Drama and Performance Studies 305

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1 Drama and Performance Studies 305 possibilities of different forms of documentation and re-enactment of performance, as well as strategies to develop historical perspectives on developments of performance art. Notable research projects in this field have been Performance Matters ( ; a collaboration between Goldsmiths University of London, the University of Roehampton and the Live Art Development Agency) and Performing Documents: Modelling Creative and Curatorial Engagements with Live Art and Performance Archives ( ; based at the University of Bristol). Meanwhile, events such as The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow (2010), organized by the Plymouth Arts Centre in collaboration with The Marina Abramović Institute for Preservation of Performance Art, and Tate Modern s series Performance Year Zero: A Living History (2012) have brought issues of re-enactment and legacy to more broadly accessed public venues and cultural frameworks. The three essay collections reviewed in this section can be seen in the context of these developments: offering a range of perspectives on notions of histories and definitions of performance art and live art, a number of the contributions make direct references to abovementioned events and many have been authored by their participants. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (2012), edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, consists of three parts, each of which approaches historicizations of performance art through a different methodology: Theories and Histories ; Documents ; and Dialogues. Without claiming comprehensiveness, and whilst acknowledging the volume s bias towards British and North-American work, the editors have managed to include work and scholarship from a broad range of geographical and cultural origins. The collection offers a wealth of research on previously littleresearched work by artists from South America, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East (although work from Africa is conspicuously absent). Differently, Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein s collection Histories & Practices of Live Art (2012) and Dominic Johnson s edited volume Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK (2013) explicitly focus on explorations of artistic practices in Great Britain. Heddon and Klein s book is shaped as a detailed, albeit concise, introductory work that may prove suitable for performance students and interested scholars from other academic fields, whilst also introducing original perspectives that could be of interest to performance studies scholars. Johnson s collection consists mainly of essays and interviews that were previously published in a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review (22:i[2012]; also edited by Dominic Johnson). Several chapters of this collection introduce detailed critiques of more established historical narratives around the histories of performance art

2 306 Drama and Performance Studies in Great Britain, whilst others present analyses and interviews concerned with work that has until now received little scholarly attention. An overarching concern, which I will examine more closely before proceeding with a more detailed discussion of the individual books, is the use of the terms live art and performance art across the three volumes. Somewhat confusingly, a number of the authors use the terms interchangeably, whilst for others a clear distinction between the two is at the centre of their critical approach. In Critical Live Art, Dominic Johnson defines live art as a self-sufficient sector in the cultural industries in the UK, whilst performance art is a wide-ranging formal tradition (p. 19). Although many live artists build on the traditions of performance art in their work and could thus be described as both live artists and performance artists others draw on different disciplines, such as experimental theatre, digital and new media art, cabaret and music. In a similar vein, Lois Keidan, founding director of the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) has defined live art as a cultural strategy typical of artists who refuse disciplinary and historical categories such as theatre, visual art, or dance (p. 22). Notably, artists interviewed throughout the three volumes appear to have little interest in a specific definition of the term: Carolee Schneemann conveniently uses the combined descriptor Live art/body art/performance art (p. 2), BREYER P-ORRIDGE state that only if the term would be Living Art they might be comfortable with it (p. 67), and Neil Bartlett repeatedly challenges the usefulness of the categorization as Live Art of his own and other artists practices in his interview with Lois Keidan in Critical Live Art. This echoes Keidan s statement elsewhere that the practices [of Live Art in the UK] are not unique, but the terminology is (p. 21). Explaining the origin of the term, Rob La Frenais, who was editor of The Performance Magazine in the 1970s and 1980s, states in correspondence with Dominic Johnson: the term Live Art offered [...] a broader appeal and an expanded range of support structures for programmers, and for some artists [and] emerged as a more inclusive alternative in the UK to the term performance art which was rather specific to a type of visual art which used the body as material and whose visceral nature alienated some establishment commentators (and early funders) at the time [...] changing the name from Performance Art to Live Art was about adopting a marketing strategy in order to develop an audience (p. 15). Thus, the term live art appears to serve primarily as an analytical concept and a lobbying vehicle for institutions such as the Live Art Development Agency to secure (government) funding.

