The Infr’action Venezia Festival presented quite different sorts of performances to those found within the national pavilions. It is a dedeicated performance art festival which ran parallel to the preview days of the Biennale for the second time. It mostly took place in the narrow park that connected Giardini and Arsenale with some performances spilling out onto the nearby streets and an early morning event on Piazza San Marco. There were over 40 participating artists from a great many countries and they formed an intergenerational mass with many styles and approaches to live performance.
It was quite striking to see the difference between these performances and those inside the national pavilions. As the Infr’action artists were generally dedicated performance artists they knew how to deal with people asking them questions during their performance, they were able to make effective use of public space, they knew how to vary their rhythm, were often improvising and finding something in the act of giving the performance. Another distinguishing feature was that it was the artists themselves who was almost always the performers of their work. There were one or two exceptions where more people (usually other festival artists) collaborated in order to realise a performance but the vast majority of the works were self-made solo performances. Most of the performances had been prepared to some degree before the festival began but there were also performances made on the spot in response to the local conditions. All of this gave the Infr’action performances a very different atmosphere: the work was more raw, personal and spontaneous, it not precious and usually made with simple materials.
The park space was the definite focus for the performances, which took place over several afternoons. There was no formal timetable but rather they unfolded in a more organic manner in response to the other works, the weather and so on. Often there were simultaneous performances providing multiple focal points. As they tended to have very different rhythms and durations this dispersed, polyrhythmic structure often helped both the slower and the more intensive pieces as there was contrast and a chance to return to actions over time and see how they had evolved.
My search for manifestos uncovered one that was written by Marilyn Arsem for Infr’action Venezia 2011. This is an excerpt:
Performance art is now.
Performance art is live.
Performance art reveals itself in the present.
The artist engages in the act of creation as s/he performs.
Performance art’s manifestation and outcome cannot be known in advance.
Re-enactment of historical work is theater, not performance art.
Performance art is real.
Performance art operates on a human scale.
It exists on the same plane as those who witness it.
The artist uses real materials and real actions.
The artist is no one other than her/himself.
There are no boundaries between art and life.
The time is only now.
The place is only here.
Full text:
http://www.infractionvenice.org/this-is-performanc…
While I would not say that every performance adhered completely to these points it does give a pretty good idea of the general tendency of the work. It does, for me, leave questions hanging such as what exactly are the things that performance art is, such as “real” and what are the things it is not, such as “theater”. I also find that being your self in a performance can be tricky as this self is somewhat fluid and dependent upon context. That said, the features that she identifies, however we might chose to interpret them, are to a great extent those which distinguished the performances of Infr’action from those of the Biennale. What’s more, it is perhaps the right of the manifesto to express itself without stopping to define terms; such academic niceties can be left for conventional academic texts.
In conclusion then it is ironic then that while performance does features in the more prestigious side of the Biennale, it is usually badly done as the systems which support the national pavilion model rarely has a use for performance. If performance art is your focus then look elsewhere, such as at Infr’action, as it operates on a model that is more accommodating of the form.
