Speechcraft
Performance. 2007.
Commissioned by Modern Art Oxford
   
   
 

Speechcraft features a meeting of the international public speaking club Toastmasters . Widely used by businesspeople as well as trainee lawyers and politicians, Toastmasters helps people from all walks of life to construct their public presence so that they look and sound like ‘leaders’. In the first commission of this piece the work was hosted by the Oxford Toastmaster club Isis Speakers.

Speechcraft is a performance work which takes a Toastmaster meeting as a readymade performative situation. The artist inserts specific subject matter for speakers to respond to by giving an impromptu speech. In this version of the work, the subject matter given to the speakers were all objects from Carey Young's studio which she personally finds inspiring.

As with every Toastmaster meeting, all the resulting speeches were judged and evaluated by other Toastmaster members, as well as the audience, in a cycle of inspiration, review, and reward.

Carey Young has written: “Speechcraft is in many senses an opportunity for the invited public to think about the relationship between art, artists and the public by presenting Toastmasters as a kind of alternative space of creativity, interpretation, ritual and critique.”

 

 

 

 

 

 




Images from Speechcraft, Carey Young, 2007

All photographs: copyright Edmund Blok