Materiality of Gesture talk

"Conserving performance art: The materiality of the gesture" by Paul Couillard © 2022

This is a re-recorded version of a talk presented on March 3, 2022 at the College Art Association Annual Conference as part of the panel "Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation," organized by Hanna Hölling and Jules Pelta Feldman.

For more infomation on the panel, visit https://performanceconservationmaterialityknowledge.com/2022/01/15/caa-2022/

Talk abstract:

Performing arts traditions tend to treat works as texts—scores, scripts, and choreographies—that endure by being reinterpreted by new performers. Visual art traditions seek to preserve objects crafted by their creators. Contemporary performance art practices, however, tend to view the unique temporal, spatial, material and relational conditions of a performance’s production as the very “flesh” of the work. Consequently, historical exhibitions of performance art tend to focus on material remains: objects, recordings and other documentation that both come out of and stand in for a body of work. While Jones (1997, 2011), Auslander (2006) and others have argued that such documents are a vital part of performance art practice, and, indeed, are likely to transmit an artist’s ideas to a much wider audience than any actual performance, it is little wonder that Phelan (1993) has argued that the ontology of a performance is to be found in its disappearance. Exhibitions of remains often have a feeling of deadness or void despite the vitality of the performances they document. Yet performance art is rooted in action. I propose an alternate strategy for reanimating historical performance art works that focuses on their underlying gestures. This paper will focus on my current research project, Manifest Gestures—a retrospective of the work of Canadian performance art duo Randy & Berenicci, who created an internationally recognized body of time-based live and digital performative works between 1975 and 2005. This project offers both a theoretical and methodological framework for reanimating the “gestural” in performance art.