Writing
TIME TIME TIME Interview with Rebecca Belmore

FADO (Paul Couillard): Let’s talk about manifesto, the performance you did last year for TIME TIME TIME. Could you start by describing the performance?

REBECCA BELMORE: The performance was in a storefront space on Queen West. I was seated at a table with a microphone, some paper, and a number of pencils. I proposed to sit there for twelve hours–from sunup to sundown–and to write as consistently as possible over that period of time, speaking whatever I wrote. I was trying to synch my voice with my hand, and the voice of my brain was involved, too. Speakers were mounted outside the space, amplifying my voice so that the audience could hear me.

FADO: When you started, what did you hope to write about?

REBECCA BELMORE: Well, I hoped I would write something great. But I don’t think it was that great. That’s OK: I knew it probably wouldn’t be great writing, because I’m not a writer. For me it was the whole process… I was interested in the fantasy of being a writer. This was a way for me to come to terms with that, or at least exorcise the idea of myself as a writer in real time. At the same time, I am a visual artist and a performance artist and an installation artist, so I was interested in creating the image of myself as a writer. In terms of an aesthetic object or installation, I installed myself. I was dressed in white. The paper was white. The walls were white–

FADO: There was a white tablecloth–

REBECCA BELMORE: Yes, the table was white, all white on white. And over time, in the process of writing, my hand became covered with lead, because I was dragging it across the page. When I touched myself, my shirt would become covered with the graphite. In terms of drawing or marking as a process, over time I change. It’s very subtle, but I like that aspect of it.

Also, I put a pencil sharpener in the bay window, which gave me a way to get out of my chair and approach the glass or the separation between myself and the outside. Over twelve hours, that was my only way to get away from my table and from the task of writing. I say ‘task’ because trying to write really was a task.

FADO: It’s interesting that you describe the performance in terms of how you’re marked by your own process. In a sense, the piece is about how you start out to make a mark, and then how you mark yourself through that process.

REBECCA BELMORE: Yes. Over the twelve hours, at times I would be into the writing, really focused on it. And then at other times, because I was really tired, I would end up getting frustrated. I would start to see myself in the space and describe the visual image I was projecting–what I imagined I must look like. It was the idea of seeing yourself, of marking yourself in a visual sense. I found it a difficult performance to do. I’m accustomed to working 15 minutes or half an hour–an hour, maximum.

FADO: To me it was an installation in which you were the main sculptural element.

REBECCA BELMORE: Through the process of making the work I realized that was exactly what I was doing. The space had white walls and all the symbols we associate with art; I liked being institutionalized, locked up in the gallery so to speak. Also, the fact that the space is across from a psychiatric hospital interested me. I would hear the audience talking outside, people’s curiosity or dismissal–“this is a piece of shit”, or “who’s paying for this”, “how much is she getting paid”, “taxpayers’ dollars” and all of that–so I had to confront that reality or aspect of being an artist, being questioned by the public about the validity of what I’m doing. “Is this art?”

FADO: Yes, that’s a tendency in our culture. Before we even try to figure out for ourselves what we’re seeing, the first thing we want to know is, “why is she doing that? Who’s paying for that?”

REBECCA BELMORE: Absolutely. Being on display in that way–being self-conscious and also through the process of the work revealing my inadequacy as a writer–was very unsettling on a personal level. All artists are subject to self-questioning about whether we think it’s good or not.

FADO: The artist’s job is to go to that very vulnerable place. During the performance, it begs the question, “are you setting yourself up for failure?” Especially in a piece where you’re so much on display. But at the end, we saw only the object you created. You took all of the pages, which were spread across the floor, and gathered them up. As an object it looked quite beautiful, a stack of vellum with the pencil shavings beside it. You presented it as an object in a way that frustrated any viewer expectation of wanting to actually read the words. As a visual artist, you can go through a process of vulnerability, but that’s not necessarily what’s exposed at the end of it. In the performance art process, the vulnerability is exactly what’s there to be exposed.

REBECCA BELMORE: What is that, then? An ‘operation’ of the visual artist?

FADO: It sets up a lot of interesting questions about why artists do performance. I see manifesto as different from your other performance work. The previous works I’ve seen were responses to particular situations. They were short, to-the-point, and they weren’t about you per se. Whereas manifesto was you going into very vulnerable territory and just allowing that to be.

REBECCA BELMORE: That’s very true. It was such a personal place for me to do, and it’s odd that I would make it stretch out over twelve hours. It was a self-examination, an interrogation of myself as a visual artist and as an installation artist. It was like a conversation between different aspects of my work, my different personalities and what they produce.

FADO: Do you think doing this piece has had any effect on you?

REBECCA BELMORE: After I did the piece, I just wanted to run away.

FADO: But you had set up the ‘opening.’

REBECCA BELMORE: I know. I had to be a professional. The ‘other’ me stood up and said, “OK, this is my object. Could I have a bottle of beer?” What was the question?

FADO: Whether you felt any impact…

REBECCA BELMORE: I really couldn’t talk about the work. Even when I went back up north to where I was living at the time, in Fort McMurray, talking to friends or my partner, I didn’t really describe the piece. I just dropped it. This is the first time I’ve talked about it. Because it was so difficult and so personal, I think you had to be in the room. It was a private thing, even though it was public.

FADO: I was quite overwhelmed by how uncompromisingly honest the piece seemed. If you were going through a bad time, the audience knew it. And you knew it, too. So if the only thing in your head was what a horrible ordeal you were going through, you would write it down, and say it. “This is a piece of crap. I’m just fooling myself here.”

REBECCA BELMORE: “This is stupid. Art is stupid.”

FADO: You’d read over something you’d written ten minutes before and write, “that was just bullshit. It’s a lie.” And yet as an artist you were instinctively following the principles of transformation: always in motion, always going deeper, always testing the lie. Even though you went through very difficult moments, you wouldn’t get stuck in one spot, or stop doing your task. Your frustration would be the catalyst that would send you off on the next–

REBECCA BELMORE: Rant…

FADO:–point of inquiry. I found that really amazing.

REBECCA BELMORE: I remember it as coming at the problem, or that point, by switching directions. Going in circles, the confusion and the frustration: sometimes thinking I had a good idea and I was on my way, and then suddenly getting trapped again somewhere else. I think that says a lot about human beings and the way we operate.

FADO: I think that’s how our minds develop things. It’s certainly how art works for me, and it seems to be how other aspects of my life work as well.

REBECCA BELMORE: I enjoyed doing the piece a lot. I felt good about it in the end, but it was definitely a challenge.

FADO: Why did you choose the title manifesto?

REBECCA BELMORE: I guess I was hoping for clarity–to clarify my own thinking and to have a better understanding of what it is that I’m trying to do.

FADO: Why is that important to you now as opposed to any other point in your career?

REBECCA BELMORE: I’ve been working for ten years, and I think it’s a good time to take a break, to evaluate what’s next. That’s probably why I chose the title. I knew I had twelve hours to really think about it, so it made sense. And the idea of writing a manifesto was romantic. I always admire people who can write, people who keep notebooks and write ideas down. I never do that, so I wanted to see myself or imagine myself being that way, actually writing things down on paper.

FADO: Do you think there’s an overriding theme or concern in your work? What do you think your work is about?

REBECCA BELMORE: Do you mean my performance work, or all of my work in general?

FADO: Let’s start with you performance work.

REBECCA BELMORE: Well, recently I’ve been doing performances as a means of making a sculptural object. So there’s some kind of conversation going on between different disciplines. And the performance work has a lot to do with my voice, or my reaction to specific situations–for example, the piece I did at 7a*11d [International Performance Art Festival] in 1997, FOR DUDLEY.

[On September 6, 1995, Dudley George, a Chippewa from Stoney Point, was the first Indigenous person to be killed in a land rights dispute in Canada in the 20th Century.]

The energy within the piece has a lot to do with my own personal frustration, even though I project that it’s the performance persona or the performance activity–not me, Rebecca Belmore. My work is the voice that speaks on my behalf, it’s my spokesperson. Basically, I try to be as honest as possible, and give myself a hard time. Much like I did in manifesto.

FADO: Do you feel that you beat yourself up a bit?

REBECCA BELMORE: Definitely. I’m very hard on myself.

FADO: Do you think that’s a good thing?

REBECCA BELMORE: A lot of people say I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, but I think it’s healthy, as long as you know the level at which it makes sense. You shouldn’t bury yourself.

FADO: You certainly shouldn’t be any harder on an audience than you are on yourself. I don’t mean forcing the audience to watch grisly things. I mean reminding people that there are things to question in daily life and society. We should be thinking about our place in the world and what we need to be doing. I think that’s what we mean when we say “hard on ourselves” as opposed to whipping ourselves for sheer pleasure.

REBECCA BELMORE: In performance, it’s very important to me to create a captivating visual image. I really like it when I am in a performance and I feel, “yes, this looks good, even though I can’t see it.” Then I feel that maybe I am being successful.

FADO: You have a romantic fascination with writing, but you speak in images.

REBECCA BELMORE: Absolutely.

FADO: Is the presence of the audience important for you in performance?

REBECCA BELMORE: It’s becoming less important. manifesto was a good example of that. Even though my voice was out there, I had no idea how it sounded, whether you could hear it across the street. I didn’t care. What I cared about was how it must look. I became totally messed up by the visual aspect of it.

FADO: Messed up?

REBECCA BELMORE: Obsessed with it, and getting stuck talking about it incessantly.

FADO: But you’re still interested in performance despite this harrowing experience!

REBECCA BELMORE: I really like performance. But the more I do it, the more I need to do it on my own terms. I’m much more selective than I was, say, five years ago. I prefer to work outside of the museums and official galleries. Official gallery spaces are too problematic. I find them really disheartening. Performance is difficult for a general audience, and I think I’m more interested in the medium itself, not the audiences.

FADO: Galleries are set up to show static images. Their design is based around the idea of presenting an object that’s frozen. That’s their power in a way, so to put performance there creates a strange dynamic.

REBECCA BELMORE: I talk a lot at universities to art students here and in the US, and often–especially if it’s a First Nations group of students–I like to do a performance for them to illustrate how I feel about the process of being an artist, what that means to me. Performance has become an effective speaking / teaching tool for me in talking with other artists and students. I’ve found a way to teach or to speak about art through performance.

FADO: Performance reveals in a way that just talking never would.

REBECCA BELMORE: Absolutely.

FADO: You mentioned that doing a twelve-hour piece was unusual for you. Do you have any thoughts about time and duration?

REBECCA BELMORE: In my installation work, time and duration is definitely part of the process. I’ve done works that are labour intensive, but usually it’s a simple task that’s tedious and takes a long time. I enjoy that. Had I chosen to do a more physical action–putting things into a box for twelve hours–

FADO: Or sharpening pencils for twelve hours…

REBECCA BELMORE:–that would have been a lot easier. The challenge of manifesto was having to think–to get the thinking, the voice and the hand working together as honestly as possible, as directly as possible. The installation work, which has a time-duration quality to it, isn’t the same. With a work using natural materials you think, “this work will only last for so long and I’m aware of that. I accept that. I accept time.” Of course I feel a consciousness or a self-consciousness of time in the sense of living and dying.

FADO: Creating an installation that requires a lot of time or a repetitive action is different from doing something that you feel is visually powerful or expressive enough to be witnessed or viewed. In an installation, that work may be seen or unseen, depending on the eyes of the viewer.

REBECCA BELMORE: Or how much they’re willing to think about it. With manifesto, if someone walked by and noticed me there, or listened for 30 seconds, I would hope that they would see an image, and maybe in the back of their mind they would think about writing. I suspect that a lot of people wish they could write better, mark their ideas and thoughts down more poetically, be more profound.

FADO: Language has become our most privileged tool of communication. Being a writer seems romantic because we think language is the most expressive form. It may not be true, but that’s the myth we carry. We’re speaking right now. We’re not communicating by touching, or drawing pictures for each other, or making faces. We do some of that as well, but it’s the transcript that’s the acknowledged bottom line of how we can compact everything that’s going on here into something meaningful.

REBECCA BELMORE: I wonder why? It’s crazy.

TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from 12 hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.



TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from 12 hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.

Writing
TIME TIME TIME Interview with Tanya Mars

FADO (Paul Couillard): I’d like to start by talking about how HOT fits into the TIME TIME TIME series. Formally, the piece is a durational work taking place over two 12-hour days. But I’m equally interested how, in terms of content, HOT looks at issues of aging. You recently turned 50. Can you talk about coming to grips with age and mortality in a performance work?

