PEDAGOGY, PERFORMANCE AND FEMINISM

Friday 21st May, 12pm - 2.15pm at the ICA

A rare screening of 'Interview with Martha Rosler' by Performance Saga.

Followed by a conversation between David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Sonia Dermience, Martin Hargreaves, Theron Schmidt and chaired by Mary Paterson.

• How can you communicate about past performances?

• What is it about performance that you might want to communicate?

• What roles can an artist/ art practice play in creating knowledge about the past?

• What kind of framework do you need in order to understand the past?

• What role does writing have in the debate?

MARTHA ROSLER is an American artist who works across performance, collage, video and writing. In her Performance Saga interview she talks about her work and the conditions under which it came into being.

PERFORMANCE SAGA tells and updates the histories of performance art, and has created a series of DVD interviews, essays and festivals.

OPEN DIALOGUES produced writing programmes for the Performance Saga festivals (

led by Mary Paterson, with Rachel Lois Clapham and Theron Schmidt,

2008 and 2009) that responded to its themes of history, influence and cultural exchange.

Notes on the participants:

David Berridge lives in London, and makes language works for exhibition, performance, print and on line publication. The Moth Is Moth This Money Night Moth is published by The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. Recent projects include The Shadow of a Train, a script for an exhibition at the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh, in June 2010, and a residency at The Pigeon Wing, London, in September exploring relations of writing, exhibition and publication. Work online in Soanyway, Jacket, Streetcake, Otoliths, Rubric and fillip. He curates VerySmallKitchen at http://verysmallkitchen.com/.

Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. Recent work includes Inside Performance, a regular column for Dance Theatre Journal, Writing Live, an experiment in art, writing and performance with the Performa Biennial New York, Re- a live reading at PSL Gallery Leeds and Essaying Touch a writing residency at Islington Mill Salford. Current fascinations are the porosity of text, improvisation and live writing. She her bio page here.

Sonia Dermience founded Komplot in 2002, a curatorial collective concerned with nomadic creative practices, trends of specialisation and the infiltration of spaces. Projects such as 'Vollevox' or 'Architecture of Survival' explored new terrain in relation to objects, spaces, artists and the public. She has conducted extensive research into post '68 collaborative art practices in Belgium; organizing seminars and making two documentary films with Kosten Koper. This research is on-going with 'Marcel', a collective film and 'Y-The Black Issue', an itinerary exhibition, workshop and publication initiated during a residency at 'Far Away So Close', Sweden. Komplot founded The Public School in Brussels, November 2009, in a joint venture with a residency program at Nadine. The current committee members of The Public School Brussels are Heidi Ballet, Constance Barrère Dangleterre, Sonia Dermience, Sébastien Ricou, Ive Stevenheydens, Ronald Van de Sompel.

Martin Hargreaves is the Editor of Dance Theatre Journal and the Programme Leader of the MA Dance Theatre: The Body in Performance at Laban. His research interests lie between boredom and hysteria and he has learnt and performed Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A in a variety of contexts.

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. She is currently fascinated by metamorphosis and time travel. See her bio page here.

Theron Schmidt is a writer and performer based in London. As a solo artist he has presented work at Artsadmin, Camden People’s Theatre, Chisenhale Dance Space, and Roehampton University, and his performance collaborations have included projects with Julia Barclay, Lucy Cash, Nicola Conibere, and Chris Goode. He is currently completing a PhD thesis on theatricality and the politics of spectatorship at Queen Mary, University of London. His critical writing on live art and performance has been published in Dance Theatre Journal, The Live Art Almanac, Platform, RealTime, and Total Theatre.

/ / / / / / /

Part of FUTURES AND PASTS, a long weekend of live art at the ICA exploring the diverse pasts and possible futures of live art and performance. The weekend is curated by writer, artist and performance maker Tim Etchells with the aid of artist Ant Hampton and Lois Keidan (Live Art Development Agency)

http://www.ica.org.uk/24606/Live-Art/Live-Weekends-Futures-and-Pasts.html

Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH,

+44 (0)20 7930 3647

A conversation with Sonia Dermience, Friday May 21st, 7 - 9pm

Mary Paterson will participate in a conversation with Sonia Dermience, Friday May 21st 7 - 9pm.

