Examining the Role of Performance: SHOW, Jerwood Visual Arts

Review by Charles Danby

The Jerwood Encounters series was launched in 2008 to investigate the margins of the primary fields of the Jerwood visual arts programme, of painting, sculpture, drawing and photography, and as such it has most readily orientated itself around performance, media and event. SHOW is the latest of this series, the fourth devised and curated by in-house curator Sarah Williams. In line with her previous outputs, Locate (2010), Laboratory (2009), An Experiment in Collaboration (2008), SHOW places new work, process, documentation, and durational activity, centrally to an investigation of what an exhibition and curatorial framework is and can be.

Jerwood curator Sarah Williams has throughout these projects put forward progressive proposals as to what can constitute documentation and archive within the work and activity of the exhibiting artists she has worked with. In Laboratory (2009) an online platform was used to build a working archive through the duration of the project. This placed contributions from commissioned writers alongside conversations from online forums, mixed press cuttings with emails, and offset official photographic documentation with images posted externally. Unedited this material was printed to create a catalogue. In SHOW the commissions of artists Edwina Ashton, Jack Strange and Bedwyr Williams have been supported by a stand-alone website and two essays, one written by Catherine Wood (Tate Curator of Performance / Contemporary Art), and the other by SHOW’s curator.

Williams’ text makes a practical dissection of the artists involved, unpicking (in its introduction) the context of “performance” as considered within SHOW. Performance here is noted to be central, but not exclusive, to the practices of the selected artists. This trajectory of contemporary performance as a partial component of a wider more discursive output also underpins Catherine Wood’s text.

Wood notes the central placement of performance within the framework of contemporary mixed media practices, sighting one emerging aspect of this tendency as being an alternative exposure of practical input, “Performance offers a means of dramatizing the process of artistic creation itself: the ‘work’ of art as the ‘work of art’…” This is a process that Wood further suggests has become a valuable mechanism by which artists choose to connect (socially and analytically) to the (recurrent) question of “how art makes sense in our world today”. Wood also draws attention to the altered territory (engagement) of viewing that contemporary practices demand, a revision within which, she suggests, performance (as live moment) emerges naturally as a connecting tissue, “For many artists working today the choreography of positions between artist, artwork and audience is what constitutes the meaning of the work, and what draws attention to the particular nature of art experience.”

The opening night of SHOW saw the deployment of performance within the work of each of the three commissioned artists. It was however only Bedwyr Williams that took directly to the stage as both artist and performer. The work of both Edwina Ashton and Jack Strange was enacted remotely by instructed performers, who curiously in both cases, and through very different circumstance, where like the artists, ‘unseen’. Ashton’s performers (lobsters) through the heavy cladding of their all-over costumes, and Strange’s performers through their selective revealing of body parts. In the first room of the Jerwood Gallery very little was visible aside from the mass of people attending. Artworks are often obscured and barely visible at openings and so the actual emptiness of the gallery did not appear to raise issue and in many ways was simply conducive to norms. On the main wall however there were two small circular holes around 6 to 8 feet apart and a foot and a half or so from the floor. These ‘glory’ holes were vicariously animated by legs jiggling as both mute (and possibly substitutive) gesture, and as certification of the fact that they were real legs and not inert fabricated appropriations. Their quivering aliveness questioned the stasis of the object, and specifically the (often partial) object mannequins of artists such as, Robert Gober, Maurizio Cattelan, and Jemima Brown, but here the synthesised dismemberment of a human body (a leg) remained unquestionably attached to a living entity. As such the work took on a dynamic of physical constraint and limitation rather than a double-take manifested through approximate material concern. Through this shift Strange tapped the work (latently) into a host of art and performance tropes, but while many of these were implicitly transgressive, the work hovered and resonated with little more than polite and quiet removal.