TANYA MARS: It was interesting to make a piece that required hard physical work–long, repetitive, carpal tunnel work–at this age. However, my performances have always involved physical limitation, even if it wasn’t totally apparent. In PURE VIRTUE, for example, I forced myself to do ridiculous things in a Queen Elizabeth I costume. Just to bend over in an Elizabethan costume is difficult and painful. To lie down is next to impossible, and to get up is awkward and funny. Elizabethan clothing is also very heavy and hot–wearing it is exhausting.

FADO: You’ve been particularly concerned with physical endurance as it relates to the image that ‘woman’ is expected to represent.

TANYA MARS: And the physical ability of the body, though not in the same way as Simone Forti or Marina Abramovic, who deal with physical limitation as their main focus. When I first started to make work, around 1974, I was responding to what I thought was a very dour, humourless kind of durational, physical performance art. I thought, ‘Why can’t performance be funny?’ I teamed up with Bob White (from theatre) and Odette Oliver (from dance) in 1978, and we began to do pieces that were interdisciplinary. That work was characterized by some as too entertaining to be performance art, but it also dealt with issues. It was political in a more didactic, text-driven, theatrical way than the ’70s aesthetic of [Joseph] Beuys and Forti and Deborah Hay. I continued this work into the ’80s with my ‘PURE’ series: PURE VIRTUE, PURE SIN, PURE NONSENSE culminating in my most theatrical work, PURE HELL.

FADO: By theatrical, you mean the structure, hiring actors–

TANYA MARS: Hiring actors, having a director, having a rehearsal period, having a decent budget… PURE HELL was staged at the Power Plant, so I had a curator, Barbara Fisher, who was a producer. She raised the money an did an enormous amount of work to make PURE HELL happen. After PURE HELL, I didn’t want to do theatrical, proscenium work any more. Also, doing large-scale work became very problematic because it is so costly to mount and prohibitive to travel. It’s no surprise that many, many performance artists avoid props, and large-scale productions. There are, of course, always exceptions: Vanessa Beecroft uses many bodies; Matthew Barney creates big budget spectacle. But for the most part, performance is spare.

When I first started doing the PURE series, it was me and the dress, and the most difficult thing I had to deal with was oversized luggage. But if you want to do something more elaborate, if you want to deal with many bodies in space, this becomes untenable as a performance artist. You have to engage a dance company or a theatre company in order to make that work.

FADO: There’s no such thing as a performance art ‘company’ in Canada.

TANYA MARS: Not anywhere. Elizabeth Chitty tried to implement something like a company for herself in the late ’80s–but it was difficult. There were no precedents in the visual arts, and the funders were skeptical.

I think here in Canada, Robert Lepage has been most successful in creating spectacular, large-scale visual theatre, and that his work has many performance art sensibilities. But he’s largely subsidized by Quebec. He’s their ‘golden boy.’

FADO: There’s Rachel Rosenthal in Los Angeles.

TANYA MARS: Yes, but she comes from a theatrical tradition. Pina Bausch is from a dance tradition. The Wooster Group is theatre; they are experimental and pushing the envelope, but they’ve made a choice, like the Hummers here in Canada, to say, ‘OK, we need more money than what an individual artist can get.’ I’ve never had a company. I’ve worked from small scale and gotten very ambitious sometimes, creating spectacles. Ultimately, spectacle is too costly. No one can afford it. Not artist-run centres, not even public galleries. I think this is because performance art is not particularly sale-able. It doesn’t have any enduring objects. And we haven’t established box office. Audiences expect performance art and contemporary art to be free.

FADO: You do an enormous project, and when it’s over, it’s gone. What have you got?

TANYA MARS: Nothing. Well, you usually have a lot of crap to strike.

After the PURE series, I started to do pieces in site-specific locations–a locker room, a ball field, a park… These performances weren’t durational, but they were certainly about the space. This shift in my work was not very well received, and people would ask, ‘Why is she doing that?’ which I found very amusing because when I started to do the theatrical performances in the ’70s, people said, ‘That’s not performance.’ Throughout my career my work has fallen between two stools. I love drama and the theatrical. I love making a beautiful picture.

FADO: And you’re a good writer, so text and narrative have also been important.

TANYA MARS: Yes, but I always knew that my work was performance art. I knew how it was different from theatre. And I’m not a good actor, but I have presence.

FADO: I think of you as an extremely successful artist, but you’re saying your work hasn’t always been fashionable.

TANYA MARS: No, it sometimes gains respectability–but often it hasn’t been perceived as either serious or cutting edge. It took me ten years to gain any kind of respect. The first time I staged Queen Elizabeth and PURE VIRTUE was a cabaret event at the Rivoli in 1984, and I got off the stage and for the first time since I had begun to make work, people were rushing up to me and saying, ‘It was fabulous.’ Then over the next ten years I got many grants, until about 1994. I think a lot of what happened in terms of publicity and credibility was timing. I was at the right place at the right time. I was doing funny, narrative, feminist work after feminism had gone through its growing pains and realized it could not go on being self-flagellating and didactic and negative.

FADO: You were doing work that could be marketed.

TANYA MARS: Not marketed in the sense of lucrative, but yes, ‘ordinary’ people liked it. They liked the characters, the attention to detail and the visual components. I think they also liked that it was about something, I’m thinking here particularly of PICNIC IN THE DRIFT, which was maligned by theatre critics and despised by contemporary artists, but got a very positive response from audiences. It moved them.

FADO: In the PURE series you were skewering the traditional feminine image.

TANYA MARS: And neo-Freudian feminism, which I took a big poke at in PURE NONSENSE. By that time, feminists had developed enough self-confidence about their position that they could find it funny. Nothing is so cut-and-dried that we can’t take a critical look at it. That’s important to me not just as a feminist but also as an artist and a human being. I enjoy–no, I thrive–on satire.

FADO: With the PURE series, you were making contemporary theory accessible in a way that people could enjoy as something other than a plodding, politically correct analysis.

TANYA MARS: That was the goal, anyway. I have a love-hate relationship with theory.

It’s similar to the way I feel about theatre, I love theatre, but I can’t stand all the rules. What I love about performance art is that you can break the rules. That doesn’t mean people will necessarily accept performance, but I don’t worry about that any more. When I started teaching performance, I had to open up my ideas about what performance was. I could no longer just say, ‘I hate that Marina Abramovic work.’ I had to revisit video and performance, and when I did I realized that I was drawn to it. As a young artist, I found a lot of early ’70s work alienating. What I like about ’70s work now is the boredom factor. Not that I like to be bored; I don’t. But I like the idea that one doesn’t have to be predictably entertaining to entertain. In other words, another kind of time and movement can be as compelling as quick, witty repartee.

FADO: Frank Moore talks about boredom as a tool. Boredom is a gateway, a state that can lead you to look at the world in a different way. Often I find that entertainment is great in the moment, but nothing sticks. Whereas the images that at first seem impenetrable might stay with me and grow and grow.

TANYA MARS: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ ClichĂ©s do bear some truth. The strength of performance comes from the visual. It’s a visual art form. Every single performance artist I know cares about what it looks like, and the body inside that image adds the power of presence. I don’t think that I’m making tableaux, but I am making three-dimensional pictures.

In HOT, I conflated two diverse aesthetics. I took the formal qualities of the ’70s endurance aesthetic, and married them with theatrical, narrative work. While visual things have always been important to me, the thrust of the ‘women in power’ work was its narrative structure and political content. The impetus driving HOT was the picture, the activity. I wasn’t thinking in terms of what the work was ‘about.’ It was task-driven work. I had 5,000 mousetraps, and I wanted to set as many mousetraps as possible in a given amount of time with red cinnamon hearts. That’s it.

Once you’ve made the politic your driving force, to say, ‘I’m really concerned with formal elements, and I am trusting that the politic will come along with the imagery’ takes a big leap of faith for people. When people asked ‘What’s it about?’ I said HOT was about aging and unconditional love because I had to say something. I knew I wanted to talk about my relationship with my dog, which is really important to me because it’s so unconditional. Love is really problematic for a 50-year old woman–though I suppose it can be problematic for anyone at any age. Nevertheless, when you’re 50 and you don’t have a partner, or you’ve just lost a partner, as in my case, you wonder if you’ll ever have a partner again. I was noticing that a lot of women my age were in the same boat. I looked at the Women’s Cultural Building crew and I could see that the ones who weren’t having relationships with humans were having relationships with their pets. I think Carolee Schneeman made a film about her cats a number of years ago, when she was around my age. Rachel Rosenthal has a big relationship with her dogs. We need companionship, and if we aren’t getting it from humans because we’re old and slightly overweight females, then we’ll get it somewhere else. My dog Woofie doesn’t care if I have bed head. He doesn’t care if I’m stylish. He’ll listen to me endlessly and if I repeat myself it’s OK.

FADO: Where did you get the idea to set mousetraps?

TANYA MARS: I started with the mousetraps at the AGO in November of ’97 with Molto Jag. Cars were the original impetus. I was looking to make an object, and I thought, ‘If Max Dean and John Scott can do car pieces and sell cars, maybe someone will buy my car and I’ll be able to recoup some of my costs.’ Well, no one was interested in my car, so I ended up storing it in someone’s garage for a while and then getting it carted away. That was a big disaster, but I kept the mousetraps. I was fascinated by them. They didn’t really work at the AGO, because the space we were performing in was cavernous and there were only 500 traps, which sounded like a lot at the time, but not enough to make the kind of visual impact I was hoping for. Plus, it was impossible to have any lighting. It was like a glorified hallway with a glass ceiling and poor acoustics–

FADO: Beside the restaurant, with people sitting there eating, waiting to be entertained.

TANYA MARS: Yes, it was like dinner theatre, very strange. Although I did it for 5 hours, and I liked that. It was my first inkling to do something long. My previous theory was, ’15 minutes maximum and then get out. Keep them laughing. Keep them wanting more.’ I was challenging myself, asking whether audiences would be interested in repetition. I dealt with many layers of repetition.

FADO: In HOT, you had the video loop, two different audio tracks, the disco lights circling, the pink pools of light–

TANYA MARS: The LED, the repetition of the text–

FADO: The pattern of your movement–

TANYA MARS: And the pattern of the traps on the floor. I didn’t know if people would be able to transcend their boredom and see something else, but I would say that I succeeded in capturing an audience and making them love this picture and want to be in it. Usually I’m cynical and bitchy about everything, but I can’t say that I have anything to be cynical or bitchy about. I’m getting very positive feedback. I was really happy, because I had done this piece before both in Montreal and Winnipeg, but I hadn’t managed to achieve the ‘picture vision’ in my head.

In Toronto, I think I created a mysterious, mystical other world. Every single person who talked to me about it said, ‘I walked through the curtain into the space and I was disoriented. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and then I couldn’t leave.’ I was also told, ‘I felt compelled to come back.’

FADO: How did you feel about the time aspect? Two twelve-hour days is pretty grueling.

TANYA MARS: It was really hard, but addictive. I loved it, actually.

FADO: You didn’t stop to eat or even go to the bathroom.

TANYA MARS: I did go to the bathroom once on Sunday morning, because I had drunk a little more water than usual.

I liked the challenge. It was hard, but it became like drawing in the studio, or when I make props for a piece. The picture evolved over time, not just for the audience, but for me. The repetitive Satie music, and the phrase ‘Do you love me’ on the video track became like a mantra. Whenever I started to lose focus because of a distracting audience activity or fatigue or hunger, I would get pulled back in by the repetitive elements. And I got very interested in what was happening visually. I loved making the commitment to the image, and I think that’s what people ultimately responded to, my commitment to the activity. In the back of their minds, they were asking, ‘Why is she doing this?’ Our society gravitates toward phenomenal activities, leaping over canyons and that sort of thing. [Mars notes in 2002: this is even more prevalent now with ‘Fear Factor’ and other ‘reality television’ shows.] I’m not interested in hurting myself or dare-devilling, but I am interested in transcendence.

FADO: There is risk in the piece. Those traps can go off. You can hurt yourself.

TANYA MARS: I did get snapped a few times, but the risk is small. It’s not life-threatening.

FADO: It’s a dark space. There’s fatigue. And as you set each trap, you add potential energy, like charging up a battery. Each trap is another charge, building and building until the image is ready to explode.

TANYA MARS: It’s a growing investment. If ten traps go off accidentally at the beginning, it’s no big deal. After 12 hours of setting 1,000 traps, if I drop a little cinnamon heart, it could set off a large chain reaction. So you’re right; while it’s serene and boring, it’s full of tension.

FADO: There was also a tension in your performance. Your way of setting the traps–picking them up, setting them so precisely, walking over to where you wanted to place them, putting them down gently–was elegant. Your movement became like a fine line drawing that traced through the space. But that wasn’t the only rhythm. If you dropped a heart, we’d hear you saying ‘No no no no no no,’ or when you found a bad trap it was almost violent the way you would throw it to the edge of the room. Your emotions changed. You didn’t stick to one trance rhythm.

