Performance Projections
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Performance Projections

Film and the Body in Action

Stephen Barber

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eBook - ePub

Performance Projections

Film and the Body in Action

Stephen Barber

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About This Book

Film does far more than document performance—it actively recreates the time and space of performance and overhauls its rapport with the viewer's eye and body. The first book to look in-depth at the intersection of film and performance in relation to issues and theories of space, Performance Projections travels from the origins of film in Europe and the United States to the world of digital media today, exploring the dynamic relationship between these vitally connected ideas.Drawing from a wide range of examples—including filmic depictions of German and Japanese and Chinese performance art and street cultures—Stephen Barber argues that the act of filming has the power to draw distinctively performative dimensions out of unruly human gatherings, such as riots and political protests, while also accentuating the outlandish and aberrant aspects of performance. Spanning the history of film, Barber moves from performance in film's formative years, such as Edward Muybridge's work in the 1880s, to contemporary performance artworks—for example, Rabih MrouĂ©'s investigations of the often lethal camera phone filming of snipers in Syrian cities. Proposing that the future conception of filmed performance needs to be radically expanded in response to the transformations of digital film cultures, Performance Projections is a critical addition to the literature on both film and art history.

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Information

Year
2014
ISBN
9781780234090
Topic
Art
Subtopic
Art General
PART ONE
IN TRANSIT: BETWEEN AND ACROSS PERFORMANCE AND FILM
An art form intersects with another in a vital shattering and reconfiguration of both. Afterwards, each may initially look the same, identical to the instant before that collision, but they have now been transformed. What emerges from that intersection can form an amalgam, an infiltration, a convergence, an accumulation or a stripping bare. It can engender a new entity of irrepressible experimentation, but it may also form a locus of final disintegration and power, in which one element of that intersection of art forms is overruled and consigned to oblivion, or else splits itself apart. As the entity which pre-eminently spans conjoined art forms, corporeality projects volatile dualities of its own, perceptible most immediately in a condition of extreme tension or an emergent but unknown spatial zone. This book is concerned with the intersection of performance and film. Between and across performance and film, across and between film and performance, in intimacy and riotous contestation, through darkness and illumination: that unknown zone is where future histories of the human body will be generated and witnessed.
In its explorations of performance, this book’s particular, dual focus is on acts of performance art, in their widest sense, and on gestural, performed acts undertaken – often momentarily, and subject to summary vanishing – in exterior spaces, primarily those of cities (it is less concerned with performances spatially enacted in the interior spaces of art galleries and museums, or of theatres and choreographic venues). Its focus on film is dual, too: on the film image as the pre-eminent, formative medium across a century or more for the perception of the human body and its movements, and on the digital image as exerting both a renewal and obliteration of film, in its rapport with the human eye. Performance primarily constitutes a corporeal act – manifested against spatial surfaces, backdrops and screens – whose enduring residue is instilled into a moving-image form.
This book is concerned with the multiple, determining ways in which vision intercedes between performance and film. Performance entails an act undertaken by figures inhabiting spatial surfaces, interzones and subterranes, whether conceived intentionally as a performance-art action or else carried through momentarily and compulsively, even accidentally; it is always made present in space by the corporeality that also allows it to be recorded in images. But, both in the gestures of performance and in the sequences of films or digital media, corporeality as a medium of duration can be instantly annulled. It exists only in its envisioning. The body’s flesh-imbued sensory presence in performance may abruptly blur, misfire and deliquesce into space, and the celluloid or digital pixels holding its detritus may malfunction and vanish into thin air, too. In that sense, performances form the casting of shadows and spectral presences across spatial surfaces and into the gaps between them. Those acts constitute pivotal life-or-death markings, pitched between darkness and invisibility, conceived for the eye but subject also to their own loss, through the arbitrary priorities of the eye and its recording instruments of vision, which always possess lives of their own.
