Performance pieces: but are they art?

After Marina Abramovic’s sell-out Serpentine show this summer, and with next week’s Frieze London art fair showcasing young performers alongside established fine artists, Alex Clark looks at why performance art is captivating the capital
Fascinating: Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece, in Paris, 2003
Alex Clark2 October 2014

One afternoon this summer, a woman I didn’t know took my face in her hands and laid it tenderly on her chest; afterwards, she rubbed my back reassuringly and gazed into my eyes before walking quietly away. No words were exchanged. I had been crying, I didn’t really know why, and afterwards, I cried a bit more, although I wasn’t unhappy. Later on, I rang a friend and told her to go and get her face held, too. She did.

And there was the evening a few days afterwards when I found myself in the middle of some sort of indoor carnival, with men and women whirling and tumbling around me, some half-naked, some daubed in paint, some wearing horned gold lamé headdresses; all of us apparently presided over by a mysterious, ungendered figure, shrouded in black, sitting atop a precarious tower made of crates, waiting to receive the child-like jewellery people were making on trestle tables below, either accepting it grudgingly or dashing it to the ground.

What was I up to, when I could have been catching up on The Honourable Woman or in the pub? In the first instance, I was in the soothing spaces of the Serpentine Gallery, recovering from a two-hour queue by submitting to the charismatic presence of Marina Abramovic. I caught her very near the end of her 512 Hours project, in which visitors found themselves standing on plinths, hand-in-hand with strangers, or walking in super-slow motion, or being put to bed. Sometimes, as in my case, there was a direct and unexpectedly moving interaction with the artist herself.

In the second instance, I was enjoying a bit of what Joe Scotland, director of Clapham gallery Studio Voltaire, calls the ‘bottled mayhem’ of Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, formerly known as Spartacus Chetwynd, one-time Turner Prize nominee and the creator of a complex, filmic artwork entitled Hermitos Children 2, of which this event was a part, which will open at the gallery on 12 October. The piece, which utilises and then up-ends the conventions of TV detective shows to make an alternative, experimental crime drama, will blend together numerous events and performances staged in venues from London to Australia, Malta to Poland, all funded by a mixture of grants, individual backers and Kickstarter donations.

Shanzhai Biennial's Campaign 1

Abramovic’s meditatively silent spaces and Chetwynd’s bacchanalian free-for-all — Scotland, who has worked with her since 2005, describes it as something between ritual and party — are worlds apart, but are both part of the provocative, energetic and ceaselessly inventive world of performance art, whose currency and popularity have been steadily increasing both on the art scene and beyond its somewhat rarefied confines. Where once it might have been seen as off-puttingly abstract, or even pretentious, it is now understood to encourage productive play between different art forms and media. And it’s certainly evolved from the early work of Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow and Yoko Ono in the 1950s and 1960s.

These days, it boasts world-famous artists such as Martin Creed and Abramovic, who has been called the ‘grandmother’ of performance art, and Tino Sehgal, who forbids his ‘constructed situations’ — often dance-based pieces that involve both trained ‘interpreters’ and the public themselves — from being photographed, and who, when he sells them (if it can be called that), does so only by verbal contract.

In terms of a collector’s market, per-formance art is still largely the domain of institutional purchasers such as Tate Modern, which owns works by Joseph Beuys, Gilbert & George and Cindy Sherman, in which it is artefacts or the rights to restage that are bought and sold; but it is likely only a matter of time before private collectors begin to want in. Some connoisseurs, such as Nicoletta Fiorucci, the founder of the Fiorucci Art Trust, are already acting as patrons — in her case, supporting contemporary art practitioners by organising the yearly ‘Volcano Extravaganza’ on the island of Stromboli, in which artists gather for a month to make work.

Such is the medium’s fecundity and burgeoning significance that this year’s Frieze London art fair, which runs from 15 to 18 October in Regent’s Park, will for the first time feature a ‘Live’ gallery consisting of six works selected and developed for the fair, and supported by associate sponsor Alexander McQueen. ‘ “Live” is a way we can really support younger and mid-career galleries to bring experimental work to the fair,’ Jo Stella Sawicka, Frieze’s deputy director, tells me, adding that the conservative financial climate has inevitably meant that it’s larger, more financially secure galleries who can take a gamble, particularly in the arena of performance art, which has historically been ‘very non-commercial’, either because of its ephemerality or the costs associated with enacting work. It is, however, too creative an area to ignore. ‘To be really representative of activity in the art world now, it’s great that we can bring that kind of work into the fair and make it possible for galleries to do it for whom it would be a risk otherwise.’

