The Tanks, Art in Action Festival Summer 2012. Tate Modern

Performance Year Zero- Preserving Performance?

This two day conference at Tate Modern was meant to draw to a close the first programme in the first dedicated performance or time-based media art space in Tate’s History. It was meant to be an analysis of strategies for showing, collecting and preserving art in the Institution, the museum. However, the institution and the museum are two quite different beasts. The former associated with certification and confirmation of being part of something with one shared or common identity, the latter with history, the past, and preservation.  They have things in common too, narrative formation and display or narrative formation through display. Yet all these things rub against the characterisation of The Tanks as a space for innovation, for showing works which are not usually shown in the spaces of the museum and institution. Whilst the objectives of The Tanks maybe a consideration of preservation or giving visibility to artworks previously excluded, the programme sought to bring dance and choreography up against social art work, installation, video and performative lectures and thus bring diverse works together into a kind of interdisciplinary clash or crash, disrupting narrative and discouraging any potential 'cannon'.

Consequently the Art in Action festival seemed to do something daring and in a way noble; innovative in dedicating a programme to performative works that also sought to engage with those related histories. A strategy which took into account the strange museo-gallery status Tate Modern holds. However, the task seemed too hard to control, the theoretical position admirable but in no way matched by the artworks displayed and the discussions programmed.  Those questions remained unanswered and only tangentially addressed through some artists and curators working in this field. At times Performance Year Zero seemed to descend into what I imagine a Tate-Modern-curatorial-team meeting would be like, the discussion barely parted ways with the projects Tate had/were undertaking and the artists they had/ were going to work with. At the very least it was a grand display in networking and the very most a view into the diversity of Tate Modern’s practice not always visible in the gallery or on the website.

The eighteen week festival as a whole and the two-day conference as a part  felt more like an exercise, a practice-run for something in the future, a private discussion made public. It was too much about TATE. This is particularly grating when the art work under consideration is often disassociated from the museum and the institution (although it may use it as a frame). When an artwork is temporary (a live performance) or time-based (a video) its non-objecthood is important when it is an installation it is the ability to create a setting beyond four-white walls which is important. Just excavating those four white walls into one continuous concrete curve does not constitute mould-breaking change. The dramatic quality of The Tanks creates a very visible back-drop which considerably impacts on the work. It is a still a space for display and unlike the Turbine Hall which also functions as a space to enter and exit the gallery, to sit down and to talk it is a space which people choose to enter when they want to see Art. They will not sit down and casually experience Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt they way they did Tino Seghal’s piece which is a particular shame when her time-lapse video on the shopping mall resonates so much with the busy hum of the gallery space.

Despite its problems as a whole, The Tanks fifteen week festival did foster the display of some great pieces and allowed for a new and different type of artist to enter the gallery space. It certainly created some impressive, emotive and thought-provoking moments and has brought Suzanne Lacy’s work to a new audience. Perhaps the problem is in the rhetoric of the programme, everything so very self-reflexive, everything considered another level of performativity; every word carefully chosen, questions carefully asked. Tate has a lot of responsibility, the curatorial team a lot a pressure to meet certain expectations at times this strain seemed to come through. Performance art is tricky to pin down, purposefully difficult, that is why it is productive Tate’s attempts to sanitise it makes the work seem awkward and unwieldy but this kind of work is meant to step on the audience’s toes, an idea which rubs against the ethos of museums and institutions in the service economy. 

James Pockson

In a small corner of Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club a plywood board obtrudes from the wall. Its pale, wood-chipped texture is distinctly at odds with the smooth varnished wooden panels which covers the permanent wall. As I walk into the room the panel gradually reveals a staircase- also in plywood- seemingly leading nowhere. Perhaps this is just a construction to facilitate a performance which is going to happen later in the evening? It is strangely alone and isolated as bodies rush past, avoiding this strange precariously new structure. Only later, when said performance is getting into its 25^th minute do I glance around the room, upto the suspended ceiling tiles do I notice that one is mis-placed. This mis-placed tile is above the staircase. I approach it and ascend carefully, wiling to stop at the interruption of an invigilator but when I reach the top, and look through the gap, do I see a vast, domed ceiling from which the tiles are suspended.

This work by architect James Pockson is part of collective 20//20’s occupation of Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, yet of all the works, this seems to be the strongest intervention in the space. This work is not simply laid over the fabric of the building but physically interfering with it. By removing a layer of the building’s skin, the work entices a new dialogue in the space; it creates a deeper and more complicated understanding of a building which has seemed to achieve a harmony between working man’s social club and young creatives’ venue. The work exposes a history which it does not explain; it sets off the imagination and allows a past to co-exist with the present.

