Lia, my instinct is to respond that process is everything, which goes completely against what I said in my earlier post, that process is irrelevant in my work. In performance, where documentation always fails, process IS the product.
Perhaps this accounts for the prevalence of process as the main content in performance (in the downtown dance community of New York, at least). There is no product in live performance, so people (artists and viewers) hold on to form and structure as if it were pottery, like they can touch it. When I try to imagine my performances, try to grab them and hold them, anything which I made (video, movement, sound, lighting) seems flimsy, and what I grab is an audience through time. I feel differently about this with my videos. So is the actual live performance the process or the product?
That goes back to our initial question for this symposium where we were trying to decide between performance and performative. I think this quote of Judith Butler is of relevance:
. . . It is important to distinguish performance from performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject. . . . What I'm trying to do is think about performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names. Then I take a further step, through the Derridean rewriting of Austin, and suggest that this production actually always happens through a certain kind of repetition and recitation. So if you want the ontology of this, I guess performativity is the vehicle through which ontological effects are established. Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed.
Judith Butler, "Gender as Performance," in A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, ed Peter Osborne, 111-112
I want to go ahead and post this to further our conversation.
Monday, 11 May 2009
Process Vs Product?
In the last few years I have been wrestling with the question you posed Lia.
Partly because I felt that my product could not sum up the vast and varied experiences that were formed in the collaborative making process. I'm not sure it's about one eclipsing the other. This feels like dangerous territory that we're entering, because I don't want to say outright that "the experience of doing is key" but in truth I live by this motto and the artists I research were promoters of this position. It would clearly help if the product itself was not "uninteresting" and thus it would be less of an indulgence to ask artists to let themselves go in experiential processes.
My research is concerned with two different but connected concepts, Anthropohagy and Syncretism. To varying degrees I utilise these concepts in my practice as a methodological position. Brazil has provided the base for my research, both in the art produced there and in the antropofagia movement, adopted by Brazilian intellectuals in the 1920’s. Anthropophagy (antropofagia) stemmed from a Brazilian indigenous Tupi Indian custom of cannibalism as a means to absorb the vital potency of the other, to become the other. The movement promoted forms of cultural cannibalism that used or adopted cultural influences from outside of Brazil, absorbing it into the culture to produce new forms.
I continually seek groups and individuals to join. Call me a leach if you like, but I feed off their knowledge and this continual contamination can be mutually rewarding for both parties. Time plays a key factor in this. The collaboration, contamination, host/parasite connection has it's limit. In my case it is always temporary, but temporary in the sense of months and years rather than brief encounters.
Veronique, your emphasis on gesture is important, because perhaps the presence of our bodies within a group is as potent as the spoken word. On a formal level, entering a group as an outside body inevitably affects it's dynamics. Sometimes my experiences in groups (here I think back to my work with mediums in Scotland) were outside of language, based in phenomenological encounters, in theatre and in ritual. The impact of my body in the group was undeniable as the stranger who was attempting to fit in. In this sense, there must be something in the attempt itself. Surely this is a performative gesture?
In this way the photograph of my aura sums up my time with psychic phenomena. It was something I could not pinpoint or find answers in. I felt absorbed into the immersive theatre of the seance arena, but I cannot tell you what was smokescreen and what I believed actually happened. What was important was that my investment was:
emotional, psychical and physical.
[1] Fisher, Jean ‘Some Thoughts of Contaminations’, Third Text, no 32, 1995
Background: Lia Chavez
My interest in the body and performance is an enduring one. The fracturing and fragmenting of the body, the collaging and re-assemblage of it and its ultimate reinvention...all these things are so action-oriented and performative. The decoupaged cyborg body; the beautiful grotesque body; the evolutionary, vitalist body; the body which (re)writes itself into existence; liberation bodies, liminal bodies, unfixed, transformative bodies, unstable bodies, bodies in formatura and on and on... These fascinations have roots deep enough to be unconscious, so discussing the background of my practice is more a process of excavation than explanation. Messy, imprecise, partial. Michelle, your words about those influences imbedded in a life’s worth of previous experience and actions resonate deeply.
