DOORS INTO THE NEOLITHIC MIND

Experiential Interpretations of the Prehistoric Landscape

Simon Pascoe and Caitlin Easterby

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Can art unlock a sense of place that is just as important as the facts? We’ve been driven up the sides of the valley between flaming braziers to the sound of gongs and I wonder whether this is an insight into the avenue at Stonehenge or the great sacred enclosures that we have fragmentary traces of. The idea of moving in a ritual way through fire and wind and light and theatre – if this doesn’t help us to re-engage with ancient ideas then to be perfectly honest I can’t think what will.

—Martin Ellis, Curator, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2011

Red Earth arts group has for over twenty years created outdoor site-specific installations and performances in, and in response to, landscapes across Britain, mainland Europe, Java, Japan and Mongolia. These intensely experiential events are often the result of interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and non-arts professionals such as ecologists, archaeologists, geologists, historians, land managers, farmers, and communities. We attempt to engage the public in the creative process, bringing people together in participatory events to explore their natural and cultural heritages, and transforming our understanding of the places where we live.{{1.}}

We are artists who have worked together as Red Earth since its inception over 20 years ago. We work with performance as a method of initiating culturally significant relationships between human and landscape. The group experiences are often intense and cathartic, immersing the public in performance and revealing the hidden terrain through communal acts of identification with place. Our interest in archaeology first bore fruit in the site-specific performance Enclosure (2007).

In this paper we look at three of our performance projects: Enclosure, a site-specific event on Hambledon Hill in Dorset, the largest Neolithic causewayed enclosure in Europe; Lithograph (in-development), a journey across the British Neolithic landscape; and CHALK (2011), a series of installations and performances across two chalk downland sites in Southeast England.

Our projects respond directly to prehistorically resonant sites. Performance and audience experience in Enclosure, Lithograph, and CHALK allow participants to draw analogies between contemporary and prehistoric experiences of the landscape. The events are cultural interfaces between modern society and an imagined past, via contemporary ritual in mythographic landscapes previously manipulated by our Neolithic predecessors. In the Neolithic Period, communities marked the land in ways that are still observable today: forest clearance and then-new constructions that utilized earth, stone, and timber – creative manipulations of spaces used for more than just everyday survival. As Mike Pearson indicates, Neolithic sites “are places of – and for – choreography: they are about the movement of people, as much as of the stars. They are locations of events, processions, gatherings, feasts, ceremonies…. places of – and for – performance.”{{2.}}

Red Earth projects do not aim for authentic historical reconstruction. They challenge reductionist thinking about ancient peoples and foreground the imaginative processes inherent in all archaeological and historical constructions. We argue that such work is valuable to both the public and academia with regards to our understanding of the prehistoric landscape. Enclosure, Lithograph and CHALK allow us, through our contemporary responses, to conceptualize parallels between ourselves and our prehistoric predecessors. As such, we invoke Pearson’s definitions of performance as being “aware of its nature as a contemporary act, the latest occupation of a place where previous occupations are still apparent,” and which “can overlay different varieties of narrative – factual and fictive, historical and contemporary, creative and analytical, documentary and dramatic – within a given location, without laying any claim to authority or verisimilitude, whilst constantly serving to reveal it.”{{3.}}

Contemporary site-specific performance, created in response to the palimpsest of history and the multitude of practices that form the identity of place, is an unconventional yet valuable vehicle for suggesting and interpreting possible cultural responses to landscape during Neolithic times. We suggest that site-specific group experiences can stimulate new interpretations of archaeological research materials, especially in the area of phenomenology, as the following sections reveal in further depth.

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Exploring the Archeological Landscape Through Performance

ENCLOSURE

In 2007 we were invited to respond to the prehistoric landscape of Hambledon Hill in Dorset. There a chalk massif stands out above the Dorset landscape, marked by a well-preserved Iron Age hill fort. Covering the entire crown of Hambledon Hill are the almost invisible remains of the largest Neolithic enclosure in Europe.{{4.}}

The Iron Age fort itself surrounds a formidable Neolithic barrow (burial mound), which, in the minds of our Iron Age predecessors, we can assume was a respected feature of Hambledon Hill’s more ancient, unknown, and mythical inhabitants. Today the visible archaeological remains include substantial Iron Age ramparts and gateways, whilst, apart from the long barrow, the Neolithic enclosure has been reduced to faint undulations in the landscape, eroded by hundreds of years of farming. The Neolithic site was never permanently occupied; however there is strong evidence of ceremonial feasting, human and animal burials with substantial mortuary remains, and warfare.{{5.}} Key to the performance was this still-powerful presence of ancient cultures.

Enclosure, a one-off, site-specific event, took place in September 2007 across the crest of Hambledon Hill. It was a poetic response to the invisible Neolithic landscape, a eulogy to our unknown ancestors, and a contemporary performative event that responded to the echoes of our prehistoric past. The land became the protagonist, the performance a ritual across a mythographic terrain molded both physically and conceptually by our Neolithic predecessors. The performance evolved into a metaphysical journey that charted a voyage through both landscape and cultural memory.{{6.}}

Evident in Enclosure were the dynamics of ritual and ceremony. It was a journey/pilgrimage and communal interaction – the creation of a temporary community engaged in a symbolic journey in a liminal place – connected by a shared vicarious experience, amplified by sound and fire, and focused on a single figure as avatar, protagonist and initiate.

We staged the voyage at dusk on the autumn equinox so it would blur the lines between day and night, summer and winter, as well as life and death. The event was saturated with an intensity and viscosity that outweighed the sum of its parts. It stimulated a sense of atmosphere and awe theoretically compatible with ritual events that may have taken place on Hambledon Hill five thousand years ago.

The event began with a mile-long ascent along a chalk path that wound up to the Iron Age ramparts visible at the top of the hill. Two white flags marked part of the Neolithic enclosure’s perimeter. From this point several flag bearers, making their way over the sloping horizon, gradually joined an audience of over seven hundred people. Met by horn players within the Iron Age precinct, the audience eventually encountered Japanese performer Atsushi Takenouchi. The event then developed into a series of increasingly dramatic and transitional interventions, with Atsushi as catalyst.

Atsushi led us northward along the spine of Hambledon Hill. During the procession we became immersed in a unique atmosphere of sounds and images generated by conches, trance-like percussion, and increasing levels of flame and fire. Upon reaching and crossing the Neolithic barrow, Atsushi crossed the line between life and death in his ritual pouring of liquid chalk over his own body, symbolically transforming him from human to specter, ghost, spirit. At that moment the atmosphere felt more potent, reaching a climax that activated the entire landscape as Atsushi moved through a field of fire bowls to disappear over the horizon, obscured by a blazing corona of pyrotechnic fire. In the falling darkness and virtual silence, the audience made its way back down the chalk path, now delineated by fire bowls, to the “real” world below.{{7.}}

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LITHOGRAPH

A continuation of Enclosure, Lithograph is being developed by Red Earth in collaboration with archaeologists Tim Darvill from Bournemouth University, and Penny Bickle and Ffion Reynolds from Cardiff University. Currently envisaged as a journey across the British Neolithic landscape, Lithograph will begin with a two-part project that engages with Stonehenge and the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales (the latter is a source of the inner blue stone circle of early Stonehenge). This journey will contrast the created landscape of Stonehenge against the raw, natural architectural landscape of the Preseli Hills. We will explore the social connection between the sites, implied by the blue stone that they share.

We intend to extend the Lithograph projectin ways that might enable a conceptual journey across prehistoric Britain. It will involve site-responsive performance events at several locations throughout the British Isles, including Avebury, Maiden Castle in Dorset, and the Orkney Islands off the Scottish coast – the latter a topic of great interest in the news due to the recent discovery of a Neolithic site that is older than Stonehenge.{{8.}} Lithograph will be an immersive experience that highlights theoretical interactions between Neolithic social groups and the landscapes they inhabited through performances in which a contemporary public shares the occupation of an imaginary landscape.

We are truly excited about the potential of how our events may bring voice and corporeality to the disembodied spirit of these places, bringing them to life through interaction. Whatever their original purpose, these constructed sites were meant to be used. Our performances can potentially break through the cultural barriers modern society has created around architectural puzzles by way of preservation without activation. Lithograph might also inspire new questions about, and appreciations for, the construction of Neolithic sites.

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CHALK

CHALK took place between March and October 2011. The project wasa multi-layered response to the hidden landscape and history of the South Downs, a long and broad chalk grassland that rises above the English Channel, where the Downs end and their famous white cliffs meet the sea. There is strong physical evidence of prehistoric occupation in the form of earthworks and archaeological remains across the chalk landscapes of Southern England. CHALK was an allegorical journey through prehistory, beginning with the mythic era of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer, and ending in the world of the shepherd and the Neolithic domestication and alteration of the land.

In CHALK our engagement with the landscape reached a new level of intimacy and interaction. Unlike Enclosure’s brief intervention, CHALK sustained a long-term presence in the landscape that lasted several months. It involved two site-specific greenwood installations called RIVER and FOLD (see photos above), collaborative dialogues, and public walks with archaeologists, geologists, natural navigators and wild plant specialists.

CHALK encompassed a sizeable area of land. The final performances took the audience-participants on two sequential journeys that lasted around three hours and traversed several square miles of chalk downland – which included drovers’ paths, ancient river valleys, downland scarps and water basins – all marked by human intervention in the form of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age earthworks. The performances had no text-based narrative but were animated acoustically by animal horns, great bells, gongs and voices. The sculptures became centerpieces for action: RIVER (at Harting Down) was used to channel “the hunted” Atsushi Takenouchi, while FOLD (below Wolstonbury Hill), became a ritualized precinct, the center of a spiral that travelled across the hillside. Audience members became the herders and the herded, the hunters and the hunted, as they were led into the valleys by artists, musicians and members of the public. The divide between audience member and participant became increasingly blurred as we all became part of the living landscape we were creating.

Local choirs brought together songs from the South Downs and the Russian Steppe with the extraordinary sound of Mongolian “Long songs” (Urtyn duu) from the shaman Badamkhorol Samdandamba, juxtaposing vocal traditions of culturally different but topographically similar grassland landscapes. The audience was directed to walk in “mindful silence” so the acoustics of natural and unamplified sound could be appreciated; however, they were also actively encouraged to participate in the creation of soundscapes.

The events, performances and sculpture installations of CHALK were inspired by past ritual landscapes – but as University College London archaeologist Dr. Matthew Pope points out on BBC Radio 4’s “Making History,”

Make no mistake. CHALK isn’t an exercise in reconstructing the past, part of that thing which makes me shudder: living history. This is an attempt to do something actually in the present. For me as an archaeologist, it’s all been about possibilities. Possibilities of how sound operates in landscape, how people move in landscapes. To see this work of modern performance utilising landscapes in ways that are evocative of, reminiscent of, engaged with the ancient ritual landscapes has been really instructive. It stands as a fantastic exercise in using landscape in new ways.{{9.}}

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Four key aspects to our methodology

1. These events take place outside and in the “natural” landscape. Neither indoor experience nor demonstration can replace the experience of an event dominated by natural forces and the elements. Sun, wind, rain and cold intensify our experiences in ways that cannot be relayed by words and imagery alone.

2. The journey (procession) serves as an entry point into the performance space. The performance space thus becomes a sacred precinct, resulting in the separation of the participants from the mundane. The journey acts as both a meditative prologue and epilogue to the main events. It enables the naturalization of the audience into the environment and atmosphere of the experience.

3. Participation. Audience members, brought together on the journeys, take part in the actions. Our experiences become shared, forming temporary communities of travellers and initiates – or artists. Audience-participants are already immersed in the atmosphere of the event induced by a journey that is enhanced by visuals and acoustics, and thus they become inextricably engaged. They are part of the story.

4. The liminalization of space through ritual engagement produces an intensified experience. We become engaged in a sensory immersion, conjoining with landscapes in our own creative umwelts. The stories become real. By definition, performance creates liminal space, a boundary zone, a crack in our normal perception of reality. In one form or another it imposes on, or responds to, a space. We enter into meta-realities within meta-landscapes, temporary mythological precincts, doors between the mundane and the epic.

