Notes on Performance

Body in Performance lecture notes

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A score for a diffractive dialogue on joy and sadness

This is a score for two people. A dialogue. A vocal and vagal experiment which hopes to lead you both forward and backwards, inwards and outwards, at the same time.

1. Sit down on the floor with your back to your partner.

Your backs should be touching.

If you cannot touch your partner then your back should be against a sturdy flat surface, like a wall.

2. Take a deep breath in together

3. Hum in a low tone as you both slowly exhale.

Breathe in whenever you need to, but also breathe in when your partner breathes in

As you exhale your bodies should fall into each other, so that the other is bearing your weight more and more.

4. Your bodies will begin to slide downwards. Lower and lower and until you are both lying down. Your heads are side by side, in the crook of the other’s shoulder, looking at the ceiling. (Or if you are not in the same physical space as your partner, maybe you are on the ground by yourself, but think and feel your partners presence.)

5. Say or sing a lyric from a song. Just the first one that comes to mind.

It doesn’t matter who goes first.

If your lyric was in the form of a question, your partner can leave it as it is.

If your lyric was not in the form of a question, your partner should re-formulate it as a question.

Examples: ‘How deep is your love?’ - Leave as is. ‘Jump out of bed and stumble in the kitchen’ - Why do you jump out of bed in the morning? ‘At first I was afraid I was petrified’ - What are you not afraid of anymore?

6. After one person says or sings a lyric, the other person asks your lyric question.

The same question is asked 7 times.

After each time you will answer the question until you run out of things to say. The partner says ‘Thank You’ and asks again.

7. Once this is done the other partner says or sings whatever lyric comes to them first, and the first person makes it into a question. Then repeat step 6.

8. You may alternate and repeat steps 5 and 6 for as long as you want. You may also alternate asking your own lyric question to your partner instead of vice-versa, or you can take tuns and ask each other the same questions

9. End the score by first sitting up and then standing and then shaking your whole body as you express anything you want from your mouth. (Humming, howling, AHHHHHH-ing)

SONGS ARE LIKE A TIME MACHINE

- Anushka Nair

I've asked friends and acquaintances who are friends to perform this score. I have yet to ask a stranger. Maybe some strangers will see this blog and perform it. Maybe they will tell me they did. Maybe they will tell one of their friends to try and it will come back to me in someway.

The initial performers of this score were Luiza and Anushka. Afterwards we spoke and this idea of the time machine came up. This diffracted from other ideas I have had about songs as vessels, portholes, or emotive non-tangible objects. Music and the voice are both elusive of and attached to time/space. "the audible is constantly in motion, disappearing as it appears." (Benjamin, 2018)I was thinking of them before as transporters of emotion, but they are also transporters of memory, similar to the way smells are. Interestingly, both smell and hearing belong to the intangible realm of the senses. After further performances which I observed through video or in person, I spoke more with each of the partners after the experience. Finally, I chose to perform the score myself, with a close collaborator and friend. It was here that this idea of the time machine became clear.

The lyric that came to me in that moment was:

Strangers

Waiting

Up and down the boulevard

When asked by my partner "What are strangers waiting for on the boulevard?" I was instantly transported to a place near where i grew up.... It was the parking lot and park at the end of a of street called Magnolia Boulevard. I have no memories of the song from my childhood, but somehow every experience I had had in this location compressed into one and then expanded and infinite storylines of what could happen in this space appeared. And it was all heavily encapsulated in the sweet warm air of a summer night. These moments were both fleeting and concrete experiences and despite the grounding comfort of my friend's warm shoulder I floated amongst them.

Here is an audio clip from this part of the score. set to a video of the original song makers. I'll call it: Journey to Diffraction

Sadly, as with the other documentation, I don't think the score works in recorded form or really outside the two participants. Therefore it feels truly like an intra-action. Happening within the space created by the participants, deflecting observation.

A Diffractive Dialogue between a

Past and Present Self

One of the central items of my research box, as well as my main source for the autoethnographic research I am doing, is a journal which I kept between the ages of 13-16. The journal is first-hand documentation of the commencement of my sexual life, from my first kiss to the 'loss of my virginity' or as I would call it now, my first experience of penis-in-vagina sex. (Virginity is a social construct and thus not something one can loose. I consider it actually a gaining of experience. This view, I can confirm based on my re-reading of this journal and an interview with my sister, was precisely how I felt about it then too. ) In addition to the standard teenage turmoil and vast number of boys names, the journal is filled with song lyrics, which I found meaningful at the time.

