The spectator is overwhelmed with changing recognitions, carried emotionally by a flux of evocative actions and led or held by the specific time sequence, which marks the duration of a performance.
Carolee Schneemann, 1979
PERFORMANCE ART, ICONOCLASM AND THE REITERATION OF ROLES
Installation art of every kind emphasises the role of the public as both participants and informed consumers of art. Performance art, whilst similarly emphasising collaborative interaction with audiences, in fact reinstates the artist, or her surrogates, as the embodied focus of aesthetic meaning. The artist becomes the unequivocal presence that hails the assembled company and demands a human, relational response. Performance art shares with theatre the liveness of this encounter, but when it emerged as a more or less discrete practice in the early 1960s, it broke with theatrical tradition. It began by jettisoning the proscenium arch that had provided a comfortable separation between the audience and the raised spectacle on stage. In galleries, nothing now stood between viewer and performer(s); both occupied the same arena, a charged space in which audiences were to be ‘overwhelmed’ by Schneemann’s ‘flux of evocative actions’. Although spectators will pin themselves against walls to avoid being drawn into the action, in principle, there are no rules legislating where the audience should stand (seating is rare) and what they might do in response to a performance.
The activation of the audience in performance was followed by the second break with theatre: the abandonment of scripts, while also renouncing the impersonation of fictional characters by actors. ‘Performance is seen as “doing”’, wrote Sally Potter; it is ‘an activity, which is being watched, rather than a part being played’.1 The artist now embodied only a vision of him or herself, freed from any externally proscribed text. The performer was guided by a series of self-generated instructions or intentions supported by a pre-determined collection of materials – flour, milk and rotting food in the case of Stuart Brisley in the UK, musical instruments, lights and film projections in the case of Laurie Anderson in the USA, and knives, fire and a handgun in that of the Serbian Marina Abramović. Chance played a large part in the outcome of the work with the most unpredictable variable being the audience itself. Artists such as Abramović, Gina Pane in France and Iain Robertson in the UK tested the limits of the audience’s ability to witness self-harm. In the case of Abramović’s Rhythm 5 (1974), only when the artist passed out in a circle of flames and smoke did a doctor break out of the conventional detachment of the spectator and galvanise the audience into a rescue party, much to the annoyance of the performer.
Performance art may have rejected many of the precepts of classical theatre but it did not dissolve the theatrical. Michael Fried condemned the theatricality of minimalist sculpture in his famous essay Art and Objecthood (1967), a text that grappled with the radical shifts in the definitions of what constituted art in the last century. Modernist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris had insisted on the unadorned ‘objecthood’ of their work, which, declared Fried ‘amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre’.2 He located this undesirable theatricality in the inscription of the putative viewer as the final term coalescing the drama and logic of the piece, a structuring principle that proved foundational in the evolution of installation art. In the 1950s, the performance and installation artist Allan Kaprow had also taken a dim view of the theatrical because, according to Briony Fer, it ‘presupposed a separation of an audience in visual theatre where he wanted to create total absorption’,3 an ambition Kaprow shared with many film and installation artists that followed. The reality is that, however enraptured a spectator may become during a performance, the work itself is predicated on the allocation of interrelated but clearly assigned roles for viewers and the performers, objects, environment or multi-media spectacle being viewed. If an audience member, or indeed another performance artist, attempts to themselves direct the outcome of a live event, they are met with considerable resistance.4
In spite of the rhetoric of interactivity derived from performance, the segregation of viewers persists in moving image installation and spectators then as now are never in doubt that they are consumers, not producers of the art. This does not fundamentally change even when a spectator is wrapped in an overwhelmingly immersive installation such as Gary Hill’s Viewer (1996). On entering a pitch-dark space, the viewer is confronted with a panoramic display of projections, each one depicting an immigrant worker simply staring out of the frame. These classical portraits create in the viewer the unsettling impression of being followed by their eyes. The figures appear all the more present for the invisible joins between screens and the blurring of demarcation lines separating screens and floor. The illusion of actuality is enhanced by the slight movements and shifts in position that the screen-subjects inadvertently betray while the viewed watch the viewers watching. This high-resolution verisimilitude does not mean that the visitor to the installation loses the ability to distinguish between who is corporeally in the space and what is only a video simulation. As I have emphasised, installation mobilises what Andrew Uroskie calls the ‘double consciousness’ of the spectator, the ability to oscillate between different modes of cognition, between reading the content of illusionistic signs (whilst maintaining an awareness of the structures of representation that produce them), and the apprehension of spatial realities in which the image is manifest.5 By the same token, spectatorial immersion in the work does not throw into doubt the authorship of the piece and the gallery-goer always knows her place.
Willow Egling joining in Tino Sehgal’s performance These Associations (2012), Tate Modern, London. Photo: Catherine Elwes.
Much live art and installation is organised around the participation of spectators, regarded as performative elements in their own right, with their senses primed and their critical faculties engaged. However, the human exceptionalism of the subject, as both artist and consumer of art, has been challenged within the recent philosophies of speculative realism.6 As we have seen, Graham Harman has argued that there is an ontological equivalence between a mere substance and a sentient being both of which he construes as objects, placed ‘on the same footing’.7 Within a performance or installation, this would suggest a correlation between the status of animate and inanimate entities sharing a space, potentially undermining the importance latterly placed on the spectator and the ‘subject position’. We will return to this issue in chapter eight. For the moment, however, I will note that while object-oriented philosophy overlooks social realities and might, as J. J. Charlesworth suggested, constitute an attempt to reduce the spectator to ‘the dead indifference of things’, the levelling out of the human and non-human resonates with performance art’s attempts to forge a democratic space of meaningful cultural exchange.8 That same impetus was reformulated by Nicolas Bourriaud who in 1998 launched ‘Relational Aesthetics’ in a book of the same name.9 Bourriaud advocated a social practice in which audiences and communities interact with and within the work. In theory, artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija (who cooks for his public) and Jeremy Deller (who organises mass events) cede control to the participants. In practice, however, these events are carefully orchestrated by the galleries while the artist retains sole authorship of the work and only she enjoys the financial rewards and career benefits. Long before Bourriaud valorised social orchestration as art, with people deployed much like the objects in Harman’s homogenised universe, practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s were embroiled in what Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn simply called community art. Unlike large-scale staged spectacles by, say, Francis Alÿs,10 their initiatives were designed to engage directly with political issues allied to campaigns driven by local communities – the closure of hospitals or the privatisation of the London Docklands. Their purpose was to create works that functioned as a catalyst for social change.11 Artists such as Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson strove to minimise the distinction between the convenor of a work and its participants and embraced what the scientist Andrew Pickering understands as the condition of existence; a reciprocal ‘dance of agency’ between subjects.12 Where Pickering’s cybernetic perspective suggests the possibility of a level playing field, performance art retained the separate ‘specialness’ of the artist, an individual who strove valiantly to unravel the rules of theatre and challenge conventions of acceptable behaviour in the hallowed spaces of art galleries and museums.
