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 included 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 •Grenoble •Valence where I served as director of the Grenoble site, performances unfold in an experimental way, in an environment at once both framed and free. This text should be read in conjunction with what I have written concerning the term “performance.” In my personal research, I have been particularly interested in the work of artist Gina Pane.
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 – in order to consider and produce a dizzying diversity of works. A performer can be defined as a person who participates in a performance. This person may or may not be the originator of the performance; they may or may not have conceived of and produced the work in consideration. In my field of research in the visual arts, performances are a priori proposed by one or more artists. The person, or people, who then execute the performance may include this artist, or artists, or not. Those involved in the performance may be considered performers, whether or not they are artists themselves. When artists solicit others to participate in their performance, these individuals may have specific skills or qualities that make their participation possible, or, on the contrary, this ‘incompetence’ may be precisely the reason they are selected to participate. In much the same way, this question of being a ‘professional’ or an ‘amateur’ may or may not arise. The person may have to perform every day, on a regular basis, or only once in their lifetime.
The performer has a body. This body may be at the heart of the performance, a subject in and of itself, or otherwise – making itself discreet, or taking up the performance space. It may be led into movement, remain static, interact with others, or it may not.
As with the term ‘performance,’ which resists succinct, fixed definition, the description of a performer must also be ‘customized on a case-by-case basis.
Within my own research, I have particularly focused on the work of Gina Pane, a visual artist who rejected the word ‘performance,’ and thus necessarily ‘performer,’ in referring to her own work, privileging instead the word Action as a name for her performative art. At the same time, Pane did not refer to herself as an actionist -- a word with an entirely different connotation linked to Viennese actionism/actionists (principally Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler), a group of artists practicing at the same time as Pane and that some historical accounts have attempted to link to her work. But mixing up these works or putting them together result in a jumbled amalgamation; upon closer examination, we see that the differences between these works are significant.
Cite this item: Inge Linder-Gaillard, “Performer”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177865
