John Reid — Walking the Solar System, Pt. 2

The statement below from John Reid and a short video of his performance 'Force of Habit' from 2000 sheds more light on his work shown in the previous post (his video from Kioloa can be found there as well).

 

Friday 3 June Late afternoon: The walk onto the rock platform skirting Snapper Point near Kioloa, NSW, is a disorientating sensory experience. The exposed and slightly off-kilter Permian sediments form the headland on one side and, on the other, is the sizeable rolling swell of the Tasman Sea. It brought to mind a performance work that I did in 2000 titled, ‘Force of Habit’ (see Video 01, the only visual compilation to exist). In it my body is positioned horizontally on a gallery plynth. Armed with a briefcase, I assume a posture as if I’m walking to work. By virtue of being at odds with the force of gravity my limbs fatigue in a few minutes, the walking pose collapses and the artwork concludes. The performance derived some formal dramatic tension from the body being under physiological stress. Conceptually, however, the work was in dialogue with Australian artist, Stelarc, and his thesis that the brain and technology are in a mutinous relationship against the rest of the body in order to attain gravitational escape velocity.

As a sequel to ‘Force of Habit’, I had imagined pinioning my eschewed, walking-to-work body in front of the spectacular Silurian sediments exposed in a roadside cutting on State Circle near the Federal Parliament House in Canberra - in full view of passing peak hour traffic. The cutting provides compelling evidence of ancient landscapes and the habitats of now extinct faunas (Mayer 1995). In this location a performance founded on a visually dislocated figure going about a daily routine in the geological scheme of things would resonate with the proposition – escape the planet or die, and to escape you don’t need arms and legs!

Now several years down the track, is it to be at State Circle in inner Canberra or at Snapper Point on the NSW Far South Coast? The crucial elements for a performance site are similar; and in terms of geological time what’s in a few million years? Instead of peak hour traffic I have a video function on my camera and tomorrow I could invite my new found colleague, Bill Gilbert, instantly savvy as a visual artist and celestial walker, to return to the headland with me.

Saturday 4 June Mid-afternoon: I have a brief case. I’m in bureaucratic uniform. I could be walking to work except I’m on a rock platform at the edge of the Tasman Sea. But I am walking to work. This is a working day. Bill is with me, his finger hovering over the shutter button of my camera, which in turn is bolted to a tripod. Wait! I confide in Bill an overnight thought. Once the figure has been rendered as dislocated from its background, I am sure the viewer will be more conscious of it as an object hurtling through space. Its journey - let’s say for need of some point of reference - in relation to the sun, may well be coincident with the loci of other places in the past or still to come with which the dislocated figure aligns perfectly. One mistake and I could time travel. Bill hits the record button. I do the walk. When it’s done we take a few photographs of a re-walk with a more advanced still camera (see Photograph 01 below).

Throughout the rest of June Several ‘walking to work’ performances are recorded as videos and as still images on the Far South Coast of New South Wales and in the Riverland Biosphere in South Australia. A selection of three videos and three still photographs of these performances were exhibited in the work-in-progress exhibition, Expression of Intent, at the ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery in July under the collective and provisional title, Walking the Solar System (see Photographs 01, 02 and 03 below). The accompanying text read in part: At issue for the final resolution of these recent works is whether to show only still photographs of ‘the walks’, or only the video of ‘the walks’, which ones of either, and to decide on a title as an entrée to the contemplation of the central idea.

Photograph 01

Photograph 02

Photograph 03