Char House (2022), found objects, italian food, petrol, ~3x4x2.5 m.
Char House
2022
42 Cambridge St, Loughborough, UK.
November 24th 2022
Char House was made midway through Bazeley's BA and marked the first serious move towards treating the viewer as an active participant in performance. The work was staged in his garage, mocked up as an Italian restaurant. Visitors were greeted as they would be in any restaurant and invited to order, at no cost beyond a voluntary donation. In the garden, cheap quasi-Italian food was doused in petrol and burned past the point of edibility on a barbecue salvaged from the local park.
The exhibition largely failed on its own terms. Visitors grew frustrated with the long waits, the absence of atmosphere and what several described as a lack of art. It did, however, establish an interest in treating the space and the people in it as interconnected parts of a single work, and that interest has shaped the more viewer-oriented practice that followed.