DON’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS

Eric Mangion

The exhibition Ne pas jouer avec des choses mortes, organised from 29 February to 24 May 2008 in the Centre National d’Art de la Villa Arson, collected together about forty works created by artists for or during performances. The aim of the exhibition was to open up a debate on the status of the objects that were exhibited. Are they spirits empty of meaning? Would they reproduce the impulse of the action which was responsible for their creation? Do they really have the aesthetic qualities from the moment when they were decontextualised? Does this not contradict the spirit of performance, the art of context and the moment, the gesture and the immediacy? All these intentionally ambivalent questions were clearly expressed during the policy accompanying the exhibition.

The first thing was to clearly demarcate the definition of the performance out of a concern for historical and semantic rationalisation. We agreed at the beginning that the performance encompassed everything which concerns the actions produced by the artists in public in order to get away from conventional schedules of creation, while confirming that it belongs to the field of visual arts.

The title of the exhibition referred to a text by Mike Kelley, Playing with Dead Things, which evokes his psychoanalytical rapport with certain childhood fetishes, recalling the concept of the uncanny, developed by Freud for the encounter with familiar objects which can disrupt our memory. We only modified this a little by imposing a negation in contrast with its original affirmation. In fact, we did not want the public to think that it is still possible to play with the works in the exhibition. All the works that are presented had their time through a gesture or an action. However, this time was then completed. There is no more playing. The game is over. These are merely relics. This made it possible to avoid a field of performance which we did not want to approach, that which allows the public to manipulate objects integrated in participatory mechanisms. We thought that this meant opening the door to fields which were too far removed from our basic concerns, viz. the study of objects as relics which are no longer manipulated by anyone, neither the artist nor the public. Moreover, this idea of manipulation by the public, which was common to many exhibitions in the 1990s, gives rise to some confusion on the very subject of the performance, tending to suggest that the latter becomes a game available to everyone, which is far from being the case.

Before mentioning the choice of artist, it was also necessary to define the historical field which we wanted to cover, knowing that the relationship between the object/performance is not a new one. The first thing was to remind ourselves that we were above all an arts centre, and not a museum. Consequently, we did not have to create an anthology on the subject. The task of an arts centre is to question the art of its time. Nevertheless, we also wanted to place an emphasis on the evolution of the status of the performance by insisting on the increasingly important position of objects. Therefore our wish was not to go down in history, while attempting to reveal a historical evolution. After that, the choice of the artists proved easier.

At the beginning we did not want to propose any scenario or any specific mis en scène in order to allow the works to live their own lives in uniquely visual or formal reconciliations. During our research, it became clear that there was a tacit route in the rooms relating to the classifications of the subjects that were broached. The work of Spartacus Chetwynd was put up in the square gallery because of its volume, in the first room of the route. This allowed us to start the exhibition with the notion of décor. There is no performance without décor, without a situation, whether or not this is constructed. Then we had a second part, devoted to the accessories worn by the artists during their activities (clothes, jewellery, wigs, false teeth, etc.) with Eric Madeleine, Sophie Perez and Xavier Boussiron, Erwin Wurm, Vasco Araujo, Antoine Poncet, Brice Dellsperger, Jean-Luc Verna and the duo, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. This part placed the emphasis on the body. As with décor, there is no performance without a body. Later the exhibition went through a (false) documentary style with Eric Duyckaerts, Catherine Sullivan, Dora Garcia and Guy de Cointet. The idea was to once again to question the idea of a documentary trace with artists who had turned away from this use. Then there were the rooms of the “exuberant” artists with Martin Kersels, Paul McCarthy, John Bock and Richard Jackson; those who were not afraid to do too much, to exaggerate, which was often the case in the history of performance. The basement started with two “urban” artists, Jordi Colomer and Kirsten Mosher, to serve as a reminder of the close links between performance and urban space, particularly during the 1970s. Then there were three artists who each in their own way reinterpreted the mythical actions of the history of performance: Fabienne Audéoud and John Russel, under the constraints of the activities of Mike Kelley, Chris Burden and Hanna Wilke, Scoli Acosta and Philippe Ramette playing with the spirit of Yves Klein, and finally Jean-Pascal Flavien and Julien Bismuth. who amused themselves – in a much less risky way – by being taken for Bas Jan Ader. Side by side we found Jacques Lizène and Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, who in their own way embody the performance of cabaret, generally based on the pathetic and ridiculous aspects of the genre, while at the same time creating a work of a real aesthetic acuity (what Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux calls the Heart of the Mystery). In a very different way we then found Erwin Wurm, Franz West, Julien Bismuth and Jana Sterbak and her work Sisyphus III, which, as its title suggests, epitomises an absurd dimension of certain gestures of an existential character. The two last rooms were devoted to three artists who suggested a possible origin of the artistic gesture: Jim Shaw with a chapter on the Oist movement, Jessica Warboys and her construction of a mythological society, which serves as her framework for action, and the work by Roman Signer which speaks volumes about the origins of art. Finally, the work by Emmanuelle Bentz was a swing from which a sound work escaped, composed of a text reminiscent of the links between poetry and performance.