PERFORMANCE ART − PRE−HISTORY
No more painters, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans… no more of these idiocies, Nothing Nothing Nothing.
Louis Aragon, 1920
Taunting the bourgeoisie was already a favourite sport of the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire founded in 1916 by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. Launching their movement in Zurich, they sought to overturn theatrical traditions by staging wild evenings that involved a heady mix of poetry, dance, puppetry and music, with Ball acting as impresario. Ball also specialised in provoking his audiences with ‘sound poems’, performances in which he chanted declarative gibberish dressed in a cardboard suit. Only when he achieved what Jean Arp described as ‘total pandemonium’ did Ball pronounce the evening a success.13 Dada’s anarchic provocations took many forms including urination and masturbation onstage (Frank Wedekind), an act reprised by Vito Acconci in his video performance Seedbed in 1972.14
Drawing inspiration from cabaret, the circus and variety theatre, the early part of the twentieth century saw the spread across Europe of a theatre of institutional iconoclasm and physical shock. The Futurist Filippo Marinetti was determined to ‘destroy the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, and the Sublime in Art’.15 He showed his disdain for the establishment in 1914 when an enemy missile narrowly missed the Basilica in Venice. Marinetti contrived to drop leaflets over the city rousing the populace to ‘Awake!’ because ‘the enemy is attempting to destroy the monuments, which it is our own patriotic privilege to demolish!’16 The artist used a variety of methods to dislodge what he saw as a backward-looking conservatism prevalent in Italy. Long before John Cage tuned in to the sounds of the everyday, Marinetti created what he called ‘Bruitism’, performances noted for their choruses of ‘typewriters, kettledrums, rattles and saucepan lids’.17 The Dadaists and Futurists were not alone. In the 1920s, the Surrealists in Paris attacked the realism of theatre with automatic writing, silent reading and dream imagery, and like Marinetti, orchestrated the machines of modernity, in their case frequently accompanied by the music of the ‘phonometrician’, Erik Satie. In 1921 a Dadaist outing was organised by Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and others whose objective was to replace ‘incompetent and suspect guides’ and shepherd visitors around a derelict church, and other buildings that had ‘no reason for existing’.18 On the day, the heavens opened and deterred by the rain, few people turned up. However, the work finds its echoes in the 1960s international art group Fluxus, exemplified by Yoko Ono’s written guides that invited viewer-participants to experience overlooked aspects of New York or enhance their wandering by following directives such as, ‘walk all over the city with an empty baby carriage’ (1961). The performance was realised by whoever carried out the instruction. The Dadaist guided tours also presage the work of Janet Cardiff, whose The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999) provided a pre-recorded ‘audio walk’ on a Discman, which transported the participant through the Whitechapel area of London, and delivered the dark history of the streets along the way through binaural headphones.19
Technology was embraced early on in performance art, notably by the Italian Futurists for whom modernity resided in the machines of industry, radio and broadcasting, and indeed the mechanics war.20 In 1909, the Futurist Manifesto proclaimed ‘We will glorify war, the only true hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill and the scorn of women.’21 A more benign use of technology could be found in Valentine de Saint-Point’s performances. Author of the 1913 ‘Manifesto of Lust’ the artist projected coloured lights and mathematical symbols onto walls surrounding her dance performances, accompanied by recitations of her love poetry. The new technology of film was also marshalled to the Futurist cause, one that championed simultaneity, spontaneity and random, aleatory interventions. Arnaldo Ginna’s absurdist film Vita Futurista (1916) (now lost) featured such curiosities as Giacomo Balla making love to a chair and Marinetti engaged in a boxing match. These disconnected, surreal scenarios were combined with early but astonishingly sophisticated special effects created by the use of split screen, double exposure, colour tinting and distorting mirrors all intended to suggest the turbulent states of mind experienced by the various members of the group.
Surrealist performances often incorporated the screening of films, such as René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), reviving an earlier tradition in which fairground entertainments and vaudeville included short filmic interludes between live acts. Clair’s film features farcical scenes of a funeral procession in which the mourners leap like gazelles, an incongruous spectacle that brings to mind Andrew Kötting’s similarly absurdist performance in his film Klipperty Klöpp (1984) in which he impersonates a demented horse. Clair’s film also boasts a bearded Picabia in a tutu and Duchamp and Man Ray engaged in a game of chess. It ends with the cast breaking through the paper onto which the credits are inscribed. The footage then reverses to reinstate the torn title, a trick that was later elaborated by Peter Campus in Three Transitions (1973), a video in which he contrived to cut through his own back and be reborn by stepping through the tear in his body.22
A different trajectory can be traced from the Russian Futurists who developed a deliberately populist brand of performance designed to reach wider non-art audiences with the objective of educating the proletariat in the glories of the Bolshevik revolution. They staged spectacular reconstructions of momentous events including, in 1920, the storming of the Winter Palace with the help of a five-hundred-strong orchestra, a battalion of soldiers and thousands of citizens many of whom had participated in the original 1917 rebellion.23 Commemorative performances staged for the camera include Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis’s Battle of Orgreave (2001), a re-enactment of the violent confrontation between miners and police during the Miners’ Strike in Britain in 1984. Again, some of the original protagonists took part in the restaged event.
