Performance and Protest: Questions on Art and Life

For three decades, post-Mexican artist, writer, and activist Guillermo Gomez-Pena has explored border culture, immigration, intercultural issues, extreme culture, and new technologies. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow and performer, teacher, and collaborator with artists and audiences throughout the world, Gomez-Pena is a founding member and director of the radical performance troupe La Pocha Nostra (1), whose fierce works and stylized dissent create a deliberate, active space of pedagogy and performance designed to confront personal and political identities. La Pocha Nostra is a member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, housed at New York University, which, according to its mission statement, is a collaborative, multilingual, and interdisciplinary consortium of institutions, artists, scholars and activists throughout the Americas. (2) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Currently based in San Francisco, La Pocha Nostra incorporates photography and writing as key elements of performance. The following conversation with Gomez-Pena examines the roles of photography in his work; his collaborations with imagemakers; the tension between the two-dimensional photograph and three-dimensional live art; his use of historical, indigenous photography; and his experimental practice of photo-performance, which considers the image as a participant and instigator in live art. I first encountered La Pocha Nostra at an interactive performance in the early 1990s in Pittsburgh, and later as a participant in a 2009 La Pocha Nostra workshop with Gomez-Pena and his longtime collaborator, Roberto Sifuentes. This interview took place on December 5, 2010, in Pittsburgh. JEN SAFFRON: Guillermo, you have told me before that you have an obsession with photography. You mentioned a project of yours called Documented/Undocumented (late 1980s- present) that began this whole obsession. Can you describe what this obsession is all about? GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA: I am primarily a live artist and a writer. Live art--performance art--has been my main artistic practice and, of course, one of the dramas of live art is its ephemerality. It is ephemeral and unrepeatable. That's why at one point I began to think that perhaps video and photography could be prosthetic extensions of my live art. I thought that perhaps the camera could replace the audience, and I began to stage performance pieces for the camera, as if the camera were the audience, in hopes that these cameras could capture the duende [the spirit] of a live performance. This happened in the late 1980s, and since then, what I term photo-performance has been a running parallel activity. There are other running parallel activities, like my passion for radio journalism and audio art, my poetry, my video work--and often all these parallel practices meet, overlap, and intertwine for a while and then separate themselves again. It was around 2004 when I decided to formalize my relationship with photography, which up until then had been completely informal--just working with interesting photographers and looking for surprising convergences between live art and photography. But in 2004 I really began to carefully think it through. I began to ask some epistemological questions about the space between the camera and my body. I also began to think of notions of authorship. In performance photography, who is the author: the photographer who has the option of choosing the frame, deciding which photos to keep and which to get rid of, how to crop them--or the performance artist, who exposes his body/ artifact/map/landscape to the camera in a sacrificial manner? So, I decided to invite photographers I respected to join me in this adventure of looking for a dual authorship. I didn't want to be the mere subject matter of a famous photographer, like Cathie Opie photographing Franco Bean or [Richard] Avedon taking your portrait--I didn't want that. Nor did I want to do what many performance artists do, which is just to hire a very good photographer as a technician and tell them what to do. …

In this paper, I focus on disclosures by one participant as enabled by a kind of artistic practice that I term “participation cartography.” By using “participation cartography” as a framework for the analysis of Running Stitch (2006), a piece by Jen Southern (U.K.) and Jen Hamilton (Canada), I demonstrate that disclosures by participants in this practice are to be seen as a form of self-mapping that positions the self in relation to a given performance space. These self-positionings present the self in spatio-temporal terms and by means of performative narratives that re-define the subject from an isolated individual into a participant within an unfolding live process.

Hilma af Klint and the Need for Historical Revision

This article addresses the case model for the Live art exhibition project Venice International Performance Art Week, founded and curated by artist duo VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes) in 2012. Since its inception, it has promoted performance art and Live art practices on a local, national, and international scale through live performance events, exhibitions, formative learning programs, and co-creation experiences. Founded on the principles of sustainability, hospitality, and care, it has become a recognized international platform where dialogue and exchange, artistic expressions and cultures can flourish proactively among performers. The project formats have evolved over the time, progressively focusing on forming temporary performance artist communities in terms of a social sculpture. Its core mission is to foster exchange among performers, Live artists, and people: a gathering reunion, a people’s project made by the people for the people. It functions as a think-tank for outlining conceptual visions which declaredly overcome imposed and external human conditioning, generating accretive reflection on topics such as poetic and civil sovereignty, inclusiveness, and accessibility through performance practices. As the project founders, we have also conceived it as a breeding ground for future professional opportunities of the participating artists, curators, and cultural operators, as well as a means to broaden the audience for performance art and Live art, both locally and internationally. The Venice International Performance Art Week has now adapted into an experiential co-creation artist-in-residence format. This enables to expand performance art and Live art beyond works of presentation and display, focusing instead on real time co-creation of interdisciplinary collective productions.