VerySmallKitchen, in collaboration with Short Term Solutions, will hold a public conversation on connections of writing, exhibition and publication, with Sonia Dermience on Friday May 21st 7-9pm.

The conversation will unfold from a consideration of ‘Y-The Black Issue’, a publication and exhibition project curated by Sonia Dermience /In residency at Far Away So Close, which she describes as follows:

The exhibition Y is a decor, a mise-en-scène for action whilst the publication Y is a script for a project motivated by the desire to combat the darkness and cold. For the exhibition, which takes place in the context of a small seaside city, deserted in the winter by tourists, the artists assembled material to create a large scale installation. The publication Y is conceived as a collectively created artists book, a black and white reader in which the contributions overlap to mirror its process of creation. In pocket book form, it highlights the relationship between the curators, artists and designers through the gathering of fragments of conversations, poetry and images about SAD (seasonal affective disorder), melancholy, northern lights, weather, countryside, second residencies…

All welcome. The conversation will be a round table facilitated by David Berridge, Karen Di Franco, Marit Muenzberg and Mary Paterson.

This is a semi-public event at the Short Term Solutions studio space in Bethnal Green. To reserve a place and receive directions please email David at verysmallkitchen@gmail.com

For more information, please see Very Small Kitchen

Memory Exchange

Instructions for the Memory Exchange:

1. Welcome to the Memory Exchange.
   
2. Please write a memory on a memory card.
   
3. Submit your memory to the memory archive. This is now the property of MemoryExchange and will be donated to another person.
   Forget it.
   
4. The archivist will give you a new memory. This is now your memory. Remember it.
   

MEMORY EXCHANGE by Mary Paterson is commissioned by David Berridge as part of AWAY DAY, 31st May 2010. 12 - 6pm. Wandle Park (nearest tube - Colliers Wood, northern line)

Launch of In Time, and thoughts on the definitions of art

written by Mary Paterson

The London launch of In Time (a series of commissioned essays on live art and it’s effects, published by Live Art UK) was held last Tuesday, 13th April. The book is an advocacy tool and study resource for funders, programmers and artists within and without the sector. As such, it’s faced with the problematic task of actually describing that thing we are all engaged with – what is it? This stuff we keep doing, which seems so popular, so urgent, and yet so fragile?

I’ve always thought of art as a type of politics. My current working definition of art is a cultural space that stands beside utility. Sometimes I think of the space of art as a series of alcoves along a corridor. It is not the journey from A to B, nor a birds-eye view, but it is a position. Meanwhile, the definition of live art that I have been carrying round for some time is that live art is strategically interdisciplinary. (This definition is lifted, and quite possibly twisted, from a sentence that has since been replaced on the ‘What is Live Art’ page of the Live Art Development Agency’s website.)

It’s easy to see that live art is a politics, because it’s not tied to any form. Like painting, for example, but without the baggage. That’s not the same as saying that live art is always my politics, although I’d certainly like to identify with the culture of generosity that Sonya Dyer, speaking on Tuesday night, said pervades the sector as a whole.

And while politics may be expressed through an open relation with form, the equation does not work in the opposite direction. Formlessness might be a tool, but it can never be the material manifestation of a political stance. Think of Richard Wright's work which won the Turner Prize last year. Temporal, temporary and responsive to its environment, Wright’s mural for the exhibition was tinged by its context in a way that was little acknowledged at the time. I lost count of the number of people who asked me if I had seen the Turner Prize work, ‘which is going to disappear.’ The hype did not focus on the time of the mural, but on the fact that the time for viewing it was nearly up. In the context of this prestigious prize, it seems, witnessing a temporary act can slide dangerously close to receiving an exclusive privilege.

Despite its slipperiness, I have recently heard a few definitions of art, and particularly live art, that are appealing. At the In Time launch Andy Field from Forest Fringe said that live art is defined, ‘not by what it is, but by what it could be.’ And at the lecture he gave to mark the launch of his book, ‘The Many Headed Monster’ last week, Joshua Sofaer suggested that a determining principle of art, as opposed to craft, could be that its effects are not only felt at the time; they also grown on reflection. I like both of these definitions, and I am going to use them to build one of my own:

(live) art is an attitude, and it grows

The artist Rajni Shah put it even better when she compared live art to a vehicle (which she proposed as one, partial, metaphor). ‘It keeps moving.’ She said, ‘And it can change direction.’

