Loop-Pool
In the summer of 2002 Yellow House gained funding support for a public art project to showcase the work of Yellow House in the European cultural exchange projects that had taken place in Gdansk, Prague, Cologne and Frankfurt. After various practical and artistic issues had a risen Yellow House consulted Philip Courtenay as part of the art creating society group.
As an artist and academic Philip Courtenay has worked with public domain contexts and came up with a proposal for a temporary public art structure to showcase the Yellow House achievements.
An important element in the proposal was to include Yellow House members in the construction process so that a sense of "ownership" would develop out of the project, in a managed and safe way.
The work, when realised, was situated on the green space on the Pier Head in Liverpool, in front of the Liver building. It consisted of a mirrored cubic structure within which video footage of Prague, Koln and Gdansk could be seen, and heard, through "peepholes". The directions of the compass were subtly marked on the grass (no damage, just a little less light for six days), and the directions towards the three European cities indicated.
In Philip Courtenay's Research Report for the Chelsea College of Art & Design publication RESEARCH@CHELSEA issue 4 he writes:
For three days in July 2002 a cubic form with mirrored surfaces rested on the grassy area in front of the Liver building at the Pier Head in Liverpool. For passers by, and for the many people who take their lunch hour on this bit of green, walking towards this object produced a set of shifting perspectives of the distinctive skyline along Liverpool's riverfront. Approaching the mirrored object, there's a moment of awareness when your reflected image registers against the shifting planes of river and cityscape. A performative space erupts out of urban anonymity. When picnicker and picnic lunch suddenly become part of an expressive social space, a public space, does the picnicker become a spect-actor?
One of the cube's mirrored surfaces has a number of circular apertures. Is it the disruption, the break in the smoothness of vision that somehow draws us closer? Voices can be heard from within, just as your own reflected appearance falls within the physical reach of your body. The object becomes irresistable. like a peep show, all the object require is that an audience be provoked into action, to peer into an unseen space, with all that such an action risks, and to see the vision within. People seem to do this voluntarily, suspend those feelings of self-awareness against the risk of pleasure or disappointment, and look. Looking through the holes, you can see roundels of video showing other rivers and skylines, strange, but strangely familiar views. People are seen and heard speaking of Gdansk, by the River Vistula, of Clogne on the River Rhine, and of Prague on the River Vlatava, and not surprisingly as far as we are concerned they are speaking of Liverpool, reflecting back an infectious enthusiasm about a city and its people.
This is part of Loop-Pool by the Yellow House International Theatre and art creating society, a project about linking people and places, and about cities as places, places to find yourself. 'Stadt Luft Macht Frei' goes the medieval Hansa motto, or 'city air makes you free'.
The issues embedded in this account are germane to my research at Chelsea, and while they go back a long way, they continue to go forward in a social and cultural process, energised by an approach to creative work that is primarily collaborative and about exploring how cultural exchange informs an experimental art practice.
The LODE Project (1992) initiated a long-term partnership with the Yellow House of Liverpool, and an experimental work about a type of modern knowledge prevalent in the global village. In village society perceptions tend to be self-referential and tribal, identity and community values are guarded and maintained in a balancing off of emotional and expressive freedoms with a psychological impulse to adapt to, and conform to available normative structures. Cosy? Perhaps, but this type of knowledge generates a sense of the local and the global as precisely that, a type of knowledge, and not what it often turns out to be, a distinctive pattern of psychological projections onto the world.
LODE worked against this with the creation of a global cultural cargo unloaded and unpacked by the Yellow House Theatre, and then reconstituted as a series of art events at the Bluecoat Gallery. These events sustained a process of questioning, with questions deliberately designed to drive the construction of a new type of knowledge through the withdrawal of our projections on to the wider world in general and the experience of other in particular.
The trajectory of this undertaking led quickly to an experimentation with how this process would work when collaborating creatively with groups of people in other places linked in some way with where we were coming from. Loop-Pool shows how, as this practice has matured, the meetings of strangers intent on creative work generates a new set of references as to who we are, actually and potentially, and where we really come from, and perhaps where we want to go. The structure of the object, where it was placed etc., is simply about extending this process; "I'm looking at Gdansk. I've never been to Gdansk but I can see it here!"
Documentation and Loop-Pool
George, Gosia, Tony (art creating society) and Macka had a great time documenting the cities for the Loop-Pool public art project. Philip Courtenay (art creating society) was also able to video document Cologne on the Rhine and the skyline and river of Frankfurt.
