Lee Miller

Away From Home The curious domain of passage

This article is co-authored by Whalley and Miller, who have collaborated consistently on performances and published writings for several years. The text focuses on four contemporary practitioners, each of whose work derives from actions performed in multiple locations, and illustrates a dynamic set of relations between the multiple sites of ‘home’ and ‘away’. Interdisciplinary performance maker Fiona Templeton’s ‘YOU – The City’ (1988), collaborative artists Alison Hanney and Adam Dade’s ‘Stacked Hotel Room’ (1998-2002), and Graham Gussin’s conjoined pieces ‘Remote Viewer’ (2002) and ‘Doppelganger’ (2003), are considered in relation to the shifting geography of the journey, and its attendant conceptual framings. The authors’ choice to consider the importance of their understanding of ‘home’ in relation to the work of each of the practitioners discussed, forces a more playfully embodied response to the work – particularly as all of the pieces were engaged with through mediated frames, rather than through the ‘real’/embodied engagement of the haptic usually expected of audiences in site-specific practice. This ludic, performative approach to the written style of the article foregrounds those shared concerns about the need for some form of (albeit temporary) fixity in a shifting geographical landscape. Each practitioner creates work that moves away from a particular fixed notion: ‘home’ is the explicit point of departure in the work of Dade and Hanney, the ‘self’ is the fixed point from which Gussin moves away in each of the pieces discussed, and Templeton’s work appears to propose a shift from a monocular response towards the multiplicity of readings available to the traveller exploring the city (New York). The article suggests that, although each piece is separated geographically and temporally, they all require some form of openness or ‘surrender’ to fixity in order that the viewer might embrace the more unsettled aspects of their construction.

A Dwelling in the screen: at least for a little while

This article foregrounds the conceptual concerns central to Whalley and Miller’s various practical explorations of Marc Auge’s concept of the ‘non-place’, a concept typified by the shopping mall, the motorway service station and the airport lounge. It seeks to reinforce the research imperatives of the performance installation ‘Wider than a Mile’ (1-31 December 2005), and includes an exploration of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, particularly in relation to its support of the lived-through experience of the users of the non-place – according to Auge, a liminal space which is traversed but never fully occupied. Further to this, the article draws upon previous performance work, ‘Partly Cloudy, Chance of Rain’ (durational site-specific performance, September 2002) and ‘We Will Remember You’ (internet performance piece, online from April 2004 at www.dogshelf.cm/wwry.html), in order to frame ‘Wider Than a Mile’ in the broader research context of Whalley and Miller’s practice-as-research The installation, commissioned by The Trafford Centre, Manchester, was intended to function as a ‘wedge’ in the consumer driven landscape of the video screen on which it was located (and thus in the shopping centre itself), and to provide an alternative rhythm to that otherwise offered to shoppers during December. In addition, the authors suggest that the spatial practices engaged in by the users of the non-place result in an operational understanding of Auge’s abstract articulation. Thus, they argue that any counter-articulation must be framed within the context of said spatial practices. Both the installation and the article explore the ways in which Whalley and Miller’s practical incursions might provide an, albeit temporary, counter-model to the dominant conceptualisation of the space.