In March 2010, PAR+RS commissioned our first ever artwork, inviting Israeli-born, Glasgow-based Shelly Nadashi to devise and present a temporary public project. This work was launched at Mapping The Future: Public Art in Scotland, a series of three symposia taking place in Dundee during October. To introduce this new work I’d like to take the opportnuity, as PAR+RS’ Producer, to explain how and why this commission came about and discuss what my own responses to the piece have been.

The invitation to create a new piece for PAR+RS came on the back of a performance of Shelly’s that I saw in February 2010 at the Studio Warehouse (SWG3), Glasgow, titled Ambush in Wedding (for more on this work, read Sarah Lowndes’ Feature article I Am The Space Where I Am: from subversion to citizenship), and was catalysed by a couple of the ideas that Nadashi’s work raised for me as I was watching.

The first was a question of content. As a work, Ambush in Wedding presents itself as autobiographical. The artist, a Jewish Israeli woman stands before her audience and tells us the story of a failed romantic encounter with a German man in the district of Wedding, Berlin. The tale is funny, awkward, and revealing. The artist is unflinching as she describes (what we are led to believe is) her own recent history. But this personal intimate history is explicitly underpinned by a broader geo-political history of which the audience shares a collective memory; and by a psychogeographic telling of the streets and parks of Berlin – the cities public spaces – as a physical and emotional landscape. Private history is thrown into relief against public history: sexual history is presented as a narrative parallel to global history. And the strength of the work was that one of these stories did not become a metaphor for the other. Nadashi’s intervention into this language of multiple memories was somehow more delicate than the idea of the fable. Undermined by its own magnetic humour and the charisma of the artist as performer, it made me wonder at quite a fundamental level how we understand ourselves in relation to the public spaces that we occupy – and, indeed, whether we can ever truly separate the idea of ourselves from these public spaces.

The second idea was one of form. I was already thinking about the idea of temporary projects in public space, as I’d already decided that this would be the new PAR+RS Season. As I watched Shelly make public her private landscape – and tracing a private path through public space by doing so – I wondered whether there were any limits to that idea of ‘temporary-ness’. Many temporary projects, I thought, use the structures of a permanent work, but make those structures speak more briefly. These are works that involve a physical object or intervention that fades, or is moved, away. Though the materials or conceptual structure of such a work might render permanence impossible, the register still seems different to that of performance, which exists only in and of the moment. There is no suggestion of longevity at any level.

At any level? Well, that’s not strictly true because of course the documentation of such an ephemeral gesture becomes critical. How can that documentation become permanent, or temporary? And where and who are the audiences that this documentation implies? Is it ‘cheating’? Is it still public? As a way to ask these questions, PAR+RS approached Shelly Nadashi and asked her to develop a new temporary performance work for a public space. We left the brief very open, other than specifying that we had to be able to represent the work somehow on the PAR+RS website. I met with Nadashi several times to discuss the proposal, and what PAR+RS would want to get from the work. Nadashi agreed to produce something during the residency she was about to undertake, at Schloss Brollin, Germany. At that point we agreed some dates and left her to it, content to receive her video Blog posts and try to guess what she might be developing.

On Nadashi’s return I met with her again, and she showed me some raw footage of performance in a public space: A road, two horses, a fluttering veil or head-piece, and an amount of time; a tense moment of proximity. We spoke about the work at length, and Nadashi told me that she’d like to re-make the piece in Scotland. Could PAR+RS give her the time and space to do this? I felt that we could. I wanted to be able to present a work that the artist was wholly happy with, and I also wanted to feel that PAR+RS had been able to support the production of a piece that really furthered the artist’s practice and thinking.

Over the next few weeks Nadashi worked on refining the piece, and Two Horses’ Scarecrow,the work that developed, was launched at Mapping the Future. The work is a gesture – perhaps a private gesture – in a public space. It was re-presented on a public platform, as it was available on YouTube, as well as at the symposia. But the public space the artist stands in is devoid of a human audience. Her interaction is with the landscape and its animal occupants. And the public platforms (of YouTube, and the DCA) that she inserts this moment into are also managed and mediated. Framed as it is – by the presence of PAR+RS, and by the artist’s defining of her own space within that channel – can YouTube space be considered public, either?

