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In 2000 an invited a group of key artists and commentators from the heyday of Performance Art in the 1970's travelled to a symposium the Robert McDougal Gallery in Christchurch, NZ.
Bruce Barber, Phillip Dadson, Billy Apple, Adrian Hall, John Cousins, Mike Parr, Litta Barrie, Anne Graham, Blair French and Carolee Scnheeman were all there talking about performance work both past and present. This was a fascinating symposium but with a narrow historical and somewhat nostalgic focus. There was an implication that performance art as a discipline had more or less vanished from the New Zealand art scene, with few new identifiable artists taking up the baton. The symposium organisers failed to notice the new practitioners at any rate (as Emma Bugden noted at the time in a follow-up article in Log Illustrated), although a notable selection of artists who are currently working with performance in some way, were in fact there as audience members.
Six years later in the latter half of 2006 three different and separate curatorial projects with a focus on contemporary performance practice occurred within a few weeks of each other. The close but unplanned timing of these three projects suggests a revived curatorial interest in positioning current work as performance.
Performance Series curated by Charlotte Dick took place at Blue Oyster in Dunedin, September 2006 during the 2nd Dunedin Fringe Festival. Govett-Brewster had just hosted a similar series Mostly harmless: a performance series in August/September curated by Charlotte Huddleston. Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington was sending out press releases at the same time for Lasting: performance series, curated by Melanie Hogg that also ran in September(27 September - 7 October)
Project curator and coordinator of Performance Series at the Blue Oyster, Charlotte Dick, said that one of her aims was to take a look at what was occurring in the genre in a contemporary New Zealand sense. The first priority was staging an intentionally diverse range of current practice as a basis for beginning discussion. A related part of the attempt involved inviting a professionally respectable panel together that had the ability to shed some perspective on the question. The panel was scheduled to occur at the end of the week of performances. The works in the series were all examples of current practice and as such expected to form an integral part of the ensuing discussion. The flaw in this strategy was that for various reasons few of speakers saw more than one or two of the works, some didn’t see any. While concrete examples were introduced that did add value and perspective, including a connection that was made to the Enjoy series via Gemma Tweedies work, it was unfortunate that in the main the works that had just occurred were not discussed in any depth and the conversation became more generalised.
The inability or unwillingness to comment on work not seen is a wider issue with ephemeral work in general but with performance art in particular. Arguably this could be attributed to the difficulties of accessing adequate project documentation, assuming that said documentation actually exists. Without documentation post event discussion (outside of direct eye witnesses) is limited at best, without post event discussion in the form of critical reviews and articles the work does not become known or considered as part of our developing art history.
There is another problem that is hampering productive conversation about what contemporary performance art might be and that is a problem of identification. Few artists seem particularly comfortable with the label 'performance' in relation to their work. Similarly many theorists are dismissive of the term and tend to assume that the critical possibilities have been exhausted. One of the positions that emerged at the Blue Oyster panel discussion was a suspicion of performance work being 'attached to an institution', as if it was an act of extreme hubris for an artist to present work in a professional situation (the need for an artist to have humility was bruited about), jumped up whippersnappers! (Whippersnapper is not the word that immediately comes to mind when regarding the professional output of participating artist Professor Sally Morgan). Perhaps inviting an audience to view the work in the shadow of an historical context made it unforgivably mainstream, joining the institution in more than one sense then.
So there are undeniable problems with positioning new work alongside the historical inheritances that the denomination 'Performance Art' brings with it. But regardless of how much writers and practitioners may want to dissociate from past practices, those existing histories and conventions inform the way the works are approached by their audience and cannot be dismissed easily. If the work is not performance, then what is it? If we are looking for a new set of identifying terms these in part could be seen as emerging in the fields of relational aesthetics and that of socially engaged public practices, but these categorisations are insufficient. However in the absence of clarity of language how should new work be strategised and discussed in post analysis, by both artists and writers? We must leave the old frame visible in order to begin talking, but bounded by a qualification of doubt that the existing frame will continue to be of use. So instead of asking 'What is it?' perhaps a better set of questions might be functional and evidential, such as: “What happened and what was the result?” Of course to answer those questions at all we have to ask them of specific works, exactly what the discussion did not do.
