Vanessa Bartlett: Artist & Curator

Postcard received from Emma Benson after Me You Now

We live in an age of increasing social isolation. Communication technologies and globalisation are causing us to live and work in a way that is more mobile, yet more solitary. The gradual decline of organised religion has yielded an absence of ritual and communal experience for many social groups, while more and more people conduct their most meaningful relationships online.

For several decades there have been artists and writers who have craved refuge from isolation in the potential intimacy of theatre. Peggy Phelan’s book from 1993: ‘Unmarked: The Politics of Performance” interrogated the workings of psychic desire within theatre. She called the relationship between audience and performer “the always already unequal encounter (that) nonetheless summons the hope of reciprocity and equality.”

It is therefore not surprising that the past ten years have given birth to the ultimate quest for theatrical intimacy: theatre for an audience of one. Evolved out of experimental practices pioneered by companies such as Ontroerend Goed, theatre for an audience of one has been sparking discussion among international producers about how to overcome the obvious economic and logistic challenges posed by such singular viewing experiences.

Luckily BAC have risen to the challenge and allowed theatre for an audience of one to attain a national profile for the first time in the UK. In an interview with festival producer Sunita Pandya, James Cowen calls this work that “questions and transgresses the boundaries between audience member and performer in the most personal and intimate way, leading to truly unique experiences that invite the audience to question the ways in which we interact as human beings.”

Intimacy is a complex emotion that often requires the yielding of power by all participants. It is in the giving of weakness that most of the works in the festival hold the possibility of achieving intimacy, or being eluded by it. In Ed Rapley’s work ‘The First Thing’ participants are invited to take a seat opposite Rapley in a large empty room. He has his eyes closed. When he opens them, he says the first thing that comes into his head about the person that he sees before him. With little chance to retaliate (participants are asked to vacate the room as soon as Rapley has made his judgment) this work does little to overcome the division of power between audience and performer. It rather calls to mind the way that we might relate to someone in the street, making an instant judgment based on race, gender or even more subtle nuances of a persons appearance. In Villanella and Hanneke Paauwe’s work ‘Rendez-vous’ participants are taken into a small antechamber where they are asked to remove their shoes and then move to a warm dark room to lie down in a coffin. Once inside they are visited by a woman dressed in white, who plays the part of a slightly saucy guardian angel, forcefully posing questions about the quality of life lived by the participant and how many tears are likely to be shed at their funeral. There are no pauses in the monologue for the participant’s answers and as such the work feels more like an aggressive ordeal than a tender exchange. In Ansuman Biswas work’2free’ participants are invited to “a face to face encounter with the nature of social and personal boundaries.” Equipped with a lantern in an otherwise dark room, participants are confronted by a naked performer who has his feet, hands, eyes and mouth bound with black cloth. A participant can only remove the ties once they are also fully undressed. In my case this process lead eventually to being showered, dried and smothered in sweet smelling oil by the performer, whom I kept blindfolded throughout. For the first time my own vulnerability was matched by the physical responsiveness of the performer grappling with the uncertainty of an erotic encounter in which he could be seen but was unable to see. In Emma Benson’s ‘You Me Now’ participants are invited to sing a favorite song in unison with the performer, who encourages, cajoles and instructs as required. An imperfect but joyful singer, Emma Benson made my heart glow with the simplicity of this shared activity where we made bad harmonies and bum notes in unison.

One on One work can create a space where a performer is willing to risk vulnerability. It is in this moment that the giving of weakness becomes a mutual act of intimacy and “summons the hope of reciprocity and equality.” Not all of the works in this festival were successful in transgressing the boundary between audience and performer in a radical way. But taken as a whole they offered participants a rich playground for different forms of engagement and experimentation that was both refreshing and exhilarating.

This essay is an extract from a text that has recently featured in Liverpool Art Journal. It comments on the performances of Mexican born artist Coco Fusco and her critical opposition to notions of ‘disembodiment’ that were frequently touted in late 1990s digital theatre theory. Highlighting the subjugated female workers who manufacture the computer hardware that powers our digital age, Fusco raises questions about the industrialized processes that underpin our highly technologized society and about the role of women within them.

In her persuasive essay, At Your Service, Latin Woman in the Global Information Network, Coco Fusco recalls an indent from the history of performance art which serves as an allegory for her entire output on the subject of the interface between the female body, technology and performance.

In 1980 a male artist from Los Angeles subjected himself to an act of physical mutation at the hands of medical science. He had a vasectomy procedure that was videotaped for public viewing, prior to which he confessed to having ejaculated into the body of a dead Mexican woman as a prelude to the operation. He declared that this act of sexual deviancy had been committed inside Mexico, where he had gained access to the woman’s body on the condition that he made no visual record of his violation of the corpse. He did, however, make an audio recording that was played as a soundtrack during his time in the operating theatre.

