I saw this film for the first time last year and fell in love with it. During this research project it keeps drifting into my mind as it seems to represent, if somewhat more ordered, the approach to the research i have been engaged with.  As to be expected, i find myself constantly expanding my gaze in search of some metaphysical positions to rest upon and then contracting to specific points that are equally universal, but may enable me to place my ideas in more accessible framework.  Maybe it is the space between these positions that i find the most enjoyable; the wondering, slightly lost, in search of something, never quite sure what but when I find it I am certain it’s what I’ve been looking for all along.

.  

 In the film the camera and distances travelled are very formulated, precise and controlled, if only the camera was to split into three and head off in often seemingly random directions, rather than in one straight ordered progression of ten, it would be closer to my approach. It is as if with every page I read there are ten more footnotes to read and then ten more pages and ten more footnotes and ten more pages… I suppose the art is knowing when to stop reading and start making. I have discovered countless new ideas and thoughts that will take time to bring to fruition, and there is still some vital theory i still need to get my head around. With this in mind i have decided not to attempt to cram all of my ideas and findings within the Longhouse project but instead will use Longhouse as a springboard into a larger body of work. I will now make a triptych of work, of which Longhouse will be Phase 1(of 3).

I was delighted to be chosen to take part in Longhouse Action Research programme 2010-2011. After 5 years of working as an artist since my graduation, I feel this is the right time to look back, analyse what is really important for me within my work, understand how I place myself within the bigger picture and how my work can have an impact on current social, political, and cultural issues.

In my work, I create what I call “short-circuits” in the public realm, in order to propose new ways of experiencing daily routines and everyday environments. Audiences’ reaction is at the heart of my practice, and each project takes on the best suited form to create the desired reactions in response to a given context. This led me to develop a wide range of artforms, from physical objects (I Thought It Was Real), to ephemeral interventions and performances (The Man Who Was Everywhere). Most of my works tend to create ‘mysterious’ situations, leading viewers to communicate to try and solve this ‘bug in perception’, and producing small communities united by the experience of a moment.

More information about my work is available on www.laurencepayot.com. Below is a video of The Man Who Was Everywhere.

Recently, I felt the need to give my practice a shift, and accentuate audiences’ direct involvement in shaping the work, moving from active spectators to active actors. I want to give people the confidence of tracing their own proposed versions of how we can experience and shape our daily lives and widen our perceptions.

The aim of my proposed Action Research is to carry out investigations into this new way of working by testing a new ‘system’. I am hoping that this will open new possibilities and will lead to try out a pilot project which I can tour in different cities and develop in the future. The project that would allow me to try this out is called Coincidence and would take the form of an invisible theatre (a form of theatrical performance that is enacted in a place where people would not normally expect to see one, and in which performers attempt to disguise the fact that it is a performance to those who observe and who may choose to participate in it as if it was a ‘real’ event). The project would consist in:

- Gathering a large number of volunteers within a given area to become actors in Coincidence.

- Meeting with groups within the community to decide on the content of the performance and create ‘instructions’ for the actors.

- Performing: by sending simple instructions daily to each of the actor. All the actors would receive the same daily actions (ie. “Say hello to every person you walk passed”), thus potentially creating coincidence, and social patterns within the area.

The first stage of my research will be to develop concepts and ideas within my work, refine the location for my work in general and more specifically find a area to develop a pilot of Coincidence.

One of my enlightened Landscape Architecture students who is looking at the concept of ‘forgotten space’ in Gloucester referred me to this:

It is the ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore’ rant from the 1976 film Network. It is a brilliant piece of oratory, with a message that is completely of our times, and ends with a wonderfully choreographed sequence that shows the domino effect of public ‘demonstration’.

Coincidentally, whilst browsing through the recent edition of Variant magazine that I picked up during a recent meeting at Multistory, one particular piece caught my eye. I offer the following short extracts:

Mario Tronti said :

‘We have to start with disgust at the way things are before we move on to imagining how we’d like them to be.’

- which reminded me of the ‘I’m mad as hell’ chanting.

Also this:

‘Polly Toynbee wrote a great sentence about the savage cuts of the new austerity:

“The price of everything was laid out, but not the value of anything about to be destroyed.”

What does it mean for a symbolic relation to be too expensive, an unbearable burden? The image of the good life is too dear; something has to be sacrificed. The attempt to associate democracy with austerity – a state of liquidity being dried out, the way wine dries out a tongue – is fundamentally anti-democratic. The demand for the people’s austerity hides processes of the uneven distribution of risk and vulnerability. Democracy is supposed to hold out for the equal distribution of sovereignty and risk. Still, austerity sounds good, clean, ascetic: the lines of austerity are drawn round a polis to incite it toward askesis, toward managing its appetites and taking satisfaction in a self-management in whose mirror of performance it can feel proud and superior. In capitalist logics of askesis, the workers’ obligation is to be more rational than the system, and their recompense is to be held in a sense of pride at surviving the scene of their own attrition.’

