An Action (OK-YUH-PAHY)

An Action

An act repeated. Slicing, slicing, slicing. An endurance. The product of the action surrounds the artist, showing the duration of the act. The act is not forced nor a trial. It is a labour in which the artist is content, purposeful. The repetition does take its toll however, it is minutely physical. Cramp, pins and needles, numbness rising from the floor, aches where the same muscles are told to do the same action incessantly. Compelling or mesmerising the audience can wonder at why and what for, does it matter?

This was a performance for Ok-YUH-PAHY, a show at the Pipe Factory in Glasgow as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. The performance lasted from 11am-7pm (with 2 half hour breaks, give or take). I was cutting A4 sheets of paper into 20x20cm squares.

I find that performances aren't easily tested as they need an audience. This one worked out better than I anticipated, despite having only been thought through in my head. The audience seemed to understand what I was doing easily and accepted that I was repeating the action all day.

When I have performed before I have often been unpicking canvas and dipping the resulting threads into oil medium. The audience have watched for a time, mostly to work out what the materials are, and then maybe what I am doing and why. The aim of this work was to cut out the painting materials and the associated connotations and just concentrate on a simple, repeated action. This was a little too successful though, as I think the audience understood too quickly what I was doing and moved on, there was little lingering or prolonged engagement.

Another surprise was how intriguing I found the paper itself, and actually how meditative the action was. I was worried the line 'It is a labour in which the artist is content, purposeful.' would turn out to be a lie and it would be a laborious, boring and insufferable day. It wasn't though, partly owing to the paper itself. Essentially it was the cheapest, white A4 paper I could get hold of. It was very thin and almost purple in colour and around 3 sheets out of 5 had a mark on them. These marks looked like they had been made in the factory in the process of making the paper, like they were clumps of fibres which had stuck together and hadn't been bleached properly. Owing to the cheapness of the paper it was really thin, you could see through it slightly and see its pattern. 

As the day went on, the blade on my knife became more and more blunt, so the paper squares every now and then were nicked slightly as the knife got caught. It is these things, which are unseen and unknown by the audience which makes the performance work for me. I need to work on a performance which is more compelling for a viewer, and which possibly has this element of uncovering the behaviour of a material.