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Performance Ritualized: the liminalization of space

What became apparent to us in both Enclosure and CHALK, and what we are consciously continuing in Lithograph, is the potential of a contemporary art event to contribute to, and intervene in, our understanding of the Neolithic through enhanced experiences of landscape. We do not attempt to reproduce Neolithic rituals but rather imagine the possibilities of what such experiences might have been. We combine the vocabulary of contemporary art with that of established ritual and ceremonial practice. We incorporate performance, installation, and especially sound to create visceral experiences that engage physically with landscapes once inhabited by Neolithic peoples, and metaphysically with imagined Neolithic minds and cultures.

These projects gave us an unidentifiable but implicit taste of the deep resonance of feeling and interaction that we can only suppose existed between prehistoric people and the created environments in which they lived.Contemporary people can only speculate such relationships. And yet we can arguably expand on that rationale through the experiential: mobilizing a contemporary art form can create an interface between the modern mind, the ancient landscape, and the people who shaped it.

Fixed as we are in our twenty-first century mindset, it seems that ritual performance can introduce us to other possible worlds, lead us to unfamiliar boundaries, and so allow us to access imagined landscapes.{{10.}}  Ritual is a vehicle for disengagement with the mundane and engagement with the “Other.” It creates liminality. It allows entry into metaphysical space between visible and invisible realities, conscious and subconscious. It catalyzes the imagination, removes us from our preconditioned mindset, and frees us to engage experientially with a meta-reality. Sound, voice, gesture, and fire all affect our subconscious perception of space and environment. The heightened experience that results from immersion through ritual becomes a bridge between the physical and the imagined landscape. Without noticing, we find ourselves “being” in a liminal zone, a meta-landscape confusing our perception of “physical” reality.

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Performance as archeology?

Our work is arguably radicalized phenomenology, possibly too extreme for mainstream archaeology.{{11.}} Ritual performances take us not only to the landscape, but into it. Aural and visual stimuli, staged within a raw elemental environment, enhance our sensory perception and induce a sense of heightened presence during the rituals in which all actions have meaning and are interconnected with the shared landscape.

We suggest that there is value in the non-rational, yet highly provocative, site-responsive experience as a counterpoint to the classical, intellectualized reconstruction of the Neolithic world. Such an approach enables us to avoid monolithic interpretations of sites and societies, and helps us to better contemplate, if not actually understand, partial aspects of Neolithic consciousness and its relationship with landscape. In all, these projects enable an alternative perception of place on a visceral level, and engagement on a liminal level. We try to facilitate contemporary responses that enable us to draw experiential parallels with prehistoric peoples.

We assume that ritual performance was an inherent part of Neolithic culture. There are also strong arguments that frame social relationships with landscape as intrinsic to the cultural makeup of Neolithic peoples. And yet contemporary people can only theorize towards understanding that relationship. It is dangerous to argue that contemporary ritual performance, even when responding so intimately with site and context, can bring us closer to a specific Neolithic consciousness. Our interpretation is severely qualified by our own worldview.{{12.}} We believe we are guessing about the past, but actually we are projecting a light onto a cracked mirror. Our contemporary response is analogous with how people of the Iron Age understood the Neolithic landscape they inherited. Similarly bounded as we are by our own cultural and chronological context, imagination and creativity are essential tools in any reconstruction of the ancient past, and are shared by both artists and archaeologists.

Occurring in mist, rain and wind, on a high hill, stimulated by fire, action and sound, events such as those we have described propel us to look outside of reason, inviting us to conjecture (via our own direct experience) on prehistoric cultural responses to both the physical and the imagined landscape. As long as we acknowledge that all performance is categorically a contemporary experience and confined by its cultural context, then site-specific performance can act as a leftfield methodological vehicle for interpretation. Our approach brings us, a temporary community of modern humans, closer to experiencing a collective vision of a transmorphic landscape, and our journey through that landscape becomes yet another layer in the spatial and narrative palimpsest.

Ours is a flawed argument. It is a conjecture. An intervention. As artists we are foreign guests in the world of the archaeologist, speaking at times a similar language, yet unrestricted by the rigors of academia. We are free to explore alternative and even radical ideas that may by chance or insight lead to new interpretations of existing materials and locations.

Ultimately artists and archaeologists share a dependency on the imagination to create images of the world, to construct stories of who we are and how we arrived at where we are, in our explorations of what it means to be human.

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Caitlin Easterby and Simon Pascoeare the lead artists and co-directorsof Red Earth, an environmental arts group creating site-specific installations and performances in the landscape, informed by geology, archaeology and ecology. For over twenty years they have been producing original interdisciplinary work across European, Javanese, Japanese and Mongolian landscapes, exploring our complex relationship with the land. Their installations are built in and from the surrounding landscape, with performances that immerse audiences in a hidden terrain, transforming our understanding of the places where we live. Caitlin and Simon weave life and work together, running Red Earth while simultaneously bringing up their three boys.

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[¹]For more on Red Earth, see Fourth Door Review Number 4, “Land, sea and sky: Red Earth’s Seven Sisters ritual performance.” Accessible online at: http://www.fourthdoor.co.uk/unstructured/unstructured_04/article4_5.php[¹]
[³]Michael Pearson, “Performing the Past.” Half Life, edited by Angus Farquhar (Glasgow: Luath Press Ltd, 2007): 49.[³]
[⁵]Michael Pearson. “Performing the Past.” Half Life, edited by Angus Farquhar (Glasgow: Luath Press Ltd, 2007): 51.[⁵]
[⁷]Roger J. Mercer, Causewayed Enclosures (Oxford: Shire Publications, 1990). Mercer’s detailed a record of his dig on Hambledon Hill is the only in-depth analysis of this landscape’s prehistoric legacy.[⁷]
[⁹]See Roger J. Mercer, Causewayed Enclosures (Oxford: Shire Publications, 1990).[⁹]
[¹¹]One of our main source texts for Enclosure was the influential work by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).[¹¹]
[¹³]For a more detailed response to the Enclosure performance, see Yvette Staelens, Enclosure performance review, Time & Mind Volume 2, Issue 1, March 2009[¹³]
[¹⁵]See, for example, “Orkney’s new Skara Brae.” Featured item in Current Archaeology, October 11, 2007. Accessible online at: www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/orkneys-new-skara-brae.htm[¹⁵]
[¹⁷]Matthew Pope, Senior Research Fellow in Archaeology University of London BBC Radio 4, “Making History.” October 4, 2011[¹⁷]
[¹⁹]Lynette Russell discusses the imagined landscape in “Imagined Landscapes: Edges of the (Un)Known.” In Handbook of Landscape Archaeology, edited by Bruno David and Julian Thomas (Walnut, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008).[¹⁹]
[²¹]Through dialogue with archaeologists we now appreciate that in an archaeological context Red Earth’s performances can be interpreted as phenomenological exercises.[²¹]
[²³]In Stonehenge: the Biography of a Landscape (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2006), Tim Darvill explores two millennia of cultural divergence with regards to observations of Stonehenge.[²³]

THREE MEDIATIONS ON RELATIONALITY AND HEGEMONY

Natasha Lushetich

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Let me begin by saying that, essentially, relationality can be seen as the “abyssal ground”{{1.}} of hegemony. Understood as the formless substratum from which separate forms – relationships – emerge, relationality is comparable to gravity insofar as it is diffuse and ungraspable, but nevertheless “pulls” all the time. It is a continuous force that constitutes relationships between entities, and in constituting these relationships constitutes as well as reconstitutes the entities within these relationships. In other words, relationality dissolves the content and form binary since the “what” of any given constitution, be that constitution a thing, an event, a phenomenon or a discourse, is inextricably intertwined with the “how” of that constitution. The same logic of dynamic co-constitutivity can be seen operating in hegemony. To borrow Raymond Williams’ famous definition, hegemony is not only the explicit and clearly articulated level of ideology which determines what is good, appropriate and desirable in any given society, it is “a whole body of practices over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy … a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.”{{2.}}

Hegemony is a specific mode of production of a wide range of social relations arising from specific social and cultural practices. More importantly, it is a self-reproductive mode of production, which, once assimilated as a commonsense, reality-corresponding structure, generates hegemonized beliefs, opinions and perceptions. It generates what Williams has termed a “structure of feeling … elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.”{{3.}} Both relationality and hegemony are self-productive, but there is a clear difference between the two. Relationality is open-ended, a no sum game as it were, a process that, in itself, does not serve the interests of a particular party. Hegemony, on the other hand, is a game with a clear sum as it invariably serves the interests of the existing power structures.

In the pages that follow I recall three performative meditations on relationality and hegemony that I realized in collaboration with the Amsterdam-based collective subRosa between 2002 and 2005. Titled The Virus, Demediocratic and Intersecting Perspectives, these performances are for the most part invisible, meaning that they infiltrate an already existing situation and use it as a medium and a form of transport to create a situation within a situation. This particular strategy serves two purposes: it highlights the performativity of everyday life either by inflecting the uninflected in the present moment or by creating a frame which casts a retrospectively inflective light on a given fragment of life. It also highlights the co-constitutivity of relationality and hegemony, both of which operate through performance. As the name subRosa suggests – in Latin it means “intimate,” “under four eyes” – each of these performances contains a one-on-one element, too. Like the vast majority of one-on-one performances of which there was a veritable boom in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these performances borrow from the so-called horizontal, non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer communication characteristic of the internet. Important to note, however, is that the intimacy, differentiation and exclusivity of the one-on-one situation is not so much a cry against the globalization-induced implementation of the common-denominator rule in which every difference is only the distance between the prevalent sameness and occasional “otherness” as it is a way of focusing on the smallest and most basic fragment of relationality: the interaction between two people.

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The Virus

A marshmallow-like vehicle appeared on the streets of the Northern Dutch city of Groningen in the summer of 2002. Popularly called Agnes in honor of her one-time owner, the vehicle was a visual and performative intervention into the dynamics of urban space. Much like other vehicles, Agnes traversed the busy streets of Groningen, and later Amsterdam, Zagreb and Ljubljana, occasionally visiting the more recumbent residential areas as well as parks full of excited children and barking dogs.

Unlike other vehicles, however, the chauffeur-driven Agnes stopped every half hour, spewed out a little crimson carpet to the tunes of Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon, reminiscent of a time of mythical innocence and suave-yet-jolly naïveté. She picked up yet another random passerby and disappeared in an unknown direction only to appear half an hour later in a different location. This dislocation had a somewhat disorientating effect on the random passerby-cum-participant given that the vehicle’s smallish windows were made of semi-transparent Plexiglas and were only knee-high, which made it impossible for the participant to see anything but the blurred contours of the nearby pavement, grass or gravel. The participant was amply compensated for this little inconvenience by the generous applause with which s/he was greeted as soon as the vehicle stopped and s/he appeared on the crimson carpet. Wherever she went Agnes caused a ripple of excited interest; potential participants were eager to find out what was happening inside, why only one participant was chosen at a time, where the vehicle was going and whether this was an advertising event, a performance or a political campaign. In my double role as director – who maintained contact with the performers inside the vehicle via the internal sound system which simultaneously recorded all performer-participant communications – and stewardess – whose task it was to ensure that all “passengers” traveled comfortably in both the physical and mental sense of the word – I was assailed by an avalanche of questions every time the vehicle stopped to pick up a new participant. But, in keeping with the strategy of invisibility, which in this case translated to indefinability, I never disclosed any clear information about what was going on inside. Upon entrance the participant found him/herself in a cozy crimson space of minuscule proportions separated from another such cozy crimson space by a wooden grid resembling a confessional. A single performer sat on the other side of the grid. The only information divulged was that the participant was going on a journey.

