If you've got nothing to do - do it on stage!
- Jack Smith

London always scares me a little. Even though the city has no towering skyline and the size of most buildings are within the limits of human scale, the city never feels human. In those parts of town where rows of terraced houses should suggest a certain amount of intimacy, the cityscape remains opaque. The streets don't appear to belong to anybody. Apart from the occasional pink front door, it seems impossible to leave a personal mark anywhere. Paradoxically this anonymity only boosts the intensity of individuals' display of themselves in everyday life. People project their personality outwards like an elaborate defence system. Everyone seems fully encapsulated within a bulletproof screen of individuality. If you walk down the street and try, en passant, to decode the many displays of identity that are casually offered, you quickly reach the point of information overload. There is just too much reading to do. Every passer-by is a complete text. Even the most mundane gestures, facial expressions or styles of clothing become part of a coded performance that is set off sharply against the blank background of the anonymous city stage. It makes you want to slam down the shutters and leave the urban theatre - or, alternatively, get a part in the play right away. Stop the show. Or, better still, take me on.

Hilary Lloyd's latest installation showing Monika, Darren and Darren, Sotiris and City Film (all works 2000) is resonant with this experience of urban performance. It presents a view of an urban scenario along images of four individual performers carrying out simple choreographed casual acts. Four different video-sequences are presented on four separate monitors. These standard professional monitors with plain grey housings rest on single-column stands. Three monitors showing the individual performances are set facing each other in a circle. The fourth monitor is placed slightly off-centre and faces away from the others. Here the video City Film is playing. It shows a panorama of London taken from the British Telecom tower. The camera remains static, but as the observation platform rotates very slowly around the tower's axis, the lookout point moves on in a circular motion. The maze of facades and rooftops gradually reconfigure as new buildings come into view. The video seems like an endless establishing shot for a film that never actually begins, setting the stage for events that will not occur. Human figures or movements remain invisible. The video also renders an image of a vacant gaze. The city is introduced as an impersonal field of vision. In the same way that the camera, it seems, will endlessly monitor the urban scenario, the city will always 'see'. It forms a visual continuum. The city is a silent witness that remains unimpressed by the events it witnesses and the ambitious show its citizens put on every day. Nothing changes. Neither the city nor the gaze of the camera is stirred by individual performances. No matter what happens, the vision of the tacit TV-eye goes on and on and on.

This sense of empty duration is maintained in the other three video sequences. They each show individuals who perform simple repetitive gestures. The videos are looped, adding to the circular manner in which the performances unfold. There is neither a discernible motive nor a clear goal that might give them a linear direction. All the same, the performances 'fill' the empty space opened up by the first video. Something happens. Nothing much, but still, once the narcotic drift of circular time, every little detail about the performances absorb you becomes significant.

One video shows Sotiris, a young man, stretched out and relaxing on the floor leisurely leafing through some fashion mags. Whenever he turns a page, he tears it out. After a while the floor around him becomes covered with torn-out pages that begin to form a corona of glossy images around his body. Even though this performance is carried out lackadaisically and at a steady pace, the persistent noise of tearing provides nervous edge to the atmosphere in the exhibition space. Zzzip. Zzzip. Zzzip. Zzzip.¹

Sotiris might be comfortably at rest on the floor, but there is something restless about him. His performance seems to articulate the subliminal agitation produced by fashion papers: the pleasurable feeling of vertigo that arises from the dislocation of the self in the face of all the alternative possible identities offered by the magazines (maybe I should change, restyle my wardrobe and remodel myself, or maybe I should just tear up the glossy that makes me want all this). The tearing noise thus feels like it is charged with the subtle tension of a cursory self-destruction (or iconoclasm). Nothing spectacular. It is just that the ambience is tinged with an underlying tension.

The monitor opposite shows Monika, a girl who tries to build a house of cards over and over again. From time to time she collapses it, either deliberately or by accident. She seems fairly intent on balancing the cards on top of each other and manages to muster a certain amount of patience. However, she seems more interested in the process of building than in producing an end result. If she succeeds in finishing the house she only pauses for a brief moment to start anew. She seems to toy with the cards to keep herself occupied. It is something she does to kill time. The subdued atmosphere her performance creates is reminiscent of Sunday afternoon stretching endlessly into the evening.

