One of the crucial aspects of Sonia Boyce's residency was an explicit requirement for her to engage with a constituency outside of the University. Accompanying this was the implicit acknowledgment that a dialogue would develop that would inform a new body of work.
Cornerhouse, as Manchester's centre for the film and visual arts, supported the initial idea for the residency and subsequently the possibility of an exhibition and a publication. Cornerhouse, since its opening in 1985, has maintained a distinctive profile in the cultural landscape of the North West and has tried to position itself as a social and cultural centre for new ideas and debate within the city. Unusually, for Cornerhouse as an institution, Boyce's residency has proved to be a catalyst not just for us to open a dialogue with other partners throughout the city and with the gallery-going audience, but within the exhibitions department itself.
The work Boyce carried out at Cornerhouse under the title of The Audition is an interesting example of this and will be discussed in detail later in this text. However, suffice to say its emphasis on progress and its exclusivity have had repercussions well beyond any of those imagined by us before we embarked on the project. Just as The Audition involves the seemingly simple recording of a group of volunteers 'trying on' an Afro wig yet quickly becomes a more disturbing examination of a shared yet 'other' culture, the group working methods we have adopted since our earliest meetings with Boyce have given rise to a new working culture where education has become a focal point enabling overlapping initiatives to be realised.
At the time that Sonia Boyce was beginning her residency at the University, Cornerhouse was undertaking a period of internal research funded by the Arts Council of England. Known as ERDI (Educational Research Development Initiative) the brief was to look at ways in which education could be integrated into the organisation as a whole. Whilst Cornerhouse has been running successful education programmes since its inception in 1985, the intention of the research was to enable a strong educational philosophy to be instilled into all aspects of the organisation's work: planning and programming, audience development, marketing and operational matters. Education was to be placed at the heart of the organisation and not regarded as a separate identity.
At the time of writing, the research is still being undertaken through a process of internal discussion on an educational philosophy, and an assessment of the audience at Cornerhouse. However, the collaboration with Sonia Boyce has been an opportunity to put the internal thinking into practice. It is perhaps testament to her that this work has been a catalyst for change within the exhibitions department, a chance to work in a new way with definitions within the job titles and duties becoming blurred. Subsequently the exhibition and education work, perhaps previously regarded as separate entities, have been treated in a rather more holistic manner. The two areas have overlapped, and influenced one another, with The Audition having a direct impact on the look and content of the exhibition.
From an early stage in the residency, Sonia Boyce had indicated that she was keen to work with the Cornerhouse team and members of the public on a project that was educational in its nature. However, she was keen to avoid delivering a project that would impart skills or knowledge in the traditional sense, through, for example, a workshop or lecture. Instead she wanted to devise a project that would engage with a wide range of people who would participate of their own free will offering something of themselves to the project. It was hoped that this would eventually lead to the making of artwork to be included in the exhibition, a culmination of Boyce's residency. The Audition, as the project was cunningly titled, would indeed culminate in inclusion in the exhibition Performance.
The Audition was not to be an audition in the strictest sense, in that it was not to be a test of a prospective performer's ability. Indeed, The Audition required only that the participant must be prepared to wear an Afro wig and be photographed (Fig 6). It was open to all who wished to participate, An advertisement was placed in the Cornerhouse publicity brochure for the months of October and November, of which 30,000 are distributed citywide and beyond. Members of the public were invited to come along, under the banner of "Have you ever thought your face was a work of art? Then read on..." The response was overwhelming, with over eighty people responding to the advert, and over fifty attending on the day.
The Audition was held on Tuesday 18 November, and for practical reasons, was split into three sessions, with participants asked to wait outside the auditioning area, until they were ready to be photographed. Boyce took shots of each participant in colour, and black and white, with the promise that every person would receive a print of themselves. Furthermore, it was made clear that a number of the prints would be enlarged into flyposters for the exhibition Performance although at that stage it was unknown who the lucky (or unlucky!) participants would be (Fig 9). Whilst it was notable that the participants were both varying in age and background, what was perhaps more remarkable were their motivations for attending. Each participant was asked to fill in a questionnaire, asking why they had chosen to come, what they hoped to achieve from the experience, and what they thought of their appearance wearing the Afro wig. For some, the event was "a bit of a laugh with friends", a chance to achieve that fifteen minutes of fame, to participate in an unusual and creative process, and be part of an exhibition. For others, there was a deeper significance. One participant commented that she wanted "to discover whether or not wearing a wig could change who you are - in appearance and personality". Another stated that she was interested in all aspects of black culture, having grown up in Ireland, "a predominantly white culture" at the time, whilst another ventured further, wanting "to... get a taster of being an African lady with a white face".
Whilst the Afro wig has in the past been seen as a stereotypical image for the black population, used almost as a signifier for a whole race of people, there appeared to be a general consensus amongst the participants on what the Afro represented today, The words music, funk, soul, dance, disco and above all, the Seventies, featured time and again in discussions with the participants. Indeed, the Afro seemed to be an icon of an age, rather than a race, which had acquired renewed fashionability and street credibility in recent years. As one participant explained, "the Afro doesn't represent black people today - we've moved on".
Ambiguity often lies at the heart of Sonia Boyce's work and it is this openness to contradictory readings that gives the work its unsettling power. Whilst hair products, make-up and even cosmetic surgery can be used to make a person whiter, they can also be used to make a person blacker. Identity is obviously at the heart of the audition piece and the responses of the participants acknowledge this. The constant references to music and fashion raise other issues. Our identity is a socially constructed sense of who and what we are and to escape this can be both liberating and disturbing. Fantasy allows us to participate in the games of identification offered by fashion, music and advertising. The images themselves in their finished form offer few clues. Are we looking at posters for a club night, new band or theatre production? The simple act of taking the photographs has an emotional charge. It's not long since white anthropologists would record racial difference through the so-called mechanical objective eye of the camera. The Afro itself was once a signifier of radical intent. The fact that meanings have changed and altered through social forgetfulness or cultural amnesia is in itself interesting and is typical of the unravelling of cultural codes that Boyce's work is about. Once you start this process you are also forced to unpick the textures of your own ideological identities. The avoidance of stereotype or straightforward political statement gives the work an equivocal edge that enables a multiplicity of responses in the audience. It is the ambivalence and open-mindedness that allows access but also gives the work a resonance.
Artists' residencies are often an unsatisfactory compromise between contradictory expectations. Funders, venues, artists and audience are frustrated and pushed into contortions that undermine the best intentions. The arts world has been all too familiar with the 'name artist' parachuting into a site to work for a short period of time under freak show conditions to a small group of voyeuristic or disinterested spectators. All such projects pay lip service to terms such as education, access, creative partnerships and engagement with the community. But it is clear that these criteria were met during the residency and that this was done organically as a by-product of the process rather than an artificial add on or after thought. The organic process has helped Cornerhouse to rethink its internal structure and reposition itself within the city while making new but helpfully mutually beneficial links with the University and the Institute of International Visual Arts, as well as its gallery-going audience. By any measure the residency has been a success, however exhibitions remain the primary means of communication about contemporary art and we are confident that the body of work Boyce has produced will also leave a lasting legacy.