This work is one of a number of recent works which take temporality ad historic narratives as their themes. From re-enactment of historic events (Jeremy Deller and Anri Sala) and artworks (Once More With Feeling Orianna Fox) to the layering of historic and futuristic narratives onto spaces, for example last year’s Turner Prize winner, Susan Phillpsz or her contender the Otolith Group. Each of these works, in their very different ways, shift focus onto the present moment by their revision to the past and future. Pockson’s work at BGWMC refrains from a specific narrative as Phillipsz’ or Deller’s work does, it engages with physical ruin rather than that of memory of political ideas. His revelation of physical layers reminds of the traces of history which remain invisible around us yet which speak of histories which we can directly relate too. The work does not extol the virtues of preservation or retro-mania, which the BGWMC certainly profits from, it subtly comments on the vacuity of appearances by allowing the viewer to discover this secret glory in their own time.

An intern's perspective OMA/ Progress

I have been busy working, or should say interning, at the Barbican Art Gallery over the summer. I have been working on the OMA/ Progress show which will open on 6th October. The exhibition will focus on the work of Dutch architecture firm OMA (formerly known as the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) and is guest-curated by Rotor, a design collective from Belgium. OMA, perhaps one of the most famous practitioners of post-modern architecture, will be seen through the eyes of this group of young designers, whose interest is in the use and re-use of materials. Its a very busy time in the exhibition preparation; and an intern rarely gets asked what they think of the entire concept of an exhibition, but I wanted to put some thoughts down and share them with you.

In this collaboration, it seems that the traits of post-modern practice- samplings and sections from different styles amalgamated- find their temporality again in the combination of newly-made and degraded materials. Whereas classical objects and un-plastered walls could sit together in OMA's design for the Hermitage; questioning ideas of preservation and age, in Rotor's practice, objects and materials exist in the present. Different items sit together, occupying the same space and time to speak their own history: hence they have named the concept of the show 'a field of exhibits', in which every item shown is an object, no matter its dimensional quality. However, this should not simply be seen as a college of multiple parts but a texture to be explored. The architectural models, that feature in the exhibition, have (as conservation has allowed) been left as they were found in the archive, with flagging materials and missing parts. Consequently, this is not a history of the buildings but of the practice as a whole, with its founding partner Rem Koolhaas at the centre, acting as a kind of gravitational pull.

It will be an interesting exhibition, like many at the Barbican, for its mode of curation and display. It will challenge what a museum can do; and what should be presented in it. It will question the whole spatial and temporal mode of an exhibition and consequently how objects can and should be viewed. It is an exhibition and a test of perception.

http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12472

I must apologise....

for my extreme delay in writing anything on this blog. Perhaps following Daphne de Maurier I have been too content to write (for her, writing was like an affliction which ran concurrently with the sadder moments of her life (see previous post)). Never fear, though, turbulence has returned to my existence; both personally- the thud to reality, finding a job and learning to live- and nationally- the riots which have sprung up in London and, as I write, Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and Liverpool.

Again, never fear, this blog will try not to turn into self-indulgent moaning about the lack of jobs (there are plenty, there are just plenty of other people) and neither will it attempt to explain rioting or condemn it- how can we adequately comment on these events at this proximity to them? Rather, this blog will maintain its original function as a space to think and write things down. I hope any readers will also comment or e-mail me with provocations, replies etc.

This post serves as a re-introduction and if I don't live up to to its claims feel free to ballast me with comments below.

Collectivity, Art and Activism: a beginning

So after another essay, an exam and a trip to New York I return enriched and culturally saturated. My increased freedom post-New York has allowed time for more exhibitions in London and having visited Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern, Susan Hiller at Tate Britain, British Art Show 7 at the Hayward as well as Modern British Sculpture at the RA my quota of block-busters is full to the brim, and my wallet empty. Even with student concession (and a boyfriend with a Tate staff card) the entry fee to these exhibitions is steep, with Susan the most pricey at £12. I am not going to launch into a scathing rant about this but I think it is a point worth making especially in consideration of my current area of research; expanded art practices.

Since Joseph Kosuth's 'MoMA Annual Pass', a forged replica of the MoMA entry card, stamped with an official-looking Art Worker's Coalition logo, institutional critique has been at the fore front of activist-art practice. The Art Worker's Coalition (AWC) set-up in 1969 began with an open meeting in which artists, writers, critics, museum-employers (anybody who worked in the arts sector) was invited to go along an air their grievances. There was little consensus and to give a short history the group had dissolved in alternative, varied activist practices by 1971. (For a more complete history see Francis Frascina's 'Art Politics and Dissent'). However Kosuth's work, in all its conceptual brilliance parallels a very current predicament. The increasing prices of institutions' 'special exhibitions' in London and the general admission fee in American museums are creating specific social groups of viewers. Ok, so admission fees are not extortionate and necessary, in the current situation of arts funding, but the worrying corollary of this pressured situation is an increase in fees beyond the affordable. Ironically the threat is most evident for those trying to get into the art sector struggling on a part-time wage in the capital to support unpaid internships.

