By Vivian Ziherl
Sarah Pierce, 'Campus', 2011/2012, Performance at Stroom Den Haag
Protest chants enter and encompass the body; they insist upon the total presence of persons. Transposing the public ‘space of appearance’ of the street, square or park to an art-space lobby, six performers cleared an area for their demonstration of sorts with the chant; ‘Find a place to stand, step back, and look.’ In three iterations of the piece, performers linked arms and rhythmically pushed their fists into the air, pressing demands that stated their conditions of presence and display. The piece was “Campus” (2011/12) by Sarah Pierce, and it punctuated the first evening of the two-day performance programme ‘I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim’, curated by Capucine Perrot and hosted at Stroom Den Haag as part of the current exhibition ‘Expanded Performance’.
The other three performances on the first evening were each tangents on the form of public speaking as a storytelling act. In The Awaken Dreamer (2012), Léa Lagasse presented a meticulously reconstructed ‘reading wheel’; a device developed in the 16th century by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli. The beautiful wooden contraption of cogs and wheels was a pleasure to behold as its parts rotated against each other. It functioned more or less as a Ferris wheel with carriages designed to hold six books laid open, and is credited as a radically rudimentary precursor to hypertext. In practice, however, the reading of six books, in this case by Vladimir Nabokov, seemed a slight conceit for such an elaborate apparatus. It called to mind the many attempts by artists – from Argentinean pataphysicist Juan Esteban Fassio to Vancouver School artist Rodney Graham – to devise ‘reading machines’ for the texts of Raymond Roussel. These efforts having been propelled by the reticulating tangle of Roussel’s texts themselves.
Lea Lagasse, ‘The Awaken Dreamer’, 2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag
The programme overall could well have been subtitled ‘When Art Speaks’, and Cally Spooner embodied this in her lecture performance _I Have Been ill-advised by my Scriptwriter _(2012). She held long posters of black geometric forms aloft while a male performer – was she his sidekick, or was he hers? – lectured at length in a nightmarish mixture of ‘new management’ lingo, chart-hit lyrics and pure art-speak.
Cally Spooner, ‘I have been ill-advised by my scriptwriter’, 2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag
Last of the evening, the French duo Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet made for a curious presence together, dressed identically in prim ladies’ suits and seemingly rehearsed in a strange kind of stage-presence. Their introduction to the film _The Wall That Bleeds _(2012) was delivered with such idiosyncratic aplomb that they could fairly be considered speaking art works themselves. The real protagonist here, however, was a yellow curtain; a rich and heavy brocade hung in the space that returned as a murderous presence in the film’s yellow wallpaper. Gesturing to the poetic and paradoxical banality of being under threat by domestic décor, the duo cited Oscar Wilde’s epithet ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death, one of us must die.’
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Louise Herve & Chloe Maillet, ‘The Wall That Bleeds (Projection and Voice-Over)’, 2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag
It remains a confrontation to be addressed by art verbally. Story and script – and an audience’s expectation of the presence or absence thereof – are much of what holds apart the worlds of theatre and performance art, albeit tenuously. Across the two evenings of ‘I Proclaim…’ it was striking to note the tendency to draw upon genre in presenting art with words: the corporate public-speaker, the public reading and the school-room scenario were all taken as templates. Opening the second evening, Alexandre Singh cast the referential net back to a Homeric oral tradition. Shifting between two overhead projectors, Singh conjured tales from an elaborate series of black and white collages in his Assembly Instructions Lecture, An Immodern Romanticism (2009/2012). With calming cadence and a soft-spoken tone, Singh led the audience through an increasingly absurd set of twisting narratives, culminating in a conflation of celebrity confessional culture vis-à-vis small-screen series such as ‘Sex in the City’ and the Catholic tradition of confession vested in, according to the tale, the weight of the pontiff’s mitre.
Alexandre Singh, ‘Assembly Instructions Lecture, An Immoderate Romanticism’, 2009/2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag
The enunciative register of language, hinted at in the title ‘I Proclaim…’, was most powerfully registered in Nicoline van Harskamp’s Without Title (an Exercise in European English) (2012). The work was gratifyingly immediate, allowing the density and humour of the material to pack its punch. The subject was ‘European English’, a sub-set of the anglo dialects spoken by those who now out-number native English speakers. The form was an adult language-lesson, led automatically by voiceover and with an assisting projection of phonetic spellings.
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Nicoline van Harskamp, ‘Without Title (an Exercise in European English)’, 2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag
Over the course of the lesson, two actors repeated words such as ‘him’ (pronounced hgim), ‘fish’ (veesh) and ‘healthy’ (hgelsi), repeating after each their rolling, glottal and all-together non-anglo sounds. After a full phonetic alphabet had been established, short and then longer sentences were built up; ‘this is a new challenge,’ for example and, ‘it is always required to have a consensus’. There was something compelling about what was, ostensibly, a rote task. The audience palpably galvanized its attention watching and listening to the phonetic progression, often laughing together heartily. Beyond the humour of mispronunciation, the piece conveyed a bio-politics of language. Part of the compulsion to watch for the audience, was certainly a compulsion to repeat. There was a strong kinaesthetic reaction to mimic the vowel forms silently, even involuntarily so.
The final performance of the programme shifted register again; here the artist took the role of art enthusiast and art historian in Pierre Leguillon’s _Non-Happening, After Ad Reinhardt _(2011/12). The piece commenced with a lecture on the lesser-known slide-performances of the American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt. Its text, propelled by fascination and dedication to the subject, recounted Leguillon’s path to uncovering the slides, and his thesis that they permit a re-reading of Reinhardt’s ‘black paintings’, not as an erasure but as a blacking-out of accumulation. Watching the hour-long presentation of 560 slides – drawn from an archive of 10,000 – another image arose; that of an ageing Reinhardt corralling friends, students and family to watch hours of architectural details, ancient statuary, religious icons and abstract painting, all clustered by formal features such as triangles or hands.
Pierre Leguillon, ‘Non-Happening after Ad Reinhardt’, 2011/2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag
Among the rhythmic Warburgian sequence of images, a short segment stood out – a few slides featuring people with protest placards. These images sat apart on many counts; they showed no strong geometry but instead inchoate groupings of bodies. Where as the other images were captured with an objective frontality, these placed the photographer in time and in socio-political place, even in his profession as the placards called for art worker’s demands. These few slides go against the image of post-historicity that is evoked in the remaining slides. It is an accumulated image uncannily reminiscent of the photographic practice of philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, which is currently being presented in exhibitions by Boris Groys. It’s tempting, then, to speculate on the operations in time of the moment of protest, and its insistence of presence. For the programme ‘I Proclaim…’ the residue overall was of the acute proximity of the acts of being seen and being heard.
Vivian Ziherl is a critic and curator from Australia. She is currently Curator at ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’ in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.