Artist and writer Cally Spooner explores the idea of an usurped voice; the transferral of the voice from a live body to a technical body, and the hire body as a technology. She speaks about her collaborative work in the visual arts – a practice which contrasts with the field’s general emphasis on solo making. She speaks about her work, ‘And you were wonderful, on stage’ and how she drew on theories from political philosophers Hannah Arendt and Paolo Virno in creating work with a political voice.
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Videos shown during the talk:
And you were wonderful on stage by Cally Spooner
This talk was part of Crossing Borders 2014 and was presented in partnership with London Contemporary Dance School.
Cally Spooner is a British-born (b. 1983) London-based artist and writer. Drawing from pop music, current affairs, corporate rhetoric and philosophical writing, Spooner’s projects address automated behaviour, outsourced subjectivity, mutated human resources and the short-circuiting of language in today’s attention economies. Appropriating different performance genres such as the musical, the television commercial and the radio play as both forms and a reference, Spooner considers how the extreme visibility of entertainment sits in relation to dematerialized, indeterminate and unmediated performance, and to the movement and behaviour of speech. Following her large-scale touring musical And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2013)—commissioned and presented by Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Performa 13, New York; and Tate Modern, London—Spooner is currently producing a film based on the musical that will be made at EMPAC, New York, in 2015. This work follows on from Spooner’s Frieze Sounds commission at Frieze New York, and will be produced in partnership with High Line Art, New York. Future projects also include a presentation for the Future Generation Art Prize, and a solo exhibition at gb agency, Paris (all 2014).
As published in 2014.
