[-empyre-] scores, landscapes and defenders

[Johannes Birringer]

Simon,

on scores ---  this is a fascinating remark you make , and your critique is well founded for the defense ministry/apparatus in general.

(and I tend you agree with most all you say, except when you suggest there no score in the visual arts)


>>[..] Simon schreibt
As yet I've not encountered this model in the visual arts, perhaps because in that realm it is usual that the thing is the thing is the thing - there is no score. That said, in my own field, where the work is "written" in a meta language (computer code), there is effectively a score for the work - a score that is interpreted (by a machine) and performed. In the domain of computer music, where part of my training occurred, the computer programme is the score. So, why not in the visual domain? And then we have areas like electronic literature, where there is a score (programme) that when performed creates texts - where is the main outcome here? The text or the programme? Are both submissable - or neither?>>


There's always a score.

And the beauty of course, in artistic practices, is to intuit or figure it somehow through our cultural or poetic imagination, or to draw from the "object of performance" or exhibition, from the genre conventions.....
I pointed this out, in discussions on the curating forum (crumb), that the score is what might well interest us not only about art objects (not to speak of music or dance or opera or digital art here) but of course about
the curatorial or design process that places such object or performance into a context, and context of course is also "score" and etiquette for reception possibilities and, thus, research & reflection and generation of new knowledge.

I'd like to invoke a scene, before, at the bottom, i submit my proposal to you all

:::
CAM (Contemporary Art Museum) Houston currently faetures two exhibits, RADICAL PRESENCE: BLACK PERFORMANCE IN CONTEMPORARY ART, shown in the beautiful large
upstairs trapezoidal space, and UNFINISHED COUNTRY: NEW VIDEO FROM CHINA, in the downstairs smaller Perspectives Gallery.
"Radical Presence" is an installation of video works, photography, installations, performances,  concerts, objects, scores,† and traces and remainders of performances both in the now and the past. A much more challenging, uneven and complicated scenario now opens up, not alone in how (and when) to view this and take it in and remember (no catalogue available here) or preserve or make sense of. 
I am precisely interested in the question of the "repository", and the "curating" of live & media art (...in the so-called information age).......

Here is how the CAM contextualizes the exhibit:
<<
Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art:: the first comprehensive survey of performance art by black visual artists. 
While black performance has been largely contextualized as an extension of theater, visual artists** have integrated performance into their work for over five decades, generating a repository of performance work that has gone largely unrecognized until now. Radical Presence provides a critical framework to discuss the history of black performance traditions within the visual arts beginning with the 'happenings' of the early 1960s, throughout the 1980s, and into the present practices of contemporary artists.Radical Presence will feature video and photo documentation of performances, performance scores and installations, audience interactive works, as well as art works created as a result of performance actions.  In addition, the exhibition will feature a live performance series scheduled throughout the run of the exhibition, including performances during the opening weekend of the exhibitionby Terry Adkins, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Pope.L, and Tameka Norris.

The exhibition will feature work by three generations of artists including Derrick Adams, Terry Adkins, Papo Colo, Jamal Cyrus, Jean-Ulrick D®¶sert, Theaster Gates, Zachary Fabri, Sherman Fleming, Coco Fusco, Girl [Chitra Ganesh + Simone Leigh], David Hammons, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Lyle Ashton Harris, Maren Hassinger, Wayne Hodge, Satch Hoyt, Ulysses S. Jenkins, Shaun El C. Leonardo, Kalup Linzy, Dave McKenzie, Jayson Musson aka Hennessy Youngman, Senga Nengudi, Tameka Norris, Lorraine O°ØGrady, Clifford Owens, Benjamin Patterson, Adam Pendleton, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Rammellzee, Sur Rodney (Sur), Jacolby Satterwhite, Dread Scott, Xaviera Simmons, Danny Tisdale, and Carrie Mae Weems.