'Live Art' is an area of time-based arts practice which arises from inter-related or hybridized forms of contemporary Visual Arts, Theatre, Dance, Music, and Moving Image. Live Art events that have occurred in the UK over the past thirty years have been documented as part of a digitized database (The Live Art Archive). As well as using digital means to record and preserve key presentations, Live Art events are increasingly incorporating computer-generated states and situations as a significant aspect of their performances. Both the facilities and the dilemmas prompted by advances in computing technology are becoming integral to Live Art concerns, a development which predictably will continue into the next generation of Live Art events with intriguing and imaginative results. This paper charts this evolution

In a 1994 article for black listings magazine Artrage, Bernadine Evaristo highlights Catherine Ugwu’s (then Deputy Director of Live Art at the ICA) conviction that ‘[b]lack theatre may be disappearing in one form but it is reinventing itself as live art’ (Evaristo, 1994, p. 15). Ugwu’s Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance (1995) is the first book to offer detailed analysis of black live art in Britain. Ugwu argues that ‘[g]rowing numbers of black artists are engaging in live art practice, viewing it as one of the few remaining spaces available to express complex ideas of identity’ (Ugwu, 1995, p. 54). Ugwu highlights the centrality of cathartic testimonials in black women’s solo performance that ‘attempts to engage both the artist and the audience in a process of memorialisation, within which it is hoped some kind of purification will occur’ (61). Significantly, she sees the potential of live art ‘as a critique of the timidity and the undaventurousness of a large amount of the output of black theatre and performance in Britain in recent years’ (82). Similarly, Beth-Sarah Wright argues that black British performance poetry (a generic term that includes dub poetry, jazz poetry and hip-hop or rap poetry) is ‘commonly situated within the arena of struggle and the consequent empowerment of its exponents […].

Reviewed by: Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y cabareteras on the Transnational Stage Jessica Lynam Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y cabareteras on the Transnational Stage. University of Texas Press, 2010. by Laura G. Gutiérrez. 1. Sex in the performing arts—Mexico. 2. Lesbians in the performing arts—Mexico. 3. Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.)—social aspects —Mexico. 4. Women entertainers—Mexico. 5. Women performance artists—Mexico. In this book, Gutiérrez employs the notion of “unsettling comforts” to call attention to the disruptive, transgressive quality of the queer cabaret and performance artists she studies. Such disruptions or transgressions challenge heterosexual national and nationalist culture, provoking audiences to question heteronormative paradigms. Additionally, Gutiérrez uses the concept of “unsettled comfort” to refer to the in-between space inhabited by queer artists. The author suggests that “in betweenness, particularly for minoritarian subjects, may, in fact, be the home address of all those involved in a queer world-making project” (20). This discomfort or unsettled comfort, she argues, opens a productive space for analysis. Performing Mexicanidad is divided into two parts, the first of which concerns the ways in which several contemporary Mexican and Mexican American visual, performance and video artists interrogate national identity and its relationship with gender roles by appropriating and re-imagining feminine icons of Mexican national identity. For instance, Gutiérrez explores the ways in which Mexican and Chicano/a visual [End Page 220] artists have deployed the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, re-inscribing her with new meanings, as well as the critical response to such re-inscriptions. Other icons of femininity such as the china poblana, the rumbera figure popularized in the golden age of Mexican melodrama, and the female subjects of ranchera music standards become subject to re-visioning by the cabareteras Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodríguez, Liliana Felipe and Regina Orozco, as well as the video artist Ximena Cuevas. These artists’ performances serve to parody and interrogate the masculinist and heteronormative discourses that figure prominently in the Mexican national identitary, opening a space for a queer Mexican identity while inscribing the artists in a long-standing tradition of rule-bending women performers. In the second part of the book, Gutiérrez profiles the avant-garde Chicana performance artist Nao Bustamante and Mexican video artist Ximena Cuevas, demonstrating that both women avail themselves of dominant mass-media forms in order to undertake “queer performative interventions.” Bustamante and Cuevas move beyond the traditional, contained spaces of the museum or stage in their artistic production, such as when Bustamante appears in character as a sexual deviant on the Joan Rivers show or Cuevas spools out a fabricated homosexual love affair with another artist for the benefit of a tabloid magazine. The author’s “coda” to the book describes how Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe have left behind the enclosed space of the cabaret in order to take to the streets. She argues that in abandoning the cabaret, these artists transcend social, sexual and political borders to contest neoliberal policies of the Calderón administration through public performances and acts of civil disobedience. Drawing on a broad base of performance studies, queer and feminist theory, Gutiérrez also clearly delineates and acknowledges the challenges and limitations inherent to using live art as an object of study. Perhaps because of such limitations, Gutiérrez’s close readings of Astrid Hadad’s “Heavy nopal” aesthetics and Nao Bustamante’s stage performances become vital to familiarize readers with pieces of cultural production that are ephemeral by nature and often unavailable for reviewing. This is especially true because Gutiérrez uses these and other anecdotal performances to illustrate methodological concerns raised at the intersection of sexuality, language, politics, nationalism and art, and in order to unsettle further comforts: those conventions that she considers as having, until now, largely conformed scholarly production on literature, film, and material culture of Latin America. In general, as a call to acknowledge the careful and detained study of embodied performances as important avenues for scholarship in Latin American cultural studies, Performing Mexicanidad succeeds most where it leads by example. Jessica Lynam Christopher Newport University Copyright © 2011 The Board of Regents of the University of Arizona

