Fiona Templeton’s site-specific work YOU - The City (1988) explicitly addresses the limits of work and site, and so a performance of site-specificity. Constructed as ‘an intimate Manhattan-wide play for an audience of one’ in the form of ‘a journey through both known and obscure parts of the city’ (Templeton 1990: ix), You - The City offers its ‘clients’ guided tours of Manhattan through twenty or more locations hosted by a series of performers. Addressed directly by each performer through a flow of text that turns on the word ‘you’, YOU - The City confronts each client with a ‘radically interactive’ ‘play’ (Templeton 1990: ix) where conventional oppositions between performance and environment, performer and spectator, are continually challenged. Recounting his response to its later realization in London, Tim Etchell’s suggests that here:
'The old dialectical separations between inside and outside, fiction and reality, self and other, audience and performer, were here exploited and blurred, leaving the strange sense that the city and oneself were now almost the same thing, a shifting network of narratives, places, touches, voices, lost puns, myths and intimacies'.
(Etchells 1994: 119)
In her ‘Afterword’ to the performance, Templeton recalls the articulation of relationships between performer and client not only through this text, but in the playing of cinematic conceits through live performance, where a
'non-theatrical location provides the possibilities of long-shot, including the performer’s choosing to frame him or herself against a close-up or distant background … close-up is reclaimed in YOU from the automatic seduction of spectacle and replaced into presence, live responsibility, theatre in your face.'
(Templeton 1990: 141)
In YOU - The City, not only are the oppositions which Etchell’s identifies implicitly under question, but at its culmination the client’s implication in the construction of the work is brought into sharp focus. In Act IV scene iii, the ‘climax of the piece’ (Templeton 1990: 143), the client finds herself back in the place of an earlier scene, a playground, where, as a ‘less advanced client’, she had walked towards and crossed the path of a ‘performer’. Now, though, the client discovers herself being seen in the role of ‘performer,’ as she faces an oncoming client moving through the earlier scene. Here, Templeton suggests
a revelation and a certain power are yours: it is on being made to wait for the client on the far side that you realise, if you had not already been warned by the fact that the pronoun ‘you’ … has suddenly disappeared from the text … that you can now be a performer in any way whatsoever to the approaching client, including choosing to admit to the identity of the client, which the less advanced one may or may not be willing now to believe.
(Templeton 1990: ix-x)
In this moment, the ‘advanced client’ is subject to a blocking together, around her own presence, of the roles of ‘client’ and ‘performer’. Entrapped into seeing herself act out the work, the client discovers herself at once inside the piece, as performer, and outside, as a witness to its effect. Like Duchamp’s Ready-made, this effect rests upon the viewer’s awareness of an opposition, here ‘performer’ and ‘viewer,’ at the very moment in which its construction is revealed to be contingent upon her looking. In this way, YOU - The City sets a conceptual trap, in which the client becomes witness, to herself, in the act of performing the oppositions in which the work is defined. Indeed, in this moment, Templeton’s site-specific performance reveals its deferral from inside to outside, as, in its positioning of the viewer, it at once constructs, exposes, and upsets its own limits.
These ideas around site-specificity are further considered in Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: performance, place and documentation (London: Routledge, 2000)
