| Tract Live A rt |
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| Site specific live art and performance in and around Penzance, Cornwall, over three weekends. Summer 2006 | ||||||||||
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| Information on this site will be updated as part of the Tract Live Art Programme | ||||||||||
In a piece originally developed and performed in Oxford and Exeter City centres, Jordan McKenzie, dressed entirely in white, drew compulsively and repetitively in black pastel on a large white cube which he moved ahead of him. He started his performance close to the water on the rocky beach near the Newlyn Art Gallery, where he was initially camouflaged by the stones. He avoided eye-contact with his audience, and indeed appeared to be in a trance. He approached the task of covering the cube with chalk as a purely physical activity, like a child might scribble on a wall, not really attending to the visual detail and occasionally even doing it with his eyes closed. Some times he lay on top, at others beside the cube, as if to relieve the burden of a task which, like Sysiphus he was doomed to repeat forever.
Called At arms length, on one level this was a very minimal work, but it was interesting in being poised between media, each one distilled into its essence. Drawing is the most simple of painterly acts, yet the cube is a sculptural form. Moving the cube gave the piece a temporal, narrative quality and doing so in this location turned it into a site-specific performance. In fact with the backdrop of Mounts Bay behind him, the work seemed to serve as an antidote to simple views of the picturesque, by introducing elements of visual denial and autistic compulsion.
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