Team Pony

Hubertus Lounge
30 January

Smoky rooms, dogs sleeping on threadbare chairs, a disco ball. Such was the setting for a late night gig by the post-modern Wohnzimmer (trademark pending) performance trio Team Pony.

Two singers and a pianist make up the threesome, who de-construct misogynist pop culture via an array of 20th (plus a smidgen of 21st) century songs mostly on the theme of love, from Billie (no, not Piper--Holiday) to Britney. That's a lot of de-constructing in 30 minutes but the topic's ripe for it, and in their own inimitable way, they do a remarkable job, given the limits of time and space. Giving one's all to a torchy ballad is difficult when the bar staff are dropping glasses and chatting away in the background.

The two women, who also perform as Julia + Julia, take turns at the mic, delivering straight-faced lyrics of betrayal, desertion and obsession while subtly undermining the song's intent. "Toxic" was brilliantly staged, with the two twirling like marionette ballerinas before shuddering to a halt.

re.act conference: it's a stitch-up

So far, my focus has been art and not performance, so last night I put that right by attending live events scheduled as part of the re.act conference. These might be summed up as blood, clothes and laughter. Quite the gamut of emotions and responses and, indeed, intent, though I can't be sure of the latter.

Boryana Rossa's performance The Vitruvian Body was conducted with the Bulgarian artist wired up with a headset a la Janet Jackson ca. 1990 or, indeed, presenters on the Home Shopping Network. But rather than try and sell an unseen audience a range of rather shoddy consumer goods, she had more pressing concerns. The contrast between her rather matter-of-fact commentary on her ideas about the idealised body and what was actually happening was disquieting. As she spoke, she undressed, positioned herself inside a circular apparatus and then had her arms and legs sewn into it by her colleague Oleg Mavromatti. Much has been spoken about body art and feminist theory in relation to it. But this was the first time I had actually seen a live performance of it.

Rossa created a very striking relationship to the audience. Before she started the performance, she invited people to come as close as they wanted and to take pictures in any form they wanted: mobile phones, cameras, video cameras, etc. She wanted the audience to document and participate in the performance. For that reason, I think the experience was less uncomfortable for me than I might have anticipated. I went up close, I had a good look at the stitching. I saw the blood run down her leg.

I wasn't shocked, but I felt a lot of empathy, as did many other audience members. Once the artist escalated the performance to have her lips sewn shut, as a protest against censorship in the Czech Republic, many flinched, as she was clearly in pain and a lot of blood ran down her chin. But, she had also invited an audience member to cut her free, and that allowed a certain amount of relief: we observed and were complicit in her pain but we could also participate in her liberation. Body art and manipulation are not really my areas of interest but it was certainly an intense experience. I also found it rather endearing that several older artists approached Rossa afterward and hugged her, as if offering comfort as well as congratulations for her performance/ordeal.

The other two performances also involved a certain amount of discomfort, both for the artist and audience, though not in the visceral manner of Rossa's. Tanja Ostojic re-enacted Juniper Perlis's Clothes I, which involved the artist attempting to put on all the clothes she owned during the duration of the performance. This was a curious exercise: firstly, Ostojic was re-enacting quite a modern performance, originally done in 2003; secondly, Perlis apparently spent several hours getting to the venue with her clothing (she said she had to carry her own baggage) and then putting them on, while Ostojic's performance was less than an hour; thirdly, Ostojic came nowhere near to putting on all of the clothing she had arrayed on the stage, as she must have known.

As she put on an item of clothing, Ostojic displayed quite a large grin, as if she were a small child doing something a bit naughty and was testing out the limits of parental patience. Then she would step up to the mic in her bulky clothing and read a bit of text about her own mother's experience in Yugoslavia or about Perlis's experience of homelessness. Again, one sensed quite a bit of audience empathy for the artist, with calls of "Tanja! Don't rip it!", as she attempted to pull on a delicate item. And once she had everything on she could manage, several women, including Rossa, got on-stage to help her extricate herself.

By contrast, the final performance, Antonia Baehr's Lachen, was conducted in a more formal setting, a proscenium theatre, with Baehr reading from a score, taking bows in between scenes, and the audience very much kept at a distance. However, given that the content of Baehr's performance was laughter, this allowed the audience to share in it, in a strange way. Baehr had invited friends and family to compose laughter pieces for her to perform. This was a testing experience and I felt more uncomfortable at certain places than I did in Rossa's performance. Who wants to spend an hour watching someone laugh? But, there was variation and some clever staging, with Baehr dropping balls and laughing in time to them. And the final piece had her performing a duet with herself on a TV monitor, with the TV self giving the live self orders. At the end the artist switched off the TV.

re.act conference: yes, we have no bananas

Well, after an enlightening afternoon and evening spent at the re.act conference, I emerged with some delightful quotes and thoughts. The talks I attended on "Performative Tendencies in the DDR" and "When Personal Was Not Political" were intended to fill in some gaps in the historical record, documenting performance culture in the DDR and Yugoslavia, states that no longer exist and whose conditions produced a particular kind of performance that was done in secret.

