Friends have heard this story a few times. Back in ancient history, Frieze commissioned an interview with the veteran US performance artist Carolee Schneemann. She was in the UK for an exhibition of her work at Cornerhouse in Manchester, her first show in the country for some time. We needed a portrait of the artist to accompany the piece, but the only time Schneemann was free to be photographed was on a Sunday morning, at her friends’ house in west London where she was staying, and she would have only an hour to spare before heading to the airport to fly home. We lined up a photographer. But on the morning of the shoot, the photographer phoned me to say that she had come down with a nasty stomach bug and would have to cancel. With only hours left, the only solution I could think of was to take the photograph myself, so I grabbed my camera and took the Tube to Ladbroke Grove.
It was a cold winter morning. The house was on one of those large west London Georgian terraces; white stucco, tall windows, steps up to the entrance. Schneemann welcomed me at the door. She was wearing high heels, mini-skirt, a luxurious black coat and a pair of thick, curved bull horns on her head. I was introduced to her friends. I got the impression they had known each other since the 1970s. Schneemann told me that she wanted to take the photographs in the back garden, using an old mirror with a white ornamental frame crowned with two horn shapes. I was to direct her. We began shooting but I found that I was too shy to give direction, so she took the lead. It was fun. She played it serious and dignified, she vamped for the camera, she gave encouragement. After photographing three or four set-ups we ran out of time. Schneemann asked if I’d accompany her to the station to get the train to the airport. I went out on to the street to hail a cab while she said goodbye to her friends.
She came out of the house with two enormous suitcases. Tears and mascara streaming down her face from her farewells. The horns were still on her head. I found a taxi. She had to sit leaning forward at an angle to keep the horns from bumping the roof of the cab and all the way to the station I could see the cabbie eyeing us in his rear-view mirror. We had an intense, serious conversation—the artist bent forward the entire time—talking about the BSE crisis that was then gripping the UK, how distressed she was at the sight of pyres of cattle in fields across the country. She talked about her friends, and how hard it had become to get by as an artist in big cities. I dropped her off at Paddington Station. She waved goodbye, still wearing the horns, a satyr heading to the Heathrow Express.
A few months later, Schneemann returned to London for ‘A Short History of Performance’ at the Whitechapel. This series of events re-staged pivotal works of performance art from the 1960s and ‘70s. Schneemann’s orgiastic happening, Meat Joy, first staged at Judson Memorial Church, New York, in 1964, was included alongside pieces by The Bernsteins, Stuart Brisley, The Kipper Kids, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce McLean, and Hermann Nitsch. (The Kipper Kids and their contemporaries in ‘70s London, particularly Anne Bean and her Moody and the Menstruators, came up frequently when I was researching my film on COUM Transmissions. I’d love to see a solid book or documentary about them.) I remember that year witnessing a lot of hand-wringing about re-staging performance art. Arguments in pubs, fractious panel debates, angry letters sent to the art magazines. Anna Dezeuze, writing about the Whitechapel series for Art Monthly, described a public talk connected to the series at which “devoted fans of performance art expressed their concern that a re-enactment would take away the authenticity, spontaneity and radicalism of performance art in the 60s.” One of them accused the Whitechapel of “commercialism and nostalgia, arguing that historical performances could not, and should not, be recreated.” According to Dezeuze, Schneemann agreed, saying that re-stagings she’d seen were “inane and vitiated.”
