between theory and action
Lecture by J. A. Tillmann DOCUMENT: invitation, video
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László Földényi F.
Haggard Bodies and Torn Clothes.
Two Contributions of Cultural History to the Roots of Performance Art Lecture by Gábor Klaniczay
(3 May 1995 – Artpool Art Research Center)
Performance intended to make a passage among the different fields of culture, to break down the borders, to make consistent even the most extreme contradictions. It merged not only the art and life, the play and the bloody physical reality, the “high” and the “popular” genre, the meaningful symbol and the fashion but the religious ritual and the obscenity, the world-redeeming moral and cynical nihilism. To understand this artistic genre, let me evoke some of the religious and cultural phenomena of our early and modern history which were likewise complex and paradoxi cal.
I would like to present two examples: one of them is the sight of the tortured body displayed to the public in the culture of the Middle Ages. Among the representatives of the heretics and the mendicant order who took upon them selves unenforced deprivation, there emerged a couple of religious phenomena in the 13-15th century which, being on the verge of preaching, the tableau vivant, the mystery-plays, the judicial punishment and the mass penitent self-scourge, can be regarded as the prefiguration of perfor mance.
The other example I would like to mention comes from this century.
I recall the youth subcultures of the last decades of this century from Teddy Boys to the punks, from the hippies to the trans-vestites, from the student leaders to the religious cults. The relation-ship of these subcultures to dressing, to the body, to the heroic contravening of pro hibition can also help us to understand performance (whose representatives appeared in the same milieu supported by a sensitivity of the same kind).
Gábor Klaniczay (Translation of the text from the invitation.)
Sound / Formance or the extension of sound into the space of action Lecture by Endre Szkárosi
(12 May 1995 – Artpool Art Research Center)
«…a Persian poet compared the universe to an old manuscript with its first and last pages having been lost. Two fundamental questions arose before him: what was the meaning of his life, and what was the nature of the universe that he saw before him.»
(Demetrio Stratos: A Letter to Claudio Costa) It is only from the end of the sixties that the happening and the performance have been understood as, by concept and designation, distinct genres. Much earlier, however, is the artistic practice which refuses to apply the one-sided code system of the traditional distinction between the genres for the sensual unity of life or for our experience of it. It intends to confront life with the totality of the available artistic expressions-either instinctively or consciously. Motivated by this complex sensitivity, stepping out of the one-sided expression (literature, painting, music, etc.) leads the artist and the recipient into space where both – or the artist at least – is forced to act (at zero degree: at least to be present with his own body).
In my lecture I want to outline – primarily based on the practices of futurism and dada –, how the rediscovery of the poetic function of the voice can lead an artist into the space of action and the complex use of symbols, which is an integral feature of performance art.
Endre Szkárosi (Translation of the text from the invitation.)
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1 9 9 5 — t H e y e A r o f P e r f o r M A n c e 197 Illusion and Presence
Lecture by Péter György
(17 May 1995 – Artpool Art Research Center)
1. Theater is a place where the viewer pretends that he/she does not know that what he/she sees is only an illusion or less.
He who enters the stage suddenly becomes someone else; his physical reality is concealed by the reality of the invisible illusion.
A acts as B, and his death as B is more authentic than his life as A.
2. That this is based upon a fragile and complex set of rules is brought to light when suddenly somebody dies on the stage or really declares love to someone or turns against the tyrant.
3. Performance is the action and the place by which the viewer cannot pretend that he/she does not know that what he/she sees is not an illusion but reality. The performer is always himself, A remains identical with A and transforms into someone else only in accordance with his own identity – if he transforms at all. And here lies the aesthetic and the disaster of performance.
This is where the show begins.
Péter György (Translation of the text from the invitation.)
Where is the Beginning and Where is the End of a Performance Lecture by Sándor Radnóti
(19 May 1995 – Artpool Art Research Center)
The question I am posing in the title of this lecture seems banal. Yet, every time I participated in a performance, this seemed to be the relevant theoretical question. However, as a theoretical question it appears to be outright absurd since how could it be answered in a generally applicable way without it providing a description of the individual works? Nevertheless, there are some questions that can (or must) remain in question-form, since it is this nature of theirs that is important not the answers to them.
Performance art is one of the most interesting ways of denying art as an institution and a denial of the institutional forms of art. The conventions which generally distinguish a work of art from
“reality” are suspended here: its provocative potential and its recurrent awkwardness come from the uncertainty that could be expressed with the words of Péter Esterházy paraphrased this way: Is this the program still / yet?
Sándor Radnóti (Translation of the text from the invitation.)
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The Letter of Words and the Memory of Acts.
An attempt for mapping the gap between theory and action
Lecture by J. A. Tillmann
(7 June 1995 – Artpool Art Research Center)
In the ominous year of 1984, my friends and I performed a shadow/
play and a Passion/play.
(The play with the shadows was at once metaphorical and real, literal and spectacular – an evocation of spirits in the dark chamber of a specifically designed setting, in the company of a couple of dozen interested people. The spirits were those of the dead, and their evocation was performed according to a script:
this peculiar document was a dialogue between Heidegger and Tezuka, which could even be called dramatic…)
When we are engaged in doing something, we know not in the same way as we do when we look back upon it. The target of our interest, its intensity, the position of the body, and our concern altogether are of a different nature. The focus of attention is that which is to be done – together with the complex texture that constitutes its direct surrounding, and its elements that are to be elaborated.
In such a work, all my being takes part. The act that spans over my body constitutes a dynamic bridge between the field of elaboration and the nerve tracks activated meanwhile. During this time, the so-called Self comes to a break, its considerable proportion settles into the relation of the elaboration and the body; it becomes entwined with the network of effects and after-effects. It vibrates and shifts in the gap that it can deepen on the verge of the powers called subject and object.
J. A. Tillmann (Translation of the text from the invitation.)
20–30 April 1995 Québec and Montreal