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trace: the domestics of art We took one of the unions' [1] now battered privatised rail network trains to Wales' capital Cardiff, on a typically overcast day on the island. We were to arrive in the city for a performance by Alistair Maclennan marking the official opening of the Trace gallery - 7th October 2000. In the publicity material for the event, the gallery's artistic director André Stitt describes the artistic charge of this new space in terms of an intention to "represent intersections between artistic disciplines [...], place emphasis on the expression of context in the working process [...], explore previously unconsidered ways of thinking and doing offered by time based work” [2] It is clear then that Stitt conceives of an art space that understands a certain artistic risk. In the course of a practice which has led him to major galleries, festivals, specific sites and alternative venues throughout the world, Stitt has contributed to activities of networks in which there is an opening up of the model of the solo practice; the artist takes on many roles in disseminating, organising and making. This is a potential counter to an individualist approach, as it focuses on living conditions, the continuity of association and exchange and invokes a high degree of critical engagement with respect to context as a whole. This has been evident in events where Stitt and I have met in overlapping paths as artists. To sketch a history I might mention our initial encounter in the Winterschool Architecture festival in Glasgow, Scotland (1994); the AnnArt 7 performance festival, St.Ann lake, Transylvania (1996); and the Rencontre International d'Art: Performance et Multimedia (1996), Le Lieu, Quebec. Closer to my home at one time, Stitt performed in The Medium is not the Message event (1998), a two-week program of work organised by myself in collaboration with the RED Gallery, as a Nomad Territories of England project, Hull, England. There is then, a considerable history and weight of work leading up to Stitt's founding of Trace. One of the things that differentiates this art space is Stitt's specific targeting of the exploration of performance and installation relationships as inherently dealing with locus and passage, expressed in his subtitling of the gallery "installaction" art space. In addition to those who have used it for an un-fixable amount of time previously, the term installaction, has more recently attracted some critical attention, not least in the peer review Inter, [3] where a number of artists active in the domain, amongst them Alistair Maclennan, Esther Ferrer and Roddy Hunter have articulated perspectives. Whilst opinions vary about neologisms - from the luddite [4] to technocratic outlook - it can be said that a new formulation can be a useful means for refreshing critiques in a time of expansive terms and potentially conflicting applications. Clive Robertson heralds this climate, on a prophetic note in respect of another term currently much in vogue - performative - when he says "The purpose is not to play games with a hierarchy of practices but to arrive at what was and is different, particular and peculiar about performance art and its intermedial intentions before we get buried in an institutional pleasing array of performatives". [5] The consideration of aspects of critical and socio-cultural context that Trace's general situation stirs up is also explained by the other special aspect of the gallery, since in initiating Trace Stitt took the important decision to open an art space in his own home in the city. Whilst there have been a number of art projects touching a discourse of art and nomadism through, for instance, the use of re-locatable shelters, [6] Stitt has added to this discourse by setting up the dialectic of itinerancy at home. I think this investigation is critically pertinent at a time when the situation of the nomad is sometimes aligned to a kind of virtual or touristic mode in which the surface of movement alone is emphasised, re-installing Cartesian axes; I move therefore I am nomad. Just as the tourist may, and often does, represent the expansion of the sedentary economy base, so we are reminded that it is essentially a way of making life, an activity, that conveys the state of the nomad, who may well, then, decide to stay at home. And so, there was something immediately engaging about being present (in the psycho-geographical sense) in one of a dense, sprawling mass of residences, waiting to see a performance in an ordinary house - 26 Moira Place to be precise - directly opposite an abandoned (!) pub. The large group of people that had come along were mostly bustling in the kitchen (like at the best of parties), having a cup of tea, juice and crisps, whilst Maclennan prepared in the upstairs bathroom. The situation did not suffer pretension, as the domestic setting seemed to make for a diminished sense of territory and heightened sense of responsibility. By this I mean that the occasional sophistry of art audience which allows a kind of blasé knowing before the event, was unsettled, - the behavioural codes are mixed. I felt a recognition of a shared context and overlapping reality, which many current art projects aspire to; this is more than a matter