Think Tank Gallery

Performance Relay - an essay

2009-11-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

Where does art sit in between the singularity of the art outcome, residue or object and the contrasting multiplicity of art process, dialogue and participation? Can performance frame and unite the two? The September Performance Relay was a four week event taking place inside the Think Tank at Curtin University that I coordinated to help answer these questions. Artists in groups of two took it in turns to respond to and transform the evidence and remains of artists who had used the space previously into a body of work with both process elements and residual outcomes. At the completion of the four weeks, an opening was held in which videos of process alongside residue were displayed in a carnivalesque space. I intended to question the dualistic nature of art as a whole. Initially intending to examine this issue from a somewhat Deleuzian perspective of rhizomic or intertextual links and nodes, I have moved into focusing on Bakhtin’s idea of carnival to place the event into perspective. Performance, becoming synonymous with carnival, became a catch-all state or space that allowed singularities and multiplicities to exist together.

It has, of course, become accepted that artworks not only consist of objects. After the peak of Abstraction in 1950s America (and even in movements like Futurism and Dada), the art world more widely began to accept and embrace that its artworks existed in two parts. The singularity of the art object, behaving autonomously, was also mercy to (and was even undermined by) the extended processes, experiences and discussions that happen before, during and after production. Even viewers, ideally converging on the singular art object to glean from it a universal, basic and aesthetic experience were subject to their own readings based on their individual circumstances and their position within a language system. Our current state of postmodernism has developed strategies derived from Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author, Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality and Jean-François Lyotard’s negation of meta-narratives to undermine the structures and systems developed within modernism that favour elitist and hierarchal models, especially in painting. It has been the intention of the September Performance Relay to work in a more fluid and interconnected space than usually expected within an institution, but without necessarily negating art objects in a contrary fashion. Between reside and process, the event has intended to find a mediating space between singularities and multiplicities respectively. Painting especially has been employed to symbolise the top of a hierarchy or point of singularity, however the way it has been treated in the Think Tank space has reduced it; interspersing it with more multiple and diverse territories.

The September Performance Relay took as its most perceivably unconnected or isolated forms; the aesthetic practices of painting and ceramics, and combined them with and mechanisation and performance. It was great to see two practices mostly dominated by “silent” object-making resonate with these habitually conceptual or socialised territories. This is definitely a positive thing and suggests that stigmas between disciplines need not exist despite any prejudices between them. Ben Barretto and Claire Steiner’s collaboration A Series of Interruptions (Images 1 & 2) saw the development of a painting “machine”. Barretto hovered around the environment, maintaining a Warholian sense of authorship without a necessary “touch”. Paint was poured down tubes that dripped onto rotating canvases. Steiner sat at her pottery wheel, becoming part of the overall machine as paint was spattered on her fresh bowls. The result was an interesting mix – of the sense of authorship, painting and gesture we see in modernism, and the interference of machine or tool; referencing the technology and mass-production that spurs much of postmodern theory. This “mechanised Pollock” was both a spectacle to watch in its unfolding, and produced intriguing aesthetic objects.

Image 1 Ben Barretto and Claire Steiner, A Series of Interruptions, 2009 (machine setup)

Image 2 Ben Barretto and Claire Steiner, A Series of Interruptions, 2009 (residue/outcomes)

I return to the 1950s here to discuss the duality of the work of Jackson Pollock (Image 3). For me he sheds light on an art that consists of both process and outcome, creating a transgressive or total art. Although heralded for the production of the “autonomous” art object, Pollock’s work also existed as evidence of performance (Image 4). Not only was the outcome a singularity offering a “universal” aesthetic experience in the modernist sense, it was also the result of a pouring process derived from the methods of American sand painters. The work is usually only given credit for the former purpose; it being displayed in clinical gallery spaces. In our Think Tank space, the paintings and ceramics Ben and Claire produced were displayed as objects, but in a more dynamic space that shed light on their process (Images 5 & 6). Painting was displayed in a rotating motorised frame, alongside videos of the performance. A perspective was offered that placed the work in both an object-based and time-based setting. Theorist Roy Ascot favours the non-material side of Pollock, describing the result as “an “arena”’ a meeting place, of behaviour, myth and idea.” (Ascot, 9, 1984). I agree, for I think the work synthesises process, individual self and cultural reference as well as holding aesthetic value. This is what I’d hope the Think Tank could achieve and frame, and what I aimed to forward with my own contribution.

Image 3 (left) Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952

Image 4 (right) Jackson Pollock in his studio, 1950, Courtesy Hans Namuth Studio

Ben Barretto and Claire Steiner, A Series of Interruptions, 2009 (final presentation)

Image 5 (left) ceramics displayed near video of process

Image 6 (right) Painting rotating on motorised frame

For my own contribution, keeping in mind the theories of Roy Ascot who creates a “framework for approaching interactive artworks... [bringing ] together certain characteristics of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, and Pop Art” (Shanken, 2003) I also began thinking about the space from a Deleuzian perspective; a place where disparate activities could be linked, and their analogous features and potential states brought together into a new, piecemeal art conglomerate. This did happen to some degree with Ben and Claire’s work, but my own contribution with Shannon Lyons attempted to bring together not only art disciplines, but ideas and behaviours from other time spaces as well as our own. When we dressed up in costumes to paint the portrait of drag queen, Panache (Images 7 & 8), the result became a fusing together of a medieval witch hunt with pop-art, gender-bending, painting and occultism. The analogies I drew between these ideas were based on drawing metaphors between witches and dark magic with the position of artists who use “impure” methods of making art. These are artists who are not focused on aesthetic, spirituality or painting and rather technology, pop, appropriation and conceptualism. These methods on a wider scale are often met with mistrust or readings of anarchy, leading them to be “dark artists”. Our act of painting was an appropriation tool to steal the “beauty” of Panache. This “beauty” was represented in the drag queen as a state of being “other” – a transgressive or non-binary-oriented (hermaphroditic) archetype that exists in a state of the liminal. By attempting to portray this state on canvas, and by displaying the queen almost like a found object or symbol, it became a metaphor for the condition we were seeking within the Think Tank space itself, to portray two elements of a binary argument but transgress them.

