Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
London Metropolitan University
'WE', Live performance and video commission from TateShorts with 10" vinyl recording.
'WE' is a live performance by collaborative artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv, featuring live music played with Victor M. Jakeman, Ruth Angel Edwards and Emily Rachel Beber. As 'WE', four performers in matching costumes wearing Perspex boxes and situated in a Perspex stage set, sing and play minimal synth cover versions of pop songs, where the personal pronoun singular is substituted for the plural. The project investigates the latent politics of the love song and the construction of its liberal subject. Songs about 'me' and 'you' become songs about 'us', intimacy becomes a form of collective action and the unique universal. Despite being the mass product of an anonymous culture industry, the premise of the pop song is one of extreme individualism, elevating the ‘one’ subject of romantic desire above any other and declaring one moment in time more significant (‘when I first saw you’) than any other. As a result, even though the pop song is often the outcome of the labour of producers, engineers and technicians, it is associated with the strong fictional character of the pop star. 'WE' re-injects collectivity into this framework, exploring the tension between the dystopian quality of the totalitarian mass and the utopian promise of a communal project.
'WE' uses the format of a pop group rather than the conventions of performance art and is therefore able to operate across galleries and music venues. To test the idea of collectivity in pop, the project accommodates different skill levels and emphasises the interchangeability of performers. Instruments are swapped, faces and bodies are obscured by uniforms and vocals are quadrupled. However, WE are not identical: different abilities surface during performances. Instead of illustrating the anxiety about equality abolishing difference and individuality, the project demonstrates that meaningful differences can be produced from within equality and cooperation.
