confessional modes

I must confess that I am quite fascinated with all your different backgrounds, processes and desires that fuel the practices.
For me performing - or have someone to perform with me or for me - has always been a process of being with others. Of connecting with people and connecting to people. Even if it is just for a brief encounter. I must say that I hardly work with people with whom I don't have or I don't engage in a personal relationship. Affect, as a human bond, is something that is part of my work. That affectual relationship can be in the present time - be happening now - or it can be in the past - as a memory, as a reposition of something that was hidden or erased. I am always both terrified and attracted by the sheer vulnerability of performing. Because I am not pretending to be someone other than myself. I really am there being myself. And I never quite know what can happen, and I like to allow space for things that I cannot predict, to improvisation, to decide and change things now, as things are occurring. Maybe it is too romantic, but I quite like the idea of performance as a gift. As something that you offer without wanting anything back.

Palpable sensations

Palpable sensations Michelle, are an apt description of something I try to perform in my work both in the doing and in the viewing. To begin with, I’ve always been a great believer in doing and experiencing things for myself – it is a great test of self-knowledge- about discovering one’s own capacities and limits and of knowledge about the work. That’s why I’ve always been more comfortable being the performer in my work because I know how far I can push myself and I am able to push myself further than I would be able to others. It’s also a great test of knowledge of the work through experience- how can I talk knowledgably about performing the work without performing (in) it myself? Yes, this is about sensitising the body to experience and to live it and feel it- that’s why your own engagement in Lygia Clark’s work through your own investment in the experience is so important.

In my running work I have had to train myself to run the distances that I run. I am not a natural runner and this was not an activity I was particularly engaged in to a great extent before I began to make this work. I was trying to think of a physical activity that was very straight-forward, that did not require any special or additional equipment in its activity (other than shoes and basic clothing) and that could take place in a number of different locations and environments.
I wanted to push myself and to find an activity that I would find difficult to do and to find that tension where there is always the potential of possible failure. In this work, the tension of possible failure comes not only in the activity of running itself, but in the production of the image (whether it is recorded or live). And sensation carried through the image through its movement as an image (or images) which is directed by my (head) movement as I run, with the sound of my breathing as a constant reminder of the experience and sensation of the activity.

When I was away I met for the first time someone who suffers violently from motion sickness and it occurred to me also for the first time what the effect could be on someone watching this work. This gave me some cause for concern as it was not something that I had considered or thought of before. I was quite shocked but at the same time horribly fascinated at how violently another's body could react to the palpable sensation of seeing an image.

Confessions....Sensitising The Body

I want to confess that my body has been in hiding.

I am a performer but I have been performing through others.

I'm neither proud nor ashamed of my actions.

The time has come to experience the live again.

These photographs are documentation of a series of experiments I developed in Brazil with American artist Julia Kouneski to re-sensitise our bodies to live our research physically as opposed to an engagement with text alone.... If my body has been in hiding as a performer, this feels like a crude start but one that finds it's root in the early psychotherapy of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark who developed sculptural objects that evolved into mediating tools for healing. She named it the relational object. It's relational quality was defined by it's direct placement on the body of the participant, so that subject and object were in direct contact with each other. Several people experienced a "dissolving" of the self into the object (I'm not sure what the object would say) but tactility (to return to Lia's choice of the word palpable) was given as much weight as the visual.

These palpable sensations were a crucial re-awakening of the hidden capacity of my body to perform. We are still left with the documentary evidence lacking the physical sensation of the live act.

Talking of the body, I must go for a foot x-ray... I need to know whether I have been walking for 6 weeks on a hairline fracture...

The physicality of an image

Lia, the questions you pose about the performing (and peformativity) of an image and your earlier question regarding experience in the ‘doing’ are key concerns of my research and my work with the moving image. The title of my thesis: Re-presenting the Physical Act : Strategies for an Exploration of the Physical presence of the Body through its Screen Representation addresses these questions head on by proposing re-conceptualisation of the materiality of the body through its physical presence as an image.

At the heart of my concerns is the direct relationship (or interrelationship) between video and performance that has been prevalent since the 1960’s and 70’s when video was emerging as an art-form in its own right (and the question the emergence of video as an art form rather than just as documentation is key here) It is my belief that the body captured on video not only stresses its very physicality and existential presence as an image, [as a physical document and tangible record of an action or an event], but also in the very direct relationship it has with the viewer, in processes of spectatorship and communication, through which I suggest its physicality becomes concretised. This directly has to do with what an image ‘does’ and it suggests something in the performativity and ontological presence of an image (something that happens in the image itself and in the experience of viewing it) that is different but nonetheless experiential in the moment in which it is viewed.
So it is not suggesting that it is the same kind of experience as the experience of watching a live performance with live bodies, but what it is suggesting that it is another kind of performance in and of itself. It this way it goes beyond the idea of the product by including the image as part of the performance (or performed) act. In this sense it tries to hold onto the idea of the experience as a current experience rather than one that has transpired.

