Performance et Photographie : POINT
Vito Acconci, Max Dean, General Idea, Suzy Lake, Arnulf Rainer, Paul
Wong
curated by Michèle Thériault and France Choinière
Opening Thursday, March 4 at 5 p.m.
The exhibition runs from March 4 to April 10, 2004
The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m.
This spring, Dazibao presents a special three-part event, curated by Michèle Thériault and France Choinière, comprised of two consecutive group exhibitions entitled Performance et Photographie : POINT & SHOOT; and a day-long performance event, La lumière comme surmoi, organized in collaboration with Sylvie Cotton.
Performance art and photography have a relationship that is almost as
old as the disciplines themselves. As posing for a photograph evolved,
so did artistic experimentation on and around the limits of photography.
The two exhibitions present works that occupy a continuum of differing
links between the two disciplines, starting just after the most obvious
link: the photograph as document of the performance. Though not historical
per se, in this first exhibition we see seminal works by influential artists
of international stature who delineated the relationship between photography
and the performative act.
Because of the ephemeral quality of performance and the purported role
of photography as record-keeper, many works demonstrate a certain blurring
of the borders, a mutation of the documentary function of the photograph.
An example is Paul Wong’s In Ten Sity (1978), a disturbing, provocative,
performance which the audience could only watch via television monitors.
From its first viewing, the performance was mediated: the recording of
the image being necessary not only for the posterity of the work, but
as integral to the internal logic of the piece. Max Dean’s 1981 piece,
Pass It On, operates in a similar mode. Participants were invited to take
a bath in a room with only a tub, and a structure incorporating a clock
and a Polaroid camera, inside. Upon exiting, the bathers were offered
the generated portrait of themselves, at once œuvre and document.
In the 1970s, Vito Acconci produced a remarkable body of conceptual, performance-based
film and video works, in which he engages in an intensive dialogue between
artist and viewer, body and self, public and private, subject and object
and, especially, with the mediums themselves. His performances only make
sense —indeed, only exist— because of the the recorded image
and its parameters.
The trio known as General Idea made themselves the centre of their own
constructed and performed mock-media empire. Manipulating the Self (1973)
was a mail art project which asked individuals to take a picture of themselves
carrying out the instruction: “...wrap your arm over your head, lodging
your elbow behind and grabbing your chin with your hand....Held, you are
holding.” The responses were assembled into a poster which recalls
the pages of popular celebrity magazines.
Self-representation is another area where there is a natural overlap between
performance and photography. In his series, Face Farces (1968-1972), Arnulf
Rainer performs for the camera, becoming the violent subject of a photograph
which is then erased, lacerated and scratched. Combining mark-making and
photography, Rainer demonstrated the use of body language, as much in
posing as in the subsequent physical aggression towards the images, as
a form of artistic expression. Suzy Lake was among the first female artists
to adopt performance, video and photographic work to explore the politics
of gender. Lake's earliest works, produced in the 1960s and 1970s, already
employed devices such as the invention of personas, directly inspiring
artists such as Cindy Sherman, Lisa Steele and Barbara Kruger. In addition
to her significant contribution to the development of an engaged feminist
art, the series Co-Ed Magazine (1973) occupies an anxious space between
self-portraiture and the incarnation of different personalities, bearing
witness to a recent and important photographic practice which places the
artist in front of the camera.
The works in POINT were created at a time when photographic practice,
and all practices involving the recorded image, were developing at breakneck
speed. While intense debate about the medium of photography occurred,
peformance art was evolving as one of the most innovative artforms. These
artists brought together in this first section point to issues that continue
to inform the work of today’s contemporary artists who investigate
these two dynamic disciplines.