One perspective on the seminar

As a painter, I asked myself more than once what I hoped to get out of the four-day seminar/workshop on performance art led by Ron Athey and Jennifer Doyle.  I had been feeling a pull toward incorporating elements of performance into my art for some time but my knowledge and understanding of performance art itself was very limited.  I must admit I came to the first day of the workshop with a few common misconceptions about performance art and particularly the art of Ron Athey.  That said, I was open to learning and I was completely enthusiastic about participating.  

I was impressed with the diversity and caliber of my fellow participants.  It was clear the group was open and eager.  Ron organized the first hour or so in a way that brought us all immediately together as a group.  By sharing our personal stories, stretching our bodies and even laying hands on each other, we lost our inhibitions and felt safe to explore whatever we might need to explore over the next few days.

The first day we delved into Ron's work, some of his early inspirations, his methods and practice, the role of the audience in his work and misconceptions about his work.  There was ample opportunity for all of the participants to ask pertinent and meaningful questions and for us to "flesh" out some of the concepts and meaning in Ron's work.

I was particularly interested in and impressed with Jennifer's presentation the first afternoon.  It dealt with the "difficulty" in certain pieces of performance art, for example, Ron's work.  This work is challenging and does not always leave the viewer with a clear and easy interpretation.

The second day we shared more with Ron and with each other, really looking at our individual practices.  We broke into small groups and performed impromptu pieces.  That afternoon, Jennifer shared with us the story of Aliza Shvartz and what can happen when a piece goes viral and the media and the internet place it in the center of a fire storm.  It was enlightening and thought provoking and proved to be a catalyst for quite a bit of open discussion and debate.

The third day we worked in small groups again and performed new impromptu pieces with emphasis on sound, voice and text.  It was really valuable to see the process through the eyes of each participant and experience each performance so intimately.  Finally that day, each of us gave focused thought to an individual piece that we would present on the last day of the workshop.  We shared our "rough drafts" to the group for critique and suggestions.  It was great to have feedback from everyone but we all benefited from the advice of Ron and Jennifer. Ron gave me advice for my piece from a performance perspective and Jennifer, with her wealth of knowledge and point of view as critic, gave me insight into related pieces and literature that tied in directly to what I was doing.  

The last day was all about performance.  It was instructive and valuable to have heard the loosely conceived idea presented the day before, and then, with suggestion and critique applied, see the piece fully realized.  There were some fantastic and moving performances, even a couple of "difficult" ones.  I had never performed in any capacity prior to this workshop.  It would have been reasonable for me to feel nervous about my performance.  However, the environment was so supportive and open that I was much more interested in the experience of performing itself, rather than focusing on any anxiety I might have felt about performing.  I think my performance was well received and I was really thrilled by the experience and the feedback I got.

I am so glad I took the opportunity to participate in this extraordinary workshop  It was eye opening and educational and it has imparted me with the recognition of a corner of myself that I wasn't fully aware of before.  I have a new tool at my disposal when creating my work and expressing myself.  I am left with an eagerness to learn and experience more in the arena of performance.  I want to thank the sponsors of this seminar, my fellow participants, and most especially Ron and Jennifer for their time, openness and the effort it took to bring it all together.   

Morning After Thoughts

It is too soon to make narrative, so I'll just make a couple observations.

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Ursula Rucker practices a form of improvisational disobediance. The term is Jayna Brown's, and was invoked by Erica Edwards in her dialogue with Rucker - while it has specific resonance in the history of Black women's performance, the term works for all of the artists who shared their work with us this weekend.

I was really moved by the conversations on Saturday - by the wisdom of each artist, and by our collective movement towards the ideas and feelings they described.

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Michelle Raheja, speaking of the challenge of James Luna's performances here in Riverside and in Palm Desert, suggested that performacne about who we are may in some cases be a lot more difficult that performance about who we are not. Much of Luna's more satirical work is driven by the latter. This work is centered on the former.

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This is the work of the "sub sub" - Ursula invoked this image to describe working from a space below the basement - like, not even the basement.

