Rayelle Niemann
PHYSICAL VEHICLE II
PHYSICAL MEANS I
Lecture for the EXIT Festival, Helsinki, February 2001
(part of PHYSICAL VEHICLE, Performance Project, work in progress by Rayelle Niemann,
copyright remains with the author)
In the world of entertainment and events performance is used as an agent of communication.
A lot of elements of performance have been combined within DJ- disco-, i.e. pop culture.
The English word "performance", in one of its German translations standing mainly for "Leistung" in the sense of "achievement", "power" or "yield" is to be found in advertisements for sports goods and activities, the stock market, banks, cars and energy giving soft drinks.
These few examples demonstrate the wide use of the term "performance" nowadays, not even mentioning "life art" in the domain of dance and theatre.
The difficulties encountered when dealing with the allocation of funds, prove just how varied and tricky the classification of performance art remains within the arts themselves:
Is it dance? Is it theatre? Do they recite texts?
What is "performance"?
In the following lecture, without laying claim to perfection (of course), I shall go into the history of performance art. It will be an attempt to approach this particular artistic form of expression, which uses the body as the central point and in which social and technological changes play as much a part as sociological discourses.
I shall mention some samples of performance art since the sixties in order to point out a development also serving as a background for the better understanding of some examples of Swiss performance art.
The main emphasis lies on performers living in Switzerland and having developed their art in the 90s.
I shall also present some work from Switzerland on Video and CD.
After the futurists and DADA, in the 50s it was Fluxus, which advanced performance art, influencing and substantially supporting the actions, happenings and events of the 60s and 70s as well as shaping the comprehension of what we now understand by performance art.
Social criticism and the revolt against social grievances prompted Joseph Beuys to develop the idea of a Social Sculpture, Herrman Nitsch deconstructed religious icons, and Schwarzkogler amongst others explored the limits of physicality and pain. Chris Burden took his criticism of ruling systems one step further by risking his own life in his performance "Shoot" in 1971. Feminist strategies induced female artists to revolt against classical gender roles by using performative images. In 1973 Gina Pane pierced her arms with thorns of roses and slashed her skin with razor blades in symbolical protest against society's violation of women and their degradation to object status.
Reflections of social power structures and of tensions in general human relations or between a couple have been visualised especially in performances by Ulay/Abramovic.
As an example of a performance sustained by the philosophical idea behind it and able to do without work or an audience I would like to cite Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh's piece of 1984: for a year they were connected by a rope of two meters without being allowed to touch each other during this time.
As yet another example for an ideal approach within performance art, which in this case underscored the
aspect of fleetingness, there is James Lee Byars' famous "Perfect Smile" of 1994.
He pulled up the corners of his mouth, yet before that movement could be named a smile and thus determined, it vanished within the lower half of his face just as the performer himself disappeared from the scene immediately afterwards.
The discourse also has the immediate time during which a performance takes place and its immediacy in relation to the audience as a subject.
The audience is incorporated into the flow of events and thus becomes a component without which performances seem unthinkable.
The following episode illustrates the importance of the presence of the audience:
In 1977, in New York, John Lennon and Yoko Ono distributed badges with the inscription: "you are here". Asked about the meaning of it they answered: everybody tells us they are here because of us, but what is really important is that THEY are here…
Thanks to the rapid development of new technologies and their easier availability, as early as in the seventies artists started multiplying their physical appearance by employing video, thus exemplifying Benjamin's thesis of endless reproduction. As the eye of the camera took the place of immediate viewing, the glance of the spectator ceased to be a direct one: it was transposed into new dimensions by extra lenses.
So the body itself turns into the screen, becomes its own mirror; the fellow human being, the onlooker is substituted by a medium. The body surface is explored with the assistance of yet another surface.
Performances are staged for the camera, visual angles, perspectives in relation to the visible object are varied.
The body as a whole is deconstructed, with the use of technical tricks parts of it can be detached and presented as new units.
Bruce Nauman for instance turns his head upside down letting it endlessly revolve, whereas Andy Warhol in "Blowjob" chooses to give a view over selected details only. Thanks to recordings, performances can be witnessed independent of fixed dates and without the physical presence of the artist.