Thinking once more about using songs as a time machine, I thought it might be interesting to performa a version of the above score, but the two people would be my present self, and my teenage self who wrote this journal, carefully listening to her favourite songs in order to write their lyrics in her journal.

I recorded the video and edited it a bit to add to the feeling of there being a dialogue taking place. The experience was very fulfilling, however it felt less like a trip to the past, and more like a springboard into the future, powered by the culmination of experience.

The lyrics I chose from my journal were:

'Prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will grow old'

'It makes me feel so good to always tell you when you're wrong'

'You and I should get away for a while, I just wanna be alone with your smile'

While writing a reflection on the workshop I participated in with the director of Via Berlin, I came to the conclusion that it was impossible for me to be vulnerable with just myself, as my vulnerabilities exist in the context of others. However, watching this video back, I do get a sense of vulnerability and surprise at myself and my answers. I am not sure how it will read to the viewer, but I am excited to reflect more on how I might enter a dialogue with different parts of myself in my future practice.

Benjamin, L. ‘Rewriting the Gaze: Hearing Sex in Cinema’ (2018) MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 12 September. Available at: https://maifeminism.com/rewriting-the-gaze-hearing-sex-in-cinema/ (Accessed: 25 March 2021).

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Reflective Journal - Body in Performance

The body in my artistic practice invites participation. It does not, however, always succeed. The body is conditioned by capitalism to feel shame. This shame stops our bodies from feeling connected. The body in my artistic practice wants to create connection. In order to do this, my body must be vulnerable, holding space for rather than perpetuating shame. In this reflection, I will consider how participatory performance is affected by vulnerability, failure and shame and look to the symbiotic influence this has on our social and political realities.

‘It was so great to watch you when everything went wrong’, is a phrase that has echoed through observations of my practice for many years. It is usually in reference to some technical difficulties that I’ve had to fix before or during a performance, crouching awkwardly on the floor in whatever absurd costume I’m wearing.  On one hand, I am proud that I can carry off mishaps with such tantalizing finesse. On the other hand, I pray that my future in performance will not continue with me running front and back of house at the same time. Nonetheless, it leaves me to ponder what the root of this comment is. If I were to hazard a guess, these failures expose the risks I am taking, and therefore my vulnerability. To quote performer Taylor Mac, “to show your humanity and your failure onstage—your real failure… you are truly allowing yourself to fail and look ugly and be a human being in all of its complexity” (2014). This humanity creates an instant connection between performer and audience. I actively engage my audience in these moments, letting them share my failure; my humanity.  The audience feels more invested than before, rooting for me to succeed. These failures create feelings of activation, authorship and community in my audience, three concerns which Claire Bishop identifies as the foremost agendas of participatory art (2006, 12). It seems my failures create more successful participation than the participation I write into my work. This leads me to ask, how can I more effectively use my body in performance to purposely address these concerns.

In 2019, I was selected to perform in the Berlin run of Taylor Mac’s ‘24 Decades of Popular Music’. Early on in the 24 hour-long durational piece, Mac spoke about how he tended to dislike shows which required participation because he felt, as an audience member, that the performers were trying to ‘force fun’ on him. However, despite this, Mac had plenty of participation planned in the proceeding piece. His reasoning, he said to the audience, was that this participation was supposed to make you feel uncomfortable.  Most of the audience activities that followed erred more on the side of fun than awkwardness, but that is beside the point. After this statement was made, I mused on how it might affect the audience’s relationship to the participation. Having often used participation in my body of work, I deliberate frequently over what the magic formula is for an excited and engaged audience. Sometimes, it feels like the energy is either there or not, no matter what you put in as a performer. Nonetheless, I do not want to believe that these things are completely out of my control.

