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Body Parts April 24, 2005

Posted by Giles in : writing , trackback

This article appeared originally at the SSA web site at http://www.s-s-a.org/

The recent Body Parts Festival held by the Society of Scottish Artists has its roots in the history of Western performance art which, in turn, can be traced at least as far back as the theatre of ancient Greece – that tremendous flourishing of theatrical art which began around the middle of the first millennium BC. As a modern phenomenon, its origins go back to the Italian Futurists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) who unleashed his theatrical ‘incendiary violence’ as an attack on Bourgeois values with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto in Paris in 1909. Several years earlier, the German actor Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) had shocked and delighted audiences in Munich with sexually explicit performances in venues such as the city’s Café Simplicissimus. Over the years practitioners such as Pina Bausch, Hermann Nitsch, Yves Klein, Gilbert & George and Laurie Anderson have elevated performance to an art-form capable of holding its own amongst the best that twentieth century art, in all its manifestations, had to offer.

The SSA has, since its foundation in 1891, existed to promote “the more adventurous spirits in art” and it is therefore no surprise that this festival – the idea of the current SSA president, Kate Downie – should have included such an adventurous programme of experimental and challenging work. Downie comments that “although performance art was not entirely new to the Scottish and Edinburgh scene, the collective platform represented by the Body Parts festival was a unique and important event which required an immense amount of political and organisational will on behalf of the SSA – with the support of the National Galleries and the Royal Scottish Academy – to make happen.”

In Scotland, the first sustained and radical exposure to performance art came in 1970 with Richard Demarco’s inspired exhibition Strategy: Get Arts which successfully attempted to present the vast array of contemporary art forms currently being practised in Düsseldorf and other important centres in Germany. Among the artists were Klaus Rinke, Daniel Spoerri and Joseph Beuys. Beuys’ seminal Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony combined, action, images, music and theatricality in a sustained performance which melded Beuys’ deeply held spiritual beliefs with a perceived Celtic rootedness.

It should be noted, however, that the inspiration for Body Parts also came from the important role that Glasgow has played: for a number of years the city has hosted an annual festival of performance art – the National Review of Live Art – at venues such as The Arches; and much work in this genre has also been seen at other venues such as Tramway. Additionally, a former SSA President and a participant at Body Parts, George Wyllie, was also instrumental in laying the groundwork for performance art because of his vociferous support of installation art, which formed a natural evolution towards live events. These have included work by performance artists such as Alex Rigg who has performed a number of works at the SSA since the early 1990s.

An early follower of Beuys’ shamanistic, ritualistic and spiritual approach was Alastair MacLennan (b.1943), currently Professor of Fine Art at the University of Ulster. MacLennan gave a ‘keynote’ lecture/performance entitled Rain Rein Reign at the SSA’s recent Body Parts festival of performance art. MacLennan’s geographical positioning in Belfast is perhaps no mere chance event; Beuys visited Ulster on a number of occasions partly because he believed in the regenerative powers of art and its ability to heal society’s ills. Lys Hansen, a former president of the SSA comments that “MacLennan [told] of how living and working in Belfast has been an amazing palette for him. An urban battleground of human emotion, both political and religious. We saw shopping malls used as installation areas, busy streets as performance arenas, pebbled coastlines as abyss edges for the wandering creative spirit. The form, the furniture, the debris of living and life are all here and everywhere for investigation and are in the element of art, not outwith it.” Kate Downie, current SSA President, adds: “MacLennan took the audience on a spiritual journey which denounced the reduction of art as mere ‘cultural real-estate’, and took us with him to a place where the central ‘activity of performance has its own momentum’. One left the lecture inspired by the man, and wishing to become a performer oneself.”

Although a central tenet of performance art has historically been the presence of at least one performer, MacLennan has extended the practice to what he describes as ‘actuation’ where the performer may not be physically present but where, instead, the audience has been guided by the artist’s intent. Elsewhere, discussing ‘Body of Earth’, made in 1996 to commemorate the thousands who had died in political violence, MacLennan has said: “I was not present in the work. Instead it was structured so that in order to experience it fully, viewers were required to adopt some strategies I would have employed in the space had I been there. In this way, viewers became implicated in the work.”

