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Gestures are the language of the body, sometimes accompanying speech, sometimes filling in when speech fails. Gestures are universal and multicultural. Primal, pre-linguistic and sometimes theatrical, they are complex methods of communication and the expression of ideas.
Many gestures make a community and build up to create a language. Through gathering bodily actions and interactions with the world the Lexicon of Artistic Gestures can become a social space - a research archive.
LoAG is looking for something. We are gathering information about gestures, perhaps as accents, like mannerisms, or personal characteristics. Shifting the focus from the art object to the artist’s movements changes the relationship between subject/object. Does it leave object representational to the movement? (Bringing about a strange relationship to Time and Motion studies.)
Gesture can be a part of ritual or embody practise in motion. Are artists involved in perpetual labour or perpetual play?
LoAG is a video collection of gestures made by artists working in a wide variety of media. All artists produce gestures regardless of practice and we are interested in what they want to share, in relation to or outside the bounds of their regular practice. The work is a gathering of information and seeks to explore the language of artistic production by making public the intimate, often private, space of art making. Like dance, they have rhythm, and contain moments of intimacy or slapstick, performing and revealing tacit knowledge.
Whether political, communicative, choreographed, or gestures of the grotesque, these gestures are at the heart of our practices.
In the lexicon the gestures are dislocated, taken out of context, reorganised and collected like objects. In the absence of things we take for granted, direct communication or production, we might look for something else and in this way the lexicon becomes a space of possibility.