Creating the 'normal' in performance

Something that we found ultimatley fascinating, so much so that when we brought up discussing what was going in this section there was always either a giggle or a groan, was our idea of how impossible it is to represent something as perfectly normal in performance and what that ultimatley said about our pursuit to fit into a norm or the ways in which we attempt to document and repesent 'reality' in art and non-fictional documentation. In particular, was the very diffucult way it was to represent the investement the individual puts into creating their own personal space and the way in which we represent our identities, collecting fragements of identities we recognise in ourselves and storing them, either in physical, virtual or a metaphorical state, in order to help compose a greater understanding of ourselves

I would have liked to spend more time exploring the theories of this and its connection to performance in greater detail. However, the current project was already very complex and we were strapped for time, so it remained as ideas and thoughts as was decideded it will manifested more simply, but still keeping the ideas running through the aesthetic of the piece and through the basic composition of the 'normal' section. 

- Way in which we create our own 'nest', either the personal space of our room when we're younger or when we expand and create a home for ourselves, and the investment the individual puts into the space, an output of identity as well as a medium to help create one's own identity.

For example, one of the very first things I did when I moved into my clinical, boring campus room in first year was put my own nick-nacks, bedding, personal possessions in it to make my own. If anyone walked into my room, even though it was virtually identitcal to every other room in the block to start off with, they would know it was mine.

- How do we feel when we go into someone else's room? We can tell that it is there space also. Even if not something as private as a bedroom, there is still a sense of the owner connected to the material environment. How do you feel entering another person's room uninvited or without them present? How does this correlate to a promenade audience? Do we get the same sense or feeling even if we know its a performance?

- Document our lives through personal possessions

- Other means - diaries, new age of photos, videos,

- Pursuit to document more accuratley, more clearly, truthfully.

- Isn't the desire to document the same as sterotyoing, in that it trys to summarise or simplify a life into a manageable 'document' or text.

- Getting put into a box, dividing up our lives into different, managable areas when yet we are far more complex and multi-faceted. Can we ever truly know everything about ourselves? Even if we get that understanding is it really something that we can mediat and re-present?

- Same as this academic project, hard to capture everything!


A practical influence on this square was the exhibition 8 Rooms, 9 Lives, another part of the Welcome Collection's Identity Project (as earlier featured).

Review by Times Online:

This exhibition is a jumble of what appear to be half-finished boxes. The show looks a bit like a building site. And that’s probably because, in many ways, that is exactly what it is. Identity is more about construction and deconstruction than about a completed product.

Drawing on assorted, often extraordinary and always fascinating, memorabilia from a number of collections, both public and private, this exhibition assembles everything from notebooks, diaries, drawings and photographs to scientific objects, models, letters and plastercasts. It creates a show that challenges us to examine what determines our sense of identity: both our inner, innate sense of self and the idea of self that is imposed from the outside by the societies that need somehow to define us.

Identity, this show encourages us to see, is an amalgam of multiple selves. It’s a fittingly postmodern position to take in an era of face transplants and gender reassignments and electronic avatars

Texts & Links

- Campbell-Johnston, Rachel, Idenitity: who do you think you are?, Times Online, November 24th 2009,  http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article6928532.ece
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX9B9rxgck8&feature=player_embedded