Deirdre Heddon has proposed the Suffragettes as the prototypical political performers with their sometimes-extreme public protests exemplified by Emily Wilding Davison who declared, ‘Deeds not Words’ and hurled herself under the King’s horse on Derby day in 1913. Heddon cites as an early form of body art the self-mutilation of Constance Lytton, who, whilst in prison in 1909 attempted to carve the words ‘Votes for Women’ onto her body with a needle.24 These anarchic acts may well have influenced artists and the thread of self-harm in art draws down through the years to Antonin Artaud and his 1920s Theatre of Cruelty and the blood and guts gallery performances of the Viennese Aktionists in the 1960s, who shared Artaud’s determination to force bourgeois society to face its grimmer truths. The Aktionists explored the extremes of human experience with the intention of inducing cathartic reactions in their audiences. Catharsis, they believed, could bypass the constricting and deadening effects on the human psyche of bourgeois social convention. According to Georges Bataille, the body in extremis was capable of dissolving social divisions and, he observed, ‘human beings are never united with each other except through tears and wounds’.25 Hoping perhaps to elicit a similar egalitarian empathy, in the 1970s and 1980s Marina Abramović also toyed with the limits of human endurance and sought out her personal pain thresholds in her ‘rings of fire’ performance mentioned above as well as works involving hyperventilation, starvation and drug-induced catatonic states. She was joined in this self-mutilation enterprise by the Brazilian artist Leticia Parente who in Marca Registrada/Trademark (1974), sewed ‘Made in Brazil’ into the sole of her foot,26 and Gina Pane whose Psychic Action (1974) was a ritual of mourning for the death of her mother, a ceremony that involved the artist cutting herself with razor blades.27 In the UK, Sonia Knox also recalled the Suffragette’s traumatic protests in her performance Echoes from the North (1978–80), a work in which the artist lacerated her legs as she walked through fields of barbed wire as a gesture of solidarity with the women of Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’, the war of attrition between Protestants and Catholics.28
Andrew Kötting, Klipperty Klöpp (1984). Film still courtesy of the artist.
Individual demonstrations of grief and political anger such as those enacted by Pane, Parente and Knox and may still occur, but they generally manifest outside gallery spaces. For instance, in 2003, the Londoner Mark McGowan (the ‘Artist Taxi Driver’) pushed a peanut from New Cross to No. 10 Downing Street using only his nose as a protest against the introduction of student fees.29 Such individual performative gestures are less prevalent nowadays and social and political issues from climate change through corporate corruption to intrusive government surveillance tend to be addressed collectively by named organisations operating outside the gallery system. In this context, art is less a point of reference for flash mob or online initiatives, than is advertising and other forms of popular culture.30 Fathers4Justice tap into the fashion for dressing up as superheroes to highlight the plight of divorced men who are denied access to their children; in cities across the globe, the Occupy Movement use largely non-violent, carnivalesque encampments to protest the excesses of capitalism. These contemporary protest movements may well be the inheritors of ‘agit-prop’ manifestations originating with the early Russian revolutionaries, but their acts of civil disobedience owe at least as much to the more recent initiatives of the women at Greenham Common in the UK, whose long-term occupation of the American airbase’s perimeter fence protested the presence of nuclear weapons held there in the early 1980s.31
It is perhaps the Bauhaus performances of the early 1920s that most directly resonate with the gallery-based installation with which we have become familiar in the postmodern and contemporary eras. Walter Gropius opened the Weimar Bauhaus in 1919 with the intention of creating a fertile collegiate environment in which all the arts were encouraged to co-mingle. Like the Italian Futurists, Bauhaus members celebrated the creative reciprocity of art and technology in an age of optimism about the benefits to humanity of science and engineering. Oskar Schlemmer developed highly mechanistic dance performances that deployed the body caught up in a web of geometric lines that together reiterated the dimensions of the space in which the performers were in play. In Schlemmer’s Slat Dance (1927) the performer’s arms, legs and shoulders were fitted with long poles protruding from the body like overgrown splints, devices that both reduced the figure to an automaton and dramatised the kinetic energy of human musculature – with an additional frisson of bondage in the restriction of movement the costumes imposed. This use of body extensions reappeared in the 1970s in the performance and video works of Rebecca Horn. In Finger Gloves (1972), she strapped long sticks to her fingers, incongruous prosthetics that enabled her to access objects and surfaces normally beyond her reach, while simultaneously reducing the sensory capacity of her touch. In Roi Vaara’s Towards the Sky (1994), Horn’s body extensions were now replaced by a row of wooden struts assembled in a series of precariously balanced A-frames that together held the artist’s body a breath away from the ceiling, providing a means whereby a spectator could precisely gauge the distance between floor and ceiling. The body as an instrument of measurement in the built environment brings us back to the light projections of McCall, works that directly implicate the spectatorial body as the essential building block, the human proportion around which all installation artists animate the volumetrics of architectural space. Artists and viewers are bonded by their common mortal frames, by the equivalence of their sensory apparatus, which delivers to them what Schlemmer called Raumempfindung, ‘a sensation of space’,32 an audience experience solicited by both performance and installation art.
PERFORMANCE IN THE 1960S AND BEYOND
Performance is like a force of nature that doesn’t have a name.
Lucas Samaras (2002)
It might seem from the account so far that much of what came to define performance in the 1960s had already been laid down by the pioneers of live art in the early part of the century, predominantly in Europe. In the late 1950s the American artist Allan Kaprow was already practicing an expanded form of sculpture he called ‘assemblage’ and he soon introduced participatory elements in one-off events, which he now christened ‘happenings’, a term also favoured by Fluxus and the Japanese Gutai group. Kaprow’s happenings included tightly ‘scored’ activities for spectators and his stated aim was the ‘integration of all elements – environment, constructed sections, time, space, and people’.33 ‘Happening’ as a rubric later attracted to itself an indelible association of hippydom, and was replaced with ‘performance’ while ‘live art’ was a term often adopted in the UK because of its ability to encompass almost anything an artist might do in front of, and with, a live audience.
One of the changes that took place in the early 1960s was the recognition of performance as a separate category of art practice, albeit subsisting on the margins of cultural life. Classic 1960s performance art was allied to counter-cultural, socialist principles and, like much video art of the same period, it produced no art objects to feed the commercial interests of a capitalist art market. Early performance addressed ‘issues of participation, self-determination, cultural autonomy and authenticity’, wrote Deirdre Heddon, and functioned, ‘beyond the entwined reach of state and market’.34
One of the rallying cries for performance art in the 1960s and 1970s was the fusion of life and art. Kaprow declared that ‘the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible’.35 In 1970s UK, the British duo Gilbert and George painted themselves silver, climbed onto gallery plinths and sang the old wartime ditty ‘Underneath the Arches’ whilst proclaiming themselves ‘living sculptures’. Across the pond, in the same period, Judy Chicago and a group of young women at Fresno state college dug deep into their own experience and sought to ‘open up their whole range of emotions for creative work’.36 They dissolved the Cartesian split between the intellect and embodied, instinctual responses in works that attempted to ‘link the public with the private in our schizoid world, to embrace the whole of life’.37 However, as I have argued before, life and art did not lose their distinctive domains and performance artists maintained the requisite critical distance that enabled them to develop their commentary on social realities, especially, in the case of Chicago, on the oppression of women.
