Open Dialogues has
been commissioned by Present Attempt to produce documents from SHOW TiME, a
programme of performances taking place from 15-17 June at Rich Mix.
For SHOW TiME Open
Dialogues will take up position at a writing station in the audience. We will use a manual stamp to NOTA moments of the event in a series of time stamped documents. The documents will explore the time, place and quality of notes in relation to performance.
The
SHOW TiME project is part of Open Dialogues’ framework for research for 2012 - NOTA:
NOT, NOTES, NOTER (NOTA), NOT/A, towards a sometimes set of performance writing
tools. It explores documentation as a
medium within the context of collaboration, liveness and public space. After
SHOW TiME a
selection of NOTA documents will be published online, along with an accompanying conversation
between Mary and Rachel Lois about our work.
About
SHOW TiME is an artist-led event which creates a
vibrant, hospitable and unusual weekend of performance that makes more space for experimental work in
professional venues. Curated and produced by artists Present
Attempt, the weekend blends work-in-development and rarely seen pieces in a
series of dynamic and provoking sessions.
Present Attempt is a collective of artists making and
producing collaborative, interdisciplinary performance works including studio-based pieces, interventions,
writing and research. Present Attempt are
James Bush, Alex Eisenberg and John Pinder.
Open
Dialogues is a UK collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary
Paterson, that produces writing on and as performance. As Open Dialogues Rachel
Lois and Mary have worked internationally with Pacitti Company (UK), Performa
(US), Performance Saga (CH) and Wooloo Productions (DE) amongst others. In 2012,
their work focuses on NOTA; towards a
sometimes set of performance writing tools.
Published in 2009, RITE is the result of a nine month collaboration with Critical Communities, a New Work Network and Open Dialogues project exploring the practice of critical writing on and as new work (interdisciplinary and live art).
RITE was launched at PSL Gallery Leeds March 26 2010 6.30-8pm. The evening was supported by Open Dialogues, In a word, PSL Gallery and East Street arts and included a temporary library, two new performance commissions and a spoken score. The archive from the evening is at the In a word website
RITE is commissioned by New Work Network, designed by Wood McGrath, edited by Open Dialogues and produced by the members of Critical Communities. It includes a foreword by New Work Network and introduction by Open Dialogues. External editorial advisor Maria Fusco. All material is copyright the authors and Critical Communities 2009.
Contributors include Emma Bennett, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg, Emma Cocker, Hannah Crosson, Amelia Crouch, Chloe Dechery, Tim Jeeves, Emma Leach, Johanna Linsley, Joanna Loveday, Charlotte Morgan, Mary Paterson, Jim Prevett, Nathan Walker and Wood McGrath.
Details on the wider Critical Community can be found here
Details on Re- one of the commissions to mark the launch of RITE by Emma Cocker and Rachel Lois Clapham can be found here.
Open Dialogues is taking part in Notes on NOTES…; a collaborative writing residency with Matthew Hearn, John Dummett and Rachel Lois Clapham
NOTES on a Return is a series of events and exhibitions recalling a sequence of live artworks which took place at the Laing Gallery in the late 1980s.
The programme brings back works by Anne Bean, Rose English, Mona Hatoum, Bruce McLean and Nigel Rolfe. Five UK and international artists - Sam Belinfante (UK), Sofia Greff (Germany), Graham Hudson (UK), Meg Mosley (UK) and Viola Yesiltac (USA/Germany) -have also been commissioned to make new works that respond to the five original 1980’s performances.
Together, the exhibition based archival recollections, new commissions and symposium are all part of an open question or in-process experiment in how to house ephemeral practice and return to or re-enact the live.
Notes on NOTES
Notes on NOTES is a writing residency in which Rachel Lois Clapham, John Dummett
and Matthew Hearne will collectively make an imperfect fiction of Notes on a Return in a series of live, drawn and public actions.
Rachel Lois Clapham ‘Scoring Notes on a Return’ Ultimately speculative, a score lies in between action and object, performance and document; it is a singular record of action past or imagined and a call to future performances.