Images 7, 8 Tom Penney and Shannon Lyons, Images from Untitled (Painting Panache) 2009

From reading Roy Ascott and Gilles Deleuze, it has become important to me that the artist occupies a liminal or “between” space. This is a facilitating space navigating a world of concepts, ideas, language and people, and the solid world of objects, materials and physical law. Bengt af Klintberg from Fluxus (to whom the model was to be “in flux”) describes this as a state between “stone and water” (Stiles, 2000). This location has the potential to propel the artist into a transformational space in order to become a connection maker – with the possibility of taking any number of analogous or completely unrelated ideas from any number of geographical, time, spiritual, scientific or material spaces, and highlighting their relationships, apparent connections or (previously unforseen) potential as connected bodies.

In a discussion with Markela Panegyres, she told me that Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of the rhizome had also influenced her work Thirteen Actions that she devised in the space with Roslyn Cadee. Panegyres worked with PVC pipe and her own body (Images 9 & 10), explaining to me that electrical wire flows through the pipe; her body here becoming a central element in an expanded networked structure; a structure that is reflective of both the way the Think Tank space has operated and societies of people operate in general. From my perspective, this, on another level, is the same way the networks of cells operate in our body to form consciousness (Thomas, 2009). It is almost as if Panegyres’ body represents this central conceptual or disembodied element – the consciousness or “body without organs” of a space that is material. This shifting of scale and metaphor (from the body to the space and to society), finding similarities within multiple systems and mirroring them with art analogies, brings Panegyres’ work to operate with the transformational and the topic of boundaries – where are things the same, and when are they other things? Collaborating with Roslyn Cadee, Panegyres used the opportunity to question the point at which her practice was compatible or resonant with another person’s. We might look to Bourriaud’s alter-modernism to realise that things could be linked by universal models, while retaining their own individual elements or “cultures” (Bourriaud, 2009). Panegyres and Cadee, coming to terms with each other in the space (Images 11 & 12), developed a sense of definition in discovering where their practices may or may not intersect within a broader conceptual framework or space.

Images 9, 10 Markela Panegyres and Roslyn Cadee, Thirteen Actions, 2009 (Installation of pipes)

Image 11 (left) Markela Panegyres and Roslyn Cadee, Thirteen Actions, 2009

Image 12 (right) Roslyn Cadee, Untitled, 2009

(Markela and Roslyn quote each others’ work to investigate boundaries and compatibility)

In working together and building off each other as a team, the space began to reflect the dialogical of Bahktin. Transformation and performance, linking and quoting became facilitated through discussion. The space was self-referent and talked about itself. Painting, machines, pancakes, a wooden frame, a wall drawing left over by Glasgow residents Clare Stevenson and Alex Pollard, and the space itself, became motifs that were re-used and quoted by us all. The use of an external discussion space, a blog site (http://thinktankgallery.blogspot.com/) was used to help people see each others’ work and continue discussion. It became a totally networked space. A network of course requires nodes and it requires links. Photos and evidence (outcomes used to inspire the next artists) became nodes, and the activity of discussion and quoting, and then making and performing, became links that drew them together. From this perspective, I cannot say that either the nodes or the links are more important, only that they needed each other. Our art required both outcome and process to exist within the intended framework.

The outcomes and processes were however, mixed and not always discernable. This confusion was important, and it is here that I mention the carnivalesque nature of the entire period that became, at the end, synonymous to performance. This word, “performance” has indeed been used right from the start to title and frame the experience. At the end of the four weeks we displayed the work in a piecemeal, conglomerate, untidy style. We left tools and mess around to confuse viewers as to what was process and what was outcome (Image 13). The space was inhabited by people dressed as witches, and anyone wishing to view the work had to dress in costume (Image 14). Pancakes, refreshments and a craft-tent style pseudo-relational aesthetics work where anyone could glue googly eyes to objects became part of the festive/carnival atmosphere (Image 15). The space was deliberately awkward and topsy-turvy – paintings that moved on their own, photos of drag queens, tacky portraits, stale week old pancakes (Image 16) and cheap store bought costume created a post-apocalyptic scene, a deconstructed state from which could spring new potential. This mirrors the relay’s use of the word “performance” to suggest a common ground, blank canvas, or “zero space” to frame and allow all other methods of production to operate inside it in an open-ended manner. Reading RoseLee Goldberg’s account of performance art one might see that this process is usually “anarchic” (Goldberg, 2000, p.9). This may be so, but many artists like us are deconstructive in order to reconstruct and reconfigure.

Image 13 (left) Performance Relay Opening, 2009 (mess and residue)

Image 14 (right) Performance Relay Opening, 2009 (everyone in costume)

Image 15 Performance Relay Opening, 2009, Googly Eye Workshop (created objects)

Image 16 Harry Court and Tanya Lee, Pancakes, 2009 (week old remnants)

The Think Tank’s version of “performance” was one with no hierarchy, but it was not necessarily anarchic. Performance was not against anything, it harboured all things that took place. It wasn’t a shallow rhizome; it was both diverse and meaningful. All things were treated equally, rather than holding prejudice against object making which is common in performance as a counter-modern strategy. In the context of Bahktin’s carnival, Shanti Elliot writes “Carnival shakes up the authoritative version of language and values, making room for a multiplicity” (Elliot, 1999, p.1). I celebrated this diversity of art methodology as such a multiplicity within the space of the Think Tank. If within carnival, paupers can become kings and vice versa operating together without distinction; pop and conceptualism became kings, and painting became a pauper – traditional approaches were butchered imaginatively and enthusiastically by myself and Shannon’s naïve abilities with the brush and Ben’s use of the painting machine, rigging canvas up to motors and using a frayed canvas that dragged on the ground, creating a sort of “Frankenstein’s painting”. Essentially, one had to negotiate art objects, time-based elements, and performance together in a mixed bag. Everything, process and outcome, became privileged as part of a gestamtkunstwerk where distinctions between the two were never clear, and rightly so.

