This is no ordinary situation for me. I’m an artist and don’t call myself an academic. I don’t tend to put myself forward for such things as conferences. And if I do speak, lecture, give a ‘paper’, I like to be funny – it’s easier, I like to talk about my work (as artists like to), or other people’s work, ideas around practice, the practice itself. But this time is different. This time I wanted to talk about something around practice, something that bothers me, the kinds of things I have discussions about with others in private. And so I wanted to jump off the deep end into a critical place, a risky place in an attempt to ask questions. There are unlikely to be any answers. So much has been said this last day and a half, about the good things going on which are important and which I value but it’s important to be critical about what troubles us as practitioners, thinkers and doers. The critical is where the gaps are, the slippages and where the marginalised peek out from. And so…
The last 20-25 years in the UK has seen an amazing explosion of diversity within performance practice. Live Art has become an umbrella term for all forms of radical, experimental performance – from those coming from the body and performance art as a precise artistic form, to those coming from the theatre and drama, and meeting in a huge variety of territories, including those curated by programmers such as Helen Cole at IBT Bristol, organisations such as the Live Art Development Agency, and artists themselves such as those involved in ]performance s p a c e [. The breaking down of definitions and boundaries is astounding and shows how positive change can come – a disregard for limiting boundaries of forms and yet whilst there is an erosion of definitions there hasn’t been a complete erosion of discipline, for example, rigour and craft in the making of performance, or contextualisation, that is, at least certain histories.
Whilst I celebrate the excellence and commitment of individuals and communities in supporting, through action, live practice now, I have also seen a disregard of a certain strain of practice – the art formerly named ‘performance art’. Mixing it up formally is always good but my concern here is the exclusion of certain types of work and its legacy.
Firstly, there has been a demise of poeticism in favour of the overt, explicit and accessible in performance – the extreme, the funny, the trashy, the performancey. In an age of overstatement where is the understated? In an age of the quick where is the slow? In an age of theatricality where is the minimal? These questions need time all of their own. For this paper I am focusing on my second concern – what happened to the historicisation of performance art in the ‘Art world’?
It’s not as though performance art has gone away, and even if it had, there’s a whole swathe of work made here from the early 1980s to 2000 that is just absent from the institution, – by which I mean, for example, large-scale contemporary art museums and galleries, – and the academy, – by which I mean what is being taught in universities and written about by academics. There is plenty of support, and rightly so, for emerging and young artists but what about those who have paved the way and opened the doors to the now? The valuable contribution to the field by those older artists who have now been somewhat marginalised. There are little cross-generational through-lines. I don’t see artists that influenced me still performing very much (in some cases not at all). I don’t see their work in the Tate Tanks. There I see, albeit extremely important work, dance and video/film installation. The timeline that was up on the wall for a while at the Tanks stopped abruptly short of the last twenty years. Up until A Bigger Splash I had seen little of Stuart Brisley in the Tate. The premise of A Bigger Splash is in any case problematic in it’s framing through Pollock and Hockney as you enter the exhibition, and stops short also of the last period in performance art history instead jumping into performance-related art that is not connected directly. Live Culture was a welcome foray in 2003 and included some current performance artists such as Hayley Newman. Tate Liverpool showed Art Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance in 2003/4. But these were responses to the recent and/or the documentation of the live, and any older generational artists were the same names as usual. How much does the Tate purchase and document what has been going on? Are they archiving the work of, for example, Rose English, Brian Catling, Silvia Ziranek and Antony Howell? They are still out there, but I don’t see how they have been included in these histories. Why can’t the large institutions further consider British performance artists?
But I don’t want to just single out the Tate. What about other major galleries? There have been excellent medium-scale exhibitions such as Live Art on Camera at Space, London and the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton in 2007/8. But this was concerned with documentation and not showing live works, and only a few were UK artists, which doesn’t make them less exciting and important shows but still leaves some issues unresolved. And what about academia? There are hundreds of books about Live Art but few about UK performance art. To what extent is performance art part of Fine Art teaching? Drama departments seem to have developed an interest in picking up alternative performance strategies where Fine Art has dropped the ball. Performance art is hardly even used as a term anymore but nobody declared its death. It’s become a term of the past not the present. I’m not really interested in holding onto terminology for the sake of it but dropping it feels like colluding with the disappearance of artworks, deleting certain living practitioners, and accepting it is now no longer part of art history.
One major reason for the exclusion of performance art from the gallery and institution is the YBA/Brit Art movement, which began its meteoric rise in 1988. The Art world was so preoccupied with this that everything else going on fell by the wayside. In considering the Artist as celebrity and capitalist project anything that was complicated financially and not an object became easier to ignore. Art as a commercial currency has definitely lessened intellectual discourse. Performance included in these large institutions has been quite slight on that front and more interested in the quirky and entertaining.