of delivering opinion; in the intimate realm of another one senses ones own gestures and accordingly responsibility. It is this presence that underlies Trace. Stitt's own work has challenged the isolating and repressive conditions of modern life, analysing in his particular work, how these may be concentrated in people through such states as addiction. Beyond the more common associations, Stitt has suggested that addiction is innate; addiction to states of mind as much as any substance, and he has often sought to expose these. In this respect the context of the home is a space potentially to get to the heart of the matter. The venue, the house, is clearly such a home, with a familiarly ineffective English style radiator sitting poised on one of the front-room, art space walls; a fine idiosyncrasy, which, amusingly, nevertheless irritates Stitt's sense of aesthetics. The room was already prepared with the installation of the featured artist Alistair Maclennan, [7] a practitioner whose work has traversed the territories of performance and interdisciplinary concerns and is of a sensibility which combines the political with the poetic and, significantly in my opinion, compassionate concerns. Maclennan is of Scottish descent, spent time in Halifax amongst many journeys, and has lived in Northern Ireland since returning from North America in the seventies. Indeed it was in Belfast that Maclennan and Stitt were to meet. Both Stitt and Maclennan's practice has developed alongside the internal political and religious conflict where protectionist and reactionary mentalities lead to ignorance, prejudice and denial of the other, and behaviours linked to this. From the point of view of meeting, the Trace opening demonstrates both the continuity of long time relationship and a mutual regard of the artists for making where you are and in relation to others. Thus, in a practice of international breadth, Maclennan has worked in the context of prestigious fora, galleries, festivals and symposia, including events and projects that build on creating exchange at once in immediate and extended environments, as evident in his instrumental role in setting up ARE- Art and Research Exchange in Belfast, where Stitt once performed. Maclennan's work ranges from performances in outdoor contexts, to large-scale installations, sometimes connecting indoor and outdoor situations (Still Tills). He makes lyrical yet jarring installation works, in which he sometimes performs, and it is these explorations that bring him naturally to Trace.
The installation for Stolons (II) at Trace was charged in this way ; a poignant detournement of what, most traditionally, is the meticulous arrangement of the best room. Upon entering the room, instead of seeing furniture which is always meant to look like it hasn't been used (whilst everything else in the house is just that wee bit more worn-in), there was a long table, placed diagonally, for a dinner or maybe another type of meeting, around which were placed a number of chairs convening two sides. In a simple but curiosity-arousing gesture, the chairs at the head and foot of the table were facing outwards (a positive lack of hierarchy, or missing guidance figures?, I wondered). The table's length was loaded with soil packed up to a height along both table sides, slanting to form a ridge running along the middle. Interestingly in terms of the question of the relative presence-absence of the gesture in performance-installation works, the action that had made this seemingly precarious slope, somehow hung strongly in the air; like the sense of preparative gesture that lingers around a wake. This minimal installation saturated the space and it is this economy of what is necessary that is so strong a weight in Maclennan's work. The performance began without to do, as Maclennan's internally measured paces began to articulate a cycle that was to endure throughout the performance. Moving around the table, within what seemed to be a hair's breadth of the chairs, whilst not touching them physically, he placed strips of paper on the soil. Some of these were blank, and on others excerpts of text were printed, as it turned out quotes from a variety of works on culture, art and politics. In such a work, attention to detail is key, especially in terms of the verb attempting to characterise the act. And so it must be said he didn't exactly place but rather 'let fall' the paper strips. Through this nuance, the gesture did not seem expediated, but rather provoked a number of overtones between the experience of language and act; an arrangement occurring between formal and relational aesthetics - considered as the place in which meeting emerges. This 'letting fall' of paper touched the sense that the making of meaning is a continuum, like a casting on and off, coming across in alternating moments in Stolons (II) as: the stitching of earth, through the overlapping strips; the pointedness of eulogies; the melancholy of words expended; the simultaneity of physical and mental refining and erosion, amongst others. The curiosity of the situation, text and body was woven in a mesmodic cycle, installed in the motion of Maclennan's feet, subtly shifting the weight from left to right foot as he barely, but assuredly, advanced. The engagement of the gesture was such that his eyes were barely open - heightening our sensitivity of each position he posed. As mentioned, some of Maclennan's actions have very directly related