One of my roles in the Taylor Mac show was to be a facilitator of the participatory elements, handing out props, selecting people, reseating, or merely attentively focusing on the show in an effort to refocus the audience’s attention. From this position as an intermediary between the audience and Mac’s commanding presence on stage, I could see first-hand the experience of the audience. For the most part they reacted well, gladly engaging with the participatory tasks (and I have previously experienced what a limited capacity German audiences have for participation). These shared activities created a new depth and connection with the audience which would not have been there if they were asked to be mere spectators. Did Mac’s statement on discomfort make the audience more apt to engage or, this being the fifth iteration of the show, did the audience simply know what they were getting into? Mac is possessed of a type of vulnerability that, despite his flamboyant appearance and powerful presence, whispers a soft, warm invitation to his audience to step inside his world. I believe when he made this statement about disliking something he created a space where the audience could be more open with themselves about what they might dislike or feel uncomfortable with. Furthermore, they were allowed to feel those things without shame, which in turn freed up what was possible for them within the space.

         My interest in using participation in my own practice originated, I believe, when I was working with my art/noise collective. ‘Le Couteau Jaune’ in London between 2006-09. Participation was at the forefront of our practice. I describe our work as a four-year long performance of ‘being a band’. We had started as an improvisational, site-specific project, using spoken word and noise. However, after one performance where we took on personas of a quartet of Kim Jong-Il’s claiming to be North Korea’s only punk band, we ended up being booked on more traditional music line-ups with ‘real’ bands. While we did have a few ‘songs’ that we used regularly in our performances, for the most part we continued to concentrate on how we could use what was already available to us to create our performances.  Adhering to performance artist Kembra Pfahler’s doctrine of ‘availablism’, we made outlandish costumes and props out of free and readily available materials such as cardboard and paper-maché.  The audience was also conveniently to hand, and we took advantage of that. We borrowed from the canon of rock show participation actions such as call-and-response or crowd surfing, gleaning inspiration from other projects that blur the line between rock show and performance art, such as Gwar or the B-52s and particularly Pfahler’s project ‘The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black’. In hindsight, I can see how it was wise to utilize this common language of participation as the audience already has a collective knowledge of these activities and thus feels more comfortable participating in them.

We were also greatly influenced by the Situationist International. (One of the myths we invented about the group was that, ‘Le Couteau Jaune’ was Guy Debord’s nickname for his penis.) We thought of ourselves as creating on-stage situations in which events could happen.  While our availabilist dogma had clear anti-capitalist leanings, at the time I do not recall explicitly linking our project to Marxist-socialism, despite the influence of Debord. In reading Bishop, Rancière and Bourriaud’s analysis of participatory art and its connections to socialism, I am surprised that these links had not occurred to me before. “The hope [of participatory art] is that the newly emancipated subjects of participation will find themselves able to determine their own social and political reality” (2006, 12). Having been plunged into the social reality of  ‘live music’, we wanted to see how far we could push the parameters of what ‘going to see a band’ meant. If we could keep our audience on board despite the chaotic calamity happening in front of them, then perhaps any social or political reality was possible.

However, looking back I think our work lacked vulnerability. We approached our audience with a brash bombardment of the senses and while the improvisational elements of our technique did harbour some vulnerability, there was overall, more insistence than invitation. Nonetheless, I learned many things from this work. I used my voice for the first time on stage. I learned how to perform moment-to-moment, trust my co-performers and to appreciate the art of pacing. Even so, while we seemed to take risks on stage, I think we were never prepared to lose anything, (except perhaps a cardboard prop or two) and thus our risks were superficial and our vulnerabilities never truly present.

Writer and researcher, Brené Brown defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure” (2010). The stage, for me, has never felt like a risk, but I think for many people it does. This is not to say that in my own work I do not make an effort to push myself to places of discomfort or that I have never been hideously nervous over a new piece. Even so, the stage remains some sort of exhilarating safe haven for me and a place my body feels at home.

This makes for an interesting place to explore vulnerability. Live performance itself invites plenty of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. A performer on stage stands in some place of authority, seemingly dealing with all of these elements, while the audience watches, often projecting their own insecurities up towards the stage. Even though my body stands on stage for the most part, without shame, I am still aware of others projecting their own shame on to me. They assess my actions as risky in relation to what their own experience would be. Nevertheless, because of my lack of shame, I lack true vulnerability. I am stuck without knowing what I am personally risking because mere embarrassment for me does not place the stakes high enough.

