Jake Laffoley / Louisa Martin / Rachel Pursglove
The Royal Standard presented a series of three live events taking place over the sumer. Each event invited an artist to showcase new performance work, all of which were vastly different and entirely experimental.
Each artist developed and performed a live event which unfolded over a two-hour time slot, experimenting with ideas of audience engagement and the boundary between watching and participating. Themes of bodily endurance and the role of the artist as material operated through each event.
The Struggle: 12th June 2015
To begin the programme of events for The Royal Standard: LIVE!, Rachel carried out a live performance of her video work The Struggle.
The Struggle is a performance rooted in loneliness; it deals with the many challenges of creativity and serves also as a metaphor for the many challenges of life. The starting point of the performance is a large cardboard box which births the artist who may or may not have chosen to wear a black plinth like object over the upper part of her body, concealing her identity and restricting her vision and movement. The artist struggles with the experience of leaving this womb-like box, and the weight of the new form is carried with her throughout. The restriction of the heavy black plinth acts as an embodiment of the pressures often forced upon us by the real world. The viewers can only watch the physically and mentally exhausting task, but one which is necessary and dependent upon completion. It is a task that the artist may have set herself or by some outside force. Creativity itself is a task, a struggle and this performance is an interpretation.
Toilet Time Compression: 26th June 2015
Continuing the programme of events for The Royal Standard: LIVE!, Jake presented live event Toilet Time Compression.
For two hours, visitors were invited into the blank gallery space and provided with food and drink. Toilet breaks were monitored by a security guard employed by Jake who timed and ended each visit to the rest-room.
Jake’s practice often concerns research into labour. How do we define it? What are its conditions? Who is performing labour, and on whose terms? Querying new and increasingly bizarre methods to measure workplace productivity, Toilet time-compression explores the traditional regulation of time, and asks whether the dynamics of our life, social space, and possibility for political action would be diminished if timed so precisely. It examines the idea that the one place in which you can feel like you can escape, to not be surveyed, has all of a sudden become governed by an algorithmic ideology.
Body Zero Body Double: 12th July 2015
To conclude The Royal Standard: LIVE!, Louisa presented a new performance work.
This work dealt with inheritance; what does this generation value as tools for self-definition and how is this captured by society? She will venture beyond the surface of social standing, material things and identity politics and uncover what it is to own and pass on feelings in a domain which has been commercialised.
In a marked rectangle on the floor of the gallery space, Louisa acted as a mimic to any audience member who entered, copying their actions and observing their behaviour. This performance blurred the line between artist as performer and artist as interpreter.