Seeing as we’re on a theme of formlessness, I would also like to suggest another (partial, certainly temporal and quite possibly temporary) word to describe art. The word is ‘yet.’ Yet, is it art? Is it art, yet? Yet is a word that anticipates the future and builds on the past. (I explored this theme for my piece for the Oxhouse Alphabet). Is it a coincidence that one of the synonyms my computer finds for ‘yet’ is ‘in time’?

In Time features essays on Infrastructure, Public Engagement, and Legacies, commissioned by members of Live Art UK. (My essay on critical writing was commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency.) It is available to buy here, or to download as a pdf for free here. For more information on In Time, go here.

Audience horror stories and ‘The Many Headed Monster’ by Joshua Sofaer

written by Mary Paterson

We all have a horror story like this one. It was a Sunday night in Battersea. I was given a lollypop as I entered the room. Someone said, ‘feel free to walk around the space.’ The space was filled with raw chickens hanging from the ceiling like fat, dimply, headless men. I did not feel free to walk around, but, like the rest of the audience, clung to the walls with a growing sense of unease. Artists began to manipulate chickens enthusiastically. They tried to get the audience to ‘participate’ by flinging bits of flesh our way. I left when a piece of fowl landed in my wine.

Audiences, naturally, sit at the centre of any artwork. They’re invited to watch, asked to immerse, encouraged to join in. The relationship between artist and audience is delicate and personal, and the more unusual the artistic method (for example, the further a piece of performance gets from the proscenium arch), the more carefully the artist must consider who and how is her audience.

Joshua Sofaer’s new publication, The Many Headed Monster, published by the Live Art Development Agency, promises to be an indepth look at the relationship between artists and audiences. It is a boxed set containing a lecture, a DVD and image cards. Most importantly, it knows exactly who it’s aimed at. The Live Art Development Agency says:

‘Monster has been specifically conceived and created with higher education in mind as a tool kit that can be used as a resource to undertake personal research, or as an illustrated lecture suitable for students at all levels, or as a template for workshop and seminar programmes, or even as the foundation for an entire teaching module.’

I don’t know why it’s called The Many Headed Monster yet (I’ll be heading to the launch event on 8th April to find out), but I hope it has nothing to do with horror stories. There are two events to mark the launch – one at Tate Modern on the evening of April 8th, and one at Whitechapel Gallery on the afternoon of 7th May. For more information, including the type of audience each event is aimed towards, and how to buy the publication for a special launch price, follow this link to the Live Art Development Agency website.

Notes towards a navigation through Unbound: from U for Unbound to A for Authority.

by Mary Paterson

In 2009 I began a residency at the Live Art Development Agency.

res•i•den•cy [rez-i-duh n-see] –noun,plural-cies.

1. residence (def. 3).

2. the position or tenure of a medical resident.

3. (formerly) the official residence of a representative of the British governor general at a native Indian court.

4. (formerly) an administrative division of the Dutch East Indies.

[["residency." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 31 Mar. 2010. .]

I have been looking at Unbound, which is the Agency’s online publication and distribution arm. Unbound is an online shop for books, documentation and the paraphernalia surrounding live art. It is also a commissioning platform for new works, and as such it stocks art historical text books like (for example) Body Art by Amelia Jones, as well as limited edition, commissioned artworks made to mark the Live Art Development Agency’s 10th birthday, which are exclusive to Unbound.

res•i•den•cy ['re-z&-d&n-sE] –noun, plural -cies

1. an often official place of residence

2. the condition of being a resident of a particular place

["residency." Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law. Merriam-Webster, Inc. 31 Mar. 2010. .]

At the Art Writing Field Station event in Leeds last week, I presented some notes towards the text I’m writing for the residency. I described Unbound as my field of study. “Imagine that we are looking.” I wrote, “Imagine that this is what we find – a series of resources labelled Unbound; a metaphorical sheaf of published and commissioned paraphernalia connected to the suggestion of live art. Imagine that this website Unbound is the field of study.”

