Rebecca Moss - Seminar and workshop - MA space and Camberwell - October ‘23

Rebecca Moss (2018-23). Click-through on image

Moss’s lecture/seminar started from Low Tide (Sausage) and Pink Concrete as the introduction to her practice.

This way of working is about bathos and pathos, fleeting moments. There is also a de-monumentalising of sculpture through temporary situations. As a teaching point, she says don’t distrust works that take a short time to complete, that while sometimes it is frustrating something that took ten minutes rather than ten weeks is the most effective, in the end being a working practitioner is about selecting the strongest work to put forward.

With that in mind, this method is at least as much about creating an interesting situation or condition for the work to happen as it is about the result. (It is linked to, but less formalised than, the ‘event score,’ and more personal.) The idea changes in the landscape and in the doing, but the idea of landscape, of people in it, of internal condition or question; aka artistic practice; is what brings us to this odd situation in the first place. This is underscored by the fact that most of her works are shown as video.

I asked a question about this; isn’t it kind of a contradiction that although she says this, she doesn’t stage her performances live in the gallery, where the emergent nature of the work would be seen in real time, and for the work to simply happen and pass away?

Her answer was that film allows her to do subtle edits. To communicate what happened through film, rather than to show literally what happened. It eliminates the possibility of failure - although our intention might fail, or be to fail, it is not acceptable for her for the work to fail, publicly. Film allows her to show the time where it worked. That to have it risk failing in the gallery is overpowering and film allows her to do things which might not work the first time. In its own way, it makes allowance for failure.

By extension, I imagine this allows her to bring landscape and outsider-y-ness to the gallery, because live work that addresses the people that attend performances in galleries are also, in context, co-creators and subjects and objects of work in a way that is not desirable to speaking about landscape; to speaking about the low places, the forgotten places, and home. Found, everyday objects take on the canon of art history in the white cube but can retain an everyday-ness when used just in the home, or the street, rather than re-presented (or presented, or performed) in art spaces.

Moss also says that as a female body working in sculpture, in a very broad sense this is a different engagement from the historical category of ‘male’ heroic achievement and spectacle. There are quite a few notable exceptions (Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Hepworth) but broadly speaking.

Indeed her body often features, or stand-ins for the body. If we look at performance methodologies which are interested in subject-objectness (‘Eye/I’ Phelan, 1993) use of film makes her subject/object-ness bearable but keeps her as the subject of a film.

Moss ends with most recent project (Sky Drop), which is probably a turn back towards traditional object-based walk-aroundable sculpture. These are big ‘found’ and altered ice-creams, from the seaside. This idea of landscape, and the people in it, is crucial for dialogue, for identifying small expressive things. It is totally reasonable for sculpture to deal with ephemera or with ‘permanence’ - vast geological spans of time - but either way they are somehow expressed through what I would call specificity, or contemporary discourse would call ‘gesture’ (Hannula, 2006.)

Workshop responses: Disguise and/or Disturb. Photography Owen Herbert

Bib:

rebeccamoss.co.uk. (2023). Rebecca Moss. [online] Available at: https://rebeccamoss.co.uk/ [All accessed 7 Nov. 2023].

Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Oxford: Routledge. [online] University of Michigan. Available at https://courses.lsa.umich.edu/jptw/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2017/08/Phelan-Unmarked-OntologyofPerformanceAfterword.pdf [Accessed 7 Nov. 2023]

Hannula, M. (2006) The Politics of Small Gestures Istanbul, Revolver. [online] Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54d6681fe4b02fde3d6e646e/t/54f84951e4b0b65fe0ba0ea6/1425557841762/mikabook.pdf [Accessed 15 Dec. 2023]