|
a young woman hangs up side down from a 5th-floor balcony by a single rope tied around her ankles. Her limp arms and hands dangle just off the ground; her elbows provisionally bound in foam and yellow tape, somehow pathetically ready for the climb. You are, at once, struck by the body’s lameness; its unemployment at odds with its potential. A crowd forms, uncertain of their responsibilities. The police arrive and depart…
2
a naked middle-aged man grapples with something (silently) between his knees. Behind him, as you are, you will never know what or its completion. His body, like yours, floats in darkness. You (in space) ride over him. While he shares your darkness, his activity—digitally looped and semi-frantic—will continue forever without you. If this is ‘live’ it was not meant for public view…
a pair of weeping doleful eyes stare right back at you, blinking through a slit in the orange fabric held apart with two fingers of a hand. That fabric fills the video’s visual frame. After some time the whole image slides away from you, the eyes still peering out now from a distance. At the end of its passage the orange surface sways precariously. You see its parameter but only a shadow of the eyes’ figure…
Random Entrant 4 risks performing bodies that fail; we venture misbehaviour, misperformance and absence. Performing bodies that fail draw you out: out of yourselves. Their dysfunction lends them force: a force-field of lack that (performatively) draws you out as you desire completion in your body, the body of the audience. We are haptic, somatic bodies in process. Undefinable and on the move; ambiguously part bodies/part objects. We recognize a potential breakdown of performance rituals as what lends them efficacy.
We approach different modes of performance and performative installation from the perspective of redundancy: what is left out, left private, overlooked, unidentifiable, masked from view or too close. We aim to disturb a tendency to assume a possible wholeness either in live art or performance documentation: in both bodies/selves and their representation.
1) Alicia Frankovich’s The Opposite of Backwards (2008), performed outside Galleria Annarumma404, Naples.
2) Christopher Braddock’s Above (2008), looped dvd 41.24 minutes, part of the installation The Artist Will Be Present, July-August 2008, St Paul St Gallery, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
3) David Cross’ Receding Plane (2008), looped dvd 5 minutes.
4) Random Entrant will be performed on 25 June 2009 at PSi#15, Zagreb. The project involves two performances and a video installation: Alicia Frankovich’s I would like to be attached to a random entrant; David Cross’ Thump; and Christopher Braddock’s Back (Christopher Braddock as curator). The artists wish to acknowledge and thank the following funding institutions: Creative New Zealand, The Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa; Auckland University of Technology; Massey University.
5) From a different but related point of view Amelia Jones insists on an interdependence between artist, subject and audience located within a notion of performativity in which meanings or readings are “…contingent on the process of enactment rather than attributing motives to the authors as individuals or origins of consciousness and intentionality…” (1998: 10). 6) This is based on Rebecca Schneider’s words when she writes about sculpture that “…gestures toward its own excess…” (2005: 42).
7) Other works by Frankovich such as Flying Fox (2008) rely on their ability to fail expectations both formally (aesthetically) and as a public event. See my paper ‘The Force of the Moment’ in the symposium proceedings for One-Day-Sculpture, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in association with Massey University, 2008. I am grateful to the symposium convenors, Claire Doherty and David Cross, for the opportunity to present this working paper. See www.onedaysculpture.org.nz.
8) This wording is partly based on Frankovich’s panel abstract for the PSi#15 panel Are You Partial? chaired by myself.
9) Less and Less/ Worse and Worse/ More and More (2008),Le Case d'Arte, Milano.
10) This is based on a comment Frankovich made about another work, To Veer: A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of Behaviour (2007), which also invests a similar sense of functional frustration. See my paper ‘The Force of the Moment’ cited above, n7.
11) When Frankovich sent me jpgs of the images she labelled them ‘Chambon dwell’, ‘Chambon leap’, ‘Chambon thinking’, ‘Chambon upside’ and so on… I first interpreted these as each photograph’s title underlining their partial rendering of the performance work.
12) The sound track constitutes another work titled Over & Over (2008), looped sound recording 59.54 minutes. The sound consists of breathing and occasional slapping which accentuates the energy and doing of the process as well as a sense of ambivalence about what kind of activity might actually be taking place.
13) These sculptures are titled Take 1-18 (2007), epoxy clay, hand-held dimensions.
14) Back (2008),looped dvd 59.54 minutes, and Caress (2008),looped Blu-ray 22.46 minutes, were part of the installation The Artist Will Be Present, July-August 2008, St Paul St Gallery, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
15) This wording is based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm. See chapter 1 of my PhD thesis (Braddock 2008).
