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.