Exploring how to compose, punctuate or re-write performance Rachel Lois will publicly make a score for Notes on a Return using materials gathered from artists and audiences over the two days of the symposium. The resulting score will be used to produce a written response to the five newly commissioned performances in Notes.
Visitors to the exhibition are invited to contribute to the composition of the score in whatever way they wish. All contributions will be acknowledged in the final published text.
Rachel Lois Clapham has a BA Fine Art/Art History (2000) and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory (2007) from Goldsmiths College. Previously editor of Live Art UK’s Writing From Live Art, and Arts Council funded Writing Live fellow for Performa Biennial, New York, her writing on performance related practice is published in the UK and internationally. She works across exhibitions and gallery education, most recently curating Nahnou-Together Now an exhibition at Tate Britain (June -Sept 08). She is currently Co-Director of critical writing initiative Open Dialogues and writes a regular column 'Inside Performance' for Dance Theatre Journal. Current interests are collaborative live writing, scores and the porosity of text. www.opendialogues.com
John Dummett ‘My very first Incunabulum’ Through working on and annotating a facsimile of Mel Bochner’s seminal 1970 conceptual artwork; ‘Language is not transparent’ John Dummett will print a text composed of the transient, ephemeral, and unstable fictions that together constitute memory. This live printing process will draw upon what is made visible and legible during the 1,050 minutes of the Notes on a Return symposium.
(Incunabulum is the Latin for "swaddling clothes" or "cradle" and can refer to the earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything. In printing, an incunabulum is a book, or even a single sheet of text that was printed— not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe.)
Working with text, writing and discussions,Dummetts' practice is a live collaborative process which performs the act of thinking and critical reflection. Over the past 10 years he has worked internationally exhibiting works at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, Irish Museum of Modern Art and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
In 2009 John has worked on bodies of writing which have explored urban green space (The Architecture Centre Bristol), the significance and value of thinking in contemporary society (National Review of Live Art) and how shared codes of behaviour mark public space (Limerick City Gallery). He is currently undertaking a 6 month research programme supported by Longhouse in Birmingham.
Matthew Hearne ‘Notes on an Index’ Whilst accepting the subjectivity of our individual response to an event, action or intervention, as we process our thoughts, polish our vocabulary and perfect our grammar the indexical link between first impression and written response both diminishes and collapses.
Within this fulcrum, this margin, this middle ground however there exists the potential to develop and rekindle this connection. Exploring the process, connection and the immediacy of the writing with the aid of type-writer – formally used by Rob le Frenais in Anne Beans 1997 performance at the Laing – and a sheet of carbon paper, the medium, like the live work itself, will become the message.
Matthew Hearn is a writer, curator and sometime artist. He is currently undertaking an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with University of Sunderland and The Locus+ Archive. Having worked with Locus+ since 2002 this current body of research led to his involvement in researching and curating the Locus+ Archive exhibition This Will Not Happen Without You and has also fed into the development of Notes on a Return.
Thinking, talking and writing about archives and the need, means and process of documenting ephemeral practices he has fed into a number of recent initiatives including, Per-Forming the Archive and Arkive City in collaboration with University of Ulster, Belfast, and Rethinking Archives, Arnolfini and UWE, Bristol.
Notes on a Return is supported by Arts Council England
Open Dialogues: Performance Saga is a responsive writing project created for the "Performance Saga – BONE 11 Fesitval" in Bern, Switzerland, 3 - 6 December 2008.
Performance Saga - BONE 11 invites artists from different generations to respond to each other's work, and Open Dialogues: Performance Saga invites five writers to respond to these performances and associated discussions. Texts will be published in print and online, in English and German.
Open Dialogues: Performance Saga is developed by Mary Paterson for Open Dialogues. Writers are: Mary Paterson (UK), Theron Schmidt (UK), Dagmar Reichert (CH), Chris Regn (CH) and Jana Ullman (CH). Translator: Almut Rembges (CH). Assisted by the graphic designer Nicole Boillat (CH)
PERFORMANCE SAGA FESTIVAL Performance Saga Festival is curated by Katrin Grögel and Andrea Saemann, and organised in collaboration with Norbert Klassen, Peter Zumstein and Schlachthaus Theater Bern. Artists performing are: Alison Knowles (US), Irene Loughlin (CA)/Jorge Manuel de Leon (GT), Muda Mathis (CH), Die Maulwerker (DE), Sands Murray-Wassink (NL), Carolee Schneemann (US), Annie Sprinkle/Elizabeth Stephens (US), Peter Vittali (CH), Martha Rosler (US), et al.
