1985 : chronologie performance

1985

 

- BANANA Anna, In the Red, In the Black, workshop and performance at Off Center Centre, Calgary.

- CAMERON Shirley, ROSS Monica, SILVER Evelyn, Monument to Working Women. 1985

Shirley Cameron’s sculptural work from the 1960s developped into a hybrid practice in the 1970s that included performance and a collaboration with Roland Miller. In the 1980s, Cameron introduced political and feminist ideas into her practice. 

Monica Ross contributed to the Women Postal Art Event (1975-77) at the ICA London, Künstlerinnen International 1877-1977 (1977) in Berlin, the Sister Seven Anti-Nuclear Project (1981-84) and exhibitions such as Typisch Frau at Galerie Magers, Bonn (1981). In December 2008, Ross began Anniversary-An Act of Memory, a performance series of solo and collective multilingual recitations from memory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Evelyn Silver created entertaining performances in galleries, on streets, in peace camps and in festivals in the UK in the 1980s. She made the personal political by blending feminist and anti-nuclear issues with her lesbian and Jewish identity. She collaborated with Cameron for over two decades.

In Monument to Working Women, the artists Shirley Cameron, Monica Ross and Evelyn Silver came together to intervene in a public site where history – in the monement of John Bright, an influential industrialist – misrepresents the living memories of workers and their experience of the relations between labour and capital. The thousands of women, who were employed in textile mills such as John Bright’s, were once the world’s largest unionised female workforce, renowned for their social spirit and labour activism. Dressed like these working women, the artists proceeded from the town’s art gallery, also built by John Bright, to his monument, while overlooks it. In their enactment of a temporary Monument to Working Women, they symbolically super-imposed the women workers’ memories of John Bright over the official legend, which idealises him as a social reformer and as a representative for the philanthropy of capitalism. (photo: Patsy Mullan, 1985, performance Triple Transformation Residency, Rochdale Art Gallery, UK).

- FERRER Esther, Festival de Navarre, Pampelune (Espagne). Performers : Ferrer/Hidalgo.

- FERRER Esther, La primera media hora, universidad Complutense, Madrid. 1985.

- FERRER Esther, L’Air et le feu (Agua y Aire), Centre Georges Pompidou. Musée National d’art moderne. Paris. 1985.

- FERRER Esther, Logos, Gent. Belgique. 

- FERRER Esther, Memoria, Universidad Complutense, Madrid. 1985.

- FERRER Esther, Milanopoesia, Milan, Italie. Performers : Ferrer/Marchetti.

- FERRER Esther, Performance, Het Apollohuis. Eindhoven. 1985.

- FERRER Esther, Performance, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. 1985.

- FERRER Esther, Tortilla nacional, Universidad Complutense, Madrid. 1985.

- FERRER Esther, Universidad Menendez Pelayo, Santander (Espagne). Performers : Ferrer/Hidalgo.

- FIALA Natasha, Perfo. 3, 1985. Amsterdam.

- FOX Terry, Swallowing the Century, 1985, Ristorante D’Angelo, Venice.

- GÓMEZ-PEÑA Guillermo, Border Action, Tijuana Playa.

- HATOUM Mona, Roadworks (Actions de rue), 1985, vidéo, couleur, son 6’45’’. (Brixton Art Gallery)

— Dans cette performance, Mona Hatoum marche dans la rue pieds nus, une paire de Doc Martens attachés à ses mollets par les lacets. Bien que nus et vulnérables, les pieds de l’artiste ont la force de traîner ces chaussures lourdes (qui rappellent à la fois le militaire, le policier ou le skin head) comme des marionnettes suspendues à un fil.

— Le caractère conservateur de l’enseignement de Slade School of Fine Art où Mona Hatoum a étudié à Londres a sans doute poussé l’artiste à se tourner vers des pratiques artistiques alternatives, telles que la performance. C’est ainsi qu’au cours des années 1980, elle réalise une série de performances au contenu fortement politique. En 1985, la Brixton Art Gallery invite dix artistes contemporains à créer des performances dans les rues de Brixton, quartier ouvrier situé dans la banlieue de Londres. Les photographies prises durant ces actions font alors l’objet d’une exposition dans la galerie.

