Shuttling

Mick Douglas

This exposition investigates practice-as-research dynamics through a project titled ‘Shuttle’, from which emerged a practice of ‘shuttling’ as a layered modality for processing methodological artistic research. An international crew of artists, designers, and performance makers enquire into peer-to-peer creative practice development: practices unfolding through the dramaturgy of a twenty-day, four-thousand-mile mobile performance-research journey in the deserts of the North American south-west. We trace the dynamics of a practice-as-research milieu through a suite of artistic operations, performatively elaborated through this rich-media exposition. Through ‘shuttling’, we generate parafunctional performative spaces and temporalities. Our spatio-temporal and sensory mode of research – conditioned, co-created, and situated as a mobile laboratory – posits reflexivity as an embodied practice, as a medium of ‘shuttling’ with the dynamic emergence of creative research practices.

CO-CREATING

1 Extract from 7'36" video series, filmed at Loves Garage Nevada, Mick Douglas, 2013.

2 Shuttle Library

3 7’36”, multi-view,… Mick Douglas and Shuttle crew, 2013.

4 Van: Group / Individual, Mick Douglas, 2013.

5 Mobile Infrastructure deployed at Sun Tunnels, Beth Weinstein and Shuttle Crew, 2013.

6 Blue Time, James Oliver; photo: Didier Morelli, 2013.

7 Daily Accumulations (as per John Vella Instructions), James Oliver, Mick Douglas, 2013.

8 Tan Lines, as per Alex von Bergen Instructions, 2013.

9 Border fence (video), Beth Weinstein, 2013.

IMAGE CREDITS

SHUTTLING >

1 Shuttle Orbit: daily environs (drawings and photographic montage), Beth Weinstein.

CONDITIONING

1 Extract from untitled video, Chaco Canyon, Mick Douglas, 2013

2 Shuttle performative cargo + mobile infrastructure drawings:

left: Mick Douglas; center + right, Beth WeInstein, 2013.

3 Stills, Shiprock, NM, 2013.

4 Neal Haslem’s postcards, writing and drawing by Mick Douglas, James Oliver and others, 2013.

5 Local wisdom on the Shuttle Van, 2013.

6 Dramatugy of Landscape diagram, Beth Weinstein, 2014.

7 Not There, remediated personal archive, James Oliver; image credit unknown.

SITUATING

1 Calexico Border Turnstile (video) Beth Weinstein, 2013.

2 Corrugations (audio), Mick Douglas, 2013.

3 Daily Fax to base (vehicle window drawings), 2013.

4 Daily Environments (drawing), Beth Weinstein, 2014.

5 Adaptation: Desert Trouts, James Oliver, 2013.

6 'Killer' bee sting, James Oliver, 2013.

7 Daily Environments, Beth Weinstein + Shuttle Crew, 2013.

8 Shuttling at SEAM (Nov 2013, Sydney, AUS), animated stills, Beth Weinstein, 2013.

9 Shuttle at Sun Tunnels (photo: Beth Weinstein), 2013.

10 Calexico border fence, solar farm, All American canal (photos): Beth Weinstein;

Calexico Border fence, Wendover defunct military base (photos):

James Oliver, 2013.

11 @ Historical Marker, James Oliver, 2013.

12 Van: Group / Individual, Mick Douglas. 2013.

> SHUTTLING

1 Shuttle Dramaturgy of Landscape planning: (itinerary), Beth Weinstein, 2013.

2 Shuttle Dramaturgy, Mick Douglas, 2013.

3 Shuttle programs, Mick Douglas, 2013.

4 7’36” trace at Bonneville Salt Flats, NV, Mick Douglas, 2013.

> ENDNOTES

1. The journey ‘SHUTTLE: mobile desert performance’ took place 17 June – 7 July 2013.

The “Ten Artists” included Grzegorz Brzozowski, director and script writer working on a PhD at University of Warsaw researching modern festival communities through the lens of anthropology of performance and sociology of religion; Mick Douglas, artist making socially-engaged art and performance, senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, and initiator of journey-based projects that explore the performance of mobilities; Andrea Haenggi, New York-based choreographer, visual artist, performer and artistic director/founder of Dance Arts Company AMDaT, who recently established 1067 PacificPeople in Brooklyn New York; Fiona Harrisson, landscape architect, horticulturist and senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, exploring the role that citizens' relation to landscape plays in the crisis of our times; Didier Morelli, interdisciplinary performer and artist investigating the body as a site for change, exchange, identity and belonging; James Oliver an artist-researcher and Graduate Research Coordinator at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships of Melbourne University developing performative methodologies of practice-as-research; Meredith Rogers, theatre and performance maker in mainstream and independent settings, honorary research associate at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies; Sam Trubridge, performance designer, artist, scholar and artistic director with New Zealand company The Playground researching nomadic philosophies and practices; Unknown Persons given passage during the course of SHUTTLE; and Beth Weinstein, architect and Associate Professor at the University of Arizona working between architectural and choreographic practices, and research of American Southwest land art and water issues.