16) Cross’ works Bounce (2006), and Hold (2008), were both installed in large foyer spaces to museums and universities. Bounce was part of the performance series Mostly Harmless at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, 2006, and also deployed in the foyer of the Wellington Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, 2006. Hold was deployed in the Great Hall of Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, 2008. |
The three ‘takes’ above provide a glimpse into recent projects by Australasian artists Alicia Frankovich, Christopher Braddock and David Cross. Our practices operate across the arenas of visual & media arts installation and performance. We engage with habits that hand ‘work’ over to audiences: that involve the absence, or diminished sensory capacity, of performers; where written, recorded or videoed 'documents' operate as access to the 'live'; where spaces promote participatory and reciprocal exchange; where performance is a testing ground that mixes sporting, recreation and bodily pleasure with a scrutiny of sensory limits. We are artists and performers who double as the object of our enterprise: part subjects that slip capriciously into part objects as both subject and object of our works; slippages within unpredictable durations.
As a means of articulating volatile flows of events and their relationship to ritual contexts, Brian Massumi employs a parable of the soccer match and sketches out the playing field as a force-field, describing the players as part objects and the ball as a part subject. He does this by defining the ball as “…the focus of every player and the object of every gesture” (2002: 73). In this context the player is not the subject of the play but the ball. As he goes on to say: “Since the ball is nothing without the continuum of potential it doubles, since its effect is dependent on the physical presence of a multiplicity of other bodies and objects of various kinds; since the parameters of its actions are regulated by the application of rules, for all these reasons the catalytic object-sign may be called a part-subject. The part-subject catalyzes the play as a whole but is not itself a whole” (2002: 73). Concomitantly the body figures not as a whole body but as a part body: a foot that kicks where the kicking is not so much an expression of the player inasmuch as a response to the ball ‘drawing out’ the kick. And typical of unlimited (performative) contexts, the players are drawn out of themselves, looking beyond the ball as they take in a myriad of external factors that might include, but are never exhaustive of, other players’ movements, the referee, the crowd, the extended TV footage. 5
None of this is surprising. It applies to any conversation or movement we make in the world. In turning this game of affect to our own proposition it is our attention to it, our application of it, to methods underscoring our works: if the artist/performer is not the sole (authorial) subject of the play and ‘is nothing without the continuum of potential it doubles’; if we call the body of the artist the part object (while it slips back and forth as partial subject); and if the body/s of the audience we call catalyzing part subjects, then we describe a force-field of participatory and reciprocal exchange that risks apparent misbehaviour and misperformance. For Frankovich’s The Opposite of Backwards we recognise a multitude of possible occurrences as this hanging (redundant) part object draws in a host of external dynamics: viewers, crowd, police, and reporters.
No fields, or rule-sets, remain static. The game is constantly (necessarily) re-figured. Random Entrant entertains a swarm of external responses (from live interventions to performance documents to hearsay…) that fail expectations. We call attention to a catalytic force of the part object/subject as active agents in a post-medium condition. Our works are redolent with the ‘liveness’ of their making (and encounter) in perpetual quarrel with their material existence: sculptures that gesture toward their own excess. 6 Such excess is designed to draw you out; to contest our solo performances and insist on our presence intersubjectively embodied with yours. As Amelia Jones writes, this is “…a performative conception of the artist/self as in process, commodifiable as art object, and intersubjectively related to the audience/interpreter” (1998: 12).
Frankovich’s The Opposite of Backwards (2008) involves the artist hanging from the five-story exterior of Galleria Annarumma404 in Naples. Unannounced, this gesture, so slim and formless, relies on you—her audience—to add value; even as I write this document, given that none of us could have ever been there, except by chance encounter. 7 This work raises questions very relevant to our Random Entrant project at PSi#15: how might we receive The Opposite of Backwards when it is not conceivable for us to be present for the performance; or how might we view this work outside of its live undertaking? In this light, notions of lack of control, product, spectatorship, or a ‘misfiring’ of Frankovich’s (non) spectacle are precisely what draws you out. 8
|
Frankovich’s Lungeing Chambon, performed in January 2009 in Melbourne, involved Frankovich suspending her curator Hannah Mathews in an apparatus of two chairs, one hovering over the other. This ‘kit’, typically makeshift for Frankovich, was suspended by some climbing rope extending out the gallery window only to enter through another, and strapped around the gallery wall then tied in a knot. Most of us experience these hovering bodies as distilled documents that suggest momentary postures like dwelling, leaping, thinking and so on… 11 They are poised moments; latent with the possibility of unraveling this pseudo-gymnastic routine.
For Back, a five-metre wide wall projection, Braddock films himself in a blackout studio grappling with some form or other between his knees. The objects that he manipulates are never seen, just as the views of his body are partial. Back is filmed vertically (locating his body’s vertical axis as it moves up and down), but projected horizontally so that the image of his body scrolls horizontally in and out of your space; at times leaving you in darkness while the sound of his labouring body continues in a distant foyer space. 12 Such spatial dislocation increases a sense of partial experience endemic to the Random Entrant project.
