CIRCA Art Magazine - Summer 2003

C104 Review

London: Live Culture at Tate Modern

Live Culture was a four-day event at Tate Modern whose purpose was to consider the shifting nature of live art practice within visual art, through scheduled performances and a symposium. It was a sunny weekend in London and most of the time I was stuck in a seat in a bunker auditorium at Tate Modern, but loving every minute of it. The discussions and debates that ensued from curators, academics and artists like Marina Abramovic, Roselee Goldberg, Amelia Jones, Peggy Phelan, Alastair MacLennan, John Jordan, William Pope.L1, Oran Catts, and Ron Athey, were enlightening and entertaining. However, the highlights were the Live Art Performances and consequently, La Ribot and Franko B are forever etched on my memory.

Persistently stressed in the discussions at the symposium was the audience-and-artist relationship. One point relevant to all performance, however committed an artist might be, is that such commitment is of little value unless it is met with equal involvement on the viewer's part.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Juan Ybarra and Michelle Ceballos of La Pocha Nostra with Kazuko Hohki and Ansuman Biswas, Ex-Centris (A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others); photo/© Manuel Vason, 2003; courtesy Tate Modern

La Ribot, the award-winning Spanish artist, began a life-long project in 1993 and she performed Panoramix (1993-2003) to a packed audience sitting on the floor. The performance involved compressed short solos, using objects lying around or pinned to the wall. Within the performance there was sustained uncertainty from her and from us the audience. Her naked body tested the tensions between audience and viewer, performance and dance. Often she would lie on the ground, sometimes in the space which we physically occupied. There were gaps between actions, the stillness became the object, and she was succumbing to the power of the emptiness as we were drawn into its force. In Becket, we learn of emptiness or nothingness as object, and the belief that art happens in that space between the artist and the audience. For La Ribot, the emotional, physical or intellectual space is the connecting power between performer and viewer. There is a shared anticipation and a feeling that I am in your space and you are in mine.

Liveness as object investigates what is permissible in art. This object encompasses a connection to painting, a bleeding of boundaries between disciplines, a need to contravene the rule of society or just to exist as the physical manifestation of poetry.

Franko B's performance, I miss you, was the final event of the weekend and certainly contained a power that was appropriate for a grande finale. The turbine hall was dark; we sat on the floor on either side of a runway that was lit from the ground with fluorescent tube lighting. He appeared out of the darkness at the end of the runway, bald and painted white. He walked up and down the white runway for maybe fifteen minutes, bleeding from inserted IV valves in his forearms. These valves facilitated a slow but consistent flow of blood. The red of his blood engaged with his white body in a way that was dramatic and beautiful. The blood fell on the runway leaving its mark, and his movements as he walked enabled him create a painting. The vulnerability of the artist was to the forefront and the symbolism of his controlled action was poetically displayed. The act of bleeding can be read on many levels. It is brutal, sacrificial and carnal in nature, conjuring up religious imagery of ritual, beauty and suffering. The repetition of walking up and down annuls the shock of the bleeding. It had great power, honesty and realness. He sustained eye contact with the audience as his walking pace got slower and the performance ended when excessive blood loss hindered him from continuing.

It is reasonable to concur with the organisers, Live Art Development Agency, that there is a resurgence of interest in live culture within our media-condensedcontemporary culture. The event grew out of a need to look back in history in relation to the evolution of performance in visual art and simultaneously to examine the possibilities of live art now, but more significantly to advance its critical currency and relevance to our present and future cultural economies. Performance is an open-ended medium, made by artists determined to take their art directly to the public, or rather into the public.

The event was a success and like the art itself, it was open-ended, which is a good thing.

Nathalie Weadick is Director of the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny.

Live Culture, Tate Modern, London, 27 - 30 March, 2003

1sic