Output details

What Have We Done?

Our work is predominantly about relationships, starting with our own. Our roles within our collaboration are indistinguishable - we are in effect one artist, SMITH/STEWART. We both have equal input at all stages of the work, from its conception, research, fabrication (often as performers in the work itself), installation, dissemination. We have worked in this way since the mid-nineties and our practice continues to be solely in collaboration with each another (though in more recent works we are reaching out to the audience &/or invited participants to extend this collaboration further).

Will invited participants follow a specified instruction/s for a performance-to-camera? - Even if this plays with breaking conventions of social behaviour? What have we done? is part of an ongoing series of instructional performances, where our interaction with others forms the basis of the work. A provocative situation invites the participant/s to make a decision; and the consequences of participating - or not - in what we’ve constructed has implications beyond their and our control. In this piece, through giving specific instructions and working with a particular group, we aim to explore the boundaries of collaboration, power, intimacy, acting and reality. We videoed a live action and, in the resulting footage, a kiss is endlessly passed round a circle of six participants; male and female, of various ages. With deliberately no contextualising information as to who these people are and what their relationships might be, the work becomes a metaphor for all our histories of intimacy.