KEYNOTE SPEAKERS THREE:
IAIN FORSYTH AND JANE POLLARD IN CONVERSTATION WITH CERI HAND

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard work collaboratively and are pioneers of the current trend in art practice exploring re-enactment as an artistic genre. Their work has been highly acclaimed, from their first live project in 1996, ‘The World Won’t Listen’, to the seminal ‘A Rock N Roll Suicide’ at the ICA in 1998, their work continues to engage with the ‘soundtrack underpinning everyday life’.  They recently exhibited ‘Silent Sound’, as part of the Liverpool Biennial.

"The magnitude and sensitivity of this engagement should not be underestimated. Its terms, beyond any binary, liberal accusations of exploitation, dared to embrace, more extremely than before, the tragic flaw lying between chance and action that makes Forsyth and Pollard's epic structures of re-performance such extraordinary works of art."
Ian White, Art Review

What follows is a summary of the main themes and lines of enquiry that emerged in the conference paper. It is therefore a partial and edited record of proceedings. Iain and Jane were in conversation with Ceri Hand, Director of Metal, Liverpool.

Jane: Here’s what we’d like to do, look at different ways that we’ve used repetition through accurate re-enactment and sound.
We thought two things; we’d look at four pieces of work and carve up the hour in relation to it. We will start each section with a new piece of work-saying what motivated us to do it and what our aims and objectives were in each piece

 We asked Ceri to come along because we felt uncomfortable talking about our work and didn’t want to do a straight forward artist’s talk and thought Ceri would be a good lead through this,helping us think wider than the standard artists gallery talk

Beginnings of Re-enactment
 (First work discussed)  This was our fifth major live event made in 1998, Rock and Roll Suicide. It is a full on accurate re-enactment of David Bowie’s farewell concert as Ziggy Stardust at Hammersmith Odeon. This was our first full attempt at working with re-enactment, we had previously used ideas of re-enactment trying to make work that emotively immersed an audience before they analytically engaged with it.  We are always looking at ways to draw the audience in. We are not really interested in the past and don’t use re-enactment to look at the past, it is more the way that it lets us engage or reflect on the present.

Ceri-Do you think its almost a safety net (re-enactment), in reclaiming things from the past the audience have a meshing, traces of the past, first experience of youth, drawing something from that energy allows an immediate engagement?

Jane: When we first thought about it we had a half baked theory that in attempting to restage the past, your experience of it, that in the present you would be more liberated to become involved in it, that is creates a
psychological  state of being freed up…instead of being in the moment and experiencing which can also somehow  paralyse the experience so in some ways you are not fully experiencing it.
In re-enactment the audience know what to expect- the experience is unsurprising and surprising all at the time. There is an oscillation between the two conditions, they say its what I expected and not what I expected. In this situation the audience can make a decision that they want to get involved, “I am choosing to this’,  so they can participate in a much more active way.

Ceri-more empathy with the performer?

Iain the distance is important

Research and Process

Ceri say something about processes, the research that you do and the decisions you make. Who do you choose and why?

Jane we take on a role where we become one of the most annually retentive fans you can imagine-you have to get into that role. We read fanzines go to record fairs etc, anything to get into the head of the fan.
We like performers that have an extra layer of character that helps you get inside them…so for Rock and Roll suicide we asked the actor to become Bowie and then take on Ziggy, so in all of our choices there is generally something that gives them all an extra dimension

We get obsessed by details, we have a strong belief that if we take care of the small details in relation to the original, or the spirit of it, then it will work, there will be a kind of truth in it.

What makes it work?

Ceri  there is always the possibility of failure-does it feel a tense moment?

Iain –I think it’s the gaps that give the process validity-just recreating something is quite redundant

Taking care of the details unpicking what is important to that moment-the slippages and gaps are what makes the work
From live re-enactment to recorded re-enactment-‘File Under Sacred Music’

Iain  the next work was made at the ICA, London, ‘File under Sacred Music’ ( ) is an extension of work with re-enactment. There is a well- known bootleg tape of the Cramps performing at the Napa mental institution in…. The tape has famously done the rounds and achieved cult status due to the difficulty in getting hold of it.  We wanted to re-enact the bootleg tape, not the performance

Jane-lets show a min or so…. So we put a band together ourselves this time, we wanted someone who could understand what it felt like, to be a band, to be young. We worked with three mental health arts organisations in London and asked them how they felt about being involved, they then became the audience on a closed set.  So this was quite a big move for us, moving from a live event to a recorded one. We were concerned by loss of liveness, we’ve always worked with the power of the moment and with this piece the work was just the staging of the video and we were concerned about  how that would work. In this instance we were trying to channel the past rather less than we were trying to replay it…

Ceri- it was restaged but you also wanted to get the grainy quality of the bootleg, the ‘slippage’ in this instance was that you were filming a live audience

Iain –what was interesting was that we worked with a cameraman who put down shots reflecting the way the camera would have moved etc in the original, so we could get as true to the action of the original as possible, to the spirit of it

Ceri- the audience went for it in a big way-did it play out as you imagined it?

Jane- I imagined terrible things such as more direct interaction with the camera which was the central performer. We had the camera points marked so it was clear who was in shot and who was out of shot, there was loads of stuff just out of shot,the camera only saw what it needed to

Ceri was this disappointing?

Jane  we didn’t ask anyone to ignore the camera, we thought there would be more arsing around in-front of the camera but it didn’t happen. We did the performance twice, the first was dominated by three characters. The second time, again it was like people knew what to expect and so made decisions about what they did

 

Silent Sound

Jane Silent Sound (2006)is our most recent work, it was made for the concert hall at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, for the Liverpool Biennial. The hall had been the site for Victorian performances of séances by the Davenport Brothers. We were interested in the idea of the Victorian public performance with its clashing of science, spectacle, information and entertainment and we wanted to recreate that. So this was re-enactment on a different level but still involving recreation and the idea of the performative. In this work there is a correlation between the idea of mediumship, channelling the past and the subliminal use of sound to achieve that.
We performed on the same stage as the Davenport Brothers and in the small hall that hadn’t been used for 20 years and was re-opened for the occasion Recreating the Davenport’s spirit cabinet we performed in a soundproof booth, repeating in unison single sentence throughout the hour long performance. This was inaudible but was transmitted subliminally to the audience via sound wave frequencies and ionisors that would intensify this experience, echoing the mediums channelling of messages from the dead.
We collaborated with Jason Pierce from the band Spiritualised who composed the music that was played live and with Dr Ciaran O’Keeffe, a leading authority in parapsychology at Liverpool Hope University, who had also appeared on TV’s Most Haunted.

Ceri there was a real sense of anticipation leading up to the event-people being made to queue and wait to get into the hall. Tickets were arranged so that you sat next to someone you didn’t know rather than someone you came with, so that normal comfort zones were interfered with. Throughout the performance there were lots of physical and emotional reactions by some people, by others none, this very much depended on where you were sitting in the hall and how the soundwaves were reaching you.

Jane Yes we very deliberately arranged this. This was a departure for us in terms of re-enactment but it utilised many of experiences with re-enactment and allowed us to create something very site specific. Its repetition lay with the strategy of the repeated phrase and its communication to the audience

The final work discussed was-Walking After Acconci (RedirectedApproaches) 2004

Talk Ends

More information on Iain and Jane’s work can be found at www.iainandjane.com