Day after: some musings

Performance art, like music and dance, is distinguished by its lack of an art object. Unlike painters and sculptures, once the performance art event is complete there remains no trace of it, except in the memory of those who were there to witness the performance.

Artists like Vassan Sittiket and The Turner Prize use accessories during their work. But the viewing of a piece of broken glass from Arti Grabowski’s (or Pancho Lopez’s) performance is not the same as the viewing of a painting or a sculpture. The shard of glass is a trace, a souvenir that links us back to the art event. It is not an art object in itself.

The shard of glass or the grain of rice is incomplete and static. Outside the moment and context of the performance, as our memory of the art event fades, the small power of these objects also fades. Soon they fall back into the wash of the day-to-day.

So where is the art in performance art?

As I am sure you have noticed, the photos of Hua (Phoebe) Jin the photographer for the festival and the videos of Elisha Burrows the videographer are particularly strong. Both do beautiful work. This is important because their documentation of the Live events is often all that remains after the show.

Over the course of the festival, I saw that the photos, the video and the brief descriptions of performances in the blog had a powerful transformative effect upon many of the performances, changing sometimes difficult viewing experiences into something more intense, more beautiful and easy to consume. Take for example Anna Syczewska’s piece, the hour-long arc-welding session.

For the live audience in the gallery at Vivo, the piece was long and physically grueling. After we had seen the first spike welded to her shoe, was it necessary to stay and watch the process for the next nine? The blinding light, the fumes and the music pushed most people out of the gallery to the bar and onto the street.

During that hour however, Phoebe and Burrows captured moments with striking effects and stunning beauty. For someone who was not in attendance, looking at the photos and the edited video, reading the few lines of text describing the action, their reaction might be “Wow! That looks incredible” or, “ Sorry I missed that show”.

Watching performance art is a bit like hiking up a high tree-covered mountain. For hours and hours the hiker climbs up the trail under a thick canopy of trees seeing nothing more than the rock-strewn path. Sweating under the heavy load of a pack, scrambling and stumbling, plagued by mosquitoes and deer flies, the hiker dreams of the end of the climb, imagining the crest of the mountain is just up ahead around the next switchback. When at last the hiker reaches the crest and looks out at the surrounding countryside spread out beneath, the view is magnificent. But after a few minutes rest, eating an energy bar and enjoying the splendor, it is time to climb down through the dense forest again.

The photographer, the video editor and the writer of these events create an abstraction of the performance, reducing an hour of difficult exertion into a couple moments of pleasure. In this reduced concentrated and form we can consume the experience, shooting it back like our morning de-caffe latté with soy.

Sometimes in moments of exhaustion, one asks oneself whether or not a postcard of the gorgeous view from the top of the mountain would be just as fine and aesthetically fulfilling as the hours long slog needed to climb to the viewpoint.

The problem with this shortcut is that the art in performance art takes place at a particular moment, in a particular place. The art is the phenomenon that takes place as the viewer witnesses the performance. The performer’s actions elicit a set of thoughts, emotions, and sensations in the viewer, a communication. If you are not physically there to witness and experience that communication, it’s a bit like getting a post card from Mazatlan in the middle of February.

“Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

It is just not the same as two weeks lying on white sand under a blazing sun.

FA

Even though it’s nearly winter, things are pretty lively here in the heart of Vancouver.

Last week’s invitation for me to blog about LIVE2009 was just what I needed to get out the house, away from the books and down into the rainy town. So far the festival has made me laugh myself silly (at the post-recession, post-arts cuts, small-f fund-raising Gala Cabaret); kept me in rapt silence through a night of love & honour for the art of performance art festivals, from pasts into present; and (also a folding of past onto the present), it has allowed me to hear reflections from artists whose entanglement with this art form has extended 30 or 40 years.

Some highlights so far --

The crowd on Friday night was absolutely taken with the clown Booshmeeka (Pricilla Costa) as she set up the situation of a clown willfully rejecting her own props. Owing in part to the crowd’s high performance art literacy, Costa’s resentful clown made large the situation of being made to act something that is completely outside of ones self-understanding. Whose faces was she making?: an annoyed teen, inveigled upon to show up sober at a family dinner, in straight clothes?; or maybe we were seeing the look of artists being told that anti-celebratory messaging is now illegal, along with access to the downtown so that a couple of weeks of elite sports broadcasting can proceed? … gawd that was funny …

Joomi Seo and Heidi Nachtegaal’s first presentation of their experimental music-making was intriguing despite glitches (the projection was on the wrong wall). Again, I have the impression that the context made their work into something much richer than the thing they had rehearsed. It was an assembly of spiritual elements –synthesized organ, atonal singing and spoken word about a higher power or essentialist meanings about self (I think) with a flickering white orb projected to the side. Set within a raucous night of begging for arts money, cheezies & booze, flinging bras, boy-on-boy Cuidadito, and more, the Seo Nachtegaal composition was to me a very fresh experiment –an indulgence into a reflective aesthetic that perhaps folds minimalism over-top spiritualism.


And, I can’t tell you how great it was to see Velvis, the act resulting from **’s year or so of Elvis training. This King is lithe, smart and musical, born of her admiration and respect for well-crafted music, hard work and good looks (she features his early songs). Velvis, it is so great to have you back in action!!

[**October 21 - I should have know that the tribute artist's straight identity is never to be exposed... not even in blogs about performance art festivals. My apologies V.]

Everyone was impressed with Velveeta Krisp’s intervention at the Hastings Steam Bath on the opening night of the festival. She arranged to have the admission fee waved for women, a recognition of the restrictions of women in men-only saunas and bathhouses. [I missed it for the performance of taking my ethno botanist-wannabe son to hear Wade Davis give the Massey Lecture at the Chan Centre.]

This invitation to blog is offering me a new experience, that of watching a festival thoroughly. I have so far been a casual observer (and casual practitioner) of performance art. Shannon Cochran in her introduction to her Performance Festival Performance said that most people don’t have the experience of seeing more than a single night or event at a performance art festival. She aimed to demonstrate her love for the intense experience of following the arch of theatre within the whole event by re-performing choice gestures from last year’s 7a*11d Festival in Toronto. She described it as a ‘love letter’ to the artists and their art form.

That affection-inspired mimicry set up a (loving) readiness for the past that was needed to view Lee Wen’s The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps). In this work Wen’s body, which now carries the marks of scoliosis and early Parkinson’s, was animated by Stravisnky’s once controversial ballet score. At one point he used his wise body in a girl’s bright red halter dress to propose to the audience that he would like to be part of our revolution. And then, he slowly conceded to the futility of that proposition by eating the paper on which it was written. The dialectic of Wen’s hopefulness and futility was woven with tributes for the past (iconic references to Nam Jun Paik) and materials gathered in this place and time (the day’s paper, fresh milk and apples).

The following day in his remarks at the round table talk, Wen described replaying performances from the past as “working on an archive.” He talked about how a re-staging or referencing of the old in a new work was a way to make an archive of the past alive. His words were something like: “If it sits in a drawer of photographs it is dead. It is only alive when people talk about it or re-stage it.” He was in conversation with veteran performance artists Esther Ferrer, Lee Wen, Valentin Torrens, Glen Lewis, Chumpon Apsiuk, as well as younger but experienced practitioners Paul Coulliard, Shannon Cochran and Randy Gledhill. Ferrer made the distinction of performance art being a presentation of an experience rather than its representation, which is the state of documentation (video or photographs) of performance after the fact.

See you at Esther Ferrer’s performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery tomorrow (October 20 2009) at 7pm!

Lois Klassen