p a u l h u r l e y

I know things have been a little quiet around here over the last couple of months, although they certainly haven’t here at Hurley Towers. I’ve been running a project called CONNECTION / TIME, supported by Arts Council England, and involving collaborations with artists and partner organisations in Bristol and around. We’ve got a blog running for the project, which contains all sorts of information about it. We’ve got a couple of performances this weekend as part of The Performance Exchange, SITE Festival, Stroud, so do come along if you can or follow live documentation of the performances on www.whosedata.net/connection-time

Thanks to all who came along to the opening performance and exhibition of Overgave / Surrender at Motorcade / Flash Parade. It was a great evening, wonderful to see some old friends as well as new ones. Thanks so much too to M/FP, Penny and Julie put so much into the gallery, as do their team of volunteers, it was a pleasure working with them and I am really grateful for the opportunity to do so. See below a few photos from the preview night, there’s some video to come too, just as soon as its edited. We had a fantastic crit too on the Saturday, led by the brilliant Ruth Holdsworth. It was a really interesting conversation that raised some important questions about the nature of the live, about translation, about that sticky acquaintance ‘absence’ and about what happens when we do things in front of people (and what happens when we don’t).  Much food for thought, and many questions left unanswered….

It’s been an intense and productive last few weeks here, not only working out ideas for my solo show at Motorcade / FlashParade (more on that story later…), but largely consumed by planning a project for the late spring and putting together a funding bid for it. It’s a good few years since I last did one, and I obviously underestimated the time and work it would take! It’s good work, mind, the processes of thinking through how a project might best come together, how partner organisations (in this case Arnolfini and Knowle West Media Centre) can pool resources, how audiences and artists can be engaged by practice, and what different skills and experience individual collaborators will bring to the table. It’s both encouraging and humbling, as are the ongoing conversations it’s sparked with individuals and organisations. I’m looking to develop, with the exceptional Dane Watkins, new interactive performance documentation software, based on a prototype with which we experimented as part of Whose Data at KWMC last year. I’m planning to explore this through experiments in collective durational performance art with a number of artists from Bristol, Bath, Gloucestershire and Somerset, informed by research visits and experiments to/with the lovely folk at ] Performance Space [, Oui Performance, and Bbeyond. It's very exciting, and feels quite timely.

Becoming-goat 2006

As part of the project, I’ve been invited to curate a something at Performance Exchange, SITE Festival, Stroud. It’ll be a collective durational performance involving members of a number of artists groups (]PS[, OUI, tactileBOSCH, CAZ project space, Tertulia), who will also be presenting performances and artists of their own throughout the weekend. It struck me yesterday that not only do I know all of these groups (chosen by the curator of the Performance Exchange) and respect their work, I have a deep sense of love towards them. This new(ish) decade that we're in seems to have brought with it a different sense of community (amongst artists as in wider social movements), of generosity between artists, and a desire to build a strong grassroots network for performance and action art in the UK that is vital and resilient. In spite of - or perhaps because of - the recession, government cuts, and the common sense of disillusionment with capitalism and politics, it seems like different strategies, different values and different forces come to the fore. In writing this I recall a response I wrote some two years ago, to Live Art UK's publication In Time. One excerpt seems particularly relevant, a quote from a former professor of mine, the feminist philosophy powerhouse that is Rosi Braidotti:

“Crucial to the ethics of sustainability: the transformation of negative into positive passion and through that a non-normative concept of limit. Affectivity in fact is that which activates an embodied subject, empowering him/her to interact with others. This acceleration of one's existential speed, or increase of one's affective temperature, is the dynamic process of becoming.[...] The subject-in-becoming is the one for whom “what’s the point?” is an all-important question. A high-intensity subject is also animated by unparalleled levels of vulnerability. With nomadic patterns comes also a fundamental fragility. Processes without foundations need to be handled with care; potentia requires great levels of containment in the mode of framing. Sustainability assumes the idea of continuity – it does assume faith in a future, and also a sense of responsibility for ‘passing on’ to future generations a world that is liveable and worth living in. A present that endures is a sustainable model of the future. ”You play you win you play you lose, you play.” [J. Winterson]” (Braidotti, R. ‘Between the no longer and the not yet: nomadic variations on the body’). And it really feels like a joy, an honour and a responsibility to play, and to do so with such wonderful colleagues.

