From Performance to Video (and back again)

It’s time to draw some of the various strands together, at least for now, and put down a few thoughts that have accompanied me during this research. It is clearly not the final word, I still have a lot of viewing and thinking to do and then some practical experiments of my own as well. A few things have struck me all the same.

The first is that Dance-for-the-camera is a big thing, indeed it has been for several decades. Why has dance spawned a hybrid film genre in a way that performance art has not? I don’t mean to suggest there are no performance artists working in film and video, of course there are and I talked about a few of the more famous ones the other day, but somehow I don’t see it as having created its own centre of gravity in the way that dance film has.

As genres of performance there are significant differences. Perhaps one that is most pertinent here is repeatability. When making a video it is often advantageous to film several takes of the same scene. It is then possible to either pick the best of them or to edit the different videos together. With a single action that is performed just once this is not an option.

With a single unrehearsed action there is also greater unpredictability, particularly from the point of view of the spectator: the boundaries are unclear and things might well go awry. Watching a video is a more predictable experience, it is going to remain safely on the screen (unless it is The Ring!) and not spray you with water,  make you move out of its way or get stopped by the police. The video will be the same no matter how many times you watch it. It has a fundamentally different presence.

A further feature of much performance art is that it happens in so called “real-time.” There is usually no fictional time whereby the action jumps from one point in time to another. In performance art what the spectator typically sees is a process unfolding in the shared time and space of artist and audience. Within this, the lulls are often just as important as the moments of tension and release because they offer the spectator time to reflect upon the work and possibly reposition themselves both physically and mentally in relation to it. Films that function in ‘real time’ like Empire (1964) of Warhol are neither common nor particularly watchable.

With a tightly rehearsed show the audience is usually carried along at the pace of the show and these lulls are eliminated. When this is transferred over into video where we are more accustomed to editing, lulls will often come over as simply dead time. If you start to edit the video and remove them, however, you can quickly distort the performance and end up with a highlights clip.

Performance art videos, often therefore, tend to take the status of documentation, rather than possessing a life quite independent of the live event. This goes to the heart of the notion of authenticity, much valorized in performance art, which can be seen as being undermined when the video intervenes to too great an extent. Of course some styles of performance survive this transfer of media better than others.

So there are plenty of exceptions and it is perhaps these which I will be studying over the next few months. Historical ones like Jack Smith’s Faming Creatures looks like a happening that has been filmed and edited together with the logic of an experimental film, while Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen is a direct to camera style of performance. In many ways I prefer this to having a decorative audience present whose principal function is to make the performance appear more important and more real, whatever that is. Filming in public space is different, there the audience gives a context but if it is just to include 20 people in black turtlenecks lurking around the edge of the frame, I don’t need them.

So that’s it for now. Time to get viewing more, filming more and most importantly, spend more time going over my clips and editing them. Once I have made one or two video experiments, I’ll post them here but for now: THAT’S A WRAP!

The last of my formal conversations on video and performance was with artist and curator Cinzia Cremona. She was in Sydney and sadly my a-n grant didn’t stretch so far as to fly me there for the meeting. This was clearly for the best in terms of carbon footprint and it was actually very appropriate to talk over Skype as we had previously had a conversation in a similar way as part of a video art project of hers involving virtual dining.

She has a very particular interest in video art and performance this being the major thrust of her PhD and the direction of her program when she was co-curating Visions at The Nunnery in London. We started with some historical figures who have staked out the territory of video performance. Vito Acconci was the first we covered and while I was well aware of his performances I was not so aware of his video work that incorporates this and which looks incredibly prescient given the directions things have evolved in.

Abramovic and Ulay came up naturally enough within the discussion of the position of the camera in the live performance. They set up many of their performances for the camera then invited a live audience to watch. This combines some of the precision of the film-maker with that of the performance artist and is one way to straddle the two media. I have seen this go too far in terms of events being documented to death and it seems to me that the presence of the camera and focus of the performer is an issue here. I have in mind here a Herman Nitsch performance but now I think about it that was as much a problem of the spectators all wanting a piece of the action and crowding round with their gadgets. This staged for camera approach can work with certain types of work, I guess. Where I will not forgive Abramovic is the dreadful video of hers where she is reunited with Ulay after all those years at her MOMA show, complete with violin background music. This was recorded at the same time they were fighting in the courts over unpaid royalties on their shared artworks, a case she finally lost.

