With Performa having recently concluded and in the wake of the Marina Abramovic kerfuffle at the MOCA gala, I have been giving a lot of thought to the difference between visual art performance and contemporary performance – more specifically, Time-Based Art with its origins in dance and theater. This is an ongoing obsession of mine and one that I feel needs to be addressed critically. Thanks largely to RoseLee Goldberg, who literally wrote the book on performance art, the visual arts world has “rediscovered” performance in an unprecedented way. Unlike RoseLee, it seems that many of the visual arts curators currently working to promote visual arts performance lack knowledge in contemporary performance, and I think this presents a problem, as well as a challenge.
Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance | Culturebot
Although this article is about dance– and theatre-based performance rather than music, this is what my work is about.
I think the writer has a bit of a blind spot that shows here:
From the artistic director I was told, “The visual arts world hates craft, they’re seeking ‘authenticity’,” suggesting that when a visual artist stages a performative event it should not have any degree of artifice, that it be perceived as “real”.
The director I spoke to said that the visual arts world, somewhat understandably, finds theater laughable and as a result rarely studies it. While I share the visual arts world’s distaste for popular theater predicated on “psychological realism”, I lament the fact that there are many, many devoted practitioners of contemporary performance who are as dramaturgically engaged in the construction of their time-based work as visual artists are in creating the intellectual framework around their object-based work, and that this is, apparently, not recognized or valued by the visual arts world. It is as if when visual artists and curators “discover performance” they think that they are the first to ever encounter the aesthetic issues it proposes. It would seem that they are frequently unaware of – or indifferent to – the fact that there is a long history of performance theory; that theater, and especially dance, have for many years explored issues around presence, embodiment, presentational aesthetics, the observed/observer relationship, the visual presentation of the constructed environment, the semiotics of representation, etc., etc.
And yes, thats exactly right—but Horowitz’s focus on craft in relationship to performance is too limited. His model for the two modes of performance is that visual artists are object-based and dramatic performances are experience-based, which is a useful over-simplification, fair enough, but not necessarily accurate, and there’s something strange about the way he talks about narrative forms and psychological drama etc. I think he’s misreading the distrust of craft in visual art—it’s not something confined to performance. In the comments someone suggests that “if I go out and make a painting and claim that it is somehow more authentic and real because, well, I don’t know how to paint—I’ll get laughed out of the room” but that is in fact categorically not true, and you can confirm that by going to any little show with paintings in it here in the UK (not so much back in Edmonton, or maybe elsewhere in Canada, but so much here).
Contemporary visual art has a very complicated relationship to craft, and just as I would say some of the best object work engages with that directly by creating a contradictory experience, the best performance work engages with it by being careful about creating a complicated experience of dramatic quality, and by very directly engaging some of the things Horowitz feels are so unfashionable, like narrative drama.
(I wanted to reblog this article from where I found it but it was a couple of days ago and I don’t remember, and couldn’t track it down. Sorry someone!)
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