Performance as Knowledge
Jane Whitaker (JW) June 2013
‘Performance, as knowledge’: An investigation, questioning and
analysis of applied “criteria” in the establishing of “pedagogical space”.
Fig 1. ©Imaginativeeye
Introduction (to the project)
Implied and applied criteria: an evaluation.
The development of an equality of exchange: (Ethics, investment).
Identifying the “new aesthetic”, core values, dialogue and integration.
The constituence of performed knowledge allied to research method.
Building criteria, in the context of funding (the funded project): The artist
academic relationship.
Outcome/s. Partnership/s –alliance and development.
In defense of Archive/ precedents, initiatives; exercising the decade,
Performance Art as an image of history.
Fig 1. The Object/s of Light in Perception PMCAG November 2012
Fig 2. The South Gallery Women in Art PMCAG November 2013
Fig 3. Stills from the Performance work November 2012
Identifying the “new aesthetic”, core values, dialogue and integration.
2004, saw the publishing in French of Malaise dans l’esthétique© Editions
Galilée; Jacques Rancière’s English edition of Aesthetics and its Discontents
followed in 2009. Further Rancière in 2009, acknowledges the provenance of
this further collection of texts in English collated and published during this
period “the latest incarnation of a series of talks whose earlier versions,
revised several times, were presented at a variety of academic, artistic and
cultural institutions over the past four years.”i
Fig 2. ©Imaginativeeye (JW)
This pinpointing of the timeframe for the releasing of Rancière’ s project, in a
collated revision of a series of “talks” significant and mature reflections
regarding the redefining of the term aesthetic, represents a new approach to
the concept of the aesthetic in art, in the politicization of the audience and
artist alike (within its communal referents), and is a key point of entry to the
groundwork investigation that took place within the Performance Art
commission of The Object/s of Light in Perception.
Fig 3. ©Imaginativeeye
At the core of the commission was the focus on interrogation of the vehicle of
the “primary source” within the identified canon of material for a Performance
Art work and as a constituent part of the research method in the uncovering of
perhaps previously unexamined historical data. The intention being, to
scrutinise the significance, in context, for a number of key texts.
Identified materials that sprung from the concept of the revaluing or rethinking
of the shift in perception that occurs, in the making of any work of art,
importantly from the perspective of the artist. The tracing of this shift is in itself
arguably a fiction, augmenting the idea of poetic licence, arguably where any
notably conventional historical placement of an artistic event or endeavour
and its defined context is concerned also. However in this case a number of
factors were deliberately placed to impact on the rationale for the creating of a
response to a commission for a work of art and within the set criterion,
through the funding body of the Arts Council of England, the support in kind
that was offered by the Plymouth Museum and City Art Gallery, and the
curatorial response of the staff team there. The remit itself continued the
earlier opening up and investigating in the present moment of the territory of
the painters of the localised Newlyn School (SW region for the arts) of the late
nineteenth century in an exhibition at the Newlyn Gallery November 2007
regarding this element of both commissions their historical counterparts in
Europe.
The question that motivated the research for the artists of the imaginativeeye
Eye Projects concerned Performance Art as a medium contained within its
own space and time historically transposed and remade. The idea of
Performance itself as a potential vehicle for a direct understanding of the
earlier decades of those visual and dimensional practices, not only allied
themselves within the discipline of Performance Art but had a direct influence
on the practitioners of the form in the mid twentieth century and subsequently
and arguably to the present day.
How do we know this?
Evidence is currently very variable in terms of any formal appreciation of
Performance Art history. The Tate Britain’s recent findings, transpositions
materials of examples of the artefacts of the form, in the exhibition Has the
Film Already Started? Arguably established a major curatorial opportunity for
mainstream popularisation. This exhibition precipitated media interest in the
leading proponents of the day. The further feature article in the Guardian
weekend 02.02.13, Wham, glam! And the artist Noel Fielding’s work
encompassed in Glam! The Performance of Style Liverpool Tate (2nd Feb –
12 May 2013.)ii Supports this viewpoint.
Lizzie Carey-Thomas gives an example of the observational writing that
resulted from the –film already started, exhibition, in an arguably accessible
and mainstream format, proliferating interest beyond the original intention of
the original works of art. Arguably, key examples of the protagonists of the era
in Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Bruce Maclean, and the infamous partnership of
Genesis P Orridge.iii
The points made above impact beneficially, it is suggested, in terms of both
the curatorial motivation for the Exhibition/s mentioned and the
unprecedented transposition of this era and the rootedness of Performance as
an art form, into the museum sector and mainstream media in the first decade
of the twenty-first century.