But a field of study is normally a finite entity, and Unbound is not finite in two important ways. Firstly, it is effectual: unlike an archive, it does not simply claim to record a set of influences, but also to define those influences and shape the discipline. Secondly, it points to resources, but does not map their contents. You have to click on the elegant photographs, enter your credit card details, and wait for a parcel before you can access the knowledge described on Unbound.

res•i•den•cy [rez-əd-ən-sē] –n, pl -cies

: a period of advanced medical training and education that normally follows graduation from medical school and licensing to practice medicine and that consists of supervised practice of a specialty in a hospital and in its outpatient department and instruction from specialists on the hospital staff

["residency." Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary. Merriam-Webster, Inc. 31 Mar. 2010. .]

But it is this oblique relationship to knowledge that interests me about Unbound.

residency: The position or term of a medical resident; The position of a musical artist who commonly performs at a particular venue; The condition of being a resident of a particular place; The home or residence of a person, especially in the colonies

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/residency accessed 31st March 2010

Unbound does not represent knowledge, but it does give information about it. And information is, of course, another kind of intellectual resource; arguably, one that is more relevant to contemporary living than the weighty facts of knowledge.

I remember sitting round the kitchen table when I was 11 or 12, helping my brother learn the capital cities of the world so that he could pass an exam. He was sliding round the kitchen in his socks and he learnt the capital cities by rote, to the rhythm of his body making laps of the table.

No-one needs this kind of knowledge anymore. It’s all available on the internet, and so accessing the internet is more important than being able to remember words or phrases. This amounts to a change in status that I think of as a change of location. The names of the capital cities of the world are no longer resident in the bodies of schoolchildren. Instead, they live in a shared, virtual system that everyone can access, but which no-one needs to possess. It is a change in status from knowledge to information.

residency: The location that a student is deemed to live for the purpose of funding.

www.learnnowbc.ca/course_finder/glossary.aspx accessed 31st March 2010

What does it mean to have access to “a shared, virtual system”? Is it the same thing as “virtual memory”? Or “cultural knowledge”? Or “common sense”?

residency: Please refer to the Residency Classification Guidelines.

www.umich.edu/~regoff/tuition/explanation.html accessed 31st March 2010

In Leeds, I asked Simon Zimmerman to read out the text I had written, which was about memory and meaning. I asked him to insert some of his memories into my text. He talked about childhood games with his sister, and about travelling on buses with his aunt. When he spoke his memories he lifted his head from the script, and the left corner of his mouth rose in a shy smile. Everyone in the room was captivated.

residency: they tax anyone who lives there, regardless of citizenship;

www.answers.com/topic/multiple-citizenship accessed 31st March 2010

It reminded me of the time when something traumatic happened to a friend of mine. The event was so traumatic, that to describe it was to hold an audience’s attention. After I had described the event to people, they would retell the story elsewhere. Soon, people who did not know my friend would tell the story of the traumatic event. Sometimes I would find myself in a crowd of people where I was known as the person who had a friend who had been affected by this traumatic event. One or two people admitted that they were jealous of me for being so close to such a shocking incident. Nevertheless, they restyled my feelings into their own language. The event had become “common knowledge”, or “cultural memory”, or perhaps “virtual sense.”

Main Entry: domicile/ Part of Speech: noun/ Definition: human habitat/ Synonyms: abode, accommodation, apartment, castle, co-op, commorancy, condo, condominium, crash pad, dump, dwelling, habitation, home, house, joint, legal residence, mansion, pad, rack, residence, residency, roof over head, roost, settlement

http://thesaurus.com/browse/residency, accessed 31st March 2010

After Simon had finished speaking at Art Writing Field Station, we had a short discussion. Emma Cocker (who made a presentation later that morning in relation to rhizomatic diagrams on graph paper that refer, obliquely, to the knowledge and information of her studio and her practice) said that she had been thinking about ‘residency.’ She said (rhetorically): ‘What does it mean to take residency inside someone else’s text?’ Simon said that he was interested in parasitic writing – writing that lives off another source.