In the furthest gallery Edwina Ashton presented Peaceful serious creatures (lobster arranging) (2011), a cluttered room of collected materials familiar to the detritus of studio or gallery. These ranged from rough breaks of plasterboard, odd ends of 2x1 wood, and packing blankets, to less familiar items such as egg cartons and an electric keyboard. The contrivance of stage-set was apparent and predictable, but what was interesting and curious was the compelling nature of the orchestrated intervention within the space by a series of performers dressed as lobsters. At undisclosed intervals a solitary ‘human’ lobster inhabited the space and went silently about its business - whatever that might have been. Moving within the mass of (generally uninspiring) materials the lobster would pick things up, put things down, organise, assemble, and disassemble. The differences between these actions, ordinarily readily discernible, became difficult to assess under the circumstance of the displacement of the performer; their invisibility (under a heavily draped costume), their silence, and the restriction imposed by the costume on their movement. The action (communication) of the lobster was reduced to the handling of materials, and this occurred through large awkward claws that slowed and eliminated any familiar or habitual movement. Ashton’s deployment of the performer as lobster is tied to a characteristic of the animal whereby it constantly rearranges its living space. The connection to (or commentary on) human (or specifically artistic) behavioural tendencies was not intrinsically interesting in itself. What was interesting was the curious unlocking of materials through intensive introspection (on the part of the performer) that emerged through the slowness and awkwardness of the active moments of performance.

Welsh artist Bedwyr Williams had likewise constructed a stage-set, this time not as a playground, but rather to serve one specific function, a single short moment of performance presented at the opening of the exhibition to mark the launch of a book, a compendium of almost all of his previous performances to date. A central platform was filled with piles of Williams’ book, usefully titled Bedwyr I’m sorry I missed your performance, a line that has no doubt resonated at regular interval in shops and pubs, on Williams’ mobile phone, and in the sanctum of his online inbox throughout the fifteen or so years of his performances.

To either side of the stage were large projected images. On the left screen was a heavy-tread (tractor) tyre, set on an empty background, eternally forward rolling, and emblazoned by the flames of a fast food advert. To the right was a stationary image of the artist, flat cap and jacket, with this back turned to the camera, gazing towards a distant pastoral void. In the top left corner a moving graphic depicted what appeared to be mechanically jointed legs. To the side of the platform was a pair of shoes, while on stage alongside the books was a medical kneeling (back) chair, a microphone, and an exercise ball.

The performance, under the title of Urban Hick, after initial introductions, “…Hi Bedwir, Hi Bedw-uh…This is how posh people mispronounce my name…” a short musing on the role of performance, “…a performance once it’s done has a stink to it… To use it again you need to turn it inside out…” and the collective imagining of each listener as a mole (bad eyesight no doubt being the key), began with a quick tour of London. The audience was taken from the “…tang of piss with the burning glove waft of crispy duck…” on Charing Cross Road to the East End where “Drag Queens are the live art equivalent of a ready meal. Ultimately unsatisfying.” Leaving London, still as incantations of burrowing moles, Williams described performing for a client at a private dinner party. In line with the twofold ‘mirrored’ nature of the exhibition’s title, SHOW, this was likewise contingent to the recurrent paradox of performance - that of who is performing, and to whom. Having arrived at the house Williams’ story continued, “They are all acting weird. Pretending to be disinterested. Who is going to be doing this performance anyway?”

Williams has an exacting eye for observation, his storytelling was as sharp tongued, potty-mouthed, and impeccably delivered as anyone familiar with this work would have expected. Less here, but lines deployed by Williams are often delivered and left simply to hang in isolation. Such a notion of unsightedness and apparition seemed to reach across the works, conjuring a partial retrieval of things already shown.

SHOW continues at JVA, Jerwood Space until 21 April. For more information please visit www.jerwoodvisualarts.org. To access Aesthetica's feature on the Jerwood Contemporary Makers please click here.

Image: Edwina Ashton, Peaceful serious creatures (lobster arranging), performance, duration: three hours intermittently, 2011

Pop Up Art: Temporary Contemporary Art Space, Gateshead

A disused terraced house in Bensham, Tyneside, which is scheduled for demolition, is to briefly enjoy a radical new life – as a contemporary art gallery. The property – a converted fair of flats – is playing host to a unique project inspired by the changes being brought about in the local area and carried out by members of Behsham’s growing art community.