This book also explores what exactly takes place in the ‘mystery’ of that liminal, interzonal movement between performance and film. Performers may instigate the filming of their acts; many such acts have historically been conceived and executed solely for their realization as filmic sequences, thereby reinforcing film’s recording-medium status as an integral ally of performance, with the cryogenic capacity indefinitely to sustain performance’s existence after its momentary enacting. Conversely, film-makers may themselves solely determine the rendering of performance into the medium of film; film can form a direct contravention of performance’s assigned intentions, to the extent that it actively obstructs performance, and utterly scrambles its time and space, with the aim of reconfiguring corporeal traces as filmic traces. Film may also be activated neutrally, without any intention to record or appropriate performance, through accidental or automatic moving-image sequences, shot by surveillance cameras or oblivious human documenters of performance. But in each instance of performance’s intersection with film across widely disparate forms – through collaboration, against the grain or automatic – a vital residue of performance’s corporeal acts is always generated, momentarily or indefinitely, for archival preservation or near-instantaneous disposal. Every manifestation of filmed performance is one in which the human body’s presence is materialized, but simultaneously transformed. Film uniquely impacts upon performance to reassemble corporeality.
In its mapping of seminal infiltrations and conjunctions – generated across and between performance and film – this book is predominantly focused upon the spaces in which those dynamic encounters take place. As such, it is concerned with performance as an event and phenomenon that is invariably undertaken in an intimate rapport with space, whether one of complicity or antipathy. That rapport is one in which a division of time is also at stake. The performance theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte has probed the delicate but formative shift that takes place between a performance’s temporally limited occurrence within its space, which she defines as a charged manifestation of ‘spatiality’, and that encompassing space’s existence before and after the performance act:
Spatiality . . . is transitory and fleeting. It does not exist before, beyond, or after the performance but emerges in and through it, as do corporeality and tonality. As such, spatiality needs to be distinguished from the space in which it occurs . . . First, the space in which a performance takes place represents an architectural-geometric space that pre-dates the performance and endures after it has ended . . . The performance’s spatiality is brought forth by the performative space and must be examined within the parameters set by it.1
Those parameters are accentuated, and also cast into a new dimension, whenever a performance act takes place in exterior space, and notably when it is conjoined with moving-image media.
A very wide range of films and of forms of film appear in this book, encompassing documents and documentaries, feature films and fiction films from film cultures ranging from German cinema’s Weimar era to that of 1960s Japan, as well as contemporary digital loops and corporate animations. But in most cases, the films which are at stake here are experimental ones (as with the very first 1890s filmings of performance), in which a film-maker or film artist has approached an act of performance with a set of preoccupations, and a conception of time and space, existing at some degree of variance from the preoccupations and orientations of the performer. Film-making is always an act in counterposition to an act of performance; it is never simultaneous or identical, even when its aim is purely to replicate a performance in film. The intersection of performance and film is often conjoined as much by mismatches as by suturings. Every attempt in film to seize performance’s temporal slippages forms one further variant of an ongoing, open-ended filmic experimentation into time and space. Film possesses its unique and accumulated histories of experimentation just as performance does, while film’s experimentations are notably exacerbated in the contemporary moment as a result of the unprecedented transmutations which digital technologies have exacted on that medium.
The conjunction of performance and film is integral to the perceptions and histories of both forms; at the same time, traversing those two entities constitutes a precarious tightrope walk.2 As misfired attempts to film the acrobat Philippe Petit’s spectacular transit over the void between the New York World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974 indicates, tightrope walking itself can form an outlandish and illicit corporeal performance extending between already vanishing endpoints, and resistant to moving-image capture. The conjunction of performance and film is not dependably a rational or linear terrain: it is often also one of riotous insurgency, of fallings into darkness and of disorientating sensory loss and excess that can leave the eye of the spectator multiply displaced. Whenever performance enters film’s arena, it may be delicately accented and sensorially enhanced by that manoeuvre, its corporeal gestures revivified, but at the same time it is always irreversibly overhauled by film and relocated elsewhere. Film, in turn, may be deployed into performance’s arena and hold its own there for a time, juxtaposing itself against performance acts, and even visualizing and projecting those same acts on screens located within the performance space; but if it endures too long, imposing its own spectatorial rituals and compulsions, film’s presence will eventually unsettle the dynamics of performance and require extinguishment. The spectator of enmeshed performance and film has to negotiate the demands of two contrary entities and to envision dual, intersecting histories.