The Virus was conceptualized as a once-removed remediation of the internet chat room, itself a remediation of the proverbial train station or airport lounge in which vertical and horizontal time intersect. Vertical and horizontal time correspond to a number of similar temporal differentiations such as sacred time and profane time. In ritual, sacred time is characterized by cyclicality and solidity, actions performed within this time are inscriptions in the universal, or, indeed, religious order. Profane time, on the other hand, is the time of linear development of any given course of events. In profane time, flowers wither, apples rot, people and animals are born and die. In sacred time, however, their spirit lives forever. Vertical time is a term often used in music and is similar to sacred time insofar as it exhibits both stasis and cyclicality. A good example of this is one-tonal music, which has no tempo variation, no “opening” and no “closure.” From the beginning to the end mono-tonal music consists of a single sound and is, as such, endlessly repetitive. Repetition is also the reason why it produces a sense of timelessness which often has a hypnotic effect on the listener. Cyber time is in many ways similar. Like vertical time, it is not irreversible which is to say that it does not exhibit a progressive passage from state A to state B, as does a rotting apple. Rather, it exhibits stasis like mono-tonal music. In this sense, the internet user inhabits two parallel species of time: the vertical time of stasis and the horizontal time marked by the need to get up to stretch one’s legs or make a cup of coffee. Apart from intersecting vertical and horizontal time, the internet chat room also intersects distance and proximity, establishing relationships of augmentative reciprocity. The farther away people are, the closer they may feel precisely because they are far away. The less they know each other, the more inclined they may be to share their innermost secrets. In this sense, the stranger is the opposite of the neighbor. Whilst a neighbor often remains forcefully close, so to speak, a person whose imposed physical proximity obliges one to develop congenial neighborly manners which exhibit all signs of closeness, familiarity, even intimacy, and which, for this very reason, more often than not prevent intimacy from taking place; a stranger encountered in a place riddled with multiple strands of horizontal time, such as an airport or a train station, often seems unexpectedly close precisely because s/he is far away.

The momentary physical closeness in space and time is amplified by past as well as pending distanciation. These and similar encounters thus operate both in vertical and horizontal time, resonating in the realm of the universal as well as in the realm of the particular. Henri Lefebvre calls this the moment, “a higher form of repetition, renewal and reappearance and of the recognition of certain determinable relations with otherness (or the other) and the self.”{{4.}} It is “passion and the inexorable destruction and self-destruction of that passion. The moment is an impossible possibility, aimed at, desired and chosen as such. That which is impossible in the everyday becomes what is possible, even the rule of impossibility.”{{5.}}

Sudden close encounters in which the impossibility of otherness is made possible are festivals of the mind and the heart. In a split second, the interpenetration of the possible and the impossible establishes itself as an absolute existing in a brief and fragile moment of horizontal time. This paradoxical relationship between the particular and the universal, closeness and distance, the temporally horizontal and vertical, present in airports, train stations and internet chat rooms was specifically targeted in The Virus. The horizontal passage of time was textured by the sounds of the city which could be heard at all times – the traffic, the sirens, the voices, the gravel – as well as by the rapidly changing landscape which could be seen – or, rather, intuited – through the Plexiglas window. The performers (who performed in “shifts,” one at a time, usually for two hours, giving four consecutive performances) were carefully chosen for the texture and resonance of their voices, crucial for establishing a sense of closeness, as well as for the fact that they were either natives or long-term inhabitants of the cities where the respective performances of The Virus took place. Once a participant entered the vehicle, it was the performer’s job to weave a meaningful interaction based on the emotional cartography of the city, in which the city became an agglomeration of past-present “moments.” Furthermore, they were chosen for their improvisational as well as mnemonic skills, the most frequently used improvisational device being the metaphor which is the linguistic equivalent of “the moment” since it encourages the interpretation of one thing in terms of another, thereby condensing and overlaying diverse fields of human thought or action. Lastly, the performer’s mnemonic ability played an important part since s/he always used the threads and motifs established in the previous interaction to “weave” the current exchange.

Each performer had a number of possible openings and these included laughter, silence, muffled tears, humming a tune, a telephone conversation with someone else on which the participant was implicitly invited to eavesdrop, and direct speech. In case of the latter, the performer opened with personalized metaphorical speech, such as “I often get that foggy feeling in spring” or “On a day like this I feel as tall as a mountain.” Most participants interpreted such an opening alongside the visual context of the “confessional” as an invitation to intimate philosophical reflection. If the participant responded eloquently, as many indeed did, the performer began to weave in some of the previous participant’s reflections, but also speech patterns, sighs and pauses into the current interaction, thus performing the process of tracing. The purpose of using spatial metaphors was to explore the emotional cartography of the city by overlaying the mental, the physical and the social production of space.

Indeed, spatial metaphors that worked particularly well such as “my whole life has been a waiting room” often engendered predominantly silent interaction pregnant with unsaid words and syncopated by an occasional sigh or an “oh, well…there you go,” characteristic of people engaged in reminiscence. In the recordings, “the moment” was most palpably present, not only textured by the silence of the interlocutors, but also by the sound of traveling – the sound of a parallel horizontal temporality. A slightly more risky opening, often practiced by the Croatian actor Vilim Matula, which enticed a particularly engaged response from a number of participants, was bursting into tears, crying inconsolably for several minutes, then apologizing profusely and finally admitting “I feel like a toilet.” As soon as the participant overcame the initial concern – for being taken in an unknown direction in a vehicle of, for some, uncomfortably small proportions, whilst what seemed like the only other person in the vehicle sobbed in semi-shadow, did cause concern – s/he embraced the metaphor and engaged in touching and, at times, poetic reflections on the impuissance one sometimes feels in the face of life.

The role of the performer was that of a catalyst which provided the initial impetus for the process of weaving in which each thread tied the participant’s ruminations, impressions, feelings or confessions to multiple other threads, thus creating an auditory tapestry. As mentioned earlier, all exchanges were recorded. Upon leaving the vehicle I approached the participant, handed them an invitation to the next phase of the project, an announced (thus visible) exhibition in a gallery and asked for their permission to reproduce the material in edited form. In the gallery, Agnes became a residual object in which the ruminations of the city’s inhabitants were played via headphones. In this part, the visitors to the gallery could sit on both sides – that of the participant and the performer – and listen to a series of “moments” woven of mental, social, emotional and physical space and vertical-horizontal time. The pattern of weaving was different in every city because the rules of comportment, in other words the performativity of relationality, differed considerably. However, the subtly emerging “hue” was also apparent, despite its many variations, due to the ways that every participant incorporated into his/her rumination the themes, and often, the speech patterns of the previous participant. The observation that people react amicably and often obediently to suggestion is by no means new; as humans we depend on cooperation. What did seem interesting and surprising, however, was the fact that the speed, the rhythm, the texture and the intensity of the movement of relationality could be so palpably felt. In this sense the piece brought to light the ways in which relationality may be sculpted in an auditory medium.

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Demediocratic

As the title suggests, this project renders visible the relationship between consensus and mediation by producing a de-medio-cratically conceived work of art. It was first performed in November 2003 in Amsterdam during the 24-hour event hosted by De Balie entitled What Would You Do for Art? and subsequently re-performed at a number of art centers throughout Europe in 2004 and 2005. Mediation is the process of forming a connecting link between two or more entities or occurrences, an intervention into the existing state of affairs, with or without an explicit purpose or intention. Coming from the Latin consentire, the literal meaning of consensus is to “feel together”; the word thus refers both to the process of group decision-making and to commonly held beliefs and sentiments. Throughout history there have been countless interpretations of the value and purpose of art – imitating nature, depicting beauty, conveying philosophical verities, revealing phenomenological, emotional or religious truths. Likewise, there have been countless as well as vastly different cultural views on how one should relate to art. Whilst most traditional European art favors definite object-hood, a clear frame, clearly identifiable authorship and the viewer’s aloof engagement, the value of traditional native American art, for example, seen in the Navajo sand paintings, is considered to reside in its creation, not preservation, and this is the reason why these paintings are destroyed immediately after their completion.

Both the production and the consumption of art are closely related to culturally specific and period specific methods of knowledge production. Classical art thus retains an umbilical connection with Aristotle’s notion of mimesis. Usually translated as “imitation,” mimesis departs from the divide between the image on the canvas and the thing or the world this image represents, the underlying assumption being that there exists a fixed and stable reality and that this reality exists a priori, before all experience. Since the performative turn of the 1970s, however, in fields as diverse as art, anthropology, linguistics and sociology, performance is a preferred method of knowledge production. Aptly characterized by the performance theorist Dwight Conquergood as a “shift from mimesis to kinesis,”{{6.}} this method of knowledge production treats performance not as a temporary enactment of a reality that exists independently of agents and actions, but as that which produces reality.

Art can also be seen as fundamentally influenced by the prevalent economic relations. According to B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, recent history comprises three distinctly different economic eras: the commodity economy of the first half of the 20^th century, the service economy of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in which service takes the place of tangible commodities, and the experience economy of the 1990s and 2000s in which the chief economic output is experience. As the authors of The Experience Economy suggest, experience is created by “inging the thing” or “experientializing the goods.”{{7.}} A good example of this is the recent Nike campaign in which the consumers of the “Nike experience” – prospective buyers of the Nike shoes – play basketball with a laser projection of Michael Jordan. The highly socially productive capacity of such and similar experiences, based on active participation, multisensorial interaction and immersion, serves another economic purpose: it organizes consumers into clubs and finally a branded way of life. It could be argued that with the exception of the historical avant-garde – Dada, Futurism and Surrealism – much of the pre 1950s and 1960s art, that is to say pre-minimalist, pre-performance art and pre-conceptual art did, indeed, have much in common with commodity fetishism. An art object, a painting or a sculpture, can be seen as an object of “affective presence,” which, as Robert Plant Armstrong points out in The Powers of Presence, is the quality an object acquires as a result of the way it has been treated. When objects are treated as subjects they “begin to exist in a state of tension between these two poles: being subject and being object.”{{8.}} In marked contrast to this, the 1960s and 1970s called for a decisive rupture with object-based relations, evident in much performance-oriented work of such artists as Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Alison Knowles, Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramović, to name but a few. Likewise, much of 1990s and 2000s art focused on immersion, (often networked) interactivity and the production of social life. This can be seen in the work of groups like Blast Theory who make projects with game-like structures which involve hundreds of participants and last up to a month, or The Yes Men, a group of culture-jamming activists who create fake organizations which host hybrid socio-aesthetic, ludico-activist projects with the aid of thousands of virtual interactants.

However, the relationship between the various economic eras and the corresponding art forms could also be seen in very different terms: it is not economic relations that influence artistic practices but it is artistic practices that use the various economic forms to ironic or subversive purposes, as was the case with Ken Friedman’s 1972 Professional Services, in which the artist offered a wide array of hourly paid services, artistic as well as administrative and manual, or with The Yes Men who famously managed to infiltrate the World Trade Organization in 2000 and have been posing as members of the WTO since then. Demediocratic probes the fragile and constantly shifting interconnection between the various values and purposes of art, the socio-economic framework in which these values are embedded, the shifting role of the artist and the forming of public consensus.

In the first, “invisible,” non-announced phase of the project a number of performers interview a wide range of the visitors to the art center, ensuring that the “sample” on which the data analysis is based includes interviewees of varying ages, ethnicities and professions. Meanwhile, another performer reads out a random selection of texts whilst stirring ash in a transparent astray projected onto the wall thus referencing fortune-telling and divination. Performers read into a microphone texts that resemble artists’ statements or art criticisms, such as:

The artists see their monstrous creations as puzzles, mathematical variations or ironic combinations of wordplay and bad taste. Their stated cynical intent is to attempt to reach a cultural value of nil, to create an aesthetic of insensitivity and indifference. Therein lies the tragic dimension of their oeuvre.{{9.}}

as well as short communications about life events, such as:

Satoru Fushiki was accidentally hit in his left eye by an air gun pellet on January the third 1943, near his home at Kasuga Jinya when he was 13 years old. He was hospitalized for a month but the bullet was not removed from his head. Instead, it has remained in his head to this very day. Mr. Fushiki is thus the longest living person with a bullet in his head.{{10.}}

The interviewees are asked twenty questions in total. These questions belong to the following four categories: attitudes to art, attitudes to the artist, attitudes to the art establishment and personal perceptive and emotive qualities.

An example of the first category is:

What would you say is the foremost role of art?
A. To reveal a different world behind this world
B. To make us laugh at our mortality
C. To teach us how to look at things in a different way
D. To offer a brutally honest critique of the society we are living in
E. To confuse us into saying “Well, if that’s art I am glad I am a social worker”
F. Other

The second category consists of questions like:

How important is the artist’s personality in relation to the value of his/her work of art? (henceforth referred to as WOA)
A. Very
B. Moderately
C. Marginally
D. Utterly unimportant

Within the third category the interviewees were asked questions like:

Should the artist demonstrate an awareness of the current political policies when working on a new WOA? E.g. make the work accessible to troubled teenagers or interesting and inviting to non-integrated Moroccan grandmothers?

