How to start? How to begin a log/review of my experience doing an online course for those that want to learn the intricacies of making an installation or performance and getting it seen? Who’d read this? Who’d care enough to read it? I have nothing as poetic as Nabokov’s first paragraph in Lolita which ends with the awe-inspiring alliteration ‘look at this tangle of thorns’, or the teenage insouciance of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye: ‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Besides, those are from novels. Something more apt might be in the tone of Hemingway’s memoir, A moveable feast, where he starts his atmospheric account mid-flow: ‘Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal…’
But enough of those dead white males. Hopefully you’re interested enough, having read this far, in a log conveying my emotions and thoughts as I went through the short course. Maybe I should state I took the course because I felt it would not only give me insights into the processes behind the practices of the tutors who were professional artists, but it would also give me a bit of structure. You see, I’m in the limbo between finishing my Master’s and my PhD which is focused on Jelili Atiku, a Nigerian performance artist. Figuring out that I could do worse with my time than taking an online course put together by Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education, called Reconceiving Space: Installation and Performance Art, I signed up and paid for the Verified Track option which promised ‘graded assignments and exams’. I’m such a nerd that even when I could take it easy, I chose to do a course where an essay was expected!
18/09/21
I approached the course with so much excitement and enthusiasm I blitzed through a fortnights’ worth of video lectures and exercises in one day. I introduced myself on the forum and noticed my classmates were from all around the world. They were taking the course for a variety of reasons- from those deepening their knowledge to those considering taking up performance art. I thought about the answers to questions we were asked to consider and did the quizzes set. I took a look at the reading list and even downloaded the one that looked most fascinating. Called No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience by Frazer Ward (2012), it interrogates artistic strategies adopted by Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden and Tehching Hsieh to implicate the audience in their extreme performances. There’s no space to go into a full review of it, but I would recommend it to anyone keen to examine how iconic works by these titans of live art have entered the annals of art history.
20/09/21
I plodded through some of the week three material that day. I was getting bored by then, finding it harder to see the relevance of the course to me for some reason. Could it be because the format for each unit of the course was the same, or was it because that particular component, with the emphasis on practical methodologies putting on a drama didn’t appeal to me seeing as I have no ambition to write or produce a play? Things were not helped by the fact that the information provided on how the lecturer secured funding was sketchy to say the least. Giving no detail on such a key point isn’t really helpful to those that want to embark on such a journey.
There was one thing that stayed with me. The tutor referred to the cruciality of liveness in her practice – that notion of work being experienced in person – which got me thinking about the question of whether an audience is necessary for a performance. I dove into texts that explored what it is to be concerned with performing live during a pandemic. Did you know that in Shakespeare’s day, when there was a plague, he retired to his home at Stratford-upon-Avon as the theatres were shut? Similarly, during modern lockdowns a significant number of those employed in the performing arts rehearsed for postponed plays and gigs as even ‘invisible theatre’ (a new term I’ve learnt – a play that’s performed in an unconventional setting with the public as unwitting participants) was potentially illegal. Quite a few performers engaged in Zoom performances though. As laudable as their intentions were, I recall I avoided those as the anticipation, the embodied perception, being amongst other bodies, exulting in the co-presence of the audience, seeing the sweat on the brows of performers, all those essential elements of live art are what make it captivating for those of us that are wary of the mediatisation of everything, for those of us with a strong appetite for and insistence on liveness.
21/09/21
More week three stuff, more disinterest, more scrolling through the transcripts instead of sitting through the recorded lectures. I searched for what assignment I was meant to work on and didn’t see one, so I contacted the Institute of Continuing Education. They told me there was no assignment and that I should contact edX. I noticed hardly any of my peers entered their answers to the questions by this stage in the forum and wondered if they were also bored, or didn’t see the point in doing so knowing no tutor was going to look at it. I carried on with the quiz and even got all the answers right without having to read the suggested extract.
23/09/21
I was transfixed by Abigail Gibb’s lectures and explanations of her practice in the final unit! She discussed: her view of artmaking as serious play; her love of assembling texts from various sources and treating them like found objects; the genesis of an artwork she created; and was inspiring in the way she discussed the various outputs (a performance and an artist’s book) that resulted from it. The reflective task at the end of that unit, which was to select an extract from a text or choose an object in order to consider how they could be re-presented to the public, was an echo of the work she had talked us through.
Reconceiving liminality
So, was it worth doing the course? Well, the reading list was brilliant and extensive, and the platform for delivering the program was smooth. Also, it got me thinking about liveness and learning terms like co-presence, while discovering the poetics and praxis of Alison Gibb. Invisible theatre is something else I had come across before as Atiku once faked a marriage to a preadolescent girl on the streets of Lagos (Senator Yerima’s Wedding, 2013 in protest against a Nigerian politician doing the same thing) leading to passers-by becoming outraged enough to intervene, but I wasn’t aware of the term, so that’s going to feed into my PhD. Being in limbo has given me a chance to slow down after a busy few months and the course has enabled me to go on an intellectual journey in which I encountered gems, and learnt more about the aberrant and wondrous world of live art. What was important about cramming in more formal learning in this liminal stage was it plugged some gaps in my knowledge. Coming across people daily engaged in the creation and delivery of performances and installations was an intriguing proposition, and my curiosity was enough to see me through, though the lectures were tedious at times.
Could it be though that this desire to get an essay marked with a certificate of completion from Cambridge University is a symptom of imposter syndrome, or just a desire to show I have achieved something concrete in this transitional period, and a reflection of a condition that afflicts most of us: too focused on doing, instead of simply being? I leave that to you to ponder on.
