ARTISTS TALKING

As Newman points out, the history of performance art is impossible to comprehend in its entirety; documentation is not exhaustive, there are few books on the subject and many art magazines have difficulty accommodating the comparatively fleeting nature of an event in contrast to a six-week exhibition.

Similarly, due to this time-sensitivity, Newman has never found gallery representation particularly relevant. The financial needs of her work suit commissioned projects rather than the ongoing influx of funds through selling.

Education

After completing a BA at Middlesex University and a MA at the Slade, Newman won a DAAD scholarship to Germany, choosing Marina Abramovic's class in Hamburg.

At this time, Newman talks of a split between the theatre-based performance of Britain and European roots in the avant-garde. She was more interested in investigating non object-based art than the black-box theatrical productions that were prevalent in Britain.

The yBas were still in the ascendancy and the structure of the art world was, although infiltrated by artist-run spaces, still very much a commercial conceit. Newman's work, eliciting no art object as such, was not commodity-based and therefore hard to place in this economic structure.

In Germany, Newman developed the performance Microphone Skirt (1995), in which she danced in a mini-skirt made of twenty hi-ball microphones, her physical movement transforming into audio as she gyrated. This transference of one form of energy to another is a recurring motif in Newman's work.

The previous year, in London, she performed a kiss with a partner on the balcony of Nosepaint (which later became Beaconsfield) at midnight. A microphone passed between the two mouths, amplifying the movement of the unseen tongues.

Later, in 1999, the method became more technologically complex in Soundgaze. Two sets of electronic weighing scales rigged to a computer would, when loaded with an object of a particular weight, trigger one of 400 sound samples. The piece was a sort of free-form improvisation that was performed in many venues around Britain and Germany, including Beck's Futures at the ICA in 2000.

PhD

After the year-long scholarship in Germany, Newman returned to London, signed on and tried to continue making work with no budget or facilities.

Eventually, a six-year PhD at Leeds University gave her the freedom to research the history of performance as well as develop her own work, both in terms of practice and theory.

Out of this came Connotations – Performance Images (1998), a series of imagined performances represented by photographs and accompanying texts. Crying Glasses (An Aid to Melancholia) shows the artist wearing a pair of dark glasses that are supposedly rigged up to a water pump in her jacket pocket.

The text claims that the artist wore the glasses whenever on public transport but, in reality, the scene was staged just once for the photographer, and the glasses were not at all mechanised – the wet cheeks were simply smeared with glycerine.

These staged performances are at times hilarious, perverse or grave, but always seem completely plausible. Newman acknowledges that an understanding of the political, conceptual and historical position of each proposal enabled her to place them credibly. She even changed her hairstyle and clothing so that the photographs wouldn't appear anachronistic to the fictional dates she had given them.

This conversion of the non-existent event to neat commodity of text and photo is a distinctly wry comment on the status of performance art in history and the contemporary art market and, predictably, it was from this series that Newman sold her first piece of work.

Non-commercial practice

As Newman's career and reputation has built up, she tends to be approached by organisations to develop and realise new projects. A relationship with an art organisation rather than a commercial gallery requires ideas to have a distinct end point and timing tends to be quite rigid.

This generally means that the self-initiation of a vague half-idea, which is many artists' idea of studio practice, is not often possible. Newman finds, though, that to incorporate proposal writing into her practice is very useful, as it is often the point at which she sharpens up an idea or works out ideologies.

Self-administration

Without the support structure of a gallery, administration could become overwhelming, but the independent artist has to keep abreast of paperwork, tax and correspondence as any other freelancer must. Newman tackles this by keeping everything on disk, from CV and biography to images and reviews.

To cut down on time spent waiting for people to reply to correspondence, email offers a solution that does not intrude into the day's work. Instead of spending, say, two days a week in an administrative capacity, the freedom permitted by mobile phones and email means that admin becomes something that ticks over in the background.

Although, as most people, Newman would prefer to have someone else to negotiate contracts and fees for her, she finds that on the whole, working independently keeps things simple and controllable within the complex structure of her fluid practice.

Update 2006

In 2006, Hayley Newman said: “I still have a part-time contract at Chelsea College of Art and Design, where I now look after graduate students.

I am trying to spend more time making my own work. I’ve just finished working on a commission called MKVH (Milton Keynes Vertical Horizontal) at Milton Keynes Gallery, for which we are currently putting together a book that documents this project. I’m also working on a large scale commission for Commissions East.

Matt’s Gallery are now representing me. This suits me, and means I can get on with what I want in my own time. Matt’s Gallery offers me support with contracts, loaning work, applications and generally helping me with what are sometimes quite complicated decisions regarding the direction of my work and what I want to be doing.”

Sally O'Reilly

Sally O’Reilly is a writer, lecturer and co-editor of ‘Implicasphere’. She also organises performance-based events.