In these examples of early performance, the living body of the artist was designated the fulcrum of meaning in the work in tension with the embodied presence of the audience. With little or no directive regarding where to stand and sit, or indeed how to behave, members of the audience experience a heightened awareness not only of the artist-in-performance, but also of one another, creating a charged atmosphere of multiple connectivities. As Hayley Newman once remarked, ‘the audience perform themselves; there is a camouflaged performance by the audience’.38 The open structure of a performance has occasionally led to life spilling unchecked into art. I have already footnoted my granddaughter’s gentle intervention into a recent work by Tino Sehgal, but crossing the boundary between performer and audience, between life and art was not always so civilised. Sometime in the late 1970s at the Air gallery in London, an evening of screenings hosted by London Video Arts was interrupted by an altercation that erupted at the back of the audience. Kevin Atherton, who worked in both video and performance, took exception to the evening’s proceedings and after a heated exchange with David Hall, a couple of punches were thrown resulting in a fight that turned a screening into a performance of exceptional verisimilitude. The audience was left wondering whether they were witnessing a performance by the fulminating Atherton or an alarming slice of real life.39 More personally disturbing to me was the reaction of an audience to my performance Each Fine Strand (1978) at the Basement in Newcastle. An explosion of class tensions broke over my head as I was pelted with beer cans and told to take myself and my ‘toff’ accent back down South.40 Although the Futurists would have approved of such enthusiastic audience participation, the last example does point to the inherent dangers of performance for women. The theme of violence to women was deliberately explored by Marina Abramović as well Yoko Ono, who in Cut Piece (1964) invited members of the audience to cut away her clothes with a pair of scissors (with the risk that they might also begin cutting her flesh).41
The involvement of women in performance art was inextricably linked to the feminist movement flourishing in Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s, guided by its foundational axiom, ‘the personal is political’. The prospect of a woman performing in public inevitably awakened associations with the early history of theatre in which actresses were regarded as little more than prostitutes.42 The theme of feminism will crop up again in chapter six, but in the context of performance, the key objective was to refuse the dual insult of being relegated either to the category of stage-bound actress/whore, fanning the sexual desires of theatre audiences, or model/muse, frozen in some wilting pose to provide inspiration for a male artist. As Adele Lister and Bill Jones have observed, women ‘were finally demanding to publicly play their own parts’.43 The process of emancipation was by no means straightforward; then, as now, women’s lives were dominated by the injunction to be constantly on show. How could exposing herself to public gaze reverse the demands of patriarchy on a woman to perform only sanctioned models of femininity? The strategy artists like Chicago adopted was to counter the repressive stereotypes promulgated in religion, art and the media with unadorned narratives of their own daily tribulations, and thus seek to redefine for women a public visibility – on their own terms.
Performance lent itself to the interests of other disenfranchised ‘minority’ groups whose bodies were marked as different: black and Asiatic artists, gay and disabled practitioners all of whom sought to contend with both the personal and political consequences resulting from the negative mis-reading of their physical appearance. The notion of ‘performativity’, once seen by commentators such as Peggy Phelan and Judith Butler as a liberating force, enabling individual agency, nowadays is turning into a new kind of societal pressure.44 Reality TV has rendered performance a compulsory form of social and professional engagement creating a postmodern, Baudrillardian nightmare in which surface is the only graspable reality.45 Social media users similarly project groomed versions of themselves conforming to social expectations. Catherine Long has pointed out that ‘the excessive imaging of a narrow range of feminine attributes actually works to make women invisible’.46 Where young women vanish under the sexualised characteristics of cultural femininity, those who cannot or will not conform struggle to be seen and heard. Nina Power has argued that the requirements for women in particular to perform an accommodating, ever-cheerful ‘team player’ brand of feminised social intercourse has become mandatory for securing and keeping a job.47 This has led to what Power calls the ‘sexualisation of the economy’ in which temporary, ‘flexible’, low-paid working conditions traditionally reserved for women are rolled out across the board. With the uncertainties of the current economic climate a source of constant anxiety, those in work not only aspire to win employee of the month but, argues Power, they also allow their private lives to be appropriated by their employers. Employees voluntarily enter into a process of constant self-disclosure, posting mediagenic ‘selfies’ (young, sexy, successful) on Facebook, and daily photo-diaries on Instagram. They will continue to perform the company ethos on other public portals yet to be invented, in a grotesque distortion of the feminist principle of ‘the personal is political’. This perpetual performance of social conformity feeds on our latent narcissism and seeps into all aspects of life in which, as Power observes, one is compelled to be ‘constantly advertising oneself as a sexualised being, presentable, networking, selling oneself’.48
Contemporary performance has now been overtaken by the regimented performativity structuring social and corporate life, and as Mark Ravenhill has observed, ‘there is often a sense that we are all part of a performance over which we have little control’.49 As I shall argue below, the art market makes no less exigent demands of practitioners who are required to enhance their exhibitions with choreographed public appearances; however, I believe that it is still possible for performance art to resurrect something of its radical, oppositional roots and develop its capacity to ‘reconfigure the visible and unsettled the seemingly given’.50 Performance can apply an aesthetic and sensory charge to quotidian existence, and challenge the political establishment as has been demonstrated by artists working both inside the Euro-American axis and beyond in Cuba, Morocco and China.51 For all artists, performance enables them to carve out a space and a time in which, for a while at least, they hold the element of surprise and experience, briefly, the feeling – however illusory – of being in control.52
THE LEGACY OF PERFORMANCE
Performance art flourished throughout the 1980s then somewhat fell out of favour in the 1990s, in the UK being overtaken by the ‘yBa’ phenomenon that was founded on the plastic arts. Although Tracey Emin, one of the leading lights of the ‘Sensation’ generation, maintained a link to the feminist insistence on personal content, she simultaneously divested it of its political relevance.53 Together with the likes of Damien Hirst, Marcus Harvey and the Chapman brothers, Emin shrugged off the squeamishness towards the art market that had driven the previous generation into artists’ collectives and alternative, artist-run venues. As the city of London became rich on deregulation, the yBas produced visually captivating and often sensationalist objects for sale to those who could pay. The commercial galleries who had struggled to trade in the residues of the dematerialised, ephemeral medium of performance, once again rejoiced in the accumulation of marketable art objects and business boomed.54