Dans ce contexte de commande, Mona Hatoum présente deux performances intitulées Roadworks. En intégrant son travail dans l’espace public, l’intention de l’artiste est de créer un lien entre les artistes et un public très différent de celui des musées et des galeries.

Dans la première vidéo, l’artiste marche pieds nus dans les rues de la ville, traînant derrière elle une paire de bottes Doc Martens noués à ses chevilles. Ses pieds nus sur le goudron de la ville apparaissent vulnérables et non adaptés en comparaison à la lourdeur des bottes, traditionnellement portées par un panel social très larges : ouvriers, police, skinheads et la mouvance punk de la fin des années 1970.

Dans la seconde performance, réalisée en collaboration avec Stefan Szczelkun, les deux artistes, la bouche recouverte de ruban adhésif, habillés de combinaisons noires et pieds nus, se poussent mutuellement. L’un des deux tombent et l’autre dessine à la craie blanche la silhouette du corps au sol, à la manière des repérages de scènes de crime. Les rôles sont ensuite inversés, celui qui a été poussé devient celui qui pousse et à son tour dessine le corps de celui qui est au sol. Le processus de violence anonyme se poursuit en boucle à l’infini, jusqu’à ce que les traces au sol une trainée sur le trottoir.

A travers des actions a priori très simples, l’artiste fait une description de la mixité sociale du quartier et des violences dont elle peut être témoin. (Priscilla Marques)

- JONAS Joan, Volcano Saga, 1985.

- JONES Grace et HARING Keith, Performance in Paradise Garage, 1985. 

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Grace Jones boldly interrogated both racial and sexual stereotypes associated with the black female body, through her work in performance. Interestingly, Jones, a Jamaican born artist, was actively working in the Parisian fashion world as a model at the time she moved into performance art. Her involvement and popularity in the Parisian fashion world as a spectacle, being a model, may be compared with the likes of Josephine Baker and Saarjite Baartman before her, black females whose bodies became the locus of the Parisian imagination.

Jones’ bold and often confrontational dress and performance style played with and disrupted primitivist myths about black sexuality. In collaboration with artists like Jean-Paul Goude and Keith Haring, Jones transformed her body into medley characters, many of which satirized a primitivist reading of the black female body. The multiple personas of Grace Jones ranged widely from overly sexualized dance performances in which she donned a gorilla or tiger suit to very masculinized self-representations. For these performances Jones would appear with a crew cut in a tailored men’s suit. Both these modes of representation in Jones’ work, as hyper-sexualized animal and instance of cross-dressing have been related to Josephine Baker’s performances, more specifically, her « jungle » performances in banana and tusk skirts and the famous photographs of Baker in a top hat and tuxedo (Kershaw, 21).

In 1985 Jones collaborated with Keith Haring in a performance staged at Paradise Garage, an alternative dance club in New York City. For the performance Haring painted Jones’ body in characteristically Haring-stylized white designs. Interestingly, Haring’s body art was inspired by the body paintings of African Masai. Jones also adorned her body with an elaborate sculptural assemblage of pieces of rubber, plastic sheen, and metal, created by Haring and David Spada. A towering sculptural headdress topped off the costume. Her breasts were delineated with protruding metal coils. The metal coils were a deliberate reference to an iron-wire sculpture of Josephine Baker by artiste Alexander Calder. Later in the performance Jones appeared in a Baker-style skirt, composed of yellow neon spikes. Through the painting, adomment, and importantly through her performance, Jones played with iconic signs of the « primitive, » and transformed these signifiers and her body into a site of power.

– see Miriam Kershaw, « Postcolonialism and Androginy: Performance Art of Grace Jones », Art Journal 56 (winter 1997): 19-25.

– see Michelle Wallace, « Modernism, Postmodern and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture », Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, Ed. Russell Ferguson, 39-50.

- KIPPER KIDS, 1985, photo.

- LA FURA DELS BAUS, Suz/o/Suz, 1985.

- LUNA James, The Artifact Piece, 1985-1987 (1990 ?). San Diego, Museum de l’Homme.