And, finally, this:

‘The problem is that in their desperation people try to ride the wave of the forms they know,

even when there is no water beneath them nor air to float them.

The problem is that people do not feel that the world is a generous and patient space for them to be awkward in.

In the meantime they remember the good times…..’

Taken from ‘Affect + the Politics of Austerity’ by Lauren Berlant

As featured in Variant Magazine 39/40. http://www.variant.org.uk/

“… amid the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace…most people actually still live in places like Harlesden or West Brom.”
(Doreen Massey, 1994:21).

My first visit to West Bromwich took place some time in 2004, when I went to watch a performance in the town’s library. I remember the library well. It had the same scratchy carpet, stuffy, central-heated atmosphere and municipal smell (a mixture of disinfectant, aging paper and human bodies) as every other local authority library I had visited.  But unlike the 1960′s modernist buildings that housed most public libraries I’ve known, this was an ostentatious Victorian edifice.  In particular, I remember the green-tiled entrance hall, smooth like the inside of a shell.

If the library was distinctive, the town centre was not.  It consisted of a 1960’s style semi-indoor shopping centre, housing the type of ubiquitous, ‘downmarket’ shops which often find themselves pushed towards the margins when towns are regenerated or ‘smartened up’: Poundlands, Greggs and all sorts of charity shops and pawnbrokers.  I remember thinking that I could be in Preston or Burnley or Gateshead.  Yet, it was the generic town centre, rather than the memorable municipal library that sparked my interest in West Bromwich and suggested it as the focus for my research.  For me, it is West Brom’s ‘everyday-ness’ that makes it interesting.  In a world of tourism and place-marketing, West Bromwich is most certainly not ‘a destination’.  It is a historic place, yet its history hasn’t been repackaged as ‘heritage’; despite the opening of the Public in 2008 it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a ‘cultural hub’; and it is definitely not a retail Mecca.  In fact, there is almost no reason to visit the town.

At the same time, West Bromwich is a visibly globalized place.  If the effects of global capital can be understood as a spectrum, with the burnished skyline of Canary Wharf at one end, and a sprawling Mumbai slum at the other, then West Bromwich is somewhere in the middle.  Polish food shops, Sikh health centers and multi-lingual Police warning signs tell of migration and the volatile nature of capital, (which never stays in one place for long), whilst hoardings conceal urban clearances, soon to be occupied with the latest local premises of a multi-national corporation, one which, incidentally, began with a shipment of tea – that most English and ordinary of drinks.

West Bromwich is a place where encounters with the rest of the world are both frequent and mundane. No melting ice caps, trading-floor dramas or sweatshop deaths here, simply the monotonous practices of everyday life that happen in the type of place where most people still live.  And it is this familiar sense of boredom, I think, that makes West Bromwich fascinating.

(what happened to the balloons)

When I proposed the ARB in September 2008, I had just completed a work called Skymirror. The work comprised 2000 solar lights laid out on a hillside in the shape of the constellation of Pegasus.

Of course, one of the really big questions was what effect human weathering would have on the piece - it created a lot of tension. Some people were worried that the layout would be changed but we were quite keen that this would happen.  However we were all nervous that a concerted effort might result in the whole thing being destroyed – perhaps even before the opening night!

In the event, the work stayed virtually untouched. There was very little theft and a few changes which we really felt were more people engaging with the work than vandalism – although others disagreed.

This came at the end of the summer off the back of installing Luke Jerram’s Street Pianos in London, Blackburn and Burnley and Belfast. Street Pianos is a simple but very successful work which places pianos in the street for the public to play.  It has the similar tensions. How will the pianos be looked after? Inevitably you encounter loads of naysayers when you install the pianos. Inevitable some are weathered by both humans and the elements. But the crucial questions is whether this prevents Street Pianos from being a clever and successful work. I would argue not.

Previously we’d been in the same position wondering whether our tented silhouettes at the Big Chill would survive (which they did). And in Flashlight, most of the lanterns were taken by the end of the night – which made the clearing up process very quick and easy!

I think this raises a really interesting question about what happens to work when it’s left in public or open space as a result of people being there and how people interpret this as interaction, damage, vandalism.

At the time of proposal, it seemed that this would be a critical question to know more about in terms of moving my practice forward – it seemed that as we scaled our work up and up, the potential impacts would become more severe and risk damaging the work more.

