7. Circles

“What if we are not bounded by our time? So many pasts coursing through this present. All the old lives entwined in our felt now. We dwell at the open horizon where futures must remain unknown. What if we are not held by this feeling of oneness, or of parts, so minded; but renatured. One in the other, with the many. The many people, spirits, things, here, unborn.” 


- Spirit Labour (2019) Hugo Glendinning & Adrian Heathfield. 

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Alongside the four main rules of Ghosting (that the ghosts could wander wherever they like, and move stuff, and that they wouldn’t speak, and couldn’t be seen), another was communicated to staff, tenants and visitors of the building through emails and posters in the lead up to the workshop. “In case of need, make or display a circle” – through drawing, gesture, or simply by saying the word ‘circle’ – “and the ghosts will depart.”

We can’t remember who proposed this idea, but it wasn’t something imposed on us by the institution. We all – Channing Tatum and the Artsadmin staff – felt it obvious that there should be some kind of ‘safe word’. And while this was immediately questioned by participants when we introduced the project on Sunday morning (“is this just another example of artists going easy on the institution?”), we defended its use. We are not interested in actively encouraging people to trespass everyday social conventions – and limiting the possibility of communication – without also providing a consent mechanism by which to close down certain encounters. There are too many examples of people cynically using the frame of ‘art’ to indulge in shitty behavior. 

On Sunday we pretty much had the building to ourselves. But on Monday morning, the reaction to the ghosts was more sudden and hostile than we expected. Circles appeared en mass: on doors, in corridors, or marking off whole floors. What was intended as a tool to escape an unlikely yet potentially traumatic encounter seemingly became a means to shut out anything mildly uncomfortable or undesirable. But how can you police whether someone really ‘deserves’ to withdraw their consent? There was a feeling among the participants that people were ‘copping out’; that they could have ‘taken more’. In response, the ghosts acquired blueprints of the building on which they charted this use of the circles. Rooms might be sealed off, but ghosts would wait outside, or tear down the circles and slide them back into the offices underneath the doors. 

Notably, the Artsadmin office was one of the few places that circles didn’t really appear much. Perhaps it was because they were in closest dialogue with us about the event as a whole. Or maybe individual staff members had been given permission to be distracted from their demanding workloads for the day. However, we suspect there was significant pressure on them as an organisation to appear receptive and welcoming to this ‘critical’ gesture – could they really afford to say “no”?

The core problem with the circle was in our own wording: display a circle, and “the ghost will depart.” Why does the ghost have to depart? Why not the person distressed by the ghost? Why shouldn’t they leave, and let the ghost continue their spectral activity? The circle mechanism, as we articulated it, reinscribed the hierarchies of access and ownership in institutional spaces; the artist’s presence is temporary and provisional, whereas the organisation staff’s is guaranteed. If something goes wrong, it is the artist who must depart. This makes clear the value of Ghosting’s fiction. The ghost comes from before – before the artist, the staff, the audience – and has prior right to this space.

This radical proposal cuts to the impossible question of ownership at the core of an institution. Mick Wilson defines institutions (as opposed to organisations) as a ‘trans-generational project’: “a kind of a contract, that outlives the parties who make the contract.” An institution, by Wilson’s account, does not simply engage different generations of artists and audiences across time. Rather, it makes possible a co-ownership and co-responsibility between generations of people that never directly encounter one another. Ghosting is a way of temporarily making present – or feeling the force of the absence of – those who are party to this institutional contract, but not present at this time.

So how do we understand the relationship of organisational staff to these multi-generational stakeholders? After the workshop, the Studios Manager reported that she only used the circle once: when a ghost was at risk of pulling a computer off a desk. Of course, this makes sense; a two-day workshop doesn’t seem to warrant the destruction of the computer. But beyond the arbitrary exercise of an individual’s judgement about what is appropriate or not within this space, how can we find a logic (or maybe ethics) by which this ‘no’ is being expressed?

We like the concept of ‘stewardship’. The staff are taking on temporary responsibility for the maintenance and delivery of the organisation, by liaising between a group of stakeholders: at least part of whom are necessarily absent. In the case of the Studio Manager’s decision, the equipment at risk was deemed essential to continue Artsadmin’s work. The significant expense to replace it would take up resources; resources that are otherwise allocated to future projects. As a steward – responsible to those present, and in the past, and in the future – she had to make a decision about how to honour the many (and in this case conflicting) promises that Artsadmin has made and must uphold.

As freelance artists, so often deemed as ‘beneficiaries’ of these institutional projects, we are constantly receiving rejection or limitations from organisations. In this case, as in some others, we (and one of us was the ghost about to pull the computer off the desk) felt pretty happy to be told ‘no’. Obviously, this idea of ‘trans-generational contracts’ or ‘stewarding’ in no way ensures that those with power act with any degree of transparency, rigour or accountability. It also leaves open the question of how this semi-distanced relation of stakeholder-stewards takes place in practice, with one Artsadmin staff member asking: “how much distance do I need to have from artists to do the work to support them?” But we think it’s a useful model to articulate the agency of artists within these spaces: how we enter and leave, speak and listen, and demand accountability from those holding (temporary) positions of power.

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- Mick Wilson (2015) Thinking Through Institutional Critique. Presented at: THINKING THROUGH INSTITUTIONS, The Para Institution, Galway. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzlJMMo60UX