Today I went to visit MOVE: Choreographing You, the current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. I have been asked by the Southbank Centre to deliver tours and workshops for this show to schools, teachers and university students, which is fantastic. The exhibition is a survey of contemporary art from the 1960s onwards with dance and movement as the central curatorial theme. The show features some pretty iconic pieces including Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970) and, thanks to Franz West, some rather esoteric dances with mod-rock sculpture.
Franz West, Passstucke (Adaptives) 1975
Much of the work in the MOVE show appears to act as a conduit for communication or a prop for interaction. But I wonder whether this interaction is a good or a bad thing. Why should we? Although some pieces feel gimmicky, like a one-line joke there is a great sense of camaraderie. It’s the kind of place you might expect a staff team building day to take place. This is something that occurred to me as I saw a group of city bankers negotiate crossing from one end of a load of hanging gymnastic hoops to the other after a few post-work pints. Everyone is so talkative. And unlike my previous experiences of gallery attendants, no one tells me off for eating my cereal bar for a bit of mid-exhibition fuel. They are just as much a part of the exhibition as we are.
William Forsythe, The Fact of the Matter, 2009
What we see in the MOVE exhibition from Lygia Clark is the detritus evidence of a by-gone era of early experimental and conceptual art. Lygia Clark and fellow Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica founded the Neo-Concretist movement in the 1960s at a time when artists were breaking into new terrain, collapsing the invisible wall between the artwork and viewer by creating – an altogether new way of experiencing art with the emphasis being the actual interaction with art objects and the people around it.
Lygia Clark, Straight Jacket, 1969
For my workshops I think I’m going to use the work of Lygia Clark (Gestural Communication) and Franz Erhard Walther as a starting point. Their works pose the idea that the physical objects they make are subsidiary to the actual work, but it is only because of them that the work or conversation comes into being.
I’ll check in again to let you know how it goes.
Posted: Wednesday October 27th 2010 | Categorized in: Uncategorized