The project – Nest – will open this Saturday (26 March) before permanently closing again next Wednesday. The properties are scheduled for demolition as part of a scheme to redevelop the area and create much-needed new family homes.

Each of the rooms in the property has been converted into an individual work of art inspired by the empty house and the changing environment beyond. There is an intriguing variety of work on display at Nest, highlighting not only the growing art community in the area but also the wide range of voices having their say.

Gateshead is acquiring a reputation for creating new art in unexpected places. The recent Shop Art project has seen disused shop fronts in Gateshead town centre converted into works of art, and The Shed in Gateshead’s High Street is currently providing rent and rate-free workspace for up to 36 local artists and creative entrepreneurs.

Nest has given local artists such as Jo Scandrett, whose installation entitled Found: No.5 Dunsmuir Grove showcases an assortment of seemingly nondescript items left in the house by previous occupants, Araminta Swan, whose Welcome to My Parlour relates to tea parties, traps and cocoons and David Goard whose Time and Tide is a response to the physical and social changes in Bensham the chance to express what is happening in their area.

Nest is located at 5/7 Dunsmuir Grove, off Saltwell Road in Gateshead and will be open to the public on Saturday 26 March from 11.00am until 4.00pm, and on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 1.00pm until 7.00pm. For more information please visit www.gateshead.gov.uk

Claude Cahun/Sue Tompkins at Inverleith House, Edinburgh

Review by Colin Herd

In a tiny photograph of a domestic interior, the doors of an ornate wooden cabinet gape open. In the lower half, a chest of drawers; the upper half, three deep shelves. On the top two shelves are books, papers and medicine vials; on the third shelf, something altogether more surreal: a slight-built young woman lithely scrunched into the cupboard. Dressed in shorts, white socks and a sleeveless polka-dot blouse with a bow in her hair, she looks both adolescent and feline, insouciantly stretched out, all gangly limbs and eyes tight shut, apparently asleep. In spite of the bow and the polka dots, there’s something provocatively boyish about the prominent arm and leg dangling from the edge of the shelf, limbs tanned the colour of bronze. Her face, too, has a statuesque lustre from heavy, monochrome bronze make-up. Subverting erotic fantasies and tropes of Western Art, the image is transgressively androgynous, ironically refusing easy categorization even as its subject is literally placed ‘on the shelf’. Taken in 1932, this unforgettable photograph is one of over fifty self-portraits by the French Surrealist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), currently on show at Inverleith House.

Cahun was born Lucy Schwob, niece of the Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob. She was best known in her lifetime as an experimental writer who blended fact and fiction in fragmented and disjointed texts that vacillate constantly in style and tone. In 1937, Cahun and her life-partner (also step-sister) Suzanne Malherbe, known under the pseudonym Marcel Moore, settled on Jersey, and very quickly found themselves under German occupation. Showing tremendous bravery, as well as remarkable skill and cunning, the pair were active in the resistance movement, producing anti-German fliers which they disseminated by dressing up as German soldiers and infiltrating military events, to surprising effect. Finally, in 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death, but both escaped due to the looming end of the war, and Cahun died nine years later. It wasn’t until the French writer François Leperlier was researching a book on Surrealism in the mid-1980s that he discovered the wealth of photographic experiments created over a forty-year period. Since their discovery, the photographs, which are almost exclusively self-portraits, often in androgynous poses, have come to be championed by Queer theorists and are seen as an important antecedent to the gender-bending photographs with which Cindy Sherman burst on to the art scene in the 80s.

When seen in such an extensive exhibition, Cahun’s chameleon-like ability to portray herself in different styles and poses is astonishing. In one picture, she’s wearing what looks like a trapeze-artist’s leotard and men’s baggy sports shorts. Her hair is slicked to her head, except from two curling whiskers. On either cheek there is a face-painted love heart and on her breast, two black buttons. She’s holding a set of dumbbells. Scrawled in messy handwriting across her chest is the slogan: “Don’t kiss me, I’m in training.” In another image, she’s doubled, looking in a mirror, with her hair crew-cut. Both the collar on her checked coat and her chin point insouciantly and intimidatingly skywards. Anticipating the Psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan, it’s as if Cahun is caught in “the mirror stage”, permanently experiencing the gap between emotional self-image and perceived appearance. A definitive image, in a body of work that thoroughly rejects the idea of a definitive image or identity, might be Self portrait, with masks (1929). Cahun is standing in front of a heavily patterned curtain, wearing thick woollen tights and patent black shoes, her toes pointed outwards. Her hair is neatly bobbed around her face, and her lips are bashfully pursed. She’d look the picture of honesty, and slightly awkward innocence, if it wasn’t for the black cape she’s wearing, covered with sewn-on masks.