Speaking in response to this work Fusco describes

An artist exhibiting a portrait of himself on the operating table willingly turning himself into an object of medical science to express his desire to detach himself from his body’s procreative function, playing the tape of his transgressive rejection of his generative capacities – a gesture that required that another place and another person serve him in silence and then, disappear. ¹

Through this allusion to the ‘disappearance’ of the dead Mexican woman, Fusco references the physical processes that facilitate the existence of highly technologized society. She imagines the dead Mexican as a prototype for the kind of servile, hierarchical relationships that are inevitable within all of humanity’s interactions with technology. The abused corpse symbolizes the thousands of workers employed in the maquiladoras where the hardware of the digital revolution is assembled. In an interview with Juha-Pekka Vanhatalo, Fusco describes the maquiladoras in the border zones of Mexico where “female workers have no privacy, no time to go to the bathroom, no opportunity to talk during work, few breaks, and little control over their work situation”.² With no physical or social autonomy, these women represent the antithesis of all of the freedoms heralded by digital technology’s aspiration to ‘disembodiment’ and by the internet’s supposed ability to surpass physical and social boundaries.

Paul Virilio, in his book from 1991, The Aesthetics of Disappearance describes the link between manufacturing and the body as a corporal bond that can be observed as early as “Ford’s social project for the American Economy (that) announced already the synergy being formed between techniques of production, the manufactured object and corporeity itself.”³ Historically, mass production binds bodies and machines in a relationship of mutual dependency, which is as necessary now as it was for early Fordist production. In spite of the advanced state of modern manufacturing, machines still require operators and employers are at liberty to exploit bodies in sweatshops that we rarely see. Yet, as Fusco herself observes, the common supposition that globalized technologies such as the internet afford humankind the possibility of liberation from physical and social limitations, neglects not only the immediate history of the computer as a manufactured object but also the hierarchical relationships of exploitation over bodies that facilitate mass production on a worldwide scale:

The abundance of descriptions of net communication as structurally anti-authoritarian, decentralized, “rhizomatic,” open-ended, flowing, as if it followed some force of nature, are effectively diverting attention from the centralized economic formations that sustain it. In the same way that concentrating solely on what we see on the screen suppresses the status of the computer as a manufactured object, formalist fixation of the net we use as consumers or make a living off as designers obfuscates the political and economic realities out of which digital media and telecommunications emerge⁴

Dolores 10h to 22h: A Storey That No One Saw

In Dolores 10h to 22h, Fusco attempts to make the unseen realities of hardware manufacturing visible, by performing online, a story of exploitation “that no one saw.” Developed from a story about a maquiladora worker who was locked up in a small room at work without food, water or bathroom access and terrorized into confessing to trying to unionize her factory, the performance attempts to highlight the figure of the exploited female worker and her physical subjugation at the hands of her employer. Playing Dolores, Fusco was locked away under guard for a period of 12 hours consecutively; during which time none of her bodily needs were tended. She was denied food and bathroom access thus reaffirming the urgency of her bodily functions. Periodically her male guard, who relentlessly attempted to incite false confessions to fallacious crimes, subjected her to periods of physical abuse. Audience members witnessed Fusco’s gradual subordination to her guard: the manager of the maquiladora where her fictitious crimes had taken place. Events were filmed on four CCTV cameras positioned inside of her cell that streamed the images live to the internet. Here an online audience could observe the abuses in the moment that they occurred. Representing the habitual maltreatment of female workers that underscores the digital hardware industry, the performance was a very public manifestation of the virulent physical injustices that often underpin globalized mass production.

The internet user is confronted with the political realities that facilitate widespread use of the network in our global economy and with the figure of subjugated women who facilitate our ongoing consumption of this network. For most consumers who use the internet on a daily basis for working and socializing, the net may represent accessibility, visibility and freedom of information, yet as Fusco asserts:

In the recent rush to celebrate the expanded communication potential afforded by new technologies, we often assume that the increased circulation of information necessarily yields enhanced possibilities of substantive intercultural interaction. It is time to ask ourselves how much we want to know about what we ask to see.⁵

FOOTNOTES

1 Fusco, Coco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours p192

2 Vanhatalo, Juha-Pekka, Coco Fusco – Life Under Surveillance

http://www.kiasma.fi/www/viewresource.php?lang=en&id=3Lolv9aQpOfVH9Z0

3 Virilio, Paul, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, p86

I must stress here that in Ford’s system workers existed as worker-consumers, thus making their relationship to embodied labour different to that of the maquiladora worker. In Ford’s social project the workers who produced the objects also used their wages to consume the cars that they had produced. Thus this manufacturing system is structured differently. None the less, the co-dependence of mechanism and body remains the same.