Into the new millennium, the galleries have filled with painting, sculpture, video and photography dominated by a postmodern sensibility of pastiche and quotation. However, in the last decade or so, a resurgence of performance art has revived what Deirdre Heddon defined as ‘an aesthetics of the present moment’.55 Amelia Jones attributes the new enthusiasm for all things live to ‘epochal events’ such as the Velvet Revolution and 9/11, historical milestones that are leading to a questioning of political realities through performance.56 A number of commentators have recently questioned whether art actions might offer resistance to the local and global workings of power, whether neo-liberal or autocratic. Sven Lütticken postulates that a performance by a currently fashionable artist such as Tino Sehgal is sold as a service like any other commodity in the ‘experience economy’.57 This creates an echo to the persistent belief, outlined above, that notwithstanding the constant emphasis on appearance in the media, performance art can circumvent the production of commodities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, having nobly refused to manufacture art objects, artists declared themselves ‘cultural workers’, selling their labour by the hour like any member of the working classes.58 Most performance artists were half-hearted about the production of documentation and some followed Peggy Phelan’s injunction to renounce entirely the accumulation of video and photographic records of live work.59 Tino Sehgal similarly abhors documentation and is said to prohibit any images of his performances being published. The fact that such a position is untenable is attested by the Tate website, which is awash with photographs of Sehgal’s work and indeed tasteful snaps of the artist himself. Lütticken makes the astute observation that Sehgal’s self-effacing stance in fact serves to fan the flames of commerce by racking up notoriety through what he calls ‘the mystique of absence’.60 High-profile performance events provide relatively cheap publicity for cash-strapped public institutions, which might indeed to account for their recent successes within the international museum and gallery network.61
Like installation, performance is generally available only as a short run of ephemeral experiences. A performance can sometimes be restricted to a one-off art manifestation, witnessed by a small gathering of individuals, never to be repeated. Live art is therefore wholly dependent on an industrial process of promotion that begins with a gestation period as the gallery or museum’s publicity department drip-feeds to the media and the blogosphere tantalising glimpses of the main event to come. The performance itself is formulated at least in part to enhance its ability to produce ‘mediagenic’ documentation.62 The video and photographic documentation will not only prove that the event has taken place, but it will provide the fodder for the work’s carefully orchestrated afterlife. A legion of art pundits, celebrity curators, tweeters, critics and earnest scholars are mobilised to participate in ancillary events: conferences, workshops and Q&A encounters with the artist. Beyond that, critical appraisal in reviews, interviews, blogs and academic papers extend the impact of the work and labour to confirm its place in the art historical canon. Although video records of performances have proved poor imitations of the original event, many photographic images have become mythic objects in their own right, helping to secure the progress of their creators’ careers and legacy. These emblematic black and white images may have provided the fillip for the rash of re-enactments of key historical performances witnessed in recent years. The documentation is the main point of reference for these re-imaginings rather than the lived event as it exists, atomised and scattered across the fading memories of the few individuals who were there at the time.
INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE
Beyond a common dependence on documentation and institutional support through promotion and critical review, what does performance art bequeath to moving image installation? Firstly, the notion that a temporary assemblage of human, technological and material entities configured as art is also an event, a fugitive manifestation with no ‘original’ or master copy emerging from the fray that can be submitted to definitive critical examination.63 In spite of the efforts of critics to mould opinion, it is difficult to reach a consensus around the meaning and cultural value of an ephemeral artwork that may have several iterations. The escape from absolute definition of a live event, the fundamental contingency of performance art has been associated with a worldview derived from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. According to Hugh Tredennick, Heraclitus famously rejected the notion of a stable, eternal universe concluding that we exist in a continual state of flux, a condition based on ‘the impermanence of everything in the world around us, and the impossibility of knowing anything that is changing all the time even as you think of it’.64 Gilles Deleuze believed that spectators were cast back into these inexorable tides of mutation, the ‘multiple moving universe’ when exposed to films such as Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929).65 Espousing this theme of transience and ungraspability, and appropriating for the performing art Heraclitus’s famous aphorism that a man cannot step twice into the same river, Antonin Artaud made a similar observation: ‘a gesture, once made, can never be made the same twice’.66 Each iteration, each encounter with a performance is unique because of the deliberate use of aleatory elements including materials that are fluid or constitutionally unstable, and interactive technologies that depend on undirected audience participation. As already stated, the ultimate variable in the piece is the viewer, an individual with unpredictable specificities of gender, age, health, ethnicity, cultural history, memory and temperament. This means that an artist can expect a wide variation in how we might experience and interpret an installation or a performance; the looser the frame of the work, the more likely that people come away with very different accounts of what they saw and heard. As Brian Massumi remarked, ‘a thing has as many meanings as there are forces capable of seizing it’, and, I would add, as many points of view – standing, sitting and sprawling – from which to formulate those readings.67 The same is true when a spectator is offered the freedom to explore labyrinthine routes traversing an installation, pathways that might encourage ambling or racing, or works that oblige visitors to climb or crawl through narrow spaces. Spectatorial attention cannot be guaranteed. One can choose to focus on the work, or half attend whilst chatting to a friend and simultaneously checking social media on an iPhone; one can listen with eyes open or closed, or with earphones clamped to one’s head streaming the current playlist; one can watch without listening. Of course, many installations, particularly those that involve pre-recorded film and video do not vary much from venue to venue, and few can be classified as site-specific. However, the principle still holds that differences will indeed occur, individual versions of multi-screen works are ‘edited’ by each spectator, on the move, and any live, real-time media interaction with audiences can produce surprisingly divergent responses in different users.68
This brings us to the second bequest performance makes to installation, the ‘liveness’ of the encounter with the work, Hatton’s ‘aesthetics of the present moment’. The notions of liveness and real time, when transposed to installation, place the emphasis on a series of triangulated relationships between audiences, artefacts and their creators. The ensemble of elements in an installation is embraced by an architectural, social and institutional context that also promotes a heightened sense of ‘now’. The continuous present of performance similarly shadows the proscribed duration of an installation – book-ended by the arrival and departure of the spectator. The work is set apart from daily life, and within the hallowed enclave of the gallery space, installation creates a hiatus in which it synchronises the temporality of the work and that of the spectator. The emphasis is not on a literal, horological temporality, but on the quality of experienced time. Amelia Jones has argued that performance is an art form ‘that begs for a durational engagement over time’.69 Installation requires a similar gift of attentiveness, however the extent of that commitment is self-programmed and spectators are not compelled to stay beyond their natural inclination.70 There are durational works in film and video that also demand a substantial allocation of time, although as Pamela M. Lee has observed, in the case of Warhol’s Empire (1964), running to eight hours, the work is ‘best played out in the mind’s eye than actually burned – and interminably so – on the retina’.71 There remains, however, a sense of a shared journey in the context of an installation, one that is heightened by the introduction of moving image elements that themselves call to order the spectator, employing familiar cinematic and televisual modes of address, to which we habitually attend.
