présidentes / chairs /

• Barbara Clausen, Université du Québec à Montréal
• Felicia F. Leu, Université du Québec à Montréal

Que signifie l’absence au cœur du désir pour le direct en art ? Comment les modes hybrides de présence ont modifié nos relations avec l’art actuel à l’intérieur et au-delà de l’espace d’exposition en tant que site de production, d’expérience et de réception ? Trois ans après la rupture soudaine causée par la pandémie de COVID-19, nous ne pouvons que commencer à réfléchir à la manière dont la perception de l’espace et du temps a été modifiée par de nouveaux modes de présence. En invitant de perspectives artistiques et théoriques, cette session bilingue propose d’étudier et d’analyser la corrélation entre la performativité et le curatorial en tant que modes critiques d’opération entre l’agentivité et l’in-situ. Nous invitons des propositions et d’interventions artistiques et théoriques qui examinent le potentiel du performatif à travers un large éventail de pratiques créatives et qui abordent l’impact culturel et social des dernières années sur la politique de l’espace et du temps.

What does it mean to be absent in the heart of art’s desire for liveness? How have hybrid modes of presence changed our encounters with contemporary art within and beyond the exhibition space as a site of production, experience, and reception? Three years after the sudden rupture caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we can only begin to reflect on how the perception and use of space and time continues to be altered by new modes and ideas of digital and bodily presence and movement. Bringing together a range of artistic and theoretical perspectives, this bilingual session hopes to investigate and discuss the interplay of the performative and the curatorial as critical modes of operation between agency and site specificity. We invite papers and alternative presentation formats that look at the potential of the performative across a wide spectrum of creative practices, addressing the cultural and social impact of the last years on the politics of space and time.

mots clés / keywords: space, time, performance, exhibitions, post-digital / espace, temps, performance, expositions, post-numérique

type de séance / session type: réunion d'experts / panel

Liveness and the Archive: Reversals of Order in Steve Paxton’s Proxy (1962)

• MJ Thompson, Concordia University

This presentation grapples with the relationship of liveness to the archive, through a focus on American dance-maker Steve Paxton’s Proxy (1962). Proxy used a paper score comprised of photographic images primarily of athletes in order to initiate movement. The visual score challenged dancers to arrive at idealized poses without the habitualized movement patterns that produce such postures, or otherwise choreographed strategies of arrival. The resulting dance was indeterminant to the extent that dancers’ maintained agency over how best to move from pose A to B. If the effect was to destabilize questions of authority and authorship vis-à-vis the role of the choreographer, and the role of the male figure as organizing principal, the work equally broke the binary of archive/repertoire to the extent that it theorized and relied on embodied citational practices—offering a gentle reminder today of the entwined nature of the two, yet insisting on the primacy of the live dancing body. Post-Covid, as the importance of nurturing live encounters through performance dilates, Proxy reminds us of the dancing (live) body as priority even as hybrid, mediated and archived representations proliferate.

keywords: dancing, performance, archive, Paxton

“Thank you for keeping New York City Alive”: Value, Embodiment, and Mediation in the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles

• Georgia Phillips-Amos, Concordia University

In her 1969 Maintainance Art Manifesto, the feminist conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles asks, “after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” As a mother who is also a conceptual artist, Ukeles’s practice emphasizes the repetitive, physically arduous, and unremitting labour involved in maintainance — work women are often expected to do in the domestic sphere without compensation or recognition. Reflecting on a performance during which she washed the stairs of the Wadsworth Athaneum Museum of Art in Hartford Connecticut using water and diapers, Ukeles wrote, “It was very hard work. Did that make it real work? I think so. And in the saga aspect of the long duration, something else happened, a piercing through the wall of work into a new place.” This paper will consider the ways in which, fifty years later, Ukeles’s practice continues to raise essential questions around the forms our labour takes and the ways in which it is valued.

