Last week I participated in a two-day curator’s course at Arnolfini that explored the contexts associated with curating performance as a public programme. The course accompanied the September edition of Anrolfini’s performance festival 4 Days, which explored contemporary arts’ restless relationship with the theatrical and the staged.
It was a fantastically intensive two days, particularly as I arrived at Arnolfini knowing very little about performance and the considerations for curating and programming. In introducing the course, Jamie Eastman, Arnolfini’s Curator of Performance, described the relatively new role of a performance curator as a mediator of live moments. For me, this helped to frame the two days and below is a whistle-stop tour of parts of the course.
Curating the Audience / Keep Your Distance – Anja Dorn, curator and guest-professor for curatorial theory and dramaturgy at the University of Design Karlsruhe. Dorn proposed that the recent increase of performative programmes in galleries and museums is directly related to the need for institutions to address and engage with wider audiences. Dorn referenced Tate Modern Director Chris Dercon and his belief that it is no longer about developing audiences, but of coming up with new ways to engage and involve them. She spoke about the de-bordering of art, dissolving the passive experience of the audience and creating strong experiences rather than an aesthetic art experience. The term ‘social space’ arrived at this point. A space to stage a performance is often referred to as a social space; a space for movement, a place for actions.
Dorn went on to discuss a performance piece by Andrea Fraiser called May I Help You, a great example of relational aesthetics. The performance considers the many cultures and many ways of speaking about art and how through taste we take a certain position within society, which determines our social standing. In highlighting different positions and giving space to difference, Dorn considers this work by Andrea Fraiser to be of a political nature.
Part 2 of Anja Dorns workshop considered the transformation / osmosis between artist, artwork and viewer. The viewer as the second part of the creative act (Marcel Duchamp). Dorn discussed Statue Actions by Mark Leckey, a performance of an aesthetic experience through sound, in response to a Henry Moore sculpture. Leckey is communicating with the sculpture as an art object he doesn’t quite grasp and thus questions what is aesthetic perception. Dorn here spoke of alienation, of the inability to grasp something, of being unsettled by art and the need for engendering these feelings. She went as far as to say that this should be defended, that it is endangered. Keeping a distance is the key for Dorn, for when the performer is the same as the viewer and when strong experiences become mere entertainment, the democratic process is lost.
Dramaturgies of Curating – Florian Malzacher, artistic director of Impulse Theater Biennale in Germany and a freelance curator, dramaturge and writer. Malzacher began with the proposition that the curatorial role for the theatrical within the visual arts is similar to that of being a dramaturg. Malzacher discussed ‘performative curating’ and live art as exhibitions through various examples, such as Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus’ An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale for the Romanian Pavilion and Hannah Hurtzig’s Black Market for Useful Knowledge and Non-knowledge. Malzacher spoke about time and duration, and how this is mainly for the performer rather than the audience, who is not always asked to remain throughout. Boredom was put forward to be an important factor when thinking about duration; that boredom can be interesting in itself.
Malzacher meandered between many examples of performative curating, however the one example I found to be of particular interest was Jonas Staal’s New World Summit. Stall staged a two day summit for an alternative parliament and the artificial theatrical setting enabled a very real summit to take place. Malzacher suggested that the theatricality created a distance, which better enabled viewers to look and understand the ideas and issues addressed. Returning to dramaturgy, Malzacher described dramaturgy as the looking at aesthetic and political procedures.
Curating Sensible Stages: live action and live images – Bridget Crone, curator and former Director of Media Art Bath. Crone began with the premise that it is no longer possible to differentiate between bodies and images in the world around us. Screening a clip from the 1973 film Mesiah of Evil, which depicted a ‘hermetically sealed space’, Crone discussed the body being unfolded into the image and questioned whether the ontology of the body of the body no longer exists. Through our increased amount of time spent online and in virtual realities, the prevalence of the image has dematerialised the body. Crone gave the example of using VR technologies in the recruitment and training of soldiers and also mentioned the 2005 Brian Massumi essay that looked at the operation of the US terror system. The hierarchy between body and image has been flattened.
Crone questioned what the stage can do in relation to this system and the increasingly blurred interface. We were invited to consider a performance by Cara Tolmie, which was gratefully screened in full. Crone proposed that the work articulates the notion of a taking place in mapping the barriers, delineating the stage through voice and producing the stage as a space. The stage here enables the recalibration of the body and image. Crone also screened A is to D what E is to H by Heather Phillips and discussed the work of Gail Pickering. The lasting question was as follows: how are these works dealing with questions of the accelerated transmission of images and effects?
Cally Spooner in conversation with Vivian Ziherl – across the lunch break we had the opportunity to listen to a conversation with the artist Cally Spooner, which I found to be fascinating. I was not before familiar with the work of Spooner and so it was a fantastic introduction to her practice.
Spooner’s work is about language and in particular, language that looks speech based/live but is instead automated, e.g. the musical. Spooner is interested in the abuse and misuse of language, where liveness has become automated and lacks the qualities of live, such as spontaneity and risk of failure. She gave the example of Beyonce lip syncing at Obama’s inauguration and the outcry that caused due to a moment of automation parading as live. And You Were Wonderful, On Stage is Cally Spooner’s musical, which creates spectacle through language rather than the visual. It emerges from the body of the audience, appears and disappears in fragmented language but increasingly becomes more visible and choreographed, and hence, less ‘live’.
To sum up (and there’s plenty more I could have written about – it was certainly an ‘intensive’), it was a fantastic course and I’ve come away with a knowledge of so many (new to me) ideas, contexts, artists and performances. It perhaps would have been nice to have a few more practical elements, but I am so glad to have been able to participate and now head to the Venice Biennale with a better understanding of the considerations behind curating performance.