Who’s afraid of performance art?

JONATHAN CARROLL
WHO’S AFRAID OF PERFORMANCE ART?
It’s perhaps too easy to take ill-informed pot shots at performance art. But I must confess, for me, sometimes group performance art events resemble William Hogarth’s The Rake in Bedlam (The Rake’s Progress 1734) and have me scampering for the exit. On at least one occasion recently I’ve nearly brought the set down in my urgency to escape a performance art piece shown in a confined space to a seated ticketed audience.
It seems that there have never been more performance art events. They seem not only to be an intrinsic component of art exhibitions, but also more and more popular as stand-alone events. This may have something to do with the wider availability of performance art-based modules at universities. The University of California San Diego recently received some unwanted publicity (UCSD) with the headline “Fury as students told they should get naked to pass exam” (The Independent, Doug Bolton, 13 May, 2015).
We also of course have Marina Abramović to thank (or not) for popularising performance art to an extent not seen since Yoko Ono decided to invite the world’s press into her marital bed (Bed-ins for Peace, 1969). Abramović although garnering notice, has lost a lot of respect of late from within the artworld as a result of her flirtations with celebrities “Jay Z v Marina Abramović: what’s the beef?” (g2, 21 / 05 / 15). Whatever the reasons, there have been huge variety of performance art events happening in Dublin recently. We had Live Collision International Festival (29 April – 3 May), Influence (@Livestock) at 12 Henrietta Street curated by John Conway (8th May), Overstock# 1 +2+3 a series of performative Lectures curated by Jennie Taylor in Mart (29 April – 24 June), The Performance Collective at NCAD Gallery (9 – 16 April 2015), and the 4 Foaming At The Mouth spoken word events to name just a few (see VAN Issue 3 May – June 2015).
What interests me most is the formats and contexts of these performances. Some occupied the territory traditionally used by comedians (the spare room of a bar used by FATM) while others brought you to an atmospheric historical building to perform to a ghostly past, Influence (@Livestock) and Dublin Live Art Festival’s performances at The Casino at Marino (26 July 2015).
Two key dynamics in terms of the presentation of live art were well illustrated by Seamus McCormack’s Roadkill, a night of performance and live events that responded to Primal Architecture at IMMA (12 February) and ‘Excuse me, I’m not finished!’ a series of live performances and exhibition by the Performance Collective at the NCAD Gallery. While Roadkill engaged exclusively with a well versed art audience (in the confines of IMMA), The Performance Collective had the advantage of both engaging with an art audience (those who went into the gallery space) and the unsuspecting passing audience (with several artists focusing their work looking out onto the street through the expansive window frontage).
My preferred viewing point and preferred place for performance art, is with those unsuspecting passers-by. My second preference would be the more traditional interaction of performance with existing work (as with Roadkill) where a more classical idea of the ability of performance art to expand on the viewer’s relationship with an artwork lie.
As part of Roadkill ‘Smilin’ Kanker’ (aka artist Ciarán O’Keeffe), took us on a tour of Primal Architecture. This bearded hairy legged man dressed in a summer dress, face painted like a clown and sporting a fine blue feather boa headdress, brought to life an exhibition that I previously considered dull. Kanker was a perfect embodiment of the mixed up, confused, hilarious and alternatively creepy clown-like work that Mike Kelley (whose work featured in the exhibition) produced. Kanker’s story telling often returned to his childhood (a shared Kelley trait) and his mixture of humour with moments of sad and dark reflection (for example O’Keeffe singing Mary Poppins Feed the Birds to his dying mother in hospital in the 60s and again here at IMMA) were pitch perfect for the troubled Kelley who killed himself in 2012.
Kelley’s work was often risky in content and risky in actuality. For example his live Petting Zoo for Sculpture projects Muenster 07 featured horned animals roaming amongst the audience and referenced the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I have a hunch that allusions to petting zoos is something generally to be avoided by anyone working with performance artists.
So how then do I account for my recent programming at ArtLot, with its fenced in performers and in one instance a caged in performer (see DLAF 2014 at artlotdublin.wordpress.com). In my opinion, presenting performance art as we do at ArtLot, brings back the element of the unexpected and surprise (where the audience is not invited nor known) that has its origins in the earliest performances organised by artists. This passing audience are also less reverent than what one witnesses in the protection of the gallery space and again arguably closer to the more robust responses recorded from some seminal performances.