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Our April issue is a diverse
one. However, I think there is an interesting theme that runs through these
essays and the work of the artists they’re about concerning the ways the
conceptual emerges in art. U. Aldridge Hansberry has written, at my request,
about her work as an American percussionist and composer who has lived in Paris
for the last twenty years. I hope you will enjoy reading her texts and
listening to her compositions as much as I have. We expect to experience
music in many different forms (for instance, live and recorded) and to hear the
same music repeatedly. But Marina Abramovic’s re-performances of performance
art pieces at her MoMA retrospective has brought the issues of memory and repetition
into play in that realm. I wish to thank Harry Weil for engaging us in this
discussion. And I am so appreciative
that the retrospective of the American artist Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of
Painting premiered at the Haywood
Gallery in London, UK, and has been deliciously dissected by our London
correspondent, Anna Leung. The show closed in London, but travels to Haus der
Kunst, Munich (12 February-2 May 2010) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (29 May-5
September 2010). I want to acknowledge all
your positive response to our March issue, which focused on the artist Alice
Neel. I would love to know if there are other artists our readers might suggest
to us, as we plan to devote an issue to a single artist every year. I look
forward to your suggestions. Please contact me at theartsection@gmail.com. All my best, Deanna
U. Aldridge Hansberry in Paris. Photo: Laurence Pratt. A Road Less Traveled
Conveying
why I came to live in Paris can be compared to
explaining the “why” of an on-going tempestuous love affair. Certainly we all
want to think that the reason we were first attracted is also the reason we
continue in a relationship – but the reason we start is rarely the reason we
stay…. Paris, in its great
history, has given shelter to a host
of non-French who have contributed to its creative community – Frédéric Chopin,
Marie Curie, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh,
Nathalie Barney, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Sidney Bechet, Richard Wagner,
Richard Wright--to mention just a very few of those who distanced themselves
from their native lands to explore other ideas. This alone could be enough to
influence one to seek “l’aire de Paris.” Being from New Orleans could also be
considered an element for me, as children in Louisiana learn French history
first because New Orleans, which existed within the French colony for many
years before being sold to the United States, has no English history. And
during my childhood, the first foreign language studied was generally French.
In fact, we usually have French surnames or, as in my case, at least a French
first name. But all this is has
little to do with the direct influences
that steered me toward France in my quest to experience some other aspects of
the planet. Neither did the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysées, nor the fashion
scene measure in my considerations. No, it was the French
writers – particularly Albert Camus,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Regis Debray, and especially Jean Genet—who espoused the
political-philosophical thought of the day, coupled with the fact that France
had harbored a growing population of American musicians whose music was taken
“seriously” there, as were they themselves. This was an outstanding feat for
the epoch. Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Sunny Murray, Alan Silva, the Art
Ensemble of Chicago, Clifford Thornton, among a whole host of artists who were
changing pre-conceived ideas of what music was and where it could go, all made
Paris their home for a time. Although they may have been critical among
themselves, they resolutely defended each other’s right to another idea of
creativity. So I had the idea
that here was a community. And in fact,
there was a community but it was as virtual as Web-based communities are today.
There was no particular place to gather except the clubs, bars, or concert hall
dressing rooms. This meant that one had to have the budget to go to these
concerts or personally know the musicians. Of course there were, for some,
apartments, which were most often the apartments of admirers, or girlfriends.
None of these places were openly accessible. Understand that, of course, the
players were mostly men. Some of these forward thinking men were light years
ahead in terms of music, and some in their socio-political idealism, but many
hadn’t yet left the “cave” in regards to how women fit into the scheme of
things. But as always, there existed individuals who were not trapped in their
epoch. (They are all around us, but we must recognize them.) And for some
reason, I was fortunate enough to have met quite a few.
Clockwise from top left: U. Aldridge Hansberry and Rasul Siddik. U. Aldriddge Hansberry playing flute. U. Aldridge Hansberry with flute trio No Sax, Paris.