We got onto the question of at what point does an artist become a video artist and cease being a performance artist working with video. Sometimes this line is blurred and the liminal space between the two media is a very productive one. John Smith’s films are a case in point. In many of them, such as Hotel Diaries, he plays a significant presence as the narrator and his camera often adopts a POV focus. While he never, as far as I am aware, gives live performances, his films are infused with a performance for the camera sensibility.

Joan Jonas was a further point of reference and following up on her work and some of the other artists we talked about I am struck by the final form in which this work reaches its public. These are works that are consumed within the gallery. John Smith in a conversation at The Barbican makes the valid point that his screenings are usually one-offs and the people who come are usually in the know whereas gallery exhibitions continue for some time and new people can discover the work. When putting this alongside online video, which I talked about during my last meeting, the distinctions become clearer and these are manifest too in the type of work that fits best with these different formats.  It seems I will have some experimenting to do.

For my next meeting, I got together with video curator and lecturer Sylvia Zhan. I last met her in Nanjing, China when she was there on a whistle-stop tour arranging an exhibition program. She is interesting for me to connect with because she is just as at home in China as in the UK, straddling the two worlds and providing curatorial continuity that connects them. As an artist I also spend a lot of my time in China, making work and showing it there too, as well as operating in my more familiar context of the UK and Europe.

We started talking about how people are engaging with video nowadays. While the gallery and screenings remain the most prestigious contexts, she was in little doubt that the future was online. We got talking about some of the different ways people come to videos and she gave the example of a friend who posts online videos of food reviews. There are a lot of different platforms out there, some are more sophisticated and some less so, like Kuaishou which attracts a large following who watch, share and comment upon short comic videos.

One of the things that strikes me with many of these, such as Douyin here, is that they are heavily layered. By that I mean there are multiple windows, scrolling texts, pop-up texts, animation and so on. Like most Chinese TV, it creates the impression of movement and vitality by bombarding the viewer with information. This reminded me of Alan Smith’s videos, many of which also feature scrolling text. The content is vastly different and there are no animal ear animations on the screen but this collaging of video and text is common to them.

We arrived at Youtube and Vimeo and discussed the merits of them, the question of duplication and how they produce revenue. This conversation was not, however, mostly centre around money, it was genuinely looking at the contemporary distribution of video and the formats and sub-formats that this has created. I do already have a Youtube channel and have had one film that was a minor hit with 50,000 views. While this has been a useful as a calling card it was not enough to be an effective substitute for live performance.

I was left with the impression that there is a large and rapidly shifting marketplace. I also felt that even if these platforms remove the traditional cultural gatekeepers one still needs to be savvy to these trends and have an eye for popular tastes.

I also realized I have had a short video made about my work that reached a huge audience of around a million. A popular web documentary producer in China made a piece about a performance of mine in a marriage market last year. It may well be that the format and point of interest has to be something quite different to what it originally was in the live performance, or indeed the performance has to be conceived as one that is done solely for the camera. With these questions swirling around and some feedback to come on the videos I have in circulation, we parted with me vowing to look more carefully at what is out there.

Today I made a welcome return to Allenheads Contemporary Arts in Northumberland for the first of my meetings to talk about video and performance. Curator and video artist Alan Smith proved to be as useful a source of practical and conceptual information as I could hope to find. Starting off in front of the TV with Boris Johnson holding fort, we talked broadly about video as it circulates in popular media and online and then narrowed down to artist’s video.

It was really useful to be able to make the connection between this broad visual culture and some of the processes of artists’ self-produced video. Like Figgis, Smith also stressed the need to keep things simple in the sense that you shouldn’t allow the technology to run away with you but rather you should consider the work as a whole from the start and understand your tools thoroughly. There were plenty of useful tips on sound recording and the wise words of bad image usually being more forgivable and fixable the bad sound. Archiving was also a useful topic to touch upon and I have started to clean up my overcrowded laptop and put more material onto an external hard drive. Finally, in terms of image, I immediately started doing a few tests on my camera’s video and made a useful discovery there.

We looked at some of Smith’s videos which combine text and moving image and talking about the processes by which they were made. This in turn lead us to looking at some trailers, most notably that for Man Bites Dog with the idea that the asymmetrical timing of the cuts in this video is really rather good. This lead to the challenge of using it as a musical template and putting ones own material into it and seeing how that worked. Given where I am this sort of formal exercise is quite a useful one for me to work within.