Even so, shame still exists in my body just as it does in all bodies that have been subjected to white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism. Shame is a preferred dish of the animal of capital. One’s body is assessed for ease of digestion by the capitalist predator, each part either devoured or deemed unworthy of whetting the appetite. And while I do have many privileges, privilege seems to hold little sway in our experience of shame.  I am white, pretty, feminine. My body is trained to be the invitation it is expected to be. Perhaps I experience shame in my inability to be sharp, hostile and threatening. I feel confined by my softness. Even so, I curate my body using the structures outlined by patriarchy. We can all exploit what worth we have to the system but in doing so we perpetuate a cycle of shame.

If shame is something we all feel as human beings, it must then create an opportunity for connection and thus community, one of the aforementioned concerns of participatory art. Shame is more than mere embarrassment, but rather a belief in our fundamental unworthiness (Brown, 2012). If vulnerability is tied to risk and risk implies loss, what if the thing we were willing to lose is our shame? A collective loss of shame would have detrimental repercussions on the capitalist model with the potential to usher in a new societal reality. However, capitalism nurtures a state of what Mark Fisher calls ‘reflexive impotence’ (2009). The knowledge that this unworthiness we are taught by capitalism is not true, does not help us rid ourselves of shame, but instead we are made to feel more unworthy for our inability to eradicate it. “It is a self-fulfilling prophecy” (Fisher, 2009, 33)

When Taylor Mac stands on stage, I believe he both acknowledges his shame while being unashamed of it. In doing this he invites his audience to do the same. People have told me, when I have presented my naked, not-thin body in performance, that it made them feel empowered. And while I do possess an easy comfort with myself, I achieve this by ignoring the shame I was taught, rather than acknowledging it. This stretches beyond just my body image, to the use of my voice, or the subject matter of my work. While this technique might come across as brave or powerful to some, others, I’m sure, have been unimpressed, or merely unengaged. Just like our lovers, we can never truly know if our audience is having their mind’s blown or making grocery lists in their heads, and the grocery-listers never stay after the show to tell you about it.

Going forward, I too want to recognize my shame without being ashamed of it. I want to risk losing my shame and invite others to do so too. I will invite my audience into participation through vulnerability, in the hopes of fostering connection and social change.

REFERENCES:

Bishop, C. (ed.) (2006) Participation. London : Cambridge, Mass: Whitechapel ; MIT Press (Documents of contemporary art).

Brown, B. (2012) Listening to shame. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame 

Brown, B. (2010) The Power of Vulnerability. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability 

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist realism: is there no alternative? Winchester: O Books (Zero books).

Pfahler, K., Grayson, K. and Whitney Biennial (2008) Kembra Pfahler: Beautalism. New York, NY: Deitch Projects.

Rancière, J. (2009) Aesthetics and its discontents. English ed. (with minor revisions). Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Taylor Mac by Katherine Cooper - BOMB Magazine (2014). Available at: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/taylor-mac/.

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How can Practice-led Research broaden our Definition of Knowledge

A short summary of two texts - ‘Acquiring Know-How: Research Training for Practice-led Researchers’ by Brad Haseman and Daniel Mafe and ‘Knowledge as Production: a dialogue between Liam Gillick and Lucy Cotter.’

Knowledge is often understood in something that can be demonstrated through writing, images or action. It is also often depicted as a linear process of input and output. However, practice-led research has shed a new light on the path of research and artists involved in practice-led research are bringing a new understanding to both research and knowledge itself. One of the main hurdles of practice-led research, especially in the realm of higher-research degrees, as discussed in ‘Acquiring Know-how’ is that we must find a way of qualifying this new form of research so it may sit more comfortably next to traditional research methods, and be better understood by those not engaged in it. 

Practice-led research is a diverse and possibly limitless field that could dramatically change the research landscape. When practice leads research, it has the power to take us to entirely new and unprecedented research questions and therefore could shape not only the art world but also those of science and philosophy. A practice focused research could be explained as the act of drawing new lines in the relationship between things. It does not take us smoothly from A to B,  but instead exists in the messy grey areas. An amalgamation of unsorted information may/will confront the practice-led researcher, but we must learn that this is vital to this methodology. Unlike traditional research, much more can be discovered by not sorting out this ‘swamp’ but allowing the research to swell inside of it.

