Alex Murdoch, Artist

Category: Research Paper

  • On the border of Theatre and Fine Art

    What do I mean by this? I’m picking up some threads of things coming together for me based on some recent theatre experiences which have danced around with the definitions of Theatre and Fine Art.  But are not ‘Live Art’.  Live Art is another thing in my mind – and much less connected to the practice and crafts involved in theatre making and more close to being an area of Fine Art but with liveness and..people..? My definition anyway.  I don’t have many examples in my experience (but am glad to be corrected) of Live Art taking responsibility for it’s audience with any kind of care or skill. Massive generalisation but that’s my experience.

    Two shows I saw recently that made me really sit up. ‘Matter Era’ by Tim Spooner and Terrapin at the Battersea Art Centre – an experimental London venue where I cut my teeth as a messy young theatre maker.  Matter Era was technically a puppetry show, object animation being the preferred term these days – and the craft I’m referring to is the skill of the Puppeteers.  Who remained invisible beneath the metal stage, moving the objects around with magnets.  And most interestingly they couldn’t SEE what they were doing.  (Unless there was some kind of live video feed perhaps?) There was this element of surprise and jeopardy, that you would get in an improvised show, because without a direct manipulation the objects would sometimes fall out of their control.  And that became story. The audience, as in any improvised piece, become complicit moment by moment in that story by being more knowledgable about what was going on above the Puppeteers. (Who are famously shy folk – so there’s something rather lovely about them hiding below with magnets and anonymity).

    Above or On stage – an ethereal wild world of dreams where objects (thinking of Jane Bennet’s book Vibrant Matter) have agency.  None of the objects were realistic or recognisable – sort of like twigs, sort of like fur, sort of like fat blueberries covered in oil.  But all with some kind of recognisable quality we can attach a feeling to.  There was so much space for the audience – which is exactly what I want to deal with – and it was just beautiful.

    I also want to speak about my friend Tim Crouch’s work.  Tim is an extraordinary theatre-maker – after Caryl Churchill I would say he is the most significant experimental theatre writer at work in the UK today.   What I went to see was him in actor-mode rather than his own work – but his take on ‘The Tempest’ at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse was absolutely in line with his tireless experimentation with the form.  Prospero is normally cited as the Shakespearean hero connected with the idea of forgiveness but Tim’s Prospero as I saw it was not moving on in forgiveness but playing over his wrongs and how to right them over and over on a loop. Perhaps more like we do in life.  As usual he broke most of the rules of theatre – it was quite slow (I felt mesmerically slow but he definitely tests the levels of patience) and it didn’t really end or conclude but rather looped back round again.  Like bitterness does, feeding itself like a beast

    An update to this post: I also saw Tim’s Toto Kerblammo this weekend. (Alot of Tim in my life by chance at the mo, this one he’d invited my mentee Zoe along to his rehearsals for) Kerblammo-ed by this piece which takes the audience into the internal world and sensescape of a child in a coma and her dying dog by using binaural sound on headphones. It was a live play, a radio story, a one on one piece in a way whilst also being a shared experience. Sidenote – it occurs to me I am noticing work that works directly with emotion lately (this the unvoiced topic of child mental health)…

    Got to speak about his play ‘An Oak Tree’.  Inspired by artist Craig Martin’s work that self-declared the glass of water exhibited on a high shelf was in fact an oak tree.  Martin says on the Tate website  –

    “The Oak Tree was meant to be ‘how do I create the maximum imaginable transformation?’ and my way of doing it was to produce no transformation at all.”

    In Tim’s namesake play the second actor has never seen the script before. So their reading of the grieving father they’re playing is loaded with confusion along with those strange blanks and spikes of interrupted thought that anyone who has experienced grief can probably recognise.  

    Tim says – 

    ‘I take responsibility for how audience receive my work’

    This is really speaking to me right now as I reconsider what kind of work I really want to make. 

    As the two disciplines creep towards each other and cross over and meet and join up and speak to each other…

    I want to think more about what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of my art making.  I can take responsibility for that.  

  • Talking to my Dad about making art

    Session with Rebecca Fortnum, artist and researcher, about ‘correspondence’.  Rethinking how we do research as artists.  Collecting data and other traditional methods may not work – and she raised the question who is the best judge of the work.  Is the audience?  Not always.  The critics?  The artist themself – and at what point?  Retrospectively or immediately after making a thing?  

    Fortnum has made work in ‘correspondence’ with other artists, often marginalised female practitioners, giving voices to say the Practiciennes supported by Rodin.  She explores their voices through letters, through investigating images from a different angle, her viewfinder closing in on large figurative sculpture and honing in on say, a detail in an expression. She gives us another way of looking at a 3D piece by flattening it into a painting.  I write down the word ‘prosopopoeia’ – making the inanimate have a voice.  Are we doing that in what we chose to hone in on?  Giving a moment or a feeling or an idea a form.  I feel that I’ve done that in the past with writing and today is a writing exercise day.  

    When we work in homage to another artist, or in response to or have correspondence with, we are still making our own voices heard.  As Tim brilliantly says ‘you are writing to the significance they have for you’.  

    We are asked who would you like to have a conversation with in relation to your work.  I work on an imagined dialogue with my late father. In his last months he told me about an opportunity he had by chance (coincidence comes up several times today) which saw him and a bunch of other South London kids who’d had a tough life, as part of a progressive education project, transported to the countryside and a classical education.  Something I have tried to research but never got very far with.  Partly maybe I resist that research because he kept this story from me for most of his life for his own reasons.  To me it is a moment of glorious post-war optimism which he chanced upon (how chance could have taken him another way) and that changed who he was and who I am in turn.  

    So I wrote about this and mostly I think I am actually writing about the hopelessness of ever getting a full answer from him now that he’s left us.  He was an unreliable narrator at the best of times.  

    *******

    Talking to my Dad about making art.

    But what did you make Dad?

    It was a golden time.  One of the tutors there was a contemporary of Henry Moore you know, very respected.  

    You said

    And then it was all over and Nan came to fetch me and we went back to Camberwell.  She was with Stan then.  Grandad Stan.  I didn’t like him.  

    But what did you make Dad?

    Well, that was it, it was all over.  It was the same when I got into Grammar School.  When I passed the eleven plus.  She got the hump about that.

    I know

    She had to fork out for a uniform and she was livid.  

    And that was Wilson’s Grammar School.

    What is Camberwell Art School yes.  Terrible place, Wilson’s.

    And Johnny said you had an exhibition in the little library on Camberwell Green?

    Yes

    What was it of Dad?

    Paintings.

    What kind?

    Near Kennedy’s Butchers.  Best sausages.

    In the whole of London.  But what were the paintings of Dad?

    It was a golden time at that school, the one I went to.  We listened to opera and read Shakespeare.

    And you learnt sculpture.

    Yes, she was a contemporary of the great Henry Moore.

    What sort of work did you make Dad?  

    I was pissed off when Elsie turned up with Stan. Nasty piece of work Stan.  

    And you went to Cambridge?

    I enrolled in the poly and I was a milkman.

    Did you still make art Dad?

    Lovely city Cambridge.  Full of people and ideas.

    Maybe you could have made some art later on.

    No Al, no.

    Why not Dad?

    Never time.

    Would you make some art now Dad, if you were still here?

    Maybe.

    What would we do today Dad?

    We would take a trip into town and see Rose Wylie if it’s still on.  A feast of colour.