Contemporary arts
Inge Linder-Gaillard, Artistic and pedagogic Director, ESADMM, France
American-born and an art historian by training, I have been studying, working, and researching in the contemporary arts for nearly thirty years.
At Le Magasin – Centre national d’art contemporain in Grenoble, where I served as Head of exhibitions, our team worked with artists on implementing a program that welcomed performances. At Grenoble’s Pierre Mendès-France University, where I taught the history of performance, we examined the concept through the lens of its multiple incarnations throughout the 20th century. At the École Supérieure d'Art et Design •Grenoble •Valence where I was the director of the Grenoble branch, performances unfolded in an experimental way, in an environment at once both framed and free. In my personal research, I have been particularly interested by the work of artist Gina Pane.
In the visual arts field, performative work – more commonly called “performance” – is recognized as a genre among other creative acts. In art history, this nomenclature allows us to take into account works created since the beginning of the 20th century by the European avant-garde such as the Futurists or Dadaists, as RoseLee Goldberg tells us in 1970.
Thus, for more than a century (or even more, according to some analyses), the arts have mobilized the human body – the raw material of a performance – to consider and produce a dizzying diversity of works.
A performance must “take place” in a kind of space-time. It might take place only once or several times. Its duration could last anywhere from a single second to twenty-four hours, or more. This duration must occur somewhere; it “takes place”: in an ordinary room, on stage, in a public square, or, just as well, in a closet. In this way, performative work differs from painting or sculpture, which are placed within space, although certain theories insist that a static work does not exist without its spectator and that, as such, all creative work would be understood as experiential just as certain creative protocols undertaken in order to bring the work into existence would be considered performative. This also applies to videographic work or sound recording – which might be the recording of a performance. These object-works might make up part of a performance as elements contributing to their environment, to the apparatus set up and mobilized during a performance. Object-elements of all kinds – numerous or otherwise – can function as part of a performance.
A performance might be comprised of a single individual – or even no one visible – just as it may be made up of a multitude. The creator-author-artist – or the artists – might participate, or they may not. The artist might speak, or sing; they might not. They might move, or dance; they might not. There may be music or other sound elements, or there may not be. Every moment of the performance may be pre-planned and repeated until a very specific finished product is rendered, or it may be entirely improvised if the artist so chooses, even if an improvisation could also be considered a finished product.
The artist’s will might be that no trace or recording is left behind or, conversely, that even the slightest trace be conserved and that the performance be recorded in multiple technical or technological ways. These traces or recordings may be considered as raw material for the creation of further, perhaps quite different works (fictional or documentary film, photo or video, audio works, elements of an installation or another apparatus). Gina Pane, for example, had her performances very precisely photographed. She presented some of these photographs as separate works, ones that she qualified as Constats, a French term meaning “findings” or “observations”.
The possibilities are so vast, they are nearly unimaginable. And, every time, we count on artists to propose performances that we weren’t expecting, and even to reject the word “performance”. Such was the case for Gina Pane, who privileged the word Action to describe her performative works in the 1970s that emerged as part of an artistic movement called body art.
More from this author:
Inge Linder-Gaillard, « De Situation idéale à Little Journey, un court voyage dans la « sémiotique sans modèle » des actions de Gina Pane » Gina Pane, Carquefou : Frac Pays de la Loire, Dijon : Les Presses du réel, 2011, édition française / “From Situation idéale to Little Journey, A Short Voyage Into the “Unprecedented Semiotics” of Gina Pane’s Actions”, Gina Pane, Carquefou : Frac Pays de la Loire, Dijon : Les Presses du réel, 2011, édition anglaise.
Cite this item: Inge Linder-Gaillard, “Performance”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble : Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online] : http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177859
