- Venue
- Tramway
- Location
The NRLA “One Year On” programme is a chance to see new work from NRLA Elevator artists who were the talking point of NRLA 2007. Claire was definitely one such talking point last year. Opinions about her 2007 durational piece Flagrante Delicto, in which Claire repetitively opened and slammed shut wooden doors for four hours on a small circular stage, were strong and divisive; it was either the best thing that you saw at the festival or you hated it with a passion. As someone who swayed towards the latter I decided that Claire’s output for this year –Auslander- was an opportunity for me to take another look at her work and find out what many people loved about it.
Auslander is four hours long and comprises of a circular staircase upon which a performer (Jordan McKenzie) walks up and down at a slow, steady pace while an opera singer (Feline Lang) stands in the middle of the set and sings acapella to no apparent or recognisable score. Meanwhile Claire, who omits her surname to assert her anonymity, stares down at the ground, hiding her face from the audience whilst walking slowly and drawing a partial black curtain around the entire set. Claire and her co-performers are dressed in black unisex clothing and all their gestures are minimal, controlled and rhythmic.
There are similarities between Claire’s 2007 and 2008 NRLA presentations; the duration, the circular stage set, the uniformity of the black clothing, the pared down gestures and sound are common to both Auslander and Flagrante Delicto. There are also underlying critical similarities. Auslander, as with Flagrante Delicto, is a work overtly wary of its own spectacle. Claire has stripped down identification and gesture to focus meaning on the elements of routine, the banal and everyday that are Claire’s main material. With this she deliberately scripts a deliberate and definite nothing in order to performatively double those same elements of the everyday, routine and the banal. This is recognisable performance art history at work, but, crucially, Auslander doesn’t have the benefit of the humour, poignancy and political impetus of its 1960’s conceptual precursors. More importantly, even though the repetitiveness and the extended duration skew the normalities of the behaviour on display (drawing a curtain, climbing stairs), Auslander, which translated from German means foreigner or outlander, doesn’t succeed in making that same behaviour or everyday reality strange, foreign or outlandish. In addition, whilst Jordan McKenzie’s continual stepping up and down is no doubt uncomfortable after four hours, and precarious due to the size of his feet on the comparatively small steps, it is not strenuous or precarious enough to lift Auslander out of the realms of the habitual and into the beautiful. Without all this, Auslander is a performance stripped down to only its most anonymous and beige. The experience of being inside it is analogous to being in an airport lounge, a petrol station forecourt or the inside of the IBIS in Glasgow; an easy on the eye, wipe down, inoffensive pit stop en route to somewhere else more exciting or important.
It goes without saying that Auslander may not be all those things to many people. If nothing else, Claire’s 2007 Flagrante Delicto proved that what is one person’s less-than-mediocre is another’s wild excitement. And just as beige isn’t meaningless (it denotes palatable, neutral, mid range and in interior design terms: contemporary) so too Auslander is a carefully choreographed exercise in repetition, banality and blankness. This is not the same as saying the work lacks content or meaning, as Giorgio Agamben argued in his 2000 essay ‘Potentialities’, non-meaning is significant and potentially the ultimate in productivity in and of itself. Seen in this light, Auslander isn’t beige, an architectural in-between or an NRLA pit stop, it is a loaded blank canvas, brimming with potentiality, contingency and the liminal, non or negative side of meaning. Sadly, what this relates to in practical performance terms, for me sitting there in the space, is a great deal of productive, paradoxical and academic nothing. Perhaps this plentiful blank is what many people love about Claire’s work, and if so, who am I to judge?
This review was written as part of the Writing From Live Art publication project ’We Need to Talk About Live Art’ at the National Review of Live Art, Tramway, Glasgow Feb 6-11, 2008. Excerpts from We Need to Talk About Live Art are published in RealTime Magazine (Aus) 84 April-May 08,2008.