All that anxiety now seems quaint. The horse has bolted. Mark E. Smith’s line about “the three Rs: repetition, repetition, repetition,” has been repeated to the point of tiring commonplace. We live with a different relationship towards words such as “authenticity” and “radicalism,” used-up labels more commonly used for marketing people and things rather than embodying ideals. Technology has turned context into quicksand. It’s always been the case that repeat performance and re-staging is unremarkable for musicians, playwrights, dancers, and actors. It’s integral to the work and to the pleasure of watching it. (Writers are spared the pain of rewriting after their work is published. Re-reading, however, is an altogether higher order of torture.) The daily job of an actor or musician makes those arguments from twenty years ago against re-staging performance art seem precious, like possessive attempts to claim ownership of memories: “I was there at Judson Church in ‘64, you weren’t.” Performance art, of course, isn’t theatre, it isn’t the work of the concert hall. It has its own protocols, developed during a particular moment in 20th century art, some of which have dried into formal convention, some of which remain liquid. I appreciate that. But respect for preservation, keeping the art in aspic, tending to “what the artist intended,” can quickly shade into idolatry. Earlier this year I was talking to an American museum curator who used the phrase “what the artist intended” so many times during our conversation that he sounded like a vicar consoling a bereaved parishioner over tea and biscuits. (“I’m awfully sorry Mr Blandish, but I do believe it’s what she would have wanted…”)
Interviewed a few years ago by art historian Dominic Johnson, Anne Bean said: “By being a continuum, art includes all the life ‘in between.’ It’s just the truth of it. That’s how the work happens, in among other practices of life. So, those moments in a life that happen to have a photograph or a bit of video attached, they are simply butterflies caught in a net… The work, and the life, and everything in between—the fluidity of it—all of it is equally valid.” It makes me think of that cold morning all those years ago photographing Carolee Schneemann. What was that? Two people doing their respective jobs; for a bit of press, to record a little moment for the archives. Two people making pictures together. It was my nerves, her confidence, a cab ride, a conversation, a bemused taxi driver. We would publish two of my pictures in Frieze, but to my lasting regret I lost the transparencies I took of her that day. The two photos that were printed are all that exists, unless a dusty drawer somewhere still keeps them hidden. It was a Sunday morning that happened to have “a photograph or a bit of video attached […] simply butterflies caught in a net.”
The other day, scrolling Instagram for my daily fix of futility, I chanced across a short piece of video posted from WIELS in Brussels. It was from the exhibition ‘Workers in Song’ by composer Billy Bultheel and artist James Richards, conceived as a kind of chamber music composition, combining live performance with archive film and video. (It sounds good. I wish I could see it.) The Instagram post showed a strobe-lit gallery and a man reading from behind a desk. It was an excerpt from Ian White’s piece IBIZA: A Reading for ‘The Flicker’. Ian was an artist, writer and curator who galvanized film and performance in London during the 1990s and early aughts. In 2013 he died of cancer at the age of 42.
I saw IBIZA in 2008 at The Horse Hospital, London, when Ian first staged it. He sat at a table, behind him a projection screen. Tony Conrad’s 1966 film The Flicker played throughout. It assaults the eyes using a strobe effect created by black and white frames on the celluloid alternating at different rates. Ian read an account of a brief relationship with a man he met in Ibiza. It was as if an intense sensual memory were erupting through the formalities of a college film lecture. I remember lines from Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto sewn into the monologue, and a list of dating profile likes and dislikes. I can recall something of the atmosphere of the Horse Hospital that summer evening: the red walls and the tiled ramp leading up into the gallery; sitting at the back of a packed room; Ian’s strong Essex accent; the retina burn of The Flicker; a stinging Rainer sentence against “being moved”—a nod, perhaps, toward Ian’s own distrust of sentimentality—and a crowd going to the pub opposite afterwards.
This is how Ian described IBIZA: “A real life true story and the image-less hallucinogens of Tony Conrad's 1966 film The Flicker are presented simultaneously, like parallel lines in a face-off. IBIZA is a question about the real: an assertion of difference or a kind of hopelessness with nonetheless some good energy, a response to a specific place and a specific time, a personal history and imaginary space. Not Ibiza, but the room we're in.” Art and performance, for Ian, existed not just in the moment between the lights going down at the start of an event and coming up again at the end, but in the way you carried yourself through the foyer after it finished and how you behaved in the pub afterwards and the way you described it to a friend the following morning. Colour, texture, emotion that no museum can ever recreate, that can only exist in fragments, carried in the minds of many, smudged in with whatever else rattles around the head—thoughts of sex, going on holiday, paying the rent, doing the groceries. Things that colour an account of the performance in anecdote, in a book, as part of another show years later at an art centre in Brussels. On an Instagram post that sets the mind thinking about something that happened to you with another artist’s work, in another time and place.