You also structured the piece to reveal your physical breaks. Every hour you would go to your exercise mat and do your stretches, without going ‘offstage.’ What you had to do with your body to keep going for 12 hours was part of the piece. When you got down on the floor and you were gong ‘ugh–oh,’ it was laid bare for the audience, which added meaning to the piece.

TANYA MARS: I remember the first three hours of the second day were excruciating. I was physically tired, and my muscles weren’t stretched. It was really hard to keep going. On my break I would lie down, and getting down there was just… You were laughing because it was funny. It wasn’t so funny to me, but when you laughed it made me realize, ‘This is pretty funny.’

Was the piece funny? I always feel humour is one of my signatures.

FADO: I would say that HOT was ‘amusing’, with an emphasis on the word ‘muse.’ It was funny in a way that made people think. People may have felt many things, but they wouldn’t necessarily burst out laughing. The room had a presence to it, almost like a sacred space where people felt hushed.

TANYA MARS: You’re right. People didn’t feel they could meddle. There was uncertainty whether or not they should talk. I did talk to a few people, but it distracted me. By the second day, with so many traps set, I really needed to keep my wits about me.

FADO: There was a moment on the second day where you seemed quite distracted as a result of audience intervention. Then you snapped into focus, and there was no problem for the rest of the performance. Seeing the whole piece, I felt the performance turned on that moment, where you recommitted to the task, and then suddenly there was no stopping you. I think people could feel it when they walked in the room, even if they didn’t know what had happened.

TANYA MARS: We communicate things without words. HOT has the fewest words I have ever put out in a piece. ‘Soft Warm Safe’ on the LED, ‘Do you love me,’ on the video, and the countdown at the end.

FADO: Negotiating the relationship to the audience in such an intimate piece can be tricky.

TANYA MARS: There were moments when I was very self-conscious. Often I would feel I had to be up and moving rather than sitting down to set the traps, that that was the ‘performance.’ When someone walked in the room I felt compelled to entertain them. I wanted to set every trap delicately. But sometimes I was dancing to the music. I guess that’s acting, but it wasn’t acting for the audience. It was more like private acting, like singing in the shower, or dancing to your records in your living room. I was making the work, and I was inviting people to watch me do that, to be part of it. Sometimes I was full of self-doubt, sometimes I was elated, sometimes I was just tired, sometimes I was thirsty.

FADO: This is one of the most interesting things about time-based work for the performer. In a short, scripted piece, the imperative is to get the plot out, and there’s no time to question anything. With durational work, there’s room to be aware.

TANYA MARS: And to change things. I started to play with the image. I had a number of objects–a fan, a pair of boots, a bag of bones, a megaphone–all prearranged in a certain spot. But I started to say, ‘Maybe I’ll put the boots over here, and put the traps around the boots so I can’t get to the boots.’


TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from 12 hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.

Writing
TIME TIME TIME Interview with Roddy Hunter

FADO (Paul Couillard): In your recent writing and interviews you talk about the defining line between art and actuality. Could you explain your notion of the term “actuality” and its relationship to your work?

RODDY HUNTER: I became aware of the term actuality from Alastair MacLennan, who uses the term “actuation” to describe some of his performances. Previously there has been a debate about the relationship of art to life, which brings up ideas of authenticity, of one thing being more “real”–and by extension more “important”–than some other thing. Postmodernism, though seeming at times a construction of culture in theoretical terms, has had a big impact in many areas of life. We have to take some account of that, for its implications regarding what is “real”, what is “art”, and how we recognize and differentiate one thing and another. How does it affect the cultural and societal context, where the equation “material = value” is more or less the paradigm for governmental organizations across the world? In most places we see increasing adherence to capitalist/corporatist, free market ideology. So how do we artists negotiate that situation? How do we interrogate this paradigm in our work in terms other than as subject matter? I think it’s difficult to participate in that kind of economy of representation.

The question of what human activity can be recognized as art has been crucial ever since Duchamp exhibited his urinal. Robert Lebel writes that when Duchamp’s fountain piece–which was made under the pseudonym R. Mutt–was rejected from the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, it wasn’t because it was signed “R. Mutt”, or even because it was a urinal. It was rejected because it resembled a urinal too closely. Since then, postmodernist thinking has pulled apart the ideas that traditionally surrounded artistry: the idea that what activities a person does makes him recognizable as an artist, the idea of the artisan, the idea of an originating creative force, etc. If artists can’t be recognized by the activities they do, then it has implications as well for Beuys’ idea of “everyone as an artist.” There are implications right across the board–societally, culturally, for education… Recognition is really an intriguing point.

FADO: Do you have a glib answer for the question “what is art?”

RODDY HUNTER: Not for the question “What is art?” I do have an answer for the question of what performance is, which came out of my Masters research. I wasn’t striving for a definition, but at the time I was beginning to pull my writing and research together from this two-year period between 1996 and 1998. Roland Miller’s work and practice continues to be of pivotal influence and interest in the development of my ideas, especially perhaps in this regard. He characterized performance art as “behaviour exaggerated or enhanced for effect, that may be derived from or result in dysfunction”–and then developed the wording further after a conversation with Ben Patterson, so he told me, to “afunctional” instead of “dysfunctional.” This has a relation to the “material = value” equation: what is functional, what is valuable, etc. Can anything elude these criteria of valorization? I was also very interested in Roland’s reading (and re-readings) of Mikhail Bakhtin, whom I think is very important in terms of performance. So at the end of my research I came up with something that said performance–and you can take that in whatever expanded conception of performance you wish–represents “means of negotiating contingent actualities, and implicit in this is a contention with apparent dualities.” An “apparent duality” would be something like art and life–things that appear to be separate. A lot of artists, young artists particularly, have problems negotiating this understanding of the relationship of art to life–which one is in the other, which one takes part in which other place, what are the implications of this representational economy, what’s the relationship between performing and acting, what’s the relationship between performance and madness–all areas that performance art practice foregrounds.

For me, to contemplate the possibility of “performance methodology” is to subvert the paradigm instantly. It’s a kind of reverse alchemy, a way of distilling lead from gold. It’s a way of dissolving value systems, of coming to an actuality: not something that is more real than something else, but something that you can’t discount or can’t wholly “read.” You can’t consume it. This is true for the artist as much as the audience, especially in duration performance. There’s a kind of struggle that goes on, a possibility. There are different conditions for dialogue, and you want to take advantage of that–but all the time you know that you’ll never be able to hold it in your hand. I think that’s why people tend to like performance, contrary to what certain politicians or academics will tell you.

We’re told that people don’t understand performance, that it’s elitist and obscure, But I’ve always found that reactions to performance are very positive when people actually get to be involved in it, and the clichĂ©s and projections of language onto the phenomenon of performance dissolve. Performance is always very heartening and intriguing because it deals with and foregrounds these human actualities. But it can also be frustrating, because it’s your only shot at doing it. You get to a situation where you think, “This is fantastic, but I can’t own it, I can’t hold onto it.” You have to learn a certain humility, perhaps.

When you leave the performance it doesn’t just go away. You’re still thinking about it, and you can’t work out why you can’t understand it. What’s required is a different type of understanding that isn’t necessarily epistemological. There’s a useful book on Ludwig Wittgenstein written by Henry Leroy Finch, who wrote that what’s important for Wittgenstein isn’t the question of what takes place in an act of knowing: it’s more what takes place in an act of meaning. How is meaning generated in a dialogue? Boris Nieslony from Germany advocates performance as meeting. It’s not wholly the onus of the artist. It’s not wholly the onus of the spectator. It’s far more like: whatever we decide to do here, within these conditions that I’ve foregrounded, is how meaning is generated.

FADO: A performance is a kind of negotiation.

RODDY HUNTER: A negotiation of contingent actualities. We have to accept certain things in our everyday life on phenomenological terms. Otherwise we’d go crazy.

FADO: What sort of things?

RODDY HUNTER: We can’t question everything we do, or we would really fuck ourselves over. If we were to sit down and really think about how our subconscious operates, how we feel about our sexuality, how we feel about desire, how things are commodified–obviously we do sit down and think about these things–but if we were to feel that in our first cup of coffee in the morning, then we’d feel completely disempowered. So we accept certain arrangements that we can work with without doing ourselves over. But performance is a place where you can have these things out. And you begin to notice that these actualities are interrelated, or rather, interdependent. There are a number of contexts in play at any one time. For example, I live in England, which is Western Europe, which is obviously in a capitalist paradigm. Then of course there’s my particular living situation–my friends, my partner, my work… It’s amazing that we manage to operate in all of these contexts in some workable way, when you think about it. And then you realize that the unhelpful aspects of living, politically and culturally, are very fragile. The acceptance of political divisions, of alienation, of estrangement etc.: you take one part of it away and the rest of it is very fragile.

I am very concerned with the politics of authoritarian morality, which is derived from puritan roots and finds constant echo in Canada and Britain and America, the common moral climate–

FADO: With regional variations–

RODDY HUNTER: With regional variations, of course, but you can point to some basic things. The law is an ass. I am of anarchist thinking: the law really doesn’t make sense. To give you an example, there’s moral deviance and legal deviance. In some places an action or a way of living can be morally deviant but not legally deviant. In another place it can be legally deviant and not morally deviant, and in another place it can just be deviant altogether. The law feeds on alienation, intimidation and fear, and this is how things are kept in order. That’s why there are a certain number of unemployed people, because the State requires it. That is why wars are fought. That is why some people are discriminated against. That’s why people can find not only some of their actions but their whole way of living criminalized. In this context, to talk about liberal democracy is ridiculous. It’s a representation of a system of participation.

With the coincidence of the elections here in Ontario taking place at the same time as my performance, I felt I would like to address that, so that we could have a performance methodology at work, which was open for people to encounter, at the same time that there was this liberal democratic capitalist corporate methodology at work. The differences between the two are very clear to see. The possibilities of the performance methodology in terms of research, in terms of praxis, in terms of politics, in terms of culture, have not even begun to be exemplified–to the extent that there’s a fear of this subversion of the paradigm. Consider Jubal Brown’s action the other day on the cenotaph with the black flag. [On the day of the provincial elections, Jubal Brown, a Toronto artist, climbed onto a war monument in front of Toronto’s Old City Hall, currently used as a courthouse, and waved a black flag to the passing traffic. Police quickly arrived to investigate and stopped the proceedings. See eye weekly “Art terrorists mock the vote” for a media account of this action.] I’ve also referred in my research to Steve Barnes from the Critical Art Ensemble playing with a toy car on Daytona Beach, and the police coming to meet this threat of an adult playing with a toy. The enforcers of the law realize the fragility of the situation, and they realize the contingency of one of these actualities on the other. We are discussing an interdependence rather than an interrelation, because interrelation and simultaneity are the key aspects of performance methodology. Performances of human activity, of artistic activity, of political activity: the simultaneous occurrence of these acts of volition is what constitutes performance that works. That’s very different from traditional corporate capitalist liberal democratic methodology, which always seeks to separate subject from object, voter from voted, etc.

FADO: You draw a parallel between your performance and the election, saying these two things are going on simultaneously. But the election is about forming a government that has specific responsibilities. What is your performance about? It’s not about the same thing, is it?

RODDY HUNTER: I try to elude and conjoin distinctions between subject matter and object matter. Of course the performance has content. But my performances don’t assume something to be subject matter, because that would be to take something and place it in a vacuum, almost like an exhibit in a vitrine in a museum. I wasn’t making a performance about the elections here or about liberal democracy, but what is implicit in the performance is a different methodological framework for dialogue, for encounter and for meeting. The performance isn’t about that; the performance is constituted by that. I make the conditions for a dialogue and then the dialogue can concern itself with whatever. I find this idea of conditions for dialogue to be very important, because this seems to be the common interest and intrigue of performance in very different types of work by very different types of artists from different influences and contexts.

Now, we were talking about the election. The government has responsibilities to corporations that determine its relationship to citizens.

FADO: Although that’s not the rhetoric.

RODDY HUNTER: No, but we see it quite clearly. We can refer to Noam Chomsky and the excellent work that he’s done in exposing the real operation of liberal democracy and the fact that it’s abusive toward its participants

FADO: Toward the people it purports to serve…

RODDY HUNTER: It’s a self-consuming, self-perpetuating representation of a system of participation, and no one’s fooled. Personally, I’ve taken the decision not to vote. I encourage people not to vote, because if you don’t vote then they’re in real trouble. They need dissent. It’s very important for the Harris government [The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, under the leadership of Mike Harris, came to power in 1995, and was reelected in the 1999 election being discussed here.] that they are so unpopular in electoral terms in Toronto. That might sound strange, but this level of dissent is key, because it allows them to say that they have a mandate to be the government: “A lot of people voiced concerns against us, but in the end we won the debate.” There was no winning of debate. As Alexander Trocchi wrote, “revolt is understandably popular.”

