Demeter's Dark Ride - an Attraction
Research Material
Interperformance: The live tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine
Antoni and Marina Abramovic.
Author: Jennifer Fisher
Published: Art Journal; Winter97, Vol. 56 Issue 4, p28, 6p, 4bw
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The affective power of live display is a key aspect of the nineteenth-century
performative genre known as tableaux vivants, literally, "living
pictures." Typically, performances would involve enacting masterpieces
of sculpture and painting or the staging of moral and literary themes.
Although the popularity of tableaux vivants waned in the early twentieth
century, there are vital continuities and parallels with contemporary
performance works. What persists in recent tableau performances are specific
dimensions of living display as vehicles of affect, aspiration, and sensorial
engagement. Yet there are significant distinctions as well. While the
aesthetic staging of traditional tableaux vivants involved the unidirectional
communication of symbolic representations, the contemporary tableau performances
discussed here constitute zones of interperformance by which the terrain
of fixed representation is transformed.
Although the genealogy of tableaux vivants has multiple trajectories,
its populist form can be traced to performances in Italy at the end of
the eighteenth century by Emma Hamilton, whose "attitudes" mimetically
enacted the poses of classical statuary that were being excavated at the
time. Her performances were described in the writings of Goethe and achieved
great popularity as a result.( n1) In mid-nineteenth-century America,
the phenomenon of tableaux vivants evolved into two forms: erotic vaudeville,
and a form of domestic entertainment and amateur theater, often under
the direction of women.( n2) In elaborate mise-en-scenes, participants
would mold their postures, holding their positions and emotional expression
from two to twenty minutes. The performative technique of tableaux vivants
became conventionalized following Francois Delsarte's method, a gestural
vocabulary nuanced with Christian and moral themes, often depicting supplication,
blessing, or appeal. Populist sentiment was frozen in a "decisive
moment" of moral talks, religious allegories, or classical myths
(fig. 1).
While the earnest idealism of such theatrics may appear platitudinous
today, what remains compelling about tableaux vivants is that the locus
of their performativity focuses on an identification as aspiration. In
this sense they evidence an ethical practice or "aesthetics of the
self" in the Foucauldian sense.( n3) The themes of nineteenth-century
tableaux were closely linked to the prescriptions of manuals of etiquette--the
self-help books of the time--to instruct a growing middle class in the
development of "presence": the cultivation of poise, carriage,
and self-confidence. Just as important as the evidence of "taste"
in the choices and appearance of individuals was the instruction of the
performative dimensions of "grace and ease" in such everyday
activities as "how to descend a staircase" or "how to board
a train." It is in this sense that tableaux vivants--as practices
performed on the self to transform the self--indicate both techniques
of existence and an aesthetics of becoming.
This was to impinge significantly in the performativity of gender as well.
The fin-de-siecle was characterized by simultaneous reactionary and revolutionary
forces affecting women. On the conservative side, tableaux vivants sustained
repressive Victorian concepts of womanhood.(n4) The agency of women's
self-display was often restricted to the "embodiment" ideals
of Art, Justice, and Liberty, "standing in" for moral teleologies
as living sculptures.( n5) Yet, significantly universalist themes that
ultimately "objectified" women coincided with more progressive
representations of fin-de-siecle activism promoting women's suffrage.
Shuffled among such idealist representations of women in the tableaux
manuals of the time were examples of women as agents rather than objects:
a liberatory "spinsterhood," "the female bicyclist,"
"the suffragette," "the college girl," and "the
new woman."(n6) At the turn of the century, tableaux vivants moved
from the parlor into the public sphere, developing into civic theater
and pageants. During a time of massive immigration, public events involving
thousands of participants played a significant role in socializing recent
immigrants as well as mobilizing the trade union movement. The aspirational
aspects of these forms of self-display evidence important sites of both
individual and collective social transformation.
Emerging around the time of photography and declining with the invention
of cinema, tableaux vivants--which ostensibly mime the camera's ability
to fix time--can be read as a profoundly visualist form. Yet an evening
of tableaux involved another dimension of aesthetic experience, specifically
the perception of the energies produced by the situated presence of the
performers. These exhibition situations involving live display engaged
not only the visual sense but other aspects of the sensorium as well.
