(The following essay appeared in the book The Edge of Our Thinking, published by the Royal College of Art, London, in November 2012.)
In October 2011, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University ofDundee, invited artists Bruce McLean, Sam Belinfante and DavidBarnett to take up residency at the on-site gallery, the CooperGallery. Â McLean, Belinfante and Barnett had been commissioned by Sophia Hao (Curator, Exhibitions & Visual Research Centre at Duncan of Jordanstone College) to, over the course of five days, devise, rehearse and exhibit an original performance.
The three artists conceived the project prior to arriving in Dundee on Monday 17 October but had not worked together on the performance before then. Â Titled A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE, the performance was devised as a comic opera, incorporating drawing, sculpture, moving image and a libretto being written live. Â The work would be rehearsed over the five days in private within the gallery and with three, hour-long public rehearsals: Once within the gallery itself, once in Dundee City Centre and again the townâs Botanic Gardens. Â Following the performance on the evening of Friday 21 October, the Cooper Gallery would host a month-long exhibition of artefacts created by the artists from the performance and its rehearsal.
Alongside this Sophia Hao invited participation from the Department of Critical Writing in Art & Design, Royal College of Art, London; I and two first year MA students and took up writing residences within The Cooper Gallery for the period of the rehearsals and performance.  Our roles during this exercise in âlive writingâ were to, broadly, bring a concurrent critical interrogation to the work that was being undertaken that week.  We were not given any fixed direction in which to work but it was on the implicit understanding that we would create objects that could be placed within the subsequent exhibition of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE.  The residency was given the title An Action of Words and was described by The Cooper Gallery as: ââŠa live writing action in site to publicly share observations and reflection in a dedicated space at Cooper Gallery.  This space will also act as a collaborative text, in which common ideas and responses will be drawn out and addressed by the writers.â1 Observations, reflections, annotations and commentaries were and continue to be published on the An Action of Words blog.  The live writing residency was funded by the MFA Fine Art department at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and we writers were therefore encouraged to involve the MFA Fine Art students (who attended on a voluntary basis) within the discourses that we would be exploring.  Though open and advertised to the public, these sessions (daily, at midday, and entitled Meet the Writers) were grounded in a conversation around the practice of criticality in the creation of a new work of art.  Further discursive events were the daily Salons, which took place immediately following the hour-long open rehearsals. These were a series of open, roundtable conversations about the rehearsals, performance-in-progress, the project overall and thoughts provoked.  Initially led within the gallery by the performing artists but moved at their choice to the space established for the writing residency, these Salons became spaces for critical dialogue with the work-in-progress.
During the first Salon, Sophia Hao, in conversation with Bruce McLean, told the artist âRemember Bruce, you have permission to fail.â This notion was quickly picked up by all three of the artists â they insisted that the framework provided for them by the institution was based fundamentally on experimentation in cross-disciplinary practice and that this was their remit to explore. Â Throughout the week, they recalled and relied on the notion that they had been given âpermission to failâ; they had been given the luxury of failure, be it by accident or design.
The open rehearsal on Wednesday 19 October took place in Dundee City Centre; the curved paving stones creating an invisible stag for a non-physical amphitheatre. Â A tuxedoed Sam Belinfante conducted with a megaphone from a red-painted soapbox. Â Beside him, a similarly-tuxedoed, Bruce McLean provided stage directions from a hastily-assembled libretto. Â The rehearsal, which included seven drummers, performer Adeline Bourret and soprano and lead performer Lore Lixenberg, felt successful. Â While it was stressed throughout the previous dayâs open rehearsal that this was a work-in-progress, this performance felt, for an audience, assured and certain âincidental incidentsâ that the artists were keen to explore hit their (un-)intentional marks. Â There were few expressly intended expectations from the artists but as we returned to the Salon I remarked to fellow writers John Dummett and Christina Manning Lebek that the performance âlooked goodâ.
Later that afternoon, Sam Belinfante opened proceedings with the following remark:
âFor me, I thought it was one of the least successful things that we have partaken in so far.  I think the main reason for that is that we contradicted stuff that we have been talking about all week â in terms of the fact that (today) we made a performanceâŠI think itâs about ownership of that performance and asking âWho are you performing for?â  I think we just got to do the same thing we would do in an empty gallery and with the kind of supplementary interest of having public engagement.â
Fellow writer-in-residence Christina Manning Lebek later wrote on the An Action of Word blog: âHow much of this undertaking of rehearsals operates as an attempt to initially obfuscate the notion of a rehearsal and performance yet all the while building towards that which is familiar?â2
Until that point, the question that had preoccupied me, personally, was âWho is this for?â â that is, the performance, the live writing exercise and the event. Â At this Salon it became clear that the notion of a public was secondary to the research that the artists were undertaking in creating a performance from scratch and within a time-sensitive period. Â As mentioned above, the discursive sessions were open to the public but were based on conversations rooted in philosophy and art theory and were in practice limited to people who had some understanding of one, the other or both. Â In addition, these conversations were taking place in a room within a private institution and not in a specifically public forum.
In 11 Statements Around Art Writing, co-authored by the teaching faculty of the MFA Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, the fourth statement reads: âArt Writing does not take modalities of writing as given, rather it tends to, and experiments with, non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativityâ3. The attempt to instigate a non-hierarchical position within an institution is optimistic rhetoric, but one that was explicit in the foundations (at least) of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE.
