The Round Table

Number One: ‘Performance art today’

Tatjana Macic, Monica Hernandez and Daan Noppen initiate Round Table discussions and invite guests to discuss a theme that they find urgent in contemporary art.

Round Table 1 participants are: Manon Navarro and Arjen Went (image makers, NL), Raoul Teulings (artist, Phd. candidate ASCA, NL), Monica Hernandez (mixed media artist, filmmaker, CO/ES), Daan Noppen (artist, NL), Tatjana Macic (artist, writer, SRB/NL). Photography: Iceburner.

Somewhere in Amsterdam, on Sunday 15th of November 2009.

TM: The question I would like to pose to all of us is: are we all performers? Or, are we triggered by performance art to become performers? In a sense that for me performance art is an art form resonating directly from life.

RT: Possibly. At the end life becomes aestheticized. The interesting thing that happened around the 70s and the 80s is that the artists were of the same social class as those who were canalising art. There was no division between the lower and the middle social class, around 60s it all became middle class…

DN: I’m interested in performance art because it almost feels like a necessity. I’m very much in the dark why performance artists are somehow completely reviving now. It seems to me that it is all about the product, the leftover or whatever is left by the performance - than the performance in itself.

MH: Performance art is not a reaction against the institutions, as it was before.

RT: If you consider it from a political point of view, I think you have to wonder where the power structure lies, like Bourdieu says. In the past performance art wanted to get away from the institution… it had a sort of romantic influence. Today even artists have the intention to become, as fast as possible, part of the institution.

TM: According to Bourdieu we all live in “the field of cultural production”. But do we really live in a giant factory? And do we want to? The institutions also have to renew themselves, as they have to deal with new forms of art…

MH: The institutions all over the world are asking the artist to do the same performance again and again. They don’t want something else. Because you can do whatever and say: ‘this is a performance’ but actually who really gives the value to that is the curator or the art critic. It is always somebody from outside who defines it.

MN: Yes. But as an artist, you can always say no to that.

RT: So this means… that perhaps we should be aware of how these values work, because most values only work in a sort of retrospective way. Institutions look back at history and then they categorise art from the past, and project values on present events.

MH: The institutions do not open themselves for the artists; they do not want things to change. Artists just have to perform over and over again… Iceburner: Artist as jukebox?

All: laugh…

RT: Why is re-enactment in performance art going on, actually?

TM: What I discovered about that, for example from recent re-enactments of Marina Abramovic, is that she is re-contextualising her own performances. The performance artists maybe want to have more power about the context of their art, since academics are focusing too much on the artist’s body. In regard to what Raoul was referring to 70s and the 80s earlier: according to Hal Foster avant-garde art comes from the future after some huge trauma in society has occurred. I’m very puzzled by this way of thinking…

DN: Interesting mechanism… well, I mean, it is pretty sincere that we react to this trauma, that will then shift us to the ‘next- present’ time. The artist reacts from the urgency, from his or her own will. But, if there is a big institution or factory asking the artist for another product, maybe the artist is not going be able to follow the nature of that mechanism?

TM: Especially in the west, where the artists are generally speaking, living a comfortable life. When I came to Holland, I felt like the Dutch artists have fallen into a-half-sleep-mode. Where is a little drama or trauma in that?

MH: I can relate to that, as I grew up in Colombia where most of the people live in a “surviving mode”! There are so many things bombarding you every single day and in a way your life is a total chaos… at the end most of the people do not worry if the “chair” they have is from one designer or the other… they worry about having a “chair”.

MN: Do you mean if the artist has “safety nets”, then he/ she does not have anything to tell?

MH: No, well, I don’t know, I feel that you “tell your story” through another language, I guess… RT: How do we mediate and talk about something that is urgent? If you do it by something that is already canonical, like the performance, it might not work.

MH: I must say that sometimes I miss urgency here. It is all becoming more and more about the appearance…

RT: If you re-enact a performance with an intention that it becomes a performance, we can still wonder if it is a performance. Even if you completely re-enact Marina Abramovic’s work… it is not her work. That is so interesting: even if I have the same body, I speak the same language, I re-create the same circumstances… it won’t be the same; because there is a difference: I’m not Marina Abramovic.

AW: Why would you want to re-produce a performance?

TM: Maybe because it is a part of our cultural heritage? When you want to see contemporary art you can easily go to a museum or an art gallery. Yet, when you want to see a historic performance art, you know that it was something that happened only once… that you cannot experience it again. How can you re-experience timebased performance that happened in the past?

DN: That is a contradiction of performance art. It is part of the ‘holy trinity’ of performance: you can only taste it when you are there, when it happens. It is a one-time chance.

AW: I wish I was there when the Berlin Wall felt down. I wish I was there when the Dutch football team won the European championship, I wanted to be in the stadium so badly, but I wasn’t!

TM: It is the uniqueness of performance what makes it special… Isn’t it the roll of a museum to collect, archive and display all these art treasures not only for us, also for the coming generations?

MN: Maybe we can only “frame” the leftovers of a performance art, as a way of insinuating that uniqueness?

AW: What institutions try to do is to ‘transplant the aura of the performance’… and the aura means money…

DN: Yes, but stop the machine… stop the “factory” please… and create new pieces with the aura…