This paper attempts to conceptualize the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances through the aesthetic lenses of performance art. The expressiveness of performance art forms is frequently praised for the emotions we have toward them. These feelings are derived from the symbolic connotations and functionalities of the arts in life. Through an exploratory design of qualitative inquiry, the researchers focus on a contextual dialogue on the aesthetic visual presentations of selected contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art forms. The critical content analysis of music videos was espoused to examine the stylistic body movements and gestures coded in some contemporary Ghanaian dances such as Azonto, Twerking, Kupe, Pilolo and Shoo as part of an empirical artistic study. Instruments for data collection were observation, document analysis and photography for the contextual visual content analyses grounded in semiotic and aesthetic theoretical discourse. This study again relied heavily on secondary data from recorded communication including music videos, books, transcripts, websites, newspaper articles, journal articles and the like to make objective inferences. The findings indicate that dance is the communication that occurs via the conduit of the dancer's body that ruptures individuals' independent existence and generates a sense of finitude. Whereas some of the dances make aggressively erotic visual statements, others are mere expressive gestural and body movements to simply entertain a targeted audience. The result further shows that, the contemporary Ghanaian dance performances transcend beyond mere entertainment but rather are an embodiment of body language emerging from the indigenous dance symbolisms. Teaching learners to perceive visual aesthetic qualities and symbolic interpretations in dance performances will deepen the appreciation of Ghanaian dance performances not just as entertainment but as another medium for expression to transmit their inherent messages. It is suggested that, these dance forms should be formalized as indigenous knowledge in a quest to blend tradition with modernity in our creative endeavours. This knowledge should be propagated through creative arts education in Ghanaian schools. Other performance art components displayed in contemporary Ghanaian dances including body painting, facial expressions, costumology and fashion accessories present another lacuna for further research by future researchers. Key words: aesthetics, dance, therapy, performance art, body, movement