On the third monitor, Darren and Darren perform. In a strict sense they are the only ones who 'act'. Their fluid motions come almost as a release from the feeling of arrested time produced by Monika and Sotiris. Their performance is staged in a vast empty office space. The reflective marble floor, monotonous rows of windows and white pillars confuse any sense of clear space. Against this abstract backdrop the two young men, casually dressed in jeans, tank top and trainers, carry out a repetitious sequence of movements. Darren 1 faces the camera and stands with legs apart, his arms hanging loosely at his side. Darren 2 gets on his knees and crawls through the legs of Darren 1. He gets up again, and for a split second, the men freeze, the right foot of Darren 1 beside the left foot of Darren 2 .Then they begin again and Darren 2 stands with his legs apart while Darren 1 gets down and crawls through them. This procedure is repeated with reversed roles over and over again. The nature of their circular movement is impossible to comprehend. It could be a game. It could be a ritual. It might as well be a minimal dance performance. And although the absurdity of their actions defies any aspiration to serious posing, the two young men still manage to convey a certain attitude: Here I stand. This is me. Now who are you?²

An empty gaze on London; a young man ripping pages out of a fashion magazine; a young woman building a house of cards; and two young men performing a self-contained routine of posing in a vast unoccupied space - all three performances seem to evolve directly from the underlying sense of vacancy. They give a shape to it. It is as if the feeling of vacant time and anonymous urban space itself created the impulse to perform. To fill space. To kill time. The edgy tearing noises produced by Sotiris reverberate this impulse - the nervous itch that urges you to do something to be somebody. The sense of floating in a void gets you all wired up. Whatever de-centres the ego - the effects of boredom, the impact of urban anonymity or the thrill of glossy surfaces - makes you want to go out, get on stage, put on an act and present yourself, like Darren and Darren do.

Or maybe this socio-psychological interpretation is misconstrued. Hilary Lloyd's videos are no empirical study on the presentation of the self in everyday life. Even though the performances in the videos are casual, they are not part of a real-life scenario. Perhaps they could be because they are neither too bizarre nor too outrageous to be noticed in an ordinary environment - in a busy gym even the performance of Darren and Darren might pass as a basic warm up exercise. It is not the degree of spectacularity that sets these performances off from common behaviour, but rather the context in which they are presented. The installation establishes a specific 'situation' that creates its own space and time. The repetitive structure of the four video sequences produces something like a self-contained time zone that seals itself off against linear time and the speed of daily life. Inside this zone, time is stretched and slowed down. Perception is made to adapt to the circular rhythm of the loops. No matter how casual the performances may seem, inside this time zone they come to be perceived as microscopic choreographies of formalised acts.³

The sculptural arrangement of the monitors transforms the exhibition space into a 'place'. Installed at chest height on single column stands, the monitors occupy the room as group of people might. The factual appeal of the professional equipment emphasises its 'objecthood'. The technicality of vision is exposed. As a result perception becomes 'embodied' as a physical process. You are made aware of the way in which your own movements between and around the monitors determine how you perceive what you perceive. The constellation of videos you see changes with the position you take. You step into the circle of monitors to see Darren and Darren's activities in contrast to Sotiris ' passivity. You step out of the circle again to see the exterior view of London's architecture in the foreground, a striking contrast to the interior spaces in which Darren and Darren perform. However, the ways of encountering the work are not entirely open. The installation determines the set of possible positions for the viewer in relation to the monitors - a fully defined perceptual environment in which every component is designed to bring about a change of perception.

The installation is self-referential in the sense that, first and foremost, it is 'about' the specific spatio-temporal experience it creates. From this point of view it might seem appropriate to abandon any interpretation that introduces a socio-psychological narrative in favour of a strictly formalist reading. This approach would probably start with pointing to the pivotal function of City Film within the structure of the installation. The motion of the revolving lookout point on the BT tower mirrors the look of the viewer. As he or she steps into the circle of monitors and moves around in circles to see the individual videos, his or her motions become an analogue of the circular pan of the camera. The viewer comes to occupy the impersonal vantage point of the look introduced by the City Film. The empty gaze on London operating as a significant blank. In the same way that the viewer can be said to 'fill' the vacant vantage point of the look, the individual performances in the other videos can be said to 'fill' the vacant space and time induced by the empty gaze of the camera. The whole installation comes to be seen as a continuous play emptying out and filling up space and time - a continuous play of zero and one. In principle these two interpretations of the installation - one that suggests a socio-psychological narrative and the other that proposes a formalist account of a change in spatio-temporal perception - operate on the basis of two different concepts of theatricality. On the one hand, theatricality can be understood as a mode of performance which governs the coded presentation of the self in everyday life.⁴ On the other hand. Theatricality has been described, by Micheal Fried in reference to minimal art, as a purely formal mode of altered spatio-temporal perception - the confrontation with 'specific objects' in material space combined with the temporal experience of empty duration.⁵

The first concept of theatricality can be applied to characterise the performance in which individual offers themselves to the gaze of other people. In this case to perform means to strike a pose, to show some attitude, to do something to be somebody. A 'narrative of becoming' (a recognizable person, somebody, yourself) is implicit in this kind of theatricality. Such a heightened awareness of this narrative dimension of everyday theatricality has become common sense. We know how to read the way people perform their own 'selves'. And we know how to offer ourselves to be read. The second concept of theatricality however is opposed to any idea of 'reading' or 'narration'. It refers to the factual presence of an object (and in an extended sense also of an image or a performer) in space and time. This factual presence is self-contained, non-referential and not expressive of any underlying meaning. Fried's concept of theatricality also does not apply to everyday situations. It demands a specific stage, an exceptional perceptional situation in which the effect of the vacancy and non-referentiality of minimalism can be obtained.