Point A to Point B I will not pretend to give even a brief summary of the
different lineages of Jazz here; it is not the purpose of this short piece and
is too vast a subject. I would like in any case to be clear as to how some
artists who were writing/performing at a certain period in my development
affected my initial direction in composing and performing. For many on the branches of the “Jazz Tree,” getting from
point A to point B is pre-determined. For some erudite boppers, and post
boppers, chords, scales, and modes, either extended or altered, mapped the
paths of their improvisational discoveries. Ornette Coleman coined the term
“free Jazz” with his album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960).
(This should not to be confused with the
Free Jazz of the late sixties through the early eighties and beyond.) His
writing and playing clearly showed that “melody” was sufficient (once again) to
inspire an improvisation. Coleman’s first American publisher was MJQ Music that
was officiated by John Lewis, the pianist, composer – arranger of the Modern
Jazz Quartet. (The MJQ was one of the principal groups of the sixties with
precise arrangements and spare improvisations. John Lewis had much respect for
more “adventuresome” music – though quite honestly, the mixing of classical
music forms and musicians are evidence that Lewis was a precursor in the Third
Stream school of thought. But I’m getting ahead of myself....) My informal studies were largely around Ornette Coleman’s
harmolodic principles and George Russell’s “Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal
Organization.” Many of my initial compositions were influenced by these ideas
either in writing or in improvisations. Now, whether my work reflected these
influences in a clear and orthodox manner is open to debate, but they were
certainly vehicles that directed my thinking and playing at the time – and
remain reference points even today. The common thread of these rather different ideologies is
that they very naturally underscored the elements of research and gravity in
what was called “Jazz.” For years, the violin and acoustic bass were included
in compositions and ensembles. But the inclusion of other “orchestral”
instruments was minimal and their importance in the composition marginal or
decorative. (This is in no way an insinuation of a lack of richness and
audacity in writing. There are a host of spectacular composers and arrangers in
the Jazz idiom, strictly speaking. But frankly, Duke Ellington’s sacred music
had already left the constraints of what is categorized as Jazz. And Mary Lou
Williams, in both her compositions and improvisations, was – and is - incredibly contemporary, to name just
two gigantic figures closely associated with the Jazz idiom.) For a time in
20th century music, Jazz and classical music were considered the antitheses of
one another. But more and more, the two genres overlapped in writing and
timbres. In the 1960s, Gunther Schuller referred to this overlapping or removal
of boundaries as “Third Stream.” John Lewis co-founded, with Gunther Schuller,
Orchestra USA, dedicated primarily to it. I had a very
natural affinity for this music - the flute finding a place where it was not asked to imitate saxophone bop solos. Apart from
Brazilian music and Afro-Cuban music, the role of the flute was reduced to ‘pretty’ interludes in Jazz when not
trying to be an alto saxophone. One of its great interpreters was Eric Dolphy who, though he was a hard bopper, added another
dimension for this instrument as well as introducing the bass clarinet to small Jazz ensembles. His writing was less formatted
by what was considered Jazz in his day. His 1964 album Out to Lunch features the young Tony Williams playing the drums as a grouping of percussion instruments –
which is, of course, what the trap set is. For brevity, I’ll turn to the
percussions that I play that are strongly influenced by the great heritage of New Orleans and sixties Jazz, as well as contemporary
classical idioms using percussion for time as well as emphasizing timbre. Having started the snare drum at 4 with my grandfather,
who had been the departmental head of the music at Mills College (Alabama) long before my birth, I was always a drummer at
heart. I studied in
the Paris area at two conservatories, one being regional (this means little outside of France but is an important distinction
here). I wanted to advance in technique and was plunged into contemporary percussion composition and skills. As we are all
sponges of our environment, this affected my ears as well as my compositions. All this is to say that my reasons for coming to Paris
were not to teach, learn French fluently, discover distant non-French cultures, study contemporary percussion, etc. These
were the unexpected gifts that came from locating the “Jazz” community, struggling through immigration procedures,
finding housing, dealing with melancholy, and on and on…. So in my compositions, and indeed in my playing are all these elements. They are sometimes recognizable
and sometimes so fused that one doesn’t see the connections. Here I offer some compositions that reflect different aspects or problem solving (in a compositional
way) of my French residency. 1 Culture Collision
I wrote using neo-classical
technique on a basic blues progression in the Locrian mode. The death of the
great American artist Georgia O’Keefe occurred just as I was naming the piece.