Practice-led researchers may also use methods of friction to create research, allowing paths of information to cross and become tangled in an attempt to pull insight from new depths. And it is often the moments of ‘In-action’, as Cotter states, that are crucial to the discoveries of practice-based research. The outcomes of such methods  can be difficult to demonstrate. We continue to run into the problem of how to quantify this research, and the key to this must be a redefinition of knowledge. We must push past the idea that knowledge is something that can always be written, or demonstrated or reviewed. In order to fully grasp the potential of practice-based research we must repurpose conventional tools of research to better suit these new definitions.

Most of the examples and challenges discussed in these texts are in line with my current understanding of practice-led research. Particularly when Haseman and Mafe state that “Practice needs to be understood in its wider sense as all the activity an artist/creative practitioner undertakes. Practitioners think, read and write as well as look, listen and make.” However, I think the full complexities of this field can only be understood in its undertaking. Some of the more abstract notions of what practice-led research is leave me with with a desire to fully experience the process myself, allowing my practice to create my own definition of knowledge. Nonetheless, I believe the essence of what must be understood is that art is not necessarily the product of a thought process, one that we expect to be clearly outlined like that of a traditional research paper. Art is thinking in and of its self. If we can fully grasp this, we will then be able to transform our definition of knowledge.

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Body in Performance - Lecture 2

Concepts, theories, terms and people

Performative/ Constative (Descriptive)

John Austin

Allan Kaprow - Artist who coined the term ‘Happening’ 

Felicity - Happiness, Joy. In the sense of ‘Felicitous statements from Austin: When a performative statement is ‘successful’ 

John Searle - Student of Austin. Tied to explain austins work in the context of fiction and expand on performance.

Gonzalo Diaz

Serious/ Non serious

Adrian Piper - Black Artist

Speech Act

Sol LeWitt - Conceptual and Minimal Artist

Illocution/ Perlocution

Marcel Duchamp

Fiction -  A shared pretense.

Barbara Kruger - 

Parasitic utterance

Bruce Nauman

Infelicitous

Etiolations

Abrogating

Misinvocations

Misapplications

Misexecutions

Exertives -

KANT:

Contative: denoting a speech act or sentence that is a statement declaring something to be the case.

pheme: a word regarded as a grammatical unit in a language," 1906, coined by U.S. philosopher Charles S. Pierce (1839-1914), from Greek pheme "speech, voice, utterance, a speaking," from PIE root *bha- (2) "to speak, tell, say."

rheme: the part of a clause that gives information about the theme.

meme: an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means. (reflexive behaviour

an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variation

nomenclature: the devising or choosing of names for things, especially in a science or other discipline."the Linnean system of zoological nomenclature"

the body or system of names used in a particular specialist field.

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Body in Performance - Lecture 2

Questions

What is the difference between descriptive and performative ? Does this distinction hold?

What is a felicitous and infelicitous performance?

What is the difference between describing and performing, representing and presenting ?

What is the relation between reality and fiction?

So far in your reading, how can you relate to the word performative as coined by Austin to the way it is usually used in your community?

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Body in Performance - Lecture 2

Notes on J.L. Austin’s ‘How to do things with Words’

John Cleese, Dale Bozzio, and a group of penguins walk into a bar....

CLEESE: I insult you!

BOZZIO: You whaaaat?

CLEESE: I insult you.

BOZZIO: with what?

CLEESE: Well with an insult, course. You have been insulted

BOZZIO: But I didn’t hear an insult?

CLEESE: Well certainly you did, because I insulted you?

BOZZIO: (to the penguins) Did you guys hear an insult?

PENGUINS: (not in unison) Insult! Insult! Insult! Insult!

PENGUIN 1: Whad’ya mean, ‘insult’? We’re penguins, we can’t be insulted

BOZZIO: (rolling her eyes) Look mister, You can’t just go around insulting people with out an insult.

CLEESE: But I just did. I clearly Insulted you!

BOZZIO: You can’t have insulted me if I wasn’t insulted. Watch (to the penguins) ‘Hey, you’re all a bunch of slimey flappin’ arse-worms!’

PENGUINS: (not in unison) Worms! WormsFlap! Flap! Arse! Arse!

BOZZIO: An insult only works if the insultee is insulted, and I have not been

CLEESE: Oh, I see..... then, I INSULT YOU!

