Art Work/Work art.

Performance + keynote presentation: Art Work/Work Art was part of Steder/Places, an international programme of site-specific artworks staged throughout the town of Lillehammer, Norway in August 2003. I also gave the opening keynote performance lecture address: 'The Architecture of Belief' at the Steder/Places conference.
Art Work/Work Art developed my concerns with the relationship between performance and the everyday, between the theatrical gesture and ordinary movement and particularly the possibility of the everyday gesture as way of thinking through transnational dialogue. For this piece I became interested in the round coffee table – a piece of furniture endemic across many nations and cultures – as a metaphor for internationalism. As part of my artistic strategy I took on the role of a waiter at the Park Caffeen in Lillehammer where the action of waiting tables became the medium and mode of perfomative action (i.e. actions liable to trigger other actions in other participants). I used my experiences as a waiter as the research process allowing daily writings which were relayed back to the website http://www.rescen.net and also translated into Norwegian for publication in the newspaper Gudbrandsolen Dagningen. In this way the mode of reproduction of my findings was manifest in precisely the diurnal terms which were under investigation. My findings critique the separation of politics and aesthetics by imbuing his undercover 'employment' as both expose and artwork; as both medium and message.