FADO: What do you propose as an alternative? Obviously, you’re not saying to just shrink away.

RODDY HUNTER: I dedicate myself to performance methodology. You don’t have to have a parliament in the way that things work normally. You can live the way you want to live.

FADO: But we’re all caught up in the economic system. Even if you set up your whole life around barter, for example, you can’t help it, you’re implicated. You’re going to end up with a credit card, or–

RODDY HUNTER: Of course. Well, not of course: there are places and communities that operate on different principles.

FADO: They’re very limited

RODDY HUNTER: They’re rare, and it depends upon the relationship of any given community to how they perceive commodity and exchange, and whether exchange has a parallel in dialogue, which I’m not so sure about.

But what I’m trying to say is that voting doesn’t make a difference. Many times we’ve seen people put a lot of faith–this happened in Scotland from my own experience–into the Labour movement, into politics of community, into non-competitive ideas and “representation of the many and not the few,” as [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair always says–he’s such a traitor! But it’s impossible now for someone to be in government and have any ideas that are different from the previous government. What I’m interested in is insurrection, not a revolution. I’m interested in people having pragmatic responses to any given political situation, in the face of which these vacuous systems based on self-interest, intimidation and fear can be very clearly seen for what they are. They completely flounder in the face of integrity, of a commitment to one’s friends and fellow citizens.

Artists particularly are concerned with this. That is why artists organize themselves as much as possible, because they know that money isn’t the essential part. I’ve been invited here, and everything’s been very good; the conditions are most favourable toward the visitor making as much of the opportunity as possible, which wouldn’t come about just by giving somebody a heap of money. Of course it’s nice to be paid, to have the proper situation, but performance artists organize themselves in a non-hierarchical, rhizomorphic network, which is constituted by performances as meetings. There’s no division between subject and object matter, and so you have a radically different position than the current dominant political paradigms. Artists involved in performance art network don’t–or shouldn’t–want to imitate the recognizable offices or accoutrements of the State. We don’t need to vote on things. Boris Nieslony organized a very interesting symposium some years ago, which was a big table with chairs around it, and everybody was invited to meet at the table. The table was offered as a place. Incidentally, Richard Martel from Quebec said to me that there’s no other institution to trust but the table. It’s a different type of dialogue. I referred earlier to Alexander Trocchi. I was drawing upon his work in my performance here. He outlines very pragmatic conditions for what he calls “the insurrection of a million minds.” The State and conventional politics are in fear of this.

FADO: It sounds like there is an implicit privileging of intimate connections here. You can only get so many people around the table before it becomes a cacophony of too many voices, or there is no longer the possibility of every voice being able to express itself.

RODDY HUNTER: The invitation is open to all. It’s up to individuals whether they take up that invitation.

FADO: But you can’t have a million people at one table.

RODDY HUNTER: A million people wouldn’t act of their own volition to be there. It’s more likely that a person may express a claim or a right to be at the table, but not actually go to the table. This is a very complicated area of morality and politics. We are in a situation with corporate liberal democracy where people are dispossessed, disenfranchised, estranged, etc. A lot of people have chosen to concentrate on voicing their claims for the right to do or be something. I don’t think that’s necessarily a helpful position, because it’s twice removed from the actuality. You’re exercising your claim to the right, but you’re not exercising your right.

The invitation to the table is open. No one has a “right” to be at the table or not at the table. You come to the table. Often people will say it’s about representation. Why be represented by someone? Why not represent yourself? The State that criminalizes your life is not going to decriminalize you; they’ve already made it clear that they’re your enemy. The artist Alain Gibertie expressed very clearly–often through graffiti–that “your government hates you.” It’ll criminalize you. You can enter into a dialogue with it until eternity, saying, “I demand my right.” If you bypass that system and exercise your volition, then you’re in a different situation where you don’t wait for permission to go to the table.

There’s a strange sort of hesitancy around the question of how many people can see a live performance versus television or the internet. But we have to ask ourselves, “Is the level of engagement in representation of an artwork–for instance on the internet–sufficient?” How can performance be converted to digital code? I am personally very happy with the quality of the dialogue rather than the quantity of the dialogue. We’ve seen that here, I’m sure you’ve seen that with the other performances that you’ve programmed. Here, people can talk to the artist. And in a series that takes place over the course of a year, people start to make connections and comparisons about how one artist’s work relates to another’s. These things are key to the development of performance methodology in everyday life.

There is such a democratic deficit in everyday life that people might find performance art to bridge those feelings of alienation. People don’t have the same expectations of painting, or of what might be seen as more conventional art forms. But when it comes to something innovative that is powered or catalyzed by a different methodology, people will ask, “How many people can see that?” Or, “Why didn’t you address this problem or that situation?” Those can be very pertinent questions, but you often say to yourself, “Well, I’m making this one performance. Why criticize the performance instead of the State?” It’s common for people to make false comparisons, like “this artwork cost this amount of money and here’s a picture of a person who can’t have a hip replacement operation.” This is a very–I was going to say evil but I can’t; I don’t believe in good and evil–a very malevolent, unhelpful comparison.

FADO: Yet those are exactly the kinds of polarities that the corporate system is constantly making.

RODDY HUNTER: To turn people against art.

FADO: The choice is a) the hip replacement, or b) the art. It’s a mode of thinking that certain conservative politicians have been trying to construct.

RODDY HUNTER: Not only conservative politicians: any liberal democratic administration will perpetuate these same things. This has been happening to an increased extent, certainly in England since the [Margaret] Thatcher era.

[Pause: Roddy was headed for the airport, so the interview continued during the drive.]

FADO: You’ve done a whole body of work over the last several years where duration was one of the defining elements. I’m wondering what your thoughts on duration are. What interests you about it, and why have you been using it? Are you moving away from it? Is it still important?

RODDY HUNTER: Time is a material of performance. All performance models have a dependence on a certain time scale. If you go to the theatre or the cinema, you have an expectation that perhaps this event–event’s an important aspect–will last for maybe one hour and a half to two hours.

FADO: Those forms are often constructed as entertainment, as something that can be consumed very easily.

RODDY HUNTER: Performance resists commodification. People are anxious for linearity, for a causal efficacy. Of course, people are not misinformed or foolish to ask what happened at the end of a durational performance, what happened at the beginning, and how did they relate. It’s in our consciousness, our way of perceiving phenomena. This goes back to the questions of what do you perceive to be art, what do you perceive to human activity broadly, etc. Duration is a way of dissolving this categorization of activity in relation to time, to commodification, etc. So it would seem to be a very useful place to begin to question the models of articulating performance. When you question existing models, different activities or performances are generated. With duration, you’re taking a bit of a risk, because the process is the key element. What is being foregrounded is the possibility that things can change, that they can be altered.

With duration, you remove a categorization of time and an axiomatic relationship with event that predicates a certain type of response from a viewer. If you dissolve those categorizations, then we’re all in a different situation. Things aren’t necessarily assured, Material takes different forms. Material migrates between forms. You might end up being very honest with yourself about some things that you normally wouldn’t consider. It requires, again, a certain humility in accepting this lack of assuredness. That’s why it’s a very interesting form to work with.

I began to make durational performance as soon as I began to make performance, without knowing that there were other artists who had worked in this way. I also now make shorter performances, but the duration performances are always the locus of the laboratory. Whether that process is in public or in private is an interesting question that I have to ask myself now, but I can envisage that I will continue to make durational performances in public.

FADO: Is there something important about duration in terms of the way you feel doing it, in terms of what that long haul–not sleeping, not eating, whatever the factors are–requires of you? I find that there are particular resistances or problems that come up as a result of doing this type of performance that end up becoming defining elements.

RODDY HUNTER: I’m not so sure whether they’re defining elements of not. For me, details such as whether you ate or not, whether you slept or not, whether you talked to people or not, aren’t so important–unless an artist is particularly foregrounding their physical situation of being in the performance, and that might be very important in a methodological approach. Different artists have different ways. But it’s not an act of suffering. It’s not, for me, an ordeal or an endurance. It’s far more of a luxury. It’s a privilege. We have to remember that artists volunteer to do this. It brings up another important question about art practice, and that is, ” Are artists compelled to be creative?” Gustav Metzger initiated an art strike where he refused to make art for three years [see “ART STRIKE 1977-1980”]. This was aimed at the gallery system of commodification of art, but to me it was also about the artist’s refusal of creativity. You’re not compelled to make art. The work should not be assessed on the basis that this person did this for 36 hours and therefore it must have some value. These traditional ideas–of ordeal, guilt, suffering, flagellation, purification–are very religious ideas stemming from puritan values. They may or may not have a place in the performance depending on the individual artist. Of course when you begin to experiment with these models of creativity, things change, and you feel a certain pain–I’m sure the audience does as well–but the point isn’t the pain. That’s just a temporary, transitional thing. FADO: But don’t you think it can also be a catalyst for whatever it is you’re trying to achieve or research?

RODDY HUNTER: If you have in your mind the outcome of dissolving timeframes, of dissolving traditional ways of thinking and doing, of dissolving the split between thinking and doing, then the pain–the physical discomfort or inconvenience involved in this relocation or displacement–is a symptom. It’s an indication that it’s happening. In itself, I don’t think it’s a catalyst for my work. Of course there are physical effects on the body. One becomes very aware of one’s ontology, of one’s consciousness, but it’s the displacement that makes this situation arise.

FADO: I’m interested in the rules we choose for ourselves. I am presenting a premise as a curator: that each of the performances in this series will last a minimum of twelve hours. I offer one constraint as a starting point. Then each artist decides what to do with that. As you said, artists choose their own parameters. No one is saying you can or can’t eat, or sleep. What’s interesting is what each artist chooses as his or her parameters, because it’s when we come up against our own resistance, in that struggle, that meaning is generated.

RODDY HUNTER: You and I have had conversations about the twelve-hour stipulation. I’m not convinced of the necessity of a minimum duration, which sets apart a particular time and says, “Beyond this time something different begins to happen.”

FADO: It’s a question that I have. Is it true that beyond this time something begins to happen?

RODDY HUNTER: All performances have a duration. A performance that draws upon time as a material can be ten second long or an hour and a half long or whatever length of time. The beginning of the performance and the end of the performance in relation to everyday life is of course a very interesting point. The conversation after the performance with someone, the conversation in the performance with someone: what is the qualitative difference between the two? Of course I empathize with your curatorial situation and I’m very heartened that you’ve chosen to work toward giving specific conditions over to durational performance. I understand that the twelve-hour stipulation is there to foreground longer durational work, but that’s not the only work that uses time as a material. It’s not even swinging between polarities of saying a performance of one second or a performance of 144 hours. I’m more interested in drawing upon time as a material, actual time, as opposed to working with the categorization of time into minutes and hours: hence, the eventuality we arrived at of a 36-hour public framework for performances of indefinite duration. This was the interesting dialogue that emerged, which provided for yet another model of performance. It’s important, because we’re having a situation here in Toronto for this year where the specific concerns of performance and duration are being addressed critically, theoretically and actually. Discussions between curators and artists can generate new forms of performance, which is an absolutely crucial element. Otherwise, it would be a museum-like approach of taking what’s already done or predicating a certain type of activity over another.

FADO: One of the things I find frustrating in North America, particularly now, is that even in spaces that were traditionally performance friendly, the agenda of “financial viability” has created a situation where venues are telling artists, “We’re only interested in presenting work where we can charge an admission.” It’s very constraining.

RODDY HUNTER: All contexts have their constraints. If one can limit the constraints of what Alastair MacLennan has referred to as “a confining context” and negotiate within that context, then it’s always possible for credible and articulate modes of performance to emerge. It’s important for all curators to consider the implications of the choices they’re making, but it’s also up to people to make their own scene. In order for a rhizomorphic network to exist, it is crucial to make where you are. Your activities have to constitute the situation where you are in order to constitute a network. Making something for a context, one has to remember that the performance changes the context.

Peggy Phelan provided quite a helpful analogy when she discussed the relationship of performance to documentation of performance, and likened it to the situation of microbiologists who have to use more and more sophisticated microscopic equipment. The microscopic equipment has to emit a certain level of radiation, which actually alters the thing they’re trying to see. They’re seeing microorganisms that it wasn’t possible to see before, but the implications of discovering them is such that they change them irrevocably. So the scientists have to try to quantify the amount that looking at the specimen has changed the specimen in order to make a projection of what the specimen was like before it was seen.

