One of the best features of work that treats its audience on an individual basis is the manner in which it can have a lingering and longstanding effect on life at large. Simon Bowes of Kings of England does exactly that with I Vow to Thee, by asking his audience members to make a promise.
Entering a makeshift office of sorts, in which Bowes sits behind a trestle table with a pile of empty forms, you sit yourself opposite the artist. Bowes explains the piece and its origins in the recent tagline of the election: the Big Society. He wants to make Britain a better place and is asking each of us to do our bit, whatever that might be. We talk through possibilities and Bowes makes an instructive and insightful advisor, guiding your hand without ever forcing it. What might we want to commit to? What are we able to commit to?
By filling out the form, which is laid out like a contractual agreement, one cements a promise in writing. It solidifies the moment of commitment like a flashbulb scorching a moment onto film. Afterwards, when you notice yourself transgressing that pledge, it has a habit of jerking back into memory and your behaviour realigns accordingly. I Vow to Thee makes us better people, at least in theory, and does it’s little, tiny bit to swing the country’s moral barometer to the good.
One thing that I Vow To Thee flags up, however, is the difference between the perspectives of artist and audience with this type of work. Necessarily so, of course, but there remains a slightly unsavoury aftertaste about that. For all that these one on one experiences feel personal, they are in fact mass-produced. Just as Build-a-Bear Workshops, found in shopping malls the country over, leave each child with a unique teddy bear of their own making, the process remains a production line, albeit open and adaptable. (It is awareness and self-conscious demonstration of this that makes Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy so powerful and honest.)
Here, Bowes keeps his archive of previous vows on the table for perusal, both as a tool for decision and for interest sake. There were around 140 by the time I undertook mine and that figure is likely to have passed 200 by now. He is open about the piece’s own history in the same way that Barnaby Stone incorporates it with the pegs of previous participants showing up in your slice of Oak.
Yet what concerns me slightly about Bowes’ contract is – as so often – the small print. In order to receive the ongoing “encouragement, mentoring, support (or even actual help) in the fulfilment of my Vow,” each of us has to give consent for the contract to be used “in future promotion or documentation” of the piece. In other words, we (the audience) and he (the artist) get different things out of this treaty.
Though I don’t wish to question the integrity behind Bowes’s intentions, it reminds me of David Hoyle’s On the Couch, which played as part of the Chelsea Theatre’s recent Sacred Festival. Presented as a piece in its own right, On the Couch was little more than a gathering of material for Hoyle’s other piece Theatre of Therapy. Yes, Hoyle had stated that this might be the case in promotional material, but – by virtue of its presentation as a piece in its own right – one expects its motivations to be less singularly exploitative and cynical.
Of course, Boyes doesn’t go that far (at least, I hope not), but he does have a viewpoint across the spectrum, where we only see our own encounter. We have given of ourselves in the course of the piece and, while we (and, in this case others/the country at large) may benefit from that, Bowes benefits in a different way. He gains a wealth of potential material, promotional or otherwise, for his own future practice.
But then, perhaps that’s just the way life works. Isn’t it a series of mutually beneficial contracts made together but taken in different directions? The thing is I Vow to Thee feels like a pact made with myself, a personal promise, rather than one with the artist himself. Bowes appears to be a conduit or catalyst, but turns out to be rather more complicit.
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