As a result of the September Performance Relay, I have seen possibility in making the statement that a different kind of performance exists. This is a broad idea of “performance” that has no owner and does not necessarily own itself. It isn’t against anything but it is a state of deconstruction that revels and celebrates the “other” and all things mashed together, even where they oppose one another. In terms of the Think Tank this was a state of mind, of activity and of framing that navigated both object making and process. The painting of Jackson Pollock became a three dimensional space with more than one artist behind the “picture plane” and more than just a discussion with a single quoted style, Native American tradition, or artist behind the work. It was a space that discussed itself through all the artists who used the space together and all the experiences and ideas they were quoting. One might ultimately say that art sits in between the singularity of the art outcome, residue or object and the contrasting multiplicity of art process, performance and participation, but I feel inclined to say that a state of mind, of thinking, and the space to privilege this cognition, can transgresses both and contain all things together, rather than be victim to the undecided “between”.

References:

Ascott, R, Art and Telematics: towards a network consciousness in: H. Grundmann, ed. Art +Telecommunication, 1984, Vancouver: The Western Front, pp. 25-67.

Bourriaud, N, Keynote, accessed 21/10/2009 at http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/aaanz05/abstracts/nicolas_bourriaud

Elliot, S, Carnival and Dialogue in Bahktin’s Poetics of Folklore, 1999 (e-book) accessed 21/10/2009 at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/2327/30(1-2)%20129-139.pdf?sequence=1

Goldberg, R, Performance Art From Futurism to the Present, 2001, Thames and Hudson, London

Shanken, E, From Cybernetics to Telematics: The Art, Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott in Ascott, R. Telematic Embrace: Visonary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, 2003, (ed. Edward A. Shanken), Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stiles, K, Between Water and Stone; Fluxus Performance, A Metaphysics of Acts, excerpted in Tracy Warr, ed., The Artists'Body (London: Phaidon Press, 2000): 211-14 In the Spirit of Fluxus (1993): 62-99.

Thomas, P, April 2009, Nano-Midas, lecture at Curtin University Art Department

Other Reading:

Bishop, C ed. Participation, 2006, Whitechapel & the MIT Press, London

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Peeren, E, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bahktin and Beyond, 2008, Stanford University Press, California

Performance team 3!

2009-10-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

Hi! Harry here,

Tanya and I began our time in the Think Tank by containing the residue of the previous performances. We shifted the frame used by Ben and Claire in to the corner of the room and used it as a container for the remaining residue including poles, masking tape, lights, tripods followed by a sheet to drape over it all.

The space amongst the contained residue became our site for performance, leaving the rear window of the Think Tank as the only point of exposure. To me this represented the traditional artist’s studio, a private place to create something that will later be exposed to the public. One thing I find interesting about the Think Tank space is when an artist takes residence it appears more like a stage than a studio. Passing people I presume look through the glass expecting something exciting to be going on when in the reality of my own art practice it would be a relatively stale and dull display of someone sitting in front of a computer thinking about what they should be doing. This is the reason why it was important for me to contain and privatise the working area.

Activity began in the now contained Think Tank accompanied by an electric frying pan, shake and pour pancake mix, various toppings, a kettle, tea bags and some water. We plugged in the frying pan and kettle for tea brewing and to cook pancakes (later generously decorated) within the now very clustered environment. Our creations were pushed out of the private space as we made them exposing them to the main Think Tank viewing windows. Our mouth-watering delights were now visible to viewers but still mostly inaccessible due to the Think Tank being locked and only able to be opened from the outside with an authorised student card.

We offered anyone who came inside a fresh pancake and tea with toppings of their choice. Visitors however were asked to wait outside the contained private space while their order was being processed leaving the relationship impersonal – like one between customer and service provider. Visitors were asked to leave their empty plates and cups with the uneaten creations for further evidence of performance.

Think Tank: Thirteen actions : 17th to 23rd of September

2009-09-30T00:16:00.000-07:00

Roslyn Cadee and Markela Panegyres

On entering the Thinktank we were faced with one bright pink wall of a particularly intense shade, another wall covered with pink medieval figures that were situated within an Austin Powers inspired pattern and a floor entirely covered with a blue tarpaulin splattered with a myriad of bright colours. Responding to this residue was both exciting and overwhelming. We felt that in order to work meaningfully in this space we had to subtract some of this residue. Thus our first action in the space was to almost completely paint the walls white and to remove everything except for the frame of Ben's paint machine. It was interesting that our initial response was subtractive, in contrast to the additive nature of Claire and Ben’s response to the space.

Roslyn's approach
I used the Thinktank as a studio space, to research and investigate notions of suspended body as an extension directly related to my existing project work.
The performances I directed were undertaken to trial tangent ideas that I had come across during the semester. The existing frame provided me with a way in which I could interrogate whether my suspended bodies, as action caught in a state of flux, could be emulated outside a water space.

The notion of the ‘absent body’ is an intriguing one, where artists use traces of their bodies – casts, imprints, photographs – as stand-ins for their physical presence. The absence of the real body can evoke notions of the transience of the human body in contrast to the more permanent forms. The imprint or trace speaks of memory and absence, setting up a contrast between the body’s physical manifestation and the spiritual or unconscious (Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artists Body, 2000). “The space of the subject”: what could the phrase mean, or be made to mean?

The body presents the paradox of contained and container at once. Our attention is continually focused upon the boundaries or limits of the body; known from an exterior the limits of the body as object; known from an interior, the limits of its physical extension into space’ (Susan Stewart, On Longing, The Imaginary Body).

Markela's approach
To take my existing way of working with the body in a performative way into the unique space of the Thinktank and to respond to both to the space itself and to the residue left by previous artists work. I
I wanted to use this space to attempt to answer the following questions:

Can the way I have been using my body in my practice be translated into a new space with new conditions?
Can this way of working with the body be used to successfully respond too and collaborate with other artists?

I am interested in using my body to articulate, explore, develop, test out or embody ideas through actions that can be metaphoric or literal. Lately I have focussed on the use of my own body as a tool through which to explore notions of entrapment and confinement. Real, imagined, psychological or symbolic boundaries or barriers which cause confinement are all of interest to me.

