Tract Live A rt
N E W L Y N
ART GALLERY		 ART SURGERY
Site specific live art and performance in and around Penzance, Cornwall, over three weekends. Summer 2006
Programme
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Information on this site will be updated as part of the Tract Live Art Programme

Fran Cottell

Cab Drivers
Continuing and developing a vein of work that seeks to give greater visibility to support services and behind the scenes activities. Visitors are invited to take part as individuals or in groups, in a taxi relay around Penzance and access an alternative view of the town.

Saturday 23 September

 


Still Lives 2003-4. photo Mark Harwood

 


Fran Cottell is an artist who works with ’live’ installation and performance.
She is currently continuing her series of live installations displaying the contents, visitors and occupants of her house in collaboration with café gallery projects, London: Collecting Time the Living and the Dead 2005/6, Still Live 2003/4 and Display 2001. Fran is interested in negotiating and interacting with the static nature of museum and gallery collections, the inability/ability of museums and galleries to collect life and time and how artworld contexts frame/mediate ‘liveness’ and experience.

Fran is in the process of making a (photographic) collection of curators Heads She recently performed The National Gallery of South London: Art in the Time of Reagan 2006 at the South London Gallery: ‘Number sixty seven’, for Camberwell Arts Festival. Other recent projects include live installations for the m2 Gallery, Artist’s Impression, 2006, the UK touring exhibition arttextiles 3 2004/6 and for Arts Catalyst’s The Suicide of Objects 2004 Belfast at the Ulster Museum.

Past projects include: lecture: Temporary Public art in the UK Moscow Art Fair 2003. Installations: View 2001 Dilston Grove (café gallery projects) London and Double Interior 1989/91 Cambridge Darkroom and The Painted Bride, Philadelphia USA. Performance: English Performance Artists 1998,The Bunkier Sztuki and Klub Kulturany, Krakow. Curation: researched/co-curated River Crossings (site-specific installations) 1991/2 for Camerawork, London and co-curated group exhibition Conceptual Clothing Ikon Gallery, Birmingham UK/USA tour1986-90. Residencies/performance collaborations: Box’n, Knox College, Illinois 1997, Boundary Condition 1992 Whitechapel Art Gallery/Open, A Meeting Outside Time Projects UK,1988 Newcastle and for the Arts Council of Great Britain; The Blue Line, Hull (Humberside College of HE) , and Passing Through 1987 London (Chisenhale Dance Space/Gallery). Fran is a Senior Lecturer (Live project/Electives) at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
Archive Fran Cottell’s Cab Drivers Saturday 23 September

Billed as a series of taxi rides around Penzance, Fran Cottell’s piece did not seem, initially, a terribly enticing prospect. Having signed up for the ride, however, I was introduced to fellow punter, Chris - who turned out to be an art-historian from Cardiff - and the two of us were ushered into a ‘Nippy’ taxi cab, and whisked through the streets of Penzance to the harbour by an affable female cabbie wearing a rugby shirt.

We got out, and as three people who had never met before, watched the waves lapping against the sea-wall; Chris and I talking about art and living in Cornwall, the taxi-driver about her fear of the sea and her experience of losing a friend in a fishing accident.

We then had 10 minutes each with a relay of 3 other taxi drivers, who, in similar fashion took us to their favourite thing in Penzance, which amusingly in the case of the last one was his souped up black Ford Mondeo, parked in the fore-court of Penlee House.

Fran’s piece was deceptive. The visual content of the work e.g. the views of Penzance were not very important, nor even was the process of the journey itself. Both were only a backdrop to the human drama which took place in the encounters between the ‘art-visitor’ and the taxi drivers.

Like a form of mobile speed dating, the work was a highly choreographed quartet of facilitated social exchanges, in which the boundary between art and life, audience and performer, was dissolved. I know this because I went into the taxi thinking I was a member of the ‘audience’, but then found myself explaining the work to the taxi driver who I had originally expected to be the performer.

The working through of the various role-reversals that resulted was refreshing: an intrigue that became possible only because the artist herself had managed to remain completely detached from the work while it was in progress.