Performative Security: An Interview with Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan
Photograph by John Possemato
by Matthew O’Shannessy
Drawing on the work of English philosopher Nina Power and research into the techniques of crowd control, Australian artists Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan have created a satirical work amplifying the “camp” aesthetics found within the organized policing of public spaces. For their performance at the Mona Foma festival in Hobart, Australia, Spiers and Ryan constructed a water cannon (a device typically used to control protesters) from a range of mundane consumer objects including safety cones and a high-pressure hose. Adapting Power’s statement, “No more public space, only public order” into a slogan, Spiers and Ryan’s ironic celebration for the “end of public space” highlights how seemingly banal directives encountered daily cumulatively result in an oppressive environment.
Spiers and Ryan have a background in performative art, but recently their work has become more concerned with matters of policing and security, including 2014’s Nothing to See Here, where techniques of crowd dispersal were used to choreograph a performance where the audience were denied freedom of movement; or Closed to the Public (also 2014), where two security guards were employed to deny patrons access to an absurdly small space in the middle of Melbourne Art Fair. Together, these works evoke Power’s argument that “the immense efforts put into guarding every tiny piece of land, and the private ownership of virtually everything you can think of” has resulted in a farcical situation.
O’Shannessy
In the videos I’ve seen, there’s a weird dynamic, you’re performing at Mona Foma, a big arts festival in Hobart where people go to enjoy themselves, but you’ve recreated an authoritarian spectacle. There are kids playing, people laughing, but they’re laughing at being controlled. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance…
Spiers
I totally agree with you and we anticipated that because there are some really quite extreme moments. We made little silhouettes of people that we used as targets, and there’s one moment where our performers turn on the silhouettes and bash them up. That’s a moment that a lot of people were talking about, “I was laughing and suddenly the laughter got stuck in my throat.” But we always anticipated that people would enjoy it and when we were thinking about doing a water cannon we were like, “Oh it’s going to be summer, people are going to want to get sprayed with water.” We tried to think through what that would be like, if people enjoyed being sprayed by a water cannon. We were anticipating that we would get that sort of image, like children dancing in the water. That image bothers me in a way, it goes to the heart of some sort of complacency in Australia about these issues, the fact that not many people think about this very much, I don’t know. So it’s unsettling for me to watch that.
Photograph by Craig Opie
Ryan
But we do try and play with images, we do try and introduce a mimetic quality, but a kind of mimetic quality that is over-identification. We’ve been looking at all the Border Force stuff in Australia, this rebranding of immigration which is “high camp” in terms of the number of flags that used to appear behind Tony Abbott and the number of insignia that appear on their silly uniforms. So we wanted it to be a recognizable situation in that sense, for it to read pretty straightforwardly as a protest…actually the way we talked about it was, it was a parade—that’s how it was framed, before the cannon came out, I was playing the role of this mean, customer service disciplinarian type person, making announcements like, “Thank you for joining us and have a good time but do as we say,” that mode of address that you often get in public spaces. A patronizing announcement implicitly backed up with force. It was announced as a parade and then the cannon did this demonstration where it got to show its capabilities by shooting silhouettes of protesters and families before it, you know…turned on the crowd.
We called it a celebration of the end of public space and the triumph of public order…which was a little tongue in cheek.
Spiers
Ironic…(laughs)
O’Shannessy
Looking back at your work, especially Amy’s work, a lot of the earlier pieces are about bringing people together, creating a social interaction or connection. More recently, the work has gotten a lot darker, more about public space, especially the regulation of public space…what led to this shift?
Spiers
I think it’s a number of things…there’s quite a clear break in my particular practice and what I want to do in art. When I finished my masters, I’d read a lot and become discontent with a lot of socially-engaged art and live art, particularly in Australia, which tended to be about “bringing people together.” It had this quite-simplistic politics attached to it, about how if we all just shared some time together the world would be a better place. And I think through my masters, I tried to theorize my misgivings around that kind of work and I think I came out the other end thinking a lot more about how do we tackle more intractable situations, ones where happy connection isn’t going to solve the problem, or how do you address politics when outrage or discontent is perhaps the more important response? Rather than loveliness…(laughs)
There was a moment after Occupy Melbourne where Catherine got arrested, where we started becoming more interested in these ideas of public space. We just wanted to approach things a little bit differently. And also I think, you look around at the kind of art that’s being made in Australia and we just wanted more…outrage! (laughs) You know, more confronting work.
Photograph by Craig Opie
Ryan
Well, there’s a lot of quite ‘nice’ work.
Spiers
I think particularly in Melbourne, there’s not a lot of politics and the work tends to be a bit touchy-feely.
O’Shannessy
What do you mean “nice”?
Spiers
I mean in terms of participation, and performance art. Particularly in Melbourne, in the Next Wave generation of artists there was a lot of work that was about parties, dinner parties, or “hanging out”…I loathe to single out anyone particularly but I think that as we were all getting used to this relational social turn in artistic practice, a bunch of us probably made touchy-feely work until we came out the other side. I know an awful lot of people now who are thinking about making more confronting work. Maybe it was something we all just had to work through.
O’Shannessy
You mention Next Wave, and a lot of your work is made inside public institutions or publicly funded—and things like the controversy over the Sydney Biennale made public the fact that there is a connection between art and the kind of state violence you’re talking about, I’m wondering if there is a certain irony in performing the work in that context, where these institutions might be complicit?
