Awkwardness and the power of performance art
For 17 years the Visualeyez festival has provided space for performance artists to craft and present performances in spaces we may not be used to as observers. Just as the act of performance art itself challenges cultural norms, Visualeyez has focused in on a theme that questions our contemporary life. As we looked back at the first Visualeyez the themes of surveillance, voyeurism and the boundaries between our personal and private lives emerged as the themes in the early 2000s. This year the festival focuses on the idea of awkwardness.
Curator Todd Janes writes that as technology has permeated our interactions, they have become highly codified.
“If we were to suddenly remove societal perceptions and norms of behaviour then we could examine if there is such a thing as suitable societal interactions. If not then there might not be such a thing as awkwardness.”
From its beginnings in the Dada movement, performance art questioned the place of the artist, and the observer. Poetry began to be performed in unconventional ways. Paintings were brought to life in the 40s and 50s by way of performance work called Action Painting. These roots in abstract thought allows for boundaries to be questioned and broken. Performance art can remove these barriers, question them and place the participant at the heart of interaction.
“The awkward chance possibilities of everyday life are part of what makes performance art such an immediate and palpable form,” says Dr. Natalie Loveless, a professor of the history of art, design and visual culture at the University of Alberta.
“Performance art, at its best, and in every single one of its forms, as far as I am concerned, is not autonomous. It works with the chance elements that emerge in the encounter.”
We spoke to Loveless about performance art and the connections to this year’s theme of awkwardness.
L53: How does our theme of awkwardness lend itself specifically to the medium of performance art? Is there an element of awkwardness inherent to the practice of performance art even if the work is not centred around the theme of awkwardness?
L: The fact that real life and real bodies are often awkward and unruly is a link to this year’s theme. In the performance art modalities that I privilege (body art, Fluxus, social practice, relational and dialogic art, activist intervention and new genre public art, action art and installaction, daily practice, endurance and duration art, to name a few), the action and the body has an obligation to be true to the “reality” of the action or exchange — it is not rehearsed or staged. It is never about pretend. Jeff Huckleberry is not pretending to push through masonite walls, he sets up the parameters for the action, and then, with the audience as witness, follows through on that action (“THICKv1,” 2007). What happens happens, and is allowed to happen. The awkward chance possibilities of everyday life are part of what makes performance art such an immediate and palpable form.
**L53: **How does performance art inform viewers in a different way than other media?
L: Two of the key factors distinguishing (broadly speaking) performance art from, say, experimental theater is that the body is taken as a tool or material in the work, and whatever is happening is really happening. The immediacy and “reality” of performance art implicates, and thereby informs, the viewer by making them complicit in something really happening: a body bleeding or enduring something over a long period of time or otherwise being put “on the line”. As a viewer-participant you are invited to be accountable not to a representation (painterly, sculpturally, or through video) of something, but to something real, happening in real time, right before you. There is a level of material, physical, immediacy, that is specific to performance and communicates things differently.
L53: How does the ephemerality of performance art change how it is interpreted?
**L: **That is a good, and hotly debated, question. Matter of fact, one of my students, Michael Woolley, (this year’s Visualeyez animator) just defended his master’s thesis on this topic! Peggy Phelan, the performance studies scholar, famously wrote that “performance only life is in the present.” Performance Art historian Amelia Jones then countered Phelan, writing about experiencing performance art through documentation, and suggesting that while there is something specific to the presence of the live act, there is also something valuable and specific to the encounter with the representative documentation of that live act. No encounter, Jones counters, is “unmediated” — they are just mediated differently.
I agree with Jones, but these days I find myself really valuing the live, sensorially attuned encounter, and performance art as a site of resistance to life as configured under the speedy “productive” sign of neoliberal capitalism (my new project, Sensing the Anthopocene is all about this — performance modalities that s l o w u s d o w n and attune us differently within our local ecologies). While this doesn’t answer your question at the level of interpretation, it does say a little bit about why ephemerality matters.
L53: Do you have any particular memories of the Visualeyez performance art festival?
**L: **Two performances come to mind, both from the year before last (2015): Luciana D’anunciação’s “The Sound Between” and Rachel Echenberg’s “Nine, Five, and Three.” D’anunciação’s was a responsive and electric (in all senses of the word) sound performance. Echenberg’s was a participatory work that involved groups of people, together, blowing up large-scale balloon structures in publics spaces. I think these two come to mind because my experience of both was of being implicated (made to matter) within the performance actions and because they invited me to attend to the texture and moments and sounds and breaths and breezes of everyday life in a way that still resonates. Each of these performances attuned me aesthetically, and created a space of shared experience where we were not an audience looking at an artist, but rather where the artist created a situation through we we could all co-experience time, organized by simple, refined, orienting, and very material actions.
Visualeyez 2017 runs September 26 - October 1. Find more information, schedule and updates at visualeyez.org.