Researching

AUTHOR:
Nicola Trezzi
TITLE:
PERFORMING ROLES: CATHERINE WOOD
SOURCE:
Flash Art (International Edition) 41 42 N/D 2008
COPYRIGHT:
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.
    Catherine Wood is curator of contemporary art/performance at Tate. Flash Art spoke to her about the current state of performance and its relationship to various projects in the museum.
    Nicola Trezzi: Let's talk about the resurrection of performance. Why has the interest in this practice been increasing over the past 5 to 6years?
    Catherine Wood: I think in the '90s artists such as Matthew Barney and Vanessa Beecroft renewed this interest by including the performing body and mass choreographies as new kinds of picture-making. Around the beginning of the 2000s there was a lot of interest in performance in London, like Mark Leckey and Ed Laliq's donAtella music performance in Brixton and Spartacus Chetwynd's low-fi remakes of films such as The Wicker Man or her group performance of Thriller that erupted in the midst of Seb Patane's Nerd club night in Hoxton.
    NT: Your title is "curator of contemporary art/performance at Tak," could you explain your role? CW In 2001, my job grew out of a one-year sponsorship for a live program across both London Tates. The sponsor was keen on high profile events with well known musicians, but I was also interested to give a platform to the exciting new work that was happening in artist-run or temporary spaces. I programmed work by David Thorpe, hobby-popmuseum and others. It was incredible witnessing Leckey's Big Box Statue Action in the classical Octagon gallery at Tate Britain or Amorales's wrestling match that transformed the Turbine Hall into an arena with 2000 people. Then I have established a regular live program at Tate and research certain acquisitions for the collection. We have kept 'performance' in the title because it helps to know who's the main point of contact for a particular historic specialism. I have always fought for work by visual artists who also make performance work, rather than championing 'the performing arts.'
    NT: Could "The World as a Stage" (co-curated with Jessica Morgan) be considered an advanced version of 'Relational Aesthetics' with a little bit of Big Brother, Wagner's total theater, all mixed with the ever more enlarged participation of visitors in art events, like fairs, biennials etc.?
    CW: That puts it pretty well! All of those things were touched upon in our discussions. We were interested in bringing together artists who approached ideas of 'theatricality' or performance but not too literally. As far as situating the work in the show vis à vis 'relational aesthetics,' we were interested in a more formal, pictorial notion of 'theatre' than the open-endedness that those works implied.
    NT: Who are the first five artists who come to your mind when you think about performance? CW: Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas, Otto Muehl, Guy de Cointet, Jeff Koons.
    NT: What do you think about Kippenberger as a performer? The artist anticipated the recent collapse of the barrier between art and entertainment. Is there any connection with today's state of performance?
    CW: Kippenberger is of course a perfect example of the artist who engages a 'performative' attitude in the whole of his practice, playing the role of the artist as a star. He looked at his artistic predecessors such as Picasso and Beuys and at their cultivation of 'genius' personae and saw that our time could no longer believe in that myth in the same way, so he staged a brilliant game with the media playing on those notions, understanding that the artist was as much the work as any objects he produced. I'm collaborating on a Tate exhibition that deals expressly with this theme, drawing on the legacy of Andy Warhol's business art activities, with Jack Bankowsky and Alison Gingeras.
    NT: Speaking of Koons and Kippenberger, do you consider these two artists in the legacy of Warhol and Beuys's double-edged western attitude towards participation and mass culture?
    CW: Koons has taken his inhabitation of a persona to such an extreme that it is almost impossible to unpick any idea of authenticity from the image of himself. Beuys engaged in a similar fascination with mass multiples and populism, perhaps the materials he used put him outside of the 'pop' camp and thus outside of the idea that his persona was artificial and constructed. Kippenberger explicitly played on his own awareness of this, so they're different, but I think Beuys is an important artist to bring into this discussion.
    NT: What issues must a museum take into consideration as it engages in the preservation of performance-based works?
    CW: Our acquisition of Tino Sehgal's This is Propaganda (2002) was an intriguing process (although he expressly terms his works 'situations' rather than performances). Sehgal does not allow for any written documentation, transcription or photography of his work, and so the entire event was conducted as a verbal contract, recited and witnessed by our director and head of acquisitons, his gallerist, our respective lawyers. Jessica Morgan and I are now official 'keepers' of the instructions of this piece within the institution. If we leave Tate, the idea is that we would teach it to our successors.
    NT: What are your upcoming projects?
    CW: In November we present a new work by Sturtevant, as well as showing previously unseen performances. The new wing of the museum called Tate Modern phase Two will also open up new possibilities for live or cross-disciplinary work when this opens in 2012.
ADDED MATERIAL
Tate Modern redevelopment. Tate Modern south-em oil tank. Courtesy Tate Media, London.