In the same way, a performance engages in contexts and changes the context. It’s very important for me to be aware that the context will be affected and therefore I have a certain responsibility. Sometimes I might choose to articulate that responsibility through purposefully changing the context, making performances that change the context more than the context changes the performances, but it’s not a linear relationship. What I am currently very interested in is the prospect of mataxis, “the process of the participation of one world within another”, which is how as described by Augusto Boal. Mikhail Bakhtin discussed the situation of answerability, of an action being answerable in the world of culture and in the world of life. In the same way that we experience pain when we are displaced from normal time frames, we experience a pain in trying to come to terms with different worlds or different milieus of perception, of conception and of activity. So how do we solve that? Bakhtin says that for an action to be answerable, the world of culture–where we make all of our decisions that we give so much attention–has to participate within the world life–the place where we actually live. Then the theoretical and aesthetic will participate within the world of life, but of course no longer in theoretical or aesthetic terms. What’s interesting there is the matter of recognition. The theoretical and the aesthetic are inherent in the performance, but they do not have to be recognized as such for them to exist. It’s a matter of visibility.

FADO: Some artists want to privilege that aspect of what they are doing, to foreground the aesthetics, while other artists find that much less important. Maybe they want to highlight a message, or —

RODDY HUNTER: If the performance is recognized as art, then it makes things a little easier for the artist. We come back to those workable assumptions we make in our everyday life. If you organize a performance by an artist in an artistic context, then you can say, “OK, this is art, OK, I can go with that for the time being.” But whether that recognition exists or not, the performance shifts between something that can be recognized as art and something that might not be recognized as art–I mean immediately or consciously–and this brings us back to Duchamp and the problem of any phenomenon being recognized as art. If art itself is to be recognized to have value, then art is able to be reconciled with the system of quantification, which is the commodification of capital, the art market etc. So if you ask these very difficult questions of the way of making art, then you’re going to expect some problems in translation for yourself, and you have to deal with a situation where someone might not think what you’re doing has a particular value. The problem of recognition and translation can be painful. Like any form of translation, it’s usually tantamount to a form of betrayal, which causes more pain. It’s a very complex, sometimes even psycho-pathologic situation that an artist contends with in working in the public sphere. I think that’s why individual members of the public find it intriguing when they experience it firsthand, rather than through secondhand phenomena that they can make certain projections and assumptions about.

FADO: In some cases, having one’s work recognized as art can be very unhelpful for the artist, because it means there’s a whole set of things being done that will not be seen. As soon as you have a context, it determines what will or won’t be seen, whether or not it exists in the actuality of the event.

RODDY HUNTER: That’s right. It’s possible that one phenomenon or action can be privileged over another solely for the purpose of reinforcing some idea or abstraction of art, rather than a working actuality of art, which is what I am more interested in.

TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from 12 hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.

Writing
TIME TIME TIME Interview with Jenny Strauss

FADO (Paul Couillard): Let’s start by describing your piece.

JENNY STRAUSS: INTAKE was working with projections of pigness–both human and animal–and all the ways that those images are created and projected in society. The piece presented many evocative elements in a large warehouse space. Along with my body, which I think of as part of the installation, there was a kiddie pool full of mud; 18 bales of hay, many of which were spread around the space to suggest a barnyard; and an old, ratty, thrift store easy chair with a flower pattern on it that rocked and turned 360 degrees. There was a bassinet with a pork baby in it, a raw pork roast dressed in baby clothes. There was a pile of 204 twinkies in their individual wrappers in the middle of the floor. There was a pile of dirt where I urinated. A large television played Charlotte’s Web over and over and over again. When people entered the space, the first thing they encountered was a table with literature and a large friendly-looking piggy bank, which I named Clovis. People were invited to write down their comments, dreams, hopes, fears, and intimate thoughts on pieces of paper and put them into Clovis. I wanted to present the anthropomorphized qualities of pigs–cute, adorable, little creatures needing to be rescued and petted and touched–and also the more disgusting and grotesque aspects of ‘pig.’ That included not only the elements of the space, but also my body, which was naked, covered in mud, spit-up, hay pieces and whatever else accumulated on me during the piece.

FADO: There was also a growing mound of garbage in the room.

STRAUSS: Right, the garbage was near the entrance. People walking into the space would immediately smell garbage and then see this cute little pig. I wanted this tension of opposites.

FADO: The garbage was also an interactive element. In the advertising you asked the audience to bring garbage to leave behind.

STRAUSS: Yes, I think a few people brought garbage. I heard garbage getting dumped onto the pile, and around three o’clock in the morning, when I was placing individual twinkie wrappers on the garbage, I noticed more garbage than there had been when I started.

I started the piece by entering the space on my hands and knees and sniffing all the garbage. Each thing had an individual smell–‘oh, there’s a banana peel; oh there’s the smell of something molding; oh there’s a nice smell of bathroom tissue…’ I thought it might make me sick, but it didn’t.

I think those were all the elements. Oh–there was a blanket, which became quite important to me. I used it to cover myself and to keep warm. It became my friend.

FADO: I guess it was the one element of true comfort in the environment. There was hay for you to lie on, but hay isn’t that comfortable.

STRAUSS: I have cuts all over my body from the hay scraping me. Hay is not something I would choose to have in my life as a comforting element.

FADO: You performed for 24 hours, from noon on Thursday, November 25 to noon on Friday, November 26 [1999]. You wanted to do the piece on US Thanksgiving.

STRAUSS: Thanksgiving is a very important holiday for me. It’s a time when family comes together, and it’s a very community-oriented event in my life. I have very good memories of it. It’s also a time when people are shoving food into their faces, the beginning of the pig-out season.You start at Thanksgiving and you go through to New Year’s. When I knew I was going to do the performance in November, I decided to choose that day, even though it wasn’t Thanksgiving in Canada.

FADO: In Canada we have Thanksgiving a month earlier.

STRAUSS: Right, so you can start pigging out much sooner and have it last longer. Although I think we’re generally a fatter nation than you are, so your pig-out season might be different.

FADO: Why did you want to deal with the idea of ‘pigness’ in the first place?

STRAUSS: As a fat woman I have been reacting to pigness my whole life. It’s been assumed that what I am is a pig. Of course the qualities of pigness–eating terrible food, and being filthy and dumb and lazy and huge–don’t match the actual creature. Pigs are smart and very clean. They are big, but that’s because people stuff them. Pigs are a factory item to be manufactured and consumed, so we breed them to be as big as possible. Pigs have a bad rap, and that bad rap has always been projected onto me as a fat woman. We hear people called pigs all the time. It’s something that I’ve dealt with, and I think in a larger context it’s an issue in North American culture. I felt that there was a lot for me to explore both personally and metaphorically. I wanted to create a scenario where people had the opportunity to get in touch with their own process of projecting, both toward me and onto themselves–their own process of making meaning.

FADO: Why did you choose to take on all of the negative projections, to live in a way that you would find disgusting in your everyday life?

STRAUSS: I would find it revolting. I’m a princess. I like to take three showers a day. I don’t get into messes.

FADO: Except in your performance work.

STRAUSS: In my performance work I go places I don’t go in my everyday life. Performance allows me to explore my Jungian shadow side, and the shadow side of society. It allows me to get dirty, to go into the muck. I find going down into what is difficult and horrifying to be a transformative process. It allows me to experience transformation and helps to create cultural transformation. I want to do work that affects people’s thinking and allows changes to happen at a molecular level in the unconscious.

In the piece I wavered between going toward what was really hard and stepping back. I couldn’t stay in it all the time, but at the same time I went much deeper into it than I could have imagined. I set up elements and think, ‘ok, it’s going to be 24 hours of living hell, and I’ll do it’–but it’s impossible to imagine the experience. When you’re in it, time takes so long. It drags and becomes very difficult. One of the reasons I do durational performances is because I feel that time is somehow my enemy, Time is this thing that runs me. It runs other people. It’s slippery. No matter how much anticipation you have for something, that thing happens and then it’s over. No matter how gruelling that experience is, it becomes a memory. I’m disturbed by things ending.

FADO: But when time slows down, it’s a kind of hell being trapped in that moment.

STRAUSS: Yes, I want to make time stand still, but I don’t want to be stuck in it. Time is a conundrum I don’t understand.

FADO: When you say that you think of your performances as windows for transformational experience, do you have a sense of what you hoped people would take away from this piece–or what you would take away from it–before you did it?

STRAUSS: I’m not sure that I knew exactly how I might transform during the piece, or how other people might transform. I knew that I wanted to present the possibility to the universe to create a transformation, to be very ‘California’ about it.

FADO: Which is, after all, where you are from.

STRAUSS: I’m a hippie chick, I admit it. An anal retentive hippie chick, but nonetheless, here I am.

I was creating a provocative scenario, and I know what happens to people when they encounter something provocative. It moves them, and they begin to think about their own lives–in this case, their own encounters with pigness, with filth, with fat people, with their own bodies, with emotions, with stillness… I knew the work would evoke an emotional and intellectual response, and also a spiritual response. Anybody truly engaged in a process over time draws energy, and the space gathers that energy. I was allowing the opportunity for some kind of transformation to happen. But I can’t be specific and say I wanted someone to suddenly decide ‘I will never project pigness again.’ That wasn’t my point.

FADO: You weren’t making an overt, two-dimensional political statement, like ‘this is about rights for fat people.’

STRAUSS: I don’t think of my work as political in that way, but it is politically layered. It’s not about cause and effect, it’s about having an experience. I think it’s important that audience members encounter my endurance. That I am a fat naked woman enduring means something different than if it were a thin man enduring. There are levels on which the action takes on a very specific meaning. I’m trying to get deeper into my own psyche, to forge a spiritual connection with a force that I don’t understand

FADO: Do you mean in the sense of channeling an energy?

STRAUSS: Yes, there were moments of that. For instance, I had been sitting in the chair–it was late in the evening–and shoving Cheetos into my mouth. I started by eating them, and then just shoving them in and then–something happens at certain points in any work like this where you are no longer doing actions that you planned–I started hooking Cheetos into the space between my lips and my gums, using my mouth as an anchor. I would run them along–it hurt–and try to find that hook place, until there were no places left. By that point, the Cheetos were sticking out and I felt like a wart hog, something with fangs. Then I started piling Cheetos one on top of the other in front of my face so that I was seeing the world through an orange screen, and there were just little chinks of light coming through. I suddenly felt ‘not me.’ Whether that’s a channelled entity, or energy, or something else it’s hard for me to say, but I definitely felt outside of the realm of my own experience. I left it there for a long time, until the whole thing fell down.

Then I decided to try it again with potato chips. I couldn’t hook the potato chips in my lips, but I shoved them in my mouth and created a platform. I piled them on my face, up to the top of my head. I thought of Phantom of the Opera, where the face is half-iron covering something grotesque and half-human. That’s how I felt: half a potato-chip-monster-god-goddess-thing and half human, looking at the world through a screen. Then I decided to get up and move as this entity, because I felt something new in my body. Some of the chips fell, but the ones that remained looked like a snout. I started moving in circles around the space. Then I felt an even stronger energy and I started bending my knees and spreading my legs out, walking in an animal, ritual fashion that felt like a channeled energy. I was being given strength in my body in a way that I couldn’t have had on my own. I had been going for a long time and I’m a big woman, so it takes a lot of energy to bend and have all my weight on my knees like that, but it felt wonderful.

FADO: Your relationship to food developed over the course of the piece. Your first contact with the food was centered around eating, but as time went on the food became part of your environment. You made a bed out of twinkies. You made a mandala out of junk food.

STRAUSS: The food became amazingly complex to me as a creative set of objects, and I could not have predicted that beforehand. That’s the beauty of durational performances. You get to such a state of exhaustion that you become free, and you start to explore out of desperation. I mean, you have to do something with those chips and you cannot possibly eat another one. You can only throw up so many times. Shoving food in my face became a tired image. I started where it was necessary to start–consuming it, shoving it in my face–but over time I was forced to use the food differently. I wanted to lay down somewhere soft, so I unwrapped the twinkies and laid them in rows and made a bed out of them. Later I used the chips to make a mask, and much later, I made a junk food mandala. I had made mud prints on the wall with my body, and with one of them I had created an image of the pig mother, which is a force that has been operating behind the piece for a long time. I felt the need to make her an offering, but all I had available was the junk food.

FADO: Tell me more about the ‘pig mother.’

STRAUSS: About six months ago, I dreamt I was crawling around in hay and muck and filth in a dejected state of pigness. There was a mother figure above me, hovering in the corner, flickering in black and white–not quite the Virgin Mary, not quite my mother, not quite me, but a figure. The sow is an ancient symbol with a lot of power. I felt a pig mother was trying to make her presence known to me and work through me. She was surrounding the piece and had something to say. She was a pig mother for my particular place in culture as a white woman, a dyke, as a fat woman in 20th Century North American culture, in the corporate world. She wasn’t a tribal icon from somebody else’s culture–although there was meaning associated with her–she was her own evocation.