In particular, the foregrounding of "presence" implicates the
haptic sense. Haptic awareness engages the ontology of a performative
situation through a kind of "distal touch," which perceives
the ways energies are galvanized to generate experience. Just as the haptic
sense is engaged when the body is in motion, so too it is operative when
the body is still. On the one hand, proprioception, an aspect of the haptic
faculty, discerns spatial depth and the arrangements of objects. On the
other hand, kinaesthetic awareness, another aspect of the haptic, gives
a reflexive awareness of bodily comportment. But it is the even more subtle
registers of the haptic that experience the resonance of affective climate.
In what follows I will discuss performances of three artists—Suzanne
Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramovic--which can be understood in
continuity with tableaux vivants in both their sensorial and identificatory
aesthetics. The situations of live display developed by these artists
stage presence in ways that break the constraints of
modernism's scopic economy through innovative transformations of institutional
and social space. Each artist deploys in a distinctly different manner
practices of aspirational agency which have significant implications for
rethinking the relational locus of aesthetic
experience. My aim is to show that this occurs not only visually but,
significantly, through particular modes of "presencing" that
foreground haptic engagement.
Presencing a Living Monument: Suzanne Lacy
During the past twenty years Suzanne Lacy has developed a performative
method that blends art and life, aesthetics and ethics to focus on the
political significance of women's experience. Lacy addresses the "absence"
of women through the framing of situations that assert their "presence."
In the creation of the frame, Lacy consciously draws on the history of
tableaux vivants.( n7) In continuity with women's suffrage demonstrations,
pageants, and tableaux vivants from the turn of the century, Lacy has
mobilized large-scale performance projects to serve an agenda of education
as art activism. Emerging from feminist consciousness-raising, Lacy's
work has named and resituated the issues of rape, violence, death, racism,
murder, and misogyny in women's lives, thus initiating processes of collective
recovery and political empowerment.( n8) Lacy's tableau vivant-like pageants
frame situations and shape connective activity to effect what she has
called "sculptures in dialogue." The staging of such events
implicates the haptic sense through the creation of a communal climate
(connecting hundreds of participants) as well as by presencing the performative
frame on a gigantic scale.
For example, Lacy conceptualized The Crystal Quilt (1987) as a tableau
vivant (fig. 2).( n9) For her, a tableau vivant is a "framing device,"
and "such intentional framing is inherently political."( n10)
Here the genre of tableau vivant is mobilized as an exploratory catalytic
project that challenges the marginalization of older women by creating
a monumental space for them to "be presenced." This is governed
by clear objectives to overcome stereotypes and reveal the strengths,
leadership, talents, and productivity of older women. The performance
begins as four hundred women between sixty and one hundred years of age
from diverse social, geographic, ethnic, and economic groups enter the
atrium of an office building in downtown Minneapolis. The "quilt"
is formed as the women take their places--four to a table--and engage
in conversations that address Lacy's questions concerning women and aging.
The quilt mise-en-scene was designed by Miriam Schapiro to resemble a
"living painting." Blocks of color defined by the women's black
dresses amid the bright tablecloths make an enormous patchwork pattern
spread within the building's interior glass facade. The configuration
of the quilt changes on cue as participants' hands and arms move in unison
through a choreography of gestures. A sound installation by Susan Stone
washes the space with sounds of seagulls, thunder, and the taped voices
of the participants relating how they think of themselves.
The collective presence generated by such an immense group involves complex
cooperation on many levels. Community organizing and consciousness-raising
prior to the event are integral to shaping the work. Lacy assumes the
role of "director" in collaboration with others. The collaborative
aspect is crucial to what Lacy terms the "resonance" of the
piece.( n11) This resonance can be understood in aesthetic terms as the
enactment of spaces of connection. While Lacy works in continuity with
tableaux vivants, the collective enunciation of multiple voices destabilizes
the universalizing, and ultimately closed, narratives of conventional
tableaux, enabling a range of stories and experiences to appear. Lacy's
agency as director is decentered and involves tapping, and provisionally
crystallizing, the energy of collective remembering as a "living
monument." Whereas the aspirational dimensions of traditional tableaux
vivants focused on socializing individuals into culture, those of The
Crystal Quilt work to transform the social constraints pertaining to older
women by presencing their collectivity while retaining their individuality.
