Subtle Architectures, Emma Waultraud Howes

Emma Waltaud Howes "Subtle Architecture", May 19, 2007
photo by anonymous videographer

Today starts off with a number of performances dispersed throughout various downtown locations. Lori Weidenhammer begins early in the morning at the Strathcona Market, Amber Landgraff finds a spot for her piece in front of the American Apparel, Juliana Pivato and Marc Couroux park their roaming van by the Hudson’s Bay Department Store and Emma Howes begins her nomadic performance in various spots situated in the downtown core. There are so many events happening each day throughout the festival- too many for me to see at once – so I have decided to focus on writing about one work a day. In the morning I met with various artists at the gallery to set up times throughout the week to talk about the process of their work and how they see my role in the documentation of it. In the early afternoon, I spend time with Emma Howes in conversation and witness to her first series of performance actions.

Subtle Architectures: A Practice in Enabling Constraints is a new research project conceived by Emma Waltraud Howes. The project explores and investigates movement of the body within various constraints and structures in the cityscape. Using a yellow chalk, Emma wanders through the city drawing chalk lines on the pavement, and creates subtle gestural movements within them. When her movements become noticeable to people, she stops, leaves the site and then continues to walk on to another location. The point of the project, Emma explains to me when we speak about the work, is to engage with and move through the city as an anonymous body- a body that moves through zones of indescernibility. She intends to remix and recreate gestures of the body found in the urban landscape. In a sense, she is interested in exploring Spinoza’s age old question What can a body do? within the constraints of the city. Emma takes the question one step further to explore how a moving body become “a motion machine” where “the spleen spits at the liver, slosh through the kidneys, gurgles towards the bladder.” (1)

Emma’s project is deliberately imperceptible in its execution. It asks audiences to find what they cannot already perceive. So how does the audience engage in a work that has no obvious entry point- no declared or established point of view, no clear frame of reference? Emma’s conceptual premise explicitly raises these questions. The timeframe and place of performance is denied to the audience. There is no fixed and predetermined stage. Like many of the other artists in the festival, Emma’s nomadic performances cannot be assigned to a schedule- much to the exasperation of audience participants who want to see the performances, but can’t find them. Emma explains to me that it is her intention to challenge the performer-audience divide conventionally upheld in performance, - especially professional dance, a field she is well trained in. Emma proposes accidental encounters with unsuspecting audiences and pedestrians. The festival audience must work to both find and see the “performance”—and in many cases, will fail. But this constructed intentional failure challenges expectations of art presentation and notions of audience.

When I meet with Emma prior to her first performance, we discuss the problem of documenting the work, given the fact that it intentionally seeks to be imperceptible. I ask Emma how my presence and that of a video camera might be relevant to her performances. How might the remembering of her intentions and actions be best evoked? Might another form of media and lack thereof be more desirable? What are the parameters that she envisioned for future audiences accessing the work? Was there a future audience for this work? At what point does the work begin and end, from her perspective as an artist, and mine as a documenter? Knowing that the presence of cameras in a site-specific context (or any event for that matter) inevitably shifts the dynamics of the event itself, I explained to Emma, I want to be clear about how my involvement in the documentation process might impact the work. Emma and I decide, based on the premise of her concept, that it would impede the work if I take any visual documentation. We agree that I will follow her movements as a silent witness.

Emma begins by walking out of the gallery to the street below. I watch her from the patio and see her walk up to a street parking sign two floors below. With a piece of yellow chalk she draws a box around the post, and steps inside it. The chalk marks echo the centre street dividing lines and the parking lots. Emma’s makeshift “stage” is nomadic. She steps inside the lines and begins to move within them. The subtle gestures seem to move the space around her. The chalk lines become abstracts marks that extend beyond their intended function, to create an unexpected harmony with the horizon line of the street and the sky. Her gestural movements are odd. Her arms move vertically along the parking meter. Her legs bend and she sits. Then she stands. Watches. The legs bend slightly, and she collapses ever so slightly. The motion of falling turns to standing motion. The impact of the movement bleeds through the constraints of the “stage” creating a ripple affect. A car driving by, stops. The man inside says something to Emma that I cannot hear. Then drives away. Emma picks up her backpack and chalk, then crosses the yellow line, walks away.

I continue to follow Emma for the next hour as she repeats the drawing of chalk lines on the pavement and creates strange bodies in motion. After the second performance, Emma and I discuss the possibility of videotaping the event in order to experience a sense of the motion she is in the city. Given the public responses to the work, Emma decides that video taping the next few performances may be a worthwhile exercise. I agree to stay inconspicuous in the background, as I tape with my small camcorder.


Subtle Architectures, Emma Waultraud Howes Video: Tagny Duff and Emma Waultraud Howes


The process of witnessing and documenting these performances, in a sense, becomes a major component of the performances themselves. After the performances were done this afternoon, Emma and I revisit the video footage and speak about how the performances were both perceived and imperceptible to city dwellers in the different locations. I note that the video evokes a different sense of timing and rhythm than what I remember seeing during the performances. Emma’s comments, when seeing the video, that she didn’t realize that her movement was not as amplified as she had felt them to be. She also notes the responses from people and recalls the conversations she had with a number of concerned citizens, which at the time I could not hear. We decide that three of the video segments will be interesting viewed on You Tube. Emma decides to keep a log of her observations and additional video footage on the Subtle Architectures blog.

The negotiation process of documentation is often overlooked in performance art festivals and live art presentation. In this case, my involvement with Emma’s project impacted on the development of creative content and the reception of that content. The potential for documentation to be a creative component of performance work is current under realized. Documentation practices (i.e. video and photography) are often seen to be taken from a neutral observer perspective. But this is far from the reality. As documentation is collected and reconstructed, often by gallery documenters, volunteers and/or staff in the pre and postproduction stages- the conceptual constraints of a work are affected. Rather than produce documentation “after the fact”, it is useful in the context of relational art practices, to approach documentation in collaboration with the artist before the performance takes place in order to express the conceptual frame of work. In this sense, Emma’s project along with many of the other works in this festival, ask for such a new methodology and relation between documenters, audiences and her work.

(1) From Emma’s bio in SEE Magazine. May 17-23, 2007, pp 22