By using video technology Vito Acconci had the audience participate indirectly in one of his events. In a separate room he confessed intimate encounters with his ex-wife in front of, that is, to a mirror. Filmed by a camera the confession was transmitted to the gallery where it was projected onto a wall.
Although the spectators were robbed of the immediacy of the performance the live broadcast enhanced the intimacy of the confession as they witnessed an event, which supposedly was not meant for the public.
The diversity of technical means changed the fundamentalist attitude towards performance as a necessarily transitory experience, a fleeting moment. A performance can be identically repeated the physical attendance of the artist is no longer mandatory; as an event "on record" it is turned into a lasting product.
The authenticity created by the assumed equation: time plus space equals event has lost its primary importance. The creation of performative artwork, which is reflected in film, video and photography, substantially adds to the manifestation of this "art without work" as a product. This again exerts influence on the availability of the work and consequentially on the financial situation of the artists.
With regard to selling, fairly often performances are re-enacted in order to guarantee the best possible illumination of the scenery etc. etc. The reproduction turns into a work in its own right.
Now as before, however, the art of performance still thrives on its attendants and their tales in respect to its quality. Reproductive media such as video, photography or web cam cannot render the authenticity of a live performance, its palpable duration within a specified space, its suspense, warmth, and cold.
Eva and Adele manifest existence per se, "being there" as a performance by their irrevocably recognisable appearance as "twins" of undefined sex. Still remaining "man and woman", both bald headed, clad in identical costumes, they sometimes arrive on the scene wearing angels' wings, always portraying the topos of "life being a work of art" as such.
They also strongly refer to definitions of different rooms by maintaining: "Wherever we are there is museum."
This quote points to another important component of performance art: the possibility to present art in public places, to emerge from galleries and museums, thereby dilating those spaces which are clearly designated repositories of art.
An element of surprise, such as seeing something completely unexpected on the way to work, the way home, when shopping, invites passers by, an unknown audience, which cannot be assessed in advance, to pause in their habitual movements. The chance of seduction, of suddenly perceiving familiar, regular, as well as dreamed of sights in a different light is offered.
Working in such a way performance artists reach an audience, which does not move within the customary context of art, they touch people who are rooted in their everyday life, by drawing attention to ideas and images, interrupting daily routine by offering thought provoking impulses. Surely therein lies a definitive strength of performance art.
Not least the development of technical and medicinal possibilities (up to genetic engineering) to shape existence as such as well as one's physical appearance, greatly influences performance art, as exemplified by Orlan.
Already artists and scientists are teaming up for the new creation of the world, as the Ars Electronica in Linz in the year 2000 let us know. There a new species of butterfly was presented as the result of a fruitful co-operation. A female artist had designed pattern and colours of the wings.
Let us return to the still current human body. Against the background and under the influence of the briefly mentioned history of performance art, in the seventies, a lively performance scene began to grow in Switzerland. It was further developed in the 90es not least thanks to the intense discussion of performance and its history at the F+F School in Zurich.
In the early seventies already, Urs Lüthi explored the possibilities of gender in his happenings and photographs by merging images originally endowed with a feminine or masculine connotation. In the mid-nineties, fine artist Ugo Rondinone re-introduced the topic in his videos and his photographical work.
Manon proclaimed a performative manner by her unmistakable appearance. At the same time, in 1977, she questioned her own "image" using a photograph on which she is to be seen 17 times in the same outfit wearing sunglasses and just once without glasses.
In the early eighties a wave of rebellion swept over Switzerland. "Down with the Alps, free view to the Mediterranean" was one of the slogans illustrating the imagination of mostly young people who felt that the moment to do away with bourgeois values and rigid norms had come. The Swiss scene gathered in Zurich, and Zurich was burning: politics was a great Happening and a huge potential of angry creative power was set free. Everybody seemed to be a musician, a performer: an artist.
To really give justice to that time I would have to hold more than one additional lecture! Therefore I shall restrict myself to cite but a few examples pertaining to the main topic and just mention the influence this phase exerted on the further development of performance art.
The aforementioned F+F art school in Zurich was a reservoir for huge creative energies. Not all of the activists of that time, who of course did not come exclusively from the F+F, are famous now, some have given up art and now work in banks, computer firms and public relations agencies or have turned into happy or depressive family mothers and fathers with kids.