3 Drama and Performance Studies 307 In Histories & Practices of Live Art, Jennie Klein discusses the role of terminology and discourse in the institutionalization of performance art in more detail, drawing attention to the use of terminology associated with New Labour politics, especially LADA s adoption of the concept of the Creative Industries and its focus on Entrepreneurialism and the commodification of artistic output (p. 28). Drawing from the writing of performance scholar Jen Harvie, she points out that the use of the term creative industries, instead of cultural activities, implies a prioritization of individual creativity over the social dimension of a notion of cultural activity. Therefore, Klein suggests that the Live Art Development Agency could be seen as a representative of the ideology of New Labour, but argues at the same time that the founding of the organization can also be considered as a strategic, opportunistic act (p. 29) that gives experimental artists access to government funding without necessarily adopting its ideology in their work. She concludes that the latter is more likely to be the case, arguing that it is clear that LADA has created multiple opportunities with artists that are unlikely to have existed without the organization s input (p. 29; original emphasis) and that the organized professionalization of performance art by institutions like LADA, rather than counter-cultural rebellion, have made the UK into the epicentre for the most cutting edge experimental art being produced today (p. 34). However, it does not become clear how the creation of unique opportunities with artists would exclude the possibility that these opportunities were not also complacent with a framework of New Labour ideology, nor does Klein present a comparative analysis in support of her hyperbolic designation of the UK as the global epicentre for experimental art. Later on in the introductory chapter of Critical Live Art, Johnson mentions what he calls a cliché (p. 28) criticism of the identity-politics focus of a lot of British performance art as anachronistic. Rejecting this suggestion, he argues that the persistence of identity and its politics [facilitates] fertile conjunctions of themes for artists and audiences alike (p. 28). Johnson is right in that the relevance of identity politics should not be downplayed, also because these are necessarily connected to broader socio-political concerns. However, privileging a focus on identity politics, whilst avoiding direct engagement with broader socio-political concerns, is also compatible with post- Thatcher governments preference for a cultural outlook that prioritizes notions of individual opportunity and responsibility over broader conceptualizations of society and culture. Indeed, the widespread focus on identity politics in contemporary British performance art should not be considered anachronistic. On the contrary, it seems to be fully compatible with the discourse of New Labour ideology that Klein refers to. This is all the more

4 308 Drama and Performance Studies reason to subject the prominence of identity politics in British performance art and LADA s curatorial strategies to closer scrutiny. Surprisingly, in Johnson s Critical Live Art and Heddon and Klein s Histories & Practices of Live Art the term live art is hardly examined in relation to the concept of liveness. Differently, for Amelia Jones this aspect does form a key characteristic of the term in her introduction to Perform, Repeat, Record. Apparently unconcerned with the association of the term with institutional politics in a UK context, she describes live art as performance art for an audience present at the time, and thus contrary to Johnson as a subcategory of performance art in the broader sense, which may also involve audiences who engage in the work through representational modes such as video installation (p. 12). Jones observes the emergence of an obsession with live acts and bodies in the art world since 2000, but does not offer a further analysis of this development, arguing that Attempting to explain definitively why this obsession has occurred would in fact betray the very mode of open inquiry this volume hopes to keep open (p. 13). Nevertheless, it is remarkable that Perform, Repeat, Record does not include a thorough problematization of the ontological distinction between the live and the mediated that appears to underpin Jones understanding of the term live art, especially since the first chapter of the collection is from the hand of Philip Auslander, a performance and media scholar who has made a key contribution to this debate with his book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge [1999]). Building on Baudrillard s concept of the contraction of the poles of the real and simulation in contemporary mediatized culture, Auslander argues that live and mediated performance cannot be categorized as ontologically different, thus problematizing the notion of a categorization of performance art on the basis of its liveness. Considering the variation in uses and definitions of the term live art across the three publications reviewed here, in the remainder of this chapter I will use the term performance art to designate all artistic practices that engage with bodies and performativity, and which are referred to as either live art, body art or performance art by the authors of the texts discussed. In addition to the broader engagements with the terminology of performance art analysis and policy I have discussed above, the three collections each offer insights into specific artistic practices and analytical methodologies, and present detailed critiques of a broad range of aspects of the conceptualization, making, presentation and representation of performance art. Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK starts with three chapters that offer critical perspectives on the historicization of performance art in the UK. After the introductory chapter Marginalia: Toward a