Performance art’s final bequest is the direct address of an artist to a live audience, a configuration that resurfaces in the community of address of television, and in the declarative mode frequently adopted by video installation, particularly in the early years. The artist or other performers play to the camera, projecting their message from the captivity of the ‘box’, the video monitors, where, according to Robert R. Riley, they also express ‘the body’s confinement in relation to time’.72 Bruce Nauman, who has often trapped his image in repetitive, compulsive actions, has addressed his audiences in a number of guises including his clown persona. Vito Acconci has used performance to camera as a form of insult, leering at female spectators from a monitor placed on the floor and inflicting on them verbal insults, what Judith Butler described as ‘linguistic pain’.73 Meanwhile Kevin Atherton harangued television audiences, Ian Bourn and John Smith developed their own wry commentaries on London life and Martha Rosler gave her fans a tour of her kitchen utensils.74 I will return to this theme in relation to video art, but in the context of live art conclude that in the age of video diaries, blogs and webcam sites, individuals can now broadcast to the world – anyone can be an online performance star.
Where installation deviates from performance, it is in the frequent removal of the artist’s person from the limelight, to be replaced either by a pre-recorded image onscreen or by any number of sentient or inanimate surrogates. In 1969, Jannis Kounellis filled a gallery with tethered horses, nothing if not a symbol of potency, and in 1991, Damien Hirst exhibited a pickled shark, perhaps a reference to his business acumen.75 More controversially, in 1998–2000, Vanessa Beecroft assembled a roomful of pencil-thin models each standing naked but for a pair of Gucci high heels and identical wig. Beecroft herself described these proxies as self-portraits, images that, as Roberta Smith remarked, were rendered ‘in real time and real flesh’.76 They served as a passport for the artist to the world of high art and fashion, and I would suggest, they embodied Beecroft’s own struggle with her weight, manifest as an ‘exercise bulimia’ eating disorder.77 In the case of moving image installation, many artists retreated to a simulated presence, their likenesses embalmed in the amber of film or video technology. Artists such as Gillian Wearing, John Smith, Ian Bourn, Vera Frenkel and Laure Prouvost leave only their disembodied voices and have sacrificed the physical liveness that proved irresistible to Kounellis, Beecroft and Hirst (albeit deputised to surrogates).
An interim phase, forming a bridge between the enshrining of the live presence of the artist in performance and the retreat into manifestations of the self by proxy can be found among those in the 1970s who combined their personal appearance with their simulated images onscreen. Artists such as Kevin Atherton, Mona Hatoum, Tina Keane, Steina Vasulka, Rose Finn-Kelcey and Rose Garrard played on the transaction between their mediatised, electronic personifications, pre-recorded or via a live feed, both audio and video, and their embodied, flesh-and-blood materialisation in the scheduled performance itself. In Beyond Still Life (1980), Rose Garrard sent in heralds of her impending arrival in the shape of a plaster cast of her head and shoulders, a dead bird, a book and eventually her disembodied voice describing the seated audience, rendering us in-representation, our ‘now/our present, already in the past’, as Tam Giles remarked.78 When Garrard finally appeared, she moved among the objects speaking of their personal significance to her and periodically positioning herself so that a live video camera relayed her image to a monitor. By means of superimposition, ‘her image merged with her replica … the real was exchanged for the copy’.79 While at one level, the work was a meditation on still life, on another, Garrard’s performance marked the moment of transition from live actions to pre-recorded performance to camera, now commonly associated with moving image installation. At the same time, Garrard raised questions about female identity, demonstrating the splitting of her subjectivity into her embodied, subjective sense of self – so impossible to disavow as she stood before us – and her regulated and commodified existence as a mediated image onscreen. Where the live performance had given Garrard control over the terms of her visibility, theoretically the video image could now be reproduced, recontextualised, sexualised, distorted and sold by whoever might acquire it.
Rose Garrard, Beyond Still Life (1980), video performance. Courtesy of the artist.
Insofar as an artist makes him or herself an object of attention, there must be some degree of amour propre at play, even if it is simply the confidence, or the hubris required for an individual to communicate their thoughts to an audience. As mentioned, that confidence has seen something of a revival in recent years, with the galleries awash with a new wave of performance artists promulgating their views on the world we live in. However, performance persisted in the world of experimental film throughout the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. The live presence of the artist was to be found enshrined in hybrid, situated works that came to be known as ‘expanded cinema’, a tendency that is arguably the first manifestation of moving image installation. This rich vein of work will form the substance of chapter nine, but I will end here by noting that the body in expanded cinema was not so much a vehicle for the expression of the artist’s personality or subjectivity – for instance, betraying a penchant for what Brian Catlin called ‘the abnormal, the misdirected and the misspelled’80 – as an instrument for both the celebration and materialist deconstruction of the filmic apparatus. To this end, Malcolm Le Grice interrupted the projection beam, Nicky Hamlyn manipulated multiple projectors during his screenings and, like Rose Garrard, and Dan Graham in the USA, Mona Hatoum trained a camera on both herself and the audience uniting the whole assembly in the perpetual feedback of a closed-circuit video system. In both expanded cinema and video performance, the technology is brought out of the shadows and moved centre stage, its properties the actors in a new public performance of cinema and television. The body of the artist, like the film strip, projection beam, video camera and monitor, was now placed at the service of what Judith Butler called performative ‘resignification’, the ‘troubling’ of established identities and belief systems, with the audience as both witness and co-conspirator.81
NOTES
1 Sally Potter (1980) ‘On Shows’, exhibition catalogue for About Time: Video, Performance and Installation by 21 Women Artists, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, unpaginated.
2 Michael Fried ([1967] 1998), ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 153.
3 Briony Fer (2001) ‘The Somnambulist’s Story: Installation and the Tableau’, Oxford Art Journal, special issue ‘On Installation’, 24: 2, p. 80.
