Collaborative Arts » Essays » John Wood and Paul Harrison- The Odd Couple

Collaborative Arts » Essays » John Wood and Paul Harrison- The Odd Couple

The immediate impact of watching a Wood and Harrison video work (no single sequence lasts longer than three minutes – Jo to confirm!) is without doubt the physical nature of their endeavours – the ways in which their individual (or joint) uniform presence addresses each given obstacle. Gravity is the constant against which their bodies and/or objects are variously hurled, pulled, squashed and dropped. One could apply to their work a recent comparison of artist Bruce Nauman and Samuel Beckett, “(their work) is held or called by the ground. In both artists’ work, gravity exerts its pull everywhere, though not always visibly. As with all human beings, the ground-ward tug effects or exerts (as an accidental by-product) shapeliness, grace and balance, even as it deforms those things, pulling them into disorganisation, flatness or comic indistinction[4].”