Performance at Artpace
Posted by ben on 23 Apr 2008 at 10:48 am | Tagged as: performance art, responses/reviews, video/film
I have a piece in last week’s Current discussing the work of Regina José Galindo (currently at Artpace). It’s not so much a review as a discussion of the history of Galindo’s work, and the way that it brings protest strategies into a visual art context. There’s a lot I couldn’t get to in that article, though, and thought I might dig into that a little bit here.
One thing that struck me about the work at Artpace is the contrasting uses of performance and documentation by Kate Gilmore, Regina José Galindo, and Margarita Cabrera. (Although Rodney McMillian incorporated performance and documentation into his work, for various reasons I won’t be discussing him in this post.) Galindo’s performance draws from a protest tradition — at Artpace, she locked herself along with her husband and daughter in a mobile prison cell in the gallery. Also, like a protester, she views her performances as her artwork, while the videos and photographs that are generated from them are purely documentation of the performance — not individual works of art, but necessary to spread “word of the performance and the message.” However, when she discusses her intentions and expectations, Galindo never mentions social change:
I suppose that—like everything I do—this was done for me…. I never have any expectations after completing something. What I do have is a certain amount of nervousness and anxiety before every performance. But after that I have no expectations. It’s done.
So in this way at least, it is distinct from protest which aims to catalyze social change.
Like Galindo, Kate Gilmore puts herself into dangerous or difficult situations in order to comment from a personal perspective on the systemic problems that prevent human progress. But the similarities end there. Gilmore’s work consists of performances on video (the videos being, in this case, the artworks, while the performances become simply part of the process of creating the work). The situations Gilmore puts herself in don’t target material injustices, but are created by the artist. She sets her foot in a bucket of cement, lets the cement dry, and then sets about the task of breaking her foot out of the cement with a hammer. This kind self-imposed task suggests an allegorical confrontation with psychological barriers more than a way to address specific injustices (although these barriers are connected to societal inequities).
Margarita Cabrera takes a different tack. She turns the gallery space into a makeshift copper butterfly factory, and recruits community volunteers to make 2,500 butterflies by hand. This strategy recalls the work of Harrell Fletcher, who often addresses divisions within communities by organizing collaborative events. However, Cabrera does, like Galindo, deal with concrete issues of ongoing social injustice. The workshop Cabrera builds is meant to signify the maquiladoras (low-wage manual labor factories, often with lax labor law enforcement) in Mexico. By “exporting” the butterflies to the home of a wealthy San Antonio collector, Cabrera targets economic systems that hide the human costs of a product from its owners by separating the craft from the craftsman. The documentation plays a minor role in this work: a photograph of the butterfly installation is affixed to the wall of the workshop. In another parallel to Galindo’s work, Cabrera leaves the workshop for gallery visitors to explore, so that a trip to the gallery gets you an experience of the residue of her artwork.
The interplay between these exhibits helps flesh out the contours of performance in contemporary art. Each artist works with performance strategies that articulate a distinct relationship between artist and community. By placing these shows side-by-side, Artpace encourages the visitor to contemplate approaches to social critique: The direct, literal commentary of Galindo, or the allegory of Gilmore. The interpersonal relations of Cabrera or the personal goals of Galindo. The roles of document and sediment in the artistic process.
I’ve thought a little about Galindo’s piece and I suppose she is able to assert a detachment to what she’s doing after it’s done, but trying to prove that is like trying to prove the sound a falling tree makes when there’s no one around. I, for one, don’t buy that she is merely putting something out there and then she’s done with it. Speaking as a parent, the idea that she would subject her baby daughter to the potential psychological jolt of such a confined space for 36(?) hours speaks to a deeper involvement in her work than she lets on. To me, it’s clear that she wants the post-exhibition dialogue given her means, but it’s a favorite thing to do among a lot of contemporary artists – making false assertions about their work that can’t really be refuted. The assertions become part of the work, then so do the critiques. It’s a nasty cycle that becomes a bit played out after awhile, really.
Anyway, totally off topic, but I wanted to revisit the exhibition so I took a look at it again on Artpace’s Web site and while perusing I took a glance at the site’s “History” page and there is zero mention of Linda Pace. None. There’s mention of specific curators and artists, but no mention of Linda. In fact, I didn’t see any mention of Linda throughout the whole active site. To find any mention of her, you would have to do an archive search.
Also found it interesting that in every year since 1996 there have been almost monthly news releases. This year there are zero (according to the site).
“People talk about Eric Clapton. What has he ever done except throw his baby off a fucking ledge and write a song about it?”
Thanks Tetanus!
written by terranov on April 22, 2008
Thanks Tetanus for responding to Rainey’s call. ‘Hope your meds kick in soon. Hang tuf, you can do it Little Guy!
I, for one, don’t buy that she is merely putting something out there and then she’s done with it.
This is a valid point. I would imagine that she pays attention to reactions to her work. I think what she’s getting at is that her main impetus is more about catharsis or personal transformation than driving social change.
In a way I think it’s not particularly helpful for artists to be forced (or encouraged) to discuss their work publicly. For certain artists, like Harrell Fletcher, it’s totally appropriate. For others, it almost forces them to say something misleading.
In the case of Galindo, my sense from reading her interviews (didn’t see her speak in person) is that she is being pretty sincere. But that’s purely my intuition. The question of whether to trust an artist’s description her own motives (or even process) is an important one that I think is not given enough attention. Sometimes it’s sincere, and sometimes it’s “part of the act.”
That is, sometimes it’s external to the artwork, and sometimes it’s a part of the work. It’s up to the viewer to make that distinction. Finding the boundaries of the work can be very difficult.
I was trying to find the quote from Yeats where he notes that the only true way to deem something “art” is if it causes or was created in the context of “social or societal motivation.”
Alas, I could not find the quote. But I do think that old Yeatsy would have called what Galindo does “art.”
re galindo:
i think there are very few artists who approach art as a tool of social change. art as it was used during the counter-reformation is not going to happen, so i believe that many artists do approach their work with a small measure of cynicism… as larry rivers once said: “art is a very little thing”
Is Art Worth a Life