But then there were the first hours of Roman Signer, now a well-known artist of the explosion who represented Switzerland at the last Biennale in Venice. The performance group "Bataks" in changing formation treated for example the subject of art and medicine in wild happenings and concerts, Walter Pfeiffer, now renowned for his photography and video art performed his narcissism, Gerhard Johann Lischka massaged in public and Christian Philippe Müller, now internationally working as a concept artist, invited to guided tours through town, taking people to places of little attraction.
The explosion of self-consciousness and the will to express oneself led to an important development within performance art. For the first time since Fluxus international groups were formed. Amongst others there was Minus Delta T, who were invited to the 1986 Documenta and travelled the world with their politico medial concept. There was Black Market, members of which include Norbert Classen, Aleister McLennan, Boris Nieslony, Vänçi Stirnemann, Roi Vaara and Jaques van Poppel. They create manifestos, appear alone as well as repeatedly in differing formation to this day. Thanks to these international connections important networks spanning the world were created. Without these, performance art as it prospers now would be unthinkable.
Many a performance artist organises festivals, conferences, thus providing her or his own art with a stage. As a result there is now in Switzerland the Performance Index in Basel, the Belluard festival in Fribourg, STOP.P.T in Berne, Pow Wow in Zurich, the Seedamm Culture Centre in Pfäffikon and APROPOS in Lucerne.
In 1987 the performance festival "City souvenir - remembering-identity-forgetting", probing the extent of the influence of technological developments on the human body, on human identity, was staged in Zurich. Vänçi Stirnemann tested the interplay of food (yoghurt) and human voice with a tape recorder, Chrig Perrin exposed her body to a multiplier, a copy machine, while Fritz Franz Vogel demonstrated the transience of physical existence by leaving the wet traces of his body on a wooden floor to dry, to vanish.
The nineties provoked a completely new discourse and forced a far more delicate approach regarding the body. The achievements of the sexual revolution and the omnipotence of medicine were severely jeopardized by the deaths of thousands caused by AIDS related diseases while at the same time the query into the status of the biological sexes within the social context generated an uneasiness between the sexes or "Gender Trouble" (Judith Butler). In addition, not only the vehement discussion of national and ethnical identity, but its homicidal manifestation in places such as former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, demanded reconsideration of one's own physicality, its appearance and its ways of expression.
The Swiss Performance duet JOKO, Regula J. Kopp and Karin Jost worked with the concept of pain. In a series of performances they had started developing in 1995, they chose tension, be it within a specific space or between two people as their subject. Yet their work is not about generating a winner, the one who can bear it and a loser, the one who cracks up. Their resolution to the problem of tension is mutual endurance.
JOKO strives to shape pain while grappling with physical limitations, - employing concentration and mental stamina they finally overcome pain. Pain symbolizes the experience of borders, crossing borders; JOKO's mastery of the body almost conveys an image of stoicism.
In their performances pain is defined on different levels. It is not physical pain alone that has to be defeated. In their piece "nettle dance" (1996) they face each other standing with bare legs inside a hole in the ground, which is filled with stinging nettles. Barefooted they tread the nettles down. In "stitches" (1995) they pierce their bare breasts with needles and thread. The thread connects their breasts, connects the two of them, they are no longer separated from each other. They have truly become best of friends, busomfriends or as in German "Busenfreundinnen". Obviously they tackle psychological pain as well. In "spittle" (1998) they sit opposite each other, spitting into one another's faces. As time passes the production of saliva decreases while the intervals in their spitting increase, after one hour they quietly leave their seats.
Endurance and duration also play a substantial role within their performances, as patience seems to be a great sacrifice in our fast-moving times. For hours they stand still, holding a large stone in "slate" (1997), for hours standing back to back, arms interlocked, either one of them bends over to carry the other one on her back in "sacrum" (1997.)
All the same, the pain caused by the knowledge of being separate, by the unbridgeability of the aloneness of an individual is a subject per se. In "androgyn" (1996) JOKO creeps out of a skin-tight sack within which they lie navel to navel performing "separation", the "cutting of the umbilical cord". Although this process does not seem to indicate much physical exertion, their faces are marked with suffering and pain.