When Sam Belinfante made the above remark he had revealed a displeasure in their work that day. Â When David Barnett and Bruce McLean joined the session later, it was discovered that they had made a (humorous) pre-arrangement to remain silent for as long as possible, an arrangement broken by Belinfante. Â From this, further questions arose, including how much of what the artists were attempting to achieve was a manipulative act that the viewer accepts as a form of performative entertainment? Â In then asking questions of our live writing exercise, the artists wished to explore a perceived disparity in our professional relationship with them â insofar as in the collaboration with âtheirâ project but in keeping a critical (and physical, the room dedicated to our writing being some thirty metres down the hall from the gallery and core focus of the event) distance, they felt that, in part, our intention was to analyse and ultimately âexposeâ what was described by John Dummett during that session as âthe trickery of the artistâ; that virtuosity of technical skill and professional manipulation of aesthetic and temporal elements that the artist can make evident but that which can also disguise or confuse intention. Â There was also their concern that their authorship was being undermined. Â Dummett wrote on the An Action of Words blog:
âDuring an act, or process, of interpretation its relation to what is being interpreted changesâŠthe space of interpretation can gain its own agency and volition.  The space of writing, or of reflection, assumes its own peculiar and specific gravity, it becomes a âbodyâ in its own right and it can assume a position of phantom authorship in relation to the material or matter under interpretation.â4
The question of authorship can be divided further still. As artists commissioned by The Cooper Gallery, Bruce McLean, Sam Belinfante and David Barnett were creating a work for the institution; this was reinforced further by the fact that The Cooper Gallery would be hosting an exhibition of collected artefacts from the performance. Working within the structures erected by Sophia Hao on behalf of University of Dundee, she acted in position of curator, commissioner and producer of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE. Â In one aspect, the questions of âWho is it for?â and âWho is it by?â can be, conversely, the institution.
Also revealed to the artists during this Salon was the fact that a further iteration of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE would be hosted by the Royal College of Art at the end of Spring Term 2011/12, a fact that we writers had been aware of since the agreement of our participation. The framework for the forthcoming installation of the exhibition at the RCA was yet to be decided, though we were all keen to have the participation of the artists as much as was possible without re-staging the performance.
The role of the Royal College of Art in the subsequent instalment of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE will use the artefacts collected by The Cooper Gallery to explore, in part, how interpretation can occur as an exhibitive act within the art academy. Â Conversely, can the museum become a site of interpretation or is it constrained by its own curatorial framework and the internal critical discourse that runs through its public programming? Â In this sense, the gallery (the exhibiting institution) shares more common elements with the art academy, collapsing spaces of learning with spaces for exhibition. The notion of âpermission to failâ may actually be a permission granted for one expert (artist, curator, teacher, writer, etc.) to work in the mode of another without expectation of a necessarily entirely professional outcome. Â Museums and galleries, of course, have less stringent (sometimes non-existent) regulations regarding accreditation.
With large-scale expansion of the contemporary art museum taking place across the UK in the twenty-first century, the institution has evolved to incorporate interpretation and education as a core function within its exhibitive practice. Â The key question to explore is whether the museum gallery can become a site for free interpretation (as opposed to, for example, display) or is it constrained by its own curatorial framework and the discourse that it wishes to promote within its own reflexive curatorial boundaries?
Irit Rogoff writes of ââŠenvisaging the museum as the space for unexpected learningâ.5 With education, and art education, becoming a site for politicisation, the institution/academy has allowed itself to take up responsibility for a practice-based learning, with exhibitive rather than accredited outcomes (those which testify to the successful completion of a prescribed course of study).  The nature and direction of the institution in question will inevitably frame the context into which the materials exhibited are both created and received, and in return for providing a public platform for artists to create and exhibit work, the institution will shape its critical reading.
In 2006, Alex Farquharson (now Director of Nottingham Contemporary, the reformed Kunsthalle developed from Centre for Contemporary Art Nottingham) wrote how there is the danger in such immersive, gallery-based interpretive work, that ââŠthe institution becomes a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk ultimately authored not by artists but by curatorsâ.6 Writing then in response to ânew institutionalismâ, a small movement of indicating to a shift toward ongoing, research-based exhibition (notable examples of which come from northern Europe in the early- to mid-2000s, and include Rooseum, Malmö; Kunstverein MĂŒnchen and Witte de With, Rotterdam), there are parallels to work that is being undertaken currently across extended or newly-built Kunsthallen in the UK: The Public, West Bromwich; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Showroom, London; and Turner Contemporary, Margate, for example, all demonstrate within the structures of exhibition how visitors can encounter artwork both directly and in the conceptual spaces between their various metaphysical states of responsibility.  If the institution functions (as former Director of Rooseum Charles Esche stated) as: ââŠpart community centre, part laboratory and part academyâ7 or as a site of production, then Farquharsonâs forewarning still has merit.  However, the institution has a accountability (either overt or implicit) to provide responsible approaches for all of its stakeholders. Â
Maintaining this balance ultimately became untenable for a number of organisations managing projects within the tenets of ânew institutionalismâ, though of the organisations that closed (including Rooseum but that also includes Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; and the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, among others) most were integrated into neighbouring larger institutions, though under a significantly more traditional remit for visual art exhibition. Â With access to larger available resources, the contemporary art museums are placed within a more robust position to develop integrated interpretation within their working practice, supported, as the majority in England are, by public funds. Â Whether this support is robust enough itself to maintain this contemporary form of ânew institutionalismâ may, ultimately, be another political decision.
3 11 Statements Around Art Writing
5 Rogoff, I., Academy as Potentiality
6 Farquharson, A., Bureaux de Change
7 Esche, C. Whatâs the Point of Art Centres Anyway? â Possibility, Art and Democratic Deviance