CIRCA 111 article

The Current State of Performance Art in Northern Ireland

Peter Richards looks here at performance art in Northern Ireland, with particular emphasis on the FIX biennials.

In this article I will briefly describe the history of the Catalyst Arts’ FIX Biennial of performance and time-based arts, including their most recent event FIX 04. I will address the problematic nature of the term ‘performance art’, and look at how within contemporary visual-arts practices, artists employ elements or attributes of performance art in their work, whilst not always referring to themselves as ‘performance artists’.

In 1994 Catalyst Arts went from being a homeless organisation, realising projects in temporary sites or venues, to being an artist run organisation and gallery space based in Belfast.1 It was the year when the FIX festival was born. The FIX festival, now in its tenth year, is an international biennial of performance and time-based arts. FIX 94, the first of these festivals, predominately featured artists based in Northern Ireland, such as Dougal McKenzie, Theo Simms, Charles Walsh, John Adie, and Keike Twissleman, to name a few. The festival consisted of a number of live events that mainly took place at Catalyst Arts Gallery in Exchange Place. Also in 1994, Exchange Resources, an international event (following on from ARE’s Available Resources), took place in Belfast, principally at Catalyst Arts.

In the time between these events and FIX 96, as they have continued to do between the FIX biennials, Catalyst Arts programmed a number of Club Curious, Curious FIX and other similarly named events. These events usually comprised a one-day / night programme of performance and time-based arts followed by a party of varying descriptions. In 1996 I joined the management committee of Catalyst Arts and began by working on the coordination of FIX 96.

FIX 96 attempted to build on these previous events, and at the same time continue to develop networking opportunities, which is often the case with performance-art festivals. The festival took place over ten days and featured works by over fifty artists, a number of whom were also involved in the coordination of other performance-art festivals, from a whole host of different countries. This has basically been the pattern that has continued through FIX 98, FIX 2000, FIX 2002, through to this the sixth international biennial of performance and time-based arts FIX 2004, introduced by Julie Bacon festival coordinator as featuring…

performances that expose and play with the role of technology in culture - using sound techniques, video and web-cam elements - to low-tech, highly charged experiments with body and mind, to performances that radicalise an all too conditioned and exclusive social space…2

John G. Boehme, Irish shinty Christmas, 2004, performance shot, FIX 04; courtesy Catalyst Arts

FIX 2004 featured works by sixteen artists3 surveying contemporary performance art practices from all corners of the globe. The variety of approaches to content, subject and medium again served to reinforce the problematic definition of the term ‘performance art’. At the same time the festival provided the public in Northern Ireland with an opportunity to experience first-hand a comprehensive survey of practices from around the world that can be loosely described by the term. For example, the works presented during the course of the weekend included the following:

•John G. Boehme’s attempt to smash individual light bulbs from two different strings of fairy lights and down a glass of whiskey when eventually successful. The work must have lasted at least an hour and saw the artist being (unwittingly) assisted in his task by members of the audience.

•Uto Gusztav created a work that utilised the properties of tension, both literally by his use of elastic bands and emotionally with regard the potential physical consequence to himself.

•Arahmaiani developed her work in collaboration with the audience. She initially invited those present to each write a word on a plate, and when all the plates had been customised she proceeded to violently smash them against the walls of the gallery. Simultaneously she delivered a story of how her friend had been poisoned and killed because of his political beliefs.

Each of these examples of presented works could, at least loosely, be defined as ‘performance art’ if we accept that ‘performance art’ refers either to a type of art practice that features a live exchange between the artist and the viewer, or follow the description of Rose Lee Goldberg, one of the best-known authors on the subject:

By its very nature, performance art defies precise or easy definition beyond the simple declaration that it is live art made by artists. Any stricter definition would immediately negate the possibility of performance art itself.4

•Also featured in FIX 2004 were works by both Matt Cook and Jamie McMurry, who, whilst both employed elements within their works that could fit the definition of ‘performance art’, simultaneously had elements that also contradicted or challenged the nature of the description, a matter previously addressed by Peggy Phelan when she wrote:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does, it becomes something other than performance.5

Uto Gusztav: PH-C shadow, 2004, performance shot, FIX 04; courtesy Catalyst Arts

•Matt Cook created live soundscapes through the activity of drawing; when finished the drawings acted as a record of the live event or trace of the artist’s action.