The history of performance art as a manifestation of radical shifts in social thought and artistic practice is well documented in publications like Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979 by Paul Schimmel, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body by Sally Banes, as well as Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (1998) by RoseLee Goldberg and her seminal book from 1979, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. Performance art practices in Latin America were also eloquently documented in the 2008 exhibition Arte y Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 at El Museo del Barrio, New York. Ironically, given the rich history of performance and its prevalence in black artistic practices since the 1960s, this tradition has largely gone unexamined save for a handful of publications including the exhibition catalogue Art as a Verb (1988) by Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims.
>>


I went to one of the performances, Saturday 01/05,† scheduled in the long run of "PERFORMANCE SERIES AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS SCHEDULE" (http://www.camh.org/exhibitions/radical-presence-black-performance-contemporary-art),
that accompanies the exhibition of the repository, and witnessed Benjamin Patterson, the well known Fluxus artist.

It was announced he would perform a new work, "A Penny for Your Thoughts," which he did. But he also, unnannounced, had rehearsed and then restaged, with young local performers,
an older "score" from 1962, titled "Pond." The original score, in a glass box, was on exhibition.  

This was very enjoyable and a lovely sound/words performance (vocals) by the local performers in conjunction with small sound toys (frogs) that were
released onto a checker-board diagram painted on the floor. Patterson was "conducting," and having fun, and the audience seemed to enjoy it  thoroughly .

What I am wondering is how such performance work, along with the films, documentaries, videos, and photographs and the left-overs are curated to be preserved or re-sited/re-performed or remembered and documented/installed on or off line?*  (William Pope L. performed a new piece, "Costume Made of Nothing" on opening night in November apparently, a hole in the wall is all that is left; in one corner of the exhibit, there is also a large installation piece by William Pope L, 
titled "Eating the Wall Street Journal," and it looks as if it was a performance installation. When I inquired, it turned out yes it was a Pope L. performance but one that was not performed by him but by another performer.....
a lovely twist that of course, historically, falls into place with the kind of instruction works that G. Brecht or Yoko Ono would conceive. (I tried to discuss Ono's "Cut Piece" before in such debates;  you may have heard that Ono is still 
performing it on occasion, even now ---- not sure whether she had allowed it to be performed by others (e.g. Marina Abramovic and her foray into what she calls "easy pieces" come to mind, yes?). Surely someone will do a Phd on such matters of re-performing and re-performance documentation (Tino Sehgal, a good case here, for research).

So what do we think about these kinds of easy pieces of traditional performance and media art curatorially? as creative practice?

* I called the CAM and they tell me a catalogue of the exhibition will be forthcoming after all the live events have passed. 
** Notably, the museum incorporates happening, dance, fluxus and performance into "black visual art" thus writing a new history, yes?   And I cannot be sure how artists like Coco Fusco, whom I remember well from her performance work (The Couple in the Cage, etc) , will think about the new categorization of her work as visual art; since she has a film background, she may not mind, all genres being mixed up and re-narrated, a susual.  And perhaps these differences won't matter in the long run?†  But what is the specific long run here?

The second performance, 01/12, was by Clifford Owens:

Owens steps out into the midst of the exhibition space and lies down on the floor, in a rectangle created with black strips.  The assistant curator announces that two performances will take place, upstairs and downstairs. 
Then another assistant reads out the "score" for the first performance, which consists of Owens inviting audience members to place his body into five different postures on the floor, each positioning prescribed and then enacted by the volunteering audience members. "You need to place my body in the middle of room facing the entrance door, the right leg crossed over the left leg, my torso leaning to the left, and my left arm supporting me head, the other arm bent over behind me, etc. "   The audience members did their best and manipulated the positions until they got it right. Applause.  etc. 

Later downstairs we were in an enclosed room (adults admitted only), and Owens continues to propose scores, this time it seemed he had the score adopted from "Steffani Jemison".  The task was:  "Do something to me that you will regret, but do not apologize."   You would not believe the (playful?) aggression that unloads and gets unleasehd by a majority white but also black and Latino and Asian audience in the little room.  Maybe because the artist/performer sets up a 'convention' that allows acting out aggression within the (contained) (containable) room of a museum, and then things happen and will happen. que sera, sera..

::::


well my proposal is simple:  what if hypothetical Phd candidate would submit a "score" of instructions for the examiners to carry out,  along the lines of Clifford Owens's Anthology?  I think it could work.  The Phd project and Viva need a good curator, though. 



with regards

Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab / AlienNation Co.
http://www.aliennationcompany.com