Although Kosuth's card has passed into the institution that it sought to critique, the AWC's brand of collectivity is becoming a model for new art practice. The expanded art practices I cite as my current area of research include collectivity, along with activist art, relational aesthetics, social art and littoral art. These methods of working, outside the institution, interacting in the everyday find their precedent even further back than the AWC, in the Art Worker's Guild and in the Women's Suffrage (although the model is in reverse; politics infringes on art through iconoclasm). The dynamics of interaction between the ever-separated models of art and politics, autonomy and heteronomy, aesthetics and ethics is fought out in these groups. The model of group practice, unlike Kosuth's card, will not be folded down into the museum and although we may register the limits of success of certain groups the resilience of the group, of the collective is surely important.

Looking and seeing

So I'm back in essay mode and this time the topic is Jacques Ranciere's essay 'The Intolerable Image'. Ranciere asks what makes an image intolerable? Is it the content? Or the conclusions drawn from that content by an implictaed viewer? His essay concentrates on war photography and mainly examples of the representation of war in art work. From Martha Rosler's violent juxtaposition of Vietnamese victims in pristine American homes to Alfredo Jaar's object approach to showing and concealing. His essay deals with the problem of representing through the medium of photography. Rolling out the old dialogue, on the one hand the photograph is a direct imprint of reality on the other an always-composed snippet of one distinct viewpoint removed from any kind of reality. My summing up will be left there (the essay isn't written yet!)

My tutor suggested I look to the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial which was entitled Memory of Fire; War Images and Images of War in which (another tutor) Julian Stallabrass curated 8 sites on the South coast along the theme of war images. The exhibitions were diverse and multiplicitous, a gesture which Stallabrass hoped would lead to more clarity, no doubt through questions proposed rather than answers given. Reviews describe the breadth of exhibition; the positivity of showing images from sides, the inclusion of media from photojournalism, amateur and anonymous photography and art works, the time-span from World War 2, to Vietnam and Iraq. Yet they also tiptoe around the precarious subject of content. Should images of war be put on display in an exhibition?

Ok so back to Ranciere to answer that question? I'll argue that in my essay. Right now it has made me question exhibtions in general. How do we look, when we visit exhibitions. What are we looking for? Do we go with open eyes? Or those loaded with expectation? Unanswerable questions. But it begs the question, especially with the rise of the big institutions such as Tate, should art exhibitions be relegated to realm of leisure activity? Should we go looking at war photography on a Sunday afternoon for pleasure? No and this is not imply that art can or should not be enjoyed or that it requires immense thought and critical analysis but when faced with the photograph of a face blown apart on the fields of Somme, the question becomes pertinent.

In this year (or three) or government cuts to the arts we must rescue our instutions and museums from being solely leisure facilities dependent on visitor numbers into interrogative and challenging, educational and economical places. These images must have space to be shown outside the context of the media circus in order for questions of viewing and representation to be asked. We have to be brave enough to face upto these images yet also to realise when an image is one too far (as Stallabrass and photographer Simon Norfolk did in one of the Biennials exhibitions), a good exhibition, like that in 2008, should allow us to do so.

Link to 2008 biennial website:
http://2008.bpb.org.uk/2008/

Image: Simon Norfolk

Photographic triangualtions: need help in understanding

The photograph and reproducibility is perhaps the medium of the postmodernism. To take a photograph is to freeze reality in an image, cut it out and seal it off.

postmodern because it is a work which can never be fully autonomous. It breaks down the possibility of the original. Douglas Crimp comments on this as plurality. Not a 'pluralism of originals' but plurality. As such no concrete origin can ever be located, no single moment, even though the photograph is supposed to capture a single moment for duration.

What about when a photograph lies, when it is doctored, when it is altered in post-production. Then is it art?

What about typological photography? Reducing taking pictures to a constant process which reveals difference or sameness, presence or absence, the extraordinary or the banal? Then is it art?

What about the photographic object? Then is it art?

Photographic presence, is a ghostly absence- is that the postmodern art experience- the emptying out of the image and filling up of potentiality without didacticism but subjective possibility.

These are questions... please help me answer them....

They are triangualting in my mind

Future?