The artist’s interest in the undervalued labour involved in maintaining institutions, families, and cities led to her longstanding position as the official unsalaried artist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation of New York (DSNY), a role she has held since 1977. In title and practice this role highlights the simultaneous privilege and precarity of the artist’s labour versus that of the unionized DSNY workers. Famously, with her Touch Sanitation Performance (1979-80), Ukeles physically traveled across the city and shook hands with more than eight thousand employees at the DSNY, saying to each “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she recycled the phrase to thank the city’s “essential” workers, broadcasting it on an immense Times Square Billboard, on more than 2000 advertising screens across New York City’s MTA system, and on the entire 200-foot-long glass façade of the Queens Museum. Ukeles’s practice tracks the shifting nature of labour, technology, and artistic production. This paper examines the varied physicality of Ukeles’s practice within the context of the global pandemic, considering the layers of labour, value, mobility, and mediation at play in the original live performance versus the written message reproduced en masse.

keywords: performance, mediation, liveness, maintenance, labour

Zoom, somatic and performance: how to reassess presence

• Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, Université du Québec à Montréal

Choreographing collaboration was originally developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I began to critically rethink both my methods of choreographic creation and the spaces I have previously chosen to carry out my choreographic research in. It is the result of a performative practice taking place over the course of 30 days, revealing the experience of time in a creative process that reaches across the physical space of a vacant storefront and the digital media platform of the Zoom call. Within these environments, my aim was to explore how the themes of intimacy, publicness, transparency and opacity shape my artistic work. I invited Brazilian performer and filmmaker Erneste, whom I met just before the closing of the borders following the declaration of the worldwide pandemic, to collaborate in this artistic research. I will examine how the Zoom interface acts as a site of performance within a site-oriented perspective (Kwon). I highlight how the aesthetic (Jones and Holmes) of Zoom informed the performance in the act of improvisation as well as renewed my perspective on the body representation and its agency. This specific vignette exposes a methodology induced by a somatic approach (Ginot) where the shared performance and presence between my collaborator Erneste and myself, produced artistic traces such as writing and the video editing of my flesh is like an old piece of saran wrap. This work illustrates how a performance practice induced via a somatic approach offers the potential towards a qualitative experience of site. The media space of the zoom and the concreteness of the empty store collaborate actively inducing the process and the work. I aim to emphasize how the experience of this shared presence via Zoom has informed my performance within the concreteness of specific place and space (Hunter).

keywords: performance, media, site-responsive, somatic, body

An Open Invitation: Curatorial Gestures, Access, and Connectivity through Virtual Encounters

• Christine Negus, Director, London Ontario Media Arts Association | MFA, Northwestern University

Virtual Encounters: New Entanglements in Performance and Media grew from the critical imaginings of artist-curator Christine Negus, who developed the project with and through moments of collective loss. By way of this programming initiative, Virtual Encounters aimed to support two hard-hit communities—live-based practitioners and isolated, vulnerable arts audiences. Moving from the series that “invited seven artists and one artist duo to [create and] present new mediated performances that [unsettled] their previous modes of creation and [addressed] the challenges faced in digital translation” this panel presentation focuses on one of the commissioned works, Jerron Herman’s LAX.vid, to consider the connective potential in creating and presenting in absentia.

In the work, Herman—a black, disabled, and queer man—performs from the comforts of his home studio. The audio features exaggerated and meditative breathing and casual hums as the artist lackadaisically moves around the floor in his underwear. The video cuts to reveal a laptop with an image of a bright, tropical paradise that soon engulfs the screen. This laptop is a crucial and relational tool, symbolically reflecting the power of virtual connection from both the position of the artist and the viewer. This presentation shifts from a case-study of a curatorial invitation to a close-reading of Herman’s video, asserting that the invite in discussion extends beyond the one issued to the artists and offers marginalized viewers the opportunity to share screen-space from the comfort, and safety, of their own home. Virtual Encounters exemplifies the potentiality for collectivity, and mediated presence, through online presentation, and attests that this freedom of access is an essential aspect of community care and disability justice.

keywords: curatorial practices, performance art, media art, disability justice, virtual presence