal enough to be interesting’, ‘tourist texts take away the humanness of the experience’ and ‘text guides you to read a place in a particular way.’

How can you be guided without being guided into interaction?

Instead, they consciously attempted to find ways to engage with the places on the map in ways that did not make sense.

They:

- photographed

- recorded sounds

- sketched

- engaged in conversation with staff on the premise

- asked local residents questions

- collected objects, etc.

Many attempted to find the ‘unofficial’ narrative, the alternative authentic experience that could be gained from directly experiencing the place.

One of the participants gave examples of two successful artist-led walking ‘tour guides’ that she had experienced in Vienna. The artist created narratives of historical buildings that did not exist any longer and whilst taking a group of people on a guided tour of the city would recite the stories at the locations where the buildings used to be. The absence of the buildings made the participants look even more closely at what was not there. The ‘encounter’ triggered powerful imagination to see beyond what one could physically see. On reflection this idea seems a little prescriptive in perhaps an even more spectacular or touristic way than our dissolved . Is it possible to provide imaginative triggers that allow participants to paint their own pictures in their minds or even to find those alternative images and visually poetic associations in the geographic environment themselves?

The idea of ‘post-tourist’ was also discussed. However it was pointed out that alternative ways of experiencing a place (‘off the beaten track’, ‘extreme tours’, ‘AirBnB’) quickly became catagorised experiences. Words such as ‘unique’, ‘authentic’ and ‘different’ that were used to express certain experiences as being unlike any other experiences were simply set of commercial languages to sell the idea of authenticity.

On reflection, we feel that:

- texts are valid ways to encourage experience but the text/script we had prepared was too complex, too formal and dry

- perhaps we could have worked only with historically ‘accurate’ text and asked the participants to modify that

- a structure or framework to guide the participants in to ways of engaging with the place is important

- the structure needs to envision possibilities for how it might facilitate imagination and creative use by participants

- the structure needs to pre-empt / forsee, possible ways in which it might disadvantage, oppress or exclude participants (see 'responsiveness' in Joan Tronto's 'Ethics of Care')

- whilst it is possible to theorise resistive spatial practices in advance, these cannot be implimented as closed structures to 'fill in', only as cues for improvised 'performances'

- participants need a key or way in to caring about / for spaces, in order to 'reproduce' them through practice

- it is not possible to demand people to be imaginative and to 'dwell' in a place - the imagination requires 'tools'

- in order to see through others eyes, it is first necessary to identify with 'the other' - participants and janitor were both 'the other' at Bournemouth Natural Science Society

- six different locations to cover in one walking session was too many and (still) question:

- how can we successfully create a situation where historical narratives and personal stories are woven together to form rich multi-layered experiences that can be termed as being ‘authentic’?

 

Defamiliarising the Familiar: everyday tourism as the art of everyday life

My latest body of work, recently shown at Winchester School of Art, explores the relationship between tourism, art and everyday life. The work investigates the ways in which we can learn from our experiences of art and tourism practice to develop beyond habitual ways of seeing and being. In this direction, everyday practice becomes as an attentive ethics of care through which we can separate personal ontological value from symbolic or exchange value within the cultural systems of late capitalism. One of the aims of my multidisciplinary practice, which includes painting, collage, photography, video, installation and artist-led projects, is to explore the relationship between art, leisure and everyday life in order to expose the paradoxes and inadequacies of commercialised leisure in terms of reward and liberation. Moreover, I also seek to produce conditions to make visible the affective labour of everyday production as a capitalist resource. Further to this, I use relational practice and processes of authoring / de-authoring, to highlight the ambivalent and paradoxical nature of object production and exchanges within late capitalist systems. 

 

The practices of art and tourism encompass both immersion and reflexive subjectivities and can be used to develop a duel consciousness of everyday life in an age in which it is rarely possible for the everyday to be fugitive or to exist outside of specialist practices. Within the biopolitical structures of late capitalism all practices are specialist within the 'creative' economy, characterised by the de-differentiation between work and non-work. Subjective practices and everyday escapes become affective capital within globalised neoliberal systems. New knowledge cannot exist outside of this logic unless it is a situated and contingent knowledge, formed in the gap between the immersive and the reflexive, as an ethics of everyday practice. Artistic and touristic practices, then, become ways of envisioning alternative ways of being and seeing – of imagining possible futures and entertaining the idea of flux and change in the ungendered potentiality of the moment. Above all, we can utilise art and tourism subjectivities as a means of seeing difference in de-differentiation, seeing through the eyes of the 'alien' other, in order to see beyond the alienating same.

HOTEL (installation views)