Once you adjust to the procession of bizarre, disturbing, and often amusing portraits, perhaps the most disarming of all are those that employ and subvert a veneer of naturalism and vulnerability. In one, Cahun is seen bald-headed and shoulders bared, wearing a loose black chiffon robe, which encloses her arms. Her face is turned towards the ground, and she appears sensitive, tender and ill-at-ease. As with all these pictures, Cahun reminds us it is just that, an appearance and an artificial effect. A piece of black chiffon almost identical to the one worn by Cahun is pinned to the wall behind her like a minimalist work of art. The colour of her skin behind the chiffon is almost identical to the grayish colour of the wall. Deconstructing our impressions of transparency and femininity, it’s a meticulously posed photograph that wears its artifice on its sleeve.

Downstairs in the ground floor gallery, Inverleith are showing new work by Glasgow-based artist Sue Tompkins. Tompkins, who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1994, found cult fame thanks to her distinctive vocal performances with the indie band Life Without Buildings, a glorious blend of talk-singing, shouting and squealing, the epitome of hyperactive passion and nervous energy. The exhibition consists of six object-based pieces and a performance entitled Hallo Welcome to Keith Street, which she has also recently performed at The Hayward as part of British Art Show 7. Her work channels the tradition of radical experimental writing, a tradition that includes Cahun herself. On either side of a huge, wall-sized folded sheet of non-archival newsprint, the words W. Coast and E. Coast, cut, it looks like, with scissors from a piece of tartan fabric. On the newsprint there’s a typewritten text, spaced out in constellations and conglomerations. Making use of all the page’s dynamics, it has to be read vertically, diagonally and horizontally. Given the use of newsprint, it’s tempting to see the text as not a text at all, but an erasure, and re-arrangement of a newspaper. Perhaps less fancifully, it’s as if the text is the spilling over of half-mindful projections experienced while reading a newspaper. An obvious influence would be the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (Tompkins was included in the ICA’s recent survey of text-based art which took its title from Finlay’s legendary magazine ‘Poor. Old. Tired. Horse’) but the artist I was most reminded of is the American poet Hannah Wiener. Wiener’s performance pieces, as well as her long, experimental projects of personal ‘journalism’, shared with Tompkins a restless investigation of language and personal expression, conducted through the details and debris of everyday language-use.

The collage-aspect so prevalent in much contemporary experimental writing is provocatively taken out from the text and overtly stuck or pinned to the wall in a number of Tompkins’ pieces. A torn magazine advert for Clinique combines with safety pins and keys in a humorous dynamic of, what, give-and-take maybe, or nip-and-tuck. In other pieces, Tompkins’ exploration of text crosses over into an exploration of textile, such as three wall-collages made from purplish chiffon, safety pins and zips, in various states of open and closed. But even in her silent, non-text-based pieces, Tompkins seems to be hinting at the complex procedures of transparency and obliqueness through which we communicate to each other. Her work lays bare possible scenarios and metaphors for the processes by which language connotations attach to one another and through which texts are fabricated. Zips, (as the creators of the T.V. show Rainbow knew), can also be a potent metaphor for the mouth. Just as in her photographs, Cahun deconstructs the self-portrait, Tompkins dismantles its literary equivalents: the diary, the lyric and the personal utterance. It’s a piece of subtle and inspired programming from Inverleith House to show these two artists together.

Claude Cahun/Sue Tompkins continues at Inverleith House until 17 April. For more information please visit their website here.

Image: Sue Tompkins Untitled, 2011. Typewritten text on newsprint, fabric, photograph: Paul Nesbitt.