Next to Performance
AUTHOR:
Marie de Brugcrolle
TITLE:
NEXT TO PERFORMANCE
SOURCE:
Flash Art (International Edition) 40 88-90 N/D 2007
COPYRIGHT:
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.
    IN A RECENT CONVERSATION, the French dancer and choreographer Jérôme Bel articulated a distinction between the 'fine am artist,' or 'visual artist,' and the dancer or actor dramaturgy, that is, time-based work. What trace of dance still remains in the museum? The spectator's body penetrated by the choreographer, Jérôme Bel's headphones or the insistent regard of Tino Sehgal's stripteasers.
    Here I would like to discuss what develops, now at the beginning of the 21 st century, after the action, from performance props, from today's objects, and how they are to be considered.
    What should be done with what's left over? What is the status of objects after a happening, event action or performance? Do they take on a new status, and if so, what? How should one present these objects? Like separate, consummate works? Like documents, fetishes, leftovers. indices? With these questions in mind I'll address the work of ten artists who are establishing a new set of stakes.
THE ARTIST'S BODY
    For Mike Kelley, artistic experience is created through an interaction with an object or a film. This process, both of identification and detachment, approaches the disquieting eeriness developed in his catalogue essay "Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny" (1993), which accompanied his exhibition "The Uncanny."(FN1) He notes the powerful role played by certain objects -- notably mannequins and fetish dolls, their scale changes in particular -- in the shift from the real to the symbolic. "I didn't keep any of the residue, or document those works... Without me, it was no longer a sculpture," he said.
    One should note that it is the artist's body that transforms the ensemble of actions and objects into sculpture.
    A work lasts only so long as the artist, objects and spectators share a space. The same is true a priori for a detachment from representation in the theatrical illusion of a common present. And yet Vito Acconci's gesture in 1973, at Galleria Schema in Florence, Italy, when he violently pushed a young woman in the audience, demonstrated that the boundary, however tacit, between the stage and the public still persists (Ballroom). Al this point, wouldn't the real stakes of performance today be in objects rather than in a pseudo-interaction with the public?
    The artist's body is a sculptural vector for Mike Kelley, as well as for Bas Jan Ader and Wolfgang Stoerchle, two European artists who were working in Los Angeles in the '60s and '70s.
    These artists all use language, sound and movement like materials for stage scenery.
    Bas Jan Ader's work reveals an aesthetic in which the disappearance of the body transforms objects into remnants. "He shared a common territory with Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, who likewise used performance to 'write' verbal formulae with their bodies. By 1973, he had moved on to combine performance and inscription in more indirect ways. In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles), completed in 1973, documents a dusk-to-dawn journey, undertaken by the artist on foot, from an inland valley in Southern California to the sea."(FN2) Adopting California clichés as European imagery -- urban drift, peregrinations, sunset -- Bas Jan Ader subtitled his piece with excerpts from pop songs. In another piece, he arranged all his clothes on the roof of a house (All My Clothes, 1970), like the sloughed off skins of an absent body. Fatalistic premonition? In any case, his last piece, the now mythic In Search of The Miraculous (1975), would have been the final chapter of a three-part work, before finishing with an exhibition at the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands. Bas Jan Ader decided to cross the Atlantic alone in a sailboat and disappeared definitively.
    In 2006, Julien Bismuth (Paris, 1973) and Jean-Pascal Flavien (Le Mans, France, 1971) created Plouf! off the coast of Brazil. The two artists board a sailboat and simulate a shipwreck. As the boat goes under, they wave colored flags as distress signals. The text in itself is a series of fragmented stories, interrupted or scrambled by others (as often happens to messages at sea), interspersed with phrases pulled from nautical manuals ("I am drifting... The way is of my ship...").
    At the end of the performance, only three things remain: the images, the flags and the text. The text and the flags depend upon each other in order to make sense. The flags clarify certain parts of the text, just as the text explains the presence of the flags.
    Semaphore becomes colorful sequences or animated tableaux. The quotation and the détournement proceed from the displacement, or the translation, of one dimension into another. The same goes for a return to the symbolic through the prop, with a light-hearted awareness of the history of performance. Detachment sidesteps any simplistic fetishizing in the work of Catherine Sullivan, such as in her 2004 reprisal of the 1964 Fluxus Festival in Aix-ia-Chapelle (Aachen, Germany) in Tis a Pity She's a Fluxus Whore (2002), premiered at the 7th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2003, or in 2004. when she x-rayed the Fluxus collection of the Musée d'An Contemporain de Lyon.
    These two examples show how emphatically these questions of re-interpretation -- and thus of the transfer of isolated, heroic gestures into a repertory, like in theater -- are posed.
THE YOUNG SCENE: MATERIALS AND SETTINGS
    For the youngest artists, who never attended the events themselves, the history of performance is transmitted through photographs and books. This raises the question of the authority to commit shameless reprises and to produce new interpretations. How can a work such as this be transmitted? In the case of Guy de Cointet (1934-1983), the artist left a repertory of twenty works. In his oeuvre, the status of objects is determined: they are sculptures before and after the performance. They become accessories, texts or characters during the action, but may be exhibited independently afterward. In his theatrical performances, language is hypostatized in color-coded objects, the same as in his drawings, where the network of lines reveals a narrative. Drawing inspiration from "soap operas" and their rhythmic interruptions of commercials and ready-made images, he directly incorporates snippets of overheard conversations and excerpts from life in his dialogues. These "props," as well as his drawings, compose a narrative only revealed in fragments,