BOZZIO shakes her head

CLEESE: I’m insulting you....

BOZZIO: You might wanna expand your vocabulary.

STALTER: (Suddenly from the balcony) He couldn’t insult her if he tried, he’s just an actor!

WALDORF: You call that acting?!

CLEESE: But insult is an insult! It’s right there in the word. By saying I insult you, am I not performing and insult?

PENGUIN 2: What a  Bozzio!

Launch into a cover of Blondie’s “Rip her to shreds” by Bozzio and the Penguins.

Performative sentences. Words with which you perform an action. I take this man to be my…, I bet you…. Not words that describe an action you are. But they are all dependent on other factors. None of these things do the action just with words. You have to be the right person, in the right place, maybe sign a document afterwards, have the person you are talking to agree…. I man considering how long he waffles on about it, I’m not sure if it was such a strong theory to begin with: “I am not reporting on it )a marriage), I am indulging in it” Page 6. He seems to be not reporting on a theory but indulging in it.

CAN SAYING MAKE IT SO:

NO! Like what is a marriage. One say ‘I do”, but then a second person must do the same, and you must not already be married, and you must sign a document, and then And then one must enact the marriage. This is a long and durational performance with your souse that might last many years. Words in comparison to the actions required are useless.

“If we never make mistakes than how should we correct them?

Then we have the rules of how to make performative statement. This whole text is obsessed with rules, bogged down with rules, to the point of absurdity. SO yes, rules, for performative statements, could also read like the rules of a performance (i.e. an improv)

A.1 There must exist and accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect that procedure to include the uttering of certain circumstances and further,

A.2. the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate to the invocation of the particular procedure invoked

B.1 The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly

B.2 completely

GAMMA:Where, as often the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts feeling or for the inauguration of certain concequentianal conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feeling and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves and further

GAMMA 2 must actually so conduct themselves subsequently

Then this whole thing about words becoming meaningless when said my in actor, or in the context of a play. You can marry someone in a play, but that does not make you married. Well I think we will have more on this with Derrida, but also, all of an actors statements are performative because, because each statement the actor utters in in the action of acting.

(1) the ship was not thereby named

(2) that it is an infernal shame

PERFORMATIVE STATEMENTS RELY ONE AGREEING ACTIONS OR STATEMENTS.

“The pheme is a unit of language: its typical fault is to be nonsense-meaningless. But the rheme is a unit of speech; its typical fault is to be vague or void or obscure, &c.xx”

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Body in Performance - Lecture 1

Key Words, Themes, Concepts and People

Performance: Being: Doing: Showing Doing: Explaining ‘Showing Doing’

Michel Foucault: Writer, philosopher and Theorist from France. His theories dealt with power and knowledge and how they are used for social control. He wrote the History of Sexuality. He was the first public French figure to die of AIDS (in 1984). Labelled as post-structuralist and post modernist, yet he rejected both terms.

Marina Abramovic - Performance Artist from Serbia making long durational pieces, going to the limits of body and mind. She refers to herself as ‘the grandmother of performance art’. “when you loose conciousness you cannot perform”

Performance Studies

Richard Schechner - Founder of the Performance Studies department at Tisch. Writer of Performance Studies: An Introduction

Cindy Sherman - A photographer working almost entirely with portraiture. Using costumes and make-up to reinvent herself in imaginary cinematic moments. 

Disciplinary Authority

Dwight Conquergood

Jérôme Bel

Practice: to rehearse, revise, repeat. In reference to an Art Practice, it is the way in which ones thoughts, ideas and feels are expressed through art, through a body of art works.

Victor Turner - An anthropologist working with symbols and rituals

La Ribot

Event/Happening: Term coined by Allan Kaprow to describe his 1959 Installation/perofmance 18 happenings in 6 parts. Used to describe art-related events. performance art, situation art, art events etc.

Situation Art: In reference to the Situationist. The creation of situations as performance. Art and Performance related to the politics of the Situationists, mainly marxist socialism.

Erving Goffman

Franko B

Restored Behavior / Twice Behaved Behaviour - physical verbal or virtual actions that are not-for-the-first tim; that are prepared or rehearsed. A person may not be aware that she is performing a strip of restored behaviour.

