Inventory of behaviours

This paper will explore the preparations, patterns, neuroses and procrastinations that surround the production of art works in the studio. It will draw on data gathered from a four day, live performance event at Tate Modern. For Inventory of Behaviours, artists are invited to consider their own behaviour in the physical, digital, or psychological spaces in which their art is made and devise an instruction to enable someone else to imitate or re-enact their ritual, traits or habits. The resulting instructions will be collated and enacted by visitors to Tate Exchange and scrutinised by invited specialists from a variety of disciplines, including psychology and neurology. Christopher Bollas‘s 'unthought known‘ refers to the ways in which individuals may organize their lives around patterns of experience that are known at some deep level but possibly not at the level of conscious thought. By attempting to draw out some of the behaviours that are integral to the interior creativity of artists and employing re-enactment to embody them, this research seeks to understand the possibilities for making and learning. Inventory of Behaviours was developed by artists/senior lecturers Jo Addison and Natasha Kidd in collaboration with Freelands Foundation. Consistent with their individual practice-based research in to the conditions of making, their collaborative research explores learning as form. Performances and live events are designed to stage the act of learning beyond the constraints of academia. In keeping with this methodology, this presentation will employ a performative approach.