Output details

'And Me a Head Full of Horse'. Hassall’s performance contributed to the 'Mobilize Performance Series', ongoing since Jamie McMurry’s initiation of it in 2003 as a collaboration between Mobius and the Performance Area of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Prior to the performance, on Wednesday 7th March (12.15-1.45), Hassall had discussed development of his work with students, faculty and researchers of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

This performance and installation were an outcome of Hassall’s ongoing experimentation with the use of video to present large-scale, real-time, cropped, fragmented images of the performer’s body alongside the live presence of the whole body outside the image frame. Drawing on Hassall’s interest in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Film’, by these means he sought to counterpoint the ‘closure’ of the live body with the open-endedness and ambiguity of the represented ‘fragment’ – in this case, his mouth. He sought to address problems and opportunities arising out of work previously made for Artspace Sydney, as part of TRACE Collective (see Output 1) concerning images of lost objects that fossilised the past and left him with nowhere to go. Hassall’s intention, now, was to make what he calls “good images” - images that reconfigure the world; orphans who reject all fathers. Hassall posited that such ‘true images’ are ones that belong to no-one and are content to drift and float. This was the research imperative - to create imagery that would point beyond the viewer, eluding his/her grip, setting off on a different course and willing itself to be remade (again and again). This play of the image, Hassall proposes, is paradoxical: the ‘futural’ or sustainable image is one that insists on expending itself, on serving no real purpose. (See Allan Stoekel’s book, 'Bataille’s Peak').