• Jamie McMurry began his work by handing out disposable cameras with flash to members of the audience, before having all the lighting turned off and beginning his live work. The audience then both served as the ‘lighting engineers’ and as the ‘photographers’, documenting his live activity.

These last two artists presented works that can be seen to further complicate an understanding of the term ‘performance art’, and demonstrated the ways in which contemporary hybrid practices can work within, and simultaneously challenge, the framework of this particular context. As demonstrated in relation to Phelan’s definition, we can begin to see the problematic relationship between ‘performance art’ and its documentation: “it becomes something other.” This relationship is at the centre of Douglas Davis’s article ‘Performance photography: is the picture of an art event also art?6:

Certain photographs are much more than simple records of artworks that are either temporal or difficult to see: they are primary sources, at once documents and unique, precious objects.

Through my practice as an artist7 I have principally attempted to question the notion of histories of performance art and explore further the impact of mediation, principally publications, on my understanding the nature of performance art. I proposed, as did Katy O’Dell, that publications are “…still by far the predominant way one comes to know about performance art.”8

In 1999 I wrote an essay titled Installaction: representation of representations for a special issue of Inter Art Actuel9 that explored the practices of a number of artists who employed performance art or a live event as an element of their work. Other contributors included Alastair MacLennan, Brian Connelly, Artur Tajber, and Roddy Hunter to name a few. The edition came about as a result of a conversation between Brian Connelly, Brian Patterson and Richard Martel during the FIX 98 festival.

The Inter Art Actuel publication addressed the nature of contemporary practices that have become ‘something other than performance art’, though they employed elements or attributes of ‘performance art’ in their construction. This is particularly relevant when looking at the current state of performance art in Northern Ireland now, as there are a number of artists whose practices enter into this area of ‘something other than performance’. Examples of this include artists such as: Alastair MacLennan who has referred to his practice as being ‘actuation’, where by he activates specific sites employing performance as an integral element of the duration of the work; Dan Shipsides, who carries out live actions to camera or creates installations that feature live activities based on his interest in mountain climbing and the histories of painting; and Ian Charlesworth, who creates works that function as records of the artist’s action.

The contemporary state of performance art in Northern Ireland is one that is continually evolving beyond its previously defined parameters. These hybrid practices both refer to and employ elements of ‘performance art’ within the expanded multi-disciplinary arena of contemporary visual art.

Peter Richards is an artist and curator based in Belfast.

1Peter Richards, Born 1993, homeless: A brief history of Catalyst Arts, Inter Art Actuel, No. 66, 1996

2Julie Bacon, co-director, Catalyst Arts, co-ordinator FIX04

3Arahmaiani (Indonesia), Marilyn Arsem (USA), Sylvette Babin (Québec), Anne Bean (England), John G. Boehme (Canada), Alexander del Re (Chile), Sinéad O’Donnell (N. Ireland), Jamie McMurry (USA), Michelle Rhéaume (Québec), Denis Romanovski (Belarus), Vasya Vasileva (Bulgaria), Helen Sharp (N. Ireland), Matt Cook (Wales), Uto Gusztav (Romania), Matt Cook (Wales), and Roman Maskalev (Kyrgyzstan)

4Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, p 9

5Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the politics of performance, London / New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 146

6Douglas Davis, Performance photography: is the picture of an art event also art? Connoisseur, April 1985, Avant-Garde Section, pp. 144 -145

7Included in this issue of CIRCA is a short introduction to the nature of my practice.

8Katy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s, Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p 14

9Peter Richards, Installaction: representation of representations, Inter Art Actuel, No. 74, 1999

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.64–67

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