The unique space of the Thinktank gallery with its many windows and its triangular shape (causing extreme corners) corresponded nicely to the some of the concerns of my practice. Thus, the space of the Thinktank was naturally conducive to me exploring some of these concerns. Since I have previously done works suspending or inverting my own body it seemed logical that part of the collaboration with Roslyn focussed on seeing whether or not I could emulate the shape and condition of the body suspended in water in the Thinktank.

We wrote a list of performative tasks. This was stuck to the window and tasks were ticked off as they were completed. We allowed ourselves to diverge from these tasks as our ideas developed and we explored alternatives. We invited passers by to write their own suggestions for tasks we could attempt in the space. This was unsuccessful as people either wrote nothing or did not take it seriously.

Performance actions

1. Tube-stallation
Before collaborating with Roslyn, I had some time in the Thinktank alone, just after Hannah Jackson pulled out. I installed electrical conduit, florescent light bulbs, bicycle tyres and inner tubes. I have been working with these tubes in my sculpture research class and wanted to extend this work in the Thinktank. The performative act was in the physicality of moving these large pipes into the Thinktank and placing them so that they effectively responded to the peculiarities of the space and the residue left by previous artists. In the manner of minimalists such as Robert Morris, found industrial objects are chosen and placed with high regard to their relationships in space. I am working towards a synthesis of sculpture and performance, where the tubes would transcend a purely formalist composition and embody more metaphoric or enigmatic meanings.

2. ‘Mapping’ the Thinktank with masking tape
Masking tape was used to delineate and mark the routes we would take through the gallery space as we moved to and from various performative activities. We marked off the far corner of the space as a ‘research corner” where we read texts on performance art and the body, brainstormed, discussed and reflected upon our work. All tape lines led from this “research corner” to locations which were designated as places in which to perform planned actions. Lines went to each of the windows, to the top corner of the room and to indicate that we would work outside the Thinktank. These lines would later be the only residue or indication of our actions.

The pattern of the tape led to other work to actions 7 and 8.

Why masking tape? Masking tape was chosen because it was used by Ben and Claire whilst they were painting. We also had used masking tape when we had overpainted in white, thus the use of tape was a link to and extension of previous actions in the space.

3. Mapping the eyelevel line
We marked out the line of each others eye-level on the six windows out of the gallery to delineate and also obcure the subtle differences between each other’s points of view.

4. Performance: follow the leader through the window
Interest in the difficulties in communicating across boundaries led us to this performance. We choose the far window at the front of the Thinktank. Roslyn was situated behind the glass, inside the gallery and I was situated in front of the gallery, outside the glass. We faced each other:
i) Markela led and Roslyn had to follow my actions
ii) Roslyn led and Markela had to follow.
iii) Roslyn led and Markela had to do first the opposite, then the mirror image.

5. Using projections to see if the body could emulate body suspended in water.
a) on floor
Projection of body in water on wall: Roslyn gave Markela instructions and she followed these on the floor to see if she could get my body into the same position.

b) suspended in frame
Projection on other wall: Markela tried to copy, imitate or at least get close to this image using the frame to assist me in suspending my body. This also exposed and tested her physical limitations.

7. Performance using the lines made by the tape as boundaries and/or triggers for body movements on the floor
Markela: I attempted to enact spontaneous physical responses to the tape lines on the floor. I wanted to use the space in between the lines as boundaries- to show my body testing or reaching the utmost points of these boundaries, I also wanted to show my body cutting across these boundaries or allowing both the tape and my own body to ‘function together' to create an interesting image.

8. Confinement by triangles
Markela: I sprawled within one of the existing triangles formed by our mapping. I then directed Roslyn to use more tape to “draw” one smaller triangle inside of this larger triangle. I then had to change the position of my body to fit inside this new triangle. This process was repeated over and over again until I could only remain in the triangle by balancing on the toes of one foot.

10. Breathing on glass- documenting the condensation of my own breath
Markela: I wanted to explore the question of whether my own respiration could define and expose boundaries.
I had initially wanted to show the futile attempt to cover an entire window with the condensation caused by my breathing. This proved extremely difficult to document due to problems such as the camera reflecting on the glass, I also got lightheaded after a few minutes and had to stop. The solution we came up with was for me to breathe onto the lens of the camera itself until I ‘disappeared’.

11. Facing the corner
Markela: I choose the one corner of the think tank. I faced into the corner with my back to the rest of the space. I stood and then extremely slowly shrank down into a kneeling position.

12. Markela taped into a corner
i) We choose the same corner of the gallery as in action 11. Markela squashed herself into this corner as much as possible by sitting down with her knees tucked up to her chin and her hands around my knees.
ii) Roslyn and Harry Court then used masking tape to tape Markela into this corner. Eventually she was completely covered in masking tape.
iii) Markela remained in this position for about 10 minutes.
iv) When she began to feel pain from being cramped for so long she “broke free", peeling the ape off my skin.
v) The remnants of the masking tape made an intriguing shell-like shape which was then stuck upon the wall.

13. Tubes into frame
One of the requested tasks by passer by was to “bring back the tubes”.
The frame was pushed against one of the windows and a selection of tubes from the earlier installation was placed within the frame. These were placed in an arrangement that attempted to echo the triangle motif. Markela also experimented with placing the masking tape shell from performance 13 within this installation and placing my own body within this installation.

Brief Reflections:
Working in this relay format provided the potential for an enhanced conversation with other artists. Rather then purely responding to ideas we were responding to physical traces left by other artists.

