Dynamic Media Network

Martyn Coutts is a Melbourne based ‘live art’ artist – an art practice defined only by the fact that it tends to fall between the categories and discourse of established art practice and the institutional discourses into which they play – live art is difficult to contain or position in terms of intended audience or defined outcome.

Martyn has worked with, and helped to cultivate, a network of artists. He is,involved with an number of projects that experiment with funding and collaborative models for live and marginalised art practice. These projects include the Live Art List (a blog) and Field Theory (a collaborative funding/support model and collaboration -with performative elements).

In the context of this Dynamic Media Network he is notable for his collaborations with Kate Richards on the Wayfarer projects. He was the recipient of the Green Room award for his work on James Saunders’ The Harry Harlow Project (2009) and has experimented with the use of digital and relay video in choreographed performance works Inside (2004) and Bunker (2006). His work with the ‘live art’ collaboration Deadpan (with Willoh Weiland)  and puppetry/new media collaboration Blood Policy (initially with Sam Routledge) are characteristically difficult to place – although he use of media and a mechanism as a mode for generative engagement of an audience or subject marks an intriguing juxtaposition to the bulk of media and new media art documented here.

It’s tempting to package the form of practice that Martyn is engaged with as related to performance art – a form his work occasionally skirts around and engages. Despite the use of performance as a central mechanism in his work its not clear that expression in any sense of the word is key. The diversity of practices that Martyn is involved recall forms of structured improvisation – perhaps more of the musical or dance variety than theatrical in that the process and the object are inseparable and in constant recursion – the performance is exploratory rather than expressive. There are also echoes of a kind of urban and reflective anthropology (particularly with Deadpan) except that the form of the investigation itself implies a kind of open compositional and playful intent.