Artworks | CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK

Invitation to Dialogue

13-04-2022

Artworks

Chris Braddock with dialogue group, Invitation to Dialogue, 2018–ongoing, In How To Live Together, AUT ST PAUL St Gallery, 2019, curated by Balamohan Shingade. Photos by Emily Parr.

On the occasion of How to Live Together, Chris Braddock invited a group to come together every Wednesday afternoon to dialogue in a manner proposed by quantum physicist David Bohm. The number of sessions totaled thirteen, mirroring the duration of Roland Barthes’ lecture course titled ‘How to Live Together’ and recalling the first session in which he said, “We’ll have to hold onto the unsustainable for thirteen weeks: after that, it will fade.”^[1]

Braddock designed a shoes-off installation space involving rolled out carpet and modular cushions that developed a life of its own during the three-month exhibition. This is a profoundly transdisciplinary project between visual arts installation, performance art and collaborative design processes. As part of this process, artist Emily Parr photographed the project as an ongoing participant so as to avoid forms of external ‘documentation’. The images are therefore a collaboration with Emily.

Over the course of the exhibition a core group of dialogue participants emerged meeting every Wednesday. Following the ideas of David Bohm, a dialogue group tries to talk together without hierarchies. There are no leaders, no agenda or appointed topics of conversation, and no conclusions for the group to arrive at. Participants try to suspend their beliefs, opinions and judgements in order to shift the emphasis from the content of thoughts to the process of thinking. This might be a ‘movement of thought’ that emerges from a field of discontinuous and entangled experiences, fears, histories and stories. The intention of a dialogue group is to unravel the view that an individual’s thinking is all their own, singular and fragmented, as if “the one who thinks (the Ego) is at least in principle completely separate from and independent of the reality that they think about.”^[2] As Chris Braddock writes in his email invitation to dialogue, remembering David Bohm, “Love will go away if we can’t communicate and share meaning…. If we can really communicate, then we will have fellowship, participation, friendship, and love, growing and growing.”^[3] Learning from quantum entanglement, dialogue groups aim at opening up potential for what Bohm calls ‘participatory thought’, the possibility of a ground of being that never began or ends, and which unfolds from the environment.[4]

^[1] Éric Marty, ‘Foreword’, How to Live Together: Novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces, notes for a lecture course and seminar at the Collège de France (1976–77) by Roland Barthes, ed. Claude Coste, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), xii.

^[2] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), xi.

^[3] From Chris Braddock’s second email invitation to dialogue, received 12 June 2019. David Bohm, On Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2014), 54.

[4] Bohm, On Dialogue, 96-9, 103.

Skull Acoustics (2017)

07-12-2018

Artworks

Chris Braddock & Olivia Webb, Skull Acoustics (collaborative live performance), 12:00pm, 7 October 2017, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand.

Skull Acoustics is a performance artwork made in collaboration with Olivia Webb. Performers face each other and are joined by a PVC acoustic hood-like device that sits over their heads. This acoustic hood references the artwork First Workset (1963- 1969) by sculptor Franz Erhard Walther. By leaning back slightly and pulling the hoods taut, the performers negotiate a balance between both their bodies and the object. Maintaining an equilibrium, they simultaneously hum one note at the pitch of their own speaking voice for a 30-minute period. Humming the sound of your own voice was a direction given by musician, composer and musicologist Pauline Oliveros when teaching participants in her own works how to ‘listen deeply’.

In connecting two hummed notes by way of a physical hood/object, and one that captures and transmits sound waves through its materiality (the type of PVC fabric it is made from), the performance demonstrates a social exchange of sound and voice through physical sculpture and performance.

Skull Acoustics was first performed as part of PSi#22 in Melbourne, Australia in July 2016.

Review of Skull Acoustics by John Hurrell, EyeContact.

