Contemporary Theatre Review volume 29, 2019- Issue 4
Autor: Tancredi Gusman
Workshop at the Migros Museum Zurich
Interviews with Artists
Interview with Graciela Carnevale – Part I (22 March 2019)
Interview with Graciela Carnevale – Part I
In the context of the symposium „Performance Art: Who Cares“ at the Migros Museum in Zurich in March 2019, I had the pleasure to interview Graciela Carnevale. As one of the acteurs in the 1960s Argentinian political art scene she had specific interest in documenting and archiving the political and artistic actions, especially and most known of the Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia de Rosario. In that regard we spoke not only about the conservation of her art and art practice, but also about the possibilities and necessities of present access to it. Not least her travelling archive of the Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia therefore became a specific point of discussion regarding Carnevales idea of art, as well as political practice.
Interview with Graciela Carnevale – Part II (22 March 2019)
Interview with Mike Parr – Part I (01 February 2018)
Interview with Mike Parr – Part I
I interviewed Mike Parr on 01 February 2018 in Berlin at the International Research Center „Interweaving Performance Cultures“ with which I am currently associated. This interview was realised after some meetings with Parr during his stay in the German capital for a few months. On these occasions, we have been able to discuss widely his artistic work and reflection. This record represents a sort of crowning and condensation of this dialogue. The documentation (16 mm films, videotapes, still photography, writings, and drawings) represents a crucial device of Parr’s performance practice: he uses it not only as means of recording an event but rather as medium of its displacement, re-elaboration, and transformation. Therefore, the documentation has been here, in a certain sense, the way of entry and investigating the entirety of his work. It has appeared as a sort of continuum that connects different places, themes and moments of his artistic research: from the initial influence of Vito Acconci’s photographic (re)presentations, to the role that the documentation plays in his crisis during the 1980s and in its overcoming, up to the relationship with his documenting team. A point of particular interest is also the notion of archive and how the construction of his own archive, through the accumulation and organisation of individual pieces in a single archival body, gave him a new vision on his own artistic practice and portraits, at the same time, the relationship between Australia and performance art. The interview also explores how Mike Parr understands performance art and his relationship with the audience.
Re-Constructing Performance Art: Processes and Practices of Historicisation, Documentation, and Representation (1960s-1970s)
30 November – 1 December 2018, Freie Universität Berlin
The issues of documentation and representation of past performance art have dominated the debate over this art form, both in scholarly and museum-related contexts, for several decades. In recent years, the discussion has undergone a crucial shift, in that no longer is it concerned with whether a performance may or may not be reproduced and documented, but how multiple materialisations and representations in effect re-produce an artist’s work over and over again in the course of its history. The symposium Re-Constructing Performance Art, while upholding this new approach, offers a new and original perspective within it. In three sections and one roundtable, international scholars will explore the practices of historicisation, documentation, exhibition, and archiving of performance art. The aim is not to evaluate specific techniques and methods for the preservation of this art form, but to examine how these practices construct its epistemic and aesthetic space. Thus, the question is not if or how performance art can be conserved but how different strategies of conservation and transmission shape its reception according to different agendas and strategies.
The first panel, Defining the Boundaries, explores modes of historicisation as enacted by artists, theorists, and scholars, both discursively and non-discursively, emphasising the deep interrelation between theorisation and artistic creation, on one hand, and their reciprocal performative power on the other. The second panel, Documenting or Re-Presenting?, focusses on performance documentation, investigating its phenomenological constitution, the specificity of certain mediums of documentary transmission, as well as interrogating modes of reception of performance histories through documentation. The final panel, Spaces and Times of Performance Art, examines the practices of archivation and exhibition of performance art, analysing how they take part in the processes of its re-presentation and reception. In addition, at the roundtable, scholars from various fields of research will discuss and compare their methodological approaches to performance-based art forms and their history.
In each section, a recurrent yet shifting “centre” will resurface—the document—considered not as a mere medium or record of a performance, but as a juncture at which practices and strategies of historicisation, conservation, and representation are entangled. The symposium intends to contribute to the reading of this entanglement and to stimulate novel approaches to analyses of its stratification. Performance documentation thus functions not only as instrument and source for historical re-construction, but also a device for the critical scrutiny of these same practices of re-construction.
The symposium is part of the research project Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977. The research is conducted by Tancredi Gusman as principal investigator at the Institute of Theatre Studies of the Freie Universität in Berlin, and supervised by Erika Fischer-Lichte. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 747881.