Markela:
i) The question of what exactly I am doing when I use my body in an artwork became heightened in the Thinktank . I began to question the term ‘performance’ as I attempted to explain my ideas to Roslyn. Performance has come to be an umbrella term which encompasses a vast spectrum of artworks- nearly everything can be labelled a 'performance'. The word performance has become so generalized that it often does not communicate the specificities of my artwork. Words such as “action” “act” or “physical testing” may be more appropriate for my work.

ii) It became apparent that it was often necessary to structure actions/performances through a methodological process or a set of instructions.

iii) I discovered that my body became a link between Roslyn and I as we collaborated. My body could physically test her ideas and likewise I could communicate my ideas with my body.

iv) I discovered that the choice of material is of extreme importance, and using a material just because it “linked” to the space is not enough. For example in the work where I was taped to a corner, the masking tape could have been replaced with another more meaningful material which could enhance my idea.

v) It became apparent that showing the felt experience of my actions from my point of view could assist a more eloquent communication to a viewer. I took one photograph from within the masking tape when I was being “cornered” into a wall- this has made me see that another avenue of enquiry for my work is to photograph my actions from the inside out.

Performance Relay - Week 1 Comment

2009-09-18T09:03:00.001-07:00

Hi, Tom here again

It's really great to see such high quality documentation and photo evidence of our first week's performances. Ben and Claire have put a huge amount of effort into making sure their experience is retained through evidence, and this helps our next artists to respond and transform the space into stage 2.

How can an artwork express itself as both an process/experience and as a solid result or representative outcome? The answer to this usually lies in evidence or residue that can be passed on and displayed post-production.

One might well ask, are not all artworks merely residue or evidence of process? This may be so, but it is usually the case that either the process OR the outcome are what is being priviledged in an artwork. Some for example, might argue that a Jackson Pollock is an art object that speaks for itself as an autonomous object, where others may place more meaning in the trance/psychological process behind its making.

In the Performance Relay, our transforming space attempts to priviledge both stages, by elevating residue and evidence as a node or departure point - a symbol or representation of what came before - artists are encouraged to think about the entirety of art as artwork - as both singular points of inspiration, symbolic compact meaning and departure, and also as multifaceted processes of connection, discussion and experience.

Part of this realisation is through good documentation, making links to one's own practise, acting upon these connections through further generation of material, and finally participating within a wider discussion of art, and all those involved in the relay as a reflective process.

I really enjoyed Ben and Claire's collaboration this week - it's great to see ceramics, painting and performance come together where usually in the department they may be (unfortunately) seen as disparate and unrelated areas. With intruiging dynamism - pots, paint, action and artist were melded and thrown together into the space to create outcomes that totally ignored stigmas and boundaries and were absolutely the stuff of "art" and nothing else. Also intruiging was this idea of "machine" - to me the idea spoke of a removal of ego and normal disciplinary boundaries in favour of "just producing" something in an intricate and inspired zone or state of mind - there wasn't too much fussing or overcomplication and prejudice that may come with a more precious exercise. Originality was in the idea and presence of the artists themselves, and the experience or feeling of the action.

Setting up at the moment we have Markela Panegyres and Roslyn Cadee. They will be working on something this weekend. Unfortunately Hannah Jackson has had to pull out due to personal reasons.

A series of interruptions Video Part two

2009-09-17T17:05:00.000-07:00

A series of interruptions

2009-09-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

The performance "A Series of Interruptions" came together as a result of two very separate and distinctive art practices sharing the common theme, the process and evidence of making. The gallery space consisted of various machines for making. Paint and coloured clay slip was poured down a network of pipes at various intervals splashing colour onto the blank canvases and clay. Whilst Ben was the conductor/director of his crudely constructed machines, Claire became part of the machinery sitting at the potters wheel churning pot after pot. The performance became a reaction to questions and ideas generated within the space.

Ben Barretto:

A central hub of six funnels mounted in a chrome form fed paint into the factory line. Rotating fabric with various attached implements danced around boards creating paintings. A drill powered canvas conveyor belt rotated, whilst a surveillance camera hovered above overseeing the creation of movement and mixing color. This was a live feed to a monitor that was faced to the window giving the outside viewer a closer insight into the system.

"I see my ideas as my tools, and I want to display these physically. It is an intuitive reaction that creates these three dimensional forms which is ultimately a documentation of the games that are played inside my head"

Claire Steiner:

"I set up a space facing the window that consisted of a potters wheel, a table, all my tools and bags of clay. It looks like the space i usually work in, in my studio. I also had a stand next to me and slabs of rolled out clay on the floor. My roll during the performance was to make pots. These pots were then used in various ways according to what we felt at the time. Once i had made a pot i gave it to Ben and he placed them under the painting machines and swirled colours onto them so that they mimicked what was happening on the canvases. On the second day i became more of a participant. Ben poured paint onto my pots as they were on the wheel, once they were taken off the wheel i either roughly placed them on a stand in a stack, dropped them onto the rolled out clay or threw them against the wall. Over the performance duration it was as though i was a machine for making that slowly started to malfunction and destroy its own work.

"Working with Ben gave me the opportunity to further explore my interest in the unconventional ways of dealing with ceramics and taking the preciousness out of the ceramic form. The integration of electronics and ceramics is an area im exploring in my own art practice, so it was really good to see how Ben constructs his moving painting machines with the use of common household mechanisms like fans and drills. I also like the idea of a ceramic object moving within the space appose to being stationary, which enables an interactive experience for the viewer."

A series of interruptions

2009-09-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

A series of interruptions

2009-09-16T19:18:00.001-07:00

A Series of interruptions

2009-09-16T19:08:00.000-07:00

2009-09-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

A Series of interruptions

2009-09-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

Performance Relay - Introduction/First Post

2009-09-13T19:55:00.000-07:00

Hi, Tom Penney here.

First of all I'd like to thank Darryn for giving me the opportunity to curate/co-ordinate the Think Tank space for the next few weeks. We have some of the university's best performance/process artists lined up for some interesting collaborations.

Ben Barretto and Claire Steiner, who have already set up have just completed their first performance and with great success. Their painting machine/ceramic bowl collaboration drew numerous passers-by this afternoon.

Over the next few weeks I will be talking with the participants and asking them to keep in mind certain ideas of transformation, process and participation. Between artwork, residue and evidence, what is the role of the artist experientially as a connecting and linking body? Where is the boundary between the art outcome and the world of experience? How might we negotiate these issues when presenting process/transformation as the main focus of a body of work?