What is distinct in this tableau as a living monument is that it preserves
the multiple perspectives of a specific group experience rather than representing
a "universal" public truth. The presencing of such a large group
of women has an impact on the public realm. As a spectacle, it aspires
to intentionally lure the media to perpetuate its concerns. The generation
of news coverage is an integral aspect, disseminating the event's significance
as a pedagogical tool and model of interaction between artists, policy
makers, and community leaders. On an interpersonal level, the bonds of
relationship between older women made extensive and public are powerful
instances of how art's framing of a social situation can create and sustain
spaces for living.The Dialectical Muse: Janine Antoni
Whereas Lacy's events take place in public space, the tableau framing
Janine Antoni instigates in her installation Slumber (1994-96) confronts
the institutional politics and aesthetic conventions of the museum (fig.
3). Antoni, incorporating herself as part of the display, presents herself
as a communicative muse: one who at once symbolizes unseen mysteries yet
refuses reduction to silence. Antoni's agency is a key aspect of the performance
and of the consequent display of its relics. The aspirational element
hinges on her presence in the exhibition. Conceptually, the event presents
the meaning of the work in its making, while the material history of its
processes accumulates.( n12) Yet while the elegance of such resolution
risks closure, Antoni retains spaces for interactivity as well.
During the first weeks of Slumber, Antoni sleeps at night in the gallery
and weaves during the day.( n13) The artist's presence is framed by a
sparse, elegant installation. The focus of display is a single metal-frame
bed covered with cotton sheets. Draped across the sheets is a silk nightgown.
Covering the bed is a white blanket, which extends beyond the mattress
to fall in folds on the floor, where it is attached to a loom custom designed
to enable the weaving of a potentially endless blanket. The warp threads
stretch from the loom across the space like a canopy, over the bed, and
to the opposite wall, where an arrangement of spindles is fastened. Beside
the bed is an electroencephalograph unit. At night, Antoni wires herself
to the machine to record her eye movements, which indicate dreaming. During
the day, she weaves into the blanket a colored record of these REM patterns
with strips torn from her nightgown. In this way, Antoni reframes the
visceral preoccupations of seventies' feminist performance through the
mediation of medical instrumentation and claims for herself the use and
purpose of medical authority.
The aspirational focus of this tableau vivant, while situating the artist
as an object on view, simultaneously insists on an aesthetics of connections:
between the artist and beholders, between the artists and art institutions,
and between the artist's conscious and unconscious processes. Ostensibly,
the installation frames ongoing mundane
activities with conversation and sleep as places of exploration. Antoni
bypasses the mediation of the museum educator by being present to speak
with viewers about her work. Her decision to converse directly with gallery
visitors resists the legitimating role of museum guides or art critics
in favor of an open and continuous engagement with the layering of meanings
in the piece. Distanced aesthetic appreciation is displaced in favor of
a more intimate relationship. With stunning humility, she attends the
installation, its concerns and artistic investments, along with the attendees.
Chatting casually or answering questions, she sits on the bed where she
sleeps, her nightie beside her. Yet while this situation frames intimacy,
the content of the communication is not personal. Even as the installation
frames the technological means of Antoni's attempts to turn inward to
record and reveal states of dream consciousness integral to the fabrication
of the work, she does not relate the content of the dreams but rather
keeps the focus on the dreaming and on its translation into the materiality
of the blanket. What becomes aesthetically resonant here is how she has
configured her presence and activity to "sculpt with her dreams."(
n14) What is made manifest is actually a process of attention to interior,
and commonly invisible, states of artistic practice.
Antoni's embodiment of conceptual commitments to be and to work in the
space impinges on the artistic discourse as a whole by shifting the protocols
of what an exhibition can involve. The fact that the artist must actually
live in the museum challenges both the institution and the artist herself.
Both must trust. Security procedures must be accommodated to the routines
of the piece, and Antoni has to bear the vulnerability of being watched
at night by museum guards, the only audience for the "sleep"
component of the piece. The beholder encounters Antoni in one aspect of
her circuits of activity, weaving or speaking of her process, but it is
her being in the gallery that challenges the historical marginalization
of women by art's institutions. The conceptual frame of this work can
be traced to what Antoni admits is her "ambivalent relationship"
to an artistic heritage that simultaneously defines her as an artist and
excludes her as a woman.( n15) By claiming a space for "living as
a woman" in the museum, Antoni succeeds in transforming institutional
terms of propriety. Along with the "scientific" evidence and
live commentary, the frame for her presence within the museum creates
a space not only for pushing the limits of the art gallery but also for
insisting on a feminine process of becoming within art's institutions.