Similarly, Victorine Müller and Irene Bachmann took up the topic of the body, as well as the act of making up a pair and having to leave a close partnership again. In their piece "Fusione (1997) they covered their bodies with liquid silicone. They walk towards each other and embrace, thus ending up glued together, creating a "Siamese body". Only by tearing and straining they are able to free themselves from their shared skin, which they lose in shreds and tatters only to be alone again, each one for herself standing forlornly in the room.
In her performance "In The Green" (1998) Victorine Müller takes the idea of skin being protection and outer wall of a body inside which a soul resides a step further by examining the first protective casing an evolving creature knows: water. She utilizes the element out of which not only all life grows but also the human body is made up to approximately 90%. In a dark room her body resides inside a transparent pipe of 2,30 meters height, which slowly fills up with bright green fluorescent water. She is able to breathe through a thin tube. Parts of her body touch the walls of the tube and evoke pictures not unlike those from the inside of a pregnant body, of an embryo inside its mother's womb, floating in water, completely sheltered.
In the course of the years Victorine Müller has gone further into the topic of "skin". She denotes skin as the cover of the body, protector of the inner world, the emotional life as well as interpreting it as the immediate means of contact with the outer world. Her performances are experienced as processes verging on visualised transformations. In "étuis de rêves" (2000) she converts the idea of an invisible cover, an aura around the resting body into an image. In a dark room she works around five transparent life sized plastic cocoons lying on the floor fully inflated, each lit up by an adjacent spotlight. Inside every cocoon there is one person supplied with permanently circulating fresh air. Soft spherical music is to be heard throughout the room.
The performance lasts up to four hours. The images created are not supposed to work in a purely aesthetical manner, they rather conjure up a space in which paradoxical sensations enfold, veering between claustrophobic tremors, relief, cathartic instants and reverie.
Victorine also explores the term "performer" re-defining it within a series of performances in which she appears upon the scene as the initiator, the animator. No longer does she act as the player in and of her own pieces: she instructs people to translate her stories and images while choreographing the scenery. ("subp.spiro" 1999, "étuis de rêves" 2000). Thus she evades being cast in the role of the one everything is projected upon: the artist whose unmistakability is inherent precisely to performance art.
In querying cultural refinement and socialisation by way of performances language, communication, play a great role.
Heinrich Lüber employs his living sculptures as visualisations of the "expansion of action" by conferring a pictorial expression upon the use of language. In his long duration performances he works with static images of situations in which spoken language is used. His investigations take place inside language, as he delves into its innermost and emerges with the results of his endeavours to shape it, to shape words to perfection. He enlarges his mouth by inserting stuffed animals. He prolongs his tongue and lets it come to rest on top of his head. Long white threads emanating from his mouth are tacked to the same floor on which he props up his hands, grotesquely magnified by over dimensional gloves. A string of white globes pours from his mouth.
In consistence with the idea of architecture being materialised language and imagination of human beings he developed his performances into architectural pieces by "accidentally" becoming part of an interior or exterior area. In "floorpiece" he pulls a flexible tube of several meters in length over his head and upper torso. Sitting or lying down or simply standing upright, using a megaphone invisible to the spectator, he pours any odd assembly of words into the tube for hours on end.
Fastened to a huge ball he hangs in great height from the ceiling of a room. He spans a street with a hammock like contraption and spends hours in it.
In his performances Lüber focuses on the dependence of language. A prerequisite for understanding is an agreement about the value of words; he asks whether language is only understandable in interrelation with its cultural context.
In their performance "speech" (1999), Franz Mark Gratwohl and Stefan Halter elaborate on language of a different level which may be read as pre-history of language, as articulation by sounds only or just as well as inaccuracy, waste, uncontrolled expression. They sit across each other at a table, silently ladling up alphabet soup. After the ladling, the closing of the mouths, spewing ensues. They spray each other with little pasta letters. Supposed words, sentences fall apart, disassembled they cover hair, faces, the table. Language is deconstructed and disintegrates into its components. The two performers use the raw sensuality of language, they talk speechlessly, and language is perceived as mere noise, as a constant puffing and blowing, as different sounds of spitting and spewing.