Braddock’s Caress surveys up-close the surface of five part-sculptural objects made by pressing material against his body. 13 Panning the video camera as slow as he can by hand, the slow quivering of his body’s movement suggests a ‘handling’ of the objects transposed—by a mimetic ‘closeness’ of the moving image—into a fleshy and haptic filmic encounter; as a form of intensely experienced and embodied ‘participation.’ Whether it is an encounter with the inside or outside of a body is unclear. Together with this the intensity of the high-definition projection offers a spatial uncertainty. You are unsure, in the first moments of viewing, whether the image rests on or in the wall. Both Caress and Back are projected on each side of the same dividing projection wall. 14 Each bleeds to the edges of that wall where you must decide on left or right points of entry before reorientating yourself to viewing distances. This spatial ambivalence combined with the image’s mimetic incongruence summons an in-between two space (chiasmic reversibility) in your body. 15 In this way Braddock’s works are forcefully reductive in their live and authorial presence. So much so that they become strongly and openly legible: audiences literally standing in (darkness) for the absence of his body; an expanded notion of the ‘live’ encounter by never offering up the ‘presence’ of his body.
As David Cross employs his brightly monochromatic blow-up vinyl structures, he sets in play a theme park. His audiences are at once attentive to the possibilities of loose behaviour, but within the safe parameters of the game (the ‘bouncy castle’ itself signifying playful war; a naïve testing ground). As such these coloured structures give us license to lose ourselves in play. This is why his performances gravitate towards spaces such as foyers in which our daily performing rituals are less predetermined andwe are off-guard vis-à-vis the art encounter. 16
For Hold, the participant, having climbed up an inflated laddered ramp, finds an arm protruding through a longitudinal slit in a wall of blue vinyl. For the participant to make the journey along the precipice of the work, she or he must take the beckoning arm, hold it as if she knew it, and walk the work’s distance with its aid (it was near impossible to walk the walk without the arm’s assistance). The work—as ordeal—collapses recreational pleasure with an uncanny inspection of psychic and sensory limits. More to the point, there is no justification for the inflatable object without its audience/performers.
With a nod to minimalist colour-field abstraction, Receding Plane (2008) penetrates that colour-field; slashes it with Lucio Fontana’s familiar gesture. But more than this, the partially revealed and troubling eyes of the artist breach back through that gash at us with inscrutable purpose. Once again, Cross’ partially exposed body leaves us searching for more. As moving image we are necessary participants in this work as its unpredictable duration expands and the eyes retreat from us. Furthermore, as the artifice of the work (its flying fox apparatus) becomes clumsily clear, rolling and swaying away from us, it somehow fails its own cleverness in a curious anti-climax. In point of fact, the work and performer move backwards, not us, and we are left deciphering it as it once peered through at us.
Works like The Opposite of Backwards, Hold and Back undertake, in their inherent grasp of misperformance, a continuum of potential that doubles back. It is precisely their dysfunction that lends them force: your decision not to look back at the hanging body, to run the gauntlet without assistance, or to refuse the work that leaves you in darkness. It is precisely this ritual collapse that lends them force.
|
Images:
Alicia Frankovich, The Opposite of Backwards (2008). Performance, photograph 105 x 70cm, courtesy of the artist and Annarumma404 Naples.
Alicia Frankovich, Lungeing Chambon (January 2009). Performance, performed with Hannah Mathews Curator, Melbourne, courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland.
Alicia Frankovich, SEMPRE MENO, SEMPRE PEGGIO, SEMPRE PIÙ (2008). Performance, video 39.45 minutes, courtesy of the artist and Le Case d'Arte, Milano.
David Cross, Hold (2008), performance installation, the Great Hall of Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, still photograph by Stephen Rowe.
David Cross, Receding Plane (2008), looped dvd 5 minutes, filmed on location at Brooklyn Park, Wellington, New Zealand, still photograph by Stephen Rowe.
Christopher Braddock, Back (2008), looped dvd 59.54 minutes, part of the installation The Artist Will Be Present, July-August 2008, St Paul St Gallery, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
Christopher Braddock, Caress (2008), looped Blu-ray 22.46 minutes, part of the installation The Artist Will Be Present, July-August 2008, St Paul St Gallery, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
References:
Braddock, Christopher (2008), "The Artist Will Be Present: Performing Partial Objects and Subjects," (Auckland University of Technology), available at http://hdl.handle.net/10292/441.
Jones, Amelia (1998), Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press).
Schneider, Rebecca (2005), "Solo Solo Solo," in Gavin Butt (ed.), After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), 23-47. |
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)