Comments on: Attentiveness/ Attentive/ Paying Attention

By: Steve Bottoms

Steve Bottoms — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 10:40:37 +0000

Phil’s comments here chime in very much with the further Deleuzian reading I’ve been doing around all this. The need to create (or merely facilitate? observe?) site performance . . . a site performing . . . which exemplifies its own movement, its own flows and dynamics, rather than alluding metaphorically / representationally to some external idea. I think perhaps that’s what I was fumbling towards in my own demonstration of jumping awkwardly across streams – simply trying to mark or highlight that shifting confluence of watercourses. Though then the question becomes, of course, what frame does one have to put around the ‘performance’ in order for observers really to see/read the site itself rather than, say, the person or the maker. (Representation and metaphor are not – after all – so easily eluded, and do we really want them to be if there are ‘issues’ at stake?)

By: David Harradine

David Harradine — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 17:08:58 +0000

Thankyou Helen for articulating the thing I failed to articulate over that haggis when we were in Cove:

“the quiet moments of attentiveness in which we make one choice rather than another. It is this attention to the intimacy of domestic details and the opportunity to work creatively in the vernacular spaces of everyday life that has the potential for what Lefebvre calls the ‘politics of small achievements”

I think this is what I was trying to say something about when I was talking about the performativity of the dining table: a domestic, local, interior, small demarcated space. For me this remains a space at which we can respond to, think and talk about and affect (environmental) change – not by going to remote/charged/historical/constructed landscapes that I worry will pull this thing “environmental change” out of our daily lives – but by being attentive, as you say, to those small acts that accumulate to have big consequences for us and for others elsewhere.

By: phil smith

phil smith — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:50:04 +0000

the conversations on the GlasCove weekend about the agency of things – and this from Mike Pearson “The life-story of these shops did not cease simply because they were removed from the histories of the people who once worked there. They began to decompose… of their own volition.” (Site-Specific Performance, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010) – keep coming back to me, accusingly… that a performance about environmental issues, should be an environmental performance, in which the site of the performance (not its metaphorical ghost) becomes the thing of performance-“volition”… that the human part is to make itself increasingly vulnerable, (responding to the ‘why this need for species’ immortality?’, ‘why this failure to embrace death?’) and this abnegation IS the tending, the responsibility… for it risks the integrity of the site, perhaps courts its transformation, destruction… and the environment is not then an “issue” inside the content, but one more moral choice in an ‘art of living’… while I still have grave reservations about and criticisms of the mountain and lighting piece that heard about, its very invasiveness took the kind of risks that are absent from the metaphorical performance

By: phil smith

phil smith — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 10:52:34 +0000

“in the way Helen subjected herself” (correction to above comment)

By: phil smith

phil smith — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 10:51:05 +0000

reading Helen’s post, I returned to my feelings of unease- about a problem of performance, about imagining ‘the thing that what will not happen’ as a self-deprecating imposition, an imposition of wishes, and missing an ethical obligation to our site; something characterised by Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik as “attending to place” – not only ‘paying attention’ but also ‘tending’, and my own lack of attentiveness to do more than notice the huge chunks of the gravel path eroded by the slope’s chanelling of the rains and fail to understand that the site had begun to perform to us… and I wonder what ‘subjecting’ a performance to that erosion, in the way subjected herself to nutrition/waste,…. but that wondering returns me to feelings of unease and the imposition of ghostly ‘things that won’t happen’