The pieces themselves certainly sound anything but conservative: they include two historical works, one of them a recreation of Franz Erhard Walther’s ‘action-based sculptures’ of the 1960s and 1970s, and four pieces by younger artists, among them the Japanese United Brothers’ Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent? They will offer their audience soup made by their mother using vegetables grown in the region of the Fukushima nuclear power station, which was damaged to terrifying effect by the 2011 tsunami.

Perhaps even more conceptually testing is the idea of a piece by the New York-based Shanzhai Biennial, which describes itself as ‘a multinational brand posing as an art project posing as a multinational brand posing as a biennial’, and which Sawicka explains as a riff on a Chinese consumer phenomenon in which counterfeits of famous brands gain their own cultish popularity. What the Shanzhai Biennial will do at Frieze is take over the fair’s brand and create a range of merchandise for sale. Intrigued by this, I asked its gallery, Project Native Informant, whether there are any recurring features that one might detect across a new generation of performance artists — perhaps a political sense, or an overlap with other art forms, such as theatre or dance? Comes the reply: ‘Contemporary art by definition processes a contemporaneity akin to performability. It moves time on.’ OK.

A rather more decipherable answer came from Sawicka, who told me: ‘In the past, a lot of performance has been to do with the body politic. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was true that lots of feminists used performance as a way of expressing politics. Now I don’t think that’s the same motivation. There’s a whole generation of artists with online experience as part of their upbringing, and this whole concept of avatars and gaming and second personalities.’

It’s a view echoed by Joe Scotland, who thinks that things have been slowly ‘bubbling up’. ‘It’s come from the artists predominantly,’ he explains. ‘In the 1990s, the performance art scene was very insular in some ways, it was very much obsessed with the body... In the past ten or 15 years, performance art has opened up more and become mainstream, and there’s a much more direct influence of, say, music or theatre or performance.’

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd's Listen Up!. 2014, part of Hermitos Children 2

Many artists make their performances alongside other kinds of work, and don’t necessarily see them as saleable. But, I asked David Roberts, a Scottish-born and London-based property developer who has spent many years assembling an impressive art collection and an accompanying foundation, how might one go about building up a performance art portfolio? He agrees that it presents some unusual and interesting challenges: ‘Some artists do performances where they really are integral to the performance, and you think, well, how do you collect that, because some day they’ll be dead, and having a certificate saying that so-and-so will come and do this specific thing in your space isn’t going to be worth anything when they’re not there.’

His foundation has often staged live work — including The Remains (The Making Of) by Danish artists Nina Beier and Marie Lund in which two workmen sat hammering and chiselling away at a sculpture for eight hours a day — and he is convinced of its importance; he points particularly to its heritage in repressive regimes, such as Iron Curtain countries or China, where to make art with a tangible end product that might be discovered and deemed subversive was — and in some cases continues to be — highly dangerous. He recalls being gripped by an exhibition he saw at the Pompidou Centre, which featured films made covertly by artists from countries such as

Hungary and Romania; his interest was in part sparked by that of his wife, the Lithuanian artist Indre Serpytyte, whose family lived under the Soviet regime.‘If art was simple, then people would make sculptures and paintings, and maybe take photographs, and that would be it,’ he says. ‘As I’ve gone through the journey, it’s taken me time to get used to the idea of certain things. I’m probably more open-minded now than I was 20 years ago.’ His collection has thus far leaned towards work with a performance element — photographic or video documentary, for example — but he says he wouldn’t rule out the idea of acquiring something more conceptual in the future. What would make him buy a performance? ‘If I see something in the future that is so wonderful that I feel as if it would be terrible not to have it in the collection, then I’d definitely do it.’

Frieze London 2014, Regent’s Park (friezelondon.com). Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Studio Voltaire, SW4 (studiovoltaire.org)

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