Another performance of Gratwohl's, this time in co-operation with Johannes BBB Deimling is also based on a classical situation at a table. Gratwohl and Deimling sit opposite each other, their heads and faces are covered in a mass of dough reaching down to the collars of their shirts, forks are fastened to the fingers of one hand of each which rests against the head of the opponent. The performance lasts until the dough slides off their heads.
The person vis-à-vis at a table refers to cultivated togetherness but just the appearance of the performers questions coded patterns and norms of behaviour. Conversation remains on a safe track as long as the make-up, the mask, the protective skin is not scratched off. Who then, is willing or able to deal with whatever it is that resides behind the mask?
In their late work (1996/97) Bérard/Josipovic pursue a strategy of being there, playing reality off against "mise en scène", enquiring about true and simulated identity. Like Eva and Adele they appear as twins in public places, on trains, at the lake promenade, on a street bustling with people, at the summit terminal of a mountain railway. Their exterior is real in a puppet like manner, they wear suits, costumes, their faces are made up heavily, their hair is pushed underneath an artificial skin rendering them bald headed or they wear medium length wigs with bleached blonde or black hair. Sometimes their upper torsos are naked, the words "mask" and "persona" (Latin for mask) are painted onto upper back and chest. Although their outward appearance is highly artificial their behaviour does not differ from that of the people they encounter. They go shopping, go for a beer, use the cash dispenser- and what is more: they engage in conversation. Their unexpected interventions in public places provoke reactions of passers-by, while Bérard/Josipovic explore the difference between the self and its model. These performances are not announced, but they are recorded on video. In galleries the separate actions are projected side by side thus becoming an actual work of art.
Köppl/Zaçek use bodies as vehicles, exploring physical "elbowroom" as well as "meaningful" possibilities of the use of the body as an object. In their piece "doublechair" (1998) they join their bodies with the use of adhesive tape in such a manner that they turn into a chair, as which they move across a bridge. In "Scotchman" (1999) adhesive tape (which in Swiss German is called "Scotch") plays a major role again. The floor of the gallery and a part of one of the walls are lined with special tape, which is adhesive on both sides. One of the pair gets wrapped up in it and his companion sticks him against the wall, head down, while the soles of the visitors' shoes stick to the floor again and again, thus incorporating the audience into the picture.
In their most recent performances they illuminate the physical vehicle from within and go in search of its traces.
In "between" (2000), they film themselves and the audience with an infrared camera after having drunk and dished out hot and warm drinks. The picture recorded by the camera is projected onto a screen standing in the same room. The bodies, silhouettes and surface areas appear in subtly differing shades of grey, according to the different temperatures within the body.
Muda Mathis is not only a performer but also an artist who works with video, sets up room installations and plays in a band.
With her artistic language she permanently questions set values and conditions. She does it with the lyrics of her songs, in which every day life turned upside down in a playful and visionary way plays a great role, as well as with her videos demonstrating for example how the laws of gravity can be re-organised and of course within her installations which her ingenious use of sound and imagery prompts to form completely new rooms.
Her performances provoke the reconsideration of determined patterns of thought and behaviour; popular stereotyped ideas about gender roles are thrown over board and treated with such profound and subtle humour that laughter colliding with a sudden revelation often gets stuck in one's throat.
What is one to make of her, dressed up as a slatternly housewife, slaughtering a cabbage with an axe while the scene is accompanied by the noise of wind blowing and the replay of sampled sounds she produced minutes before, playing the clarinet or noisily slurping down a bowl of soup?
Presenting the following samples of Swiss performance art I shall examine two pieces, which could not have been developed without the use of new media.
In his performance "in bed with me" (2000), Marc Mourci, one of the youngest exponents of Swiss performance art, works on two levels. On the one hand he creates a one-on-one situation in an intimate setting he constructs within a public room, a gallery. On the other hand he presents that scenery on the World Wide Web.
He puts a bed into a gallery and offers a night with him in that bed, just two people, and no spectators. Then he publishes a photograph of the person who has spent the night with him, lying in bed, as well as the answers to a questionary, describing the experience of the person having been accompanied through the night, thus making it accessible to the world at large.