How to start? How to begin a log/review of my experience doing an online course for those that want to learn the intricacies of making an installation or performance and getting it seen? Who’d read this? Who’d care enough to read it? I have nothing as poetic as Nabokov’s first paragraph in Lolita which ends with the awe-inspiring alliteration ‘look at this tangle of thorns’, or the teenage insouciance of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye: ‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Besides, those are from novels. Something more apt might be in the tone of Hemingway’s memoir, A moveable feast, where he starts his atmospheric account mid-flow: ‘Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal…’
But enough of those dead white males. Hopefully you’re interested enough, having read this far, in a log conveying my emotions and thoughts as I went through the short course. Maybe I should state I took the course because I felt it would not only give me insights into the processes behind the practices of the tutors who were professional artists, but it would also give me a bit of structure. You see, I’m in the limbo between finishing my Master’s and my PhD which is focused on Jelili Atiku, a Nigerian performance artist. Figuring out that I could do worse with my time than taking an online course put together by Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education, called Reconceiving Space: Installation and Performance Art, I signed up and paid for the Verified Track option which promised ‘graded assignments and exams’. I’m such a nerd that even when I could take it easy, I chose to do a course where an essay was expected!
18/09/21
I approached the course with so much excitement and enthusiasm I blitzed through a fortnights’ worth of video lectures and exercises in one day. I introduced myself on the forum and noticed my classmates were from all around the world. They were taking the course for a variety of reasons- from those deepening their knowledge to those considering taking up performance art. I thought about the answers to questions we were asked to consider and did the quizzes set. I took a look at the reading list and even downloaded the one that looked most fascinating. Called No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience by Frazer Ward (2012), it interrogates artistic strategies adopted by Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden and Tehching Hsieh to implicate the audience in their extreme performances. There’s no space to go into a full review of it, but I would recommend it to anyone keen to examine how iconic works by these titans of live art have entered the annals of art history.
20/09/21
I plodded through some of the week three material that day. I was getting bored by then, finding it harder to see the relevance of the course to me for some reason. Could it be because the format for each unit of the course was the same, or was it because that particular component, with the emphasis on practical methodologies putting on a drama didn’t appeal to me seeing as I have no ambition to write or produce a play? Things were not helped by the fact that the information provided on how the lecturer secured funding was sketchy to say the least. Giving no detail on such a key point isn’t really helpful to those that want to embark on such a journey.
There was one thing that stayed with me. The tutor referred to the cruciality of liveness in her practice – that notion of work being experienced in person – which got me thinking about the question of whether an audience is necessary for a performance. I dove into texts that explored what it is to be concerned with performing live during a pandemic. Did you know that in Shakespeare’s day, when there was a plague, he retired to his home at Stratford-upon-Avon as the theatres were shut? Similarly, during modern lockdowns a significant number of those employed in the performing arts rehearsed for postponed plays and gigs as even ‘invisible theatre’ (a new term I’ve learnt – a play that’s performed in an unconventional setting with the public as unwitting participants) was potentially illegal. Quite a few performers engaged in Zoom performances though. As laudable as their intentions were, I recall I avoided those as the anticipation, the embodied perception, being amongst other bodies, exulting in the co-presence of the audience, seeing the sweat on the brows of performers, all those essential elements of live art are what make it captivating for those of us that are wary of the mediatisation of everything, for those of us with a strong appetite for and insistence on liveness.
21/09/21
More week three stuff, more disinterest, more scrolling through the transcripts instead of sitting through the recorded lectures. I searched for what assignment I was meant to work on and didn’t see one, so I contacted the Institute of Continuing Education. They told me there was no assignment and that I should contact edX. I noticed hardly any of my peers entered their answers to the questions by this stage in the forum and wondered if they were also bored, or didn’t see the point in doing so knowing no tutor was going to look at it. I carried on with the quiz and even got all the answers right without having to read the suggested extract.
23/09/21
I was transfixed by Abigail Gibb’s lectures and explanations of her practice in the final unit! She discussed: her view of artmaking as serious play; her love of assembling texts from various sources and treating them like found objects; the genesis of an artwork she created; and was inspiring in the way she discussed the various outputs (a performance and an artist’s book) that resulted from it. The reflective task at the end of that unit, which was to select an extract from a text or choose an object in order to consider how they could be re-presented to the public, was an echo of the work she had talked us through.
Reconceiving liminality
So, was it worth doing the course? Well, the reading list was brilliant and extensive, and the platform for delivering the program was smooth. Also, it got me thinking about liveness and learning terms like co-presence, while discovering the poetics and praxis of Alison Gibb. Invisible theatre is something else I had come across before as Atiku once faked a marriage to a preadolescent girl on the streets of Lagos (Senator Yerima’s Wedding, 2013 in protest against a Nigerian politician doing the same thing) leading to passers-by becoming outraged enough to intervene, but I wasn’t aware of the term, so that’s going to feed into my PhD. Being in limbo has given me a chance to slow down after a busy few months and the course has enabled me to go on an intellectual journey in which I encountered gems, and learnt more about the aberrant and wondrous world of live art. What was important about cramming in more formal learning in this liminal stage was it plugged some gaps in my knowledge. Coming across people daily engaged in the creation and delivery of performances and installations was an intriguing proposition, and my curiosity was enough to see me through, though the lectures were tedious at times.
Could it be though that this desire to get an essay marked with a certificate of completion from Cambridge University is a symptom of imposter syndrome, or just a desire to show I have achieved something concrete in this transitional period, and a reflection of a condition that afflicts most of us: too focused on doing, instead of simply being? I leave that to you to ponder on.