FADO: The image you drew using the mud print looked almost angry.

STRAUSS: Yes, it was a Kali-esque image of a forbidding goddess. I don’t think ‘angry’ is bad. She was full of a rageful energy or wrath, which is very sacred.

FADO: Why did you call the piece INTAKE?

STRAUSS: It was about everything that is ingested personally and culturally, everything we take in constantly–food, projections, information… It was about everything coming towards and then, by definition, what comes out. Looking up the word ‘intake’ in the thesaurus, three words stuck in my mind: accept, admit, receive. All of those words have multiple meanings. Accept that something is happening, accept it into your body. Admit the hidden, admit the shame to the world, allow admission. Receive information, receive grace, receive projections…

FADO: Inviting audience members to bring garbage to leave behind at a piece called INTAKE suggested you would be intaking their garbage.

STRAUSS: Exactly. I’ll intake whatever you give me.

FADO: I had a teacher who used to say, ‘Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.’ Garbage is the same–whatever you put into it.

STRAUSS: Garbage is revealing. I could have gone through every piece and exposed it, told a story about it, made an assumption–so it’s a dangerous thing to bring your garbage to a show.

FADO: I’m interested in relating this performance to the other work you’ve done. Can you tell me how you got involved in performance art?

STRAUSS: I come from a background of radical creativity.

FADO: Did your family identify themselves as artists?

STRAUSS: Not exactly, but they were definitely engaged with this process. Not being very good at visual art, not having a satisfying experience of being able to put my images onto paper, I did a lot of theatre. At some point in college I became less interested in theatre and more interested in interactive performance. I didn’t know there was such a thing as performance art, but I knew that I loved experiential engagement. I have a very strong urge to create images, and I love installations, so performance art made sense for me. There aren’t other media that make me think the same way performance art does. We’re trained to have rote responses to paintings or theatre or television, but not necessarily to performance art, because it crosses boundaries.

FADO: If you had to give a definition of performance art, what do you think it would be?

STRAUSS: I describe my performances as creating an installation with my body as a sculptural element over time. My physicality, and the elements that surround me, and time are all part of a tableau that changes and moves. Performance art is an experiential process for the viewer as well as the artist. I also might say that it’s odd. Performance art steps outside of the social agreements we have in life. It engages the mind, the body and the spirit of the viewer and the performer. Of course there are many different kinds of performance art. I’m working in one kind of performance art that’s very experiential and improvisational.

FADO: Did you start doing performance art in art school?

STRAUSS: I started in college. I just didn’t have a name for it. I did a piece I call FAT AND UGLY AGAIN, although it didn’t really have a title when I did it. Working with four or five other people, we created an environment the audience could move through involving food and mirrors and signs telling the audience to be obedient.

In grad school, I did a piece with three other women called WHITE FOOD, examining the social construction of whiteness and its relationship to food and the refinement of food. My thesis, IDIO/PASSAGE: PRIVATE VERNACULAR, PUBLIC CATHARSIS, was a 24-hour endurance performance. By that time I had taken an art history class on performance art, and found out about performance art as a formal medium. I decided to work in a ritualized way with obsessive-compulsive disorder and time. I did obsessive-compulsive activities in a gallery, working with a tub full of honey, 140 knives, raw meat, dirt, clocks, lamps, charcoal… That was more like INTAKE than my previous work, although in IDIO/PASSAGE I was creating ritualized beauty, dealing with the rhythm of time and order, and in INTAKE I was going toward something much more grotesque.

FADO: I’ve only seen photos of IDIO/PASSAGE, but it seemed to involve creating beautiful patterned images–the geometry of the knives on the floor…

STRAUSS: Right. In IDIO/PASSAGE I laid 140 knives in a mandala with the points facing out. I used primal elements–iron, dirt, honey, meat–to create a beautiful tableau. Whereas in INTAKE, the elements weren’t necessarily beautiful to start with, and they got more grotesque and disgusting. They smelled a lot. Smell is very important to me. IDIO/PASSAGE had rotting meat, and INTAKE had rotting meat, but it also had an even stronger smell of garbage and twinkies–the sweet sickly smell of twinkies and of piss and my own body. I let all the smells come out. For me, working with all the senses as much as possible is important. If somebody comes in, they might see the tableau, but they’re also assaulted with the smell. They’re hearing whatever noises are in the space and they’re aware of walking across it or choosing not to.

FADO: Is it possible for you to take yourself out of the piece for a minute and imagine what your reaction would be if you were a visitor coming to see the piece? Certainly it evoked audience response. A lot of people put comments in the piggy bank.

STRAUSS: I asked people to share their hopes and dreams and intimate selves, and I got that. Some people brought garbage, and one person brought apples and a chocolate bar. People also came back to see what had happened. I had one person expressly saying she needed to know I was OK, which is a strong projection on her part. Somebody else who came back put the words ‘SOME PIG’ on the door, which comes from Charlotte’s Web. There were times when people came in when I was very inactive. On the other hand, somebody might have walked in when I was standing in the mud running in place, sweaty and breathing very heavy.

FADO: Mud flying up onto the walls–

STRAUSS: Or they might walk in when I was shoving my face with food, or maybe when I was sitting on the dirt pile peeing. I could ask anybody who saw the piece about it and they would all give me different information based on what they experienced and their own projections.

FADO: There was a point when you were sitting, probably for about an hour, letting the mud dry on your body after being in the pool. Someone came in and said, ‘ah, that’s what animals often do, they sit there in a way we humans can’t, because we fidget. We can’t sit there doing nothing.’ She thought it was a very effective evocation of ‘animal’. She remarked that with the mud on your body, you didn’t look naked at all. You looked natural within the artificial environment that you had created. And then she said, ‘if she really were an animal, I would probably go over and pet her right now.’

I said, ‘that’s your impulse; you should go over and do it.’

She said, ‘but I know she’s human, so I just can’t go.’ I’m sure that gave her something to think about when she left–the permissions of how physically we relate to an animal versus how we relate to another person.

STRAUSS: I would have loved it if she had come over and petted me. And I love it that she couldn’t. Unfortunately, after sitting still for–do you have any idea how long that was?

FADO: It was about an hour.

STRAUSS: it was probably the longest I’ve ever sat completely still, and my legs were completely numb. I couldn’t feel them at all. I thought I had permanently damaged my legs by sitting in one position and cutting off the blood flow, so then I spent a while hitting myself extremely hard.

FADO: I could see that there were times when you were struggling. It’s an inevitable part of the process, where you say to yourself, ‘this is really stupid. Why am I doing this? Why am I here?’ Part of the reason one does this kind of work is to confront these questions.

STRAUSS: At times I felt like a complete failure. There was one point that was a real low, where I started sobbing, because I had talked myself into a state of extreme emotion. I had a lot of extreme emotion in this piece, from hysterical laughter to incredible sobbing. It was great, because I got to feel things that I don’t get to feel in my life in such a full way. I let it go as long as it could possibly go, and it was witnessed. To have witnessing without interaction was an amazing thing.

Later you suggested to me that even though I was having extreme emotions, they were an image that I was bringing to life, not necessarily me. That’s something I need to think about more. INTAKE was an experiment and a learning process. I don’t come to the work as an expert who’s clear about where they’re going and knows exactly how to deal with the medium. I come as a seeker trying to figure it out and learn.

FADO: Every answer, if it’s the right answer, gives you more questions.


TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from 12 hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.

Writing
Eyewitness Account: Appreciating The Chakras by Linda Montano

What is time, and how do we find meaning in its passage?

In an attempt to come to terms with these questions, Linda Montano has declared her entire life to be an artwork. While this bold, perhaps revolutionary, stance cannot fail to be seen as a challenge to the common wisdom of contemporary culture, Montano frames it in personal terms. Her task is to live each moment of her life with the focused attention and intention suggested by the notion of ‘art.’ Hence, if the focus of her life becomes looking after an aging parent, she finds herself doing ‘blood relations art’ [as she referred to it at the time of her visit: the term has since evolved into ‘BLOOD FAMILY ART’, and the particular project of taking care of her 88-year old father into ‘DAD ART’]. In this way, she reminds herself that the act of caring for another is not simply a matter of practicality, but also a practice, rife with all of the possibilities and challenges of producing form and meaning.

Montano’s commitment of her life to the service of art—or perhaps it should be viewed as a commitment of art to the service of her life—is consistent with her personality: dedicated, principled, visionary, full of heart, and by our culture’s standards, a bit wacky.

In January of 1999, Montano became the first performer in the TIME TIME TIME series, presenting an original 12-hour performance in two parts called APPRECIATING THE CHAKRAS. The invitation to Linda to kick off the series stemmed not solely from the obviously performative (and durational) declaration of her whole life as art, but also on the basis of several of her recognized works. Her collaboration with Tehching Hsieh on his conceptual endurance performance ART/LIFE: ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE guaranteed her place in art history: the two spent an entire year attached by an eight foot rope, trying to follow a rule of never touching. Linda followed up this project by conducting two seven-year investigations of the chakras. 14 YEARS OF LIVING ART was an elaborate research project and practice, of which the most visible element was the wearing of a single colour of clothing each year corresponding to the colour of the chakra she was investigating. For the first year, she dressed only in red. The next year, she dressed only in orange, and so forth.

How would an artist willing to tackle time-based works of such a monumental scale respond to the parameters of TIME TIME TIME? What sort of relationships would she set up among the elements of time, space, her performing body and the audience? And what is a twelve plus hour performance in the context of an entire life that has been declared to be art?

Montano’s solution to the physical demands of a twelve hour time frame was to divide the performance into two parts with distinct sets of participants, audiences and set-ups. APPRECIATING THE CHAKRAS was, in essence, two performances in one—the first very public and the second more intimate or private—with both parts taking place in a large rectangular room with hardwood floors and two washrooms, normally used as the studio space of a local theatre company, Canadia dell’Arte.

PART ONE: A PUBLIC SOUNDSCAPE

The first part of Montano’s performance was approximately four hours long. It began at about 8:30 in the evening and was open to the general public, with individuals free to come and go as they pleased. For this section, which could be described as a soundscape, Montano enlisted the help of eight artists, all active in the local Toronto performance art scene. Assembled by FADO, none of the performers had worked with or even met Montano before: they included myself (red chakra), Bernice Kaye (orange chakra), Koren Bellman (yellow chakra), Churla Burla (green chakra), Tanya Mars (blue chakra), Johanna Householder (violet chakra), Ed Johnson (white chakra) and W. A. Davison (sound).

Montano began by introducing APPRECIATING THE CHAKRAS to the audience as a workshop—to float the idea that its improvised framework was one in which the concept of mistakes on the part of the performers had no meaning. The piece had not been extensively developed or rehearsed by the group in advance. Prior to her arrival, Montano had requested the participation of seven performers, and “sound from heaven.” Each performer was responsible for choosing a different chakra; putting together an outfit corresponding to the colour of their chosen chakra (multi-hued, with some allowance for black, if necessary); and finding medical texts relating to the corresponding organs or body parts of the chosen chakra, as well as to the participant’s personal history (e.g. about a disease they or someone close to them had experienced). The night before the performance, we met for about three hours to configure the space, set up and test the equipment, talk to Linda about what we had discovered in our research, and find out how the performance would be structured.

The set-up was straightforward and largely improvisational. Each of the seven chakra performers would appear in sequence starting with the first chakra, red, associated with the base of the spine, through to the seventh chakra, white, associated with the top of the head. Each would read texts for half an hour, generating a total running time of three and a half hours. I would also act as a timekeeper/emcee, introducing each new performer and circulating through the audience with a sign that provided a visual picture of each chakra, and also indicating its colour and the predominant emotion or feeling associated with it. W. A. Davison was responsible for creating a live mix of the various soundtracks employed in the work.

Montano’s performance involved two distinct sections or actions. For the first 15 minutes of each of the chakra readings, she played a small Casio and used her voice in various ways—chanting, muttering and even coughing. For the second 15 minutes, which I indicated by blowing a whistle, Montano would circulate among the audience offering Tarot readings. The Tarot portion of her performance was not miked. The resulting soundscape mixed the miked voices of the performers and Linda, the soundtrack of a three and a half hour videotape being projected in the space, and music and sound textures from various cassette tapes. These elements were heavily mixed and also fed through a digital delay, guaranteeing that no one person, Linda included, could claim exclusive authorship of the unfolding soundtrack.