Two Horses’ Scarecrow is temporary. Shelly Nadashi’s work was present here, on PAR+RS’ Youtube Channel, and at Mapping the Future for the duration of the symposia (October 6th – 20th 2010). Now it has disappear.ed The artist, of course, holds onto the work, and can use it again however she wishes. As always, let us know what you think.

Two Horses’ Scarecrow
Shelly Nadashi 2010.
Conversation between Shelly Nadashi and Ruth Barker 07/06/2010

Ruth Barker: So talk to me about the new work you’ve made. Why were you drawn to using the horses’ presence in the film?

Shelly Nadashi: For me, the simple act of standing, with covered eyes and full performative concentration, next to an animal that is bigger than me – and that I’m not used to interacting with – gives tension to the work as well as lending an abstract quality to the gesture I’m making. Because the performer is placed in proximity to the horses in this way, the work immediately examines my physical presence, which otherwise takes its shape almost always in urban environments and next to other human beings. My face is covered and I’m dressed unusually, wearing entirely blue, and so I become a puppet or a scarecrow in the scene, acting for the horses, who then respond.
Looking at the work again, I found interest in the differences between my own solid vertical position throughout the performative act, and the horses’ horizontal positions; also the fact that they moved horizontally, from one edge of the frame to the other, whilst I was holding the teapot up in the air, as if aiming at God. Maybe it could be said that a vertical act made them run horizontally. The fence is an important horizontal within the work. It divides the space, creating a barrier between the performer and the animals. For me, the division was very important as the work is also defined within the limitations of my own fear of the horses. I don’t think I could have performed so close to them if that barrier wasn’t there.

RB: The sound in the work seems very important. What is the sound, firstly, and how to you feel that it operates in the piece?

SN: The noise you can hear is the sound of stones being rattled inside a metal teapot. That sound starts when the performer is out of the cinematic frame, establishing itself as the soundtrack of the work. The noise manipulates the horses by harassing them, or perhaps making them curious, or unsettled. The sequence is non narrative, but at the same time this monotonic sound acts as a provocation for action, which I find interesting. It [the sound] stops towards the end of the performative act, after the piece of drapery falls off the performer’s face, creating a link between the ‘magical’ act of controlling the horses’ movement, the disturbing sound and the performer’s physical appearance: once the face is revealed, the sound stops and the horses stop running. The sound of stones inside a metal teapot connects to the performer’s attempt to become a scarecrow; it relates to something hollow, a body that is empty from the inside and functions only as a shell.

RB: The act itself (the static shaking) seems to refer to an idea of ritual, as well. Do you think that’s a fair reading?

SN: Perhaps. I think there are definitely some references to the idea of witchcraft. The covered head, for example, and the piled object in the field with the horses also makes me think of witchcraft, in a way. And of course perhaps that returns us to the idea of the puppet, or the scarecrow – figures who are defined or controlled by others.

RB: I was also wondering if there was a connection to the idea of humour. Your other works are very funny and provoke an immediate physical response in the viewer because you make them laugh. This work is different. It isn’t funny, and the response it creates in me as I watch it is far more complicated. Could you talk about that a little?

SN: I am a performer and I love to make people laugh and be engaged in what they see in front of them. Humour is one of the most powerful ways of doing that; it’s a physical reaction. I can be far away from you, and yet I can do something that will actually make your body move, make your heart beat stronger, like magic. When I’m working on rehearsals or devising a new piece, I often think; ‘oh, that bit is going to crack them down with laughter!’ It’s like conquering someone, and it’s erotic. Two Horses’ Scarecrow was made however, with no audience in front of me. It was made when I was away in a residency in Germany, not in a city and in a very isolated place. Obviously this situation opened a new way of devising something, maybe freed me for a while from the dictatorship of humour. I think that it is important to know that you are allowed not to be funny, that your work is valid also if it doesn’t grab people in their balls! It gives subtlety to your practice and it gives credit to the spectator.

RB: The last thing I’d like to ask you about is the role of the camera, and the presence of ideas of observation within the work.

SN: The film is a moving image – a sequence designed to be seen by the camera. There are very few people passing who would have come across the performance as I was working – although there were a few. It’s interesting actually that this is something that really emerged because of the way the piece developed, I think. When I shot the original footage in Germany, the location was very isolated. There were not many people in that surrounding, but then I decided to bring that quality to the finished piece I’ve made in Scotland – I was sort of “thrown” into a landscape without people because of that first stage I went through. That first stage became very important to the finished work, even though quite of few of the elements went on to change.