INSTALLATION

SEE ME, red permanent marker on glass,
Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (2005)

The following images document a window installation that I made during my Masters Painting study at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (2005-2007). SEE ME attempted to use text to explore ideas surrounding the notion of the institution and power by generating a site-specific text-based artwork on the façade of the Slade building. What I had not anticipated with the work would be the shadows, shadows occupying the interior of the building for brief moments in the day, weather permitting, having a fleeting impermanent presence, eliciting a form of viewer interaction. In this work, I am performing my appearance at the Slade. I permanently marked my presence on the façade of the Slade with all its history going back to 18th century. If you arrived to see the work on a cloudy day, you would not see it/ you would not see me. The work was absolutely dependent on climate change. Those bigger forces of nature and their transformations allowed me to be seen or not seen. SEE ME is so implicated with the architecture. I am performing the architecture. And architecture always performs the climate, that’s what architecture does. It’s always structuring how light enters a building; its multiple aspects how it moves across a space. How a space is allowed to come into being as a space. I am performing the architecture in order to make myself visible, perform my own visibility. SEE ME is saying ‘see me’ i.e. me wanting to appear.

Susan Broadhurst, author of Liminal Acts (1999), has described my practice as: ʻplaying with various notions of what performance is and at the same time interrogating liminality'. I have interrogated ideas of liminality, meaning the ‘in-between’ within my practice for many years as I am fascinated by disrupting the boundary between public and private. Prior to making moving image work, I made installations and performance work often in windows. Work was not just displayed in a window - the window became an important part of the work as for me the window represents an in-between space that is neither private nor entirely public.

Here is a compilation of some of that work made over ten years ago in window settings ranging from institutional spaces in universities and libraries to art galleries to closed-down language schools. Included is Tefltastic! TEFL: Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Tefltastic! drew together teachers and students to perform in public together in a variety of locations around London (shop fronts, art festivals, library lecture halls etc.) For instance, an event took place in the large glass front entrance of an ex-language school on Oxford Street in London that I used to teach at from 2001-2003 (the now defunct Evendine School of English). The event consisted of me conducting a pseudo English language class as a performance with two of my then students, Tobias from Switzerland and Ivan from Spain. The humorous interplay between Tobias and Ivan as the students and me as the teacher attracted the attention of the passerby audience.

STICKER
(ANTI)SPECTACLE
SITUATIONIST

Lee Campbell solo exhibition, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 2006

Between 2000-2005, I worked with the tradition of the adapted readymade via the supermarket price sticker and the anti-spectacle whilst at the same time looking at the spectacle of advertising and how it links into the production of subjectivity. The whole problem with spectacle is that it produces a passive spectator whilst the anti-spectacle of the derive in Situationism is that it makes agency of the spectator, makes the spectator have to work. Doing something with Pop, Situationist anti-spectacle at the same time using the rhetoric of spectacle, I generated a series of sticker installations that burst out of the frame.

CHAPTER, CARDIFF, 2006