PERFORMANCE/SCULPTURE/IMAGE by Line Ellegaard
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‘The notion that work is an irreversible process ending in a static icon-object no longer has much relevance’
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How does the work of art make itself manifest? In a time of post-medium specificity I find myself taking an interest in thinking about one medium in terms of another. I ask: When is a performance a sculpture? When is an image a performance? When is a sculpture a performance? And when is an image a sculpture? These are fundamental – perhaps even banal – questions. Nevertheless, I believe, there is something to be gained by asking these questions, not in order to categorize and historicise, but to think through artist’s practices and strategies. |
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So I had these three terms in mind – sculpture, performance, image – and I sketched a triangle and posited one term on each corner to visualise the dichotomy between image and sculpture, sculpture and performance, and image and performance (figure 1). |
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I soon realised I could subdivide the sides of the triangle into subject-object, presence-absence (representation), 2-dimentional vs. 3-dimensional (figure 2). Yet, it was never just straightforward as other subdivisions and in-between categories continuously interrupted: still vs. moving, photography vs. film, silence vs. sound, body, space and duration, and … (the list is not exhaustive). To avoid the potential closure of possibilities and the reduction of practice into binary positions within the triangle, and to make it clear that this triangle of mine is not a given system, but rather constructs and deconstructs its elements as they slip and slide between each other, I have drawn up all the imaginable and unimaginable lines, circles, dots and twirls, as to say “there are also these possibilities” (figure 3).
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Sculpture: Take the series of work titled ‘One Minute Sculptures’ by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, they constitute images, sculptures and performances all at once in an effortless way (figure 4). Wurm considers all of his work to be sculpture – his carefully composed photograph is not an image of a sculpture made through performance, it is a sculpture. The ‘One Minute Sculpture’ is always ready to be made, not ready-made, inviting any spectator to get actively involved in the making; the work is continuously disseminated, dissolved and erected. In this way the work fits my triangle rather perfectly, collapsing all the categories, deflating and inflating their meaning: The two-dimensional image (photograph) is claimed a 3-dimensional sculpture: The woman can be seen as both subject and object (not in a derogatory sense): The image signals the absence of the event – the sculpture - it has happened and the woman and the oranges are no longer present. Looking at the woman balancing on oranges is mesmerising; the sculpture presumably exists for one minute, the image (sculpture) is forever.
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Image: As Wurm playfully collapse normative conceptions of duration and presence so does artist Trisha Donnelly (USA) in her work albeit to quite disparate ends. Whereas Wurm posits the duration of the above discussed work to be ‘one minute’ Donnelly takes another extreme position making the duration of a work 31 days. ‘The Redwood and the Raven’ (2004) consists of 31 photographs, yet appears to be only a single image since only one image in the sequence is shown at the time (figure 5). In this way the work, which depicts a choreographed dance, is performed in slow motion (frame by frame) over the course of 31 days. An implication of this being that the spectator is required to repeat her visit daily in order to witness the entirety of this phantom performance 1. The impossibility of gauging the whole of the work at once imposes a sculptural dimension to the work; instead of having to walk around it to see it from all sides, we have to walk back to it again and again and piece it together from memory. The relatively subtle work – the dimension of each greyscale image is a mere 18 x 13 cm - conjures both a slowed-down performance and an abstract sculpture. Every presence of any one image signifies the absence of the 30 others: for every flat surface of the paper print is the confounded space the image and the visitor has travelled to meet. The image becomes an object as the viewer performs as revisiting subject. Hence Donnelly’s work engages the space between viewer and work, performance and documentation, and notably presence and absence, yet eschewing any tangible notions of its own manifestations always incomplete pointing both forwards and backwards in time. |
Performance: Whereas Wurm and Donnelly deploy the image, i.e. photograph, as part of the manifestation of their work, the image of French artist Mathilde Rosier’s performance ‘Play for a Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty’ is merely intended as documentation, an ‘installation view’ as it were (figure 6). I witnessed the performance as it was recently restaged for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Park Night’s 2009. Not only does this image exemplify the first of the three parts that formed the performance; the first part constituted the embodiment of an image figuring Rosier’s static pose at the piano - only her hands moving, playing a melancholic and repetitive score. Most poignantly the juxtaposition of the two-dimensional painted poodles, arranged as if they were jumping or pawing at her legs, and the tree-dimensional dress conjured this sentiment - emphasising it by pointing it out. Arranged with her face turned away from the audience, hidden behind her hair, she never reveals herself but remains an opaque statue. The performer’s concealed subjectivity together with the white lace dress and the attached poodles – more prop or sculpture than dress –suggest a delicate relationship between subject and object in the scene. Half image, half (living) sculpture Rosier’s performance envisaged a magnificent tableau vivant with an eerie soundtrack. In other words this part of the performance made itself manifest as an image within an image with an indeterminate duration. However without having witnessed the performance one cannot hear the music, one cannot see the darkness around her. The ‘installation view’ becomes an index to the work, the image a reference to the absence of its presence.
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Although the elements of the triangle represent quite traditional mediums, the work discussed here within its parameters evades any one recognisable category of art as it slips and slides between them. Thus Wurm, Donnelly and Rosier each in their own way present several layers of meaning and mediums doing and undoing each other in the making of, and through the encounter with, the work. However, though there is movement within and around the constellation of the triangle, its aptitude might subside with time. Yet the novelty of seeing one thing in terms of another - or several other things - proffers endless perplexity and challenges both for theory and practice. |
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