Speakers: Thomas Mulready and Prof. Barry Smith
Over much the same period as the National Review of Live Art appeared in the UK there was a similar festival of live art/performance art in the United States: the Performance Art Festival, Cleveland, Ohio (1988-1999).
For the first time the Archives of both these events are being brought together and presented in a joint talk by Prof. Barry Smith (Live Art Archive, UK) and Thomas Mulready (Founding Director PAF, USA).
At this seminar you will be able to see short extracts from both NRLA and PAF holdings as the scope of this irreplaceable documentation is outlined together with some of the problems faced preserving and making available this exceptional history.
With support from Nottingham Trent University
Feedback Thomas Mulready
Political Science 1969 by Randy Newman
No one likes us, I don't know why.
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try.
But all around even our old friends put us down.
Let's drop the big one and see what happens.
We give them money, but are they grateful?
No they're spiteful, and they're hateful.
They don't respect us so let's surprise them;
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them.
Now Asia's crowded, and Europe's too old.
Africa's far too hot, and Canada's too cold.
And South America stole our name.
Let's drop the big one; there'll be no one left to blame us.
We'll save Australia; don't wanna hurt no kangaroo.
We'll build an all-American amusement park there;
They've got surfing, too.
Well, boom goes London, and boom Paris.
More room for you, and more room for me.
And every city the whole world round will just be another American town.
Oh, how peaceful it'll be; we'll set everybody free;
You'll have Japanese kimonos, baby, there'll be Italian shoes for me.
They all hate us anyhow, so let's drop the big one now.
Let's drop the big one now.
Self-Defeating Prophecy
by Thomas Mulready presented at the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, Scotland on February 14, 2002
(At the beginning of the program, the artist builds cardboard boxes of the type used for archival purposes. When the promotional video is just about over, the artist removes it from the video deck and smashes it to bits with a hammer)
In your programme, this piece is entitled Festival Archives: Forgetting and Remembering. You can think of me as the Forgetting Part.
It may be interesting for National Review of Live Art patrons to recall that, in the early years of our Performance Art Festival, in the late 80's, audiences complained that we shouldn't even allow a video camera in the space with the artist, they said it distorted the perception of the work, that artists would tend to play to the camera, and besides, they said, you could hear the little motors spinning and it was a huge distraction. Well, guess what: we videotaped everything anyway. Two camera angles, every performance, every Festival.
We no longer present live performances, but we have been trying to solve the dilemma of what to do with the Archives that we have accumulated over 12 years. Although the spines of the individual tapes are well labeled, we do not have all our Archives catalogued, so we can only estimate the quantity of our holdings of material for these 1000 performance artists. Many of these artists you have probably heard of: Rachel Rosenthal, Annie Sprinkle, Tim Miller, Keith Antar Mason, Holly Hughes, Paul Zaloom, John Fleck, Karen Finley, Blue Man Group, Ping Chong, Tomas Ruller, Seiji Shimoda, Kain Karawahn, Lorena Wolfer, Nao Bustamante and Coco Fusco, William Pope.L, Suzanne Lacy, Raphael Ortiz, Reno, Linda Montano, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, Charles Garoian, Goat Island.
(While the list of artists is read, a large screen projects images of hundres of the 1000 artists presented by the Performance Art Festival from 1988-1999)
Quite a few artists from the UK: Julian Maynard Smith, Alexander Harvey, Left and Right, David Thomas, Ivan Rados, Bob Parks, Mark Rodgers, Caroline McIntee, Michael Cummins, Alaistair MacLennan, David Alexander Jones, Gitte Welbe/Bregette Wellman, Susan Lewis, Gillian Dyson.
As well as hundreds more that you have may never hear of:
Thea Miklowski, Julie Laffin, Knektiv, Agonistas, Robert Sirovica, Jessica Buege, Zygmunt Pio Trowski, Andrew Kaletta, Lisa Newman, Fausto Fernos, Ken Thompson, Laila Voss, Cheryl Wallace, Keith Hennessey, Shelly Cook, Justin Chin, Jennifer Dowlin-Kelly, Chris Wrabel, Marilyn Arsem, Clara Crockett, High Risk Group, Ray Langenbach, Lynn Lukkas. Tell me when to stop.
And the Performance Art Festival Archives contain more than just 2000 hours of video and 6000 photos. Also in the Archives are interviews with artists, artist application materials, including biographies, project descriptions, and artistic philosophies and artist statements. In addition, we have saved ephemera, which could be almost anything. You'll notice the five storage boxes on stage. The Performance Art Festival Archives takes up 150 of those boxes.
So we presented all this great work, and now we have all this stuff, and its sitting in boxes, and youve got to wonder: what are our options?
This piece is called Self-Defeating Prophecy because it seems like the more I talk and perform about the difficulties of archiving performance art, the more people have stepped up and offered advice, assistance and contacts that might indeed lead to a solution to our dilemma.
Dr. Barry Smith and I started communicating a couple of years ago when we realized that we both shared a similar opportunity, with his Digital Performance Archive, The Live Art Archive, and the archives of this National Review of Live Art that he is in charge of at Nottingham-Trent University. Weve presented performance talks at a number of conferences in the USA, we are creating a joint brochure, were taking this UK tour to London next week, and we are pursuing other international collaborations, but you know, we're really having difficulty funding this type of international project.
OK, so what really deserves to happen with these Archives and what can we do about it? Maybe you folks here today can step up and offer your personal help and assistance. After all, we have a lot of important people here, funders, presenters, you know, movers and shakers. We've outlined a business plan for the tasks that might be involved in preserving, digitizing and making these Performance Art Festival Archives accessible to the public. Ill show the price list and if youd like to take on the funding and the work involved in that particular element, please raise your hand.