If yes, could you rank the percentage of such awareness desirable in a WOA?
A. 25%
B. 50%
C. 75%
D. 100%

The fourth category consists of questions such as:

Have you ever been deeply moved by a WOA?
A. Art has given you the strength to face the not-so-pretty facts of life such as illness and isolation
B. Art has sporadically inspired you to euphoric sprees and good deeds
C. Art has sent you sobbing in the nearest dark corner many a time
D. Art has inspired a feeling of superiority in you: “I could have done that with my little finger”
E. Other

Or, indeed:

Do you find that your taste in art corresponds to your hobbies or recreational activities? E.g. you play golf and are therefore fond of action painting, or, you like to spend your Sundays DIY-ing in the garden shed and have developed an appreciation of Duchamp?

After a few hours of such interviews, the data is processed; the personal situation – and perception-related questions are read against the evaluative ones. The findings are then mapped onto graphs and charts and communicated to the audience, encouraged to pose questions related to content and/or methods. At the end of the fixed durational period of either twelve or twenty-four hours, this information is used to produce a demediocratically conceived WOA. The three most often produced WOAs were: oversized clog shoes made of lead, breath captured in a balloon and given to the first passerby, and, a condom bearing an inscription in Braille.

These WOAs were produced in response to three very different sets of results obtained consistently, regardless of culture or country. Oversized clog shoes made of lead ensued from a set of results indicating, in the first place, a distinct sense of disenchantment with contemporary art and artists. According to this group, the latter were trading only in mildly innovative ways of recycling old concepts. The general consensus was that contemporary art lacked grounding, meaning and a concrete connection with everyday existence, that it seemed lost to a world of intricate cross-referentiality accessible only to “inside traders” as it were. The second WOA was made in response to a group of people who found the current state of art wanting in the area of basic human-ness and joie de vivre. According to this group, new forms of art were welcome, but had to enable one to feel the same closeness to Mother Nature and the joy of living as did the old masters in their paintings of beautiful landscapes. For this group, breath, a basic signifier for human life and also inspiration (the Latin root of the word means “to breathe in”) was placed in another suitable signifier of fragility and ephemerality – a balloon – and given to a randomly chosen “fellow human.” The third group manifested a preference for throwaway materials as well as the less orthodox forms of communication, but opined that a WOA nevertheless had to deliver a message. For this group, a temporary sculpture was made of disposable material – condoms – inscribed with a citation from Socrates or Nietzsche, in other words, a clear message, such as “know thyself” or “God is dead.”

The (continuing) fascination with this project resides in the concretization of as elusive a category as “public opinion,” the opinion held by the “average” art center visitor, or indeed the “average educated reader.” Apart from disclosing the operation of the proverbial “populist philosopher,” which, according to Antonio Gramsci{{11.}} is always already present in all hegemonic formations and constitutes their counter-current and thus a potential point of hegemony’s dissolution, Demediocratic raised questions about the mediated relationship between the audience and the artist. Throughout history, the role of the artist has varied from craftsman, disseminator of spiritually uplifting experiences and producer of financially lucrative objects to consciousness-raising social actor and, finally, facilitator. Although the latter has been the dream of many avant-garde artists, such as the Dadaist Tristan Tzara or the Fluxus chairman George Maciunas, who fervently advocated the abolition of art as an institution and whose socio-political endeavors could be summed up as: “creativity to the people!” – one is left wondering about the extent to which art (the liberating sense of democracy inherent in art for all and art by all included) has been assimilated into capitalist hegemony. In the current technologically developed media culture which has mastered the art of integrating, and, importantly, marketing all challenges – where even the ecological disaster caused largely by the capitalist mode of production is marketed as a chance for a new, better and more kosher capitalism, termed ecological capitalism – one is left wondering about the limits of possibility. On the one hand, the strategy employed in Demediocratic makes use of the custom-tailored approach utilized by the experience economy. On the other hand, it ironizes it. By ironizing it, it both mediates public opinion and is mediated by it. This double mediation simultaneously critiques the colonization of creativity and attempts to discern possible counter-currents to the prevalent modes of opinion-production.

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Intersecting Perspectives

Realized in 2004 at De Balie, Amsterdam, this project once again resorted to one-on-one interaction in a space of purposefully modest proportions. The installation consisted of two identical parts connected by a swivel mechanism which enabled viewer A to take a look at the space B and vice versa.

The visitors to this cinematic installation/performance were asked to make a booking in advance and come with a person of their choice – a partner, a friend or a family member. Upon arrival the two visitors were greeted by a jovial usherette and asked to toss a coin. The person who got heads was directed to space A and henceforth spoken to in mellifluent tones, offered a glass of champagne and a beautifully embroidered cushion to sit on. The tone was light, witty, even flirty at times. This initial communication was employed as a speech act, which, according to J.L. Austin creates a change in reality, such as when a judge pronounces a defendant guilty.{{12.}} Within the specific context of Intersecting Perspectives the usherette’s verbal address authorized visitor A to a jovial, ironic distance from the performance s/he was already taking part in, whilst simultaneously implying that his/her wellbeing and opinion were of utmost importance. Visitor B, on the other hand, was treated without finesse, there was no champagne, no cushion, nobody offered to take his/her coat nor was interested in how s/he felt. Instead, s/he was “dumped” in space B and henceforth treated as a “B person,” thus implying a second rate status.

The part of the installation referred to as the “B space,” which included the visitors to this space, was measured by the standards of the A space. This echoed Slavoj Žižek’s contention that, despite all appearances, contemporary liberal pluralism has a single norm which assimilates differences by effacing them, particularly those seen as potentially dangerous. Žižek calls this standardization via “elimination of malignant properties,” found in a number of alimentary as well as cultural products such as “coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, cream without fat, sex without sex (virtual sex) … [and]…in the recent redefinition of politics as the art of administration performed by experts – a politics without politics.”{{13.}} In the era of “decaffeinated belief” where human understanding is based on possessive individualism and where freedom amounts to the freedom of the choice of products, it is sameness which is encouraged; “difference” only fills the gap where the Other used to be.”{{14.}} In order to be acknowledged, “difference” has to be slight and easily translatable into the language of the norm. Any real difference, which is by definition incomprehensible and for that reason often intolerable, is assimilated into the norm and thus, in fact, erased.

Upon entrance both spaces appeared identical apart from frozen and patinized objects strewn on the felt floor, which, as the visitors later found out, were remnants of the filmed action.

Two performers, Hannah Eijkelboom and I, were “built” into the felt walls of the installation, which enabled us to remain invisible while commenting on the filmed action. Particularly interesting was the fact that both voices were live, but the visitors to space A often thought that the performer’s voice in space A was recorded – thus in some way relayed and mediated – whereas the visitors to space B invariably thought that the performer’s voice in space B was live. This was clearly related to the attitude the visitors were encouraged to adopt by way of vocal, gestural and proxemic cues provided by the usherette and the performers. Different audience attitudes highlighted the difference between two species of staged performance: referenced representation and representation mistakenly taken for presentation. As Jacques Rancière points out in The Emancipated Spectator, representation or mimesis is a “regime of concordance between sense and sense” which has, since the Greeks, sought to achieve a dual effect of intellectual recognition and appropriate emotion, “predicated on a regime of concordance inherent in representation.”{{15.}} This regime treats the signs exhibited on the performers’ bodies as part of the natural language whilst neglecting the fact that “the signs of thought and feelings exhibited on the performers’ bodies are not their own.”{{16.}} Like hegemony, representation “naturalizes” that which is not natural. This is the reason why it is often difficult to see a particular representational language for what it is. The acting style of the 19^th century actress Sarah Bernhardt can clearly be seen as a set of mimetic signs in this day and age.{{17.}} The acting style of Meryl Streep, however, is less readily recognizable as a set of mimetic signs because it is entwined with contemporary ideas of “naturalness” and “truth.”

Despite the fact that the representational forms of performance have largely given way to the presentational ones, representation is, as Rancière observes, still widely used in place of presentation, for reasons of aesthetic efficacy, which range from political campaigns and advertising to contemporary art.

The greeting ritual effectuated by the usherette in Intersecting Perspectives was crucial since it gave clear cues as to which attitude the visitor should adopt: the representation-acknowledging attitude, one of ironic distance and benevolent amusement as was regularly the case with the A visitors; or, the “naïve” attitude which made the visitor vulnerable to the emotional effects of the performance, as was often the case with the B visitors. The choice of these specific attitudes – the seemingly active “meta attitude” which gave the visitor a sense of control because of the ironic distance it created, and the seemingly passive “engaged attitude” in which the visitor succumbed to the emotions portrayed by performer B – was related to a specific hegemonic operation theorized by Žižek. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek makes the following observation: “in contemporary societies … cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally.”{{18.}} This is probably best explained by way of an example: a corrupt politician professes concern for the current economic crisis whilst blatantly channeling public funds into his/her private accounts. Everybody knows this and ridicules the politician’s lack of finesse, however, because of this ironic distance, nobody does anything about the blatant discrepancy between what is said and done. The result is that the politician stays in office and continues to channel public funds into his/her private accounts. What this indicates is that the ruling ideology has already accommodated the fact that its “subjects” do not take it seriously as well as reorganized its discourse accordingly. The ironic and self-ironizing attitude that acknowledges the existence of bad faith arises from the realization that there is a disparity between what a society says and what it does. However, this realization is not acted upon, nor is any attempt made to change the existing situation. Instead, it is made ironically self-conscious while disparity continues. This makes it possible for the ideological subject both to perform that to which it does not subscribe and to maintain an ironic distance from the very idea of subscribing to an idea or a belief.

Both the situation A and the situation B were rooted in the proverbial moment that occurs before one’s death and consisted of abstract and for the most part disorderly memories relayed through film and live narration. Many of the memories were identical, but received in two very different contexts and thus seen from different points of view; it was up to the visitors to piece these together once they left the installation. The very first film image visitor A saw upon entering the installation was that of three elegantly dressed men with champagne glasses raised high. The men quickly disappeared into the ground only to appear again and again. This comical routine was followed by a series of snippets which showed performer A surrounded by jovial, sharply dressed fun-people immersed in work-sex (a skillful technique for having sex while working) or “the human safari.” The latter consisted of hunting down and slashing one or more homeless people with swords, stealing their vital organs, then appearing at an organ party, full of hedonistically inclined and risqué individuals, dressed in white and wearing tastefully arranged “loser” organs. The organs had the status of collector’s items and were, for this reason, dutifully admired by the party crowd.

In keeping with the general ironic and self-ironizing strategy, the live narration of performer A was full of ready-made witticisms and intellectual titillations. To contrast, the live narration of performer B was riddled with pauses and unfinished sentences, and operated largely through the texture of the performer’s voice. On film, performer B was often seen in situations of receding content – letters slid off the page when she opened a book to read. She was seen sleeping on motorways wrapped in sheets, emerging from swamps and eating hairy cakes. These situations referenced physical discomfort and a loss of bearings.

Her speech, apart from expressing an incomprehensible, deep-felt shame, was tainted with fatalistic overtones, characteristic of ideological-hegemonic operations in which an unquestioned acquiescence in the prevalent order becomes manifest. In many cases of oppression, economic oppression in particular, where life is a continuous struggle for the bare essentials and where planning makes little sense on account of the disempowered position, the oppressed often develop a fatalistic outlook on life of the “what will be, will be” variant. At the same time, however, this outlook plays into the hands of the very systems that oppress them since these systems continue to operate undisturbed, in exactly the same way as before.

When after the performance the two visitors left, they were both given champagne and conversation menus and escorted to another space where they could talk to other visitors. Typically, the visitors leaving space A were jovially disposed whilst the visitors to side B (which ended with a coffin endlessly turning on an airport luggage belt with a sign “homebound” written on it) were subdued and in some cases, visibly affected. It was usually visitor A who started the conversation and said something like: “Didn’t you have a good time? Wasn’t your side good?” thus in fact continuing their performative engagement not only with the themes, but also with the performative strategies used by the usherette and performer A in the piece. Most visitors also continued to “cling” to their interpretation of events (the interpretation performatively suggested to them) even after extensive conversations with other people.

