The Works
Four works, made over fifteen years, that turned passers-by into a performance and asked whether the interaction of people with a work could be an aesthetic in its own right.
For public space. With Tom Wexler.
Flock was the first of KMA's large-scale public works — commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts and staged in Trafalgar Square in 2007, where the ICA's then-director Ekow Eshun called it a whole new realm for live artistic experience. It returned a decade later, in 2017, as Flock 2 at the National Design Centre in Singapore.
It was not, in any sense, planned. It grew out of a job — the kinetic scenery Tom and I had built for Eng-er-land, an experimental dance piece for Phoenix Dance Theatre, performed at Sadler's Wells in 2005. In the audience that night was Vivienne Gaskin, then head of digital arts at the ICA, who saw something in the moving scenery worth pursuing. On the strength of it she put Tom and me in a room with a dancer from the Royal Ballet, Tom Sapsford, and a fashion designer, and gave us a brief so open it was barely a brief: make something together. The fashion designer didn't stay the course. But Tom Wexler and I had already made a small, playful piece called Dancing in the Streets in York, and we proposed building on that instead. What began as a doodle ended up in Trafalgar Square.
What we built there, loosely around the fourth act of Swan Lake — the part where the main protagonists are absent — was a public square wired to notice people. Step into the space and a spotlight found you. As others stepped in, they were lit too, and then, one at a time, each light was joined to every other, until a crowd of passers-by who had arrived as individuals found themselves drawn, unrehearsed, into a single coordinated corps de ballet: pedestrian performers, as absorbing to watch as to be part of. We wanted to know whether people who had not come to see art — who were simply crossing a square — could be turned into performers by nothing more than light and their own curiosity. They could. Others gathered to watch and applaud. Strangers will, it turns out, given a frame and a little permission, step forward and play.
That was the first time we ran the proposition every later KMA work would refine: that the audience could be the performance. But the lesson I value most from Flock now is not in the square at all — it's in how the piece came about. An open brief, a chance sighting, a collaborator who left, a doodle we decided to take seriously: none of it could have been specified in advance. The work found its shape by being made. That turned out to be the method, not the accident.
What Flock did instinctively, the next work would do knowingly — and find, almost by accident, the image that explained the whole practice.
For public space. With Tom Wexler.
It was commissioned by Mike Stubbs at FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, for the inaugural AND Festival in Liverpool in 2009, and went on to run in Blackburn, Macau and Southampton.
At its centre we laid a single large chalked figure — a prone human form, the only representational image in the whole work — and surrounded it with projected light and sound. The figure's job was to draw a crowd and hold it, and then, slowly enough that no one could name the moment it happened, to turn that crowd from a gathering of onlookers into the work itself. It ran for weeks, and no two performances were alike; each was made by whoever happened to be standing in the square that evening.
The chalked figure was a deliberate borrowing from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp — the cadaver at the centre of the painting that everyone is looking at, and which turns out not to be its real subject at all. We wanted to find out whether we could withdraw entirely: whether the makers could take their hands off the work and let the people looking at it become the thing worth looking at. We could. A still, silent body in the middle of a public space did exactly what the cadaver does on Rembrandt's canvas — it drew a ring of curious strangers around it and, in doing so, made them the subject.
That discovery is the one everything afterwards rests on. We had learned that a single motionless figure could gather and hold a crowd long enough for the crowd to become the work — that, as I came to think of it, you could turn the curiosity of individuals into the creative bravery of crowds. Congregation is what we built once we knew that.
If this work found the idea, the next is where we built the machine for it.
For public space. With Tom Wexler.
Made for the UK Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, it was staged a further seven times over the following six years — among them Tate Britain, Market Square in Pittsburgh, and the town of Enschede in the Netherlands. In Pittsburgh, more than ten thousand people took part.
A twenty-five-minute score by Peter Broderick played out over a swarm of light projected onto the ground of a city square. The light gathered into the shape of a single human figure — the Rembrandt cadaver again, in a new form — and people, drawn by it, gathered too. As they circled, a thermal camera traced their outlines and followed them, mapping each person's path in light, while a screen slung from a forty-foot crane showed the whole scene from above, so that everyone present could watch the pattern they were making and see that they were making it together. Then the figure dissolved back into light, and the crowd was left holding only its own connections.
The best of it came near the end. The circle of light, perhaps fifteen metres across, tightens; almost imperceptibly the people in it are brought closer and closer together, shoulders beginning to touch, glancing up at the screen to chart their progress, the music building toward something plainly no longer ambling but driving. And then, as the circle becomes impossibly tight: silence. The music dies. The single figure — the one recognisable thing in the whole event — slowly absents itself at the audience's feet. Audience, because that, suddenly and unequivocally, is what they are.
With no human intervention at all, the work could gather large groups of strangers and lead them through a narrative that, at its best, moved them to tears. It was the fullest answer we ever gave to the question the work kept asking: can the interaction of people with a work be the subject of an aesthetic in its own right? But the same machine taught us its own limits. The structure was recursive — the same cycle, again and again — and recursion wears; the weather was a constant adversary; and the projected image was always losing ground to the brightening of the cities around it. We stopped in 2016, not because the idea had failed but because that particular machine for it had said what it had to say.
Everything before this was about the crowd. The last work took the same idea and ran it at the most intimate scale I could find.
Made anew with each host community.
It is the first of these works that is mine alone rather than ours. It opened in York Minster in November 2020 and was remade afterwards with new communities in Pittsburgh, Selby Abbey, Castle Howard, Jersey and Viborg, each edition filmed locally so that the faces always belonged to the place that showed them.
The form is almost austere. Five life-size screens, exquisitely lit, each showing a slow cycle of a community's faces. Every person on screen is gazing at a photograph of someone they love — a photograph you never see, and which was never recorded. From across the room the screens read as a collective: a wall of strangers, the commonality and the particularity of each face on view at once. Then a narrow spotlight invites you forward to a single screen, and something else entirely happens. Your eyes meet the steady, silent, life-size gaze of one person, and you are left to do the work the piece keeps for you — to imagine the absent, beloved face that they can see and you cannot.
Where the earlier works dissolved the crowd into the performance, this one withholds the subject altogether and hands it to you. The figure at the centre — Rembrandt's cadaver, Flock's spotlit stranger, Congregation's totem of light — has finally disappeared completely. What's left is one person, looking, and the act of imagination that love and empathy begin with. The aesthetic isn't on the screen; it's made by whoever is standing in the spotlight, and it belongs to them.
I learned two things from it. The first is that it is really two works — a collective condition seen from a distance, and a one-to-one transaction up close — and that the movement between them is the whole experience. The second I learned by losing it: the second national lockdown closed the first York edition after only a handful of days, before more than the original sixty-nine sitters could be filmed, and the enforced stillness of that moment — faces gazing out into a near-empty Minster — turned out to suit the work better than any crowd. It is the only one of these pieces made for solitude rather than the gathering. After fifteen years of bringing people together in public squares, the work had quietly arrived somewhere else.
These four are the anchors. What follows is the complete record —
The complete record · 2005–2020