Looking into the past seems like a fairly concrete approach for now. I can point to particular events, such as dancing from the age of 4 and loving it almost as much as I loved painting which was introduced just as early. The dialogue between performance and visual art was totally natural and uninhibited for me from early on. I recall as a young dancer being more fascinated with the abstract shadows on the stage than what the audience saw frontally. I remember being far more drawn to feeling my body from within than to relating to it as a mirror image of what the audience would see. The intense relationship to the mirror that ballet demanded felt silly and awkward to me, but internal sensations severely preoccupied me. Dance surprised and delighted me by placing me squarely in my body; this feeling of embodiment was an otherwise foreign feeling throughout my childhood. Even if that fourth wall between the audience and the stage could be completely dissolved, the audience was still “out there” rather than “in here”. For me the intriguing points had more to do with a question of space, the physical and psychic space of the dancer; the sensation of the joy of flying when dancing, (or perhaps that of a ferocious movement which jarred new sensations or psychological states to life); dance as a private, intimate union with ones’ highest self. It was dance that introduced me to the freedom of roaming the imagination. Just talking about what dance meant to me upon its initial discovery urges me to speak with my child's voice - naïve and romantic .
My onstage concern of the internal evolved into an offstage ritual of dancing in the attic of my family home for hours on end, (perhaps this is beginning to be a bit of a “confession” - to use Michelle’s great word). It was a secret place where I could access the pleasure of that connection without audience or inhibition. Dance became a sort of self-hypnosis and sacred rite, a way for this disembodied child to connect with an embodied and free existence. This utility of dance redefined it entirely for me and at the age of 18 I decided to pursue visual art instead of a career in dance. Dance however remained a faithful companion as a ritualistic, self-exploratory and experimental practice.
A few years later during a residency with Amnesty International USA Women’s Human Rights Team, I created a phototherapy project through interviews with brave and generous survivors of domestic violence and rape. Working with the camera, this was the first time I was able to begin visualizing the liberation body in others which dance had helped me personally develop earlier in life. The camera, often the subject of criticism for disembodying its subjects (and deservedly so), in this case helped facilitate a restoration of embodiment for many of the women involved. This experience introduced me to the photograph's strange power and potential to help heal fragmented bodies and psychological fissures. Shortly thereafter, I moved to the UK to continue my research in gender studies, human rights and visual cultures at Oxford. It was during this point in 2004 that I first entered my own images. Being immersed in feminist discourse triggered a necessity to bring my body and performance and even the (lens as) audience back into the forefront of my life, but this time via the image. The image enabled me to begin to map out the sinews between the symbolic, metaphysical body, which I had intuited through dance, and the actual, physical body. I realized how the performed image empowered an interrogation of the politics surrounding representation and of the audience gaze, which were things I desired to confront. It was also during this moment that I grasped for the first time that the frontier of feminism was one of total reinvention of the self. This idea seduced me to no end and for the first time I was able to connect the dots as to why I was so drawn to the work of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Orlan, the dance company Pilobolus, Francesca Woodman, Elsa Schiaparelli and other artists who have redefined the body and incorporated the chameleonic in their work.
Since then, my more recent work has grown to engage photography, video, painting, experimental music, installation and, faithfully, dance. I’ve gone on to treat the body in space as a metaphor for intense conscious and subconscious experiences, whether in photographs, movement-triggered sound installations or sensation-based videos. My previous use of classical ballet has evolved into a use of less structured, post-modern improvisation and gestural action arising from internal sensation, contact between bodies, trance-like states and free-form semiotic and automatic writing games. My practice has also developed into an engagement of other dancers in addition to myself for visual experiments which use intuitive, hypothetical or imaginary events to generate imagery. For example, my most recent such project (see image below) engaged highly-skilled dancers from Mikhail Baryshnikov's dance company, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet and The Juilliard School to create a series of large-scale unique Ilfochrome prints which technically combined contact improvisation with traditional photography, the static silhouette system of the photogram and direct, painterly application of light to the photograph’s surface. Painterly interference is also a recurring theme, as I am always looking for ways of challenging pictorial tendencies within photography in order to bring a greater sense of performativity into the formation of an image. I desire to make instrumentalized images, images which express the same logic as improvised movement. Images that express a visualization, a reception of the subject founded in gestural knowledge. In the words of Jean Luc Nancy, "The gesture is the knowledge that doesn't know in advance but knows only of something as it produces it."
So here's a question which takes me back to Susana and Jillian's posts: Why make the doing as central as the work generated? Is it necessary to insist on an equal valuation of process and product, or might one rightly eclipse the Other?