I tried to give a sense of this when I first set up the seminar performance ‘A Demonstration of Practice’, by having a live feed of my performance to camera that I was performing to the audience, projected simultaneously as an image directly on the wall behind me. By doing this I was not trying to set up binaries of this is me ‘here’ and this is the image over ‘there’ but presenting both ‘here’ in the experience and moment of viewing and doing. Jillian’s reference to the Butler text is key here. Also, what Amelia Jones refers to as ‘Body Art’ (as distinct from ‘Performance Art’) , as works that

‘may or may not initially have taken place in front of an audience: … that take place through an enactment of the artist's body, whether it be in a "performance" setting or in the relative privacy of the studio, that is then documented in such a way that it can be experienced subsequently through photography, film, video and / or text' (although I would contest the experience as being subsequent).

Jones' articulation and examination of this term is particularly relevant here since it posits the emergence of a trajectory of practice that explicitly implies not only the (physical) presence and existence of the body in the work from the start, but also points to a wider examination of the term performance through its functional status within the broader context of art practice (in photography, film, video and / or text…) and its relationship to the viewer. Jones defines this relationship as one of 'intersubjectivity' : 'a site where reception [in the viewer] and production [in the art work] come together’ and is largely informed by Merleau Ponty's phenomenological writings which see the body in terms of its 'lived' experience and its relationship to others constituted through the reciprocal relationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’.



Lia, your proposition of images that are themselves performed is very close to what I have been trying to do in my work, particularly my latest work ‘Live Run.’ In this work the ‘doing’ is everything and so is the construction and reception of an image whilst the ’doing’ is taking place. Over the last year I have been developing moving-image/performance works that use mobile camera technologies to record a series of long-distance runs. Starting from a premise of stereo sound and vision, I have two cameras attached to my head in order to record my viewpoint from each eye (and ear). What is recorded is the run in its entirety from my eye-view and experience of running the event. What I wanted to develop from the start and what I finally had the opportunity to work on during my residency in Banff, was a ‘live’ aspect to this work, where others are able to see my viewpoint (through the image) literally as I run a particular course, through the simultaneous performance of the run as it happens and its screening. I have only just scratched the surface and I was able to start something that is still very much in progress, but it is the closest I’ve got to so far to what could be described as the production of a work where the performance in both process and activity is in the image (or in the intertwining of the performance and the production of the image) and it is very exciting.

Svelte Minds and Thinking Bodies

Jillian, I think your point that performance breaks down the binary of process and product is absolutely key. I think this achievement descends, in part, from feminist ambitions which sought to challenge the tendency to fetishize subject (be it a person or art itself) as object, and experience as consumable relic.

I posed that question hoping to highlight what I suspect to be a false duality between process and product. It’s a question that poses an artificial choice, but like Jillian and Michelle, it’s a choice I too have grappled with in my photographic work. I suspect we can have both and perhaps even find a way of approaching potential answers which would validate the product more. It’s the notion that the product must be somehow solid and tangible in order to be taken seriously as a “product” which points to the privileging of certain senses and modes of perception over others. Objects, as relics, provide a kind of comfort by proving to us that an experience has transpired, but somehow not completely vanished. There’s that choice between investing oneself fully in an experience and deciding to retain the distance needed to produce a relic. This is a debate I frequently think about when I feel the urge to pull out the camera during an extraordinary moment which pervades my senses. It’s so circular; you feel an impulse to create an image-artifact of a moment of palpable presence, which will in turn solidify the bond between desire for the present and distance from it.

I'd like to propose we explore going beyond these so-called relics and documentations for tomorrow. What do we think about images which are themselves performed, in which the performance is the image? Is the separation between the two an absolute divide or merely another false duality in disguise? At what point (if any) does a documentation transcend itself? Though forms of documentation can't enable us to fully access the present which is now past, perhaps they can help us touch a new moment. What is the value (if any) of new moments created via processes of documentation? The photograph of Michelle's aura in particular makes me want to probe this dimension of purely visual events or events which are solely made possible by appropriating optics traditionally used for documentation.

Lastly, the distinction between performance and performativity remains key to our discussion as it evolves. I think Jillian’s excerpt from the Butler text goes to the marrow of the contrast. It immediately brought to mind Yvonne Rainer’s late 70’s performance, The Mind is a Muscle, in which Rainer deconstructed dance/performance by stripping its gestural customs away and instead presented a performative dancer–subject who defined her subjectivity on her own terms.

Til tomorrow...


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