Programme
Friday, 30 November 2018, L115 Seminarzentrum, Freie Universität Berlin
13:30 Registration and Reception
14:00 Welcome– Erika Fischer-Lichte
14:15 Tancredi Gusman (Berlin) Toulouse-Lautrec at the Beach. Documentation and its Role in Performance Art History
Section 1 – Defining the Boundaries: Performance Art Ideas and Historiography
Chair: Torsten Jost
15:00 Heike Roms (Exeter) Performance Documentation as Artistic Self-Historicisation in the 1960s and 1970s: Modalities of Performative Historiography
15:45 Break
16:15 Lorenzo Mango (Napoli) Historical Roots of “Performative Theatre”: The Italian Post-Avantgarde
17:00 Sylvia Sasse (Zürich) Practical Aesthetics: Performance Art (as) Theory in Eastern Europe
17:45 Break
Roundtable–Methodologies of Performance Art Research
Chair: Tancredi Gusman
18:00 Doris Kolesch (Berlin), Jan Lazardzig (Berlin), Michael Lüthy (Weimar)
Saturday, 1 December 2018, L115 Seminarzentrum, Freie Universität Berlin
09:30 Registration and Reception
Section 2 – Documenting or Re-Presenting? Media of Performance Art
Chair: Andrej Mirčev
10:00 Philip Auslander (Atlanta) Performance Documentation and Its Discontents; or, Does It Matter Whether or Not It Really Happened?
10:45 Barbara Büscher (Leipzig) Easy Access? Book as Archive of Performance Art and as Source Material of Its History
11:30 Break
11:45 Sabine Gebhardt Fink (Lucerne) Re-mediate and Remember Performance Art and Activism in Collaborative Constellations: Some Thoughts about the Methodology of Performance Chronicle Basel
12:30 Lunch break
Section 3 – Spaces and Times of Performance Art: Exhibition and Conservation History/ies
Chair: Tancredi Gusman
13:30 Annette Jael Lehmann (Berlin) Exhibiting Performance Art of the 1970s: Outlining Central Questions in a Case Study
14:15 Barbara Clausen (Montreal) On the Interplay of the Archival and the Curatorial
15:00 Gabriella Giannachi (Exeter) How a Record Becomes Art: The Role of Documentation in the Preservation, Exhibition, and Experience of Performance Art
15:45 Break
16:15 Adrian Heathfield (London) Recurring Imponderables
17:00 Closing remarks and farewell
The event will be held in English. Detailed information on the speakers and their presentations is available in the supplemental Book of Abstracts.
Registration
Admission is free. Registration is preferable. Email: symposium.performance2018@gmail.com
Venue
Freie Universität Berlin
Silberlaube (Ground Floor)
Seminarzentrum L115
Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26
14195 Berlin-Dahlem
Contact
symposium.performance2018@gmail.com
Organized by
Tancredi Gusman, P.I. of the research project Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977 (Freie Universität Berlin, Marie Skłodowska-Curie IF, Horizon 2020, Project ID 747881)
Performance Art: Who Cares? Actors in the Documentation and Reactivation of Performance Art
22 March 2019, Migros Museum for Contemporary Art Zurich
Photographs, films, videos, and other documents play a crucial role in the history of performance art. They confer duration on ephemeral events and allow for their historicization as well as reactivation, making art performances accessible to new audiences. This process is associated with a fluctuation of meanings and functions: on the one hand, documentation is the evidence of the live character of the art event; on the other, it becomes a medium of the work of performance art in its own right. Which function a document serves in the afterlife of performances depends not only on the intentions of the artists and documentarians. Rather, it is also a result of the activities of various other actors that are involved in the production, preservation, exhibition, and reenactment of performance art. The symposium will bring together artists, archivists, curators, gallerists, and scholars for a conversation about performance art and the roles of its documentation.
Program
2 pm Welcome/Introduction: Tancredi Gusman and Alena Nawrotzki
2.15 pm Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Andrea Saemann, Chris Regn and Margarit von Büren
3.45 pm Graciela Carnevale and Mira Bernabeu in dialogue with Tancredi Gusman and Cornelia Huth
5 pm Ewa Partum (via video), followed by Karolina Majewska-Güde who talks about Ewa Partum’s performative artworks
6 pm Eleanor Antin in dialogue with Tancredi Gusman and Cornelia Huth (via Skype)
7 pm Final remarks, Q&A
Followed by an apéro
The symposium is organized by the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst as part of its cooperation with the project Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977 directed by Tancredi Gusman at Freie Universität Berlin. The project Between Evidence and Representation has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 747881.
Host Institution:
Institut of Theatre Studies, Department of Philosophy and Humanities, Freie Universität Berlin
http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we07/index.html
International Research Center „Interweaving Performance Cultures“, Department of Philosophy and Humanities, Freie Universität Berlin
http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/interweaving-performance-cultures/index.html
Partner Organisation:
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
http://www.migrosmuseum.ch/en/
Media Partner:
Withstand Film, Milan
https://withstandfilm.com
Between Evidence and Representation
