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Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art: Transforming Subjects (New World Choreographies) 1st Ed. 2021 Edition Victoria Wynne-Jones
Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art: Transforming Subjects (New World Choreographies) 1st Ed. 2021 Edition Victoria Wynne-Jones
Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art: Transforming Subjects (New World Choreographies) 1st Ed. 2021 Edition Victoria Wynne-Jones
Choreographing
Intersubjectivity in
Performance Art
v ic t or i a w y n n e-jon e s
New World Choreographies
Series Editors
Rachel Fensham, School of Culture and Communication,
University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
Kate Elswit, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama,
London, UK
This award-winning series presents studies of choreographic projects
embedded in the intermedial and transcultural circulation of dance.
Through advanced yet accessible scholarship, it introduces the artists,
practices, platforms, and scholars who are rethinking what constitutes
movement, and in the process, blurring boundaries between dance,
theatre and performance. Engaged with the aesthetics and contexts of
global production and presentation, this book series invites discussion of
the multi-sensory, collaborative, and transformative potential of these new
world choreographies.
Choreographing
Intersubjectivity
in Performance Art
Victoria Wynne-Jones
School of Humanities
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to the Elam Fine Arts Library (1950-2019)
Acknowledgements
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ix
x PRAISE FOR CHOREOGRAPHING INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN …
“There’s no question that major art galleries around the world are
currently obsessed with choreography in the gallery—often through retro-
spectives of canonical performance art from the 1960s and 1970s. This
book invites a critical evaluation of this trend. Rather than only looking
backward, and sceptical of the museum as a European institution of
subjection and control, Wynne-Jones takes a broader and more inclusive
view to suggest possibilities for forms of intersubjectivity that might be
yet to come.”
—Theron Schmidt, Lecturer, University of New South Wales, Sydney and
author of Agency: A Partial History of Live Art (2019)
Contents
Index 241
xi
List of Figures
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
Introduction: Exhibitions
and the Choreographic Turn
One person stands before a wall, and another approaches. They face each
other. Then with arms swung backwards or held behind their back, they
both tilt their upper bodies forward, lower their heads, and bury their
shoulders and upper back into the chest of their counter-part. Using brute
strength and the grip of their feet on the ground, each person pushes and
tries to force their opponent backwards. They exert as much energy as
they can, pushing and pushing, resisting the strength of the other until
one person manages to shift the other’s position, forcing them to step
backwards. Once one has made significant gains, the other forfeits, and
the contest is over. This live performance known as Bisons (Fig. 1.1) has
been executed by Melbourne-based artist Alicia Frankovich with a range
of opponents since its first iteration at a Stuttgart festival in 2010.1 Func-
tioning as a kind of deconstructed rugby scrum, it begins with the artist
pitting herself against a known participant, someone invited beforehand
to take part. From there it repeats itself; anyone can come forward, one
at a time and try their luck against the artist in a “pass-the-baton” or
relay-style structure.
In Bisons the artist/audience relationship is reconfigured into a contest
of physical strength, one that is extremely raw and immediate. There
is a winner and a loser. Frankovich uses her live, performing body as
well as the bodies of others to re-contextualise the scrum, a convention
taken from the sport of rugby football. In doing so, she also interro-
gates the reception of art, visitor behaviour, and museum politics—it
is highly unusual for audience members to charge at an artist in the
manner of a bison. When I first observed this performance at the Auck-
land Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 2012, I was struck by how quickly
the playful performance gained momentum. Once it got underway, there
was no shortage of people stepping up and volunteering to engage in
Frankovich’s challenge. The artist reflected:
creates free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those struc-
turing everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that
differs from the ‘commodification zones’ that are imposed on us. (16)
1 INTRODUCTION: EXHIBITIONS AND THE CHOREOGRAPHIC TURN 5
Australasian artists like Jim Allen (b. 1922), Mike Parr (b. 1945) and
Stelarc (b. 1946). Such lists of artists are not meant to be an exhaustive
representation of the ways in which choreographic thinking permeates
performance art but rather to provide points of reference for those who
see and imagine choreography in different ways and different contexts.
visual arts practice, and figures such as Trisha Brown, Simone Forti,
Anna Halprin and Yvonne Rainer became the subject of retrospective
exhibitions, performances, re-performance and new commissions. One
significant exhibition that explicitly addressed the concept of choreog-
raphy was MOVE: Choreographing You (2010–2011) mounted by the
Hayward Gallery in London, before travelling to Germany.
Australasian examples include shows such as What I think about when
I think about dancing at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney in
2009, Framed Movements at the Australian Centre for Contemporary
Art, Melbourne in 2014 and SCORE at the Ian Potter Museum of
Art, Melbourne in 2017. The 2016 Biennale of Sydney, under the
artistic direction of Stephanie Rosenthal, with the assistance of “curato-
rial attachés,” Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki, featured a range of
performances by choreographers and artists involved in dance. In 2017
Melbourne’s MUMA hosted “Dance Remains” a yearlong programme of
talks and events in conjunction with the journal Writings on Dance, and
from a salon at the Biennale has evolved Precarious Movement: Choreog-
raphy and the Museum, a research project involving scholars and curators
from the University of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria,
Tate, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Monash University Museum
of Art (MUMA).
To provide some art historical background, the artistic milieu in New
York City during the 1960s provides an important touchstone for the
choreographic turn in contemporary performance art. Choreographers
like Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer as well as Deborah
Hay and Trisha Brown had an immense impact on artists who had
been educated as painters and sculptors such as Robert Morris and
Bruce Nauman. The 1960s was a time when art was becoming trans-
disciplinary, and this concept continues to have an impact on contem-
porary fine art practice. In 1958, artist and creator of “the Happening,”
Allen Kaprow concluded that.
within museums and live bodies are often staged as works of art (2013:
113). Wood also makes the important point that this is not a teleological
progression from eliminating objects or material in favour of the social.
