arts, access, action

1.  What contemporary arts practice or current issues inspire your work as an artist?

My work is maily in performance which I think of as being a branch of fine art rather than theatre. I’ve seen innumerable performances over the years and remain an enthusiast for this rather wild and unbounded form of art that attracts a lot of maverick ideas and artists. The other major aspect of my work is disability and how to work with theories and histories of disability in the realm of art.

2. Some people have called your work avant-garde, how do you
    respond to being named as one of the artists who are pushing the
    boundaries?
How does this relate to your work ‘The disabled Avant-
Garde’ (www.the-disabled-avant-garde.com)?
I collaborate with Katherine Araniello as ‘the disabled avant-garde’. We use the term satirically and somewhat slyly since the avant garde might be considered a historical moment (late 19th/early 20th Century) and no-one goes around bragging about being avant-garde nowadays. On the other hand though,

 Katherine and I both love experimental, ‘boundary-pushing’ art and have backgrounds in art schools. We both feel that a lot of ‘disability art’ lacks a commitment to contemporary formal innovation and experiment and we wanted to see what happened if we created this collision between the two worlds.

If you read our background blurbs we portray ourselves as having a very shaky grasp on what avant-gardeism is since we have created a ‘canon’ that includes both Karlheinz Stockhausen AND Tom ‘n’ Jerry. Hence we are working satirically with the term ‘disabled avant-garde’ and somewhat playing up to stereotype. Some of our work has caused a lot of confusion which is very avant-garde!

3. You have exhibited and performed around the world, have you
    found a difference between UK and other audiences with your
    work?
Yes, there are massive differences between how public performance (ie that is encountered by the public in an everyday setting and isn’t contextualised as such) is received in different countries. To give a somewhat banal comparison, a public performance in Amsterdam would be more knowingly received than one in China – the difference is mainly to do with cultural familiarity with performance as an art form.

4. You express your art in a number of different styles, such as
    Crosspath and Charisma, do you prefer one over the others?  Do
    audiences?
Those pieces are on my web site www.aaronwilliamson.org which collects 12 pieces made in different situations. Crosspatch was made on the streets of Den Bosch, a small town in Holland; and Charisma was performed in a nightclub in Rome. I also make durational performances in Galleries (for six weeks in ‘The Wild Boy’); as well as making video art through devising performance-to-camera in a studio. I don’t have a preference as such – I try to find the situation and context that best fits the conceptual idea in the work. However, for its exciting unpredictability, I get a big thrill out of public performance.

5. As a part of 15mm Films – can you tell us a little about your 
    involvement in this collective and what your aims are? How can
    people get involved or promote its work?
I’m called the artistic director which means I get to do a lot of the organising! 15mm Films has a website with some of our work: www.15mmfilms.com . We are a collective of likeminded artists with various impairments and takes on the label ‘disability’. We all have academic backgrounds and practice mainly either performance or video.

15mm Films tends also towards comedy – often quite black. We subvert (or ‘play up to’) stereotypes of disabled people – the object of our humour is not ourselves but normative, limited perceptions of disability. I’m not sure how people can get involved with 15mm – we recruit artists on a project-by-project basis but have quite a settled group now.

We did some workshops at the Serpentine to accompany our exhibition there in 2005 and maybe we will do more of that kind of work I the future. As to promoting us – unfortunately we don’t have an administrator or marketer and do everything ourselves, which means we don’t get to work as often as we’d like.

6. You’ve released some of your work through You Tube, are you
    reaching a new or wider audience? Will you continue to use You 
    Tube to get your work out there?
I’m a big fan of You Tube and it strikes me as a very accessible medium. I made those films specifically FOR the YouTube format and I’m aiming at adding more when I get chance to make them.

More information about Aaron...

Aaron’s work involves a consideration of performativity; social constructions of the normal and the disabled body; and notions of ‘avant-garde’ art practice. 

He make’s work that inverts the valorisation of social ‘outsiderness’ - using contemporary art practices ranging from performance, sculpture, video and installation - whilst drawing upon slapstick, pathos, failure, futility, setback and collapse.

In the last ten years he has created performances, videos, installations and publications in Britain, Europe, Japan, Greenland, China, Australia and North America. 

In 1997 Aaron completed a Doctorate thesis on performance, writing and bodily identity, entitled Physiques of Inscription at the University of Sussex.

Aaron is the Lead Artist within the disability artists collective ‘15mm Films’ (www.15mmfilms.com) which recently exhibited a critically acclaimed video installation at Beaconsfield Gallery, London.  He is also one half of ‘The Disabled Avant-Garde’ (with Katherine Araniello) whose work included an exhibition of video pieces at the Showroom Gallery, London in 2006 www.the-disabled-avant-garde.com .

Aaron’s publications include Performance / Video / Collaboration (Live Art Development Agency and KIOSK, 2007) and he co-edited ‘Art Becomes You’ a collection of essays on art and subjectivity (Article Press, 2007).  http://www.biadart.com/?q=node/711

His ‘Performance Slapsticks’ video works can be seen at:    
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Aaron+Williamson+slapstick&search=Search

For more details about Aaron and his work please visit his web site: www.aaronwilliamson.org