Attending

BACKGROUND 'Attending' was a live performance, exploring relations between the human body and types of 'edge' conditions in formal spaces for encountering art experience: the physical corners of museum architecture; the interior corner of the museum gallery; and the encounter between guarding/invigilating and experiencing art. Performed by Douglas and Preston as 'The Idleness Labouritory', an aesthetic ethos of co-creative experience is proposed through performative ways of questioning, exploring and attributing value in contemporary creative arts practices. CONTRIBUTION 'Attending' is informed by visual arts practices of institutional critique and contemporary performative art to explore the aesthetics of attentiveness that both support the institutional place of art and are practiced by art museum visitors. The performed, spatial encounters interrogate art experience in cultural institutions and engage the embodied spectator in a state of reflexive self-awareness. 'Attending' makes a live-art contribution to better understanding the potential role that power, labour and the human body play in the reception and experience of art in museum contexts. The work contributes to Douglas' ongoing creative practice-based research in socially-engaged public art, performance and mobility and inter-cultural, artistic practice. SIGNIFICANCE The project resulted from an invited artist residency by Syracuse University, and resulted in a four hour performance installation at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse New York, 1 Sept 2017. This research led to a further artwork "Attending Two / Attending to" that was selected for an international touring exhibition 'Chiado and the Respublica Litteraria: Arts in the Public Sphere', curated by José Quaresma, touring in 2017 to Paris, Lisbon, Auckland, and Łódz.