10 JAN 2021 5pm UTC “Clever At Seeing, Without Being Seen” by Lee Campbell (London, UK) dur 15min

 

 'I got very clever, very clever at seeing, without being seen.' 

Live performance this Sunday 

10 JAN 2021 5pm UTC “Clever At Seeing, Without Being Seen” by Lee Campbell (London, UK) dur 15min 

WATCH AT  WWW.ONLINEPERFORMANCEART.COM 

What may it mean to remediate, excavate and bring back to life a personal archive through the medium of moving image and then remediate that remediation through the medium of live performance via Zoom?

Recent audience comments: 

‘Evokes sharply and poignantly a lot of the feelings which are so common to discovering one's sexuality in adolescence ('I got very clever/Very clever at seeing/Without being seen' was both brilliantly simple and touching), and the double meanings littered were rich and 

effective’

‘Love the live element alongside the constant peeling and reworking layers of time and perception’ 

'Can so relate to George Michael!' 

‘All this stuff that has been marshalled into this form- that’s an act of strength ‘

“Dad watched the match; I watched the players.” Love the idea of football as erotica  and the ‘soundfield’!’ 

‘I also smuggled Gay Times!’ 

‘It nails a specific talent,  queer people need to acquire, the title’

‘Never seen anything THAT immersive on Zoom!'’ 

‘ At the end where the hand starts pulling the layers away was like pulling away skins/the body being skinned.’ 

Innovating the possibilities of media re-use, feeding-back and looping round of text, and the layering of the voices, this multi-layered  multimedia live Zoom performance is a colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montage of young queer experience told through my own personal autobiography. THIS is what it was like for me to grow up gay in 1990s working class homophobic Britain and then to come to London in early 2000s and be confronted with the implicit power relations attached to gay male queer social spaces of conviviality. There are so many different references to decades of British history though different registers of image making, language and bodies through a complex repetitive system of layering making the viewer continually question how many layers there are. With a parallel to our unconscious, with its many layers, many of which we do not have full access to. 

Containing so many visual and audio clashes and dizzying sound levels for texture and difference,  the layering subsides in places and towards the end and the taunts are heard more clearly. Whilst there are moments throughout the performance where I make everything super clear and then I go back out,  this is a performance where  the importance and clarity of hearing an understanding  is deliberately obscured/ intentionally difficult to decipher; an intentional confusion to suggest that the audience many not understand what's going on.  Whilst audiences may or may not pick up on all the many references here, it is intended that they will, at base level, have a sensory/elusive view of the work, as one viewer recently described ‘a block of amazing visual and auditory input. 

The performance charts teenage-hood; discovering one’s sexuality in private, away from one’s parents. As a teenager, you do not really know who you are. This film is a self-reflection - a ‘this is what it was like’ to come to terms with my homosexuality; of me finding somebody attractive (men) but not really knowing what I am. I speak my personal truth, my personal history of seeing and not seeing to confront the politics of seeing and underline how validating seeing can be but also the difficulty of not being seen. Whilst it can be understood as one person’s (my) narrative so too can it easily be read as lots of different voices layered to talk about wider levels of experience with various references to cultural context that (any)one can relate to: George Michael, late night tv, bad porn. Intimate and personal in a really powerful way, part of the performance includes reference to a dad and son (me and my dad) conversation exploring what one is seeing and what the other is seeing about the same action of men in football with one person viewing it one way and the other a different way. Here we travel back in time to 1996, to a football match between Chelsea and Aston Villa courtesy of a cassette recording played through a tape recorder made at the time of the match.  The double of the term ‘tackle’ is one of many humorous  double-entendres/double meanings employed throughout including: tackle, cruise, hole, and  fag. 

Similar to POLARI PUPPET, a live performative delivered via Zoom that really pushes Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame, act as a visual container and play with different levels of order and chaos through the visual confinement achieved. With my back turned to audience and operates like a screen/projection surface. A tape recorder acts as an extension of my body and offers another set of voices to that of mine performing and other voices heard elsewhere. Green screen effect employed with a constant repetitive video being played ‘projected’ onto my back gives the impression of text and imagery superimposed over my body, that I am wearing text/imagery like a garment, that of a body that has been layered with fragments of text/images/ history. Sounds that can be heard throughout the performance are textured, glitchy and uncomfortable deliberately to  give a sense of layers which in turn gives the painful impression of things (the many bodies that feature) being skinned. 

The images comprising the green screen  are drawings and paintings I made between 2005-2007 and 2018-2019, movie and audio recordings on mobile phones circa. 2005 and photographic stills and moving image recordings that I took between 2011-2019 on various iPhones. The green screen video recycles/repurposes/remediates this media but also in their collection when they were recently bought together in several examples of my moving image work  e.g., the green screen contains visual snippets and language  from recent films I  made in 2020 including Let Rip: The Beautiful Game, Tackle, Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing and Not Seeing, and Satisfaction, (You’re Matched, Say Hello). 

My back turned to the camera/to the audience constantly comes in and out of the green screen; my body that keeps getting subsumed and emerging again. Whilst some viewers have comment that they thought I was really controlling the green screen but I have no control; as the green screen progresses, the body seems to disappear more and more as more and more layers on the surface. 

Reading me as well as hearing me. A recent viewer suggested that my turned back appears almost demonic. Whilst it could be said to turn one’s back on an audience is a deliberate act to conceal oneself or block the audience, that’s not what is happening here either.  Like in both the POLARI PUPPET and FINGER PUPPET TAPE RECORDER performances,  the audience is never sure what is live, what is pre-recorded and what is playback of what has been recorded during the live performance. Pre-recorded sounds playing in the background on iTunes shuffle which I react to there and then in the moment of liveness. Some viewers of documentation of the performance have mentioned that they are completely unaware that they were watching documentation of a live performance. Some have suggested that the writing on my back is happening live too.  Whilst the green screen background acts a base, each live iteration containing so many levels of improvisation means that the performance can never be repeated twice. Its duration is important (beyond the initial early iterations of this work at approx.. 5 minutes); through a length(ier) the viewer is shown the complexity of the layers, what’s in them and how they interact and they are being show that again and again and again and it’s never the same.