PERFORMANCE SAGA DVDs Performance Saga Festival also launches the publication of Performance Saga Interviews 06 - 08: Joan Jonas, Martha Rosler & Alison Knowles. The Performance Saga DVD Edition is a collection of interviews with 8 American and European women pioneers of performance art. The DVDs are published by edition fink - Verlag für zeitgenössische Kunst Zürich, and DVD 07: Martha Rosler includes an essay by Mary Paterson.
This is a letter, forthcoming in AN Magazine September 2008, in response to Lara Farrar’s article Arts Criticism in Crisis
The recent debate on arts criticism in A-N Magazine July/August 2008 by Lara Farrar brought two very different types of arts criticism clearly into view. One is a mainstream, conservative mode of printed criticism, sanctioned by editors and written by authorised purveyors of taste who comment on, but remain distinct from, culture and their reading public. Farrar cites the advocates of this traditional form of criticism as Harold Hobson, Kenneth Tynan and Brian Sewell. In contrast, Farrar says, the other mode of criticism is manifested online. It is immediate, self- published criticism, written by people both educated in art history and those who aren’t, and beamed out globally to millions of potentially unknown readers. Farrar typifies this new type of criticism as the unedited online critical writing platform: An Interface, and my own work as a blogger who, as part of Open Dialogues, writes online and in real time during biennales and festivals. Farrars’ polarising of the debate - setting Brian Sewell as the traditionalist against myself as a blogger – is a useful outline but does oversimplify what is at stake in today’s arts criticism and its perceived crisis.
Farrar’s debate focuses on the impact of blogging and new media upon traditional arts criticism, and cites it as symptomatic of the current state of crisis in arts criticism. But new media- as Farrar knows - is not the underlying cause of criticisms’ troubles. The internet medium merely crystallises the crisis. It manifests the difference in responsibility, subject position and relationship to reader between emerging forms of criticism, or critical writing, and the traditional. In turn the internet brings to light the latent ideologies that are at work within both modes.
The practice of art criticism grew on Enlightment ideals, including the Kantian notion that the critic’s definitive and elevated subjectivity claims assent for all his/ her readers, and a belief in immanent meaning, universal reason and public consensus. In this model, which Jurgen Habarmas has described as the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, the critic is a kind of specialised everyman: he delivers meaning to people just like himself.
Blogging puts pressure on this enlightenment mode. It embodies a threat to such a bourgeois public sphere, and reveals it to be a closed, hierarchical space in which certain people endowed with extra ordinary critical senses write for the benefit of the un-educated masses; in practise these extraordinary senses are learnt and conditioned, and the masses stay homogenised and un-educated only in relation to the critic’s self-defined prowess.
In contrast, Blogging is mass communication based upon distinctly individuated critical reception, similar to the models of TV and Radio. It destroys the possibility of a reified public sphere. The variety of divergent content that the blogosphere allows disturbs the eighteenth century notion of a reasoned public consensus of opinion.With blogs, people can now shape their own critical encounter with art or at least choose how and by whom they wish to be ‘educated’. Moreover, they can publicly answer back within this online encounter instead of being rendered passive receptors or mere consumers of received logic.
As Farrar cites, Brian Sewell, Dr Ronan McDonald of University of Reading and the critic David Lee of The Jackdaw bemoan the uniformity and commodification of culture that ensues from the blogosphere’s eschewal of reified art ‘experts’ and the critics’ lack of authority over public opinion. But what they are really mourning is the loss of Enlightenment ideals that say that meaning can only be defined by specialists who bestow the benefits of their education on their peers.