Each of the seven local performers were dressed to represent a different chakra, according to colour. The outfits were in the realm of spectacular costume rather than everyday street clothes. We were encouraged by Linda to assume a persona or character for our readings. Pauses, variations of rhythm and intonation, and the interjection of spontaneous commentary into the reading of the texts were also encouraged. In the preliminary ‘rehearsal’ that took place the evening before the performance, Linda suggested that we consider in what way we could frame our involvement in the performance as a personal healing ritual–or, put another way, to think about what we wished to be healed through the performance.

The delineation of the different chakra sequences was further enhanced by a video projection played on the wall behind Linda and the performers. The video featured seven half-hour sequences, each tinted with a colour filter corresponding to the appropriate chakra. Montano describes the video in this way:

I made this video to represent the stages of life and death, going through the seven chakras: sex, then childbirth, then breastfeeding, etc. The images are from friends and found. My own are ‘performances for video’ of putting needles in my face and tubes in my nose. The death images are from my time in India gathering death and burial and cremation things. The last images of children waving are of two friends’ children. It is a poignant look at aging and time and death and impermanence and goodbye and hello. I use slow motion for the same reasons, to look at dream time. Slow motion and dream time seem to correspond for me. Also I did 15 minutes forward and 15 minutes backward to talk about the ridiculousness of getting attached to things going one way. This way you can see something forward and then reversed. It is a comedic element, which works well for things like diving into a pool; I used it to address issues of diving into and out of life and desire and fear.

The performance was presented in a proscenium format, with the video projection and the performers at one end of the room, and the audience gathered in darkness at the other. Installational elements and the movement of the performers, however, worked to unify the space. The authority of the video projection was undermined by a bubble machine that periodically blew soap bubbles in front of the image. Padded mats and king-size mattresses were placed on the floor for the audience to sit or lay on. At the beginning of the performance, Montano invited the audience to understand their own experience as an essential aspect of the performance, expressing her hope—or perhaps presenting as an assignment—that each audience member give and/or receive a full body massage during the course of the evening. In addition to Montano’s forays into the audience to give Tarot readings, I as emcee/timekeeper occasionally offered massages to individual audience members, danced alone and with others in various areas of the space, and encouraged friendly touch among participants. Other chakra performers also mingled with audience members throughout the evening.

Rather than remaining as isolated voyeurs, many audience members clumped into small tribes on their mattresses, engaging with each other physically and verbally as the performance washed over them. The overall effect was a trance-like atmosphere that was initially disorienting for new arrivals, but that was clearly engaging to the many participants who seemed happy to spend several hours there. The sense of entering an altered reality, where the passage of time, the focus of one’s attention, and the physical concerns of one’s body are measured in different terms than those demanded by the everyday routines of working for pay, dealing with the city, or even watching television, was palpable. The atmosphere could perhaps best be compared to that of a ‘rave’—although the time was relatively early in the evening, the room was smoke-free, the sound was far below ear-splitting in volume, and there was very little dancing or movement on the part of the audience.

At the end of the 3 1/2-hour sequence of chakra performances, Linda instructed me to abruptly turn on the fluorescent overhead lights. This immediately shattered the atmosphere that had been created, and brought howls of outrage from some audience members. The deliberate jarring of the senses, she explained, was to prepare the audience to re-enter the world of everyday reality, which requires a certain kind of physical and psychic shielding to maintain one’s safety. Before everyone left, Montano asked audience members to form a circle. She had each audience member present a sound/movement gesture. After each participant presented her or his gesture, the group repeated the gesture, travelling around the circle of almost a hundred who remained. This simple exercise was meant to bring each of us back to a rooted sense of self, while at the same time reinforcing the sense of community created by the performance. This participatory act was undertaken by everyone with varying degrees of self-consciousness and good humour. Once the task had travelled the entire circle, Linda and the audience bade each other farewell. Bodies began to disappear into the cold night while some of the equipment was struck by those who had chosen to stay for the second part of the performance.

PART TWO: PRIVATE DREAM MEDITATION

The second section of the performance—about eight hours long—was open to anyone who had attended the first, but required a commitment by the participants to stay the full length of the performance and to hold the silence of the space through a 7-hour “dream meditation” process. Montano’s role in this part of the piece could be likened to that of a facilitator, with the audience as contributing participants in the experience.

A dozen or so people remained for this dream meditation. The mattresses were dragged together into a central circle. Pillows, sheets and blankets were brought out. The flourescent lights were turned off, leaving only the dim glow of a lamp in a corner of the room. The doors were locked for safety. As our focus settled, we became aware of the vibrations of the floor (caused by the heaters used for the worm farm below us in the basement). We gathered together, each finding our own comfortable spot on the mattresses. Then Linda led us through some physical relaxation exercises to help us prepare for our night-time adventure. Linda asked each of us to choose one of the seven body chakras–one we felt was in need of healing energy–and to allow our consciousness to focus on this chakra as we fell asleep. The lights were turned out, and we lay together in the dark to drift into unconsciousness.

As we lay together in the dark, I played over the events of the evening in my head. The hypnotic sense of ‘tribe’ generated by the soundscape performance, with its subtle breakdown of some of the physical walls that separate us from communal touch, was now being extended to our more intimate group. There are few places in our culture where a group of adult strangers come together to sleep side-by-side, and I was keenly aware of the novelty of our group vulnerability. Adrenalized and fatigued by the performance, I found it difficult to fall asleep, so I lay still, listening to the sounds of the building and of the breathing, shifting bodies around me. The opposing tensions of familiar nestling and unfamiliar surroundings pulled me in and out of sleep, like waves lapping at the shoreline. Time passed, as I tried to quiet my thoughts and sink into body feeling. Occasionally I would check the clock, still playing timekeeper for the group.

Laying there, I was aware how I felt both alone and together at the same time. I could also feel the effects of time–not so much an action caused by time itself, but rather, the inevitability that things change as time passes. Nothing remains static, and time is what shows this truth to us.

After 7 hours, I signalled Linda, and she began to boil water and make cups of herbal tea, placing one beside each person to wake them up. I put on the lamplight, and also some soft music to indicate that morning had arrived. People sat up and began stretching, going to the bathroom, drinking tea. Soon we were all awake, and Linda called us together. We sat clumped together on the mattresses in a kind of circle, and Linda began to speak. She talked about communion, how a gesture as simple as sleeping beside one another could create a feeling of community. She invited each of us to share our experience of the night, if we wished. This was done in the manner of a talking circle, with a talisman held by each person as she or he spoke, the others listening in attentive silence. People spoke of how they felt, of their dreams, of the chakras they had chosen and why, of the healing they had sought or felt, of what healing was or might be, of family memories, of the day ahead, until everyone who wished to had spoken. Then we closed our circle, tidied up, said goodbye, and stepped out into the cold, sunny Sunday air.

I was left to delve deeper into the question of what community is, of what kind of community exists or is possible in the relationship between performer and audience, and to wonder about the markers we use to delineate where one thing ends and the next begins.

TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from 12 hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.

Writing
TIME TIME TIME Interview with Linda Montano

FADO (Paul Couillard): Hi, Linda.

LINDA MONTANO: Hi, Paul.

FADO: Given your history in performance, I wanted to start by asking whether you see a distinction between performance or art and life?

MONTANO: Until I wrote a recipe that indicated that every minute was performance, there was a distinction. In 1984 I appropriated all time as performance time or art, meaning every minute of my life was an opportunity for that kind of higher—not higher—but that kind of consciousness, a kind of awareness or—sacredness is a word that is laden, but that kind of sacredness. Before 1984 I made attempts, but they were for a week or a month or for shorter periods of time. In ’84 I designed it so that the rest of my life will be in a work of art.

Of course, Tehching Hsieh’s concept ART/LIFE: ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE was inspiring, and when I decided to join him in his rope piece for a year and I got to work with this genius of art, I learned so much about time from him.

FADO: So, everything you do is art because you’ve consciously identified it as that?

MONTANO: Yes.

FADO: Are there other things wrapped up in that, like a sense of discipline or a certain kind of awareness you try to bring to things?

MONTANO: It’s almost like… There’s a massage form called Reiki, and in Reiki, there’s a little bit of study, maybe a weekend workshop and three levels. Then there’s this so-called initiation, and it’s really an initiation into nothingness. It’s so simple; it’s just a laying on of hands. It’s not as if it’s a complicated massage form. And for me it was just a matter of consciously setting up the parameters that allowed me to incorporate, appropriate, grab all time as art. It’s—what was that question?

FADO: I was wondering about discipline.

MONTANO: In the beginning it was about discipline. I had to do this, this, this and this for numbers of hours and days and weeks and months. Then I found that the overall intentionality worked to incorporate my needs, and the disciplines were really my own ego struggling, pushing. So when I lightened up and stopped pushing so much and creating boundaries and formulas, the permission to live in the state of art loosened me up. I started making more things that looked like traditional art because I was free. Before, it was always this sort of guilt of not being in the studio, not producing enough, not working—which comes out of an art-school training or a Western model of abundance and consumerism. How can you say you’re something if there’s no product? When I took that away, I actually started producing, which is always an interesting kind of contrast. But given my philosophy, there’s no need for production, because I am in the state of art, so to speak, at all times.

FADO: Why was it important for you to identify what you were doing as art?

MONTANO: Art gave me the same kinds of pleasures and aesthetic ecstasy as the Church used to give me. And because a woman is denied priesthood in Roman Catholicism, I knew instinctively that I would never be able to be a ritual-maker.

FADO: Within the Church-

MONTANO: Yes, in the Church. I took that aesthetic ritual-making paradigm and placed it in art. Not as second best, but as deep as—and as wonderful as—experiences I was having in the Church. (1)

FADO: Do you make distinctions? For example, when I contacted you about TIME TIME TIME, I told you I was looking at durational performance and I wanted to present a series of pieces that were at least twelve hours long. You could have said, well, I’m doing that right now, or, I’ll come to Toronto and just be Linda Montano. But instead you organized a specific event with an audience component to it that could be published or announced. Is there a distinction to be made between performing a piece called APPRECIATING THE CHAKRAS and being in your kitchen making dinner?

MONTANO: Sometimes you eat chocolate cake with raspberries on it, and sometimes you have a rice cake. Doing a performance like APPRECIATING THE CHAKRAS is the chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. It’s a luxury, not necessary, but certainly something fun that I am still interested in. I see it as a night out.

FADO: In calling everything you do art, and thinking of what you do as being an artist, do you think an artist necessarily has an audience? Is there a relationship between artist and audience?

MONTANO: I think it’s changing with computers and websites etc. It’s becoming a virtual audience—a non-visible, non-visual, non-physical audience. Then there’s the audience of rumour, the audience of legend and gossip—oh isn’t that the person that, you know…—being known for one piece. There is a hunger now for community, for bodily closeness, for performance. But there’s also a plethora of taste. Things have gotten so specific to the person, that the people who will come to see a particular piece are drawn chemically by the taste of that person. The flavour of the piece coincides with the flavour of the audience members. I think there are a lot of different levels of audience, unless it’s a person or a piece that has such a following or such a need to be seen. Other than that, I think that as performance artists we draw the audience with the taste that corresponds with ours.

FADO: In an interview you did before the Toronto show, you mentioned that one of the aspects of maturing as artists—I wasn’t sure whether you meant specifically in performance art or just for yourself as an individual—was accepting or recognizing that not all audiences are going to love what you do or have to like what you do.

MONTANO: I think that’s an important lesson to learn, not getting attached to numbers of people in the audience, not getting attached to being loved, so that you can really do the work for the right motivation. Hopefully the timing of the work is right. I really think a lot of it is about the presenter. If the presenter is coming from the right place and is well-loved in the community and does a good job of making the artist comfortable, the audience can feel that and they respond. I think it’s a real collaboration, because you can do something in the right place with the wrong kind of treatment or atmosphere, and it’s not a good time for anyone. Sometimes it’s not the artist so much that’s drawing the crowd, but the presenter.

FADO: When you do a piece, what are you hoping the audience will get? Or does that matter?

MONTANO: Community—that they’ll have a place where they can wash their subconscious of ideas or fears or taboos, and a place where they can touch a kind of magical sacredness, have a spiritual high. Moving through matter and the dirt and detritus of matter as a jumping-off place to this ecstasy.

FADO: Do you have any thoughts about the element of time in your work? I chose you for TIME TIME TIME because I was familiar with the fact that you had done pieces that had unusual durations, like being tied to Tehching Hsieh for a year. Or doing a seven-year project of exploring the chakras, where every moment of every day for quite a substantial length of time was devoted to or charged with the intent of the particular project you were working on.

MONTANO: Working with time allows for a timelessness. You almost have to grab time to go out of time. Focus and concentration and discipline and spaciousness all happen at the same time when you work with endurance and time. It inhibits scatteredness. It inhibits shallowness. It helps us to go to places that change brain waves, literally. If something’s done for a long period of time, then brain chemistry changes. All of those things interest me.