"Go", 2008, Unique Ilfochrome print, 108in x 144in
Created by Lia Chavez and William T. Hillman
Looking into the past seems like a fairly concrete approach for now. I can point to particular events, such as dancing from the age of 4 and loving it almost as much as I loved painting which was introduced just as early. The dialogue between performance and visual art was totally natural and uninhibited for me from early on. I recall as a young dancer being more fascinated with the abstract shadows on the stage than what the audience saw frontally. I remember being far more drawn to feeling my body from within than to relating to it as a mirror image of what the audience would see. The intense relationship to the mirror that ballet demanded felt silly and awkward to me, but internal sensations severely preoccupied me. Dance surprised and delighted me by placing me squarely in my body; this feeling of embodiment was an otherwise foreign feeling throughout my childhood. Even if that fourth wall between the audience and the stage could be completely dissolved, the audience was still “out there” rather than “in here”. For me the intriguing points had more to do with a question of space, the physical and psychic space of the dancer; the sensation of the joy of flying when dancing, (or perhaps that of a ferocious movement which jarred new sensations or psychological states to life); dance as a private, intimate union with ones’ highest self. It was dance that introduced me to the freedom of roaming the imagination. Just talking about what dance meant to me upon its initial discovery urges me to speak with my child's voice - naïve and romantic .
My onstage concern of the internal evolved into an offstage ritual of dancing in the attic of my family home for hours on end, (perhaps this is beginning to be a bit of a “confession” - to use Michelle’s great word). It was a secret place where I could access the pleasure of that connection without audience or inhibition. Dance became a sort of self-hypnosis and sacred rite, a way for this disembodied child to connect with an embodied and free existence. This utility of dance redefined it entirely for me and at the age of 18 I decided to pursue visual art instead of a career in dance. Dance however remained a faithful companion as a ritualistic, self-exploratory and experimental practice.
A few years later during a residency with Amnesty International USA Women’s Human Rights Team, I created a phototherapy project through interviews with brave and generous survivors of domestic violence and rape. Working with the camera, this was the first time I was able to begin visualizing the liberation body in others which dance had helped me personally develop earlier in life. The camera, often the subject of criticism for disembodying its subjects (and deservedly so), in this case helped facilitate a restoration of embodiment for many of the women involved. This experience introduced me to the photograph's strange power and potential to help heal fragmented bodies and psychological fissures. Shortly thereafter, I moved to the UK to continue my research in gender studies, human rights and visual cultures at Oxford. It was during this point in 2004 that I first entered my own images. Being immersed in feminist discourse triggered a necessity to bring my body and performance and even the (lens as) audience back into the forefront of my life, but this time via the image. The image enabled me to begin to map out the sinews between the symbolic, metaphysical body, which I had intuited through dance, and the actual, physical body. I realized how the performed image empowered an interrogation of the politics surrounding representation and of the audience gaze, which were things I desired to confront. It was also during this moment that I grasped for the first time that the frontier of feminism was one of total reinvention of the self. This idea seduced me to no end and for the first time I was able to connect the dots as to why I was so drawn to the work of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Orlan, the dance company Pilobolus, Francesca Woodman, Elsa Schiaparelli and other artists who have redefined the body and incorporated the chameleonic in their work.
Since then, my more recent work has grown to engage photography, video, painting, experimental music, installation and, faithfully, dance. I’ve gone on to treat the body in space as a metaphor for intense conscious and subconscious experiences, whether in photographs, movement-triggered sound installations or sensation-based videos. My previous use of classical ballet has evolved into a use of less structured, post-modern improvisation and gestural action arising from internal sensation, contact between bodies, trance-like states and free-form semiotic and automatic writing games. My practice has also developed into an engagement of other dancers in addition to myself for visual experiments which use intuitive, hypothetical or imaginary events to generate imagery. For example, my most recent such project (see image below) engaged highly-skilled dancers from Mikhail Baryshnikov's dance company, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet and The Juilliard School to create a series of large-scale unique Ilfochrome prints which technically combined contact improvisation with traditional photography, the static silhouette system of the photogram and direct, painterly application of light to the photograph’s surface. Painterly interference is also a recurring theme, as I am always looking for ways of challenging pictorial tendencies within photography in order to bring a greater sense of performativity into the formation of an image. I desire to make instrumentalized images, images which express the same logic as improvised movement. Images that express a visualization, a reception of the subject founded in gestural knowledge. In the words of Jean Luc Nancy, "The gesture is the knowledge that doesn't know in advance but knows only of something as it produces it."
So here's a question which takes me back to Susana and Jillian's posts: Why make the doing as central as the work generated? Is it necessary to insist on an equal valuation of process and product, or might one rightly eclipse the Other?
"Go", 2008, Unique Ilfochrome print, 108in x 144in
Created by Lia Chavez and William T. Hillman
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