Crash Test Dummy
Posted by Tom Estes on Saturday, May 4, 2013
Live Art Performance 'Crash Test Dummy' by Tom Estes, Part of Health & Safety Violation: A collaboration between Ben Woodeson and Tom Estes
Health & Safety Violation is a project initiated at Lubomirov-Easton which brought together performance artist Tom Estes and sculptor Ben Woodeson in an experimental collaboration; neither knowing exactly what would happen. The Health & Safety Violation collaboration was an evolving experiment documented by visitors to the exhibition; ephemeral performance art interacting with fragile sculpture, a world where every action has consequences both known and unknown.In his practice Artist Tom Estes creates socially engaged performance work that is both participatory and immersive while at the same time a playful messing with habitual ways of thinking. Estes is interested in the relationship between machines and humans. In his Live Art performance Estes stages an ‘action’ and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a ‘communal camera’. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
At Health & Safety Violation, Estes performed his seemingly inconsequential action within the deliberately dangerous and fragile environment of Ben Woodeson’s sculpture in which ‘every action has an equal an opposite reaction’. Documentation of the evenings actions was performed by visitors to the exhibition using a communal camera; and on this occasion selected images were also displayed in the gallery space for the duration of the exhibition.
At the core of Estes’ work is an attention to digital platforms and new forms of interconnectivity. Estes’ performance- a form of intellectual mischief-making- is designed to question the relationship between life in real time and of reality as it is increasingly experienced online. We are being completely enveloped by abstract systems and inundated with information that we are struggling to come to terms with. And while machines enable us to do things they also do things to us and do things at us.
Estes’ practice seems to capture the strategic orientation and inescapable reflectiveness of cyberspace. Whatever may be said about the internet one thing remains certain- as a primary means of global communication the internet is resulting in a massive social transformation. In liberation-speak the internet favors private, unconditional, sovereign freedom over scientific, conditional and institutional freedom. Yet Estes’ performance work emits an aura of agitation that undermines the authority of this rhetoric. The truth is that cyberspace is an increasingly efficient tool of surveillance with which people have a voluntary relationship.
Formally, Estes’ action invites a dialogue between stasis and dynamism, and psychologically, between reason and feeling. His perceptually oriented thought-puzzles are infused with humour, but the real difference and impact of Estes performance work, is as a potentially critical gesture. Estes’ performance Crash Test Dummy offers a parallel and contextual reading of the fundamental ideological fantasies that sustain our late capitalist society. Woodeson’s work is inspired by mass, friction, balance, gravity, momentum, potential and kinetic energy; basic rules that deliberately straddle a line between stability and instability, action and inaction. Estes’ performance takes Woodeson’s work one step further by contributing a real human interaction into a implied symbiotic relationship of balanced equilibrium which has potentially catastrophic consequences. Poised treacherously, the work inhabits a moment of possible action and subsequent reaction. So while this absurd yet playful performance toys in surprising ways with visual spectacle it is also nuanced enough to simultaneously traverse the Commodity Fetishism and popular Obscurantism of mainstream consumerist society.
Health & Safety Violation
Lubomirov-Easton
Enclave 8
50 Resolution Way
London SE8 4AL
http://
www.tomestesartist.com
http://vimeo.com/
As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.