5 Drama and Performance Studies 309 Historiography of Live Art in the UK, in which editor Dominic Johnson offers a genealogy and definition of the term live art as discussed above, Heike Roms and Rebecca Edwards critique the broadly accepted narrative of the early days of British performance art as predominantly a response to and often a rejection of the traditions of theatre. This perspective proposes that British performance art is essentially different from North-American performance art practices in the 1960s and 1970s, which are commonly considered to primarily function in response to the conventions of visual art. Roms and Edwards draw attention to events and educational programmes outside the discipline of theatre that have also been relevant in early developments of performance art in Britain, such as the Commonwealth Poetry Conference in Cardiff in 1965 and the Basic Design course at the traditionally fine-art-focused Cardiff College of Art. At the same time, they point out that many early events that featured performance art in Britain, including the often referenced Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966 and the Fluxus Festival of Misfits in 1962, were heavily frequented by North-American and European artists and can therefore not be considered as characteristically British events, separate from 1960s developments in performance art elsewhere. Graham Saunders chapter The Freaks Roll Call: Live Art and the Arts Council, , traces the early days of Arts Council of Great Britain funding for experimental performance art in the UK. The chapter is developed around examinations of correspondence and other documentation of communication between the Arts Council and performance groups including The People Show, Pip Simmons Group and Genesis P-Orridge s COUM Transmissions. The account of the latter group s stubborn mail art-cumfunding application campaign to inform the Arts Council of the their broad range of practices from correspondence art and photography to performance events and music recordings offers a detailed and entertaining insight into the artistic and institutional climate of the time. A more in-depth examination of the concept of the freak, which is featured prominently in the chapter s title and subtitles, could have provided another interesting perspective on the often awkward and prejudiced attempts (and refusals) of Arts Council committee members to engage with artists whose work at times challenged and subverted the categorizations of their funding structures. The following chapters of the collection include interviews with performance makers who have been active in Britain over the past decades but whose work has nonetheless not often been examined in scholarship: Neil Bartlett, Julia Bardsley and BREYER P-ORRDIGE. In his interview with Lois Keidan, Bartlett talks about his diverse practice which has included work for popular venues and more underground spaces, as well as

6 310 Drama and Performance Studies productions for established theatres including Lyric Hammersmith in London and the National Theatres in London and Dublin. Drawing from the diversity of his own work and the eclectic selection of performers he admires ranging from Tina Turner to Ethyl Eichelberger he frequently challenges Keidan s insistent return to a Live Art frame, in favour of a concept of art that goes beyond the categories, labels [and] funding categories [of the] proper, fine art end of Live Art tradition (p. 108) and crosses the boundaries between what is conventionally known as high and low culture, as well as cultural establishment and underground. In their interview with Dominic Johnson, BREYER P-ORRIDGE address their Pandrogeny project, which entails their conceptualization of themselves as one person, composed of the artists previously known as Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer. The project has included a number of cosmetic surgery operations to make parts of their bodies look like each other s. Two further essays of interest are Brian Lobel s Spokeswomen and Posterpeople: Disability, Advocacy and Live Art, and a collaboratively authored text by Deirdre Heddon, Helen Iball and Rachel Zerihan which reflects on so-called One to One performances. Lobel studies performance work by Rita Marcalo and Bobby Baker that thematizes epilepsy and mental illness, respectively. Through an analysis of performances, related marketing material, and reviews and responses in the press, the author maps the complicated ambiguities in terminology between artists and organizations that seek to advocate the interests of disabled people; terms such as awareness, community and advocacy are often interpreted differently by artists and these institutions. Marcalo s work Involuntary Dances (2009), involved the artist presenting herself locked inside a cage in a gallery, whilst deliberately inducing epileptic seizures through drinking alcohol, sleep deprivation and exposing herself to flashing lights. Marcalo s interest in the work was to heighten awareness of voyeurism in relation to disability from a perspective of cultural commentary. Instead, Epilepsy Action, an organization concerned with the representation of the interests of people with epilepsy, considered the performance inappropriate (p. 116), arguing that the work distorted an awareness of the health concerns of people with epilepsy. Unlike Marcalo s approach, Bobby Baker consciously navigates through this ambiguity of terminologies in different artistic and institutional contexts. Her exhibition of drawings of her history of mental illness at the Wellcome Trust in London, Diary Drawings (2009), was accompanied by different versions of her biography to accommodate the specific audience and institutional contexts the work was presented in. Baker often ironically refers to her mental health history as having occasionally gone mad (p. 127) in her