Remote crew included Annalea Beattie, artist in Melbourne engaging Shuttle crew in sustained doodling to research the challenges of art in space; Neal Haslem, designer in Melbourne sending postcards to time lost in the desert; John Vella, visual artist in Hobart collaborating with Shuttle crew to collect, collate and respond to Vehicle Accumulations and Piss Takes; Alex Von Bergen, visual artist in Tucson capturing a tour of SW American desert & communities online; and David Williams, writer/performance-maker in London blogging elsew/here (shuttle days 1-21) at http://sky-writings.blogspot.co.uk .

SHUTTLE was undertaken with the support of University of Arizona, Tucson Museum of Art, Exploded View (Tucson), RMIT University, The University of Melbourne, PSi Performance Studies international.

2. Kester, Grant H., The one and the many: contemporary collaborative art in a global context (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 3.

3. Zittel, Andrea, Paola Morsiani, and Trevor Smith, Andrea Zittel: critical space (Munich: Prestel, 2005), 74. Adaptation by Mick Douglas, in italics.

4. David Williams, “Geographies of Requiredness: Notes on the Dramaturg in Collaborative Devising,” Contemporary Theatre Review 20.2 (2010): 197–202

5. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. 19-20.

6. http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~gaelphon/people.shtml.

7. Kester, The one and the many, 2.

8. Lippard, Lucy R, Overlay: contemporary art and the art of prehistory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983) 112.

9. Filmmaker David MacDougall ‘transcultural cinema’, proposes visual language and creative practice as not bound up in the problems of translation/explanation that textual practices encounter.

10. Kester, The one and the many, 3.

11. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.

12. Annalea Beattie, The Sustained Doodling Project invitation to Shuttle crew.

13. Kester, Grant. The one and the many, 1.

14. David Williams quoting Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002, 164,

in Shuttle 4, Dusting. http://sky-writings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/shuttle-4-dusting.html

15. David Williams quoting James Elkins, How To Use Your Eyes, London & New York: Routledge, 2000, 176-81,

in shuttle 6: the book of sand, Saturday, 22 June 2013, http://sky-writings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06.

16. Kwon, Miwon, One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002), 166.

17. Bhabha, Homi. ‘Double Visions’, Artforum January 1992: 88.

18. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.

19. See Shuttle Dramaturgy of Landscape planning: (itinerary), Beth Weinstein, above

20. Conquergood, Dwight, and E. Patrick Johnson. Cultural struggles: performance, ethnography, praxis. ([S.l.]: Univ of Michigan Press, 2013),101.

21. Clifford, James. The predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), 24.

22. Suzanne Lacy on Allan Kaprow, in Lacy, Suzanne, Moira Roth, and Kerstin Mey, Leaving art: writings on performance, politics, and publics, 1974-2007. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2010). 320-21.

23. WIlliams, Raymond. ‘Culture is Ordinary’ [1958] in Higgins, J. (ed.) The Raymond Williams Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001),10-24.

24. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell.

25. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells (London: Verso, 2012), 284.

26. Dewey, John. Art as Experience, (New York: Berkley Pub. Group, 2005), 83.

27. David Williams citing Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand in shuttle 6: the book of sand (http://sky-writings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/shuttle-6-book-of-sand.html)

28. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and infinity; an essay on exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

29. McKenzie, Jon. Perform or else: from discipline to performance. (London: Routledge, 2001), 152.

30. Van Dyke, John Charles. The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1960), 11.

31. Wallace Stevens, The Man With the Blue Guitar.

32. Fox, William L. The void, the grid & the sign traversing the Great Basin. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 111-112.

33. Baudrillard, Jean. America. (London: Verso, 1982), 172.

34. John Cage quoted in Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1993), 161.

35. Grosz, Elizabeth, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth, 19-20.

36. Nelson, Robin, Practice as Research in the Arts Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 67.

37. Grosz, Elizabeth, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth, 19-20.

38. Annalea Beattie, correspondence to Mick Douglas, May 2013.

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