A recent search through an old box of archival cards and drives revealed a small selection of video documentation I had entirely forgotten I had, of early art works, my first performance art works, from 1998 - 2002. Including the final work submitted for the final phase of formal art education undergraduate degree in Cardiff, Bad Humours / Affected, 1998.
Although documentation was then emphasised as a crucial consideration for those of us working with the ephemerality of time based media, we knew and know how it is an elusive and unstable mode of securing memory and reference. Modes of recording, retrieval of records, obsolete, and - I appreciate - relevance, all inform decay as much as a silverfish or a mildew might act upon print media. The relevance to a current art world/s, a contemporary clime is equally subject to an unstable regard. What if any do these videos, mostly ones digitised from VHS hold now?
It is hard to say, or at least for me to. When skipping through - I don’t tend to watch them all the way through, I find myself initially struck by the candour and clarity or the works. And of a tremendous courage that was not apparent to me at the time. The works emerged, and whilst embodied and coalesced by me, their textured matting of threads - of influences and confluences, fluxions and intensities, were that of their epochal context. They were informed, responsive and articulating within an environment of others active making, viewing and organising.
Particularly striking on revisiting these works, are the communities and networks - particularly of viewers, audience, witnesses, others - the other people in the room, whose attentive presence, their investments of time and being with, were what completed the art works. And of those who created and cultivated infrastructures, who organised, be it in their homes, in other non-art spaces, or in art spaces.
In 1998, during the time of my degree show in Cardiff, Christopher Hewitt who had studied there some time before me and was then taking on the mantleship of curating the ICA performance progamme, declared to me and the rest of the corridor, that the best form of documentation is word of mouth, story telling, the oral transmission of an experience, the telling of a personal encounter - of witnessing. I tend to think he is right - at the time and after, the vibrant eco-systems of performance art and live art festivals and venues was very much alive, and part of the pleaure of particupating within it all was the re-telling of works. But now, I wonder - who tells and who listens and by which means can these story tellings come to be?
I immediately think of Dee Heddon, who in 2019 curated a series of 50 performances to be re-enacted and referenced as a birthday celebration for her 50th.
Screen shot, retrieved from Twitter 16th February 2022
I live in Helsinki, when I first moved there in 2016, whilst working at the Theatre Academy, I asked many colleagues about histories and lineages of performance art - where was it made, who by, what was it like? Few were able to tell me, or seemed enthused by it’s telling, preservation or that the histories are lively and living and generative. Why this might be is not clear to me. There was often a slightly dismissive tone in speaking about ‘classical performance art’ for which a definition or description was not forthcoming. This mode of performance making was perhaps viewed as a little embarrassing, and only relevant to a time and place. It was most probably that I was searching in the wrong places and that I needed to look more widely for the storytellers and custodians of those oral histories. Vital exceptions were Essi Kausalainen and Irma Optimist, both of whom are exuberant raconteurs, treasuring not only the performance artworks, but the conditions of their presentations, how things came about and, crucially, the communities from which they emerged. Irma was the instigator and organiser of La Bas, also funding it for a period herself from her day job as a professor of mathematics. Perhaps it that what I experienced as taciturn is simply that the conditions of telling, the ambiance conducive to story telling were not adequately in evidence. Maybe it is the relaxed ambiance of the sauna, or other convivial social settings within which reminiscence and witnessing are regaled. I’m still engaged in asking and hoping to hear and learn more.
As well as the endeavour of holding a history that is spoken and told by those who lived it,, what is critical are the generative characteristics of archival material. Where and what do the items present to this moment? How do they meet the mattering of contextual now? Where are the pressures, the points of contact and the areas of absenting connection? I think of this as I see topics and themes enjoy a redux twenty or more years or so later.
These are very off the cuff musings, also informed by the project of historicising at the cost of enjoying contemporary relevance.
I was thrilled to note the enormous success the retrospective enjoyed of Ron Athey’s work, curated by Amelia Jones. Two versions of the postponed Queer Communion: Ron Athey exhibition, a historical survey, were presented during different phases of the pandemic, one at Participant Inc. in spring 2021, the other in the summer of 2021 at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibitions enjoyed significant critical success eg here and here, including acknowledgement of how Ron's work, and those he collaborated with anticipated and created the ground for much of the works and concepts enjoyed today.