We will see the artists make their own posts on the blog here, in reflection upon their experience and outcomes in the space.

At the end of the four weeks, I will have written an essay/document that puts the relay into context and perspective, given modes of participation in art during and beyond Postmodernism. There will be an opening with documentation, evidence, and objects with Julian Goddard on October the 7th.

Lets look forward to a dynamic and exciting four weeks!

September 2009

2009-08-31T02:11:00.000-07:00

Think Tank e-zine Issue 3
Think Tank Project Space, Curtin University Department of Art, Bentley Campus, Perth. Opening Times: Monday – Thursday 11pm-2pm Enquiries:A.Perejuan@Curtin.edu.au

September 2009
Performance Relay
Opening Wednesday 31 September 4.30pm
To be opened by: Julian Goddard
Curator: Tom Penney

During the month of September there will be a rotation of four collaborative performative events in the Thinktank. Every performance will adapt the residue of the gallery space, produce a collaborative performance, and then leave a residue for the subsequent performance to appropriate. The Performance Relay will also produce an electronic-conversation between the artists involved which will then be distributed through the e-zine as a document of research into strategies of performance and the potential of a relay format. The co-ordinator of the Performance Relay is Tom Penney, who is also participating, and who will be offering short collaborative projects of students in the art school in a loose curatorial framework.
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August 2009

Dress to the left!
No!
Dress to the right!

Clare Stephenson and Alex Pollard with Jane Topping, Laurence Figgis, Iain Hetherington, Lynn Hynd, Sophie MacPherson, Stephen Sutcliffe, Stuart Gurden, Craig Mulholland
Painting, installation and video work from Glasgow
Opening Wednesday 26 August 4.30pm
THINKTANK GALLERY, AV ROOM & TANGENT GALLERY
DEPARTMENT OF ART, CURTIN UNIVERSITY

Opened by: Julian Goddard
Curated by Clare Stephenson and Alex Pollard
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Review of Post-Pop Conceptualism
By Steven ten Thije, Research Curator van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
‘Post-Pop Conceptualism’, the name of the exhibition has the sticky quality of gluing things together. Its principle appears as a kind of layering, of adding one thing to the other in an almost random fashion. ‘Post’, ‘Pop’, ‘Concept’, why not go on: ‘Gesture’, ‘Abstract’, ‘Installation’, ‘Relation’, ‘DaDa’. The small show with works of Daniel Bourke, Tom Penney, Lisa Purcell and Andrew Varano, curated by Darryn Ansted seems almost to collapse under the weight of all the references that are triggered by these few works. The weight of all these traditions brought together in the constellation of this show is only lightened up by the ironic playfulness in which the artists allow themselves to be embedded in the most recent traditions. The word ‘jamming’ feels highly appropriate to designate the freestyle pastiche made out or works of Beuys, Fischli and Weiss, Gestural Abstraction and a hint of Relational Aesthetics.
Most prominently absent from the vocabulary that one can use to allow signification to surface in these works is ‘creation’. Whatever it is that these artists brought to our attention in their concentrated and often dense installations is not a celebration of an ‘invention’, something ‘new’, or ‘added’. Just as the title of the show only gives us a reconfiguration of already familiar terms, the works also are hesitant to suggest to a viewer that what they are doing is somehow ‘creative’ in the dramatic manner in which this term has been used in modern art history. Varano, for instance, presents an installation existing out of several geometrical triangular shapes, which surround an mysterious machine that pumps around water in a seemingly ‘perpetuum mobile’-kind of fashion. As the delicate heart of the piece an eraser is lifted up and touches an old rose circular platform. The work reminds one strongly of Fischli and Weiss’s famous ‘Lauf der Dinge’, but also refers somehow to the harsh geometric shapes of Sol LeWitt. However, LeWitt in a sense tried to use the causality of discursive logic to still arrive at an unforeseen, ‘creative’ conclusion, summarized forcefully in his ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ where he states ‘irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically’ and ‘artist are mystics rather then rationalists’.1 In Varano’s piece it is difficult to note what ‘irrational thought’ is followed ‘absolutely and logically’. The work instead follows a procedure of repetition, connecting the progressive investigation into triangular shapes with the repetitive pumping around of the water going through a water-mill. Nothing is ‘added’ in this process, nor are there any ‘new conclusions’ made, in the end the work’s pivot is an eraser: a subtle negation that silently articulates the impossibility of adding new thoughts into this closed circuit.
Instead of the idea of creation the works lean strongly on investigating notions of repetition and reproduction. Daniel Bourke presents as work the production of a type of lamp, which gives as much attention to the production process as the final object itself. The lamp appears to be made using macramé-techniques. In a small catalogue one can follow the laborious production process. The work plays around with pre-industrial production methods documented in a systematic manner. Here artistic creation is almost a pun played on both craftsmanship and industrial techniques. Lisa Purcell explores methods of production in a different sense, producing a small catalogue that contains references to the works in the show, but also reads as a type of legend of informal painting. By cutting up real ‘paintings’ and photo copies printed on different types of paper tied together by a low-tech piece of rope, the catalogue ironically mimics and negates exalted ideas of creative genius and virtuoso painting. In a surgical manner the work dissects artistic styles and techniques bringing them together in the non-artistic surrounding of an office and bureaucratic mechanisms. By their focus on production process and industrial or bureaucratic methodology the artists position themselves in a distinct limbo between the traditional arts and the ‘normal’ productive economy.
It is in this ‘no-mans-land’ that the artists find their source to tap from. Becoming more a viral antidote to the surrounding social-economic fabric, than that they are the inspired fore-runners in the form of a traditional avant-garde. The works warp and invert traditions and practices, folding the one into the other to construct an unstable equilibrium that, at its best moments, generates in the spectator a strong sense of ‘being-positioned’. One can feel ‘placed’ by these works; set into a type of reality that is both familiar but also slightly uncanny. Where to go? What should we hold on to? Of what can we let go? Questions that randomly start to obsess when one follows the lines that workout towards the visitor. Due to the absence of notions like creation and genius the works seem devoid of teleology and operate more as profane vortexes that draw one into a stream of doubt. The most extreme example of this is perhaps the work of Penney which is an ironic investigation of Beuy’s classic performance ‘I like America and America likes me’ from 1974, in which Beuys locked himself up for several days with a coyote. Penney uses the figure of the coyote as an icon of new-age spiritualism which he places in various contexts. They perform repetitive actions – climbing up a stair, crushing things on the floor, and (again) referencing a bureaucratic office worker. These actions are presented on three televisions placed on top of each other, opposite these televisions is another TV set, which shows a cacophony of costumed figures who read texts full of new-age nonsense. In the middle, on a small screen, three figures bless a TV set in a mock shamanistic ritual. A final set shows a dummy meditation session, with a guru-like figure enmeshed in a web of spiritual clichés. Even if the work lacks a concentrated execution – the actors can hardly hide the irony of the texts they read which disrupts the over-all ironic effect – the work is most explicit about the spiritual vacuum of the current age. A fast-food religion distributed through TV and the Internet tries to fill the gab of purposelessness, but it is not convincing. By mimicking Beuys – the last Shaman of Art – Penney suggest that even art can’t be expected to remedy this. But, by warping and mimicking in ironic games, artworks can expose a peculiar in-between space where one is able to think and critically reflect on our contemporary reality. A space that in this show is investigated in a charming way and already shows in the empty space between the words ‘Post’, ‘Pop’ and ‘Conceptualism’.
1. Sol LeWitt, 'Sentences on Conceptual Art', 1969, reprinted in Harrison, C., and Wood, P., (ed), Art in Theory, 1900 - 1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 1992, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, p. 837
Next Issue...
Dress to the left! No! Dress to the right! will be reviewed...
Feedback
Please your thoughts on the show on the blog
http://thinktankgallery.blogspot.com/.