Philip Auslander

Guillermo Gómez- Peña

Normativity (norm)

Amelia Jones

Guerilla Girls: A group of female artists mostly active in the 80s and 90s, who wore gorilla suits and make art work and performances about the lack a female representation in the art world

Theatre as a Metaphor (metaphor from transportation)

Adrian Heathfield

Ron Athey

Body

Rebecca Schneider - She wrote ‘The Explicit Body in Performance’

Explicit

paradigm: a typical example or pattern of something; a pattern or model.

theatrical paradigm: A play in three acts? Dramatic action: A theater-based paradigm for analyzing human interactions.

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Body in Performance - Lecture 1

Questions:

What is performance? Being: Doing: Showing Doing: Explaining ‘Showing Doing’

broad spectrum or continuum of human behaviour

What are performance studies? to understand how we perform everyday. to understand our response to restored behaviour. How social process have created normativity.

How can the theatrical paradigm explain the social conditions?

What do we mean by the term ‘body’ and how does the body perform?

What is the purpose of Live/body Art (to shock)?

What is the necessity of the explicit body in performance?

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Body in Performance - Lecture 1d

Notes on Pavlos Kountouriotis “Notes on the necessity of the explicit body in performance’

I like the numbered points.

1. “It is in the body that modern society has invested to exercise it’s disciplinary authority” and quite specifically to use this verb ‘exercise’ leads me to diet culture. Hard flat thin bodies seen as clean an acceptable capitalist machines. The internalisation of the phallus. Is the fat body more explicit than the thin? White-supremacist capitalism labels fat bodies as wasteful, lazy, unproductive therefore undesirable. (unuseful. without use)

2. Interesting that répéter is French for rehearse. It is ‘Probe’ from the verb ‘probieren’ (to try) in German. ‘To try’ gives the sense of doing something for the first time even though we know that one  often tries the same thing over and over again, but when we try instead of repeat are we not implying a slight change to improve or better succeed at what we are trying.

3. James Baldwin… something about wearing an identity like desert robes quote.

“Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.”

― James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985

4. Spectator—> witness. And when does the audience become collaborator? I am interested in pain but still question how self-inflicted injury might alienate an audience. As one of my goals is to research collective pain, I need  collaborators rather than witnesses, who through the collaboration will together be liberated of the numbness of ‘capitalist docility’

5. do you want to be watched? do you want to be looked at? or do you want to be seen?

“See” means to notice or become aware of someone or something by using your eyes.

“Look” means to direct your eyes in a particular direction.

“Watch” means to look at someone or something for an amount of time and pay attention to what is happening.

Again in the context of modern technology. Watching something has become almost the opposite of paying attention to something, but rather something that absorbs empty space. Putting on netflix, to have something on while you’re doing something else. Watching a film while looking at instgram. 

Spectators see and witnesses watch???

[pixelsareforsketchbooks]

Body in Performance - Lecture 1c

Notes on Adrian Hatfield - Alive

His style of writing I found the most enjoyable of the texts os far. Personal and poetic and communicating theories intelligently without over complicating. I am taking note of this for my own writing.

I am interested in the scene of live art seemingly in London in the early 2000s, especially as I was there at the time, and was drawn to performance around 2005 (just after the many of the performances he discussed) I wonder how I was subconsciously affected, or what if there was a collective conciseness in that time and space which led us all to investigate our bodies as a means to our art.

ATOMISTIC: composed of many simple elements

or

characterised by or resulting from division into unconnected or antagonistic fragments

I cannot help but divide the texts and my thoughts into pre/post smartphone. “In there hi-tech, spectacle-rich environments of the West, cultural production is now obsessed with liveness”. Imagining this sentence written before instagram and live feeds and live tweets seems nearly impossible. And now during corona when our experience of live art is almost entirely through tech “Visual Art’s shift towards immediacy and interactivity offers a reflective space through which to interrogate these cultural dynamics.”

[pixelsareforsketchbooks]

Body in Performance - Lecture 1b

Notes on Amelia Jones “Body Art: Performing the Subject”

Initial thoughts… well she makes some points but might be a bit alienating in her delivery.

Phenomonolgy/phemonialogical - Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. 

(seriously how many times did I have to look up that definition while reading this)

Cartesean -  I think therefore I am. Ego defining our sense of self. This is how we know we exist. Making ourselves the subject. The personal is political.