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Conclusion

The above performances function as sites in which different species of performance meet and cross-pollinate: performance as doing, showing, achievement; performance as an aesthetic action presented to others, which invites judgment; performance as an aesthetic action performed, but not presented, which does not invite judgment, or invites it retroactively. In The Virus and Demediocratic, audience members – or interactants – are lured both into the performance and into performing without any prior knowledge. In Intersecting Perspectives the juxtaposition between the representational mode of performance (pre-recorded film footage, parts of the accompanying live performance) and the presentational mode (the usherette’s performance) are construed in such a way as to be mutually highlighting.

What the cross-pollination of these different modalities of performance illuminates is the priority of relationality – not relationality as a universal term for the relationship between existing entities, but as that which includes the layers and the methodologies of their co-constitutivity. This further means that a constitution’s kind – what a constitution is – be it a conversation, as in the case of The Virus, a work of art, as in the case of Demediocratic, or an attitude, as in the case of Intersecting Perspectives, cannot be separated from the way this constitution comes into being. No seemingly stable, given situation or entity can be separated from its performative genesis and thus its inherent performativity.

Whilst performance may be ephemeral in its one-off variant, it often turns into a habitualization over time, as in the case of performed social institutions, such as the courting ritual. Although the various courting rituals are, of course, culturally- as well as period-specific, most inexperienced teenagers can perform them because they form part of the embedded knowledge. In essence, this knowledge is no more than continuously repeated performance that one samples and reenacts as one goes through life. Likewise, an individual action repeated over time – such as a comical routine one has developed with the local baker – will produce affective sedimentation which will, in turn, produce a “structure of feeling.” An accumulation of a number of such structures will create a worldview, a world, a person, a performative network that continues to disseminate such and similar habitualizations. Since, as humans, we learn by doing and imitating, it is through performance that mobile constellations constituting impressions, appearances, perspectives and, finally, ossified positions are created. It is in the moment of ossification which, essentially, is a moment when performance acquires a solid shape and thus also a frame, determined first and foremost by what is not in the frame, that hegemony begins to function. Hegemony is, in fact, the repressed co-constitutivity or “background relationality” of all that has been left out of the frame but nevertheless continues to operate behind the scenes, as it were.

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Natasha Lushetich is an artist and researcher.  She is currently Lecturer in Performance at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research focuses on intermedial practices from the 1960s onwards, cultural performance, questions of identity and ideology and performance and philosophy. Natasha is a regular speaker at international conferences and has published Babilonia, Performance Research, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal and TDR as well as contributed to a number of edited collections.

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[¹]This expression was first introduced by Martin Heidegger who associated “ground” with the Greek arché, which means both the “beginning, first principle” and “rule, dominion.” For Heidegger, the absence of the ultimate ground does not eliminate the process of grounding. Instead, the ground, or grund in German, becomes “Ab-grund” or “abyssal ground” because it continues to generate new possibilities of grounding while deferring its own fulfillment.[¹]
[³]Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 124.[³]
[⁵]Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 125.[⁵]
[⁷]Henri Lefevbre, Critique of Everyday Life II. Trans. John Moore. (London: Verso, 2002): 344.[⁷]
[⁹]Henri Lefevbre, Critique of Everyday Life II. Trans. John Moore. (London: Verso, 2002): 347.[⁹]
[¹¹]Dwight Conquergood, I am a Shaman; A Hmong Life Story with Ethnographic Commentary. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 83.[¹¹]
[¹³]B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business is a Stage. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999): 23-24.[¹³]
[¹⁵]Robert Plant-Armstrong, The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth and Affective Presence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981): 3.[¹⁵]
[¹⁷]Author’s private archive.[¹⁷]
[¹⁹]Author’s private archive.[¹⁹]
[²¹]Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Eds. & Trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).[²¹]
[²³]J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).[²³]
[²⁵]Slavoj Žižek, Plaidoyer en faveur de l’intolerance (Castelnau-le-Lez: Climats, 2004): 22. Translation mine.[²⁵]
[²⁷]Slavoj Žižek, Plaidoyer en faveur de l’intolerance (Castelnau-le-Lez: Climats, 2004): 23. Translation mine.[²⁷]
[²⁹]Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. (London & New York: Verso, 2011): 60.[²⁹]
[³¹]Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. (London & New York: Verso, 2011): 61.[³¹]
[³³]For more information on Sarah Bernhardt’s acting style please see Gerda Taranov, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art within the Legend (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).[³³]
[³⁵]Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London & New York: Verso, 1992): 28.[³⁵]

RESPONSE

Oral/Response

Angela Bartram and Mary O’Neill

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This work in four parts offers the practice of Bartram O’Neill, a collaborative partnership between an artist (Angela Bartram), and an artist/writer (Mary O’Neill), as an alternative creative strategy to the binaries of theory and practice, academic and artistic, event and text. To borrow and extend Wallace Bacon’s shore metaphor from his canonical publication, “The Dangerous Shore: From Elocution to Interpretation” (1960), this essay in four documents represents an amphibious practice in which different stages of its life cycle require different media.{{1.}} The four parts are: a score written during the performance Oral/Response that forms part of the event; images of the collaborative performance of the same title at Greestone Gallery, Lincoln (2011); a prose piece written in response to the performance; and questions and answers that discuss the concerns of the artists and the collaborative relationship. Each mode has informed the others and is a response to different sites. A gallery, an academic journal, an artist’s statement – these are all “sites” not only defined by a physical location, but they consist of dynamic ensembles that also include the artists’ bodies, the anticipated audience, any objects being used, and the atmosphere. Bacon categorized the relationship between the text and the performance as a negotiation between polarized opposites using the metaphor of travelling through waterways. This negotiation exists in the territory where the distinction between land and sea is blurred, the alluvial plains where rather than prioritizing one form over another, each manifestation generates potential for further responses. The result is an ongoing work.

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Document I
ORAL/RESPONSE
Site – gallery floor
Tools – a mortar and pestle
Material – charcoal, paper, masking tape Performers crouching on the floor

black
places a piece of tape on the floor to align paper
paper is put in place
grinds charcoal with the mortar and pestle
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
grinds second stick of charcoal
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
lifts paper, gathers dust in fold
tips pile of dust on floor to right of ghost image of paper
moves backwards one paper length

dark grey
places a piece of tape on the floor to align paper
paper is put in place
grinds charcoal with the mortar and pestle
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
grinds second stick of charcoal
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
lifts paper, gathers dust in fold
tips pile of dust on floor to right of ghost image of paper
moves backwards one paper length

mid grey
places a piece of tape on the floor to align paper
paper is put in place
grinds charcoal with the mortar and pestle
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
grinds second stick of charcoal
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
lifts paper, gathers dust in fold
tips pile of dust on floor to right of ghost image of paper
moves backwards one paper length

light grey
places a piece of tape on the floor to align paper
paper is put in place
grinds charcoal with the mortar and pestle
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
grinds second stick of charcoal
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
lifts paper, gathers dust in fold
tips pile of dust on floor to right of ghost image of paper
moves backwards one paper length

white
places a piece of tape on the floor to align paper
paper is put in place
grinds charcoal with the mortar and pestle
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
grinds second stick of charcoal
pinches a small amount of charcoal dust and places it on the paper places her hands flat on the ground on either side of the paper exhales on the charcoal dust
dust fans out on the paper
inhales
pinches another piece of dust and places it on the paper
exhales
lifts paper, gathers dust in fold
tips pile of dust on floor to right of ghost image of paper
moves backwards one paper length

stands up
walks away.

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Document II

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Document III
A corridor, polished parquet.

The pent up energy of charcoal, the carbon remains of millennia of waiting are released in a breath and soon will be swept way. Like a miner with red-rimmed, irritated eyes peering out from a dust-masked face, the performer stands up.

The performance is over.
On the floor is the evidence of the event, the evidence of effort, the evidence of existence. Not just the image left by the breath of the performer but the memory of coal dust, itself the trace of existence beyond a single lifetime, that unimaginable existence of a planet. Here we see the slightness of a breath, the slightness of our presence.

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.

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Document IV

Q: HOW IS THE COLLABORATIVE RELATIONSHIP OF ANGELA BARTRAM AND MARY O’NEILL NEGOTIATED? WHAT IS THE AIM? WHO INITIATES, AND WHO IS THE INSTIGATOR IN DEVELOPING THE WORK? DOES IT MATTER?

BARTRAM
The collaboration transcends the boundaries between performance and its legacy, between the performer and observer, between author and interpreter. Rather than the documentation being produced by an on- looker outside the performance, the generation of an accompanying text becomes integral to the performance itself. Thereby creating a text that is embedded in the physical experience of the performance. In the case of Oral/Response, the repetition and rhythm of the action of crushing the sticks of charcoal and blowing the dust is echoed in the tat-tat-tat thud of inscribing the text on the shared surface.

O’NEILL
Communication and development are negotiated through a dialogue. The partnership is equal in its response to the varying methods and processes that make up its sum parts. Integral to this performance is the distinction between cooperation and collaboration as defined by Pierre Dillenbourg (1996). According to Dillenbourg, “cooperative work is accomplished by the division of labour among participants, as an activity where each person is responsible for a portion of the problem solving…” whereas collaboration involves the “mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve the problem together.”{{2.}} In collaboration, the disciplinary ghettos of performance and documentation are abandoned in favour of a mode of practice that allows for a greater level of mutual critique. Performers work together towards a shared goal – the success of the performance – rather than focus on the individual contributions. To this end, auto/ethnography enhances the processes of give and take, self-critique, and improvement that en- hance the collaborative synergy.

BARTRAM
Oral/Response is a conversation that adapts to progressive elements within both collaborative and individu- al research. The piece is modified, as it is re-staged and over time, and developed to respond to current thinking and research within the collaboration. For example, we are now considering the document and how it can be activated before the actual performance and what this does to more conventional strategies that represent thinking and ideas.

Q: THE ORAL?

BARTRAM
I have worked with the oral since 2003 to explore communication without words. The performative aspects of Oral/Response expand this further to include text as a method by which to “tell” a story without a verbal voice. O’Neill’s simultaneous textual documentations of Oral/Response are as integral to the performance as the processes they document. The document in this sense is as much a part of the performance as the action it seeks to represent. The collaboration is performatively demonstrated as non-verbal dia- logue, a process that is reflexive and conversational.

O’NEILL
The oral referred to in the title is not limited to the potential of the mouth to communicate verbally but alludes to the wider capacity of the mouth to tell stories in the broadest sense. Here the mouth is used as a drawing tool to blow pigment on the floor. In everyday communication the mouth can communicate through expression; for example it can express happiness through smiling, tenderness through kissing and licking, or hate through spitting.

Q: HOW IS THE WORK TEXT AND PERFORMANCE AT THE SAME TIME? WHERE DO SUCH MODES INTERSECT OR COLLIDE? HOW DOES THIS WORK DEPART FROM THE TRADITIONAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VISUAL ART AND TEXT?

O’NEILL
In visual art, the artificial separation between the experiences of an artwork (either a physical object or a performance) and an accompanying text is exaggerated by the means of presentation of these modes of communication. In the contemporary art gallery, the text (which usually includes the artist’s name, a title, the year in which the work was made, and on occasion some contextual information about the work) is conventionally minimized to reduce visual clutter. The work of art is presented as the conduit through which the viewer can engage with artist intention, and the text is supporting information. There are of course exceptions to this convention. For example, in Vides (Voids): A Retrospective at the Pompidou Centre (Paris, 2009), the only visual elements were the texts that accompanied each void. In our work we explore the potential of the text, which has an aesthetic capacity of its own, to enhance, contribute to, and alter the viewing experience.

BARTRAM
Equally in the documentation of ephemeral work such as performance, the textual element has the poten- tial to contribute to the experience, to offer the viewer another means of engagement. The viewer thereby shares in the experience of collaboration, seeing two agents, two opinions, two disciplines, working to and fro to create one work.

Q: PEGGY PHELAN OPENS HER ESSAY “THE ONTOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE” (1993) WITH AN UNEQUIVOCAL STATEMENT: “PERFORMANCE’S ONLY LIFE IS IN THE PRESENT. PERFORMANCE CANNOT BE SAVED, RECORDED, DOCU- MENTED, OR OTHERWISE PARTICIPATE IN THE CIRCULATION OF REPRESEN- TATIONS OF REPRESENATIONS: ONCE IT DOES SO, IT BECOMES SOMETHING OTHER THAN PERFORMANCE.” HOW DOES ORAL/RESPONSE EXIST BEYOND THE MOMENT OF PERFORMANCE?