2009-08-19T18:33:00.001-07:00

Think Tank e-zine Issue 2

July 2009

Think Tank Project Space, Curtin University Department of Art, Bentley Campus, Perth

Opening Times: Monday – Thursday 11pm-2pm Enquiries: A.Perejuan@Curtin.edu.au

Tableau Vivant Sheridan Coleman

1 July – 14 July 2009

and

Extended Painting David Attwood

15 July – 29 July 2009

Both opening Wednesday 29 July 2009 4.45pm

To be opened by: Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson

Guest Peer Reviewer: Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson

Curated by Darryn Ansted

Review of Post-Pop Conceptualism

By Steven ten Thije, Research Curator van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Watch this space... Steven ten Thije is currently writing a review of the show Post-Pop Conceptualism.

Editorial

Tableau Vivant

This second episode of the Think Tank e-zine is split around two exhibitions: Tableau Vivant and Extended Painting. Sheridan Coleman’s Tableau Vivant show responds to the tableaux vivant¹ form. It is a form of living painting that is typically quite excessive in its production. The Think Tank space provided many restrictions. Its triangular shape and surfeit of windows are anathema to the usual requirements of a set for making a living painting. Coleman responded by animating the tableau that she made, taking it to the fourth dimension, time, to overcome the problems with the other three dimensions.

Artist Statement – Sheridan Coleman

In response to Marina Abromovic’s live-in gallery piece, Slumber, I began to examine the elements of the tableau, in particular the role of the ‘live’ artist or performer. The piece is described here:

During the first weeks of Slumber, Antoni sleeps at night in the gallery and weaves during the day.13 The artist's presence is framed by a sparse, elegant installation. The focus of display is a single metal-frame bed covered with cotton sheets. Draped across the sheets is a silk night-gown. Covering the bed is a white blanket, which extends beyond the mattress to fall in folds on the floor, where it is attached to a loom custom designed to enable the weaving of a potentially endless blanket. The warp threads stretch from the loom across the space like a canopy, over the bed, and to the opposite wall, where an arrangement of spindles is fastened. Beside the bed is an electroencephalograph unit. At night, Antoni wires herself to the machine to record her eye movements, which indicate dreaming. During the day, she weaves into the blanket a colored record of these REM patterns with strips torn from her nightgown. In this way, Antoni reframes the visceral preoccupations of seventies' feminist performance through the mediation of medical instrumentation and claims for herself the use and purpose of medical authority.²

In particular I was interested in the way Abromovic created a living space within the gallery and allowed her performance to include the progressive manufacture of objects, so that her performance was defined by movement: her inertia (compared to one’s typical lifestyle) within the domain of her workspace reflected inversely against the impressive growth of the objects that defined it: namely, the billowing white sheet that she slept under at night and wove to greater length by daylight.

Simply using the Think Tank as a studio space would by default create the same sense of constant labour, whatever I created there, however I wanted to expand it. I was most interested in the idea that somebody walking past at the same time every day would find varying degrees of difference between the arrangement of the materials inside the ‘Fishbowl’ as they looked in. Whether the lights were on or off, I was absent or present, there was always a degree to which the contents of the room had shifted. As the work I was to produce also took the form of photography and video, each instillation (or model-less tableau) I constructed only had a brief lifespan as I re-used my backdrops and materials over the course of the fortnight, and had to dismantle it to start the next one. I am fairly amused by the impression of Sisyphean ‘shuffling around’ this might have caused onlookers.

As I worked on the tableaux I was acutely aware of its resemblance to some kind of shop-window display and felt compelled to amp it up. I was alert also to the fact that those viewing me work on the installation saw it a) as an incomplete work, b) without a static model, as the setup was intended to feature, or c) with me working on it, and therefore the person in the ‘tableau’ was moving, and moving the setting. This is what got my attention. Whether or not I performed in the window front display, the majority of viewers would see it as a changing installation, as though my role as an artist was no more than that of a florist, arranging elements to make a vacant and artificial space. Whilst I had intended to use my backdrop to perform a tableau of Millais’ seminal painting ‘Ophelia’, I had become far more interested in the way my props and materials behaved within a constantly viewable space, and how they might constitute a tableau vivant in of themselves.