Considering Live Art’s resistance to conventional structures of power and performance practices, this article argues that Live Art affords more egalitarian modes of training to emerge. Focusing specifically on the cross-generational artistic exchange between performance artists, Martin O’Brien and Sheree Rose, it is this article’s contention that it is through peer-mentorship and not a one-directional form of master-led training, that knowledge can be seen to be shared and nurtured. With their generous, egalitarian and familial approach, O’Brien and Rose offer multilateral opportunities to train the body beyond the confines of conventional heteronormative training paradigms. Considering O’Brien and Rose’s engagement with BDSM practices in their performances, this article highlights how a different kind of discipline, generosity and training can develop alternative opportunities to train the body and disseminate knowledge. Thus, this article repositions perceptions of preparation and structure within discourses and practices of Live Art. By both engaging with and beyond texts and discourses on psychophysical performer training and queerness, this article theorises a departure from the phallocentric privileging that is evident in some of the performer trainings, performance practices and processes developed in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The Live Art Almanac Volume 3 brings together various genres of texts written on live art in 2011 and 2012. The systematisation of chapters is telling since we are introduced into the book by a selection of contributions on the relation between live art and institutions which, based on works by artists such as Marina Abramović, Tino Sehgal and La Ribot, show the ambivalence of the modern age torn between the tendency to preserve and materialise the transient and the tendency towards constant continued movement. The Almanac continues with a chapter on performance art in mass media and pop culture. It thus raises the question of the influence of capitalism on performance art since the constant attempts at objectivizing disappearing events coincide with the predominating consumerist mentality of the West. This chapter is followed by a series of discussions on politically engaged art that trace the difference between performance in the West and performance in former colonies. The Almanac concludes its dramaturgical arch with essays on death rituals, thus opening the question of the “survival” of the live in the age of consumer products. The Live Art Almanac 3 is a sort of an archive of live art that offers the reader material for further research and thus, in accordance with the Western archive fever, builds the foundations for new beginnings.

Enter any contemporary art museum, gallery, or biennale in 2024 and chances are that the live arts will be center “stage.” While theater, dance, music, and performance art were historically presented in visual arts contexts as fringe or one-off events, since the turn of the twenty-first century—and gaining momentum over the past decade—there has been a growing tendency to “exhibit” live art. As choreographers, directors, and composers who have built their careers in the visual art world—which is significantly more monied than the performing arts world—take home major prizes and awards, leading museums are inaugurating spaces designed exclusively to house installation and performance. But architectural spaces are also ideological spaces with tacit value systems that influence conventions of performance and spectatorship, as well as perceptual experience. What happens when live arts are transplanted into the modernist project of the white cube, characterized as it is by its putative neutrality, objectivity, universality, disembodiment, and erasure of context (see O'Doherty [1976] 1999)? Today's eventized museum showcases works of art characterized by durationality (they are circumscribed by time), corporeality (they feature live, gesturing bodies), and relationality (they foreground the intersubjective exchange) that engender new modes of what Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) called “relational aesthetics.” In so doing, these works challenge traditional definitions of the “collection,” the “archive,” the “museum,” and even “contemporary art.”

O texto traz algumas noções relativas à performance a partir de exemplos, alguns bastante conhecidos do público especializado, para introduzir questões básicas em torno desse tipo de manifestação, apresentando célebres obras performáticas. Pressupondo que a performance ainda não seja uma arte familiar para a maior parte das pessoas, uma breve história de suas origens e marcos principais é traçada. A intenção é mostrar como se constitui essa arte, suas relações com as intensidades do corpo e o porquê da performance ser considerada “arte viva” e não de representação.Palavras-chave: Arte viva, história da performance, presença.

In 2012, EXIST initiated the Live Art National Network Development project (supported by the Australian Council for the Arts), an online resource launching March 2013 <a href="http://www.performancemap.org/">www.performancemap.org</a> This website currently maps the Australian network of practitioners, venues and curators, enabling artists and curators to better connect and work together. In 2013 and beyond in collaboration with software engineer Kerstin Haustein, Performance Map will grow to be a digital mapping of the global performance art, action art live art network from 1975 – present, cataloguing existing archives and online sources. Although multiple sources will eventually be part of this map, the current primary source of archival data is <em>Die Schwartz</em> Larde or <em>The Black Kit</em> <a href="http://www.asa.de/">www.asa.de</a>, the largest known performance art archive in the world with access provided by Boris Nieslony. The archive element brings into the 3D global map and historical element, a time scaling slide will allow users to look back in time and uncover the evolution of the network from 1975 to present. The archival element is currently still in progress. Performance Map will also function as a live streaming state for performance art, that allows video streaming from Smartphone via the purpose built application. Future events are automatically incorporated into the map utilizing predictive network modelling and various coding techniques. The website will also collect and collate existing performance archives of artists, festivals, email lists, facebook pages etc. This website seeks not to replicate existing materials or databases such as the National Review of Live Art Archive at Bristol University [<a href="http://www.bristol.ac.uk/nrla">www.bristol.ac.uk/nrla</a>], The European Live Art Archive [<a href="http://www.liveartarchive.eu">http://www.liveartarchive.eu</a>] or UbuWeb [<a href="http://www.ubu.com/">http://www.ubu.com/</a>], but rather aims to collate, visualise the data as an accessible and user friendly resource. This paper demonstrates the current operational scale and scope of the Performance Map Live Action Art International Network and discusses future development stages.