4 If ever time stood still.mp3 This composition was used in the same theatre piece,
though it was written independently.
This was written in the
early 90’s but this is a very recent recording (January 2010).
The harmony theoretician,
George Russell, calls the 1st exercise of one of his seminars “Test
One.” Except for a minor change, this was my proposition.
7 Générique-Préhistoire I conceptualized, played all
the voices, and did the mix for this short theme (in French, “générique”) that
was for the DVD of the National Museum Consortium in France (RMN). A volume on
the instruments and “music” of pre-historic times was edited for their series
on Art History and released in 2006.
Music Samples: http://aldridgehansberrymusic.blogspot.com/ Performance Dates/News: http://aldridgehansberrymusic.blogspot.com/ Improvisation
trio (with music – in French): http://hansberry-maintenant-marzan.blogspot.com/2009/10/concert-au-babilo.html |
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Ed Ruscha
somehow seems to move easily within a “both/and” artistic sensibility in that
he is able to integrate many seemingly disparate artistic tendencies into his
own painting practice. This side of the Atlantic he is best known for his
photographic work that anticipated the conceptual art of the 70’s such as Twenty
Six Gasoline Stations (1963),
a small format book that he published himself and which
represented a move away from process and Abstract Expressionist
gesture to concentrate
on an objective documentation of the West Coast landscape characterised by
urban sprawl’s manmade constructions: free flowing highways, gasoline stations,
parking lots, street signage and billboards, with the car the sine qua non of
mobility to explore a terrain that was relatively new, and therefore all the
more exciting, to Ruscha. This exhibition, which concentrates on fifty years of
his paintings - and there was only a relatively short period when he stopped
painting - is therefore a revelation, and in more senses than one. For Ruscha
is able to navigate between figuration and conceptualism, narrative and
abstraction. He is one of the few artists of his generation who never really
gave up on painting. Ed Ruscha
(possibly a derivation of Ruschitzka)
was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska into a family marked by a strong work
ethic. He was brought up as a strict Catholic, an enduring element that was to
mark, even if tangentially, much of his future work. From a young age, much like the writer John Updike, his
vision had been formed artistically by a passion for cartoons and comics,
stamps and type faces and all things to do with graphic materials, inks and
post marks etc. Like Warhol and Lichtenstein Ruscha was inspired by comic book
heroes, but lettering and fonts were equal sources of fascination for him Subsequently,
when studying at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, later to become
part of Cal-Arts, he studied graphics, graduating in 1960. Perhaps as a result of
this background, he was able to escape the seemingly intractable dilemma of
pictorial illusionism, originally posed by strict Greenbergian doctrine, and
the “you see what you see” impasse that navigated several painters into Minimalism,
by making letters
the main
protagonists of his paintings. For Ruscha these letters were by no means merely
passive signs or ciphers but created an opportunity for him to bring out their
intrinsic aural characteristics as well as their narrative potential. His early
paintings are literally loud paintings that spell out onomatopoeic
exclamations. OOF is
painted bright yellow against a Prussian blue background and in Boss, black lettering
appears against a painterly chocolate brown
background reminiscent of Jasper Johns. What is arresting about these early
paintings is their continued engagement with the stuff of painting, the
abstract expressionist immersion in the materiality of the paint’s surface, and
with its literal application as expressive gesture. At the same time, they
demonstrate an early Pop sensibility. Pop is more often categorised as an East Coast than
a West Coast phenomenon with Oldenburg opening his Store on the Lower East Side of New York
and Lichtenstein appropriating imagery for high art from the world of
advertising and comics in 1961. The West coast tended to be marginalised
despite the fact that it was the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles that was
responsible for Warhol’s move from commercial to high art with his ground
breaking exhibition of Campell’s Soup Cans canvases. Ferus was likewise responsible for
resurrecting Duchamp and revealing him as the eminence grise behind the most significant
contemporary art developments. Duchamp had a determining influence on Robert
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose use of vernacular motifs and 3D objects had
a catalytic effect on Ruscha – he describes John’s Target with Four Faces
as having had “the effect of an
atomic bomb in my training.” Ruscha’s Box
Smashed FlatI, with squashed
raisins emerging from
the flattened packet that celebrates sun-rich California, anticipates both his
engagement with icons of consumerism and his fascination with actual materials.