For those of us considering how this baton of practice is articulated to new
audiences and or/generations of practitioners, the student artist, for example,
these exhibition/s are a recent and palatable offering to the general public
inclusive of their potential to new and developing audiences for the form. This
does however also further the thinking of “what constitutes evidence” of past
practice (given our own subjective experience as artists?). A vital factor in
the guiding parameters for research, perhaps? Importantly through
interrogation of what can be seen to constitute a historical referent?
This question/s sits on equal terms with the Tate Modern’s recent initiative for
current forms of contemporary Live Art in their refurbished and newly
developed Tanks exhibition space/s and programming.
A further question now ensues. Does a deliberate return to the civic museum,
city gallery boundary, as detailed above, and the questioning of the form of
such initiative/s (evident in the mid twentieth century contextual practices of
the European, North American tradition in defining and creating exemplar of
Performance Art), offer us any new food for thought regarding issues of
provenance, history and the role of archive for these potential audiences?
New or extant, for whom the baton passing of the complexity of modern art
history, is at best complex and impenetrable and at worst non existent or
inaccessible?
Is or has Performance Art, revered as an authentic, uncompromising
discipline of its time in terms of its ability to both create the opportunity for
scrutiny of difficult and uncomfortable questions in the social, political, arena
and in life as it is really lived and where art perceptibly crosses that divide, still
be a potent force within a focus on renewed authenticity of provenance? That
is as uncovered for the audience, in partnership with the audience, onsite, and
in an equanimity or equality for audience and artist alike?
The ethos above is encompassed as a firm basis for the unwritten protocol or
the requirement of what the philosopher Rancière recently refers to as The
Ethical Turn. The work of Performance as an art object is traditionally honour
bound to dematerialise, to be questioned in terms of a longevity of the original
“experience” through a truth telling told as only the image or document of an
event in image making can define, and this its questionable status? Where
“ethics” it is suggested at the beginning of this awkward yet energising
debate, is put forward for consideration in Rancièreian terms as a “kind of
thinking in which identity is established between an environment, a way of
being and a principle of action”.iv
Second, third, fourth, fifth generation Performance practitioners, proliferating
the territory of the seventies mentioned at the beginning of this section (my
attention here is focussed for the moment through the relationship of the artist
to the conceptual territory), have grappled with and developed the constructs
of professionalised practice, concepts of contemporary heritage,
academicisation and its multiple incarnations in the twentieth century pre- and
post war eras and the onset of globalisation.
Contemporary questions of the ethics of Performance work actions and
activity; the proliferation of digitised “evidence” and the argument of the
contemporary relevance of this material, for those who choose to step into the
mythv suggests that it is still the artist alone who predominantly makes the
present real, and in reality has to fix the critical dilemma concerning the
question of the archive and its digital inevitability.
The embedded identification of any historical relevance and the question of its
now instant accessibility might indeed be relevant to an authentic experience
of Performance Art (in history)? The question of influence, the identification
of the canon and the surrounding literary and philosophic referents required
for the discursive form suggests however that the activity of Performance itself
should be seen as knowledge and thus represents a conceptual and critical
consolidation of this dilemma.
©Jane Whitaker June 2013
End notes:
i
Acknowledgements: The Emancipated Spectator p., 133
ii
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/feb/01/noel-fielding-interview
(retrieved 10/06/2013) Noel Fielding recreates, Pose Works for Plinths 1 1971©
Bruce McLean
iii http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/scene-set Tate etc. Issue 25
(retrieved 05/04/2013) the integrated showing of the archive performance
Chaimowicz’s Partial Eclipse represented a departure for the gallery in the
presenting of a live work in situ in the context of the archive given the defining place
of Performance Art in the preceding 30 years June 2011- March 2012. This curatorial
initiative part of the Tate BP displays and re hang of the Tate B Galleries focus on
contemporary art 2011. Tate B acquisitions for the exhibition included Genesis POrridge’s, infamous handbills and a piece that gave the Title for the exhibition
appropriated from the recent work of Cerith Wyn Evans 2000.
iv The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics: Aesthetics and Its Discontents p., 110 132 2009 Rancière’s ethical turn is observed in this context in terms of the idea of art
works contextual frameworks requiring a form of endless justice and exchange
between the ethos idea and environment.
v The Emperors New Clothes: Simon Herbert: Performance Magazine no 21 1980.