So, it’s a new year and I’m back after a busy few months away from the blog. Life has been rather full and exciting here: I’ve finished a few months teaching at WAPA, Weston College, which was throughly enjoyable; and Mr P and I have recently bought a narrowboat on which to live. We’re moving over to the other side of Bath this weekend, so if you’re ever over that way at all then do keep an eye out for us! In art, as well as in life, things are good and busy.

Untitled Performance, York

Last year ended with a few performances at great events like Action Art Now in York, and at Beacons Icons and Dykons at the Cube, Bristol. And this year has begun with a very productive January (there’s no time for winter blues here!). A performance of mine is to be included in Emergency INDEX, an annual publication of performance produced by some amazing individuals at Ugly Duckling Press, NYC, and I’ve also been invited to do a performance at (In)Xclusion, an event in Leeds on the 25th / 26th February. I’ll be making a new collaborative work with partner in crime H.Ren. It should be fun. The event looks really interesting, as does the artist line up, and it’ll be great to do some more work up North. Also, I’ve recently had confirmed my first ever solo show at Motorcade / FlashParade in Bristol. This is really exciting, as it represents an opportunity to take the plunge with more installative work I’ve been experimenting with, and to envision my work in a different context and in a gallery all of its own.  The show’s called ‘Overgave (Surrender)’ and opens on Thursday 8th March, with the exhibition on until Sunday 11th. I’ll put up more details when I have them… As always, it’s all go!

Another September comes, and with it a period of busyness and new beginnings. I’ve just started a new job at Weston College, which I’m really enjoying – it’s a great place, a super team, and bright students -, it should be fun. I’m also working towards the culmination of the Whose Data? project, with a  performance at Knowle West Media Centre. The performance is part of my Why? And what does it mean?! project, and has been subtitled ‘The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The next best time is now.’ Long, I know, but we should never let that scare us! The performance is on the 13th October, between 4-8pm, at the Media Centre. If you’re in or near Bristol and can make it then it’d be great to see you there, but if you’re not, then it would be as well (if not even better) to have you watching online at the recently live whosedata.net.

I’ve been working with the brilliant Dane Watkins over the past couple of months to develop a web interface that will operate as a kind of interactive live documentation  / performance streaming space, in which people will be able to view, create and comment upon live data generated around the performance. The technical side is all thanks to Dane, I’ve just been developing the concept and being picky about the visuals! It’s still an experiment – I’ve certainly not come across something as multidimensional as this before – so we’d really love to see how people interact with it and what they think of it. Whilst this marks the end of my Whose Data? residency, I’m sure the project will have outcomes that will far outlive it.

Paul Hurley Performance Linz

I came back last week from doing ‘All around the Field: Waterside’ Festival in Linz, Austria, which was a lot of fun. They’re always a slightly odd affair – arriving in a strange place, finding your directions and throwing up a performance, meeting lots of interesting artists and audience, and then (I speak for myself, at least) when you’ve gotten to know each other it’s time to leave again. There was some great work at the festival, some lovely artists (and super organisers), and we had a really nice discussion chaired by the brilliant Boris Nieslony. We talked about this, the concept and structure of a festival, and the idea of a laboratory (the organisers of ‘All around the Field: Waterside’ also run an event called Performance Laboratorium) which seemed to be something that many of us crave. I must reactivate plans for doing such a thing in Bristol, it feels like a really valuable and worthwhile activity.

One final heads up / date for your diary, anyone in or near Bristol: BV Studios, where I hold a studio, is having its annual Open Studios on the weekend of the 14-16th October. After a really interesting conversation with the incredible Gwendoline Robin (wandering, post-performance, along the bank of the Danube) I’m considering a return to installation. Whilst for whatever reasons the focus of my practice has become almost exclusively on live performance in recent years, I was reminded that it hasn’t always been so, and that medium-specific distinctions are not necessarily always useful. I know this is by no means a radical proposition, but it kind of felt it for me, in a most exciting way. The challenge to move away from concretisation, break up some of what (I think) I know and then see what’s left.