But I know it’s not simple, a case of binary positions. In being excluded from the gallery, performance artists sought out different contexts – self-help – and so encouraged inadvertently its own omission. Or indeed they chose to experiment in other contexts for positive reasons, such as a problem with the white cube space as constraint. And of course, presenting radical work as if it is historic artefact also has its problems. By definition if you make radical practice then being welcomed into the institution is fraught and probably unlikely. However the institution does show some work that can be considered in such a way, so why not extend to include as much as it can of that which has been ignored?
There are some who have shown an interest in the understated, the slow and the minimal in performance art, such as Home London in the 90s and curators like Blair Todd at Newlyn Art Gallery. They have pushed the boat out with an openness towards not knowing, that is, “here’s a space would you like to make/show a piece?” without a fear of the definitions. And a good example of a creative curatorial project in a large public gallery was Notes on a Return at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle in 2009. Curated by Sophia Hao, the exhibition focused on UK performance artists Rose English, Nigel Rolfe, Mona Hatoum, Bruce McLean and Anne Bean, who performed at Laing in the 80s, and asked “how do we remember?”.
Whether there is now the beginning of an accurate or piecemeal re-dressing of the omission of performance art in the UK can be debated. Artists and curators keep trying to raise their head above the parapet. Fiona Templeton and New Work Network curated Bodies of Memory for Acts of Legacy last year, which saw performance artists re-enact or recollect memories of performances past. Held in the Turner galleries at Tate Britain it was programmed as a side event to a larger programme for Late at Tate. Brisley seemed absent from the public until very recently when his work was shown at England & Co Gallery, Peer and soon Mummery and Schnell. Richard Saltoun and Karsten Schubert have just shown documentation of the work of Rose English and Rose Finn-Kelcey in Taking Matters Into Our Own Hands. Ironically, having pointed a finger at the art market, it seems that commercial galleries are picking up on performance artists.
If you look abroad interest in performance art seems to have remained consistent, the urgency to consider art that comes from the body in all its formal diversity. The work of International Performance Art Event in Singapore, Performatorium in Regina, Canada, and El Palomar in Barcelona who are looking quizzically at big museums and their lack of critical awareness. The recent 1st Venice International Performance Art Week curated by Vest and Page was testament to such a gallery-based context with very diverse work from all over the world. Discourse was raised by the work itself. There was talk about problematics such as those I am raising here, but we also talked about the work and what it was about. Vest and Page curated work by long standing artists such as Boris Nieslony, Ilja Soskic and Yoko Ono, through the generations to current UK performance artists like Zierle and Carter, and Weeks and Whitford, to students from a Venetian art school, and even allowed impromptu un-programmed performances from young artists who were helping with the event.
Why are these examples successful? They engage with a diversity of aesthetics and formal decisions, there’s a respect for the elders in history and a respect for the content by the curators. But these are not the institutions. These are artist-led or by curators with an engagement with performance art, and where it’s not all about business.
So how can things change? I would like to see curators, programmers and academics engage with the understated, the slow and the minimal that still exists in performance art, and re-visit the 80s and 90s and see just how seminal it was. I think history is important in shaping the future. Perhaps there are changes afoot. But the eradication of past contributors to the history of art can only be reversed if curators, gallerists and academics know their history and consider their roles in ‘authenticating’ it.
Post-script, 2015:
This paper was written as a provocation. For me, conferences and symposia should be for argument, debate, challenging and posing questions about the state of things. Not because I enjoy discord, but because I want to understand why we find ourselves where we do, what contexts exist, are encouraged or omitted, and how we can move forward with knowledge.
Since writing this in 2013, there are signs that, in terms of a consideration of UK performance art past and present, the tide may be changing further for the better. As is usual in a time where we are seeing a blatant return to cruel Conservatism, some become more fearful and batten down the hatches, whilst others open the doors wide and welcome alternatives – as a way of seeing the possibilities of the radical, resistance, freedom in operation, inclusion, community, or just new or different ways of seeing.
In Higher Education, whilst some Drama departments are returning to conventional perspectives of theatre, others are widening their understanding. In Fine Art education performance practice is popular with students because of its immediacy, amongst other things, and offering them the layered histories has re-emerged in consciousness.
I also see more academic material being published, symposia, and a concern for re-visiting or programming UK performance artists whose practice began in the 70s and 80s, many of whom continue to stun, shock, consider, and move us into questioning and action. The 90s onwards is more difficult. Academics are still focusing on the explosion of the overt and explicit, and whilst this is exciting and imperative work, the minimal, quiet and the slow are still under represented, and contemporary art museums, galleries and curators have an even further way to go to redress omissions.
As an artist who began my practice in the late 80s, I have understood the ebb and flow of popularity and disengagement, and popularity again. Persistence and passion are at the heart of putting your body and materials in the frame, and these attributes are also needed to continue arguing for comprehensive and multiple histories.
‘Taxonomies of UK Performance Art: Absence, Eradication and Reclamation’ was originally written by Helena Goldwater for the Exhibiting Performance conference, University of Westminster, London, 1-3 March 2013.