In fact, the methodology of contemporary critical writing, which acknowledges the power of the individual, is not completely at odds with the discursive aims of traditional criticism like Sewell’s, which assumes that (educated) individuals will share an opinion. Nor is blogging a non-hierarchical, non critical pool of different but equal subjectivities. Hierarchy of voice remains online. But the autonomy and authority of the critic, and the attendant ethics of that particular subject position, is something a contemporary critical writer wrestles with in text, rather than cloaks in the myth of critical distance and transcendent meaning. Contemporary critical writing is an attempt to move away from criticism, beyond the knowing cynicism of critique, towards the critical; a more self aware and responsible mode in which meaning is indebted to the performative, and the writer and the writing are equally at stake as the subjects under discussion.
This focus on agency, contingency and the heightened sense of responsibility – towards subject, writer, writing and reader – results in a grey area compared to the judicial verdicts passed down to us by traditional, mainstream arts critics. But negotiating the safe passage of criticality in between the thorny aspects of authority, judgement and logocentrism is both the danger and the joy of contemporary critical writing.
This article originally appeared on CultureWars.org.uk and is reproduced with permission.
‘Dinner with America’ by Rajni Shah, Pinter Building, Queen Mary University, London; March 29th 2008.
Image: Rajni Shah (c) Manuel Vason
Come and have dinner with America. Over the course of Rajni Shah’s durational performance, you are invited to witness American icons and ideals slip into one another, to hear Americans define their own patriotism, and to feast on the literal and intellectual fruits of this labour. Here, America is a bride in a shimmering white veil, a blonde 50s starlet, and a glamour model in Wonder Woman boots. America is the Statue of Liberty, Amazing Grace and Red, White and Blue. America is a series of symbols, a soundtrack of anonymous voices and a supporting cast of silent figures dressed in white.
Appearing as different types of all-American-gal (bride, starlet, model), and singing the chorus to ‘Amazing Grace’ Shah represents an idea of America. At times, the idea stands for liberties and freedoms – Shah repeatedly holds one arm above her head, like the Statue of Liberty. At others, this America is a land of exclusions and divisions. Recorded interviews with Americans play overhead, and one voice begins by staking her position as a ‘privileged white woman’, aware that her country holds different experiences for different groups of people. Each speaker’s reality collides with the American dream, which is rolled over Shah’s body in a repeated repertoire of gestures and moves. And Shah’s body also shows the strain: she gets tired; her voice wavers; her limbs begin to shake. Being America, it seems, is a difficult job.
It’s usually easiest to define things by what they are not, and these strains and exceptions are testament to an America beyond its own ideal. But it’s also the American dream that gives these doubts meaning. Silhouetted against the accessories of American patriotism (which comes with a flag, a constitution and an advertising industry), the shape of real life is defined by these ideals at the same time as it contests them. Melting between different symbols and their effects, in fact, Dinner with America does not hold each element of its America up for inspection, but suggests the ways that disparate parts congeal over time. Most noticeably, Shah traces a line from the mythological power of American ‘freedom’ – a story told so often that it seems like it’s true – to the consumer power that drives American society. As a beautiful woman with flowing blonde hair and shiny red lips, she stands for that elusive something that we all want to own – a role she acknowledges with a series of alluring poses lifted from every ad campaign you’ve ever seen. Moving between Statue of Liberty and Glamour Girl, Shah’s Miss America joins the dots between an individual’s right to freedom and an individualistic drive to consume. They are two manifestations of the same American liberty, and each idea provides the template for the other, just as, on the template of Shah’s body, each gesture dissolves inexorably into the next.
The fuel for both this individualism-for-liberty and individualism-for-consumption is neither liberty, nor capitalism – nor even a shabby looking American dream. Instead, it’s desire. Dinner with America vibrates with the anticipation of things to change, things to improve. Two women in white sweep and resweep boundaries of earth around the audience’s feet, with quiet industry but no clear logic; and Shah sheds her layers of costume at the sliding pace of the inevitable. It is this desire for change that feeds the myths of freedom and consumption – we desire more, we desire better. And it’s the desire for change that means today’s shortcomings can be overlooked. American life waits on the actors of tomorrow, and Shah’s female icons distil the American dream. Like a beautiful woman, America is a wonderful idea; it stays that way because it is always out of reach.