    In Tell Me (1979), A New Life (1981) and The Bride Groom (1983), the manipulation of objects activates the text. The cryptic text continues to work in the spectator's mind after the action has concluded -- quite similar to the first performances of Mike Kelley who, like
    Paul McCarthy, was influenced by Cointet. Persectaphone (1978), for example, uses sculptures to support a discourse that, though intended to explain the objects, make less and less sense and disintegrates little by little.
    In his recent performance Leipzig Calendar Works (2005-07), Tris Vonna-Michell (Rochford, UK, 1982) applies a principal of deconstruction of meaning using pre-existing narratives: books heaped in piles on the floor. The protocol entails a time limit, chosen by the spectator. In several minutes of a reading so rapid that that time limit leaves both story and public in suspense. Tris Vonna-Michell applies the formula of "reader's digest" to performance. The work also channels the acceleration of time provoked by today's information overload.
    What is the duration of a work? What constitutes an event today? To ask the spectator to choose a time limit is to implicate him historically. For Narrative (Fold/Unfold) (2007), Julien Bismuth prints the performance scrip! on a rather large piece of paper, the size of a page from the New York Tirnes. Half of the sheet is printed. An actor recites the text while folding and unfolding the sheet according to the stage directions. The folds reflect, in a more or less abstract manner, the developments of history, in which events open (unfold) and close (fold) the narrative or allegorical surfaces or pockets. The artist thus passes from the rapid temporality of the episodic news brief, to the narration of a story.
REPLAYING THE REAL
    Certain artists "replay the real" or take distance from history by introducing a breach in today's continuous stream of images and information. What produces "drama" in the etymological and theatrical sense of action? And how does one act, how can one appropriate the past? This is one of the stakes in the work of Vasco Araújo (Lisbon, 1975) who interrogates recent history through a confrontation with myth, opera epics and everyday anecdotes. Transitioning from the singular to the heroic, he investigates a sometimes painful past, like Portugal's neutrality during WWII (Hypolito, 2003), or the community's responsibility for the individual (About Being Different, 2007). Midway through the '60s. Bruce Nauman came to the conclusion that anything an artist did in his studio was art. Since then, the city itself has become the stage on which Kirsten Mosher (La Jolla. CA 1963) inverts the systems of signs. Since the mid '90s. the artist unceasingly shuttled between the original and the model, using motorized puppets (Action Men) and toy cars, and installing her miniature stage sets in the enter of New York, In 1994, she began the series "Carmen" -- short videos composed of small mannequins carrying cars on their shoulders. In her latest, she directs herself carrying a car, now a costume, as she moves through the streets of Beacon, New York, encased in this 'Trojan horse,'
THE ATER AND PERFORMANCE
    If for Pan! McCarthy the mask (persona) of Greek theater was re placed by the camera, one can witness here a return to deliberate theatricality. That is the case for Ulla von Brandenburg (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1974) in the Super 8 film Reiter (Rider), where she films people maintaining frozen poses. Similar to erotic 18th-century tableaux vivants or to certain Pierre Klossowskt drawings, the shots are nonetheless filmed, that is, they occur in time. A standing individual appears to read a script, the raised cloth behind him evoking a curtain. The artist creates doubt as to the quality of what we're watching, between the dubious amateurishness of a sadomasochistic play and the construction of a stage set. What is more, her tableaux vivants could be said to effect a reversal of what is generally expected from a performance, since she immobilizes and turns the actors into quasi objects themselves.
    The distinctive codes between theater, performance, and sculptural installation seem hazier now, as if the categorical border crossings between disciplines since the '50s had finally been digested. Yet the processes animated by the cited artists develop through an awareness of the props left behind, and a will to reactivate the chora, antiquity's choir, in the civic space of the agora.
ADDED MATERIAL
    (Translated from French by Joanna Fiduccia)
    Marie de Brugerolle is an art critic and curator based in Lyon. France.
ULLA VON BRANDENBURG, Reiter (Rider), 2004, Film super 8, B&W, projection, 2 mins. Courtesy Art: Concept, Paris; CATHERINE SULLIVAN, The Resuscitation of Uplifting (Chittenden Lobby: Triangle Aria), 2005. Still fom 3 mm film. Courtesy Gió Marconi, Milan. Opposite: GUY DE COINTET, Tell Me, 1979. Performance. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Courtesy Guy de Cointet Estate/Air dd Paris, Paris.
TRIS VONNA-MICHELL, Leipzig Calendar Works, 2005-07, Performance al the HFBK Gallery in Hamburg, October 2006. Courtesy the artist; KIRSTEN MOSHER, Carmen Parking (series), 2007. Performance. Courtesy the artist; VASCO ARALÚJO, Le ballet de la nuit, 2001. Wood and glass cabinet, plasticine figures, 105 × 105 × 140 cm. Courtesy the artist.
JULIEN BISMUTH AND JEAN-PASCAL FLAVIEN, Plouf!, 2006. Performance in Rio de Janeiro, July 26th. 2006. Courtesy the artists.
FOOTNOTES
1. Mike Kelley, "Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny," originally published in The Uncanny. Arnhem, The Netherlands., and "New Introduction," in The Uncanny inhibition catalogue, Tute Liverpool and MUMoK. Vienna. 2004. "The Uneanny" originated as part of an international exhibition of figurative sculpture for Sonsbeek 93, in Arnhem. Holland
2. Thomas Crow, And Gravity, exhibition catalogue, CNAC Magasin, Grenoble, 1996.

