Previous AA2A Artist
William Hunt
All the way through making a piece of work I am thinking about it’s image, what does it look like? The starting point is this flight of the imagination, what if you could stand in the ceiling, what if you could breath underwater what would it look like, what would it feel like? The work starts to take shape when the impossibility of these ideas becomes explicit through attempting them. The battle is then to try and make it work somehow.
My recent work has been live performance documented in video. During the time on the AA2A program I would like to challenge this strategy by devising new performances that are linked directly to the creation of their own document.
The brutality of the treatment of the body and the rawness of the gesture were readable in the resultant print. This was because of the directness to physical gesture, printing processes have over lens- based media. I would like to explore actions and gestures that naturally provide this two dimensional evidence. Not unlike the prints produced by Yves Klein in his Anthropometries series but with a Harold Lloyed, more slap-stick even Jackass TV twist. In this way continue my interest between the history of performance art and contemporary mainstream performative culture.
In order to produce a work of art you have to be able act on the ideas and methods that occur to you during the process of making. By placing this process in a situation where you are able to move from one appropriate method to another, momentum will build and carry the ideas further faster.
I would expect the work to be of a nature that would have been impossible had I not applied to the program because of the journey the work was taken on through the surroundings.
'Even as you see me now'
still from video of performance