Later, letters would be strung out horizontally against totally neutral
backgrounds as if they constituted a landscape in their own right as in Large
Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962)
and Standard Station (1966) with their characteristic steep
diagonal perspectives, all action taking place in the left hand side of the
picture. The letters figure as three-dimensional objects in space while the
diagonals suggests the dynamic movement of objects and buildings glimpsed while
speeding past them on the highway. Later, the gasoline stations were pictured
on fire, as was Ruscha’s painting of Los Angeles
County Museum on Fire (1965).
Though the very painterly
flames do not look too dangerous, this has of course been interpreted as a
transgressive anti-establishment gesture. But whatever the initial motive, the
theme of buildings going up in flames anticipate a certain taste for the
apocalyptic that characterises Ruscha’s work though it never descends into
total nihilism.
Word Works For Ruscha,
who sounds as if he has a neurological condition known as synaesthesia, letters
and words seem to exist independently and have a distinct tactile, olfactory
and auditory presence. He explains, “Words have temperature for me. When they
reach a certain point and become hot words, then they appeal to me.…” This basic
objectness of words and lettering is conveyed in another series in which
letters are done violence to and pictured distorted by metal clamps. Then in
the mid-sixties came a series in which words figured in what Ruscha termed his
“romance with liquids,” hyper-realist
paintings
that featured liquid words painted in a meticulous trompe-l’oeil manner so that water, oil, or syrup, among other substances, appeared to
have been spilled onto the surface of the canvas, but not absorbed. There is a cool Surrealist edge to
these paintings that will resurface in the next series of paintings that forego
words altogether. In similar fashion, there is a series of paintings in which
the words, strung out across the canvas, begin to lose their link with meaning.
What characterises all these paintings is the meticulousness of their rendition
and the fact that they are totally premeditated. There is no more room here for
spontaneity or gestures of self expression than there is in the work of other
artists such as
Bruce Nauman and Denis Oppenheimer whose art practices, categorised as
conceptual in the late 60’s and 70’s, tended to be limited to the simple
photographic documentation of everyday aspects of life. Ruscha, as we shall
see, takes as his subject matter ordinary and quite banal objects, but by
isolating them within the deep space of the canvas invests them with a sense of
comic mystery. Objects in Space One of the
salient characteristics of Modernist painting since Manet is its tendency to integrate figure
and
ground and thereby minimise the effect of perspective and chiaroscuro. With
Pop, and prior to Pop with the Precisionists in the 1930’s, the sharp
distinction between figure and ground was reasserted and illusionistic artifice
acknowledged, but in a neutral mode. Ruscha’s backgrounds are just that; they are
foils for the depiction of his isolated, trompe-l’oeil, life-sized objects. The
backgrounds to his series of objects in space are rendered as subtly gradated
layers of colour that often darken as they approach the upper edge of the
canvas, which further undermines their mimetic qualities. These Stains In the
early 70’s Ruscha went through a temporary phase in which he felt unable to
continue painting with oil on canvas. He began to search for alternatives by
experimenting with substances such as gunpowder, grass, spinach, egg yolk,
beer, chocolate syrup, salad dressing, olive oil, and motor oil, among others,
using brand names as well as making up his own substances and exploring their
properties as stains on canvas or paper. It was around this period that he
started to place words or phrases against backgrounds made up of silk, satin,
rayon or moiré all of which delighted him with the various ways they modified
the support he was using. Since the nature of the materials did not allow
trompe-l’oeil effects he began to use texts so that the paintings read more
like public signs, but often with a covert linguistic or poetic twist. Within a
year he had returned to painting and began to work on a series of paintings
that he referred to as landscapes but which feature words set against panoramic
backdrops. An American Sublime In these
grand horizontal pieces, ranks of words seem to hover against evocations of a
sunrise or sunset, liminal worlds which Ruscha has described as “anonymous
backdrops for the drama of words” that almost surreptitiously suggest another
dimension of being. In A
Particular Kind of Heaven the letters themselves take on a spectral and almost
hypnotic quality.
