Leah Capaldi - MA Lecture series
Capaldi phrases her key question as ‘if I perform being an object, how long until I become one?’
One body of works she titles ‘performance sculpture,’ that is, body as material, and maybe with some structure as well. Practically, these are mostly performed by dancers, because they posses the physical prowess to hold these difficult, minimal positions. In early days (like, RCA times, 2010) she performed a lot of them herself because there was much more shock, and unappealing body sex stuff, and excess/jouissance.
For the audience, the moment of recognition that this is a real person (performing being an object) does not always occur at first glance. But once it does occur, the moment of recognition that the object in a sculpture is also a subject causes us to be instantly thrown back into our own body. In this way it is confrontational but less than the early works in the shipping container, say. It must be interesting that in-the-doing there is a partial surrender of subjecthood, it must take effort to ‘be an object’ as the mind must try to reassert itself when there are overheard snippets of conversation or big discomfort.
Also in Capaldi’s practice there are research projects like the Land Art Road Trip Residency (resulting in Lay Down, Matt’s Gallery (2016)) and British School at Rome (WIP). The Land Art Road Trip involved meeting West, a horse whisperer, as Capaldi went in search of the Romantic frontier. I was actually present for the artist research trip to a UK horse whisperer, Dido Harding, around 2015, but it was my first time seeing the resultant work, Lay Down.
For Lay Down, practically, as well as all the challenges of covid, for the installation they have to overcome the technical challenge of creating a silicon rubber screen 25m wide (long.) Here the artistic eye proceeds through various what-it-isn’ts to is able to say, no not calico, not fabric, not projector screen etc. and collaborate with a fabricator to come up with something really special. This flesh-resembling screen is carefully cut with a scalpel with real bodies poking through; I notice that otherwise it isn’t ‘trimmed to size’ as this would feel inappropriate to such a bodily thing.
This idea of surrender is extremely important in the film, as the horse makes itself vulnerable, a mini-death. It reinforces this same point in the installation to have live bodies performing surrender at the same time (not chariacture, gestural theatrical surrender like ‘hands up,’ but whole-body surrender.) which means we spend more time looking at what is happening in the film, than being impressed by its foreign-ness, its Americana.
Finally, the British School at Rome. This is clearly a vast experience; remnants of Italian fascism around a running track, Classical sculpture, British power-projecting Imperial architecture, meals rung by bells like Oxford, etc. While Capaldi looks for ways to start to work with this vast amount of material, like a baby, she puts the inedible slivers of marble in her mouth.
Her starting point is often food, I remember once she told me a story that when she was first trying to make sense of stuff in America, she just buried some hotdogs sticking upright in the sand, like, “is this anything?” Also once about the importance of the discrepancy between what is seen and what is felt in performance is also bourne out in land art; that the salt, sand and sun are an integral part of Spiral Jetty, almost to the point where you should never see the photograph, or the aerial photograph is literally unrecognisable to the experience.
One reflection on Capaldi’s practice is the pace of work. Research projects, which would often be thought of as long-form, are actually not-so-long within the larger container of a clearly-defined practice. It has a different rhythm to most, seemingly two or three three-year projects gradually progressing, being taken forward and then revisited, allowing space for lateral drift and clear thinking. There’s a sense that hammering away at a point doesn’t work that well; creating the conditions for coming to a problem fresh are often questions of timing and balance.
Bib.:
‘Performance sculpture’: Capaldi, L., works, [online]. https://www.leahcapaldi.com/works [Accessed 15th Dec 2023]
‘Structure: Capaldi’, L., Structure, [online]. https://leahcapaldi.hotglue.me/structure/ [Accessed 15th Dec 2023].
‘Revisioning of our own body’: Phelan, P., Unmarked, (1993) London, Routledge. Afterword