Artist
Paul Couillard

Ā© Paul Couillard. Duorama #129 (performance with Ed Johnson), Museo de Arte ContemporĆ”neo de Oaxaca, 2020. Photo Fausto Luna.

Canada

Paul Couillard has been working as a queer artist, curator, and performance art scholar since 1985. He has created well over 300 performance works in 26 countries, often with his husband and collaborator, Ed Johnson. Paul was the Performance Art Curator for FADO from 1993 until 2007, and is a founding co-curator of 7a*11d. His main areas of interest include site-responsiveness, building community, and addressing trauma through explorations of our bodies as shared vessels of sensation, experience, knowledge and spirit. He is the editor of the monograph series Canadian Performance Art Legends, and has been a lecturer at McMaster University and the University of Toronto Scarborough. He recently completed a doctorate through the York Graduate Program in Communication and Culture. His dissertation Rethinking Presence with a Thinking Body: Intra-active Relationality and Animate Form offers a meditation on presence from the perspective of a thinking body, integrating insights from continental philosophy, popular neuroscience, and interactive performance art practices.

Artist
Ed Johnson

Ed Johnson. Legs, Too, FADO Performance Art Centre, 2015. Photo by Henry Chan.

Canada

Ed Johnson is a visual artist who has been creating performance art works since 1996. His solo work has often explored issues of communication/non-communication (Box, Words of Love) and of HIV status (Inquisitive/Inquisitor, Untitled “[sic]”). Currently, the focus of his work is on the landscape of male bodies and self-image, including works such as Pro tanto quid retribaumus (for so much what shall we repay). Ed Johnson is a co-founding member of Fado Performance Inc., an artist-run centre for performance art located in Toronto.

Series
Five Holes

Five Holes was a multi-year, multi-event series curated by Paul Couillard. Spanning the years 1995ā€“2006, each iterative event highlighted one of the body’s five senses.

Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you (1995)
Five Holes: Touched (1997)
Five Holes: reminiSCENT (2003)
Five Holes: Listen! (2004)
Five Holes: Matters of Taste (2006)

Curatorial Statement by Paul Couillard

Five Holes foregrounds our bodies by examining aspects of the five basic human senses. The presence of bodiesā€”the performer’s body and the audience members’ bodiesā€”is an essential element of performance. We ‘perform’ when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. Five Holes considers some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive. At the core of this project is a concern with our bodies as a root aspect of humanness. The presence of bodiesā€”the performer’s body and the audience members’ bodiesā€”is an essential element of performance. We ‘perform’ when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. Five Holes foregrounds our bodies, considering some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive.

Civilization has constructed a worldview where ‘virtual’ reality has become a tantalizing ideal ā€“ a desired end point that will offer our consciousness and imagination a new beginning and a new territory to explore. At the same time, cultural theory has come to consider our bodies as something separate from our selves ā€“ referring to an objectified Other, ‘the body’, sometimes understood as a ‘text’, and sometimes considered as one ‘site’ among many to be inhabited. Our bodies are now subject to interrogation on multiple fronts, particularly in the realm of performanceā€”from Stelarc’s assertions that “the body is obsolete” to Orlan’s surgical remodeling of her physical appearance. It seems that we are following an inevitable path, guided by RenĆ© Descartes’ oft-quoted maxim, “I think, therefore I am.” We are in a headlong rush to abandon our bodiesā€”our imperfect, traitorous physical forms that suffer, wear out and eventually die. We seek immortality and omnipotence, two qualities that our ‘minds’ can imagine but that our ‘bodies’ can never attain.

But where and how are knowledge and imagination generated? For me, the answer lies in the daily struggles and resistances that my body undergoes. I am motivated by imperativesā€”survival, empathy, a search for fulfillmentā€”that are bodily driven. Learning does not come from having my thoughts fully realized the moment that I think them; learning comes from experience, which is another way of saying that it develops through the process of making my thoughts manifest in physical form. Learning happens as I go about trying to reconcile my theoretical ideal with the exigencies of physical laws and available resources. To ‘do’ inevitably brings a deeper, more nuanced understanding than to ‘imagine’. This is not a simple or straightforward process: it brings pain as well as pleasure, and often what I discover seems neither fair nor friendly. Nevertheless, I am not so eager to leave behind my cross-eyed, bow-legged body. I love this life, and I am certain that what I have to learn or discover can only be manifested through my body.

We define our living bodies in multiple ways: as material (flesh, blood and bone); as process (respiration, circulation, electrical impulses); and as vessel (of experience and consciousness). It could be argued that our senses are what constitute our bodies. We associate our senses most directly with ‘sensation’, the domains of pleasure and horror, but our senses also play a larger role in connecting us to the world and shaping our identities. They are how we apprehend the worldā€”the points of intersection between our individual consciousnesses and the actuality of time and space. It is through our senses that we undertake and negotiate our relationships to each other and our surroundings. Human senses have developed over time. Each sense provides us with a different set of information, evolving, if we believe Darwin, according to what best allows us to survive and prosper as a species. As conditions change, and as our bodies adapt in other ways, presumably our senses could also change. Five Holes provides artists and audiences with an opportunity to test their senses as they are now, informed by both history and imagination.

Five HolesĀ brings us together in this time and this space to see, touch, smell, hear and taste. These varied projects are united in their search for the possibilitiesā€”not only for pleasure, but also for knowing ā€”that the senses have to offer.

Performance
Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you

Curated by Paul Couillard

ARTISTS
Bernice Kaye
Ed Johnson
Fiona Griffiths
Paul Couillard
Sandy McFadden

Shake off the New Year’s blahs by taking in a performance art peep show. FADO combines installation and performance art in Five Holes: I’ll be seeing you, featuring new works created by members of the FADO collective. Isolated in individual cubicles, the performers will each create their own six-hour performance work that can only be seen through tiny peepholes. Twenty-five cents buys viewers a one-minute look, or for $5 you can be an audience for the full six hours.

What’s behind that curtain? There’s only one way to find out.

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer