POST 22: Arm-waving: performance art.

We need to talk--Matthias Sperling in conversation with Marcus Coates, Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadlers' Wells, 24 June.
Florence Peake, performance for Block Universe Performance Art Festival, Somerset House, 15 June.

It's contentious that Matthias Sperling waving his arms in front of a reclaimed stolen painting in a Berlin museum can  'appease the painting’, as he claims. The painting is draped in black cloth--a funereal gesture perhaps to its infamy. One could agree that his actions serve to appease his audience's sense of  historical injustices, but this has nothing to do with how the painting 'feels' or what 'it' needs appeased. Marcus Coates leaps to the word ‘shamanic’, as if arm-waving is a shamanic activity.  Now, I like the arm-waving; I find it intriguing, but I am getting extremely uncomfortable here.  Coates, a film maker whose interventions,  including wearing a horse’s head in Council chambers whilst a Budget was being disclosed, is being very loose with the term.  His work in people's council homes--responding to their questions or statements with handstands in their kitchens or short dances in their living rooms--is a nice and even powerful form of non-verbal interpolation in their day to day lives; but again, the appraisal of these as much beyond a healthy, even helpful and enriching, change in perspective is  unreasonable.

Anthropologist Mercea Eliade asserts that ‘shamans only exist where they are believed in’--a statement troubling at our nerve-endings, which somewhere still have faith--but in the end I believe he is right. Truly shamanic activities call to the invisible (or the ‘concealed’, if you prefer Heidegger to  Alice Bailey), but they do more than puzzle at a thought or stir at air.

My patience breaks its tether once Coates begins to ramble about monkeys and evolution. I say, Let's 

drape a monkey with a cloth, dance in front of it, and see what happens when you have to face that monkey's agency.  Sperling looks intrigued, wants to try it, how can I set that up;  whereas Coates behaves as if caught out.  Well, he looks ‘as if’:  he glares and says not a word.

Much less disingenuous is the performance of Florence Peake in the inaugural London performance art festival,  Block Universe. She wonders at the work of a 'medium' from the early 20th Century. What did the medium do, exactly?  What did she 'channel'?  Peake initially takes clay and moulds it into amorphous yet slightly anthropomorphic forms. One is like a failed phallus, drooping; the other a little more steady, but not by much. They are 'you' and 'me'--our malleable selves.  Over the course of another 40 minutes Peake herself becomes  'clayed', covered with the substance as she engages with the audience, enacts their questions, and comes back to reshape her 'sculptures', without wiping off her hands. Her performance plays on the edge of being maker/creator, the edge between thought and form coming-into-being where 'voices' might be those of angels, gods, or restless souls from 'behind the veil'.  Or they may just be ourselves. Hence, Peake's body 'enacting' someone's stated worry makes no claim for truth, or claim to 'heal', but it does play out an honest exchange with those words passing through her physiology. Peake climbs the walls of the room, articulating the square, squaring the arena, containing the performance, a ritual space that yet asks more questions than it purports to answer.

There is a soft chaos in the room (as maybe, too, there is in the same room where Coates and/or Sperling perform, as opposed to when they talk about performance), a reluctance to bring things to hard edges and a gentle trust in the audience itself that they are negotiating the story with and alongside her.  A trust that  another world, the next folding is opening out anyway, and which Peake helps amplify, like a caretaker or custodian.

Florence Peake. Photo: Sylvain Deleu

Meanwhile,  Marina Abramovic, all the way back in Oz, is having a retrospective in which she claims that ‘no performer can stand in for the audience—the audience have to do it themselves'. In full:

I have made a career as a performance artist for 40 years now and my relationship to the public is changing. It used to be very simple: the public was sitting in the audience and I was performing in front of them. Then, with my performance The Artist is Present, I created a one-to-one experience where the public was watching and only one person was actually experiencing. In 512 Hours, which I did at the Serpentine Galleries in London, the public were actually the ones performing and I just blended in.

In Sydney, for Marina Abramović: In Residence, I will be like a conductor in the exhibition space, but it will be the public who will take the physical and emotional journey. We constantly like to be entertained, to get things from outside. We never take time to get in touch with ourselves… our inner self. My function in this new kind of performance situation is to show you, through the Abramovic Method, what you can do for yourself. I wanted to make this big change because I understood that actually you can’t get any experience by me doing it for you… So I’m completely shifting the paradigm, changing the rules. 

Marina Abramović,   http://kaldorartprojects.org.au

Still telling us what to do and think, Marina. The self-publicity machine rolls on.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.