Yet this evident metaphysical strain is at the same belied by a certain laconic
humour. Other notably existential murmurings echo in the mountain painting Me (1999) and It’s a Small World which pictures our planet earth floating
inconsequentially in the vast blueness of the heavens as if it was of no
greater significance than one of Ruscha’s gravity bound olives. In some cases,
landscape and text seem to have very little to do with one another, and the
phrase or text seems abandoned, suspended in the air hovering over a stretch of
landscape. Much of
Ruscha’s inspiration has always come from his love of cars and the sequence of
images grasped whilst speeding down the highway. By the 1980’s other images
were prompted by plane journeys regularly taken between Los Angeles and Miami. Talk
Radio, with its
crisscrossing of night lights, suggests looking down on a nocturnal city whose
inhabitants are tuned into the radio waves. By this time, there was another
innovation in Ruscha’s practice. He had begun to use an air brush, spraying on
the layers of acrylic paint to make up his backdrops, where previously they had
been slowly built up in a much more laborious way using oils. Out of this new technique
came a series of
soft-focused, monochrome silhouette paintings and a new direction, again a
series of paintings without words. The images he used, often taken from
childhood books, are archetypal motifs of American history: in Homeward
Bound the schooner may
be taking emigrants to the New World, while in The Uncertain Trail (1986), convoys of horse-drawn wagons
follow their “Manifest Destiny” by going west, images that instantly convey a
history and an identity. On the other hand, the presence of censorship bars that
render these paintings wordless could suggest an alternative history, or at
least another narrative, and therefore introduce a degree of ambivalence toward
aspects of American history that have become almost doctrinal. This ambiguity
was of prime importance to Ruscha.
Temporality Ruscha is
fascinated by all means of image-making, especially the movies, and during the
90’s produced black-and-white paintings that take as their inspiration the
actual material of celluloid, showing all the scratches and damage it would
have suffered through multiple replays over the passage of time. Pictures such
as Exit and The
End (again
significantly written in Gothic script) spell out the temporality and mortality
of all things but also have a mysteriously static quality. It is curious that
Ruscha, who seems so interested in moving images, should emphasise the static
quality of things, investing them with a mystery and magic that is difficult to
analyse. The exit sign overshadowed by the glowing whiteness of the empty
screen has something spectral about it, or even purgatorial, signifying portals
to another world or another existence. At the same time, we cannot help wondering
“What end?” and “For whom?” Sin-Without (1991),
like the earlier Hell Heaven (1988), seems to suggest a
questioning of religious doctrine that underpins Ruscha’s scheme of things. In our
technology-driven age, Ruscha’s fascination with celluloid, a medium quickly
being rendered obsolete by digitalisation, carries with it the bittersweet
pungency of nostalgia. This emphasis on change and decay, which denote
intimations of mortality, is again picked up in a series called The Course
of Empires, its
title taken from the nineteenth century American landscape painter Thomas Cole
who drew on
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to paint the life cycle of
a city state from
savage state back to savage state, with obvious premonitory allusions to America’s
possible fate. Ruscha’s series, originally painted for the 2004 Venice
Biennale, was based on an earlier series of urban paintings of industrial
buildings which he contrasted with what had replaced them. The first series was in
black-and-white, the updates in colour. The old windowless academic or
manufacturing Tech-Chem building is replaced by Fat
Boy, some sort of burger eatery, plus possibly a
reference to the first atomic bomb to fall on Hiroshima, and where there was a Blue
Collar Trade School
there’s a deserted building surrounded by barbed wire. A similar sense of the
inevitable cycle of change characterises the diptych Azteca/ Azteca in
Decline (2007). It
is based on a motif glimpsed on a wall when Ruscha was touring the ancient
ruins outside of Mexico City. The motif reiterates the diagonal composition
that characterises one of Ruscha’s earliest paintings, Large Trademark with
Eight Spotlights.