After I had gathered together a set of props, both real and artificial, that could be arranged in various ways, I felt I wanted to represent the ‘life’ of those objects independent of the model they were built for. Before any artistic input, the Think Tank project space is already a performative arena. Like being thrust in front of a camera, it changes the occupant’s behaviour, creating a wake of self-consciousness after each new addition or change to the work inside. If I sensed this tension as a part-time occupant of the room, I wanted my props to be subject to the full anxiety of being viewed constantly, and without a gallery-ready level of completion. My thoughts conjured an image of canvas, leaves, easels and cardboard tossing itself recklessly around in the dark gallery while all the viewers were asleep, contorting into hundreds of tableau sets as if practising for the next day. This was a viable idea for a stop-frame animated narrative, and also afforded me an extra length of time appearing as the artist in residence, relentlessly shifting things about.

Extended Painting

David Attwood’s project responds to the recent fervour over extended painting. This new term seems to belong to the independent Spanish curator Paco Barragán but describes something painting has been happening since at least the 1960s in painting. Regardless, the notion of taking painting beyond the canvas, which the term entails, seem to have a new credibility by virtue of the research that Barragán is doing. In terms of painting Jessica Stockholder, an artist/academic based at Yale University, is seen as the eminent practitioner in this field. David’s project involved testing this ‘new’ direction in the art world in the Thinktank.

Artist Statement – David Attwood

In this project I wanted to extend painting beyond the picture plane. To allow paint to exist in the space of 'reality', not as a component of a picture or image, but instead as its own form in space. In doing so my work became more about colour than paint. I wanted to give colour its own voice, to present it in the simplest form that I could. I began to see paint as merely a carrier of colour, a way to give colour form. So I guess I am trying to create an installation that is solely and simply about giving colour form. Some of the works contain paint and some do not. So in extending painting, I guess I aim to eradicate the picture plane and explore colour beyond it.

Next Issue...

August – Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson will be working in the Thinktank Gallery for August

Feedback

Please send through your thoughts on the shows: Post-Pop Conceptualism, Tableau Vivant and Extended Painting.

1. Interperformance: The Live Tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramovic, Jennifer Fisher, Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century (Winter, 1997), pp. 28-33

2.Ibid.

2009-08-19T18:32:00.001-07:00

Think Tank e-zine Issue 1

Think Tank Project Space, Curtin University Department of Art, Bentley Campus, Perth

Opening Times: Monday – Thursday 11pm-3pm Enquiries: A.Perejuan@Curtin.edu.au

Post-Pop Conceptualism

Daniel Bourke, Lisa Purcell, Andrew Varano, Tom Penney

27 May – 10 June 2009

Opening Wednesday 3 June 2009 4.45pm

Curated by Darryn Ansted

To be opened by: Trudi Bennett, Remida: a Resource for Artists

Guest Peer Reviewer: Stephen ten Thije, Research Curator van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Editorial

The Think Tank Project Space follows an episodic model, which makes it easy to book, mount a show and continuously engage viewers. Episodes have loose themes and follow a standard format. Exhibitions can deviate from this format but where they follow it, the model is: 4-8 students/artists, a staff member, an external guest, two-week running times, a fortnightly email/blog update, and a fortnightly opening on Wednesday afternoons at 4.45pm.

The first episode has the theme Post-Pop Conceptualism. It questions the character of artwork that has come from art schools over the past decade. The Pop Art methodology of ironically reframing elements of popular culture has been perpetuated in the Australian context by: Sue and Phil Dodd (their Gossipop project turns gossip magazines into clunky karaoke performances), The Kingpins (in their performances they masquerade as male glam rockers and hip hop artists), Grant Stevens (whose video art draws on the text used by the Hollywood film industry and Myspace confessions), Guy Benfield (he transplants elaborate painting actions into interiors of modern flat-pack furnishings), as well as Shaun Gladwell (who reproduces subversive ‘youth culture’ as sanitised as profound), and Ricky Swallow (whose carvings of cultural icons of the 1980s include a timber Darth Vader and a timber BMX bicycle), and also Tracey Moffat (who edits popular films into absurd jump-cut montages). This list shows that artwork that has been garnering institutional and critical support over the past ten years consistently reuses Pop Art strategies in new conceptual frameworks. This project asks whether this wave of Post-Pop Conceptualism has passed. It presents the work of four Curtin art students whose work asks whether the generation coming through art school now swim with the tide or against it.

The artists featured in this show, Daniel Bourke, Lisa Purcell, Andrew Varano, and Tom Penney draw on marginal hobbies and lifestyle pursuits within mainstream culture. Varano explores the DIY culture of home renovation, Bourke explores the suburban ‘swap-meet’ as an economy of lost hobbies, Penney deconstructs new age spiritualism and Purcell instrumentalises the zine subculture as a retro platform for the dissemination of artwork. These diverse methods and processes are marked by a common ambivalence. In this regard, their approach owes more to the North American lineage of Pop Art than the British. Their performance, sculpture, installations and projects are more like Claes Oldenberg’s Store installation, which situates the artist inside the phenomenon of popular culture, than it does to Richard Hamilton’s more critical collages that seem to position him as judging popular culture from the outside. This group are not appropriating forms to decode a language of contemporary visual culture but rather, they are culture-jamming with a code that they have already cracked; throwing it all back into the mix that it came from. Penney uploads his videos to YouTube and Bourke is considering holding his own stall at a swap-meet. This is a not just an attempt to unmask the life that grows in the interstices of the economy of late capitalism but an attempt to stage it as the only alternative, however impoverished it may appear. As the fissures of ‘the economy’ itself become increasingly wide these micro-spaces become more important. Terrariums, Macramé, and new age spiritualism that circulate in the meta-economies of swap-meets become weirdly, if not more tenable, at least more visible through such practices.

Next Issue...

This exhibition is going to be reviewed by a Guest Peer Reviewer: Stephen ten Thije MA, Research Curator van Abbemuseum Eindhoven. His critique of the exhibition will appear in the next Think Tank e-zine issue.
The theme for the next episode is: Strategies of Unframing.