Charging the Gallery Space: Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic's art-life performances share with the work of Antoni
and Lacy an engagement with the haptic dimensions of aesthetic connection.
While the aspirational engagement of Abramovic's work has been characterized
by practices that test her limits and transform her, on the ontological
level her concern has been to establish an aesthetic frame that intensifies
processes of embodiment. She has used physical conditioning as well as
acts of endurance and even danger to tap energies deep in the body as
sources of lucidity and attunement. On the haptic level, the realms of
awareness accessed are intriguing because they involve the simultaneous
sensing of interior and exterior energies, which, in effect, render the
body's boundaries porous. Abramovic's aspirational concern with the energies
produced inverts a consumptive aesthetic. For her, the governing conviction
is not a question of acquisition but rather of "emptying out,"
of being rather than doing.(n16)
As distinct from the materiality of Antoni's woven dreams or the conversant
tableaux of Lacy, Abramovic's performances establish an unspoken dialogue
with the beholder that intensify and "sculpt space."(n17) To
do this, Abramovic generates an affective climate that heightens the vibrational
quality of the space as it enfolds beholders. Her performative technique
of "living immobility," developed with her collaborator of many
years, Ulay, can be read in continuity with tableaux vivants. In Nightsea
Crossing (1982), which was performed ninety times, they sat completely
still at opposite ends of a table,
looking each other in the eyes from the time the museum opened until it
closed, usually a period of seven hours. The point was not to present
"living sculpture" solely in terms of rendering themselves as
stationary objects, but rather a question of will and commitment as they
directed their attention through their interior awareness and into the
exhibition
space. The communication to beholders occurred "magnetically,"
by a full, deep, spatial resonance rather than contiguous touch. Because
the visual aspect was downplayed, visitors were compelled to experience
the sense of the room being charged by other, more haptic means--of feeling
the artist's focus through skin surfaces and vibratory awareness.
The Dragon series (1991) distills Abramovic's concern with corporeal conductivity
and energy transmissions. In this series of works, the artist posits the
possibility of grounding through the body by providing highly conductive
sculptural frames, which render the body a kind of battery.( n18) Beholders
are invited to install themselves in human-scale copper casings with semiprecious
stones or crystals designed to contact the body at head and feet, and
thus to complete a circuit of energy. The haptic dimensions of the piece
are deliberate. As Abramovic notes, "I think that we rely too much
on our sense of vision and not enough on other sensations. So I think
that artists have to be trained to `see' with the entire body, like a
blind person."( n19) Abramovic inverts normative gallery prohibitions
concerning "touching" and instead invites beholders to sit,
lie down, or stand on each piece, that is, achieve physical contact with
the art objects.
At the opening of the Dragon series in Montreal, Abramovic lay on one
of the copper and quartz beds, bolted to a wall three meters high (fig.
4). She remained motionless, eyes open, as gallery visitors installed
themselves in the pieces, their stationary bodies suggesting ceremonial
sculptures: sarcophagi, mummies, or caryatids.( n20) Engagement with these
works requires a reversal of the Pygmalion theme of "sculptures
coming to life," for it is the beholder's ability to "become
as still as a statue" that enables perception of the subtle magnetic
energies. This provisional fixing of the beholder foregrounds haptic attunement
within a performative present.
Like tableaux vivants, the performances of Lacy, Antoni, and Abramovic
present framed and intensified zones of live display. While the presences
of tableaux vivants involved symbolic situations and personages, the live
tableaux of these artists generate, in addition, a locus of aspirational
becomings, which transform not only the performers themselves but also
the relational interstices of artists, art, beholders, and institutions.
As evidenced in each instance of such interperformance described above,
it is the aspects of haptic engagement that make evident what are customarily
invisible forces, feelings, and points of contact.
Notes
(n1.) Kirsten Gram Holmstrom, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants:
Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770-1815 (Stockholm: Almquist and
Wiksell, 1967), 110-208.
(n2.) Jack W. McCollough, Living Pictures on the New York Stage (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1983).
(n3.) Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutmen, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
(n4.) See Mary Megan Chapman, "'Living Pictures': Women and Tableaux
Vivants in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Culture" (Ph.D.
diss., Cornell University, 1992).