The colourful motifs painted with trompe-l’oeil accuracy suggest a graffitied
billboard which appears in the second painting to have crumbled and seems to be
peeling off the canvas. Significantly, the graffiti is the sole element left
unchanged. Mountains Ruscha’s
Mountains are not representations of actual landscapes but invented images, and
while they too figure as anonymous backdrops for his drama of words, this
archetypal image is so strong that a conflict can arise between image and text.
Ruscha explains that they are “ideas of mountains picturing some kind of
unobtainable bliss or glory…tall, dangerous and beautiful.” Yet again Ruscha
has taken hold of a visual cliché and
endowed it with qualities that span the poetic, the playful, and the profound.
As in all of Ruscha’s landscapes, concepts encompassing macrocosm and
microcosm, space and temporality, are almost unwittingly evoked by the
interaction between image and text. Yet, also as in his other paintings, there
is no one relationship spelt out and should the existential element seem too assertive,
a corresponding echo of wry laughter can usually be inferred in the
immeasurable spaces between image and text and thought and language. © Anna Leung 2010
Anna Leung is a London-based
artist and educator
now semi-retired from
teaching at Birkbeck
College but
taking occasional
informal groups to current
art exhibitions. Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting was at the Hayward Gallery, London, from 14 October 2009 - 10 January 2010. It is now at the Haus der Kunst in Munich from 12 February - 2 May 2010. After that, it will be at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm from 29 May - 5 September 2010.
Sharon Hayes’s Yard (Sign) involved littering a grassy patch of Queens’s historic
New York Marble
Cemetery with yard signs, some mundane and others comical. One proclaimed, “If
I catch you dumping you are dead.” Hayes
attempted to summon the ghost of Kaprow without at the same time giving him
free run of the yard. At the Queens Museum of Art, Josiah McElheny’s Yard (Junkyard) projection showed a
90-by-30-foot aerial photograph of the “Iron Triangle,” a nearby,
seven-block-long area of wrecking and tire yards currently slated for
redevelopment. Like the other re-performances, interaction was limited since
the wall projection occurred in a room containing the museum’s famous “Panorama
of the City of New York,” the world’s largest architectural model commissioned
for the 1964 World’s Fair. The juxtaposition was intriguing, but a far cry from
resembling anything Kaprow may have had a hand in. As unengaging as this re-performance was,
Michael Wilson (in a Time Out New York review) correctly suggests that re-performance offers a challenge to
artists and institutions to never quite be the same, “yet always recognizable.” These
re-performances are not recreations of Kaprow’s Yard; rather, they are
reinterpretations of Yard.
This brings to light an issue that is at the heart of re-performance: how
faithful do re-performances need to be? While the answer to this question is
open to much debate, I offer a simple rationale.