Instead, she proposes that these experiments within museums and art
institutions enable one to “picture ways in which relationships constitute
things, and things influence relationships” (121).
Over the past two decades there has also been substantial interest in
the space of the museum and practices of exhibition-making from many
dance communities. Spanish choreographer La Ribot performed her series
Piezas Distinguidas (1993–2000) across a range of venues including art
galleries such as London’s Tate Modern in 2003. These included long-
durational live performances as well as installations of video art. In 2009,
prior to his directorship at the Rennes National Choreography Centre,
Boris Charmatz published his “Manifesto for a Dancing Museum” on
his website. Charmatz proposed “a living museum of dance” as part of a
spirit of experimentation, evoking a desire to challenge cultural compart-
mentalisation, as well as a resistance to the frameworks of preconceived
institutional ideas (Lista 2014: 6). Charmatz wrote of a will to transfigure
the institution, arguing:
Fig. 1.2 Sandra Parker (in collaboration with Rhian Hinkley), Three Angles ,
2014. (Single-channel interactive video installation.) Centre for Contemporary
Photography, Melbourne, Australia (Photo Rhian Hinkley. Courtesy of the artist)
16 V. WYNNE-JONES
a dialectic of the self and other which is that of master and slave: insofar
as I have a body, I may be reduced to the status of an object beneath the
gaze of another person, and no longer count as a person for him, or else
I may become his master and, in my turn, look at him. (1989: 96)
group and interaction come first and a distinct individual emerges out of
an interactional context. The point is, there is no “before interaction:”
art. I would also argue that the concept of choreography can also be used
to explain how intersubjectivity functions in performance art.
(2014: 1). Joy proposes that facing another person involves an encounter
with precariousness that is the very condition of such an address:
and live bodies are often staged as works of art (2013: 113). The
phenomenon has its roots in New York City during the 1960s, a time
when visual artists were heavily influenced by choreographers, dancers and
vice versa. Similarly from at least the 2000s onwards, the traffic between
dance and exhibition-making has been two-way, as makers from dance
communities became more and more active in the space of the art gallery
and museum. As Charmatz observed, the museum “can be alive and
inhabited… can include a virtual space, and offer a contact with dance that
can be at the same time practical, aesthetic and spectacular” (2014: 236).
In the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century, exhi-
bitions engaging with performance, dance and choreographic concerns
increased exponentially and were only just stymied by the global pandemic
of Covid-19 with its shelter-in-place orders, lockdowns and the accompa-
nying restrictions on public gatherings.
Responding to this phenomenon, artworks that shape or orches-
trate specific relations between artist/choreographer and performer, or
between performer and participants are my core concern. Selected perfor-
mances, either live or recorded, involved the execution of planned
movements, actions, choreography as part of an encounter between
various individuals occupying a gallery space. I will argue that chore-
ographed works like Frankovich’s Bisons (2010-ongoing) enact novel
forms of intersubjectivity. The intersubjective aspect of performance art
will be unpacked, prioritising philosophy and art theory to build a case.
Bringing together the interrelated fields of museum studies, dance studies
and philosophy. I posit that performances have contributions to make to
the discourse on the subjectivity/intersubjectivity relation. They produce
subjectivity for the duration of an artwork in ways that can affect new
intersubjectivities. The concept of choreography can help to explain
the functions of intersubjectivity in performance art, mainly because it
offers an account of the relational and ways artworks can produce or
challenge subjection. The idea is that taken together, theories of intersub-
jectivity and choreography enable a more politicised and critical analysis
of performance artworks than what art historical, visual analysis can offer.
The tensions between conformity and freedom that I have outlined in
this introduction in the chorography of the contemporary art museum
are well captured by Lepecki in his distinction between choreo-policing
and choreo-politics (2013). In Chapter 2, I will expand on these two
approaches. On the one hand is the political and kinetic practice of
1 INTRODUCTION: EXHIBITIONS AND THE CHOREOGRAPHIC TURN 29
Care of Materiel.
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SIGHTS.
The instruments provided for sighting and laying the gun include a
line sight, a rear sight, a front sight, a panoramic sight, and a range
quadrant.
Line sights.—The line sight consists of a conical point as a front
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useful in giving general direction to the gun.
Front and rear sights.—The front and rear sights are for general
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head. A socket and ratchet are also provided for the attachment of
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Rear Sight.
Description.
Level rocker and set scales for zero setting as directed in first
paragraph under “direct fire.”
Lay off required deflection in azimuth by means of micrometer
index and azimuth worm knob, so that deflection may be read from
azimuth index and azimuth micrometer. Traverse gun until vertical
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may be pressed and rotating head turned to nearest division in even
hundreds desired. Each unit on azimuth scale represents 100 mils.
The principal parts of the panoramic sight are the rotating head,
the elevation device and its micrometer, the azimuth mechanism with
limb and micrometer, the rotating prism mechanism, the deflection
mechanism, R and L scale and micrometer, the shank and the
eyepiece.
The limb or azimuth scale is divided into 64 parts, each division
representing 100 mils.
The azimuth micrometer is divided in 100 equal divisions or mils,
numbered every 5 mils. One complete revolution of the azimuth
micrometer is equal to the distance between divisions on the azimuth
scale. The limb of the deflection scale is divided into six divisions;
three on each side of the zero, red for right and black for left, each
division representing 100 mils. The deflection micrometer, engraved
upon the front end, is graduated into 100 equal divisions, numbered
every 10 mils, red and black in opposite directions.