Ryan
Yeah, I think, one kind of structural features of the last few works we’ve made—the Nothing to See Here dispersal where we kicked the audience out of the performance and the other works we’ve done with security guards—is a logic where there’s no right answer. In those works there’s no audience reaction that would create a nice resolution to the situation that they’re presented with, be it with security guards or performers. I think that’s our position in relation to politics as well. I mean there’s no correct, right, pure position to have, you just have to be aware of where you sit in relation to what systems are funding you and making your life possible. So I wonder…I know quite a few of our works have this kind of “no escape” feeling which a couple of people have described as “nihilistic” but I think it’s just a response to the fact that there’s not an uncompromised position you can really have, as artists.
I suppose that to some extent gets reflected in our work, in this kind of dark, hopefully humorous way, like a Kafka vibe. You know, you’re already in it, you can dream about being on the outside of it, but you’re in it! I don’t think our art is adequate as the complete political solution to anything. I think other forms of activism outside of our political practice are important.
O’Shannessy
So do you feel like your work has any impact on the audience in a positive sense, in a political sense, or it effects some kind of change?
Ryan
I think so, we talk about our work as changing habits of perception. We don’t think of it in terms of revealing the real structure of the world, like an 18-year-old’s epiphany about capitalism or something.
Spiers
I find that people notice it much more, it becomes intensified in their perception. When they see bouncers or they encounter a tram inspector or something…because they’ve seen it in a performance, they somehow feel a little more inclined to test it a bit or mess with authority…they’re more emboldened. Even in the art world, particularly the work with the dancers, you put them in a hi-vis vest or a polo top with a patch on it, and suddenly they have this authority. People listen to them. It’s like wow, these are the vestiges of authority and it’s so easy to just kind of start questioning that…
Photograph by John Possemato
O’Shannessy
Is there an aesthetic to these things, the uniforms, the equipment?
Ryan
Yeah but it’s camp, it’s like security camp I would say. I suppose if you push it a bit it becomes satirical.
Spiers
I was at Hobart airport the other day and I saw this guy and he was wearing this buttoned up shirt with epaulettes, and this badly embroidered patch on his breast pocket and it was unironed. Everything was supposed to give him the trappings of authority but it was a bit try-hard. He was trying so hard to have this kind of authority but he ended up looking like a taxi driver.
Ryan
This is a kind of creeping thing. All these different security companies are trying to look like the police, but the police are trying to look like more scary versions of the police. Obviously the difference with us is that we don’t have a gun which tends to take it away from the world of aesthetics, when you can actually shoot someone.
Spiers
Or all the body armor. That’ll be the next work, body armor. There’s these amazing images we were looking at from the Black Lives Matter protests in the Mall of America. There were some amazing images coming out of that, with the cops just completely dressed up in this intense riot gear, it’s just completely over the top. That’s what’s interesting about Nina Power’s questionnaire, which she made particularly for that work. One of the questions is about how much gear we have—“do you think you can beat us when we have all this gear?” It was a really good question…
O’Shannessy
In the Nina Power piece that the title comes from she talks about physical violence, but she also discusses more subtle forms of discipline like CCTV—I’m interested as to why your focus was on the spectacle over these more subtle forms of conditioning?
Ryan
We wanted to conflate some of these banal technologies. We were like, “Well what if we build a water cannon, which is recognizably evil, out of these more mundane instances of security and policing.” So that was the starting point.
O’Shannessy
People who work in security aren’t necessarily bad people, but they’re trained to become part of an institution. What’s your experience with the people you employ in these performances?
Ryan
Well, we tend to work either with performers, people who’ve either got a performance background or people who don’t; and then we tend to work with actual security guards like the Art Fair work or the one we did in Vienna. Often, when we work with actual security guards they find it quite interesting. If I take the example of the Art Fair work where they had to guard this absurdly small space that had no reason for existing…in a way you’re just getting them to do their job but because there’s no obvious rationale. It’s like you’ve distilled their job to the purist form, and often they get questions from the public. At the Art Fair people were actually engaging with the security guards about their job, and I think they tend to get on board with it, is my experience. And we say this is an artwork, about their skills and their expertise what they do anyway which they tend to understand.
Spiers
When we ask security companies to be involved they always ask, “Are you taking the piss?” And it’s a fine line, I mean we’re critical of the structures but we’re not critical of the individuals necessarily. A lot of people who work in security, fascinatingly, are new migrants. We were in Perth recently doing creative development and we were using all the guards from the Art Gallery of WA. We employed six of them and we would try and get them to do formations like the dancers would do just to see if guards would be able to do their job with more stylized choreography. I remember their boss came over to see what we were up to with these young guys. A lot of them were like Arabic dudes or from India, young twenty-something guys and the head of security seemed happy. He seemed to think we were doing a team building exercise with them and helping them to be more focused and disciplined. There’s a weird team building effect!
Ryan
The way we did the research for that is we went and talked to different people who have experience in the policing of protests, so that included activists and people who’ve written about the legal side of it but also the head of security at Melbourne City Council and a guy who does security plans for big events, and we found out all these things about how police do all their formations if they want to move in on a protest. I mean how they form all their cordons and do that sort of thing. I would say a third of the performers were interested in it because they were interested in the politics—they were anarchists or they were activists and so it was like this Trojan horse for disseminating information about police work.
About the Author:
Matthew O’Shannessy is a writer living in Los Angeles.