FADO: I was very intrigued by the way you chose to structure what we called the piece, APPRECIATING THE CHAKRAS. Essentially, there were two parts. The first part of three and a half hours was a soundscape that people could enter or leave as they wished, just soaking in the energy of it. The second part required a different level of commitment on the part of the people who were involved. They were no longer participating spectators; they were being what they were being. You asked us, in a sense, to sleep together.

MONTANO: I’ve slept with Linda Montano.

FADO: (Laughing) I’ll bet you have! In the morning, when we were ending the performance, one of the things you spoke about was that there was a sense of community created in our being together, just in doing a simple action together like sleeping. But people had to commit to be there for that seven-hour period and not leave in the middle, whereas the first part was set up so that anyone could come and go.

MONTANO: A lot of that was just practical safety, in terms of doors opening and closing, people coming in, and protecting the space. Because people were sleeping, the space had to be different, so the parameters were different. But time is energy. We are energy. And energy needs a lot of attention. If we’re busy, if there’s a divorce from energy, then it’s like not being nurtured, not getting enough food. All of these actions are vehicles. They’re designed to produce the effect of feeling aliveness and energy—and maybe, if there is such a thing, a chemical shift in the brain where it’s touching bliss or sacredness.

FADO: Is it fair to say that what’s involved is a commitment to acknowledging and working with the particular energy of time?

MONTANO: When you translate time, the next word you get after time is death—because time is so mysterious and it’s all about the race against time, or time out, or time is over, or time is up, etc. Time is a real piece of the puzzle that nature holds and has control of. When artists play with time, they’re playing with God’s toy, nature’s toy. It wasn’t designed for us to play with, but artists never play with anything that isn’t sacred. Or, it’s the artist’s prerogative to go into that playground. Time brings up issues of dying and of death, and of impermanence and of change and of flux and of loss. Time marches on; I don’t have enough time for that: it seems to dog us and nip at our heels and run after us. We don’t have enough of it, but when the focus changes, when the artist uses time as a material—a clay to mold—the artist can use that material to reach timelessness: no-time. And no-time is bliss or ecstasy or energy, pure energy.

FADO: I see a relationship with trance as well. One of the teachings of my artistic training is that trance is how we manage to express the immortal in our mortal bodies. I think time is an important element of that. For example, people who stayed through the three-and-a-half-hour soundscape in APPRECIATING THE CHAKRAS were affected. They were put into a different space, perhaps a trance. They wouldn’t reach that place if they were only there for one minute, or if they were watching it from a distance on their television set.

MONTANO: Right. It definitely demands a presence, a participation. Otherwise it’s a sound bite.

FADO: You mentioned that up until very recently—I think it was a seven-year period—you didn’t do any interviews about your work. Can I ask why?

MONTANO: In 1991, when I finished the first set of years, I decided to do another set of years.

FADO: You’re talking about the chakra research.

MONTANO: Yes, it became 14 YEARS OF LIVING ART, and I did an interview with Jennifer Fisher from Parachute magazine in Canada. When I read it, it felt so complete that I couldn’t imagine saying anything after that. I would just be repeating myself, and maybe not learning anything. So I made a vow. And I think it was really smart, because there’s an addiction that sets in. The artist gets addicted to: why aren’t more people interviewing me; or, I don’t like talking about myself; or, I have nothing to say; or, aren’t I brilliant? A whole basketful of thoughts around what happens in an interview. I made the vow so I wouldn’t have those thoughts. Doing interviews is a learning process, a place for ideas to be shared and things to be learned—and I’m back again. But I like having the option to set parameters and to give myself ways in and out of situations. I thought that was quite brilliant, to do seven years of no interviews. It really worked for me. But I think more than anything it took away the addiction to fame and to the interview process. It gave me a chance not to think about that issue for seven years.

FADO: And now you’re willing to think about it again?

MONTANO: Well, the times have changed. There’s more to think about. The body is evolving toward obsolescence. Robotics and cloning—I don’t know what they mean, but these things that I hear about are going to be happening, and performance is a place where the body is still celebrated. More and more people are hanging out on computers all day and all night. They are performing in chat rooms as sexual partners, or doing transgressive S&M or persona changes. Things that performance artists do naturally, the general public is doing. But as a result, the performance artist is also in for a lot of punishment. When the more conservative element starts doing the thing that the performance artist does naturally, somebody is going to be whooped and whipped. The artist is in line for a kind of conservative backlash because of the guilt of those who are hanging out in chat rooms and performing. Virtually or invisibly, they are performing, having the experience of performing and not really having the creative joy, but maybe coming away from it with some guilt. It puts performance in a pretty interesting place, maybe more necessary than ever, or maybe not. But it’s certainly different from 1970 when it was for a group of friends who were all in it together. I guess there’s a kind of pathos about this loss of body as physical flesh and the move toward an implanted cyborg or a transsexualized complete human. So many people are going to extreme performative measures. Transsexuals especially have taken the performance metaphor and really pushed it. I think that’s an incredible performance. But it’ll be interesting to watch what happens with flesh and body and space in the next hundred years.

FADO: I don’t know what it’s like other places, but in Toronto, there’s been a resurgence of interest in performance. Artists want to perform, after a long period when they didn’t, when they wanted to make objects and be distanced physically from their work. But it’s also true of audiences, who seem to be looking for a sense of tribe or community, whatever it is.

MONTANO: Yes, I think it’s hot right now. It’s a hot item.

FADO: Do you think that’s true everywhere?

MONTANO: Yes, I think this generation has heard about it, especially younger people. I think there are more safe spaces for them to be performative, in their dress and on the streets, the whole tattoo or hair or dress codes. But also flesh next to flesh, for those who aren’t getting it any other place. Certainly they don’t get it in the schools. They don’t get a place where they can transcend—or maybe they do, I shouldn’t say that—but they’re looking for more places to transcend and performance can really do that, can give that experience.

FADO: When you say transcend, is that from somewhere or to somewhere?

MONTANO: We’re in it together and we’re breathing together. We’re experiencing it together, we’ve been moved and we need ritual. Our souls are hungry and we’ve got a little bit. Let’s hold onto that, go hang out, nourish that.

FADO: What do you mean when you say ritual?

MONTANO: I can only describe it in terms of an experience. I’ll use APPRECIATING THE CHAKRAS as an example. When I was turning with the flashlight, I felt as if in the action, although very, very simple, we were there altogether and that we were changing our brain waves and that our soul spirits were happy. At least mine. I’m talking for myself—when I feel the concept of ritual. I think it’s when something is designed to satisfy. For example, they knew that for fifteen minutes this was going to happen, then fifteen minutes that. They knew the landscape of the piece, so they could settle into the repetitive action of the performance. Although the actions were absurd, the tarot reading was absurd, they knew they could rely on it. The trust creates a level of openness, and the openness creates a level of body relaxation. Then the body relaxation creates a level of chemistry and the chemistry creates a level of brain wave. The brain wave is connected to harmony with nature, and nature must be in the highest balance. I think ritual is the vehicle to touch that balance.

FADO: Is that the point where your perspective shifts from I to we?

MONTANO: Yes. Did you have feeling of that at all?

FADO: Yes. One of the motivating factors for what I do is trying to assuage a sense of loneliness. Being in a position where I feel central to what’s happening does that. But I’m never sure I can gauge what the audience is feeling, except to trust cues—like, they stayed, so they obviously enjoyed being there. Or, they seem to be enjoying themselves; they seem to be connected; they seem to be relaxed. They’re not agitated; they’re not looking around waiting for something to happen, expecting something more. Then there’s moments where you just go on instinct and do something, and you have a connection with a person or with the space as a whole, or you just feel: yes, I’m in it; that’s right. But I’ve certainly been fooled at times. Sometimes, when I hear other people describe their perspectives, it turns out what I thought was going on was completely different from what they thought was going on.

MONTANO: Well, you need to interview some audience members, Paul.

Notes:

(1) Montano has since re-entered the Catholic Church as a practitioner and would probably answer this question differently today (2001).


TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from twelve hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.

Writing
Five Holes: Touched

Five Holes: Touched is the second in a series of performances dealing with the five senses. The first part (Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you, A Space, 1995) used the device of a peep show to explore the sense of sight and the process of seeing. For Touched, artists are using the nooks and crannies of Symptom Hall to create performance installations that explore aspects of touch and our attitudes surrounding it.

Touch is arguably the most intimate and revealing of the senses, that, above all others, can moves us to ecstasy or shatter us. To touch is to ‘feel’. When we are deeply affected by something, we sometimes say we are ‘touched’. At the same time, to say that someone is ‘touched’ is to say that they are crazy. To give something one’s own ‘touch’ is to infuse it with a personal style, while to keep ‘in touch’ is to maintain contact. Human cultures are rife with taboos around the sense of touch – who, what, how, when and where we can or can’t touch – governing even the touches we give our own bodies.

The common thread among the 8 diverse performances works chosen for Five Holes: Touched include a fascination with the personal, a strong regard for the everyday – whether real or as a staged simulation – and a need to venture into the visceral in search of expression. The artists’ approaches to the sense of touch vary widely – Frank Moore’s hands-on sensual eroticism, May Chan’s handling of everyday foodstuffs in the simple act of cooking, Frank Green’s ‘scientific’ research process – yet each shares a vulnerability that seems essential to the nature of touch.

Artists were chosen both through solicitation and an open call. With the possible exception of Frank Moore – whose cerebral palsy has not doubt had an influence on his interest in touch as a vehicle of communication, expression and transformation – there was a curious lack of response from ‘heterosexual’ men. I believe this reflects how much the concerns with ‘the body’ in art and critical writing over the last 10 years, at least in North America, have in fact been the terrain of those who feel disenfranchised from what we identify as ‘mainstream’ culture. More than anything, however, I think the quality that binds all of these artists is courage. A willingness to enter and explore risky places – whether that means doing work that is quiet, physically grueling, or uncompromisingly simple – is universally evident. Performance is generally understood as a visual form, and to move to an exploration of the tactile demands a whole different approach from both the artists and the audience members who follow them on their journeys.

May Chan, a Hong Kong-born artist who lives and works in Kingston, documents her everyday reality with ‘story poems’ in which plain language is infused with a direct but affecting rhythm. In this work, May explores the associative and metaphorical meanings of touch – how, for example, by handling the foods her mother once did, she completes another link in a chain of touch that stretches back through history.

Frank Green, a U/S. artist based in Cleveland, considers how institutional structures, supposedly created to encourage our well-being, sanitize or even deny touch. The implications of this denial have profound implications for both our civil liberties and our physical and spiritual health. For this performance he is assisted by two other artists from Cleveland, Thea Miklowski and Holly Wilson, as well as several Toronto artists.

Three Toronto-based artists return from the first installment of Five Holes. Fiona Griffiths, whose work about touch reflects a background of research as performer (dance, theatre), body trainer, visual artist, surgical nurse and therapist, is on a hunt to learn the details of an internal void often triggered by touch, a touch that fails to acknowledge the one who is touched. Ed Johnson calls attention to the ‘gesture’ of touch, which begins long before contact, and how the way a touch is given and the way it is received can be entirely different things; one man’s hit is another man’s caress. Bernice Kaye continues her determined journey to strip away superflouous details – all of the bells and whistles that we usually associate with performance – to get at the essence of each individual sense.

Stefanie Marshall, also based in Toronto, has created a body of performance works that feature repetitive, ritualistic actions, obsessive use of everyday objects, and a fascination for pungent, musky materials. In this new work, she seeks to touch the silences that she cannot find the words to express – hoping, perhaps, to find language in the concrete physicality of objects.

Frank Moore – who lives and works in Berkeley with a performance ‘family’ that includes his wife, Linda Mac and student/colleague Michael LaBash – has spent a lifetime exploring the magic potential of touch. Since being “sucked into performance,” as he puts it, as, “
the best way to create the intimate community which I as a person needed and that I thought society needed as an alternative to personal isolation,” Frank Moore has become a powerful philosopher about art in general, performance art in particular, and their potential to shape reality.

Julie Andrée Tremblay (jAT) and David Johnston (jHAVE) of Montréal deal with the confusing nature of touch, understood so easily by our nervous system, but only through metaphor by our brain. The two artists will create an installation that evolves as the festival progresses, a changing passageway of sensual koans.

Writing Blue

Writing Blue is the smell of interpretation. Composed of materials that many "know", blueberry candy offers a flicker of nostalgia. Grounded in blue cypress like a hunch that comes from speculation, it is the lavender that offers overwhelming explanations.

Top Notes

blueberry candy

Middle Notes

lavender, mens shaving cream

Base Notes

hyacinth, blue cypress