(n5.) In an era when a woman's financial security depended on marriage,
tableaux vivants functioned to "present" women to male spectatorship
as a thinly veiled announcement of their marriageability. Women who challenged
social prohibitions by exercising their power beyond the domestic context
risked being ostracized. As Chapman has shown, the literary fiction of
this period, 1839-1905, depicted the
punishment--often with death--of women who dared to step outside social
conventions of Victorian virtue. Themes of tableaux from this period are
rife with images of "dying" or even "headless" women.
(n6.) See Emma Rock, Tableaux, Charades, and Pantomimes (Philadelphia:
Penn Publishing Co., 1869); and Mrs. G. R. Sikes, American Heroines: An
Entertainment for Churches and Church Societies, Secular Societies, and
Lodges (Dayton, Ohio: Lorenz and Co., 1920).
(n7.) Suzanne Lacy, "Fractured Space," in Art in the Public
Interest: New Public Art in the 1980s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1989), 292.
(n8.) Lacy acknowledges two significant influences: Allan Kaprow's claim
that "art is a form of daily life," and the feminist tenet that
"the personal is political." Hence, for her, women's experience
is political. Suzanne Lacy, presentation at the conference Performance
Art, Culture, and Pedagogy, University Center, Pennsylvania State University,
November 13, 1996.
(n9.) Lacy claimed that with The Crystal Quilt she "worked the `tableau
vivant' idea to completion." Suzanne Lacy and Rachel Rosenthal, "Saving
the World: A Dialogue," Artweek 22, no. 29 (September 12, 1991):
16.
(n10.) Lacy, "Fractured Space," 292.
(n11.) Suzanne Lacy, interview by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick, New
York, February 24, 1996.
(n12.) Janine Antoni, interview by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick, New
York, April 6, 1996.
(n13.) The installation of Slumber I viewed on November 23, 1996, was
installed at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, in an exhibition of the finalists
for the Hugo Boss Prize.
(n14.) Anthony Ianacci, "Janine Antoni," Kunst-Bulletin, June
1994, 16-25.
(n15.) Laura Cottingham, "Janine Antoni: Biting Sums Up My Relationship
to Art History," Flash Art, no. 171 (Summer 1993): 104-105.
(n16.) In Abramovic's words, "You have to empty the body/boat to
the point where you can really be connected with the fields of energy
around you. . . . I want to make this connection possible." Marina
Abramovic, quoted in Bernard Goy, "Marina Abramovic," Journal
of Contemporary Art 3, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 1990): 48.
(n17.) C. Carr, "The Art of the Twenty-First Century," Village
Voice, February 25, 1986, 45-46.
(n18.) Abramovic's concern with geological magnetism emerged during her
last, and epic, performance with Ulay. They walked toward each other from
opposite ends of the Great Wall of China until they met. During this walk,
Abramovic found that her state fluctuated according to the metals in the
ground. She relates this to the Chinese science of geomancy and legends
that describe the Great Wall as a "dragon of energy"; see Goy,
"Abramovic," 49. I asked Abramovic about how she responded to
critiques of cultural appropriation that may stem from the piece. Abramovic
made a distinction between cultural tourism as a kind of voyeuristic exploitation,
and "using" people of other cultures, and going to one place
for a long time, involving oneself there, forming relationships, and letting
something happen. Marina Abramovic, interview with Jennifer Fisher and
Jim Drobnick, Montreal, February 25, 1991.
(n19.) Interview, February 25, 1991.
(n20.) Jim Drobnick, "The Lovers: Marina Abramovic and Ulay,"
Parachute, no. 64 (Fall 1991): 54-56.
29n1.jpg
FIG. 1 Tableau vivant, Brooklyn Museum of Art Archives, Records of the
Education Department: Public Programs, American Renaissance, 1979.
30n1.jpg
FIG. 2 Suzanne Lacy, The Crystal Quilt, 1987, IDS Crystal Court, Minneapolis.
Courtesy the artist.
31n1.jpg
FIG. 3 Janine Antoni, Slumber, 1994, loom, yard, bed, nightgown, EEG machine,
and artist's REM reading. Installation view, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New
York.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): FIG. 4 Marina Abramovic, Green Dragon, 1989,
performance detail, patinated copper and rose quartz. Courtesy Sean Kelly
Gallery, New York.
~~~~~~~~
By Jennifer Fisher
JENNIFER FISHER, a 1997-98 Contemporary Art Fellow at the National Gallery
of Canada, is completing a book on aesthetics and the haptic sense.
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Source: Art Journal, Winter97, Vol. 56 Issue 4, p28, 6p
Item: 223333