7 Drama and Performance Studies 311 performances and in biographical statements that are unambiguously positioned in an artistic context. However, in broader public frameworks, where the reader may not perceive the statement as part of her artistic self-representation, such as the advertising campaign for the exhibition and a public lecture at Newcastle University on the occasion of World Mental Health Day, Baker indicated to be willing to adjust her biographical notes to foreclose her words potential offensiveness when read outside an artistic framework. Heddon, Iball and Zerihan s chapter Come Closer: Confessions of Intimate Spectators in One to One Performance, which concludes the book, is concerned with work where a performer engages with a single participant at a time. Although the form of One to One performance has been utilized extensively by artists such as Adrian Howells, Kira O Reilly, Franko B and Oreet Ashery, the authors point out that there has been little scholarly engagement with this kind of work. One reason may be the scarcity of documentation of One to One work, but another, related problematic aspect is the highly individual and subjective nature of the experiences that could form the basis of scholarly analysis. The authors address this issue through their use of a dialectical exchange about performances they all attended individually. They propose this approach as a methodology of Spectator-Participation-as-Research, building on the concept of Practice as Research, which is usually concerned with artists processes of making performance. Exchanging and analysing their individual experiences of performances by Adrian Howells, Sam Rose and Martina Von Holn, which they attended at the symposium i confess...(glasgow, 2009), the authors develop a number of insightful perspectives on the politics of One to One practice. Adrian Howells performance The Garden of Adrian (2009), which involved the artist feeding participants strawberries, among other gentle and intimate interactions, forms the basis of an examination of participants compulsion to participate in [...] normative assumptions (p. 172), whilst at the same time being invited to leave behind some of the restrictions of social conventions through Howells skillfull performance of a simulation of authenticity, of being unmasked (p. 178). Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein s edited volume Histories & Practices of Live Art consists of seven chapters, each of which offers a different perspective on specific areas of performance art in Britain in terms of methodology and disciplinary contexts. In her introductory chapter, Heddon presents an overview of previous writing on performance art in the UK and elsewhere, and draws attention to the fact that one of the main texts that have been used

8 312 Drama and Performance Studies in the historicization of performance art in the UK, Roselee Goldberg s Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (Thames & Hudson [2001]), actually focuses primarily on US-based practitioners. Through its bundling of examinations from different British performance scholars, complemented by US-based co-editor Jennie Klein s outside perspective, Histories & Practices of Live Art aims to contribute to a multi-faceted understanding of institutional and creative histories of performance art in Britain. Thus, the project also connects to Roms and Edwards critique in Critical Live Art of a tendency toward one-dimensional histories of performance art in Britain, which consider the development of British performance art primarily in opposition to the traditions of theatre. After Jennie Klein s chapter Developing Live Art, which examines the institutionalization of performance art in the UK (see above), Beth Hoffmann s essay The Time of Live Art focuses on the role of duration in performance work. Analysing Alastair MacLennan s performances, which usually last between eight and twelve hours during which the artist refrains from eating and sleeping and performs concentrated repetitive actions, Hoffmann suggests that durational work may facilitate heightened experiences of what anthropologist Victor Turner has called communitas : a liminal social space where a sense of solidarity between subjects is established through the interruption of everyday social order. Alternatively, durational work may also effect subtle transformations of everyday environments. This is the case in Eve Dent s Anchor Series (2003?), in which the artist installs her body in architectural structures in ways that are hardly noticeable but insistent over time (p. 53). Shifting focus from duration to place, the chapter Site: Between Ground and Groundlessness, by Stephen Hodge and Cathy Turner, engages with site-specific work, such as Brith Gof s Gododdin (1988), which recontextualized the traditional Welsh poem Y Gododdin in a disused Cardiff Rover factory, and the office for subversive architecture s (osa) work Point of View (2008), which comprised the installation of steps that enabled passers by to look over the fence around the London Olympic Development site. The authors trace two tendencies in site-specific performance art: the first removes or destabilizes the art practice through a questioning of the gallery environment and the formal conventions of art making, whilst the second grounds the practice in activism and socially engaged events (p. 93). Thus, they propose site-specific performance as closely tied with political activism. The intertwinement of performance art and activism is also the subject of Deirdre Heddon s chapter The Politics of Live Art. In it, Heddon investigates where the limits of politics in performance art might be. Building on