– James Luna often uses his body as a means to critique the objectivation of Native American cultures in Western museum and cultural displays. He dramatically calls attention to the exhibition of Native American peoples and Native American cultural objects in his Artifact Piece, 1985-87. For the performance piece Luna donned a loincloth and lay motionless on a bed of sand in a glass museum exhibition case. Luna remained on exhibit for several days, among the Kumeyaay exhibits at the Museum of Man in San Diego. Labels surrounding the artist’s body identified his name and commented on the scars on his body, attributing them to « excessive drinking ». Two other cases in the exhibition contained Luna’s personal documents and ceremonial items from the Luisiño reservation. 

– In his performances and installations, for the last three decades James Luna has engaged in a provocative and humorous way with the problems and issues facing contemporary Native Americans. Luna draws on personal observations and experiences for his artistic work. The artist has been living and working in La Jolla Reservation since 1975. For the performance The Artifact Piece, clad in a loincloth Luna reclined within a glass showcase filled with sand.  Around him were testimonials of his life: his diploma, his divorce papers as well as personal objects and various mementos from his schooldays. Signs positioned within the showcase indicate his name, and comment on the scars on his body. The installation’s arrangement is reminiscent of dioramas typically used in ethnological museums for visualizing the life of extinct societies. By presenting himself as an artifact, as a lifeless object, Luna unmasks in a satirical way the one-sided and stereotypical presentation of  Native Americans, as there are also presented in in museums. Where confronted by the artist, the objectivizing viewpoint – which located Native American culture firmly in the past trivializing and romanticizing it as an extinct form of living – is revealed as an act of marginalization that persists to this day.

— Les performances de James Luna concourent à réfléchir sur la légitimation de l’artiste indien natif. À l’instar de l’installation The Market is Here (2002) de George Marcus (1), en collaboration avec les artistes Abdel Hernandez et Fernando Calzadilla, mettant en relation le marché indigène d’El Coche et le musée d’art contemporain de Mavao, pour révéler deux réalités culturelles qui se méconnaissent totalement, James Luna témoigne d’un souci similaire. Dans Artifact Piece (2)  (1987), pièce majeure de performance, Luna prend l’attitude d’un gisant presque nu, placé sur du sable, sous vitrine dans le Musée de l’Homme de San Diego. Le lieu n’est pas anodin. Luna se considère lui-même comme un artefact amérindien. Des écriteaux entourent son corps, des objets personnels (acte de divorce, livres, disques…), ainsi que des objets cérémoniels de la nation Luiseño, sont placés autour du corps. Cette action est contestataire, lorsqu’il dénonce la présentation de la culture amérindienne, largement stéréotypée dans la société américaine. Il confirme l’incapacité de l’institution à rendre compte de l’actualité amérindienne et son attitude à faire demeurer le colonialisme. Il défie le rapport figé entre représentation traditionnelle et contemporaine, en convoquant les clichés de l’artefact, comme reliques du passé. C’est méconnaître finalement l’évolution de tout groupe humain et son possible rapport identité/altérité culturelle.

(1) George Marcus et Fernando Calzadilla, « Artisan in the Field : Between Art and Anthropology », Contemporary Art and Anthropology (édité par Arnad Scheider et Chistopher Wright, Berg, Oxford-New York, 2006, p. 86-95.

(2) Cf. Jonathan Lamy, « Les Performances de James Luna : effets de corps, effets de culture », Pratiques performatives. Body Remix, sous la direction de Josette Féral, Rennes, Presses de l’université du Québec et de Rennes, 2012, p. 67-77.

- MARMOLEJO Maria Evelia, America, 1985. Performance at Plaza Colon, Madrid, Spain.

- MARMOLEJO Maria Evelia, Sesquilé, 1985. Hospital Anglo-Americano, Spain. Photo: Sara Rosemberg.

- NEMEC Vernita, Private Places, 1985.

- NIESLONY Boris & VAN POPPEL Jaques, Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt..., Zweistimmig, 1980.

- NIESLONY Boris, Tar Tar Pur, 1985. Bern.

- PAQUEE Ria, Souvenirs of the Man I’ve Loved, 1985. Bruxelles.

- STELARC, City Suspension, 1985.

- VAN POPPEL Jacques, Erkennt man den Johannes?, avril 1985. Cologne.