Performance art forms a vast global phenomenon. Many young artists, from China and Japan through Europe and the Middle East to the USA and South America, now position their work explicitly as performance art, as though no other form of art could satisfactorily deploy the kinds of corporeal, political, protest-based or aesthetic processes that performance can. But in order for performance art and all associated gestural actions to be manifested after their execution, they must be filmed and that film disseminated, whether on artists’ or galleries’ websites, YouTube, arts e-journals, social media, exhibition spaces or other locations in which the traces of performance art are instantaneously accessible. Many contemporary performance artists are also simultaneously the filmic documenters of their own work, since digital media erase almost all of the delay, attention and required aptitude formerly attached to the filming of performance art. As such, the conception of contemporary performance art is often inseparable from the envisioning of how it will appear and be projected, in the next moment, in its moving-image form. Performance art possesses its distinctive filmed lineage, emerging 60 or so years on from film’s mid-1890s origins, in the form of the deteriorated celluloid documents of performance works by Gutai and Fluxus artists, and that lineage extends directly to the present moment, since contemporary artists can always rapidly access that filmed performance history. In a sense, contemporary performance artists have no option but to absorb and recapitulate that filmed history of performance art, since it is now so predominantly present and pervasively locatable through digital resources such as ubu.com; any performance artist with the impossible desire to begin again in an unprecedented way, in filmed performance, would first need to exact an all-consuming ocular and sensory self-deprivation, and an archival annulling of performance’s memory.
Since film is often now perceived identically as performance art, in part as a result of that excessive and accumulating plenitude of performance’s digital moving-image archiving, a comprehensive disentangling and re-envisioning of those two entities – performance and film – is necessary in order for their distinctive interconnections to be perceived, and for their vital, defining disparities to be delineated. Performance’s transaction into the moving image constitutes a multiple one that encompasses filmed performance, the rendering of performance into digital media and the future transformation of performance bodies into emergent sensory media. When performance takes place in exterior space, its past, present and future are simultaneously at stake. Performance threads itself through time above all via the medium of film, but that time is rarely linear or homogeneous in the perception of contemporary performance artists, and filmed performance’s revelations are often unforeseen and awry, abruptly insurging across and through time. An image from filmed performance art’s origins, in the 1950s or ’60s, can often be more tellingly juxtaposed and conjoined with a contemporary act of performance than an image from a moment ago.
Performance’s multiplicitous intersections with film can be approached historically, through the examination of amassed traces, locations or documents in archives or other resources, but they may also be interrogatively seized in the contemporary moment, through spatial and ocular transits of the locations at which performance can readily be anticipated to occur and to be filmed, or else by more exploratory trajectories that involve a permanently open eye, attuned to performance’s sudden manifestations and vanishings. Performance art, like film, is never a fixed or closed art form. It may mutate in an instant into an outlandish, rapidly elapsed spatial act that appears to possess no conceivable alliance with the exhibition or identification of art; but that same act, viewed retrospectively in its filmed form, may take on the status, together with the time and space, of performance art. The mutable interstice between performance art and less clearly identifiable gestural acts executed in space (notably peripheral or interzonal space), especially those propelled by repetition and obsession, forms the point at which film’s capacity to generate and cohere performance as art, or as spatial act, is most tangibly at stake.
Performance’s conjunction with film is not only a matter for visual art, performance cultures and moving-image media. Its projections form unique manifestations that also have pivotal relevance for the study of the human body in its gestural, sensory and spatial dynamics, and for the human eye in its capacity to capture and process split-second, aberrant manoeuvres. The future of corporeal and ocular power can be envisaged at the intersection of performance and film. But more widely, the projections of bound-together performance and film also hold and transmit philosophical, social, political and especially ecological dimensions, notably in their exposed, space-located manifestations. The potential survivals and extinctions of social and public spaces are dependent upon the capacity both of human figures to perform and protest within them, and of independent, autonomous moving images to be made of those figures’ performative presence and acts.
The space at which performance and film interact most productively is often subject to terminal instability: the spatial interzone, gap, wasteland, subterrane, threshold or transit site. That space may be a city space, but it may equally be one in which all trace of the city has been excluded or subtracted by the performer and film-maker: film possesses the capacity both to construct revealing transits from corporeal to city space and back again, especially when that space is in riotous uproar, and to focus entirely on corporeal space, so that city space appears definitively occluded, and would have to be re-imagined from zero to exist again. City space is never what it appears to be, and film’s interaction with performance is crucial in overturning apparent spatial constraints to expose the essential cruelty of space. When film is said to ‘render’ space, in its occupation by performance, that rendering has the resonance