9 Drama and Performance Studies 313 Jacques Rancière s writing, she critiques a concept of activist art where the boundaries between protest and art are entirely dissolved, as proposed by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii; a network of art activists). She argues that a belief in this concept as the foremost art form for effecting social change is underpinned by several problematic assumptions. Apart from the suggestion that events that take place inside the confines of the artworld have no political potential, the idea relies on the assumption that there is an outside to the market economy where activist artwork can be positioned as an unambiguous critique, and which prevents it from being recuperated by the market. The problem with the latter assumption is apparent in the frequent appropriation of activist art strategies by corporations, such as the adoption of flash mobbing as a marketing strategy by T-Mobile in Dominic Johnson offers a perspective on performance art in relation to specifically British cultural politics in his essay Intimacy and Risk in Live Art. Analysing work by Ron Athey, Franko B and Mehmet Sander, Johnson examines how complex experiences of intimacy may be evoked through a process of putting bodies in situations of risk. The chapter is especially insightful in its broader cultural contextualization of the prominence of queer identity politics and the infliction of bodily harm in the practices of these artists. Johnson traces the recent history of policies that seek to restrict and oppress (homo-)sexuality in Britain, examining Operation Spanner, which involved the conviction and sentencing of 15 homosexual men for participating in consensual sadomasochistic acts in 1990; Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which prohibited promoting homosexuality in local-authority funded institutions; and The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, which criminalizes pornographic imagery that is deemed grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character (p. 146). Johnson shows how the practices of Athey, Franko B and Sander can be read in relation to this oppressive legislative climate around bodily agency and sexuality in recent British history. Thus, the chapter offers a substantial addition to Johnson s (somewhat less convincing) claim for the continued relevance of identity politics in British performance art in the opening chapter of Critical Live Art. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, is co-edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield. Jones decision to invite Heathfield to be co-editor was motivated by a very specific consideration: whereas Jones background is in art history, Heathfield was originally trained in theatre and performance studies. Thus, their collaboration not only addresses the problematic tendency to confine performance art histories to specific disciplinary

10 314 Drama and Performance Studies backgrounds, as discussed by Roms and Edwards in Critical Live Art; moreover, the volume explores the connections and tensions between the performative aspects of performance artwork and the acts of its historicization (a performance studies perspective), and the materialization of performance art in the form of artefacts and other documentary materials (an art historical approach). The hefty book is composed of original essays, interviews and several thematic time lines, as well as previously published texts, some in edited or shortened form. The first section of the book, Theories and Histories, consists of thirteen chapters that present a combination of re-readings of what is now widely considered as canonical performance artwork, as well as broader reflections on the politics of the ephemeral and the role of documentation in the historicization of performance art. In The Performativity of Performance Documentation, Philip Auslander argues that the common division of performance documentation into two categories, the documentary and the theatrical, is ideological. A documentary photograph is considered to be a record of a performance as it happened for an audience, as well as evidence for its actual occurrence that allows its reconstruction. Instead, a theatrical photo concerns performances that were specifically staged for the camera and where the event represented had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences (p. 49). Whereas the photographs of Chris Burden s Shoot (1971), in which the artist was shot in the arm with a rifle, can be considered documentary, Yves Klein s photograph Leap into the Void (1960), where Klein appears to be jumping out of a window onto a street, would be categorized as theatrical; the action represented in the latter was achieved through photo montage and was not seen in this way by the audience present at the time of the photograph (they saw the safety net that was installed under the window). Auslander challenges this strict categorization through an analysis of Vito Acconci s Blink (1969), which involved the artist walking down an empty street with a camera, taking a photograph every time he had to blink his eyes. Auslander suggests that the photographs made as part of Blink are both theatrical and documentary: they evidence that the performance happened, and enable its reconstruction, but at the same time they are the only way through which the performance can be perceived. Observing Acconci taking a photo live would not give access to the work adequately as the photo itself would not be visible. Building on J.L. Austin s linguistic concept of the performative utterance, Auslander suggests that Blink shows that the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such (p. 53; original emphasis).