'Stroll On' – Exhibition of photographs and video, accompanied by ‘live’ performance. Bloomberg SPACE, London, 4 August-17 September 2005

The ‘1979’ exhibition was curated to coincide with the  2005 British Art Show - 1979 being the year of the first British Art Show, when I created the work ‘Stroll On’ for the Hayward Annual, Hayward Gallery, London.

I agreed to remake this installation and performance, commissioned by Bloomberg,  for the following reasons (which became, in effect, research questions):

• I was interested to see if a systems-based Minimalist performance work could still have currency in today`s climate
• The original installation was part of an on-going series of site-specific pieces which utilised architectural features to underpin visual structures. How might I achieve this in an entirely different space?
• I had kept meticulous instruction notes and felt that, similar to a playwright, it would be perfectly possible to re-make the piece and was curious to see how this process might unfold and what new visual, choreographic and musical structures I might need to  invent to give the work a contemporary feel

The philosophy of the American Bloomberg finance company seemed to me a million miles away from the philosophy held by most artists in 1979. I was keen, therefore, to see how today's fast and extremely commercially-driven art world would deal with a slow, soft and, in entertainment terms, ‘difficult’ piece.

I still had my initial sketches and notes, musical score, photographs, diagrams, audio and video tapes from the original performances and began re-working these so that, although the new ‘Stroll On’ looked and sounded virtually the same as the first incarnation, it was visually slightly sharper and audibly crisper. The hypnotic and ritualistic rhythms, cycles and spiral patterns contained within it have elements which allude to the meteorological weather cycles and cyclone models that have been part of my recent research.

Although the new ‘Stroll On’ was structurally cleaner and tighter, it retained its relentless, hypnotic and very pure format. I had imagined that the audience would become restless and lose focus on the work. This did not happen, however, and it was extremely well received. I was touched by many of the comments from the ‘suited and booted’ City types who had witnessed rehearsals from their offices surrounding the atrium and had genuinely appreciated, what was for them, a different kind of spatial musical performance. When one enters Bloomberg, everything is concerned with commerce: You can watch news regarding money markets being made and broadcast live from glass-walled open-plan offices; interviews with finance experts are played continuously in the lifts; large plasma screens showing global financial statistics play 24 hrs a day. All of this was experienced as a backdrop by anybody seeing the performance, giving the work an added, surreal dimension.

This project proved to be a very positive experience. It involved a collaborative process between curators, gallery staff, students, university technical staff and myself. It has caused me to rethink my approach to ‘live’ performance and I might consider incorporating elements again into my installations. It has triggered some new studio-based work linking meteorological and other scientific data to movement and live vocal and percussion sounds.

Citations

"Charlie Hooker's seminal sonic installation Stroll On."
(The Guardian Guide, Aug 6-12 2005)

"The jewel of ‘1979’ was Charlie Hooker`s re-staged Stroll On."
(Frieze Magazine, Issue 95, Nov-Dec 2005)

"...he would make a provocative Artist in Residence at the National Gallery..."
(The Spectator, 27 Aug 2005)

"As we used to say in the Seventies: stroll on."
(The Times, 3 Aug 2005)