Is someone coming to get me? |
|
|
This blog will document an artistic collaboration between Ben Coode-Adams and Kris Cohen. The final work, to be performed from 28th-30th May at the Banff Centre, will stage simultaneous, real-time re-enactments of three related events: the first ascent of Everest in 1953, the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, and a commericial climb of Everest in 1996 which ended in disaster.
CONTACT info@bencoodeadams.com Please send us thoughts, photos, questions. Or leave comments using the 'Shout Out' links. We'll post them here or try to use them in the performance.
BIOS Kris Cohen is a research fellow in the INCITE group at the University of Surrey, Dept. of Sociology. Ben Coode-Adams is an artist whose work spans traditional sculpture, video installation, performance and curating. All his work is based on developing innovative means of delivering complex and often esoteric ideas and information, in an engaging and accessible way. Working across disciplines collaboration is a cornerstone of his work. |
Saturday, May 24, 2003
Playing hooky from the afternoon session, but only so we can pay our full attention to what comes next. Bright sun and heat makes the place feel even more unreal. We're plotting at just this minute to build a 1:1 scale model of Everest and reenact every expedition ever, eh.  The blog of our blog. This is the last slide in the slide presentation we just gave at Banff. The following 30ish posts follow the slide show back to front.  We're very clever here: this is our analysis of the key difference between 1953 and 1996. It has to do with the constitution of team and individual, and what the outcome of the expedition is held to be.  Coded telegram sent by Jan (nee James) Morris to London announcing the success of the 1953 British expedition.  This is a picture of 4 members of the 1953 Everest team listening, after their successful ascent, to the coronation of the queen in London. Pictured clockwise, starting from the bottom left corner: George Band, Ed Hillary, Charles Edmunds, and x Wylie.  Clockwise from top left: 1953 sherpas and British climbers (names given below), 1996 Mountain Madness team, 1996 Adventure Consultants. We thought we would post parts of our talk that we gave here on Thursday as people here have been asking for it. So here are our notes. We ad libbed a lot though. I will post some of the images we used as well. NOTES FROM 17/05/03 BANFF TALK Intro about the piece, hastings then here. Hi my name is Ben and this is my collaborator Kris. We are going to talk about a project we undertook in February this year which we are restaging and embellishing next week here in Banff. The original project was a recreation of the 1996 Everest disaster imortalised in Jon Krakauer’s best seller, into thin air. Next week we will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the first ascent of Everest on 29th May 1953, by recreating that climb along with the 1996 climb and just for good measure we will be adding in the Coronation of Elizabeth II. I. Intro on delicacy of collaboration [see last email; kc to work more on this to shape it up] TALK ABOUT THE TALK As it turns out, I’m going to start with a short talk about creating this talk. We weren’t intending that, but our insights, such as they are, seem to lie at this level. TOO SPECIFIC TO MATTER; THE GENERAL SEEMED BETTER We had been wrestling with how to frame our presentation. My instinct was to Generalise from the gritty specifics of our work, which seemed too contingent, too personal, too idiosyncratic to be helpful here, and move towards helpful abstractions. DESTRUCTIVE OUTCOME; TOO MUCH ABOUT OUR INDIVI CONTRIBUTIONS But it turns out that this effort led to something of a destructive outcome. What it kept leading to was an analysis of how we each behave in the relationship, falling upon things like the differences in our personalities, and attempts to define our roles by identifying, and subtlely evaluating, our distinct contributions. Thinking in this way about what collaboration means for us devolved, in other words, persistently upon Difference. The implicit assumption that underpinned these initial conversations, almost a reflex on our parts, was that we are not the same and that working together requires addressing this difference—in fact, that working together IS the process of addressing this difference. It’s interesting that this particular arrangement of collaboration, implicit in our conversations about it—of two poles and the distance between them—figured as the starting point, as the way of thinking collaboration. COLLABORATION BEGINS WITH PREMISE OF DIVIDE Probably we weren’t going about it right, but here’s another reason why I think this happened: the idea of collaboration begins with the premise of a divide and a meeting across that divide. And these differences are real, material factors to contend with. WHAT OTHER WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT COLLABORATION ARE THERE But maybe they also blind us to certain other ways that collaboration works, certain ways that the work happens. Maybe they aren’t the best analytic tool here. They certainly don’t constitute the only approach. IN THE MOMENT V. NOW, AFTERWARDS For instance: during the first performance, it hardly felt like we were collaborating, in that sense of a slightly weird tension between two different people both working on something in common. It, the ‘it’ of collaboration, felt insubstantial…in those moments. Now, here, at this conference and in the preparation for it, our project feels very keenly like collaboration again: ‘collaboration’ is what this conferences gives me as a way of thinking about our work. WHAT KIND OF ANALYTIC COLLABORATION IS FOR THINKING COLLAB. The point of the critical tone is not really to cast a suspicious eye on collaboration. This is just a check on what that word fully contains, or codes for, and what kind of analytic collaboration is for seeing the work of collaboration. IT MIGHT BE ABOUT PERSONALITY, BUT THAT’S NOT HELPFUL FOR OTHERS TRIVIALISES THE DISCUSSION ABOUT COLLAB. We could say, by way of an alternative approach, that our collaboration works because of who we are now, our histories, the circumstances we find ourselves in and what we are working on. That our collaboration is such a specific forum for creativity that its usefulness to other people is questionable. And this would be true enough, though it seems to trivialise collaboration, as such, as well as the effort of looking at it. And that’s not so helpful either, as a way of approaching