The Museum of Art & History at the McPherson Center

Guest Post: Thoughts on Audience Participation by Artists Andrew Purchin and Lisa Hochstein

Posted by Nina on January 24, 2012

In the fall of 2011, Lisa Hochstein and Andrew Purchin collaborated to create a really special experience at the MAH that blended collage, living sculpture, dance, and active visitor participation. I asked Lisa and Andrew to share the story of their partnership and their reflections on how it felt to work with museum visitors in new ways.

How did MAH bring you together?

Lisa: Last July my show, Undoings, was installed at MAH. The word “undoing” occurred to me repeatedly as I completed this body of work, both in terms of how it relates to the process of collage, and also in how it is central to the impermanence of all aspects of life and the objects that we acquire and later discard. Andrew contacted me to see if I would do something as part of his Makers at MAH day-long residency. I had been wanting to work with the brown paper for a couple of years and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. The resulting performance, Reflections on Undoing, allowed me to translate elements of my smaller collage pieces into larger gestures of tearing and arranging.

Andrew: My Artists Everywhere Project is about everybody making art everywhere so I found myself wanting to create my ideal Makers at MAH day. My perfect studio environment is one in which I get to paint people creating and moving. What if Lisa Hochstein’s collages could move? What if Lisa found a way to tear and manipulate paper in public? I asked Lisa to find a way to move and create in public and I created a protocol where people learn how to move to Lisa’s collages.

What were you surprised by?
Lisa:

1. How important the sound was. The range of sounds created by tearing the brown paper were evocative in ways I never would have expected, and the properties/characteristics of the paper were surprising to discover.
2. How internal the experience was. I am not by nature a very public person and the way I was able to be comfortable doing this was to turn inward and really hear and feel the environment created throughout the day.
3. When I returned to my studio, the work took some unexpected and wonderful turns, including some 3-dimensional pieces that I am casting in bronze now.

Andrew:

1. I surprised myself by inadvertently creating a workshop. To promote the event I had to make a video. To make the video I had to create a workshop, which included a guided movement meditation and brief small group discussions.
2. I was surprised by the therapeutic power of tearing paper. Afterwards, something caused me to feel a pang of grief, then I imagined I was paper being torn and felt relief.
3. The range of participation:
4. Some people appeared to be entering deep states of consciousness, others were completely silly, still others were observing and drawing. While quite a few people peered in and then left, others stayed and stayed.

Where is this work taking you?

Lisa: We are continuing to work together, exploring themes that came up during the original performance. We are experimenting with whole body paper manipulation and a range of art materials. We also are each continuing to work on our individual work, incorporating aspects of what we learned from this project.

Andrew: I’m working on sharing the “Moving to Visual Art Protocol,” with more people. I’d like to facilitate a workshop for athletes who would work out at a museum or gallery and then have the opportunity to move their bodies to appreciate visual art in a deeper way.

Lisa and Andrew: We are developing “Doings and Undoings,” a week-long performance installation in collaboration with Hospice of Santa Cruz County, which will involve tearing and manipulating a 1,000-foot roll of paper and exploring themes of avoidance of loss and loss itself.

As part of our research, working with paper will be introduced in workshops for Hospice staff and volunteers as a material for working with loss, grief, and transformation.