O’NEILL
This is really the question that brought us together as a collaborating partnership in the first instance. As a theorist concerned with the ephemeral and how it is perceived, I am interested in the polarized argument that Phelan represents at one end of the spectrum and Amelia Jones at the other.{{3.}} As a performer I can empathize with the purity of Phelan’s “you have to be there” argument, but in practice Jones’ pragmatic view is a more plausible account of the reality of experiencing events. In agreement with Phelan, Oral/Response acknowledges that a performance “become[s] itself through disappearance.” However, we expand on Phelan to suggest that the documentation is also subject to the same vagaries of time as the performance itself. By including documentation in the work the ephemeral nature of the performance and text are linked. In reiterations of this performance, the disappearance of the text itself has been incorpo- rated to emphasize the transience of the text as much as the actions described. We have also performed a section of this piece for a “live” streamed exhibition (Low Lives 4, 2012) where the audience watched the performance in the U.S., Japan, and France. In order to accommodate the camera we restructured the performance. When this piece is viewed via the internet, the audience will not necessarily be aware of the time gap between the performance and the moment of viewing – and it will not matter. In fact, the work in the moment of performance was already mediated by virtue of being streamed and “out of time” as we were performing at 2:25 a.m. (GMT) in an empty gallery in Nottingham, to an audience that viewed the work in different time zones.

BARTRAM
Beyond most performances, memories remain in the mind of observers and form part of the legacy of the fleeting experience they have witnessed. Memory is mostly a personal indulgence that shifts, mutates and fades over time to become distant, and different to its origin, and in this way its archival potential is unreliable. To overcome this dilemma, posthumous archival methods have become the tradition of recording the “actual” event in as far as it is possible. Although a recorder, of any variation, can provide footage that gives place and context to the archive document, it does present a dilemma for renditions of what it was like to be there. Recordings are mediated and translated through the direction of the person holding the device, documenting his or her viewpoint and subjective encounter with the work. There are points, however, in which those elements can be seen to intersect through the narrative of text, and this is useful for performance. The directed observation of the archival document is open to subjective memorial discussion and recourse to its translation in text. The memory and eye collide to initiate a discussion between seeing and recording. This gives text a potency as an archive of performance, one to which the collaboration of Bartram O’Neill is indebted.

Q: DOES IT MATTER THAT THE DOCUMENTS OF THE COLLABORATION CAN BE LOST AND IGNORED OVER TIME BY WORKING IN THIS WAY?

BARTRAM
We accept and collaboratively welcome the loss of any visual archive. Visual documents, such as still images and video footage, seem unsuitable for a process founded on performative textual dialogue. The document’s role as integral to the performance, witnessed by others in the same way as the action that it interprets and transcribes, means that visual documentation is unnecessary. The reflexivity of the process is the work’s legacy.

O’NEILL
Through an engagement with ephemerality the collaboration acknowledges a cultural desire for permanence but intentionally sacrifices durability for the potential gain of the focus on experience and the knowledge of the event. The fixity of the permanent object suggests an illusion of a completeness or a conclusion. In this work, the gallery becomes the artist laboratory in which ideas are tested and lessons drawn but the work is never completed. It is more a stage in the development of an idea.

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Angela Bartram works in live art, video and sculpture and published text. Her interests concern threshold and ‘in-between’ spaces of the human body, gallery or museum and definitions of the human and animal within companion species relationships. Bartram completed a PhD at Middlesex University in 2010 and is senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln (UK) in the department of fine art.

Mary O’Neill’s practice is interdisciplinary and focuses on contemporary art as a means of discussing significant cultural issues. From an original interest in ephemerality in art and notions of mortality and immortality her research has developed to explore attitudes towards the dead, mourning, loss, bereave- ment, memory and value. O’Neill completed an AHRC funded PHD in 2007 and is currently senior lecturer at he University of Lincoln.

BartramO’Neill are a collaborative partnership whose work centres on art and ethics and the documentation of performance through situated writing and text that moves beyond formal academic conventions. They offer an alternative creative strategy to the binaries of theory and practice, academic and artist, event and text. BartramO’Neill have exhibited, performed and published nationally and internationally. Most recently they performed after a residency at Grace Exhibition Space New York 2012, as part of Low Lives 4 streamed event, at Environmental Utterances at the University of Falmouth , In Dialogue at Nottingham Contemporary Art, ‘BLOP 2012’ at Arnolfini Bristol, at ‘Action Art Now’ for O U I International performance festival in York, 2011, and at ‘The Future Can Wait’ in London.

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[¹]Wallace Bacon, “The Dangerous Shores: From Elocution to Interpretation.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 46, Issue 2 (1960): 148 – 152.[¹]
[³]P. Dillenbourg, M. Baker, A. Blay, C. O’Malley “The Evolution of Research on Collaborative Learning,” Learning in Humans and Machine: Towards an interdisciplinary learning science, edited by E. Spada and P. Reiman (Oxford: Elsevier, 1996): 189-211. Last accessed online on July 17, 2012: http://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/publicat/dil-papers-2/Dil.7.1.10.pdf.[³]
[⁵]Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation.” In Art Journal, Vol. 56, Issue 4. Issue special topic, Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century (Winter, 1997): 11-18[⁵]



PERFORMING LANDSCAPE: LIVE AND ALIVE

Annette Arlander

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If we think of performative research as a specific research paradigm, as Brad Haseman (2006) and Barbara Bolt (2008) have argued, it will have implications for how we look at the impact of such work.{{1.}} If we accept that performative research does not describe phenomena but actually creates or shapes them, like a performative utterance, which does not describe phenomena (as constative utterances do) but actually does something in the world, we must commence our analysis by trying to ascertain what a specific research project has accomplished. According to Bolt the effects or consequences of a creative research project can be discursive, material or affective.{{2.}} But how we might evaluate “effect” remains open. Bolt suggests that “[t]he problem for the creative arts researcher is recognizing and mapping the transformations that have occurred.”{{3.}} From the point of view of the artist and author there are mainly two indicators of transformation or impact: one’s own experience and feedback from viewers, in addition to possible material effects on the environment. I suggest that we distinguish between impact on the performer and impact on the viewer or the audience, as well as consider the consequences of the working process in addition to the consequences of the work itself. The working process might, for instance, produce unwelcome side-effects, like a possible heap of waste, not considered to be part of the actual work.

In discussions on performance documentation and on the changing notions of the live and the mediated, questions of the organically alive, the animate and the inanimate, are rarely posed.{{4.}} Nor is the importance of a living environment usually emphasized when the live encounter between performer and spectator is stressed. According to Teresa Brennan (2000), known to performance scholars mainly through André Lepecki (2006), we should take seriously the indissolubility of individual and environment. Our tendency to assume ourselves as subjects in a world of objects is intensified in a manmade environment such as a contemporary city. Surrounded by commodities, which function like fantasies, the subject is more likely to see what it has made, rather than feel itself to be connected with, or part of, what has made it.{{5.}}

Performing for a camera means using technology to create objects out of experiences. What I call performing landscape is a technique for documenting performances and for producing artworks or “souvenirs” of changes that take place in the environment, thus combining technology (the camera) and experience (of the site, the repetition) in order to produce artworks that remain – memorabilia of sorts. By returning to the same place once a week for one year and performing the same action in front of a camera that is placed in the same position, and then editing the takes, the slow processes in the environment can be condensed and sped up in the video work. For the performer the act of returning to a site repeatedly produces almost the opposite effect, an extended encounter with the living environment, a kind of meditative practice. Inevitably this way of creating “mementos of moments” in a landscape also means producing more inanimate objects, turning experiences of the living environment into commodities, into video works.

Like any form of recording, performing landscape for a camera preserves specific moments, and actively excludes others, like everything that remains outside the frame. It also excludes the experience of the performer. What the performer senses and what the camera on a tripod records do not have much in common. Unforeseen transformations in the environment over time can cause further complications, as in the example to be discussed in this text: Year of the Tiger (Arlander, 2011).{{6.}} On the site of this work, the vegetation grew to such an extent that the performer could not be distinguished at all in long sequences, which caused me to ask in retrospect: how to document that which is hidden, that which is literally overgrown?

This text will discuss some of the problems encountered when performing landscape – live and alive. I begin by describing the project Year of the Tiger, after which I relate my work to Teresa Brennan’s ideas about the foundational fantasy that influences our relationship to the environment. I then explore Philip Auslander’s summary of the changes in our understanding of liveness, and finally, prompted by Barbara Bolt, I consider the question of impact with regards to the possible effects of this case of performing landscape.{{7.}}

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Year of the Tiger

A performance project and video work, Year of the Tiger is an example of the practice I call performing landscape. The project was realized by using a technique I have developed in previous years: performing for a camera in the same place once a week for a year. Year of the Tiger is one part in a series of twelve one-year projects that have been (and will be) performed on Harakka Island, Helsinki. The series, which I began in 2002, is based on the Chinese calendar and its twelve-year cycle, with each year named after a specific animal. Every year I have looked for a new perspective on the landscape, a new aspect of the environment, and a new kind of relationship between the human body and the place. My working method utilizes the traditions of performance art, video art and environmental art, and moves in the border area between them.{{8.}}

During the year of the tiger (2010), I explored how changing the point of view can influence how a landscape is perceived, by video recording the same site from four different directions for a year and thus producing four different views of the same landscape. The performance consisted of me walking wrapped in an off-white scarf once a week for a year on a decomposed stone base of a building, the remains of a small house in the south-eastern part of Harakka Island, and of lying down on a small white mat in the four corners of the ruins. I repeated these same actions four times and recorded them from four different directions.

Year of the Tiger, the main work that was edited from all the recordings of these performances is a four-channel video installation, which shows four versions of the landscape with me lying on the ground while the seasons change around me.{{9.}} In wintertime the old stone base of the house is hardly visible due to the snow, and in summertime it is hardly visible due to vegetation; but in spring and fall it is sometimes clearly distinguishable in the images. Lying down in the open on the ruins of a house may produce associations with homelessness, or with the helplessness of a contemporary person in nature. The main intention of the work, however, is to bring attention to changes in the landscape due to the shifting seasons, weather and climate, thus showing in a tangible way the passing of time. The work also indicates how images and notions of a landscape are constructed, how a change in perspective may change the meaning of a land-scape.

In contrast to the four-channel video installation, a one-channel video work called Round of the Tiger documents only one session, in wintertime, and reveals how the work was made. It shows me walking in a square, wrapped in an off-white scarf, the woollen blanket of a Berber woman, moving a small mat, a whitish rag rug, from one corner to the next, lying down and getting up again, struggling in the snow.{{10.}} One round consisted of the following actions: I picked up the blanket and wrapped it around me, walked in a square on the remains of the stone base until I came to the rug in one corner, lied down on the rug for a while, then continued walking one more round, picked up the rug and moved it to the next corner, left the blanket in the following corner and thus finished the round. Then, after moving the camera and tripod to the next side of the stone base, I repeated the actions. Thus I recorded the same sequence of actions four times, from four different directions; first with the camera in the east facing west, then in the south facing north, then in the west facing east, and finally in the north facing south. The performance involved walking around the stone base and lying down on the rug four times during each session. These sessions were repeated once a week for a year.

A third variation, called Day and Night of the Tiger – in the Year of the Rabbit, was performed at midsummer 2011 for 24 hours with three-hour intervals, on the ruins of a smaller building near the original stone base, and with some spoken descriptions recorded.{{11.}} This time I repeated the action only once each time, and video recorded it from one side only – all in all, only twelve times. Instead of changes in vegetation, the changes in light conditions dominate in this work; during midsummer in Helsinki it is dark only for a few hours every night. In addition, I video recorded some small studies of sitting in the landscape. I was looking for affinities between my white scarf and details in the environment, from the salt on the seashore to bird droppings on the rocks. One of these studies, On the Birds’ Rock, explores the idea of four perspectives on the same landscape. In it I sit for a moment with a white scarf on a rock that is covered in white bird droppings, turning my back to the camera on a tripod. This is repeated four times, recorded from four directions.