The momentum of change is also what turns the needs of the individual into something like a shared experience. When Shah has left the stage, the audience moves close together to watch a film projected onto a pile of earth. It is an intimate moment, and the flickering black and white film plays out like an old silent movie. As well as footage of preparations for the show, the film shows women passing earth to one another, gestures repeated by Shah and her helpers in real time as the film plays. These images are interspersed with prompts for what’s happening next – ‘The Feast is coming!’ Altogether, the film ushers the audience into a shared past (the nostalgia of the movie’s style, details of the labour that has brought us together), and it leads us into a shared future (the upcoming meal). What comes before melts into what is yet to come, so that the here and now has to take us there. This is how national identity is born. And this is how a community of America rises from the detritus of its symbols, however tarnished by testimonies (oral and physical) of real material conditions.
Dinner with America effects a poignant reconciliation between ideal and reality, by conscripting the audience into the promise of a shared future. But who is this America for, and who is recruited into the American project? By the time the film is shown, we have seen Shah stripped naked. She has removed her glamorous clothes, taken off her wig and peeled off the mask that turned her brown skin white. She has also been subject to the unforgiving scrutiny of light that is all red, then light that is all white, then light that is all blue – exposed as an impostor beneath the metaphoric gaze of the American flag. The performance I saw, moreover, was to a British audience in a London university; and Rajni Shah is British herself. It’s tempting to say that it’s American cultural imperialism that makes us all so interested in a country far away and from which we are excluded. But it is also the extraordinary effectiveness of America’s cultural message. Built on desire, the idea of America must always project the dreams of the people at hand – even if they step out of costume with a shaven head and dark skin. The American dream is only a dream of America – it is etched by the people who see it, and it belongs to anyone that looks.
And yet the real collective moment in Dinner with America comes with the feast itself. Here, food and thoughts are served up in equal measure – you’re encouraged to take a topic for discussion at the same time as a piece of fruit. But Shah’s model of communal feasting is very different to the cultural production of America we have all just witnessed. Up to now, ‘America’ has been a chimera of unfulfilled desire, which means it doesn’t have to define its goals. In contrast, Shah’s feast invites the audience to sate its desire – for food and for conversation – and marks the end of a shared event. If Shah’s America uses the rhetoric of the individual to dangle a united future just out of reach, Shah’s feast uses the rhetoric of a community to harvest different reactions to a past (the performance) that we all know: it turns the ideology of America inside out. Is this a new model for the land of dreams? It’s hard to tell, because one similarity remains – just like the idea of America, the content of the feast is up to you.
Claire Fontaine: Get Lost, South London Gallery, Saturday 28 June 7-9 pm
Get Lost, Claire Fontaine, courtesy the artist, Air de Paris & Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
The main gallery of the SLG is blacked out. Two monitors on opposite sides of the space flash intermittently with stills of tanned and glamorous fashion models with 1980’s hairdo’s - women on one screen and men on another. The two screens emit a dull flickering light by which the audience sees to move around. In the darkness, performers Douglas Park and Diletta Mansella are in no way distinguishable from anyone else. They are dressed casually in dark clothing and move slowly in amongst the audience. As they move they repeat the phrase “I did love you once” into handheld microphones. The sounds of these amplified declarations of one-time love mingle closely with the voices of the visitors, who are scattered around the space chatting freely. There is no apparent pattern as to who these two are engaged with or why. At times, they make seemingly sincere and lingering eye contact with the assembled strangers, clearly addressing their ‘I did love you once’, to individual visitors. At other times, they can be spotted in the darkness, standing in an empty corner at the far side of the gallery pledging their ‘I did love you once’ to a blank wall. Meanwhile, outside in the foyer, the video ‘Where are We’ (2004) screens Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s infamous ‘honeymoon’ home-movie that leaked onto the internet in 1998. The video’s visuals are blacked out, leaving only a blank screen with graphic subtitles and audio. With this, visitors are left to imagine what is clearly Lee and Anderson filming their own drug fuelled, porn style, nuptials in a moving car.