Does Nollywood video-film have a place in visual art? Could a profoundly popular visual form such as Nollywood – intensely significant to a very large number of people – be seen as video art or performance art? Rooted in itinerant theatre, celluloid cinema and television programmes, the study of Early Nollywood video-film necessitates a trans-disciplinary approach to its contra-institution visual aesthetic. Writing as an art historian, I argue that time – as a foundational social construct for all societies – is an important lens that enables seeing the socio-political entanglements video-film may have with performance or live art. Furthermore, such a view destabilizes the distinction between art and popular culture in African contexts since it implies divergent conceptions of labour/leisure time in Afro-urban cultural practice, as opposed to cultural consumption. Focussing on its representation and uses of time, I propose that Early Nollywood video-film could be seen as a collective, performative creative practice.

Reviewed by: Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa ed. by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, and: Body Politics: Fingerprinting South African Contemporary Dance by Adrienne C. Sichel Megan Lewis Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa. Edited by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019; pp. 372. Body Politics: Fingerprinting South African Contemporary Dance. By Adrienne C. Sichel. Pinegowrie, ZA: Porcupine Press, 2018; pp. 234. Twenty-five years after the historic transition of power in 1994 South Africa is in the throes of decolonization and wrestling with the process of democratization. The 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements jolted the country into conversations around affordable access to education, decolonizing the academy, whose version of history will be taught in universities, and in which of eleven official languages. Two new publications out this year offer vitally important interventions to the scholarship, showcasing the power and potential of performance in the process of democracy and bringing the work of South African artists, especially movers and shakers of color, to international audiences. These are invaluable resources for theatre history educators teaching non-Western performance, as well as inspirations for practitioners worldwide. In Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa, coeditors Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle chronicle how South African artists are “search[ing] for a different language—a corporeal vocabulary of seepage and excess—to articulate the distention of the time” (1). Born out of the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, this groundbreaking collection of fifteen essays documents the diversity and scope of the country’s live art repertoire, which they claim “is born of extremity” and whose “affective tenor of excess and irrationality embodies the unpredictability of crisis” (2). It articulates a decidedly Afro-centric history of experimental performance, situated within a “precolonial and decolonial African genealogy of ritual, ruptures and experimentality, refuting the notion that South African live art is a western import” (3). The book is structured in four parts: the essays in the first section, titled “Live Art in Times of Crisis,” by Nomusa Makhubu, Sarah Nutall, Catherine Boulle, and Jay Pather, respectively, examine live art against the backdrop of the complexities and turbulent times of the young democracy. It addresses the lingering whiteness of the culture at multiple levels of society, the abiding segregation of public spaces, and the sense of unbelonging, placelessness, disruption, and ambivalence that result in these contested times. Nutall theorizes these times as a state of “upsurge,” when acts of defiance brutally confront and disassemble existing norms (43). Through an examination of works by Chuma Sopotela and Buhlebezwe Siwani (These Ghels, 2017), Khanyisile Mbongwa (kuDanger!, 2017), and Dean Hurtton (#fuckwhitepeople, 2017), Makhubu frames live art as “a question of citizenship” through which to understand “belonging and governance” (21). For Makhubu, performance art offers a counter balance to the anatopism of contemporary urban spaces, the feeling of “being un-homed and made to feel out of place” (36). In his essay on the ethics of fostering the kind of live art described by others in this section, Pather calls for a new form of curation-as-mediation, aimed at generating platforms “to give life to new works that are probing and provocative while remaining speculative and unknowable” (103). The second section—“Loss, Language and Embodiment”—focuses on the black female body as a site of contestation, trauma, resistance, and creative potentials. Lieketso Dee Mohoto-wa Thaluki begins with an interview with artist-activist Chuma Sopotela about her 2013–14 performance piece Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda (The chicken has laid its eggs), which Thaluki suggests is an embodied, socially situated articulation of a black feminist language (108). [End Page 180] Next is Gabrielle Goliath’s essay about Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama’s use of performance to “resist the erasure and violation of bodies” (125). Goliath excavates these artists’ use of invocation, absence, and loss toward a kind of public mourning and grievance that resists the ways in “black, brown, queer and vulnerable bodies” are traumatized, rendered either invisible or hyper-visible. The intersections of performance and protest, emergence and transformation are unpacked by Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga in her essay about Mamela Nyamza...