I felt that it would put us in a far stronger position to be able to got to funders with some answers.

Since then, however, there have been two key changes.

1. My practice has shifted a little. The great news is that things have really taken off and have some very large scale projects running until the end of September. But with this has come a broadening of scope. I’m excited about this and feel that it’s of huge benefit. Major projects on the cards are now – work in a special school, another Skymirror installation, a community focussed installation, a mixed arts performance piece with young people.
2. The balloon experiment in West Bromwich in November demonstrated an issue with the small scale method I’d proposed to evaluate Human Weathering. It doesn’t test the issues of scale on the impact of Human Weathering. Steal a single balloon and 20% of each installation was taken!  In the event, all the balloons were taken within an hour and little was proved.

My feeling was that, perhaps, the focus of my ARB should change to reflect both these circumstances. An email exchange and conversation with lead artist Scott Farlow really helped crystalise these thoughts.

It’s a really important part of my practice that I can continue to grow and take on larger and larger projects. To do this, I need to be able to look back and learn from and take inspiration from project that I’ve done – and prove it.

I’m still really interested in Human Weathering as a concept and think it’s still part of my practice, but feel that the evaluation needs to be much broader than that.

My proposal then is to evolve my ARB to become a project to create a framework which I can use to evaluate my work. This would be an ongoing process. I’d see the ARB as only covering the creation of the first draft. It would be interesting to see if I can use the framework evaluate itself!! I’d propose extending the ARB a little so that I can try the framework out and continue to develop it over the next few projects. I think that real-world evaluation would be the most effective.

I was invited to take part in a Creative Partnerships project in January and February.  It wasn’t something I’d done before and I was really excited to be involved.

The project ran in two Cheshire schools looking at the enquiry questions:

• How, and in what ways can a creative exploration of the local natural environment support a yr1 class to develop an understanding of diversity?
• How, and in what ways can music and dance develop a yr1 class’ understanding of diversity?

Year 1s are about aged 5.  What, I wondered, would diversity mean to a 5 year old?  Working with the lead artist, we decided to tackle the project by exploring similarities and differences.  Baselining activities in both the schools indicated that the childrens’ sense of their own culture was limited and heavily focussed on TV shows.  For the project to be successful we needed to start by reinforcing cultural references and a sense of identity.  Only then, we felt, would the children be able to understand, appreciate and value a culture other than their own.

And how succinctly sum this approach up.  Elaine Speight already had the word.  Placemaking!

So, let’s put some ideas to the test!

I began by thinking about what I could arrange in public space  and thought that balloons might be a good option.  I didn’t want to use light – particularly because I needed to work in the daytime – and who doesn’t love balloons?

And so it was.  Exactly a year after Ffosfforescence, I was back trawling the party shops of Manchester for latex bargains.  They’re not all that cheap it turns out – but I was excited to find out how easy it was to buy helium which I had always assumed was available only to bone-fide childrens’ entertainers.

Collaborating with the other members of the bursary, we made a series of tags to go on the balloons with instructions such as ‘take me home’ or ‘put me somewhere else’ to see whether people would read them and how they would be interpreted.  The balloons were arranged in clusters and left in West Bromwich town centre.

About Me

My practice is concerned with the concept of place as a social process, and examines specific places through the experiences, practices and attitudes of the people connected to them. I am particularly interested in marginalised places or those that are undergoing change, and the extent to which the existing practices and emotional connections within them can influence their future.

My previous projects have included mapping the activities that take place in a disused railway tunnel in Lancashire, and working with a group of aspiring writers to generate narratives about a Housing Market Renewal area of Merseyside. Since 2005, I have co-curated the In Certain Places public art programme in Preston, Lancashire, and I am currently studying a practice-based PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, which explores the relationship between socially engaged art and ‘placemaking’.

What I’m doing:

My original proposal was to explore the idea of ‘placemaking’ in relation to West Bromwich.  Placemaking is a term which, over the last ten years, has become ubiquitous within public art, urban design and regeneration discourses.  It  is widely understood as a way to confer meaning, or ‘animate’ public spaces, often through the installation of public artworks .  However, I am interested in how placemaking can be understood as an ongoing, everyday practice made up of activities that consciously or otherwise allow individuals and communities to affirm or interrogate their relationship to a place.

Since beginning the action research project, I have become interested in the current redevelopment of West Bromwich town centre by the Tesco Corporation. The development, which will include a cinema, leisure centre, new police station and college, will have a profound impact on the town and its residents.  Many people have welcomed the scheme as it is hoped that it will regenerate what it seen as a run-down and depressed town centre, however others are concerned that the new development will turn the existing highstreet into a ghost town and erase West Bromwich’s ‘sense of place’.