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Last night - curated by Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino, with the latter also doing a lot of the wrangling required in establishing how the night would flow - was really special. Ron & Julie brought in a crew of tireless "helpers" - set builders, lighting designers, gathered from their friend circle. Last night would not have worked without them - Steak, Pig Pen, Tania. Michelle was a rock.

None of this could have been pulled off without Shane Shukis from The Sweeney Gallery. He was working through what I suspect was almost unbearable exhaustion and has been too gracious to let any of us see that. (And we still have stuff to do today.) He's had a hand in everything - from securing the venue, to publicity, to getting chairs and building the platforms.

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Ron, Julie, Heather Cassils and Zackary Drucker moved us through a tight series of tableux - it's the not the kind of night you can sum up in a snappy sentence - but it was both intimate & fierce. The crowd was unbelievable - really supportive, interested, and there.

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The time after such a performance is strange. Ursula said that the moment you finish, when you are still on stage but the performance is over, is when you are most naked. I am sure that it is when the artist can also feel most alone.

"We mean it": Ursula Rucker & James Luna Friday 2/20!

You Belong to Me was inspired by the following quote about the beauty of performance artists, from Guillermo Gómez-Peña's manifesto "In Defense of Performance Art":

XVI.-PHYSICAL BEAUTY
We are no more or less beautiful or fit than anyone else, but neither are we average looking. Actors, dancers, and models are better looking, sportsmen and martial artists are in much better shape, and porn stars are definitely sexier. In fact, our bodies and faces tend to be awkward looking; but we have an intense look, a deranged essence of presence, an ethical quality to our features and hands. And this makes us both trustworthy to outlaws and rebels, and highly suspicious to authority. When people look into our eyes, they can tell right away— we mean it. This, I may say, amounts to a different kind of beauty.

I've always loved this paragraph and I think it describes the bill this weekend perfectly.

This video clip is for my students - we've been talking about black feminist resistance against forms of oppression & the weight of history. Ursula Rucker's Supa Sista digs into just that. Come downtown tomorrow night (8:00pm @ corner of 6th & main) and check her out! Opening (!) is performance art star James Luna - you can get a taste of his bluesy persona by listening to the track on his home page.

Lauren Deland's famous last words

With not a pulse missed, Lauren Deland delivered a satiric performance of far right art criticism, read from a spot out of view. Her voice boomed into the basement with mid-Western sharpness, offering in reporter-style rhetoric a description of the final performances of the 4-day "You Belong To Me" workshop. In the beats between the words, one could grasp both her fierceness, and the accuracy of that queer art history. She has us laughing non-stop.


"How will this serve you in your search for a real job?"
-Lauren Deland, Feb 16, 2009

Tania Hammidi, the fixer

Tania, upside down in the ladies room at Back to the Grind: a performance with a plunger in the ladies room - a series of movements that d/evolve from fixing, to fixing her self to the wall, to flipping herself upside down.

Nathan Bockelman, off his head

A photo from one of the student performances on Monday - a series of low-fi boyish actions, using a cardboard box, motorcycle helmet, and hoodie.

From Performance Art to Figure Skating

Ron showed the seminar some clips of Raimund Hoghe's work over the weekend.  I've been lucky enough to see him perform twice at a dance festival - most recently, I saw his company perform a meditation on Bolero (in which they performed to the song over and over again).
The performance explicitly revisits Torvill & Dean's performance at the 1984 Olympics (and uses the television broadcast as its soundtrack).  It's pretty amazing - and strange to see that Olympic spectacle absorbed into performance art. I also saw him perform "Meinwärts" couple years ago, and watched the audience turn on him.  That performance was so slow, so serious, so painfully sincere and labored that I fell asleep.  I figured that was OK, and he probably wouldn't mind.  He didn't seem to care what people in the audience felt - even when some queen a couple seats away from me started heckling.  It was incredible - the hostility provoked by what I think the audience experienced as a kind of aggressive sincerity.  