Final Book Pages

Here are the 18 pages I am going to scan in order to create the first part of my final---the poetry book.



this is the cover




this will be the table of contents




for the poem A NEW LIGHT




for the poem FOUR YEARS




for the poem OH I'VE




for the poem EMO MCDREAMY




for the poem HANGING IN THE LIVING ROOM




for the poem CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS




for the poem PAPERCLIPS




for the poem CON ARTIST GYPSY




for the poem STALKING THE BOOK




for the poem WORD




for the poem DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME





for the poem PILED HIGH (I'LL NEVER LET YOU IN)




for the poem SUMMER (2003)




for the poem TELL ME THAT I SUCK




for the poem COULD IT BE




for the last page




On friday in class I will scan all of these images and then during the next week I will photoshop each page to include the poems. That will be ready to printed by the 25th. For the 25th ill have a recording of the 5 minute overture piece I am going to create to accompany the poetry book so I can edit it in class on the 25th. Then over the course of the final week I will finalize the music, ensure the poetry book is finished, and rehearse the poetry I would like to read in class on the last day of class on the first. Thats my timeline.

I am planning to do a powerpoint presentation slideshow of my book (as well as the physical copy) that will be timed to the recording which will go along with the live poetry reading.

Now I'm cooking!

death by source

Alright, I have been going over my source and my ideas like whoa and am starting to feel as though Im getting somewhere.

Upon further examination of my source, I've broken it down into what it really means as well as the source behind the source.

I've realized that my work is nothing more than a shield, protecting me from outside pain. I also realized that I throw myself into my work to avoid the loneliness that could lead me to finding more that would lead to pain. My real and true source has been the marriage between me and my work, which was demonstrated nicely by using my personal music/lyric work outside of school.

So, with that said and possibly understood, I am really thinking differently about my final. Throughout this entire school year, I have been living up to my source by burying myself into music so far that I've conceived a fifteen song musical idea called FOUNDATION YEAR which is about my experiences this year. The entire theme behind it is the connection between life, love, and art. Love is questioned repeatedly throughout the lyrics. All I've been doing all semester this semester is questioning love and its different forms while keeping my shield up the entire time. Not looking for, looking at.