In response, I am currently developing a project that will attempt to bring these attitudes and discussions together and create a new, collective narrative for the town. In particular, I want to connect people who might be understood as official “placemakers”, such as local authority planners, urban designers, developers etc., with those who have an intimate understanding of the place, but not necessarily a direct influence in its future.

I want to explore some or all of these questions through the project (I may discard some or generate more as the project develops):

• How can West Bromwich’s ‘sense of place’ be described and which things/ people contribute to this?
• What will West Bromwich town centre look /feel like in 10/30/100 years time and how does this affect attitudes towards it?
• What did West Bromwich town centre look/feel like 10/30/100 years ago and how does this contribute to its sense of place today?
• How do people move through West Bromwich town centre – where are the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ areas?
• What kinds of stories are told about West Bromwich and who tells them?
• Where and by whom is knowledge about West Bromwich stored and where do different types of knowledge meet (if at all)?
• Where is the power in West Bromwich, and how is it expressed?

I want to better understand the tensions created by putting works of art into public space.

I create landscape interventions and work on a large scale. Everything I create must be left outside and at the mercy of not only the elements but also the public. I separate my audience into three types:

1. visitors and passers by who specifically come to see or who stumble across work and, in a tradition sense, look to engage with it as an art-piece

2. those who don’t interpret work as art but who’s attention is grabbed anyway

3. those who are apathetic or dislike the work and are maybe even offended by its presence

The presence of any members of these groups can impact work – changing from how it was when it was first installed. Visitors and passers by may wear it out by inadvertently bumping into it, others may want to take away a souvenir, some may actively seek to destroy. I work a lot with light and have found that people are very attracted to things that glow!

I want people to engage with my work and consider all responses to be valid forms of engagement. However from the audience’s point of view, these different forms may conflict with each other. I would like to know more about how these tensions can be resolved.

I often seek voluntary help from communities to help with construction. Working in public space creates a good opportunity to do this and allow helpers to move from one audience group to another. However it also raises the possibility that a group seeing ownership of something, will subsequently see it ‘damaged’ by someone else.

I think that it’s possible to become preoccupied with stopping work being damaged. It’s my firm belief that artists and commissioners should take these risks. I don’t think it’s inevitable that work is damaged in public space. As artists, we should strive to create works which incorporate this risk and function in spite of it.

We’re quite comfortable with degradation or change when it’s attributable to wind, rain or shine – or even exhaust fumes.  Blackened limestone or the patina on a copper surface is accepted as giving a works gravitas and a sense of place.  And if that’s not OK, there’re laquer and paint and porticos.  We’ve spent centuries developing ever more sophisticated methods of delaying nature’s inevitable impact.  Why then the problem when it’s caused by people?

Human weathering is, after all, only natural.

Artist Profile

My work is mostly live, but sometimes sculptural and usually exists within the public realm. I play between art and politics, the absurd and the earnest. I always attempt to open up both the internal and external spaces for ridicule and contemplation while attempting not to fall over or fall asleep. Collaboration and participation, either by choice or coercion, are often core to my practice.
I was a founding member of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and have recently collaborated with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Station House Opera and Quarantine.

Action Research Bursary – The Democratic Paradox

For the action research bursary I aim to investigate the ‘democratic paradox’ (Chantal Mouffe) and the notion of inclusion and exclusion within democracy and more specifically digital-democracy.

There are people who live and work in the United Kingdom who are ineligible to vote, either due to age, incarceration, homelessness, lack of citizenship or those who are in transit. These people are a whole subclass in a democratic society that prides it’s self on inclusion. There is a large collection of people within the United Kingdom who are not part of the democratic process but who live by it’s outcomes everyday and who work to support it’s goals and ambitions.
We live in an age in which Britain and America’s main export are ideas, and their leading brand is ‘Democracy’. Democracy is a large global club where, if you sign up to the clubs ‘terms’ you receive new money, protection in the global playground and trading/swapping links beyond you wildest dreams. If you do not join the ‘club’, it may gang up on you and either; slowly cut off your food supply or march into your house and form a new ‘Lord of the Flies’ ‘democratic’ family unit. Democracy is viewed as a friendly, cozy system, something that is open and welcoming, however outside of that process, it is a different case both globally and nationally.
I would like to actively discover what it is like to be politically outcast in a democratic society? How does it affect people’s behavior towards a society they have little power to legitimately change? Is there a better way of allowing people to be part of the democratic process even if they cannot vote, and what ramifications would this inclusion, or continued exclusion, have on political mobility? And how does the rise in digital-democracy expand or contract these issues?
I do not aim to find answers for these problems but to open the wound and poke a little, to play with the problem and see what spills out.