I’ve spent my artistic life in a bubble, randomly painting and drawing whatever I found interesting. Attending art school is changing that habit, and a recent class assignment pushed me into a new awareness of how my own work relates to other artists and art forms.
Last year, I discovered the work of artist Ant Hampton, also known as Rotoraza. His name comes from some surrealist-inspired, Dada artists such as Jean Tinguely, who created performances that challenged technological representations of what it meant to be human. His kinetic sculptures often used mechanical parts, assembled and reassembled, often engaging the viewer by inviting them to observe the self-destruction of his work. His approach is one way of involving the audience in a work as performers and participants. Ant Hampton offers another, less mechanical example.
Born in the UK, Ant tangles with words, performance, theater, and something he calls Autoteatro. He sometimes works with Silvia Mercuriali to create works that involve the audience (usually only one or two people) in ways that offer the opportunity to both perform and experience the work at the same time. They often use headphones to prompt their audience through the work, which has no other audience than the participants wearing headphones. So everyone is in the work, making, performing, and observing together. It’s wild. You do get the feeling that the whole work can explode in one moment, but it doesn’t. The works of Jean and others can often feel chaotic, risky, guided, yet open to chance. Etiquette is one of their early works and is an example of the use of headphones and performance between two individuals. It’s guided, but only so much, allowing the individuals to experience the work in their own way.
His book project, Borderline Invisible, introduced me to the idea that books can be experiences in ways other than reading them. Similar to his work that explores conversations between two people as opportunities for performance, the book is experienced, not read, in the traditional way. The book appears as a physical book with a cover, pages, and includes mostly images. When I first held the book in my hand, I was disappointed. With such an emphasis on images, the book raised my expectations that the images were in some way special, of some aesthetic value. But the images were bland, not remarkable in any way.
Instead, Ant intends to take you on a voyage through the book by providing you with a recording, which you listen to with headphones so that you feel immersed in the book experience. At the beginning of the recording, he informs you that you should expect to be present for about 77 minutes, although he hints at a time in the recording that you could take a break. Very thoughtful and human.
While you listen to his calm, quiet voice, you follow a path through the book, flipping back and forth, from cover to cover, but not in any linear sense. After a while, you find yourself experiencing a story embedded in the path, emerging gently from information as it unfolds through its monologue
Last year, I experimented with this approach with my book, Humans in Our Food. We sent the book to a small group of curious friends, along with random artifacts, a map, and a puzzle piece, for example, to incite their curiosity about the relationship of the objects to the book. Several recipients of the book used the map to show where they lived, designed a book-inspired menu, or used a printed page to make a collage. I some ways, the responses felt similar to an exquisite corpse, an artwork created by contributing one layer at a time, usually by different people. This was just one of my experiments to see how books could perform in ways other than through a linear narrative. In the future, I hope to explore other ways to disrupt present conceptions of a physical book, inspired by such artists as Ant Hampton.
What about you? Have a book you think you could make an experience, other than by reading it? What could you make with a book, build with a book, turn into a collage, a song, a poem?
Join us for our next Lunar experience!
Read my books: Humans In Our Food / Food Routes / The New Wizard War / Meat, Commerce, and The City
Watch my films: Shelf Life / The Arc of Oblivion / The Long Coast: Stream on Amazon Prime or Apple TV
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