Despite all their differences, however, these two approaches coincide in one basic idea. Both concepts of theatricality are centered around a specific transaction between a viewer and the subject of his or her perception. The subject of perception provides the means to be seen in a particular way. He or she confronts the spectator actively. And it creates a situation in which the relation between the viewer and the subject of the look is defined. Fried describes the effect of minimalist objects as theatrical on the basis that they not only confront you with their materiality but also establish a complete situation to encompass the position of the viewer.⁶ In the same way each subject that performs or poses to meet the gaze of other people creates a theatrical situation: the viewer is confronted with the material display of the body and involved in the 'scene' of a visual communication. So it seems that in both theoretical approaches to this situation of confrontation are structured similarly.

Kaja Silverman has proposed a structural analysis of precisely this situation in regard to the theatricality of everyday life.⁷ She argues that every subject who poses an offer to the gaze of other people performs what she calls a 'photographic transaction'. As the subject anticipates the moment of being looked at or 'photographed' (by a real or imaginary camera), he or she adopts the form of a 'pre-photographic photograph'. In this sense the pose is a 'gesture by which the subject offers him- or herself to the gaze already in the guise of a particular "picture".' The theatrical act not only transforms the subject but also turns its environment into a stage. Silverman ascribes this effect to the 'reverberative qualities' of the pose:

The representational force which the pose exerts is so great that it radiates

outward, and transforms the space around the body and everything which comes

into contact with it into an imaginary photograph. ... The pose always involves

both the positioning of a representationally inflected body in space, and the

consequent conversion of that space into a 'place'.⁸

It is fascinating to see that this structural account of the transformation of space during the presentation of the self is analogous to the statement by Robert Morris that Fried quotes to explain the spatial politics of minimalism: 'The total space is hopefully altered in certain desired ways by the presence of the object.'⁹ Fried goes on to compare this' 'presence', which can transfigure an entire space, to 'stage presence' or the 'silent presence of another person'.¹⁰ So on a basic, formal level we experience the presence generated by the theatrical self-presentation of a person similarly to the way we experience the presence of a sculptural object that confronts us by designating it own coordinates of space and time (and vice versa).

To sum up, one may say the complexity of the experience produced by Hilary Lloyd's video installation arises precisely from the fact that it touches this intersection of 'everyday' and 'minimalist' theatricality. Hilary Lloyd takes theatricality off the street into the perceptional space of minimalism. In the course of this displacement, she isolates the structural features and 'reverberative qualities' of performing. She excludes all personal and biographical aspects of self-projection to bring out the basic spatio-temporal mechanics of theatricality. Yet as she keeps her performances casual, she preserves the moment of direct address which marks the presentation of the self in everyday life (Here I am. Look at me.). As a result these performances are more confrontational and suggestive than a purely formal reflection on physical gestures in space and time could ever be (as in, for instance, a Merce Cunningham dance performance) .

Picture one last scene: In a white cube a standard professional monitor with plain grey housing is installed on a single column stand and set at chest height in a gallery. Close to its base the video player rests on a metal flightcase. On the screen, Dawn sits on a light metal chair in an empty white space. She wears a cream coloured suit and black high heels. Her arms hang loosely at her side as she sits motionless and gazes into the empty white space. From time to time she slowly changes the position of her feet, balances one foot on its high heel, turns her head slightly. Then she sits motionless and gazes into the empty white space. Her left shoulder drops a bit as she shifts her torso a little more towards the camera. The lapels of her jacket open up just wide enough to reveal that she is not wearing anything underneath. Again she freezes and gazes into the empty white space. She picks a cigarette from her pocket, lights it, leans back and crosses her legs. She puffs and gives the camera a challenging look. After a second, the provocative expression disappears from her face. It goes blank again as she looks away from the camera and gazes into the empty white space. She lights another cigarette, straightens her black hair, tilts her head back. Then she sits motionless again and gazes into the empty white space.

With an infinitely small effort Dawn takes control of the situation. She captures the look of the viewer and directs it to the details of her body. Playfully she pronounces her ankles, her wrists, her neck, her chest, her hair. Every move she makes is a visual and visceral event in time. Like the gallery that surrounds the viewer the white room she occupies is a blank space. She fills this blank with her theatrical presence. Her transaction with the camera is charged with the tension of an erotic power-game: how long can you stand watching her when she scarcely moves, and yet everything she shows you makes you want to see more? She holds onto your gaze without ever fully articulating the erotic implication of her. Above all, her performance evokes a specific idea of beauty. A beauty which emerges from the impression that Dawn seems to have dropped out of the busy traffic of the everyday and into a vacant space of her own. She revels in the beauty of vacancy.

- Jan Verwoert