Year of the Tiger shows four perspectives of the same landscape. I chose the placement of the camera and the framing of the images so the stone base would visually follow the baseline of the image. When the camera was placed to the east and south of the ruin this was easy because the land was open. In the west a swamp with shrubs formed an obstacle. In the north a group of alder bushes blocked the view. In winter-time, by the time of the Chinese New Year when I began, one could see through them but in summertime the bushes grew surprisingly fast and finally covered the view completely. So what to do? At some point I stopped walking the fourth round which was blocked by the shrubs and thought I could just as well record only those plants, but soon realized that there was no point in that. Either I would perform my action or not. If I only wanted to create an impression for the viewer I could do it just as well in Photoshop or by drawing or storytelling, for instance. Thus I continued my walking, literally in the bushes. The value of the practice is in the practice, I thought. In terms of documentation, to show my action I should have changed the camera position. But then the whole project with four repeated views would be ruined. The absurdity of documenting an action you cannot see, creating evidence of something in a manner that does not function as evidence, except for the camera being there, was soon obvious. The choice to continue the action despite the futility of recording it did have relevance in terms of impact, at least concerning the effects on the performer.

In terms of my relationship to the environment, this project showed me that I am influenced by an idealized and romantic notion of landscape still prevalent in contemporary art, a notion that is of little use when actually engaging with the environment.{{12.}} In terms of liveness, a term often used in relation to performance, this case exemplifies the unforeseen occurrences that should be taken into consideration when one works with environments that are literally alive. But of course one could say that a person better prepared to work in “unkempt” landscapes would have known how quickly alders grow and thus made other decisions to begin with, never encountering such surprises. Perhaps other “side-effects” of the living environment would have occurred, however, since in a landscape nothing stays the same. In this case I received what I wanted, more literally than I expected: mementos of a landscape.

These mementos, comprised of digital material, have turned my experiences of being immersed in, or struggling with, a living environment into objects that can be endlessly copied but not easily biodegradable or able to participate in the reproduction of life. The ethical dilemma of making dead objects of something that is alive, of trying to inspire people to enjoy the endless changeability of the living environment with the help of inert objects, prompted me to look at how our relationship to the environment has been understood, which in turn led me to Teresa Brennan.

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Exhausting Commodities

The practice of performing landscape that I describe above is challenged by ideas that are perhaps best exemplified by Teresa Brennan’s work Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy (2000). She analyzes what she sees as the exhaustion that pervades modern capitalism in psychic, social and environmental terms, and claims that a phenomenon she calls the foundational fantasy – assuming ourselves as subjects in a world of objects – is intensified in modernity. Commodities function after the manner of fantasies, and they make living substances inert in contrast with the energetic movement of life.{{13.}} For her it is this “slower movement” that is the key to the exhausting nature of modernity. The less animate the environment is and the slower time becomes in natural reality, the greater the ego’s need to speed things up.{{14.}}

Brennan’s analysis has relevance for the discourse on documentation, and for the well-rehearsed notion of performance art as resistance to commoditization.{{15.}} Her emphasis on the distinction between animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, introduces a new angle into the so-called liveness debate. Personally, I find Brennan’s arguments challenging for my artistic practice, alerting me to the problems involved in performing for a camera, which may help the performer (and the viewer) reconnect with the living environment, but actually end up producing more dead objects, like videotapes and DVDs. Moreover, in at- tempting to create a mode of working that would be a meditative alternative to the commercial corruption of collaborative performance production, I might be succumbing to a fantasy of omnipotent independence.

Brennan shows how capitalism is turning biodegradable life into dead objects, and disturbs an ecological balance by “binding more and more life in a form in which it cannot reproduce life.”{{16.}} The production of commodities binds nature to forms, “incapable of re-entering the lifecycles via the reproduction of their own kind or their organic decay.”{{17.}} She draws on Marx but criticizes him for a subject-centred perspective, which made him unaware of the fact that “nature as well as labour is a source of value, and of the energy drawn on in turning living nature into commodities and money.”{{18.}} Interesting in Brennan’s work is precisely the way in which she combines the psychological, social and economic-environmental, somewhat reminiscent of the three ecologies proposed by Félix Guattari (2000).{{19.}} For the purposes of this paper, her most relevant discussions are about the consequences of a psychic foundational fantasy of autonomy for our relationship with the environment.

Our energetic connection to the environment is crucial when working with landscape. Brennan goes further than traditional philosophical critiques of hubris and subject-centeredness because she takes energy into account. According to her, pre-modern people conceived of themselves as energetically and psychically connected with their environment and to others in it, whereas modern subject/object thinking automatically separates the subject from the environment. It seems that the transmission of affect, while once conscious, is now an unconscious process in the West, and consequently, the influence of the environment on the subject is denied or downplayed. The pre-eminence of the subject is threatened by the idea of an energetic connection between the subject, others and the environment. If the subject is energetically connected to, and hence affected by, its context, it is no longer the source of all agency.{{20.}} If I am energetically connected to the landscape, I cannot claim I am performing landscape without acknowledging that the landscape is performing me, or at least has an impact on me as performer.

How can I perform landscape without succumbing to, or reinforcing what Brennan calls the foundational fantasy? This is, according to Brennan, the paranoid fantasy of autonomous beginning; the subject must deny its history, since that history reveals its dependence on a maternal origin.{{21.}} Energies and affects flow between the subject and its surrounding environment, creating an illusion that the subject founds the world and has dominion over it, as well as the desire to destroy any evidence to the contrary, like the living and thinking Other.{{22.}} Seeing ourselves as subjects in a world of objects that are supposed to respond to our every whim is aggravated in modernity. The subject postulates itself as a subject, severs connections with those around it, and believes that its fantasies and affects are its own affairs. For Brennan, the foundational fantasy “relies on a divorce between mental design and bodily action to sustain its omnipotent denial.”{{23.}} How could this be avoided? Performing landscape (for example walking weekly on the stone base of an old building) could mean that the performer disengages from the actual environment by producing a private imaginary world on top of it. For instance, when I try to connect with my surroundings on site, am I actually projecting a fantasy onto the environment, using it as a background for my experiments in controlling time?

Moreover, it is not only the ego’s own fantasies that weigh heavily upon it. Brennan suggests we are influenced by our surroundings, by the “subjective if not subliminal sensing of what is animate or inanimate in the surrounding environment.” According to her, the less animate the environment is, the greater the ego’s need to speed things up, “its need for control, its ‘cutting up’ in its urge to know, its spoiling of living nature, and its general aggression towards the other.”{{24.}} Living in a predominantly man-made world distorts our relationship to our surroundings and to other living beings. Our physical environment alters our sense of connection with the world. Commodities function like fantasies, Brennan claims, closing the subject off from the movement of life. They create a fantasmatic world, which makes the subject more aware of what it has made, rather than connected with, or part of, what has made it.{{25.}}

A subjective sense of difference between an animate and an inanimate environment (regardless of possible difficulties in defining what is alive and what is not on a molecular level) drives me to perform landscape, to look, like many others, for ways of engaging with living environments. However, by turning these encounters into video works I actually participate in closing off the viewer into a digitally and electronically produced world of representations. The impact on me as a performer, encountering the living environment, and the impact on the viewer, encountering the video works, could be diametrically opposite.

An environment of commodities that materializes our fantasies is costly; according to Brennan, we pay a price for our temporary excitements in the depletion of shared natural resources. The consequence of living in a high-tech built environment is that one has to be a subject to repel its deadening effects, which are deceptive, since they speed up one’s conscious tempo and appear to form a world of rapid motion with a pulse that can be taken as energy itself. Nevertheless, the deadening effects of this environment more and more make everyone an object, she claims.{{26.}} When I am condensing time in my video works, in order to make it visible, compressing a process of one year into twenty minutes or less, am I, despite my conscious attempts to the contrary, actually participating in this technological speeding-up of experience?

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Mediated Liveness

The environment has an impact on our sense of what is alive, of liveness, too. The so-called liveness debate can be approached from several angles.{{27.}} One is the discussion of how documentation relates to practice as research in the UK, summarized by Piccini and Rye (2009).{{28.}} Another discussion concerns the role of documentation in performance art.{{29.}} Documenting a live performance means to make it inani- mate, in order to thus preserve its life in some form for posterity. That is what I do in the examples described above.

Another dimension is the relationship between the live and the mediated in performance summarized by Philip Auslander (2008), who claims that there can be no unmediated performances, since performances are actually techniques of mediation in a broader sense. He describes the concept of liveness as a moving target, though the word live is traditionally used to refer to “a performance heard or watched at the time of its occurrence, as distinguished from one recorded on film, tape etc.”{{30.}} Though we can speak of so-called live recordings as well.

Auslander presents Steve Wurzler’s schema, which distinguishes between three different types of liveness, based on the spatial or temporal co-presence between performers and audience. The first mode, the so-called classical live, is based on temporal and spatial co-presence. The second form of live is based on temporal simultaneity, like in the use of telephone, “live” radio, “live” television, and so forth. The audience witnesses the performance as it happens, but performers and spectators are not spatially co-present. The third form of live is based on temporal anteriority and spatial co-presence, as in lip synching or stadium replays, where the audience is spatially present but hears what has been recorded previously. The fourth category, the recorded (or the non-live), is based on temporal anteriority and spatial absence, as in motion pictures or film, recorded radio and television. The audience shares neither the temporal frame nor the physical location with the performers and experiences the performance later (this fourth category describes the final form the performances in my examples take as well).{{31.}}

Another way of looking at the spatial-temporal schema is to think of it in terms of representation and presentation, following Margaret Morse in her seminal text on the space of video-installations.{{32.}} Representation and presentation are often discussed in the sense of representation portraying or standing for something that is not present (i.e., words, signs, etc.), whereas presentation is referred to as displaying something “as it is” (i.e., color, sound, etc.). But we can think of representation-presentation in terms of time and space as well. For example, narratives use representations of “there at that time” as in “once upon a time there was,” whereas performance art and real time video try to present the “here and now.” Other combinations are possible, too. We could say “here at that time” is the logic of heritage sites, while “there now” is the logic of the telephone or webcam. The latter coincides with Wurtzler’s second form of liveness described above. In combining my performances for camera with live performance I have experimented with both spatio-temporal dimensions, “here at that time,” as well as “there now.”{{33.}} Whereas a traditional live performance takes place “here and now,” video installations like Year of the Tiger show “there at that time.” Such a neat division, however, is crumbling today.

Auslander refers to recent work by media theorist Margaret Morse, who insists that our understanding of liveness is increasingly produced by temporal (rather than spatial) co-presence, and through an entity’s ability to interact with us and respond to us. Moreover, he cites Nick Couldry, who proposes online liveness and group liveness to be new forms of liveness. Couldry maintains that the experience of liveness in these cases is not limited to specific performer-audience interactions, but to “the feeling of always being connected to other people, of continuous, technologically mediated co-presence with others known and unknown.”{{34.}} The word “live” thus increasingly refers to connections and interactions between human and nonhuman agents.{{35.}}

And here the relevance of Brennan’s ideas can be considered once more. Our understanding of liveness as interaction could be conditioned by the foundational fantasy, seeing ourselves as subjects in a world of objects that are supposed to serve us and respond to our needs. If the experience of liveness is understood more and more as a function of interaction, of receiving a response from a technological device that simulates the reactions of a living entity, how does this alter our relationship to living beings that do not respond to us in an instant? A robot will surpass a tree in terms of immediate interactivity, to be sure, and also help maintaining the foundational fantasy. If we expect the world to constantly respond to us, in order for it to feel alive to us, this will alter our relationship to the environment.

The forms of interaction afforded by the environment are not “pre-programmed to support an enjoyable play experience.” How can we appreciate creatures that are not mammals or machines and somehow recognizable as potential co-performers interacting with us, if we do not feel them to be alive? A tree is very much alive, though it cannot provide us with the experience of liveness as interaction. Some kind of interaction is actually taking place, in an exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, for instance, but on a microscopic scale that is imperceptible to us, or on an energetic level, as Brennan proposes.