collaboration. JUST DESCRIPTION So we decided to simply describe the work itself, under the assumption that THAT is ALSO, at the same time, a description of the collaboration—even while we know that the collaboration isn’t reducible to the outcome alone. Transition: “talking about the work IS talking about the collaboration”. II. Hastings and 1996 Everest WHAT WE DID A. Ben tells story of how we met, and brings us up to point of Hastings collaboration Why I love mountain histories I have been reading mountain and exploration literature since I was a boy. Indeed my school, designed to provide functionaries for the Empire, placed a good deal of emphasis on tragic bravery as a quality to be cultivated. Captain Scott was our Hero. I know the short comings of adventure literature, however it does not stop those stories being captivating. I want to do that So how do you get from reading about it to doing it. I am already spending too much time away from my work, walking biking and skiing. So why not make that part of ones practice. Also I am not actually very good at these things nor will ever be. How to experience something that is far away So I conceived of the idea of reconstructing various journeys that would help me to visualise, in fact more than that as near as possible have the experience, of the adventure. Naturally I am attracted to stories of disaster…. Kris and I met in Banff at a conference held in October. Shortly after returning I was invited to apply to programme called experimental spaces at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. This is a small seaside town on the South Coast of England. I decided to pitch a reconstruction of the 1996 Everest disaster. The frantic apportioning of blame by all those who survived had troubled me. The experience of Everest in 1996 seems to drastically deviate from the noble ideal I had been brought up on… Anyway my bid was successful which called my bluff. I quickly realised I was going to need someone to help me. Kris had shown a mild interest in my work at Banff and we had met up a few times subsequently back in London. He seemed like a nice guy and might be persuaded to stay up for 29hours moving little wooden blocks around. Which is after all what sociologists are good for. 1. “Experimental Spaces” B. Ben talks about the difficult politics of Hastings accepting a collaborator in a program that was nominally about collaboration. So I emailed the Museum saying that I wanted to work with Kris. Much to my surprise they emailed back that they were unsure whether that was in the spirit of experimental spaces. 1. His/our preconceptions for what the collaboration was for, 2. The NEED that collaboration addressed 3. Helping to make decisions 4. encouragement 5. discouragement 6. useful, in part, as a way of closing down options C. Kris talks about his preconceptions for collaboration and for his role. 1. I was coming to this pretty cold; I knew Ben, but not in the context of a working relationship; and this felt very much like his project. 2. So I spent a lot of time listening and asking questions, trying to arrive at a point where I felt I could meaningfully contribute. 3. It turns out, these open questions were useful, because the questions I was asking, hoping for an answer, not only didn’t have answers, but were some of the questions most in need of answering. D. Kris on visualising the piece and the build work in Hastings 1. We spent a lot of time researching the piece, and this we had to both do. 2. But in the on-site preparations, we could divide up tasks, because a lot of the harder conceptual work had been done. 3. We sustained a conceptual-level conversation throughout, making critical decisions about how to visualise the events we were dealing with. 4. But we also just had to make it, and in this Ben orchestrated the build and I orchestrated the informational materials (i.e. the computer). Another expedient. 5. This, too, was collaboration, but of a far more banal, workaday sort; we were just racing to get everything made, and decisions made between us always had the fast, loose sense of expediency about them. E. Ben on adaptability E.5 kc on crisis of confidence and is it art? F. Tell abbreviated story of 1996 1. Oxygen 2. The icy bulge and sherpas 3. We did this to learn more about the stories we were recreating, as an alternative way to SEE a history. 4. we weren’t thinking too much about audience yet; we were surprised when people were as engaged as they were. Transition: the diagram and comparing team dynamics in 1996 v. 1953 III. 1953 Climb A. Avoiding Good:Bad::1953:1996 binaries 1. There are stories that get ossified in history, that history likes to tell 2. The deaths in 1996 have been used to bolster the common story that history likes to tell of commercialism’s encounter with nature: that commercialism is bad 3. This isn’t necessarily an entirely wrong conclusion, but it’s not a good way of arriving at histories; it relies on reflex rather than thought and analysis, rather than an open-eyed looking at the events. This is what the piece tries to help us do. 4. Counter-examples: on Scott trip, Oats and Cherry paid; and in mountaineering, climbing with guides has been the norm 5. That said, there are significant differences in 1953 and 1996 a. E.g. climber-sherpa-mountain relation diagram, as outcome of what we learned [see attached for diagram] b. 1953: the economics of sherpas and climbing c. 1996: the rhetoric of sherpas and climbing; also, the fantasy being sold is that of an individual’s relationship to the climb, one man against nature Transition: the historical relationship between climb and crowning, via Jan Morris, also, the art and art historical epistemology of compare and contrast. IV. Coronation A. I felt like we needed to get some critical distance from the climb as a framework for the piece; but we also wanted to work from common themes in the stories we were reconceptualising. B. In this sense, the historical link between the climb and the coronation was fortuitous. C. The idea of alchemical transformation in making a queen and climbing a mountain as another common thread. D. There were clear historical relations between the events, but the coronation, we thought, was also slightly odd in relation to the climbs, and so, we hoped, slightly denaturalising. Especially when slowed to 1/6th speed. We’ll see though. We thought we would post parts of our talk that we gave here on Thursday as people here have been asking for it. So here are our notes. We ad libbed a lot though. I will post some of the images we used as well. |