Skull Acoustics (2016)

15-08-2016

Artworks

Chris Braddock & Olivia Webb, Skull Acoustics (collaborative live performance), 12:30-13:00, Thursday 7 July and Friday 8 July, University of Melbourne Law Quad, Melbourne. Performance Studies International PSi#22

Olivia Webb is a Ph.D. candidate at AUT University. Her research combines her experience as a choral singer with various time based art forms.

Olivia and I had been discussing the First Workset (1963- 1969) of 58 objects by the sculptor Franz Erhard Walther. He was creating objects from fabric and other materials that spectators could interact with, sometimes in pairs or groups. We were looking with interest at a long fabric ‘hood’ that covered the heads of both participants. At the same time we heard news items about how the Queen’s plastic umbrella ‘acted like a satellite dish’ and amplified her rebuke of ‘rude’ Chinese state officials, reported by Australia’s Daily Mail on 12 May 2016. Apparently, her majesty was clutching a clear plastic brolly in the drizzle which amplified her comments and sent them towards a sensitive directional microphone belonging to her BBC cameraman. An insider told the Telegraph: “Because it’s plastic, it reflects the sound like a satellite dish.” Olivia and I went immediately to Smith & Caughey’s department store on Auckland’s Queen Street and tried out identical clear plastic umbrellas imagining that we might use them to reflect the humming voice in Skull Acoustics. They didn’t work! It was not the umbrella! But what transpired was a hybrid of a Franz Erhard Walther First Workset object and the Queen’s umbrella.

Repeating Silence (2015)

05-10-2015

Artworks

Repeating Silence, 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, Melbourne, 8-11 October 2015, RMIT & VCA. Project assistants Ziggy Lever and Travis Cox. Curator Mick Douglas ‎and shadow curator David Cross.

Repeating Silence 2, 1.00-2.00pm 9 Oct 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, performance location RMIT University Gallery, RMIT & VCA, Melbourne. Video documentation: Travis Cox.

Repeating Silence 4, 2.30-3.00pm 11 Oct 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, performance location riverside by Federation Square, RMIT & VCA, Melbourne. Camera: Travis Cox.

Repeating Silence 3, 1.30-2.00pm 11 Oct 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, performance location Flinders Lane, RMIT & VCA, Melbourne. Camera: Travis Cox.

Repeating Silence 3, 1.30-2.00pm 11 Oct 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, performance location RMIT Design Hub lecture theatre live streamed from Flinders Lane, RMIT & VCA, Melbourne. Photo: Monique Redmond.

Repeating Silence 1, 9.00-10.00am 8 Oct 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, performance location RMIT Design Hub, RMIT & VCA, Melbourne. Photo: Travis Cox, Monique Redmond.

Repeating Silence 2, 1.00-2.00pm 9 Oct 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, performance location RMIT University Gallery, RMIT & VCA, Melbourne. Photo: Travis Cox.

Repeating Silence 5, 3.30-4.00pm 11 Oct 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, performance location Flinders Street Station, RMIT & VCA, Melbourne. Still from video – camera: Travis Cox.

Screen Shot 2015-11-12 at 1.24.32 pm

Screen Shot 2015-11-12 at 1.23.53 pm

Repeating Silence 4, 2.30-3.00pm 11 Oct 2015, performance with live stream video, in ‘Performing Mobilities’, performance location riverside by Federation Square, RMIT & VCA, Melbourne. Still from video – camera: Travis Cox.

‘Performing Mobilities’ is the 2015 Melbourne response to the worldwide Performance Studies International event ‘Fluid States’. There is a strong emphasis on performing in the public realm and relationships to passage and circulation i.e. how does public mobility manifest and operate?

Chris Braddock performs live at RMIT University Gallery and the busy lane ways of Melbourne’s CBD completely stationary and with his eyes closed for an hour at a time. He turns his head very slowly from left to right as if surveying the scene. Video images (from above and close up) are live streamed to tablets in close proximity, lecture theatres and to christopherbraddock.com.