4 My then three-year-old granddaughter Willow Egling decided to participate in a work by Tino Sehgal in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2012. She pushed her buggy up the slope of the Hall in slow time to match the regimented movements of the performers. The embarrassment of the hired troupe was palpable. There was an exception – a man called ‘Tim’ ignored his instructions to limit interaction with audiences to the delivery of brief, pre-scripted narratives, and made room for Willow to walk quietly beside him.
5 Andrew V. Uroskie (2008) ‘Siting Cinema’, in Tanya Leighton (ed.) Art and the Moving Imagee: A Critical Reader. London: Tate Publishing/Afterall, p. 387.
7 See Graham Harman (2002) Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court. Underlying the theories of Cognitive Capitalism and Speculative Realism is a generalised concern about environmental damage wreaked by society in the grip of late capitalism. However, the formulation ignores social inequalities across gender, class and race. See Svenja Bromberg (2013) ‘The Anti-Political Aesthetics of Objects and Worlds Beyond’, Mute, 25 July. Available online: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/anti-political-aesthetics-objects-and-worlds-beyond (accessed 15 July 2014).
8 J. J. Charlesworth (2014) ‘Subject v Objects’, Art Monthly, 374, p. 4.
9 An essay on relational aesthetics first appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition Traffic (1996).
10 Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) involved a line of five hundred anonymous volunteers shovelling a Peruvian sand dune 10cm from its original position.
11 In the late 1970s, Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson made collaborative videotapes in support of the campaign to save the Bethnal Green Hospital in East London, which was threatened with closure by a Labour government. Many other community projects followed. For a discussion of their creative strategies, see Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson (1997) ‘The Aesthetics of Collaboration’, Art Journal, 56: 1, College of Art Association, Spring, pp. 26–37. In the 1990s, the curator Mary Jane Jacobs’ ‘Culture in Action’ initiative was central to the continuation of politically engaged art in the USA.
12 Pickering extends his cybernetic model to include the ‘performative and adaptive interactions’ of people and materials with their environment; see Against Human Exceptionalism, op. cit. See also Andrew Pickering (2010) The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. His thinking has influenced the new materialism in cultural theory.
13 Jean Arp quoted by RoseLee Goldberg (1979) Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson p. 39.
14 Acconci pleasured himself under a false floor while his sexual fantasies were broadcast to the gallery visitors by means of loudspeakers.
15 Marinetti quoted by RoseLee Goldberg (1979), op. cit., p. 13.
16 Marinetti quoted by Jan Morris (1993) Venice. London: Faber & Faber, p. 244.
17 Richard Huelsenbeck quoted by RoseLee Goldberg (1979), op. cit., p. 13.
18 See Goldberg, op.cit. p. 56.
20 Marinetti founded the Futurist Radiophonic Theatre, which proposed ‘a new art that begins where theatre, cinematography and narration stop’. The Futurists were interested in static noise, and ‘the geometric construction of silence’ (Goldberg. op. cit., p. 21). It is surprising that artists have engaged so little with the medium of radio in the ensuing decades.
22 Campus used two cameras to project the live image of his back onto the surface through which he was cutting. The video can be viewed online: http://vimeo.com/18228543 (accessed 28 October 2013). I will return to this work in chapter nine.
23 The filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein later recreated these performances in his Soviet epic, October 1917 (Ten Days That Shook the World) (1928).
24 Deirdre Heddon (2012) ‘The Politics of Live Art’, in Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein (eds) Histories & Practices of Live Art. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 184.
25 Georges Bataille quoted in Denis Hollier ([1974] 1992) Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 67.
26 See Nick Fitch (2012) ‘“Situações-Limites”: The Emergence of Video Art in Brazil in the 1970s’, MIRAJ, 1: 1, pp. 59–67.
27 For a fuller discussion of early performance art by women, see Catherine Elwes ([1985] 2000) ‘Floating Femininity – A Look at Performance Art by Women’, in Video Loupe: A Collection of Essays By and About the Videomaker and Critic Catherine Elwes. London: KT Press, pp. 71–84.
28 The notion that these deliberate performances of self-harm by women bring under control the violence that is done to all women subjected to patriarchal social systems never quite convinces. When faced with raw, distressing gestures such as these, one becomes aware of how difficult it is for women to effectively protect themselves against the random violence of individuals as well as organised male aggression in the guise of military might. While re-working this section, it was announced that in Nigeria over two hundred girls had been kidnapped from their school by the militant Islamic group Boko Haram, whose name condemns Western education, particularly for women. At the time of going to press, around sixty of the children are reported to have escaped; the others are still being held captive.
29 The following year, student fees rose to £3,000 a year, a modest rise by today’s standards. McGowan left a request at Downing Street that the peanut be accepted in lieu of his student debt; see http://www.markmcgowan.org/ (accessed 3 March 2014).
30 In 2011, the ‘Art not Oil’ anti-BP protestors performed a ‘sleepover’ in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern to draw attention to BP’s sponsorship of the gallery and its whitewashing of the environmental disaster following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for which BP was held responsible.
31 All contemporary political initiatives use social media and the Internet to promote their activities, none more so than when peaceful protest erupts into outright revolution as has been the case in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya in recent years, and in the Ukraine, events that have yet to be reprocessed as art in a gallery context.
32 Oskar Schlemmer quoted by RoseLee Goldberg, op.cit., p.68.
34 Deirdre Heddon, op. cit., p. 181. Needless to say, neither performance nor installation artists achieved full independence from state or private sponsorship, and since the 1990s most artists have embraced the art market. Isaac Julien’s photographs associated with his current ‘Playtime’ exhibition at Victoria Miro in London (2014) have a price tag of £35,000, while the theme of the exhibition is ‘the dramatic and nuanced subject of capital’: http://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/449/ (accessed 6 March 2014). Whether or not the irony is intentional is a moot point.
36 Judy Chicago (1977) Through the Flower. New York: Anchor Books, p. 92. See also Jill Fields (ed.) (2011) Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists. New York: Routledge. Earlier in the century, Oskar Schlemmer asserted that his painting and drawing represented the intellectual side of his practice while the performance work expressed the Dionysian, pleasurable and sensual aspect of his work. See Goldberg, op. cit., p. 67.
38 Hayley Newman speaking at Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, 2 December, 2004.
39 David Hall assures me that Atherton’s outburst was a completely unscheduled part of the programme. He provides some detail: ‘I remember challenging him outside next to a rickety table where we’d provided glasses of wine (suggesting it must indeed have been the opening night in 1978). Who struck out first I can’t remember, but I do remember him reeling backwards onto the table shattering everything … can’t remember more except that we’ve got along fine ever since’; email correspondence with David Hall, 3 November 2013.