Anecdotally we know that something in the broad category of performance is continuing in pockets of activity around the country. The pool of practitioners available for three almost simultaneous performance events (all selected by a combination of invitation and proposal, and all serious in intention), with only two artists in common (Mark Harvey was in both the Govett-Brewster and Blue Oyster programmes, Kaleb Bennet was at Govett Brewster and Enjoy) would bear this out. The lack of cross over is also disturbing for a different reason, as it suggests separated communities of practice that are unaware of each other. I had a brief conversation with a Swedish curator at the SPARK conference in Hamilton in 2005 about what he perceived as one of the universal flaws in experimental practice. He was speaking about experimental activity that risked never achieving critical mass, each generation in danger of reinventing the wheel because they were genuinely unaware of the achievements and innovations occurring somewhere else. I would be interested to find out how many people saw work from more than one of the series. To their credit both Charlotte Dick and Charlotte Huddleston have prioritised documentation of the works that occurred in their respective projects. Both have produced/ are producing DVD catalogues which will make it possible to pick up some conversation later. (Other details are available from the gallery websites).
Arguably the only consistency that contemporary performance has is that it involves some kind of participatory, experiential or interactive relationship between someone nominated ‘artist’ and some other nominated ‘audience.’ However even this basic assertion comes under contestation when applied to individual works. Ironically given my previous comments about lack of documentation, the essential idea of a primary or originary artwork and what constitutes a record of it has become a fertile ground for production of work.
Several of the works that took place in the Performance Series at Blue Oyster were much more focussed on the documentary image than creating an experience for persons present at the ‘authentic originary moment’ (said with full ironic awareness). The use of technology in more than one work involved presenting various documentary forms in place of, or as well as, live and present performing body/s. The requirement that any audience be physically present at the time of the performance act is not always a given.
Vivian Atkinson performed as if alone, repeating a series of actions with a stoic lack of expression that did not acknowledge anyone present. At times over her four-hour work she in fact was alone, except for the continual presence of documenting lens and her assistant from the freight company.
Steve Carr and Sean Kerr’s DVD work Camp illustrated one possible solution to the 'problem' of real time audience performer relations. There was evidence of artists doing something that involved the traditional trinary between bodies, space and time, but the finished work existed only in documentary form. The ideas of an originary authentic experience for either artist or audience was called into question by the fact the work's earthy punch line (involving lit farts) was produced by CGI manipulation. During the week people kept asking when the artists were arriving, the idea of the artists being present at a particular time for live performance obviously being quite a persistent one in audience expectations.
John Borley worked on the other extreme of the continuum, privileging the idea of participation as the compositional fabric of his project to the point where he did not allow any documentation to take place. His refusal to set a timetable also made it impossible for anyone to choose to be part of his project. He not only refused documentation but also refused the art community access to his work, which occurred on public transport at times determined spontaneously. Only if you happened to be on the right bus at the right time would you be able to participate.
Without the document of what occurred how can that work now be discussed in a contemporary art context, does the refusal become the work? What peer recognition is possible for the disappearing artist? Ephemerality is a key part of performance but without some form of an evidential remainder we are back to an old quandary, where does the work exist now as contemporary art? What evidence is required? In the absence of the documentary image there is an alternative form of documentation in first person witness accounts, and this solution also provokes an interesting challenge to the idea of historical veracity (at the same time as privileging the originary experience that would usually be used as a indication of that same truth). If the retelling of the work becomes in effect the stand in for the work we have a return to a bardic possibility, the performance as story. The artist as a central figure becomes mythic, but not in any way essential for the continued existence of the work, as whomever is telling the story performs it.
When an artist enacts a traditional audience/ performer binary the role of spectator is well defined and the audience is relatively comfortable with the resulting experience. When the format of the work shifts away from the theatrical inheritances of spectator and spectacular then a question of what constitutes proper behaviour hangs over the experience for all except the most thick-skinned. It is obviously the task of the artist to provide the parameters for how their own bodies move within the logic created by their work. It is less obvious but given the increasing disappearance of the central persona of artist, more important for the artist to provide parameters for the other bodies who become involved in the work by being present. The intentions, power relationships and methodologies inherent in framing relationships may be one of the most productive questions remaining for something called performance art.
...whatever that is.
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