Okay, so now what. I don't want to focus on Paperclips anymore, one of the songs on Foundation Year. I want the entire spectrum of my thoughts on love, life, death, art, etc. to be represented in my final piece. I think I may be thinking of writing a little poetry book of sorts incorporting all fifteen poems.

With that, comes the idea an in class poetry reading of these poems. To go with everything I will also record a five minute orchrestratal piece of music incorporating all 15 songs music.

So, I will make a new book of poetry, I will dramatically perform select poems, and I will present an instrumental orchestral demo of foundation year.

Will post more thoughts and shit later when they come...think im finally moving now at least!

Project ideas furthered

Thinking of my project ideas and what I should do for my final further, I realized a demo of many songs may be way too much...how about one really good thorough actual recording of paperclips instead.

I don't know. I gotta talk to Lana.

final ideas

Final final final. So much more work to do and such little time to do it in. Let’s review what I’ve done so far in order to better critique what my final piece should look like...

First thing we are going to have to hit upon is my source and what I’ve done with it. The original idea I had was marriage. Marriage quickly manifested itself into a sharper more precise source. The new source was an overall look at being involved vs. being single. The idea behind this was to look at both the positive and the negative of both to really show the effects of both. To do this, I first used photographic imagery. Photographic imagery really helped me dig deeper into my source, to find new meanings and to try to understand all the effects. After sequencing the images, I then created an artist book using paperclips (source material) and my images, but in much less legible forms. After capturing my source through my artist book, I then started listening for sounds of my source. This part was a synch. Naturally, after still images and sound, I brought my source to the big screen and created a two minute video about my source.

Another consideration to keep in mind is my independent musical endeavors. Early on in the source, I redefined my source as a song I had written. The lyrics and music spoke volumes towards my source statement. Everything involving my source involved my song too it seemed.

Finally, I want to remember that the intent of the music I am currently working on is an all around overview of love. I find that the source for this class and the concept for my musical are the same.

So from all that here I am at the final. After my realization mentioned in the paragraph above, I started thinking to myself, do I just want to make a video again? How far could I push this? What’s left?

So here it is, my BIGGER ideas then just a music video---which is still an idea. The music video would b a straight up 5 minute video for my song “Paperclips”. But thats really just what i’ve been doing. I want “Paperclips” to fall back into place with my other material. I want my little view of my big source to widen and I want to tackle it further than before.

So I’m thinking demo. My musical concept is fifteen songs long so I'm thinking somewhere between five and ten songs that really get to the heart of the material.

Another idea is performance of those five to ten songs. Straight up performance either live or video taped and shown. Performance is beautiful.

So there we have it. Music video for paperclips. 7 song demo. 7 song set. What will it be. Hmmmmmmmmmm.......

Final Cut...My experience in a poem

i once wanted to be a film maker

planned on days at emerson

dreams once got shattered

visions broken

so i decided to become a writer

sad to say this did not stick

for editing was not my forte

so i taught myself to draw some

this one's gotten me far

brought me into college

but now my love is piano

incorporating the writer

finally making sense

but i'll never forgot my love

my love of the camera

so now taking this here

required foundation studio

now using a camera again

my eye feels right

for i'm still at home

behind the lense cap.

ultimately leading me to a gay old time

in the world of final cut

for editing is tedious

and once turned me off

but now with understanding

and practice

and patience

i think i get the hang of it

oh, art

how you fill me

And so the plot thickens...

After taking my source through imagery, artist book, sound, and video, I have now created a two minute short bring my 5 videos clips together. It’s amazing having seen these ideas and thoughts that I once jumbled around my head unfold into so much more than imagined. I really love also seeing the life that my song Paperclips has taken on over the course of the course.

For the video I use my clip of my hands playing the song---and messing the song up---as my straight constant at minute clip. Halfway through the minute I messed with the opacity of the night driving clip and blended the two together until the hands hit a minute and the drive comes in full force.

For the second minute I continue to use my underlying shots of my hands and my driving but slice in clips of my grandmothers praying hands, my hands being washed in the sink, and Mr. Lexington (cat) sleeping.

The original intent of my video was for an entire nearly six minute long video using all the clips plus a few others for the song Paperclips as well. After successfully editing 3 minutes of it, I learned the assignment only called for a two minute video. I tried to just cut it down to 2 minutes but it just wasn’t the same without the other minutes to let it finish unfolding. So, I decided to create an assignment pleasing trailer version until I can finish the real one.

And so the plot thickens.