MacLennan’s belief that art is capable of reaching and touching the widest of audiences and that even the most mundane, unpromising environments have much to offer were taken up by other artists such as Cynthia Whelan and Lorna Knowles. Whelan showed how everyday acts such as drinking tea, office work or applying make-up could be invested with a kind of ritual significance. In a similar vein Knowles’ ‘Alter (ego)’ posed questions about the objects and contexts of our quotidian lives: is the office desk an altar or a barrier? Here Knowles’ partial interaction with the audience created a palpable tension as the quasi-erotic act of shaving revealed a bare strip of flesh along the central axis of the artist’s naked torso. Through her performance the artist posed philosophical questions relating to the idea of the self; while the presence of a live video camera and monitor relayed events already taking place so that the audience were offered both a real and a mediated experience.

In many of these performances allusions to ritualistic and religious elements and their attendant language were no mere chance events. Beuys, deeply versed in Catholic ritual, used the visual language of the priesthood to convey highly charged metaphors. Art and religion were deliberately intertwined.

Other work, for example, by the ensemble Found, Billy Cowie, Graeme Roger, Lisa Keiko Kirton, and Fire Birds eschewed ritualistic notions in preference for more 21st century concerns such as the notion of a technologically dominated future.

Cowie is a composer, musician and audio- artist who has worked as a major collaborator within both live and filmic performance art over the past twenty-five years. His lecture ‘Framing the Body’ presented examples of work made by Cowie, in collaboration with his long term working partner Liz Aggiss, from over thirty live performance pieces (which have toured Europe extensively) and four dance commissions. In this lecture he examined the subtle differences between live performance and that made for screen and installation.

From the roots of live performance developed during the early eighties punk club culture to the highly sophisticated surreality of 3-D multi-screen film and performance installations, the collaboration between Cowie and Aggiss is playful, complex and continuously inventive.

The Glasgow-based duo Beagles and Ramsay are deft handlers of the press but their deliberately controversial antics belied the deeper moral seriousness in their work. Sanguis Gratia Artis (Blood for the Sake of Art) like the work of artist Marc Quinn made use of the artists’ own blood to create, not a portrait head, but a black pudding using a traditional Scottish recipe which also included suet, onions, spices and barley. Despite the extensive media coverage, there was little attempt to explore the artists’ intentions beyond the merely ‘shocking’ superficial reality that they intended to eat their own blood. The allusion to the Catholic Mass which ritualises the idea of taking God into our own bodies through the notion of transubstantiation should not be overlooked as an important element in the work.

Jefford Horrigan also used a kind of ritualised exchange in ‘Theresa’, based on Italo Calvino’s short story ‘Shouting for Theresa’. In this deceptively simple work, the author enters the performance space and calls the name of a woman – his lost lover? “Theresa! Theresa!” while simultaneously projecting images of the frontages of buildings on the gallery walls. One appears to be an ornate 17th century Italian stucco exterior with; the other a utilitarian modern façade. Horrigan holds a tape recorder aloft and eventually his plaintive cries are answered – “Italo, Italo” – by the elusive “lover”. The tape recorder, with its increasingly desperate answer, is left on the gallery floor. The artist and the audience exit.

Peter Russell, an artist and a long-term member of the SSA, feels that the work relates to “Italo Calvino’s ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ and the Baroque world of Bernini’s St. Theresa evoked rather desperately by 20th century man.” Such an attempt at dialogue across the centuries (suggested by the name and architectural references) was an attempt to bridge what Russell sees as Calvino’s “existential solitude”; but it is surely more than this. Horrigan was also ultimately suggesting that the crisis was of modern humanity, unable to reconcile the apparent lack of continuity between past, present and future.

George Wyllie concluded the programme of lectures with ‘Extending the Adventure’. Wyllie’s philosophy is far more than a world view, it is a cosmic view. Through slide projection, narrative, song and sculpture and conversation he shared visions with the audience which demonstrated the originality of his mind and of his life. A musician, sailor, engineer and sculptor, Wyllie has brought to bear his range of skills and experience to create art events such as ‘Temple for a Tree’, ‘Robbies Rocket’, ‘The Paper Boat’ and ‘The Straw Locomotive’, which have merged public art, performance and installation to communicate important ideas. Downie adds that “Wyllie is a regenerative artist who holds an optimistic mirror to our society, yet also a most expressive intellectual whose ability to demonstrate complex philosophical states and question doctrines is second to none.”

It is difficult to assess the overall impact of an event such as Body Parts. Undoubtedly, the effects are cumulative, subtle and to some extent random. Judging from the well organised audience feed-back most found the events stimulating and inspiring with many expressing the desire to take up the art-form themselves. The central credo of performance art – that it should be about live performers communicating directly with an audience – surely lies at the root of such success. With so much of our experience increasingly taking place through technological mediation the freshness and directness of the living artist was important and compelling. Hopefully, the groundwork has been laid for more frequent events in the future.

Giles Sutherland
April 2005

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