4 Fusco, Coco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours p191

5 http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/disapwman.html

I have had the pleasure over the past six weeks of helping to host Andre Guedes on his co-commissioned residency through the Bluecoat and Visiting Arts. Choosing to produce a project that evidences the present state of the institution by drawing a trajectory through its past, he has been trawling the archives of the Bluecoat for unusual documents, images and objects. Accompanying him to the Bluecoat’s offsite storage space in an empty warehouse in Liverpool’s old business district, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of exhibition catalogues, VHS tapes and random artifacts that we found from the Bluecoat circa 2004, prior to its redevelopment.

Andre’s exhibition and performative interventions will open at the Bluecoat in November this year. Watch this space for more blog posts on this topic - I am excited about it!

Performance Art has always appealed to my sense of austerity. While gallery goers pursue white cube spaces at their own pace and are permitted to feel disinterested and walk away when work is not to their taste, performance traditionally demands that viewers are committed for the duration, with the typical theatrical configuration (rows of seating looking forward to the stage) making mutineers conspicuous should they loose concentration and wish to leave before the artists work is fully complete.

I needed no convincing then, when Marina Abramović opened her four hour production for Manchester International Festival with ‘The Drill’, an hour long instruction on how to engage with performance art. Asking us to spend 10 minutes drinking a tiny glass of water and 5 minutes making direct eye contact with the person next to us, these simple exercises were intended to induct us into the meditative, contemplative and committed approach needed to truly understand the performances that we were about to witness.

After the induction we were given freedom to navigate The Whitworth’s expansive galleries and enjoy the work of 14 artists. Being impatient I visited all of the rooms in around ten minutes, relishing the sense of discovery that arose out of encountering a new live performer in every empty room. I lay down next to Jamie Isenstein and her pile of sheep skin and animal rugs and was charmed by Eunhye Hwang’s engaging communications with members of her audience using only the movements of her body and the static from a badly tuned radio. Following the call of a heavy pounding that resonated from the lower floor of the building, I headed finally to Nico Vascellari’s performance at the end of a long stairwell. Gradually turning a rock into powder by hitting it with a piece of metal, Vascellari created a roar that was carried up through the height of the building by the dynamics of the space and a vibration that shook my internal organs so much that I felt physically connected to the performative act.

Yet this was an uncomfortable and demanding experience and I didn’t stay long, preferring to hang out next to the long tables that had been laid out with refreshments on one of the upper floors. The whole production ran on until 11pm, but by 9.30pm I have to confess that I had run out of steam and I left with a new awareness of how little my durational commitment had actually impacted on my engagement with each of the pieces. Marina Abramović proposal for this production, while admirable, is perhaps a little anachronistic in terms of the expectation that it places on the viewer. While the vanguard of 1960’s and 1970’s performance art often depended on duration to express its political stance in opposition to a developing culture of mass media distraction, performance in the present often successfully exists as a hybrid art form that incorporates a whole spectrum of technologies, contexts and approaches.

This was an interesting commission for an exciting festival, but perhaps not the first point of reference for the lowdown on what is cutting edge about contemporary performance!

I made a special trip to London for this because projects that put visual artists on stage always fascinate me. (See also II Tempo del Postino as part of Manchester International Festival for an even more esoteric helping of artists in the theatre).

Marcus Coates work is often presented in galleries and I wondered how it’s meaning might shift within the  context of a stage and a crowd of several hundred Friday night gig goers.

A performer by nature, Coates had no problem winning over the crowd, who after a period of initial confusion seemed willing to loose themselves in his ecstatic performance. Wearing a giant horse head and sliver suit, Coates manifested the animalistic behavior that is very familiar from earlier works, ramped up to fever pitch!

A project commissioned by Nomad the ritual was a response to the current redevelopment of Elephant and Castle and a bid to exorcise the area and provide a cultural platform for regeneration. In an interview for spoonfed.co.uk, Nomad’s Michael Smythe emphasizes their bid to interact with the community stating that ‘we also lived rough on the Heygate Estate, we slept rough in the derelict areas.’

In 2004 Coates made work in response to a similar issue when he filmed himself performing a shamanic ritual in the  living rooms of a Liverpool tower block that was scheduled for demolition. Yet as I examined the crowd of gig goers from my spot on the VIP balcony, I could not help but feel that this was a unique event for a crowd of art elite, rather than an attempt to create a lasting connection to Elephant and Caste and its inhabitants.

Taken at face value however, this was a brilliant event. The Cornet theatre provided a spectacular back drop to a brave piece of artistic programming and a mesmerizing performance. I can’t wait for Nomad’s next commission!