Main Entry: dwelling/ Part of Speech: noun/ Definition: home/ Synonyms: abode, castle, commorancy, den, digs, domicile, dump, establishment, habitat, habitation, haunt, hole in the wall, house, lodging, pad, quarters, residence, residency

http://thesaurus.com/browse/residency, accessed 31st March 2010

Aren’t we all parasites? Quotations, definitions, references, libraries, archives, styles, fashions, networks, nods, winks … the building blocks of culture are other people’s ideas. Or, as it says on the gates of the British Library, ‘An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them’ (Stephen Fry). Or to put it another way, we’re all ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ (Isaac Newton). Or, to put it another way, the moment when you know you are an adult, when you know that you are symbolically present and able to participate in your culture, is when you realise that everyone else is making it up as well (Mary Paterson). Authority is the relative value that we ascribe to cultural artefacts, which turns them into shared experience, implicit or otherwise.

par•a•site [par-uh-sahyt]–noun

1. an organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.

2. a person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.

3. (in ancient Greece) a person who received free meals in return for amusing or impudent conversation, flattering remarks, etc.

Perhaps the difference between being a parasite and being a resident is ‘any useful or proper return.’ While a residency is defined by its location, a parasite is defined by its (lack of) production. My work in relation to Unbound is parasitical. It uses the resources to gain nutriment, without offering any of its own. But it is also about location – the location of knowledge, the location of information, and the location of meaning.

The Parasite is the name of several fictional characters that appears in Superman comic book stories published by DC Comics. ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_(comics) accessed 31st March 2010

18:31:01/ 18:44:38 / 18:56:25/ 19:13:09/ 19:48:07. 20:45:04

By Mary Paterson

A field analysis of Art Writing Field Station according to Instruction, Memory, Performance, Quotation and Time.

Notes from Art Writing Field Station, curated by A Very Small Kitchen. Patrick Studios, East Street Arts, Leeds, Saturday 26th March 2010, by Mary Paterson

Beginning: Flourescent light over platform 8b of Leeds Train Station: 18:31:01

Instruction: When I say matter, I don’t mean it literally.

Memory: It is a white room with a high ceiling, wooden beams and tall thin windows. Performance: When he speaks away from the script he comes to life, and those are the bits that everyone remembers.

Performance: What’s it like to be a writer in public? To bring the white squares into a public space, to press the nib of the pen til it squeaks?

Quotation: She says something like improvisation is often a quotation. Something like improvisation produces what is familiar.

Time: Imagine you could regulate time. Inbetween stations, the train driver speeds up or slows down so that it always takes five minutes. You must read more or less attentively, depending on how far you have to go. You must regulate your thoughts for each period of motion.

Time: 18:44:38

Time: Rolling out of Leeds in an empty train, the suburbs are a network of gently pulsing brake lights.

Instruction: When I say journey, I probably mean travel.

Memory: It is a large room with a chill in the air.

Quotation: He talks about Mark Rothko, who looks. He looks repeatedly (he looks repeatedly), and he looks hard. She looks as well. She looks for things she can’t see yet.

Performance: What’s it like to be a writer in public? To be identified with the words that fit you badly? To invite a reading and expect it to happen right then.

Instruction: When I say write, I probably mean think.

Time: 18:56:25

Time: We regret to announce there is no trolley service. Please relax, enjoy your journey, and have a very good evening.

Memory: It is an old building that wears its modernisation lightly.

Instruction: Write, then. Write to make it matter, to understand, to give yourself an alibi, to avoid eye contact, to generate words, to remember, to make a mark, to move your hands, to hear the sound of the pencil on the page, to join the dots, to regulate time, to travel.

Time: I’m meant to be somewhere else today. This afternoon I’m meant to be in London, where politics and art are being cut into a young man’s flesh.

Time: 19:13:09

Memory: She unfolds three beautiful rhizomes flattened on graph paper, which contain or illustrate or point to or simulate maps of her practice, and maps for her practice.

Instruction: What does it mean to inhabit a text? To take residency inside it? To roll your tongue over its syllables and coat it in your own saliva?

Time: 19:48:07

Time: As the train waits, my belongings roll gently off the table. My belongings are regulating time, or they know something I don’t.

Memory: The room’s long thin windows frame a view of a carpark, a lawn and a row of cottages owned by the church.

Quotation: Perhaps quotations are resistant to oral reading. Perhaps sensory, personal memories are easier to engage with than words written on the page.

Instruction: When I say page, I probably mean screen.

Memory: He used to place his teeth on the metal rail of the seat in front of him, and feel the vibrations of the bus run through his body.

Instruction: When I say audience [ ].

End: between Peterborough and Kings Cross Station, too dark to see outside: 20:43:04