of a slaughterhouse process of rendition that violently reduces and condenses vital animal corporeality into a state of disintegration within which it can be consumed; that process also possesses the association of rendering with a liminal moment at which performance and film spectrally break through walls and surfaces, thereby engendering outlandish conjurations and mutations of flesh and city space; finally, the term ‘rendering’ also evokes the digital domain in which a multidimensional virtual space is created through the transposition and transferral of corporeal elements, pulled from their originating space. Bodies lose control of themselves, and are potentially exposed to torture, in a political process of in-transit, cross-global ‘rendition’. But rendering may also entail a sensitized process in which the space of performance is seen to oscillate from one extreme form to another, and from one location to its exactly opposite site, through the act of its filming. Only through that multiplicitous, fractious process of oscillation can the contemporary global form of digitized city space, with its contrary dimensions and pressures, be clearly sited, along with the corporeal presence of its inhabitants, occupants and protestors, engaged either in performative acts and gestures, or else subject to stasis. Contemporary space in cities possesses at least three such forms.
In its first manifestation, city space, in recent years, has become a maximally dense site of emergency contestation and protest. Such protest may have an economic origin that opens out into infinite forms of contestation, as in the turmoil of European cities subject to economic freefall and resulting youth unemployment, Athens and Madrid above all. That origin may also be a response to corrupt power or the desire for religious power, as in the uprisings of North African or Middle Eastern cities such as Tripoli or Damascus. It may equally have its origins in deep unease with the engulfing global supremacy of digital information, and be countered both with digital information itself and through infiltrations or occupations of city space, as with the acts of the Occupy movement around 2010. Urgent city-space protests may also be ecological ones. But in all of these manifestations of protest, city space is inhabited by absolute urgency: the sense that only an accumulating, intensive contestation – constellated by acts of performance in that space, and itself a form of corporeal performance – can resolve the impasse. Space becomes emergency. And, in all such manifestations of urgency-instilled space, film is invariably present as a primary, exacerbating medium of documentation and viral unleashing. Equally, all such apparently unique spaces of maximally urgent contestation possess their precedents, as at the end of the 1910s, or in the 1960s, or at the end of the 1980s: all of them (that is, those situated post-1895) moments in which film intervened to transform city space’s emergency protests into performative acts.
Alongside that manifestation of city space as possessed by an optimal and expansive emergency, and marked by protest, contemporary space is also, contrarily, disintegrating. The central plazas and squares of cities, especially those occupied by corrosive confrontations between protestors and their subjugators, are denuded, such as those of Athens and Istanbul. Space is rendered exhausted, dilapidated, through such processes as the expulsion and dispersal, for reasons of property speculation and other economic aims, of central city populations, or as the residue of flat-out confrontations between protestors and police, or by the intentional excoriation and voiding of central space by city authorities for non-publicized, opaque motives; the outcome is that what once appeared to be the central plaza of a city now presents itself inversely as that city’s most negligible edge. The locations of performance and film historically sited in such central plazas – large-scale theatres or choreographic venues and similarly vast, ornate cinemas – constitute pivotal indicators of that process of coruscating oblivion in the form of abandoned cinemas and razed performance venues; often, the most intensive and experimental manifestations of protest take place in and around those reconfigured spaces of film and performance, momentarily reoccupied by performance artists or film-makers.
City space is simultaneously contested and abandoned; but it is also overridden by the unprecedented rise of digital culture, and that culture’s engulfing expansion through space. Protest and denudation may be diminishing and imminently vanishing subcategories of that third, final variant of city space. The genealogies of graffiti inscriptions left behind on spatial surfaces by protests, together with the accumulated, almost worn-away textures of obsolete space, form allied and intersecting presences that are immediately transfigured in the digital world. Film possesses an extensive history of recording performances in spatial situations of protest, such as the exclamatory work of Pussy Riot, and of conversely documenting performances silently enacted in abandoned or atmospheric space, as with the work of Ana Mendieta; but digital culture is one that instantly subsumes and regulates both performance and space, and immediately co-opted film, from the 2000s, replacing and upgrading its technologies but appropriating its visual compulsions and auras. The concentration of digital culture in contemporary space manifests itself in image screens, corporate hoardings and the endlessness of smartphone images; at the same time, it is invisible to eyes now fully habituated to digital culture. Performance may not be a future human option in pervasively regulated digital space, unless it take...

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