Output details

Blow Up

The output consists of a public, one man performance and accompanying solo exhibition of photographs at kynastonmcshine, a project space in Deptford (March 2012), at the invition of the curator Matthew Poole, Programme Director of the Centre for Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex (http://kynastonmcshine.org.uk/exhibitions/exhibition-blow-up).

Lloyd’s Blow Up starts from Rosa Lee Goldberg’s observation that artists working with the new miniature digital equipment ‘use the camera as an extension of their body, in much the same way as did Jonas or Dan Graham in the seventies’. This subversive and frenetic retelling of Antonioni’s film Blow Up (1966) about a photographer investigating a murder through photographic processes, was in part a response to ideas explored by exponents of technology in performance, such as Stelarc, who proposes the body’s redundancy before technology. Using the unfolding narrative to determine spontaneously when photographs should be taken, Lloyd used a handheld digital camera to take photographs of members of the audience, in this way subsuming the technology into the narrative and making it a co-respondent to the text, refusing either to technologise art or artify technology. Thirteen photographs, printed by large format printers, were hung during the forty-minute performance, forming the later exhibition.

The performance also contributed to Lloyd’s ongoing practice-led exploration of Nicolas Bourriaud’s contentions about artists’ reappropriations of cinematic forms. Lloyd employed photography and the spoken word to create a volatile and responsive narrative in a counter-critical, comedic style, utilizing stand up humour, hesitation and distraction as a methodology to strip away the distortions and depoliticising imposed on art works by inflated critical positions (Antonioni’s Blow Up has achieved canonical status) on the value of cultural forms, generating new meanings ‘after criticism’ and interpreting overlooked aspects of popular culture.

The output was reviewed in Art Review (http://www.artreview.com/forum/topics/wayne-lloyd-blow-up ).