The Literal Body

Jane Blocker, in What the Body Costs, points out the particular way that feminist and queer artists who work with the body (with the artist's body) often find their work read literally - in ways that violently reduce the meaning of the work, if not actively misrepresent the nature of the work itself.  This sort of phenomenon is particularly intense when it comes to work that is sexually explicit.  Ironically, in a culture which sets up sex as the ultimate destination of the story  - as a singular truth, the big "secret" that explains everything about us - when the sexual act or sexual body appear before us, we shut down.  We see "sex" - and little else. And so, works with sex at their center are often handled as if they were the same - when, in fact, such work can have as little in common with each other as, say, two paintings which take city life, or "nature", or portraiture as their subject.  This has come up a few times in our discussions in the past few days - and is raised, too, by many of the performance videos and experimental works we've been looking at.  

More later - the above is actually leftover from yesterday.  Today students presented performance pieces - a really wide range of types of work, and all very interesting.  The day flew by!  

Basement Valentine

The past two days have been really thought provoking - especially watching Ron and the seminar students work together in and through a vocabulary so different than that which I use in my own teaching. It has been a pleasure to present my recent work with the seminar participants (who are mostly artists and creative professionals), with my colleagues and students - and seeing this group mingling together in the basement of Back to the Grind.

The discussion today - about sex, the body, and performance politics - was superb - really genuine as people staked out really different perspectives, and made key interventions to push discussion further.

The film program was intentionally provocative - I wanted to give the night an emotional arc, and not an easy one tonight. I suppose I wanted to work against the easy sentimentality of Valentine's Day. So, I started with an early work by James Luna, History of the Luiseño People (1993), in which the artist sits alone at home, smoking and drinking, and making phone calls on Christmas Day to friends and family from whom he is alienated, or estranged. I also showed Suzanne Lacy's Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976) - a hilarious feminist classic which is much funnier than it sounds. The first "act" ended with Johanna Went's jaw dropping 1984 performance "Knife Boxing." I'd never seen this - my god, it has everything! Giant tampons pulled from a giant vagina. Naked dolls, the Statue of Liberty. A lamb-head. Went screams and shouts throughout to a beating drums and a dissonant sax. It's noise for the ear and eye, and absolutely amazing. Act 2 was more tough - two shorts by Chloe Piene, a short film by David Wojanarowicz, a fifteen minute visual essay on Hermann Nitsch, a performance video by Franko B ("I Miss You") and finally, Linda Montano's deeply moving, terrifyingly real "The Death of Mitchell", in which she recites the story of learning of her ex-husband's death in a monotonous chant. On the screen we see her face, covered in acupuncture needles. It's a hard piece, and deeply moving. (My Valentine's card to the class seems to say - Love is Hard.) As a few students in the seminar expressed interest in the line between spoken word, "reading", and performing, I thought this would give us all something to consider.

In some strange expression of worlds colliding (see my other blog) - there seems to be a giant American Youth Soccer Organization regional tournament here this weekend. The hotel is crawling with kids in their kits. I am trying to stay away from the hotel bar, where I'm sure I'd find the refs.

Primary Scenes

Day One:  Well, I am just about too tired to produce narrative.  Ron opened the seminar by asking students to cat-walk and introduce themselves & their performance personas.  It was great to discover who was ready to S-T-R-U-T!  I'm really impressed by this group.

Ron kept them going in conversation through the morning, then I gave a talk from my work in progress on difficulty & performance.  People seemed game, in general, for thinking, talking, and looking at art.  We watched a few works this evening - some Bas Jan Ader performance videos, the hilariously nutty "Hey, Baby Chickey" (Nina Sobell, 1978), Linda Montano's Primal Scene (1980) - which layers a film of a woman birthing to the soundtrack of Montano reading porn, Carolee Schneemann's Fuses (1963) - which is so beautiful, even in VHS.  If you can program the film - do.  It is totally worth it.  I felt really moved by it this time - I hadn't seen it in about 15 years.  And then, George Kuchar's Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) - a camp classic.  I'd originally planned to show a couple other pieces, but their mood was too dark - I decided to call it a night, and end of the weird upswing of Kuchar's DIY melodrama.  Tomorrow's program will probably be a little harder.  But still fun & provocative!