With this interesting piece Marc Mourci cunningly connects intimacy and exposure. The publication of those intimate nights boosts the willingness to participate as it not only satisfies voyeuristic curiosity but also feeds narcissistic tendencies, tickles the desire to become a public person, a star, an actor or actress.
In Mo Diener's work the use of video - and performance art are of the same importance, the two techniques mutually support each other. I would like to present a piece, which originated in the course of an artist-in-residence-program in South Africa. Mo says about it in her own words:
"...this is a work based on my artistic researches for a possibility of a white European cultural identity appearing in a context of today's South African culture. The work is linked with general contemporary South African cultural identity-debates in Cape Town's art communities. One of the hottest points of encounters are discussions around subjects "of contemporary appropriations of black culture by white artists".
In the video you see her clad in a traditional dress of the Xhosa, formerly called kaffers. It is a copy she made of the original dress, which is on permanent exhibition in the South African Museum in Cape Town. By her wearing the copy she reintroduces the dress into the daily circuit as a fragile and controversial artefact within a controversial intellectual territory. While being filmed moving through everyday Cape Town she is walking backwards, only a little more slowly than the "normal" walk-abouts. On the video she has reversed the motion so that she appears to be moving forwards whereas the people on the streets seem to be walking backwards.
The use of slow motion emphasises the impression that she is coming out of a dream, out of history, following a certain direction, whereas the people of the present seem to move back into the past at the same time facing a part of history looking at a part of the past.
This piece of art is very poetical in it's dealing with a topic bound to raise aggression and possessiveness, especially as it is done in a very unostentatious and sensual way.
One of those seeking direct contact with people and consequentially involving them in his projects is San Keller. He is actually offering services, which consist of strongly materialistic as well as deeply psychological components. Working on the fact of isolation and feelings of insecurity concerning human relationships he concentrates on gaps in the social fabric. He offers assistance in bridging unnerving moments, focussing on the human being with his or her social interests.
Since 1997 he has been working on the concept of "help in winter" using the slogan: "become my human emergency supply". "Help in winter" or as in its original German: "Winterhilfe", is an official and well known term he borrows from municipal and national institutions which during the cold season offer material support to socially disadvantaged people. San Keller however offers his help to people who can afford material things but suffer from the dark season. His project is aimed at a predominantly urban population and is meant to assist in " actively fighting the loneliness and damp darkness of the cold season".
From November to March he organises monthly hikes through the night, supposed to release the participants from the night, their souls strengthened, their relation to darkness relaxed.
This winter he newly introduced "moving house tours" to his programme. These hikes derive their practical meaning from the actual necessary transport of household goods. Keller looks for people willing to help others living within a range of 50 kilometres move house, preferably without using motorized vehicles, so that they become parts of a truly "man-made" conveyor belt. The "hikers" will be supplied with food and drink in either flat or house. On the one hand it is physical strength, which is in demand, on the other hand the project offers the opportunity to gain insight into the life of another hitherto unknown person by moving, i.e. handling her or his possessions.
Keller is working on the same principle as with his night hikes, assuming that people in unusual situations and in the company of strangers will behave in unexpected ways and get to see themselves as well as the others in a new light.
The product of these pieces is the action carried out collectively: the distance covered in the dark, the load borne successfully - the time shared.
Where does all this lead us?
Performance Art involves the human body as an immediate sign, an icon, a piece of material.
The presence of the artists assures the manifestation of the artwork, the audience becomes part of it.
The fast development of new technologies bestows on the present appearance of the body in Performance Art an even higher significance, which is also an answer to the newly widespread awareness of this artistic expression.
The body transports ideas about the people who dwell in the bodies. The body is regarded as a house, a home of ideas and thoughts of identity. The immaterial materializes in the way people shape their bodies, dress, take care of them etc. use them as messengers for their beliefs, desires, fears; history is written on the body.
Performance - as achievement, mental and physical. Performance as an expression of art, performance as statement - the list is endless. Each performance as well as each festival creates new definitions, demonstrates new positions. The only thing common to all performances is the will to include one' s own body, one's own self and one's own affairs. Performance equals attitude.
© Rayelle Niemann, Zürich, February 2001
translated by Kristin T.Schnider, Wassen
supported by Pro Helvetia