This is Get Lost by Claire Fontaine. The work is an examination of contemporary desire and liberal love within the context of capitalism; as such it is an exercise in intimacy feigned and at once rejected. The Shakespearean phrase ‘I did love you once’ is itself a complex rumination on love taken from Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1, who then later in the same act seemingly revokes his declaration of love with ‘I loved you not’. But the real clue to the complex negation the work manifests is in its title: Get Lost simultaneously pulls its audience in only to push them away. The immersive environment, direct interactions and love utterings are engaging. But the monotony of the repeated phrase serves to distort meaning, leaving a hollow and insincere aftertaste. The empty gaze of the polished and perfectly re-touched fashion models on the monitor screens, further reinforce that Get Lost is a surface interaction on display. Add to this the apparent arbitrariness of Park and Mansella’s interactions - they could equally love you or the wall- and we are left in no doubt as to the intended in/sincerity of Get Lost. In short, what is created is a false intimacy, closeness or love made into public spectacle and amplified out to a paying crowd.
Looking through the lens of capitalism, spectacle and fashion, Claire Fontaine defines contemporary liberal love as commercialised, moreover contrary, fickle and empty. However, the work in Get Lost maintains a tantalisingly ambiguous position towards this shallowness. In presenting what is essentially a non-screening of Anderson and Lee’s sexual exploits ‘Where we Are’ leaves space for an alternate narrative to emerge; one that is not a banal critique of Western love in the form of a carnal, plastic Pammy and rock star Tommy Lee. The question that arises from between the blank screen and the subtitles is, bourgeois idealism, hepatitis infection, divorce and abuse allegations aside, who can say that Pammy and Tommy Lee’s is not a genuinely contemporary model of true love? Folding such critical questions back into the material of the work – both in the performance and the video - is how Get Lost teeters on the brink of critique.
In the same way love in Get Lost is performed as both simulated and real, so too Claire Fontaine herself can be seen to be a contradiction. Despite being described as singular and female in literature, Claire Fontaine is not a woman, nor is she a person; she is a Paris based collective founded in 2004 who describes herself as ‘a readymade artist born out of the standardisation of identities produced by contemporary capitalism’ . Claire Fontaine then, is a brand - an artistic pseudonym; she is the sum of an unknown number of anonymous parts whose collective anonymity is an attempt to embody the crisis of the singular - including singular artistic genius - and to critique sovereignty, production and commercialism in the art world.
Claire’s overt sloganeering on capitalism might be off-putting and heavy handed, thus leading to Get Lost being considered as banal agit-prop, but underneath the work itself manages to maintain its moral ambiguity and light touch. Conversely, Claire’s strategy of collective anonymity, instead of serving as an embodiment of anti-capitalistic endeavour, actually increases the possibility of artistic production, participation and networks. The ongoing commodification of these artistic and cultural elements affords Claire the opportunity to capitalise on the same art world commercialism she purportedly rallies against. Claire’s artist biography testifies to her success; it includes a string of shows in private, commercial galleries. Clearly, Claire Fontaine does not feel the need to be a poor artist struggling in her garret. This complicity with capitalism, when added with the subtle complexities of Get Lost as a piece of work, makes the artist’s bald political rhetoric read as all too knowing - and as such, empty, cynical and deviant on an entirely different level.
It is this inherent contradiction, the push and pull between sincerity and rhetoric, and the interesting grey area in between - that is at the heart of Get Lost. The work is contrived and a prick tease; it attracts and repels simultaneously, its intentions are equally in/sincere and not. Nevertheless, the underlying point is that genuineness and authenticity are of no consequence in this liberal model of love, since they can never be distinguished from simulation, appropriation or mere performance, nor should they be. The fun is in the flirtation and the chase, and to embrace Get Lost without reservation is to be gloriously cuckolded.
Open Dialogues is a writing collaboration that produces writing on and as performance. It was founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson in 2008. This site is where we profile Open Dialogues’ collaborative work, including projects with UK and international artist/writer groups and performance festivals. We also feature our individual writing practices here. Please see the links below to find out more.