Performance
art is conceptually based; the performing body of the artist (or the
re-performer) gives form to a concept. Thus, one incarnation
of a performance does not have more
value than another. The
best examples of this are Fluxus event scores that allow
participants to perform the indicated actions in their own way, wherever they
choose. In fact, it is hard to conclude that there is such thing as an original
performance on which to
base a faithful recreation. Walter Benjamin's discussion of the futile attempt
to locate an authentic photographic print
gives
form to my rationale: "From a photographic negative, for example, one can
make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no
sense." This semantic conundrum begs the question of what constitutes an
“original” in performance art and imposes
on performance
art a value
system, an endless search for a lost original masterpiece. Re-performance, as it continues to evolve as a concept and
practice in performance art, denies such a value system by allowing artists the
opportunity to re-imagine,
reinterpret
and, more importantly, re-conceptualize performances from the past. Re-performance
is not confined to the white walls of the museum or gallery. Eva and
Franco Mattes (also known as 0100101110101101.ORG) used the online community
Second Life as the venue for their re-performance project Synthetic
Performances.
The recreated performances include Gilbert and George’s The
Singing
Sculpture,
Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, Chris Burden’s Shoot, Valie Export’s Tapp und
Tastkino,
Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks
and Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Imponderabilia. Second Life is a whole
synthetic world in which representation and existence are one and the same. In Second Life,
users can create avatars, called residents, who interact, socialize, form
communities, and create and trade virtual property and services. They carry out
mundane activities such as eating, watching movies and having sex. Avatars can
take any form users choose, allowing them the choice to mimic their real-life
appearance or conceive of a resident who is any combination of human, animal,
or vegetable. Cultural
theorist Domenico Quaranta suggests an intimate relationship between participants and their avatars: “I am
my avatar, and the fact that my avatar is an artifact, a puppet made of polygons and
textures, certainly doesn’t stop me from identifying with it.” Over time,
operators of avatars cannot help but acknowledge that the world of Second Life
is indeed a world, with its own complex society, rules to obey, and trends
to follow. The
performances the Matteses choose to re-perform are focused on bodies - be it bodies in space or
bodies in interaction with an audience. In the original performance of Imponderabilia
Abramovic and Ulay stood
naked at the entrance to a group exhibition in Bologna. The blocking of the
door required visitors to pass sideways through a narrow gap between the
artists’ naked bodies. In film documentation of the performance the reaction of
visitors varied from comical to dismay, fulfilling the artists’ intention to
question the larger social constructions of physical interaction. While the
original audience was susceptible to feeling the flesh of the performers,
audience members experience the online re-performance quite differently. In
fact, two audiences were created when Synthetic Performances premiered at Artist Space in
New York as part of Performa 2007. First there was the audience of people at
home using avatars that interact with the avatars of Eva and Franco Mattes who
took on the roles of Abramovic and Ulay. This virtual audience could either
left click their computer mouse to cross the threshold facing Franco or right
click to face Eva. Thus, the physical element of contact between artist and
viewer is replaced by physical contact of avatar to avatar. As
Quaranta suggests, because participants in Second Life closely identify with their
avatars, the avatar pressing against another avatar is indeed, like a living
body pressing against another living body. This online audience performed
for a gallery audience who witnessed their actions through live-feed
projections at Artist Space. A good analogy would equate the avatars, who get
to have all the fun, to football players, while the gallery audience are the
fans watching the game on Jumbo-tron screens from the nose-bleed seats. This proliferation of audience
positions raises
many questions concerning how re-performance can and will be experienced through
virtual technologies when the physical element of a performing body is replaced
by a virtual one. As we go forth as a society that relies more on email than
handwritten letters and Netflix instead of the movie theater, the changes in
social interaction will undoubtedly affect how we experience art. "Synthetic
Performance
defines the virtual destiny of performance art in an age where life itself can
be easily reproduced" (Quaranta). Re-performance
shows the limitations of the ephemeral nature of performance while suggesting a
path for the possible
continued existence of performance. However, this destiny is not fully
assured. As illustrated by this brief survey, re-performances can
completely alter the context and content of the original performance. Just
barely 100 years old, performance art already has a contentious and complicated
history. Studying re-performance will allow us to better understand the
inherit complexity of performance art. More important, looking at the future of
re-performance will
enable us to see better how performance art can and will adapt to social and
cultural trends.
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