to the conflict between sides in Northern Ireland, but the question
of the domestic situation of a nation is respired in the same breath
as all-pervading questions of how routine marks out territory and
the values of belonging. Stolons (II) evoked a meeting [marriage/
mourning) conveying indistinguishable relationships of family and
state. One might say that such association renders the edge of intimacy
and politics - family and state
The vocabularies of public and private bodies that situate Trace on certain levels, clearly act on certain questions of current artistic discourse relating to: the ground(s) on which we interact; extending the relations between the collection of circumstances in which a gesture is inserted (the relationship context-intervention); the charging of artistic arrangement as social trace. Traces opening and desire to cross boundaries takes place at a time of certain tensions as terms of interdisciplinarity generally, chewed over like a piece of gum, [8] have lost a certain flavour. One of the ways in we can consider this mastication in the light of art and academia is the contribution that the art critic Hal Foster makes to the book De-, dis, ex volume two - The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity in which he reflects that: "[interdisciplinary] exchanges are not trivial at a time when enrolments are counted closely-and when some administrators advocate a return to old disciplines, while others seek to recoup interdisciplinary ventures as cost effective programs". [9] The appropriation he suggests in economic terms is just one of the shifts to have taken place, and a significant one when one considers the role that academic institutions are encouraged to play in managing the business of culture. With this vision in mind, it is significant that Stitt - as well as being an established with some twenty years of practice, is also Senior Lecturer in Time-Based Art at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff - expresses in Trace a desire for a social and artistic praxis where creativity is an "enabling process; To elaborate on this, in the adding of Trace to his activities he seems to be advancing an overall framework where the trajectory of processual enquiry - the sum total of critical interactions, social, plastic, textual and other achieves a "viable methodological framework of research." [10] The domestic light of Trace - beyond the order of the reflexive - has the potential to nourish the investigation of performance and installation relationships, as these are notably a matter of questioning what living space is: how it is imbued and what conveys it in terms of material and behaviour; the experience of time as phenomenon of space; the evolving frame for locating the sphere of gesture; posing the question of whether we proceed through a process of accumulation or forgetting and recalling, tying into how things inhabit us through absence and presence. Ultimately these questions convey the implicit consideration of the body as a living situation. In another provoking of necessary critical faculties, the direction of Trace causes us to think about models for artist-run spaces. In a time of much discussion about what artist-run means, we are reminded of another possibility that escapes some of the problems of the administration of autonomy. Furthermore, in another not unconnected question, Trace touches the persistent debate of centre and periphery. On an island whose domestic politics still bear so much of its conservative, ultra-hierarchical heritage - a joke has it that Scotland is England's back yard - Wales has the unenviable status of principality. Whilst there is a certain ascendancy of nationalism and a return to the centre, marked by amongst other things the climate of Brit-art [11] marketing and such neo-colonial ventures as the Millennium Dome, [12] such a commitment to making where you are whilst "within a wider international network context" appears even more vital. It is another economy of making which debunks the myth of growing domestically to accede to international status, like a species of vegetable engineered for export market. Over the last twenty years then, Stitt's own work has come to be known for its excavation of artifice, its exposure, and reluctance to compromise; in the setting up of Trace there is an evident resonance. In Stitt's immediate practice and the direct invitation of Trace, there is an investigation that can be seen as a process of stripping away layers which may conceal what we really live as personal and collective situation, and the building up of social and artistic values. This is practice as research, and art as actuation, [13] in a context of many spheres of concern, where the overlap of difference was brought home beautifully to me by the thorough observing of a chain, gently but clearly hung across the bottom of the stairs outside the art space in Stitt's home. As one of the strips of text from Maclennan's work at Trace read "I maintain this to be the highest task between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other." [14]
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