I've been thinking alot about the future. Firstly through my writing; currently an essay on Turner Prize nominees The Otolith Group. The future in this essay is a hypothetical one, one that is always in the future, always just beyond our reach. Yet in a complicated turn this is a hypothetical future brought to bear on the present. Cool. Secondly a future, less hypothetical, my own. Less cool.

The Otolith trilogy is really quite inspirational, quoting, appropriating, mixing a culture which doesn't fit or doesn't quite work into one that does. A future in which images are not consumed dumb but thought about, chewed over and spat out.

The future, my future, could follow in these positive footsteps. Yet the work of the Otolith Group is in response to their unhappiness in the present moment of each film's production. Kodwo Eshun talks about the difficulty of bringing an image into a world already over-saturated; it seems that his reasoning for creation is only within a climate of need, of want, of desperation. Creation is positive in response to a dirth.

(Creation or production? A question for another time.)

So in these times of economic strife, where it seems unlikely that my future will be anything but plain sailing I feel a little bit excited. Opportunities for creation and individuality spring up when the big institutions come under pressure. People have to go elsewhere, either they create in new and exciting ways propelling the bounds and casting them aside in order to exist or they drift into another place and forget. I see neither as a negative option.

Lets hope for creativity, more ambitious writing, more interesting exhibitions which occupy the empty space created by this cultural, social and economic dirth.

See 'hither and thither' on tether television for curator's testimonies from artist-led spaces across the country.

So what happens when you have your first 4,000 word essay due for your v. expensive and renowned MA course?

Obviously, you think of a topic, plan it, write it. Hopefully (and especially if you get non-work guilt like 24/7 heartattacks) with plenty of time to spare.

Forget it, if you are writing on contemporary art.

Is it on show in London? No. Can you see it elsewhere? No. Can you write about it? No. Damn.

Annoying as this is, it also leads to some prominent questions; How do we write about a discourse which is very much still in full swing? How does chance form what we write about? How, in an environment of art over-stimulation does something stick in your mind? What if I don't want to write about something with no images? (-2 marks for bad presentation I'm afraid).

What if we do not want to write about work in institutions (ie work's already chosen to be enveloped into the canon or put up for sale), does that mean writing outside the institution cannot be done- but then are we writing an art history or an institution history?

This can surely only get worse with cuts to the arts which will reduce exhibition budgets and money for the proper archiving and making available of mixed-media and performance based artworks. These are sad times.

Wish me luck for the essay...

Marina Abramovic at the Lisson Gallery

Abramovic is one of the most famous female artists of the 21st century. Her performances from the 1970s and 80s are famous for their extremity. In 'Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful' a work foundational to the women's activist art of the 1970s, Abramovic brushes and combs her own hair with varying degrees of violence whilst chanting the title of the piece. At one point she pulls in different directions quickly, catching and knotting her hair, her declarations quickening in pace and anger. This work, which connotes on a number of levels, questions the nature of beauty in art, the woman in art and the woman artist. Making herself the subject she interrogates the position of the woman's body to be perfected, what happens when it is not the man performing this action but the woman herself, when she takes the role of artist. As such does the woman artist have to violate herself to place the woman as the centre of the artwork?

This work features in the Lisson Gallery's exhibition of Abramovic's work. Split across two sites the exhibition includes the complete collection of Rhythm works (10, 5, 2, 0, 4) along with works with Ulay in the main gallery and the more recent 'Back to Simplicity' series in the second space.

This splitting was interesting; from the angry, emotive and disturbing work in the first space to the large scale photographs, films with similar photographic stillness and marble pillows for visitors to line-up their 'sex, heart and head', there was a definite shift. A case of maturity and maturing work perhaps? The press release would agree suggesting the work illustrates Abramovic's desire for a simpler life. However it is not the specific meaning of the piece that really struck me, but the difference, the shift from historicised feminist-activist work to those high resolution images of Abramovic holding a lamb as if it were a baby or lying still, dressed in white underneath an incredibly mythic looking tree. Shocking maybe not, but definitely bambooziling. No bodies on the verge of mutilation, no pushing the limits of the artist making artwork beyond consciousness just concentration, animals and lush natural settings.

There could be suggestion of the woman and nature, a redefinition of what it means to reengage with the living planet after one has tested the body and the definitions placed upon (gender, profession, etc). This seems to be a conclusion too easy to draw and it is the uncomfortability of making this or any certain definition which is provocative. The difference between the works resonates between the two settings as if splitting work that is labelled contemporary into two; the near-past and the too-near-present/future. Seeing either space alone would not be as affective as seeing the two combined-at distance, the works play off each other, jarring temporalities and contexts, juxtaposing the smooth, youthful face of anger and activity with the older face of passive wisdom. This interplay between sites and works marks the strength of the exhibition, no matter what other conclusions maybe drawn.