The Daily Hayley

Performances in The Daily Hayley were based on a 6 month collection of newspapers. They took place over 16 consecutive days at Matt’s Gallery, London. In The Daily Hayley newspapers were used as scores for improvised performances, as such text was used as instruction rather than description (see outputs 1 and 2).

In this work I ‘performed performance’, using performative strategies to reflexively examine the position and role of a performance-artist (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, E. Goffman). One strategy was to create tension between engaging with the physical and psychological demands of performing for 6 hours a day, while maintaining awareness of my performative examination of liveness. Another strategy involved identifying ways of performing such as scatter performance or repetitive action and re-performing those styles. As with previous work my performances reflected on their own eventual mediation: red contact-lenses caused continuous red-eye (a phenomenon of flash photography) and self-tanning lotion made my skin as saturated as images of magazine celebrity.

The Daily Hayley video (79 minutes, 2003) represents edited footage of the gallery performances. The video, directed by myself and edited by Gill Addison, was screened at Matt’s Gallery, Centre d’Arte Contemporaine, Geneva and CCA, Villnius (2003). In 2005 I wrote the paper: Performing to Camera and Liveness (Tate Britain, 2005) exploring the ontological relationship between performance and video. This paper reflected on my experience of making The Daiy Hayley, considering performance in relation to the media-studies definition of ‘liveness’, an activity measured against that which is not live i.e.; video/audio.

The Daily Hayley artists’ book was published by Matt’s Gallery in 2004. The book is a box-set (11×35x49cm) containing a 10 minute video-clip and approximately 1500 B&W photocopies of research notes relating to the performances (ISBN 0 907623 45 X).