I like her specificity in defining body art. I particularly like her comparison to self portraiture and her example of Jackson Pollock. Jackson pollock being the hinge between formalism and post-formalism.

Formalism: art that has a form. painting/sculpture as opposed to performance, which is without definite form.

Interesting to contextualise Carolee Schneeman as a pre-feminist artist. While I have always seen Schneeman is a seminal feminist performance art figure, I had never given so much thought to the fact that she was creating these works many years before a cohesive women’s liberation movement.

Also Interesting to give more context to Kusama and her work in the 60s and 70s. I find that now she and her work are so highly revered it is hard to imagine her work being controversial, but of course it was.

Photo of Kusama’s peep-show

Self-Portrait in The Lusty Lady Peep Show

Kusama’s Peep Show makes me think of the toilets in the MONA (Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Australia) where you can watch yourself shit through a series of mirrors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh-RfF3cIDc

And once again, this all relates to online identities, and online performances. We are in a perpetual performance, and now forever documenting it. Creating a durational self-portrait. Constantly reiterating our personal brand. Creating a cohesive story in which we are the subject.

DEFINE POSTSTRUCTURALISM. Is it related to formalism? And post-formalist? Body art being post-formalist?

Perhaps the best way I can relate Post-structuralism to my own experience is that it is the same feeling I get when I have to send mood boards to clients. I become frustrated before the process even begins because I will send a set of images, but I know they will never perceive these images as I do. They will never pick out the same things that I pick out, which, especially when striving for  an overall feeling or mood can become extremely distorted. And even when using language to explain the things I see in the pictures, there is still a huge gap in communication. I am then left with our the tools to accurately communicate my ideas, which is problematic when trying to collaborate.

This relation to the body and body art and feminism, it all strikes me as rather dualist/binary. We get away from the modern artist ideal detached male. Male being associated with rationality, culture and intellect, and we create body art instead…. This still holds all of the trapping of patriarchal dualism. Women being associated with the natural body, the emotive etc etc. She discuss the ‘hinge’ the body being the hinge between culture and nature, but I feel like I want an entirely different option that smacks these binaries into 5 million pieces.

[pixelsareforsketchbooks]

Body in Performance - Lecture 1a

Notes on part 1 or Performance Studies by Richard Schechner

Why does one write a textbook? How does one begin? In the text there is flow through personal details a simple overview. It is broad an focused at the same time. Made me feel overly self aware. How do I perform for myself through reflexive performance? How can I stop? Made me think of genetic histories and traumas. My mother just recommended ‘It didn’t start with you’  about all the things we never thought of being genetically inherited, including trauma. It’s definitely an idea I am familiar with. Another recent book recommendation was ‘The Body Keeps the score’ , which i believe is more about how trauma affects the physical body. But this bring me to the age old debate between nature and nurture, which the pendulum constantly swings. Do I walk like my mother because we share genetics or because she taught me how to walk??How do I stop walking like myself? I was fucking an actor once. Afterwards in bed he told me the hardest thing for an actor to do was to change the way they walked, and if you could truly find a new walk, then you had successfully created a new character. And I wondered if the same was true for fucking. Did I genetically inherit the way I fuck or is it a learned behaviour. Do I fuck like my mother? Our parents (hopefully) do not teach us how to fuck. I don’t think I will ever know if there is genetics involved in the way I fuck or if it is reflexive behaviour. I do know that it is always a performance - for myself and my partner(s). 

Walking down a trail on an island in Greece, I notice how I perform for the people we pass. I must always be cute. I cannot help myself. I think a lot these days about one’s personal brand, which encompasses all sorts of preferences, attitudes. Going on a hike is quite off-brand for me. In order to keep it so… to keep myself sellable to myself and the people around me, I do it in bright pink shorts and make sure I am cute walking down the trail. I hold my hat and step daintily into the shallow waters, my wholly impractical sandals swinging from my fingertips.

[danismm]

Lanvin 60’s Space Age outfit via wearable art

[cuncupiscence]

[urbanmessss-blog]

Varvara Stepanova

[blushingcheekymonkey]

varvara stepanova (1922)

[aqqindex]

Varvara Stepanova, Costume Study, 1922