The images above are a series of A1 photographs documenting a an installation of my paintings at Urban Beach Hotel in Bournemouth. The gallery display itself becomes an installation, mirroring the pseudo-domestic environment of the hotel. The project originated when I gave ten of my paintings to the hotel on permanent loan. This was not a simple act of altruism, just as neither are the 'value added' creative acts of the front of house staff at the hotel - such as producing beautiful, hand drawn chalk board designs. Whilst their everyday creativities may be considered to be unconditional creative and their emotional labour altruistic generosity, this is muddied by working conditions, the blurring of work and leisure, and the ambivalence of social relations. My creative act of painting could be considered a tactic of 'making do' or of making everyday life more bearable, if it were not for the fact that the paintings have become actors in a relational artwork. This is not as problematic as it at first seems, however, as the paintings, despite attempts to articulate narratives of coldness, exclusion and alienation, in their eagerness towards the objects of tourism become complicit in the pseudo-liberation of commercialised leisure. Despite their critical content, they clearly become commercial objects and await their roles as objects of commerce and the exchange value that the market assigns them. An uncomfortable flicker of being emerges from the work. The images set up the equipment for exclusion and alienation but refuse to fully use it. Instead, seducing the viewer with the expectations of his / her gaze. Their status is always up for negotiation and their meaning always at risk of negation: a constant cycle of dissolution and retrieval. Larger works would shout out their intention “I’m here, look at me, I’m not what you think I am”. The paintings become ephemeral objects, 'snapshot' paintings representing fleeting moments that are themselves fleeting objects. They sit where they are supposed to sit, offering eternal blue skies and complimentary colours to their fellow hotel décor. Thus, there is the suggestion that by handing the paintings to the hotel – passing them clear of both the aesthetic rhetoric of material production and institutional objectification as art – their status is reduced to that of the ready-made. They neither address, demand anything of, nor solicit the expectations of the viewer – they lack the context of the gallery and simply become décor. The negation of their status allows them to exist among things; among the guitars, surfboards and other 'cool' ephemera, which sit dumbly behind the thin veil of the venue’s aura. As mildly distracting ambience, as mise-en-scene, the paintings become part of the backdrop for the actors of everyday life, which instead of absorbing them (as spectators) in the search for meaning in the paintings (as work), is absorbed by those passing through (perhaps as a poetic images) – as meaning not sought, but carried from this fleeting rendezvous. Moreover, their status reduced to décor, they join the affective objects and emotional workers of the venue - providing an unquantifiable 'value added' at no extra cost to the business.

 The Consequences (parts 1 & 2) (installation views)

"The Penthouse - cosy seaside BnB"; a high price for emotional labour'; subtle and covert modification; under the representational demands; playing 'tour-guide' for others; navigating the objects, interests and values that made up 'home'; the devolution of our shared life and an opening out to change and flux; oscillation between private and public, ontological meaning and representational meaning; “we love playing host and welcoming guests into our home”; the desire to go backstage, to penetrate the heart of their host’s everyday life; “before long we were feeling very at home”; something was eating away at the 'staycation' dream; a hub of transient sociality; “we hadn't realised that we shared the bathroom with the hosts”; “records, bands and DJs are an important part of our life”; “we spent some quality time with Bev who was kind enough to mix some '80s music for us”; mutability was key to our success; “Bev's paintings are all over the place and give it a very personal feeling”; emotional selling point; the fallout of aesthetic rhetoric; art becomes commerce, place becomes space, home becomes homelessness; staged authenticity concealed the essence of...


Living Under the Tourist Gaze (in collaboration with Stephen Hill)

Living Under the Tourist Gaze - PIRG blog

 Living Under the Tourist Gaze (installation views)

Representation IV (Mike's holiday photo, Kos 2012)

Rather than face up to the problem of quantifying my labour value as a reproducer of images, I simply recognised the photographer's gesture in comparing his image with mine and made the choice to paint it for him for free. Was this an act of altruism, dissent or cowardice?

Representation IV (Mike's holiday photo, Kos 2012) (installation view)

The end of work vs non-work equates to the end of leisure.

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Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) (installation views)

Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) (SD video)

Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) (HD on Vimeo)

Gift / Exchange (before and after, installation views)

Art practice is about bringing substantive personal meaning and value to everyday life and not letting life be something that is imagined as happening in other places, times or as being created using materials that are not to hand. We are no longer making art, we are making life!

 Representation III (after Harold Baim) (installation views)

  

Representation III (after Harold Baim) (SD video)

Representation III (after Harold Baim) (HD on Vimeo)

 

Situationist Survival Kit for Arts and Spirituality, Poole

"Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good" - David Salle

In March I co-ran a workshop with artists Jason Miller and Jennifer Newbury at the Lighthouse arts centre, Poole. The idea of the workshop was to look at how everyday creative practices can help us to look away from the unsatisfactory solutions of commercialised leisure and to become more resourceful in finding ways to occupy our own minds, rather than let them be occupied for us. The workshop was used to consider the relationship between spatial practice and spirituality as we looked for ways in which to integrate mundane art practices such as drawing, walking, re-imagining spaces and keeping visual diaries into everyday life.

 
Consumer practices are often a reflection of that which is perceived to be lacking in everyday life. From the annual holiday to the DFS sale, there is a sense in which we put our trust in commercialised leisure to transform mundane reality or as rewards for helping to fuel the wheels of capitalism. As pseudo-individualised creativities have become a commonplace part of everyday life, the social and institutional structures through which these are organised have become more transparent or revealed in full; thus exposing their paradoxes and inadequacies in terms of reward and liberation. Yet, we have the power to transform everyday life ourselves through creative practice; in order to live a liberated and transfigured existence in which the mundane becomes a catalyst for identifying intensify personal creative and spiritual inquiry, through practice. Participants were asked to choose from a series of propositions for Situationist intervention tactics to utilse on our planned walk around Poole commercial centre, quay and waterside park. We then returned to the Lighthouse to discuss the effects of our détournements.

The work I produced for the project began with the instruction to observe everything at eye level and respond to what I saw and experienced. I made a series of image / text pieces using the ephemeral snapshots of Poole that I had taken to document my journey. The images are cropped to reference the image sharing website Instagram and the transient nature of online representation. The font is SymLogiDIN by Walter van Rijn.