Photo of performance experiment at KWMC, text by Conner Segesdy

Just a quick post, as I’ve been away from  here for some time. The reason being I’ve been running a project as part of my Whose Data? residency at Knowle West Media Centre. It’s been a great project, involving workshops with young people, an experiment in creating live performance data streams (with the help of H.Ren and Phil Owen), and now working towards a bigger performance in October, which will be live to view both in Knowle West and online. Watch this space…! In the meantime, check out the project blog here!

Also cooking up this month (as well as some amazing things in the kitchen, but that would be a whole other blog that I simply don’t have time for…) has been a new project with the amazing H.Ren. H.Ren and I have worked together on Aeon and Spotlight, but for this new project, Transfigurations : Subject / Object, we’re taking over an empty space in Central Bristol (with the help of Ruth Essex and the Capacity Project), which we’ll be transforming into an open studio / installaction space for a week (15th-10th February). This is really exciting for me, having been working in an increasingly visual way with materials and transformation in performance, as Ren shares an interest in performance, but from a background much more in sculpture. The opportunity arose fairly suddenly, so we just took it, and are looking forward to seeing what comes up out of working openly and collaboratively for that period. We’ve been talking a fair bit about Modernism, about the 1960s and what we’ve lost from it, about if / how we can make art that works, and about if / how we can be serious about what we’re doing without sounding like twats. It’s been great having these conversations with H.Ren, returning to art history in a much wider sense and looking to ideas and concepts directly concerned with aesthetics and the artist. I wonder now, if this is something I miss within live art – its development as a successful sector that values itself by its contemporary relevance (cultural, political, social, etc.) somehow overlooks its historical locatedness and its relation to qualities that I might dare to name transcendent. Hmmm. Any thoughts?

We see Transfigurations as an investigation, an experiment in which we want to work responsively to each other, to each others’ disciplines, and to our context. Working without funding, we want to make the project matter, to do as much as possible on as little as possible. We’re hoping to document and blog our process throughout the week, and are looking for people to help us do so. We’ve set up a special blog for the project, which at present is pretty empty, but which’ll fill up once we get started and hopefully be quite an active discursive space, and a window into the project. If you think you’d like to help us, to either document the project or to assist in other ways, then do look at the info on the  Transfigurations blog and get in touch via the contact form there. More publicity info re. the project will be released soon.

January’s begun (and almost finished…) in a whirlwind of activity and enthusiasm for the year ahead. There’s so much to do… A couple of weeks ago I ran an exhibition tour and Live Art Crash Course at Arnolfini, both of which were fantastically enjoyable and (I think) successful. The tour of ‘What Next For the Body‘ was really interesting – I led a small group of visitors around the exhibition and they seemed to have few preconceptions about the exhibition content (largely body based stuff, with a significant forensic twist and performance documentation element) or previous knowledge of live art. But they were wonderfully interesting individuals who were really open to honest dialogue and debate (and I think one of them was a medical professional of some sort, which gave her a fascinating take on some of the material and a technical advantage over me at points!), and I think we all got a lot from the hour or so’s chat we had. The Live Art Crash Course was similarly fun, with a great group of almost 20 participants from a range of backgrounds – a mix of students, teachers, researchers, practitioners, artists, writers and just curious “punters”. I was really humbled by people’s enthusiasm and willingness to participate, and encouraged by how deeply people were really interested in live art and performance and what it could bring them – I suppose having spent the last 10 years or so making, watching, theorising and teaching live art, one can become a little complacent, if not cynical and institutionalised, by being immersed in something no matter how interesting! I was also surprised at how far people had travelled for the workshop (London, Cardigan and Surrey, as well as much closer to home), and how there is clearly a desire for such affordable live art / performance workshops. I’ve been invited to run the crash course again up in Dundee in March (watch this space for details…), which is exciting, and need to get on the case with other venues / groups about running it elsewhere in the country. If you’d be interested do get in touch!

I do love Columbo. But on a more serious note, as part of InBetween Time’s extended programme at Arnolfini, I’m giving a gallery tour of the What next for the body exhibition next Saturday 15th of January at 2pm, and running an exciting new one-off workshop ‘Live Art Crash Course’, also at Arnolfini, on Sunday 16th 11am-5pm. The tour is free and you can just turn up on the day; the workshop is best booked in advance to secure a place, and costs £15 or £12 Would be great to see you there!