Instructions (I)

One of the biggest changes for me in the last year has been the end of my doctoral research. Part of the deal with the devil when you take on a part-time PhD and you're working full time is that all your spare time is PhD time and PhD time is going to take a long time. Your capacity for wide interests is reduced to the wide interests of your PhD and while your research will inevitably cover a lot - it is also a lot within a very narrow viewfinder.

This show at Sluice has been the first significant new project I've taken on since the PhD ended. So the possibilities have been huge and alarming. During a discussion with Nicholas Middleton in the gallery while we were invigilating, around the instruction text work I've made for this show - we talked widely about the history of directional art. And here is a wide interest within the doctoral research because instructional art does actually features in my PhD - which is 'mostly' about re-enactment.  The research looks at one point at how Deller's most famous performance piece The Battle of Orgreave - a re-enactment of a key conflict between police and striking miners at Orgreave Colliery near Sheffield has evolved from a re-enactment performance into a film and then finally into an installation now called An Injury to One is an An Injury to All. This installation is itself a large set of instructional art - here is a chunk of PhD text all about it:

 "The artwork as a whole is entitled An Injury to One is an Injury to All, and this motto is ascribed to The Industrial Workers group. The installation piece is made up of several sections.  The first is the screening space for the Figgis film and then there is a second space installed with information on the making of the work, and the history of the strike. The archive consists of:

·  Vinyl lettering

·  Vinyl map

·  Archive material

·  Acrylic painting on board

·  Framed posters

·  Denim jacket, badges and decorative buttons

·  Acrylic police shield

·  Wall painting

·  Books, placed left to right – politically and have a strict order that needs to be followed from State of Siege by Coulter/Miller/Walker to The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher

·  A Chair for people to sit and read the books

·  Two x single channel videos shown on monitors (showing two programmes: Police Riot training video and a relevant episode of History in Action)

·  One x audio – (this is the CD of the audio interviews carried out by Deller)

·  One x video projection

·  A timeline

 [....]

In 2011, the situation changed, when Artangel formed a partnership alliance with Tate. As a small organisation, Artangel was finding the high volume of requests to be problematic. The creation of the Artangel Collection was a move to house the major film and video works with Tate, which would enable the works to have a more national and international life.This would mean that they would be made available to different museums around the world in a more meaningful way. Since 2011, the reach of this collection has grown with the full range of works being lent out on over 39 occasions reaching over a million visitors and An Injury to One Is an Injury to All has been sent out to six different international galleries reaching over 83,000 people.  Each time The Battle of Orgreave Archive is sent out to galleries, there are very specific instructions that are supplied in its construction. A gallery assistant from Tate is sent to the gallery to assist in the setting up of the piece. This will include ensuring the instructions are adhered to, and to construct some aspects of the work.

The timeline and layout of a version of the archive can be seen here http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/deller-the-battle-of-orgreave-archive-an-injury-to-one-is-an-injury-to-all-t12185


How people create a reenactment, how live art is documented, how artist's set up and engage with process - all of these things engage with instructions or scores or scripts or directions. So this has been very much part of my thinking for a long time - but a long time within a very particular kind of frame. Outside of the PhD frame - I've long been fascinated by text art and directional art that can just sit in my eyeline and be enjoyed.

The pleasure of looking at text telling you to do stuff in odd places is something that has not been productive for me in recent years and feels wicked. Indulgent.

Robert Montgomery: Ghost In The Machine

But I have always been a writer even when the only thing I was writing was the PhD and I am drawn to text. From Tim Etchells' neon series' to Bruce Nauman's Get out of this room, get out of my mind, text based artwork has always elicted joy. Then there are a range of other artists including but not limited to Jenny Holzer's text art, or Fiona Banner's, or Sol Witt's instruction pieces and lastly, but most importantly for me, is Yoko Ono.

From reading about live art's beginnings during my long time in performance education, Ono's instruction art has long been gorgeous - I'd find one on the internet and roll it around my head like a pebble - and I promised myself when I finished the PhD - I'd find a book that had all of her instruction work and I would sink into it with great happiness. Here is the happy time.