In this way, this route covered the essential concepts in the history of performance (the décor, body document. exaggeration, road, recycling, reactivation, the ridiculous, the absurd, mythology, language and space). Finally, we had the name of the artist inscribed (40 cm from the ground on the wall adjacent to each work) with a typographic stencil used by transport firms on the packaging cases of works. The aim was to emphasise the “manufactured character” of each object.

It was decided that the exhibition as a whole would be intentionally quite cold in order to benefit the intrinsic nature of the objects. Nevertheless, we adopted two escape routes which departed from our starting points. The first involved the choice of a number of photographs or videos. They were in the minority, and did not serve as classical documentary action pictures, but focussed on the use of the objects, in particular with Paul McCarthy, Erwin Wurm, Jordi Colomer, and Jana Sterbak. Furthermore, an accompanying document was given to every visitor at the start of the exhibition. It was composed of very specific notes on the “performative” origin of each object. It was essential for us to create this booklet in order to avoid photographic or video documentation as far as possible. Even though this necessarily changed the relationship that was possible with the works, it did not change anything about the way in which the objects were presented, which on a strictly official level always remained just as “dry” in space.

The exhibition was not aimed at “inventing” the status of the object in the performance in a strict sense, but to raise the question of its increasingly assertive fetishistic nature. Objects have always existed in the history of performance. What has changed is the attention that is devoted to them. The growing success of performances in galleries, museums, art centres and festivals during the 1970s certainly made artists want to think about the significance of their gestures in a more “formal” way. And of course, the market, like museums and art centres, seized on this enthusiastically, seeing there the emergence of new totems of art.

Nevertheless, it would be too much of a caricature to explain everything merely by the power of the economy. As usual, the market follows the trends; and the trend at the end of the 1970s was for post modernism. Even if the latter was a junk room concept in which it is easy to get lost, it is still possible to maintain that with its advent, the artists no longer necessarily try to question the support which they are ought to conjure up – which is what distinguishes them from modernist principles. Consequently the performance, like all other mediums, emancipates itself from the basic principles, viz. its temporal nature, the public need and immaterial character. All sorts of external elements interfere with the actions carried out by artists, starting with a profound desire to root their gestures in every possible creative field: first of all in installations, sculpture and painting, but also in non-documentary photography and video, sound and even design. This certainly takes place in a spirit of hybridisation, referred to by Richard Martell in his definition.

