Unfinished acts, live shaving and completed avocado stones to polish and keep as our own
OR using a tool to make a fool I asked for a ‘long stand’
Using a tool. Function: to mark out and measure to stop flow and keep straight. I would then to mask off his face, write off his vision to focus his view. Focus to draw. Focus to write a sentence or two. Discover other ways to behave and to keep straight, to keep straight; to mark out and to measure. I would then seek my own form of balance: re-setting the foreground or performing and re-writing the stage. Re-set, edit, copy, paste (paste, copy, edit re-set – start again). Re-set edit copy paste. Perform acts that should precede performance – but ‘acts’ in their own write non-the-less written.
Act: hanging up lanterns for soft light to play its resolute twirl of affection. Reason: the home is the object the studio and these objects do transfer and travel.
Act: revealing projections (a projection or two) of shared studio antics. Reason: to reveal process and to show character-intrigue. Projected on to board from laptops (one mine and one his) two different versions in the same resolution, in the same mode of focus, with the same time lapse and loop functions. Laptops seemed to be our lifelines and this is how we began, next to the plant and the tree and the chair the cushion the tea. And these were our portraits self-instructed through type, text exercises in description. Result: self-instructed portraits bringing studio endeavours – findings-out – in to the live act: in text in time in film in words. We would share the shoulders first and then the heads as we stood opposite each other as equals – each of our characters resistant yet to be revealed through the other.
Act: turn on the stage light to make the mould of dramatic effect – to focus again with light upon something soon to be a live act. Spot the chair, the line, and the ‘tool’ the stool prop for the fool: the drawn line ‘drawn’ out for full-spot centricity. Reason: to make shadows of meeting points (the barbers shop next door to Tesco near South Tottenham station, across the road from avocado superstore). We had it then, a masking of photographic-us – a performing power.
It is now that as I sit down in full light from three sources, after three acts and three reasons for doing so – the bringing of lantern light from home, the shared studio light and duality of projectors, and the stage light ‘the reasoning of live act’. It is now that as I sit the masked-collaborator steps out from behind the curtain and follows masking tape along the floor towards me. Fellow creator and opposite, frame-setter, picture maker and ‘record’ button red presser. He crawls his way towards me down the steps, taking a sharp right and down to all fours, from the background and in to the set.
“…I sit unfinished… still. He reaches me and takes away my sight with a blind-fold hidden in the left breast pocket of his black shirt. I can no longer see the audience or their reaction, how are you meant to perform without feeding off their disinterest or avid-eyes? …his sleeves rolled up he then pulls a pair of battery-powered clippers from his right breast pocket, takes them to my head shaped as an avocado. He shaves. Its like being sat back in Surrey Street in Sheffield, not being able to see my own reflection and too young to decide the direction of the blade. He makes a fucking hash of it. But then again we’re all for a bit of flesh left over when peeling an avocado – its what we do with the stone afterwards. That’s interesting. That’s when we’re more …complete.”