Nonetheless, as Bojana Pejic pointed out in her witty presentation, commenting on the "comradesses" of her country, much subversive art was produced, even if it didn't use the name feminist, which was considered a western concept. Artists such as Sanja Ivekovic found a way to stage performances by utilising the state surveillance and incorporating it into her scenarios, making the agents of state control complicit in her actions.

Pejic also pointed out that Yugoslavia had a bit of a consumerist culture, i.e., they had bananas. Bananas seem to be some kind of marker for the eastern bloc: to have them was to have some connection with the west, a tiny bit of capitalism in the form of the forbidden fruit. An audience member questioned whether this focus on bananas weren't some kind of phallic-patriarchal-capitalist symbolism, which added a bit of levity to the proceedings.

The DDR, Angelika Richter informed us, did not have bananas, only green oranges from Cuba. State controls on expression were much tighter, producing a hermetically sealed border state. Consequently, there was no public audience for the art produced by women such as Cornelia Schleime and Gabriele Stötzer. Instead, they made photographs and Super 8 films to be shared amongst themselves.

I was able to speak with Gabriele Stötzer, who explained a bit about the artistic Frauengruppe that she founded in Erfurt in the early 80s. More on that another time, but she confirmed that the group was not aware of any of the western feminist performance art going on at the time, and she followed her own drives in making photos focussing on the female body, wanting to externalise the pain she felt after being imprisoned for being a "class enemy". Her story shows the incredible threat these women posed to the state.

re.act.feminism

Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Through 8 February

This exhibit looks at the development of feminist performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, while an accompanying conference running 22-25 January looks at the resonance of the form today, with a series of talks and performances.

Visiting the exhibit last week, I spent about three hours there and could have stayed longer. The displays are not that elaborate but there is an impressive video archive of performances and some interviews, which bears careful perusal.

The film Not for Sale, by Laura Cottingham, gives a bit of context to the exhibit, offering a history of how performance art developed from the feminist movement and other social conditions in the United States. With protest in the air, it was only a matter of time before women put themselves at the centre of expression, using their bodies as inspiration and sometimes sites for creativity.

Of the many works in the archive, I was quite taken with DISBAND, a New York group of misfits, including Martha Wilson, Barbara Kruger and Diane Torr, who performed as a mock band in the early '80s, skewering machismo and US foreign policy with their songs and raps. Interesting that the members went off in such interesting directions afterward. Wilson will be speaking at the conference on moving from performer to archivist, as she now runs Franklin Furnace.

If the archival material is heavily informed by US performance art, the exhibit has a much more Germanic flavour. I was quite intrigued by the work of Gabriele Stötzer, who, moving from the punk scene to the art scene, formed the women's art group Exterra XX in the DDR in the '80s and fell foul of the authorities for her support of Wolf Biermann. Her video work and photos present alternative visions of female groups. Ewa Partum, originally from Poland but working in Germany, used her nude body as a way to protest against restrictions in society.

One theme of the exhibit is connecting past and present artists, and Stefanie Seibold's installation, A Reader-Wallpaper, offers a kind of summary in performance practice past and present. Her series of booklets, A Reader, presents an assemblage of influences from feminist theory to pop culture references, while monitors play performances by such artists as VALIE EXPORT from the De Appel archive.

Archiving and re-staging performances are two themes of the conference and Cornelia Sollfrank is currently staging several artists' works, including one of EXPORT's in which she takes a man on a dog lead for a walk through a shopping mall. This features in the video archive, while photos of re-stagings are showing in the exhibit. Her newest work re-imagines Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, which rather boggles the mind.

What relevance does the work of the '60s and '70s have today? Why re-stage? Where does feminist performance art go from here? All questions to be discussed at the conference.

Kuchen mit Rock

K9
18 January 2009

Kaffee, Kuchen, Kunst. Always a good combination, in my book. So, back to sunny Friedrichshain for an afternoon in support of the Ruby Tuesday Rock Camp, planned for the summer. This is a local version of the Girls Rock camps that have sprung up in North America, which offer girls the opportunity to pick up instruments and so increase their self esteem--stealth feminism, if you will.

And any doubts about the need for such an undertaking would be quickly dispelled by viewing the Girls Rock film which was screened (in part, more on that later). Filmed at a camp in Portland, Oregon, I believe, it focussed on a handful of participants taking part, as well as counsellors and tutors, who included rock luminaries Carrie Brownstein, Beth Ditto and sts.

The girls came loaded with baggage of problems at home, identity issues, body issues, and the general burden of living in a misogynist society. Quite a lot to get through in five days, but they threw themselves into forming bands, writing songs and getting to grips with playing instruments, while also exercising their communication and bonding muscles.

Sadly, we didn't get to see how it all turned out because the DVD froze 75 minutes in, but what was seen was gripping.

Also, on the bill was music from last-minute booking The Dropout Patrol, a duo with acoustic guitar and only one mic. This was an interesting exercise in working in less than ideal conditions but the songs came through strongly, an odd combination of amusing lyrics and earnest, understated delivery. Charming.

Equally beguiling was the performance art duo Julia + Julia, whose performance I only caught part-way through. Two women in red dresses reclining in their living room staging scenarios involving hysteria, science and smoking cigars as a way of debunking gender cliches. Hard to describe but I found it very funny.