PRODUCTIVE BODIES
Mark Harvey
Wellington City
March 12 - 16 2012
“We're all busy, it's the post-Rogernomics condition of our society I reckon, that we're busy and self-involved and trying to show we are always accountable for our actions - as Productive Bodies - as worthy members of our work-force.”
Mark Harvey
Productive Bodies is a major community performance art project in the streets of Wellington during the New Zealand International Arts Festival 2012.
Using group movement and humour in the streets Productive Bodies examines the usefulness and workfulness of individuals and groups in society. Movement will be workshopped within City Gallery Wellington during mornings March 12-16, and performed in the afternoon.
Previous Letting Space projects have dealt with commercial property vacancies as an issue for WellingtonCity. Productive Bodies speaks directly to an associated issue that is even more important: the well-being of oucitizens.
How can people, outside of their work environment and expectations of a labour contribution, strengthen their sense of community and engagement with their city?
In a time of recession and civil service redundancies the work will engage a community of recently unemployed, or about to be unemployed people. The work will encourage a sense of positive social wellbeing and ownership of public space.
Over 900 civil servants have lost jobs in Wellington in the past 12 months (see here). The pressure to be a happy, productive taxpayer can be large when you have been made redundant, or unemployed for sometime. Or as an artist with little hope of regular income. Meanwhile in the workplace ‘wellbeing workshops’ have become an important component of human resource management. How we value productivity continues to be measured by what we contribute to the market.
Mark Harvey and Letting Space will work with the 'unemployed' to encourage them to be physically active and develop a movement vocabulary of “absurd productiveness”. These worker-like cells of people will then be let loose in Wellington’s streets. The performances will explore public space in the city, and Harvey will explore notions of idiocy to develop participants’ own sense of ‘productive worklessness’ with endurance and duration exercises.
As well as working with the unemployed Harvey will learn about the change in confidence and productivity that the ‘threshold unemployed’ (or those that fear redundancy) face. By working with these usually bright, stable loyal taxpayers, Harvey explores the arbitrariness of those that have a job for now and those that don’t.
Productive Bodies is being produced with City Gallery Wellington as an associate partner, in association with a survey of contemporary New Zealand sculpture, The Obstinate Object. The project explores notions of ‘social sculpture’ and the performance body as contemporary figurative art within public space.
The work is part of a wider series Letting Space has commenced nationally called Community Service, where leading artists are commissioned to work with communities to enable social change.
Mark Harvey has worked extensively in New Zealand and internationally creating performance projects that test the boundary between dance and performance art.
Harvey’s performance practices are conceptually driven and test out notions of endurance with constructions of idiocy, seriousness and deadpan humour, and draw from his visual arts and contemporary dance influences (he trained in contemporary dance).
Some of the galleries and live art events he has presented work in include: Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, 2003; the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, Taranaki 2006; The Physics Room, Christchurch, 2002 and 2006; the Parnu International Video and Film Festival: Pain in the Class, Estonia 2006; Camp X, Denmark 2008; PSi 15, Croatia 2009; and Living Room in collaboration with Isobel Dryburgh, Auckland, 2010. He has curated a range of performance art events. He lectures at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries at The University of Auckland and has just completed a PhD at the School of Art and Design at AUT University in performance.
