Two juniors are enjoying a bit of freedom after being tied together for a week in a performance art piece.
Greta Motter and Emily O’Day attached themselves at the waist with a slim, white polypropylene rope November 14 during their Performance and the Body class. It was their response to an assignment from Art History Professor Jonathan Wallis — to choose a performance piece they studied in class and hypothetically imagine they were re-performing it, and to write about it.
“We were talking about collaborative performance where two or more people use their bodies together to create an art work,” Wallis said. “Sometimes they agree about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and sometimes the two bodies disagree, but they need each other.”
What intrigued Motter and O’Day was Art/Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece) by Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano. They wanted to re-create it for a day or two.
“I said, ‘I think you should do it for a week,’” Wallis told the students. “Because I think that makes it real. They are super brave and super up to the task and they said, ‘OK, we’ll do it.’”
HOW THEY DID IT
Motter and O’Day were never more than 6 feet apart for the week.
“It was easy to manage our class schedules together,” said O’Day, a Fine Arts major. “We would switch and do (one person’s classes) in the morning, and the other person’s in the afternoon.”
“The professors were very excited to see the both of us,” said Motter, an Animation & Game Arts major with a Digital Arts minor. “They were excited that one of us had a guest and they always asked how it was going, how we were doing. They always asked about the bathroom, because everyone’s first question was, ‘Even the bathroom? How does that work?’ You’re like, it works how you think it does.”
The two got a lot of looks from other students when they showed up in the dining hall. After a few days of the “performance,” some got up the nerve to ask what they were doing.
They had to take turns with living arrangements, with Motter traveling with O’Day every other day by bus to her West Philadelphia apartment, and O’Day having to stay overnight on campus.
They also had to squeeze the water out of the wet, heavy rope after showers, and the rope got dirtier as the week went on.
WHAT THEY LEARNED
“I had teachers warn me about our relationship,” O’Day said. “‘You better hope that your relationship can withstand this experiment.’”
“It’s interesting because your actions aren’t your own anymore,” Motter said. “Everything you do is directly impactful to the other person.”
“I learned about my relationship with personal space and having my own space and time and relying on someone else to get things done,” said O’Day. “How I work was drastically impacted by having someone with me, physically, just around.”
“It can be helpful to have an extra pair of hands,” Motter added.
As for Wallis, “he was so proud,” Motter said. “He was so excited, his eyes twinkled.”
“It’s exciting to not only see the content of the course going out of the classroom, but I think it’s also just exciting at an art college to see these kinds of unusual art dynamics happening,” Wallis said.
The artists cut the rope in class November 21.
“We are very much looking forward to a night apart,” Motter said.
See them cutting the rope here.