In 2018, IBIZA was restaged as part of ‘Any Frame is a Thrown Voice,’ a show dedicated to Ian’s work organized by Kirsty Bell and Mike Sperlinger at Camden Arts Centre in London. An artist and close friend of Ian’s, Every Ocean Hughes (formerly known as Emily Roysdon), went to see Sharon Hayes and Evan Ifekoya re-enact his work. She said afterwards in Frieze: “An unwavering principle of Ian’s was in making sure there was a choice, and I’m not saying too much if I claim to know that he would have wanted both artists to take liberties and make new space within the work, for this time, the room we’re in.”
The other day I heard a programme on NTS Radio about the British group A.R. Kane, responsible for some of the most dreamy records of the 1980s. The show featured a long interview with band member Rudy Tambala. Modest, warm, thoughtful, he talked about growing up working class in London, about his experiences as a black musician in a largely white alternative music scene, about his love of reggae, punk and Viennese waltz, about the physical power of live music and the life-changing moment when he first heard The Cocteau Twins. Towards the end of the show, Tambala remembered how blown away he was when his bandmate, Alex Ayuli, first sang him the lyrics he had written to their song ‘Spook.’ He likened it to the science fiction novel Arc of the Dream by A.A. Attanasio. The book tells the story of The Arc, a multi-dimensional being that enters Earth’s space-time continuum, an entity so vast that it has to inhabit four different people in order to accommodate itself. Each person carries a fragment of its consciousness, only making the Arc’s consciousness whole when they meet. In the interview, Tambala is unable to express why the words to ‘Spook’ hit home. “I just fucking loved it from the moment he sang it to me. It’s difficult for me to explain. It has an effect on me […] The atmosphere of that book [Arc of the Dream] reminds me of ‘Spook,’ this really innocent, lovely imagery.” He was, I think, trying to describe a moment of electrical contact between two people, fizzing inchoate at an invisible frequency. The arc of the work landing just beyond the horizon of language.
I’m now at the age when I can say “I was there” for one or two things, just like those performance art devotees at the Whitechapel. I have seen how art fragments and splinters the moment it leaves the studio or desk, and so the most I could ever claim is that “I was there, viewing from that angle, in that corner of the room, closer to the left speaker than the right, sight-line partially blocked by a tall man in front, behind me someone whispering to their friend, pins-and-needles in my foot, transfixed but needing the loo.” Books, paintings, songs, they arrive us at different stations in our lives. We might pick up on this or that aspect, overlook things the author wished us to spot, see patterns and symbols that the artist themselves hadn’t noticed. But there is no cosmic force that can reconstitute those fragments, no special art preservation glue. The world has already changed between the moment you play the first note and the instant you hit it again. Butterflies caught in a net, at best.
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—My favourite talks series in New York, nay the world—The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture—is rolling out its Fall season. Included is Chloe Raunet’s documentary I Am Weekender, an oral history of one music video: Flowered Up’s 17-minute long, 1992 club hymn, ‘Weekender.’ Sukhdev Sandhu, Colloquium Chairperson, says “personally, I think it’s one of the great London films of the last sixty years.” Raunet’s doc screens on October 6th at the Colloquium’s usual NYU campus location: check @colloquium_unpopular_culture on IG for details and RSVP.
—Ace Records are set to release In The Light Of Time - UK Post Rock and Leftfield Pop 1992–1998, a bumper compilation featuring Laika, Pram, Disco Inferno, Moonshake, Seefeel and a host of other fantastic, hard-to-classify British bands that I remember losing my Saturday job wages to back in ’92. I will be doing the same again.
—Speaking of hard-to-classify, Tania Pérez Córdova will open her first US survey show at Sculpture Center in New York this month. It’s subtle, sensual work, and according to the exhibition press release, lately curious about “the insufficiency of discourse.” I know that feeling. I love the title: “Generalization.”
—I’ve been enjoying the Animation Obsessive newsletter here on Substack. Their latest is about Art Clokey’s Gumby, and how it was influenced by a now largely forgotten Serbian artist named Slavko Vorkapich. The newsletter highlights an early film of Clokey’s, a delightful claymation titled Gumbasia, dating from 1955, a year before Gumby the character came into being. It’s like watching Gumby as a Platonic solid.