It is this literal dimension of liveness, aliveness, that I find personally interesting, rather than the supposedly immediate performer-spectator exchange of traditional performances, which tends to neglect the surroundings. It is this dimension that resonates with the ideas of Teresa Brennan concerning our relationship to the living or not-so-living environment. She sees a crucial difference in the ability of an entity to participate in the cycle of producing new entities through the disintegration that characterises organic life. Most commodities, including DVDs in this case, cannot reproduce themselves nor degenerate into biodegradable waste. On the level of physics the distinction between animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, might dissolve; but on the level of human experience it is often clear. Even though we can crave machines that respond to our actions and feel them to be more alive than trees or plants that do not react to our every whim, our body can probably sense how organically alive our surroundings are. According to Brennan, we respond energetically to our environment, consciously or not. Morevover, the energetic connection between individuals and the environment has reciprocal consequences; psychical and contemplative resistance will also have effects, she claims. If we take seriously the indissolubility of the individual and the environment, then every action and every thought will necessarily have an effect.{{36.}} Her assertion that every action and every thought has an effect is alarming and potentially reassuring. Our ways of making art and research do make a difference. What we repeat, and how we repeat it, has an impact.

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Impact?

In terms of effects, what is the impact of Year of the Tiger? As with any work it seems reasonable to think of impact on two levels. First, the effects of the creation process; and second, the effects of the reception process. In live performance these are said to coincide but that is rarely true. Many performances are prepared and even rehearsed in some way before the actual presentation for an audience. And that creation process has effects, sometimes unforeseen side-effects, like a heap of waste, too.

In relation to Year of the Tiger, the effects of the creation process, the performances in the landscape, can be discussed, since the work on site is completed. The reception process remains open, however. The installa- tion was shown to the public for the first time in January 2012.{{37.}} “For the first time” is crucial. One motivation for creating performances for the camera, rather than actions for a live audience present at the site, is that a wider outreach is possible. Works that can be shown again and again in ever new contexts have the capacity of engendering ever new responses and thus of producing unforeseen effects. To assess the impact of an artwork without acknowledging this capacity, without taking the future into account, seems absurd. To predict that future is impossible; works that were almost completely neglected by their contemporaries have had an impact on later audiences, as many avant-garde movements have shown.

Without claiming any avant-garde status for this work I will conclude by briefly looking at the possible effects of Year of the Tiger during the creation process in 2010. As mentioned above, Barbara Bolt proposes to look at results or transformations as discursive, material or affective. To these useful distinctions I propose some further differentiations in terms of the recipients of the effects, such as: a) the impact on the environment; b) the impact on the performer or artist herself or himself; and c) other possible effects.

The material impact on the environment in this case is comparatively small regardless of the repetition (once a week) and the duration (one year): some broken branches, trampled moss, disturbed birds and traces on vegetation. Small paths were created on the cliffs showing the route where a human being had walked every week. By now, more than a year later, the traces have vanished. The broken branches remain broken, but branches do break in storms or snow as well. Thus we can say that no lasting environmental consequences have been imposed.

A weekly contemplative practice might be expected to have both material and affective effects on the per- former. Extreme weather conditions, a winter with unusual amounts of snow, for instance, created problems with freezing toes and fingers, and made the project seem more like a sports endeavour at times. The chosen outfit (thick white sweater) was truly problematic in summertime, with a profusion of sweat as a side effect. The choice of working with the old stone base of a house surrounded by vegetation on two sides produced only one (noticed) attack by a tick, which proved benign. From the working notes it seems that changes in the weather and negotiations with nesting birds or birds aggressively protecting their young were my primary interest. The overall affective impact on the performer was mainly invigorating, sometimes calming, sometimes refreshing, due to repeated contact with organic elements and a living environment. The meditative effects of repetition I have discussed elsewhere.{{38.}}

Among other effects that are both discursive and affective (though perhaps more linked to reception), we could include the preview of one take of the performance that was presented to the research community at the Theatre Academy in spring 2011. I could not participate in person, so I recorded a short introduction and a soundtrack for the video material, which showed in its entirety one unedited sequence in deep snow (later edited to form Round of the Tiger). Unlike Year of the Tiger, with the performer lying motionless on the ground and the landscape constantly changing around her, the focus in this version is on the action, the performer struggling through the snow. I asked the viewers to write short comments on what they had seen and experienced, which would then be given to me for a “dialogue with delay.” Some of the comments were general, but some were pertinent, such as the simple question “what is changing?” If we think in terms of impact, we could add: what changes due to this activity? In the situation, in the image, in me, in the world? Such questions come close to Bolt’s idea of recognizing and mapping the transformations that have occurred. The question “what is changing” was probably prompted by my referring to Brennan in the voice over speech: If we take seriously the indissolubility of individual and environment, then every thought and every action has an effect.

So what is the effect of this action? Should we think of effect in terms of the “results” of an agenda, or rather as “damage” to a previous situation of affairs? Or as a sensory and affective “experience” tasted by the participants (including the performer)? Or should we think of effect in terms of comparing what remained undone due to repetition? What did not take place because this action took place? A question that is almost impossible to answer.

In terms of the possible effects on current discourses on art or artistic research, the impact of the creation process has so far been rather small; I have described it only in a few contexts, and this is the first published account. In terms of damage to the environment, the impact was fortunately small, too. The affective impact of the creation process on the performer, however, albeit difficult to ascertain, was more noticeable. The impact of the artworks (like all artworks capable of producing new events) however, cannot be determined in advance. To my knowledge the video installations have not produced strong material, discursive or affective reactions or other effects, yet. Fortunately their future and potential impacts remain open. Paradoxically and problematically their survival and future life depends on their existence in the form of digital representations, as inanimate objects.

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Annette Arlander (www.harakka.fi/arlander) is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue. She is one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and of the emerging field of artistic research. Arlander holds an MA in directing, another in philosophy, and a Doctor of Arts in theatre and drama. She is professor in performance art and theory at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Arlander’s artwork is focused on performing landscape by means of video or recorded voice. Her research interests include artistic research methodologies, performance studies, performance-as-research, landscape and the environment.

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[¹]See Brad Haseman, “A Manifesto for Performative Research.” In Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, theme issue “Practice-led-Research,” no. 118 (2006): 98-106; see also Barbara Bolt, “A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts?” Working Papers in Art and Design, volume 5 (2008). Last accessed online 11/29/2011 at: http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/vol5/bbabs.html[¹]
[³]Bolt, 2008: 6. 3 Bolt, 2008: 9.[³]
[⁵]Bolt, 2008: 9.[⁵]
[⁷]For more on documentation, see: Angela Piccini and Caroline Rye, “Of Fevered Archives and The Quest for Total Documen- tation.” In Practice as Research in Performance and Screen, edited by Alleghue, Jones, Kershaw and Piccini (Basingstoke Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 34-49; For more on the live and the mediated, see: Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Perfor- mance Documentation,” Performing Arts Journal 84 volume 28 no 3 (New York: MIT Press Journals, September 2006): 1-10; Philip Auslander, “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance,” Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, edited by Tracy C. Da- vis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 107-119.[⁷]
[⁹]Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy (New York: Routledge, 2000); André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).[⁹]
[¹¹]See: Annette Arlander, Year of the Tiger four channel video installation 2011 (28 min.) http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-the-tiger/ ; and Annette Arlander Round of the Tiger video documentary 2011 (23 min.) http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/round-of-the-tiger/[¹¹]
[¹³]This text is based on a paper called “Mementos of a Landscape” presented at PSi #17(Performance Studies International), 25- 29th of May 2011 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. http://www.psi17.org/[¹³]
[¹⁵]An overview of previous works in the series is available on the web site of the AV-archive, The Distribution Centre for Finnish Media Art, http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/artists/annette-arlander_en/[¹⁵]
[¹⁷]Year of the Tiger installation (28 min. 19 sec.) Wrapped in a white shawl I lay on the remains of the stone base of a building on Harakka Island once a week for a year from 14th February 2010 to 31st January 2011. Part 1, in the northeastern corner. Part 2, in the southeastern corner. Part 3, in the southwestern corner. Part 4, in the northwestern corner. The four channel installation is planned to be presented in such a way that all four parts are shown next to each other, synchronized, in the following order (from left to right) 4-1-2-3. http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-the-tiger/[¹⁷]
[¹⁹]Round of the Tiger documentary (23 min. 11 sec.) Wrapped in a white shawl I walk on the remains of the stone base of a building in snow on Harakka Island, four times, video filmed from four directions in February 2010. http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/round-of-the-tiger/[¹⁹]
[²¹]Day and Night of the Tiger documentary (9 min. 44 sec.) Wrapped in a white shawl I walk on the remains of the stone base of a small building on Harakka Island for a day and night with three hour intervals between 24th June 2011 at 5 pm and 25th June 2011 at 5 pm. http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/day-and-night-of-the-tiger/ Day and Night of the Tiger 1-2 installation (7 min. 43 sec.) Part 1. Wrapped in a white shawl I lie on the remains of the stone base of a small building on Harakka Island for a day and night with three hour intervals between 24th June 2010 at 5 pm and 25th June 2010 at 5 pm. Part 2. I describe the weather conditions with a few words in Finnish and English on the same occasions. This two channel installation is planned to be presented with parts 1 and 2 next to each other, part 2 to the left, part 1 to the right. http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/day-and-night-of-the-tiger-1-2/[²¹]
[²³]For more on romantic notions of landscape in contemporary art, see: James Elkins and Rachael Delue (editors), Landscape Theory, The Art Seminar (New York and London: Routledge, 2008): 143.[²³]
[²⁵]Brennan, 2000: 176.[²⁵]
[²⁷]Brennan, 2000: 174.[²⁷]
[²⁹]For more on performance art as a resistance to commoditization, see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).[²⁹]
[³¹]Brennan, 2000: 2.[³¹]
[³³]Brennan, 2000: 5.[³³]
[³⁵]Brennan, 2000: 11.[³⁵]
[³⁷]See Félix Guattari, Three Ecologies (London: The Athlone Press, 2000).[³⁷]
[³⁹]Brennan, 2000: 10-11.[³⁹]
[⁴¹]Brennan, 2000: 36.[⁴¹]
[⁴³]Brennan, 2000: 189.[⁴³]
[⁴⁵]Brennan, 2000: 36.[⁴⁵]
[⁴⁷]Brennan, 2000: 174.[⁴⁷]
[⁴⁹]Brennan, 2000: 175-176.[⁴⁹]
[⁵¹]Brennan, 2000: 187.[⁵¹]
[⁵³]See Phelan, 1993; Auslander, 1999; Rebecca Schneider “Archives Performance Remain” in Performance Research vol 6.2. summer 2001: 100-108 and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham; Duke University Press, 2003).[⁵³]
[⁵⁵]Piccini and Rye, 2009: 34-49.[⁵⁵]
[⁵⁷]See for instance Auslander 2006, or Amelia Jones Body Art / Performing The Subject (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press,1990).[⁵⁷]
[⁵⁹]Auslander, 2008: 109.[⁵⁹]
[⁶¹]Steve Wurtzler, “She Sang Live, but the Michrophone was Turned Off: The Live, the Recorded, and the Subject of Represen- tation.” In Sound Theory Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Pages 87-105. Quoted in Auslander, 2008: 110.[⁶¹]
[⁶³]Margaret Morse, “Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, the Space-in-between.” In Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, edited by Dough Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (Reading, PA: Aperture, 1990).[⁶³]
[⁶⁵]For example in the sound work “Sitting on a Rock” presented as part of the exhibition Year of the Horse on Harakka in 2003, or in the performance “Sitting on a Rock at Muu” 2003.[⁶⁵]
[⁶⁷]Nick Couldry, “Liveness, ‘Reality’ and the Mediated Habitus from Television into Mobile Phone.” In The Communication Review 7 (2004): 356-7. Quoted in Auslander, 2008: 111.[⁶⁷]
[⁶⁹]Auslander, 2008: 111.[⁶⁹]
[⁷¹]Brennan, 2000: 191.[⁷¹]
[⁷³]The exhibition Year of the Tiger was shown in gallery Jangva in Helsinki 11th January to 29th January 2012. http://www.jangva.fi/[⁷³]
[⁷⁵]Arlander (2009), ”Event scores for performing interruptions” in Tiina Mäntymäki and Olli Mäkinen (eds). Art and Resistance. Proceedings of the University of Vaasa. Research Papers 290, 2009: 153-168.[⁷⁵]