40 When I reprised the work at the ICA, in 1979, a drunken man began to shout sexist abuse at me until he was forcibly removed from the gallery.
41 Although the performance was at least in part a gesture of passive protest against the rumblings of international aggression in the mid-1960s, as with Sonia Knox’s work, the overriding impression of the performance as it struck me at the time was of a tense evocation of the diurnal threat of violence that is a feature of so many women’s lives the world over.
42 In 1913, my grandmother Dorothy K. Tilley abandoned the stage following an offer of marriage from a much older ‘stage-door Johnny’, and a veil was quickly drawn over her early career as an actress. We can find no records of her appearances in London theatres at the turn of the century.
43 Adele Lister and Bill Jones (1979) ‘Everybody Wants to Be the Girl’, in A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale (eds) Performance by Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole, p. 246. See also Moira Roth (ed.) The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970–1980. Los Angeles: Astro Artz.
44 The researcher Amy Tobin has moved away from excavating decisive, performative works by women, such as Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), in favour of community-based, dispersed works. She focuses on initiatives like Kate Walker’s Feministo (1974) in which a collective of women exchanged postal works, ‘untethered from locality’, pieces that ‘formed social relations rather than intervening in bureaucracy’. Amy Tobin was speaking about her doctorial research at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London on 5 May, 2014. Speakers included Lisa Tickner and Catherine Elwes.
45 See Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1994 [2nd edn) Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
46 Catherine Long, doctoral thesis, A Feminist Dialogue with the Camera, forthcoming. Long draws on Why Feminism Matters: Feminism Lost and Found (2009) by Kath and Sophie Woodward who emphasise the ‘sameness’ of cultural representations of women.
47 See Nina Power (2009) One-dimentional Woman. Hampshire: Zer0 Books.
49 Mark Ravenhill (2007) ‘A world of spectacle’, The Guardian, 20 October, p. 13.
50 Deirdre Heddon, op. cit., p. 183.
51 See Thomas J. Berghuis (2006) Performance Art in China. Hong Kong: Timezone 8.
52 I once asked the artist Iain Robertson why he made performances, and he answered that it was the only time he ever felt in control of his otherwise chaotic life. I will discuss artists’ investment in moving image installation at greater length in chapter twelve.
53 The ‘Sensation’ exhibition took place at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, September–December 1997, and concentrated on the work of artists held in the collection of Charles Saatchi.
54 On performance as a dematerialised art form, see Lucy Lippard (1997) Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
55 Dierdre Heddon, op.cit., p. 175.
56 Amelia Jones (2012) ‘The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History’, in Amelia Jones (ed.) Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History. Bristol: Intellect, p. 13.
57 Sven Lütticken (2012) ‘Progressive Striptease’ in Amelia Jones (ed.) Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History. Bristol: Intellect, p. 189. Lütticken is referring to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s book The Experience Economy; Every Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (1999), which charts the shift in late Capitalism from the production of goods to the selling of experiences.
58 My memory suggests that the going rate for a performance at the Filmmakers’ Co-op or the Musicians Co-op in London in 1980 was £70 when funded by the Greater London Arts Association. I have to add that in spite of our socialist leanings, very few of us were from working-class backgrounds.
59 Those who had any sense, like Stuart Brisley, produced exquisite photographs and videos of their work. For more on Phelan’s condemnation of performance documentation see Peggy Phelan (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, p. 2.
60 Sven Lütticken, op. cit. p. 192.
61 Colin Perry has pointed out the advantages for galleries of ‘cheap’ performances relative to the high costs of shows of painting and sculpture. Live events often involve cheap or unpaid labour and, for a modest outlay, ‘attract a great deal of media and social media attention’; email correspondence with the author, 20 May 2014.
62 Sven Lütticken’s neologism, as far as I can gather.
63 As noted earlier in relation to Isaac Julien, artists have got round this problem by producing high-gloss stills of their work that become expensive souvenirs of the event.
64 Hugh Tredennick (ed. & trans.) (1959) Plato: The Last Days of Socrates. London, Penguin, p. 14.
65 See John Rajchman (2009) ‘Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Ideas of Art’, in David Rodowick (ed.) Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 289.
66 Antonin Artaud (1938) The Theatre and its Double. New York: Grove and Weindenfeld, p. 75.
67 Brian Massumi (2008) A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p.10.
68 I have been struck by the disparity between the experience of performers and that of an audience. For me, the re-enactment of Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy at the Whitechapel Gallery ([1964] 2002) over which the artist herself presided was a glorious, but faintly absurd mash-up of chickens, offal and bikini-clad youngsters. A prominent critic in the row behind me muttered the insult that Schneemann looked like a listed building. The young participants, in conversation with the artist and the audience after the performance, clearly had a very different and notably more positive experience of the event.
69 Amelia Jones (2012), op. cit., p. 11.
70 Leaving an installation does not constitute a public enactment of disapproval as would walking out before the end of a performance, lecture or film screening. There were, of course, many performances that lasted days and even months, and no-one was expected to witness every minute. Not even the artist stayed the whole course. Stuart Brisley admitted to me that in 180 Hours Work for Two People (1978), his seven-day continuous performance at the ACME gallery in London, when things were quiet, he went home for a hot meal.
71 Pamela M. Lee (2006) Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 283.
72 Robert R. Riley (1999) ‘Time, Perception and Sight’, in Seeing Time catalogue, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, p. 19.
73 See Judith Butler (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, p. 5.
74 See Catherine Elwes (2005) Video Art: A Guided Tour. London: I.B. Tauris, p. 42; p. 142.
75 In 2009, Damien Hirst took legal action against Cartrain, a 17-year-old graffiti artist who made collages based on Hirst’s For the Love of God, a diamond-encrusted head that supposedly sold for £50 million. Forced to surrender the work, Cartrain proceeded to steal some pencils from Hirst’s Tate Britain installation Pharmacy and threatened to sharpen the pencils into oblivion if his collages were not returned to him.
76 Roberta Smith (1998) ‘Critic’s Notebook: Standing and Staring, Yet Aiming for Empowerment’, The New York Times, 6 May.
78 Tam Giles (1980) ‘Rose Garrard “Beyond Still Life”’, PS magazine, 6, p. 9.
80 Brian Catlin speaking about his work at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, 2 December 2004.
81 Judith Butler (1997), op. cit., p. 14.