Ron's work has always been crucial to my own: during the time I was developing Bad Humours/Affected during my final academic year at art school in Cardiff, he gave a performance lecture at Chapter Arts Centre for the Gordon Vnuk curated Body Radicals season, 1997. I was on the cusp of positioning blood letting within an artwork, and whilst I had the vast and invaluable references of works from the '70s by Gine Pana and Marina Abraomvic,I did not yet have contemporary ones. The '90s were a very different time in how acts on ones body were perceived both socially and culturally. Being in the presence of Ron's actions and his candour in speaking about them when interviewed was enormous. As were those of Franko B, whose performance of I'm Not Your Babe was unutterably moving to be with, and exerted such a clarifying pressure onto both my own artistic process, but also my ability to make the work - despite the grave reservations of the art school. I should add, that reservation was not held by Anthony Howell, my then professor who absolutely stood by and defended what he considered be my right to make the work.
For a long time I have not given permission for video documentation of my work to be be available online for other archives. They felt imitate and that there needed to remain still some vestige of an articulation notion of their relationship to privacy - clearly a concept that has endured massive recalibration and diminishment. Indeed, it might be difficult to appreciate what the idea of private and its relationship to public held for those of us working with our bodies and body politic back in the '90s and early 2000s.
I also hoped that there would be an interest from somewhere, a gallery, a galleries, an exhibition situation, in which these documents might be presented. Whilst I did not pin enormous store by these hopes, I was heartened by the examples of galleries such as Richard Saltoun and his commitment to the collections and estates of female artists working with a Body Explicit Perhaps these are possibilities for a future, but, that future has not been forthcoming and so, I found my mode and instinct shifted, and I made these works at least public - for now.
French & Mottershead hosted ‘Living Archives’, 2014, Hales Gallery curator Stuart Morrison joined us for a period offering his perspective on artists archives. He had recently realised a long cherished dream to work with Carolee Schneeman had spent time with her and her then disorganised archive in her home in upstate New York. He was sensitive to both her wariness in allowing a gallery access, and to the extraordinary potential within her archive. Mostly he voiced her concerns and reservations to us, and how he intended to honour those and hoped to earn her trust. He was aware of the financial precarity she was experiencing, despite being one of the most foremost and influential artists of her generation, and the ubiquity of images of her work in art history. Clearly he and the Hales Gallery succeeded, as she agreed to work with them and enjoyed well deserved critical and financial success as a consequence. I confess I was not a little delighted to learn that Schneeman’s archive was not impeccably organised. I couldn’t fathom - and still can’t, doing - everything, including being ones own archivist. The strata or organisational form is defying of the stochastic movement of ideas and materials I find conducive to the unsettled and unsettling, animating relations of archival stuff.
Within the workshop I presented small new works, re-imagining of photos taken following the performance of Succour at Break 2.1 in Ljubljana in 2021. I had scanned some of the transparencies and stitched prints of them to table cloth linens bought in Deptford Market in London. The works were made for actions of art at our Deptford studios that we held once a year for local charities.
Them Misty Girls, 2014
The necro-joke is that one becomes eminently collectable upon ones demise, when ones body of work accrues a cache, a glint, a pearly lustre postmortem with which it enters into the economies of a market. The beginning and excitement of my venture into performance art was informed by the then idea that by virtue of its non-object status, it resisted those economies. That performances could not be acquired, exchanged, that they were transaction resistance. Curators and museums have show otherwise, but often with stunning approaches towards examining the fertile areas between performance art and installation, for example Rose English, or the example of Queer Communion: Ron Athey. Or perhaps the re-enchantment of re-enactment, what can be a dubious practice and also be one of vitalisation and joy as Dee’s birthday celebrations demonstrate.
Clearly for me, the entire endeavour is imbued with ambivalence - but an energetic and dynamic one, inconclusive, enquiring and generative. Some years ago now, in Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead hosted a
Enjoy the video documents on vimeo.