On the basis of this argument it is very difficult to cite the precise artists who played a major role in this change. However, the works of Paul McCarthy or Mike Kelley in my view constitute the essential cogs, particularly because of their way of approaching the genres in a very “west coast” and simplified manner. The proposals recently put forward by Paul McCarthy in an interview were particularly eloquent. Whether are moulded, kneaded or simply piled up, he does not consider objects as secondary accessories, but as true sculptures which cannot be dissociated from his own gestures. In this context, he cites the basic work dating from 1970, Ketchup Sandwich, which consists of pouring ketchup between sheets of glass pilled one on top of the other, in order to create a sort of sticky sandwich as indicated by the title. It is the same for the decors, which are usually circumscribed by domestic locations which are intentionally closed and stuffy, and in which the architecture also plays an essential role in the perception of his work. He confirms: “I then showed these decors as sculptures”. Later he talks of the “finish fetish”, quoting the series entitled Assortment, the Trunks, Human Object and PROPO Photographs, which combines about fifty photographs of objects used during his different performances between 1972 and 2003, with – in the centre of the display – a table on which the trunks containing those props are carefully stacked, closed and conserved. At the same time, Mike Kelley did performances in which he manipulated objects with very basic shapes (cones, trunks, cylinders, tubes or cubes), explaining the use to the public, while employing an analogous vocabulary intentionally moved forward in order to create a permanent digression between the language and the supra-aesthetics which these shapes are meant to represent. Once the action is completed, the Performance-Related Objects become sculptures exhibited as such on a plinth, charged with their performing experience in the initial meaning of the term, by what they expressed at the actual moment of their public presentation. To say is to do and to do is to say. Therefore it seems, with these two examples, that one is present at a change of position which is not radical but significant of the importance accorded to the object or to the décor which are henceforth considered as sculptures, and not as secondary accessories right for the spectacle.

The loss of an audience for conceptual art also plays an important role in the progressive advance of the object. In fact, conceptual artists advocated the use of the photograph as a corollary of the process of dematerialisation of the art object, which to a large extent corresponded to the original spirit of performance, above all, after the Fluxus movement. Nevertheless, the artists of the conceptual movement soon came to an impasse in the systemisation of photography as the only method for distribution. This constituted a formalisation and fetishisation like any other. On the other hand, photography is essentially a medium that is difficult to control while the artists at the time were very concerned with the editorial or commercial ethics linked to the distribution of their works. It was essentially for this reason that Vito Acconci, who no longer tolerated the documentary fetishisation of his own performances, stopped producing them from 1974, preferring like Chris Burden, to create spectacular mechanisms in which the theatrical character is aimed at eliciting a physical reaction from the visitor instead of a precise implication in an action.

Finally, we were not able to complete this exhibition project properly without taking the time to reflect on the notion of the relic and the fetish. Their recurring use was not unrelated to the connotations of these two terms. A relic is above all a body or a part of a body, an object that is worn. Therefore, it is very close to the concerns of the exhibition. Similarly, a relic evokes devotion, which is not unrelated to the practices in museums which have always assigned objects cult status. Obviously this is assigned not to the object itself, but its symbolic scope and its aura, which is its thurifer. As for the notion of the fetish, it is very complex, as it depends on the context or the age for which the term is used. I will not look at all the possible definitions, but it is interesting to be aware that fetishism emerged as a concept in the Age of Enlightenment with the appearance of rationalism. Following the discovery of primitive cults, Charles de Brosses defined fetishism as a childish “cult” which traps its followers in “perpetual childhood.” This not only corresponds to the subject of Mike Kelley’s text, but also to the regressive aspect of a great deal of the history of performance. Without counting the fetishism of consumer products, successfully introduced by Karl Marx, the sexual fetishism defined by Sigmund Freud in the area of the unconscious, or the fetishism defended by the surrealists for its ontological qualities: what is the “mystery” in these things? In the exhibition resorting to fetishism once again meets this compulsive need which the art world experiences to preserve the slightest trace of artistic experience, even if it is derisory at a formal level. The work in the exhibition which gets closest to this concern is that of Catherine Sullivan. It is composed of a series of X-rays of Fluxus objects belonging to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon. This work not only raises the question of whether these Fluxus objects still belong to Fluxus (above all, a movement which advocated the immaterial in the form of furtive gestures), but in addition, the very choice of the X-ray as the basis for representation leads to the progressive erosion of the objects that are represented (as the image gradually disappears when it comes into contact with light), just as they are from memory.