(On a large screen, the artist projects a PowerPoint presentation of his business plan, with specific archive projects and budgets, viewable at http://www.performance-art.org/. He asks members of the audience to become his partner and find the funding and resources to execute each project. Inevitably, no one raises his or her hand.)
Thank you all very much for your support and encouragement. However, as you can see, this is not enough to save the Performance Art Festival Archives from deteriorating. It is depressing to think of these tapes disintegrating magnetic bit by magnetic bit, fading out slowly until snow covers the image and white noise obscures the soundtrack.
I came here to this country this week to destroy the Performance Art Festival Archives because I saw no alternative except the same fate that Performance Art itself has suffered in the United States: apathy, ignorance, lack of funding opportunities, lack of critical dialogue, lack of education.
So allow me to point out some of the challenges that we face:
First, many of these tapes are redundant or out of date. Many artists already have the definitive version of their work as it was performed in some other venue. Of course, those tapes are also disintegrating. And then there's the inconvenient fact that they are dispersed among hundreds of owners, which makes assembling them into a useful body of work for study problematic to say the least.
Second, there is admittedly, a relatively small audience for this work and it will be increasingly difficult to fund the maintenance of any Archive project. All of the funders that we've had for 12 years require a strong local community component to any project they consider, and compared to the thousands of people who attended each year's Festival for 12 years, the "audience" for an Archive project is significantly smaller, specialized in academic and research fields, and generally not in our local area of Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Of course, everyone here is sympathetic to rescuing the Archives, but before today, many of YOU weren't even aware of the existence of these Archives. QUESTION: How many of you are artists or presenters or educators who have boxes of videotapes, photo negatives or documentation of performance art that is now slowly dissolving in a basement somewhere? TELL THE TRUTH.
Third, the process of documenting performance art on video is actually detrimental to the art form. When people know something is videotaped, they just don't pay as close attention. They get lazy because they think "I can always watch it again on video." Just like the ugly Americans who drive through London with their SONY digital camcorder without stopping to see anything because they know can watch it on TV when they get home. We might find ourselves doing the same thing during these performances and talks.
Fourth, live performance art was always meant to be ephemeral, fleeting, rooted in the moment, concerned only about the live act. Have you studied your recent art history? Live art and performance art was never about creating objects or leaving behind anything of value. In fact, performance art rose up in opposition to the creation of objects with value, and the commodification of art. It is antithetical to the spirit of performance art to place any emphasis at all on the remnants, the detritus, the documentation of the performance art act. In addition, most videotape documentation looks crappy and doesn't represent the work very well at all, it just becomes a souvenir. This leads right back to a fetishization of visual art objects and all the problems associated with that. If you want to see performance art, it is a once-in-a-lifetime event. You need to be there when it goes down. The revolution will not be televised, broadcast or downloaded. You snooze, you lose.
Fifth, many people in the United States, including those in the traditional art realm: dance, music, theatre, visual arts many of them will not support performance art because they actually feel that it may threaten their sources of funding. In the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts, (the US counterpart to the Arts Council of England), had their budget cut in half in the late 90s partly due to bad publicity over some controversial performance artists. I actually served on an NEA panel that had to walk out rather than have our grant decisions overturned. A lot of people thought we almost lost the entire NEA due to performance art! But the art world has learned their lesson. The NEA is still censoring performance art and defunding performance artists. But now no one is speaking out or walking off panels. On January 1st of this year I was invited to write a commentary that appeared in the online arts journal ArtsWire about leading performance artist William Pope.L, whom our Festival had presented three times since 1991. This past December, an NEA panel had approved his grant, but the acting chair of the NEA threw it out without comment. Like many performance artists, the issues Pope.L explores, are often political and highly personal in nature, exploring capitalism, race and power structures, the human body, the commodification of culture, the representation of women and minorities in advertising and the media, and other uniquely postmodern issues. Funding for this art form is so tenuous in the US that virtually all publications that covered performance art have folded, and venues that once presented it vigorously now either rarely present performance art or they have disappeared completely.
It is a shame that larger institutions, museums and art centers in the US hardly ever present performance art exhibitions or retrospectives. Apparently, when they attempt to do so, this is the treatment they can expect. And this time theres no outrage, no one standing up to defend performance art. In the United States, it amounts to the cultural genocide of an entire art form.
Now, many of you may be thinking, wait a minute, its not like that in the United Kingdom, we came here this week to see the National Review of Live Art, a major annual showcase for performance art. And youre absolutely right, this is exactly the type of well-planned, thoughtful presentation on performance art and live art that is necessary to develop the art form. And in this country you have you enjoy a critical dialogue about live art and its practicioners. And Nottingham Trent University has the leading international repository of Archives in live art and performance art
But I am here today to show you what might happen in this country in a few years if politics takes over your arts funding mechanisms, if institutions and artists censor themselves and shy away from the immediate and direct engagement that performance art and live art allow, if audiences and supporters become apathetic and start to become satisfied with art that is less than challenging.
And dont fool yourselves into thinking that you arent becoming Americanized. When I was last here in 1993 and first met many of you, you could tell that the American influence had already started taking hold. But it was centered on the obvious targets like McDonalds and Coca-Cola, and it was limited and you could point to it, which people did, and you could laugh at it, which everyone did, and you could still convince yourself that American culture sucked and your country would never be like that.
But no one pretends that anymore. Nowadays, US style has permeated most aspects of cultural life here: theres a huge shopping mall in downtown Nottingham, theres California-style restaurants everywhere, bars and nightclubs and discotheques have replaced the corner pubs that have been a way of life here. Everyone in this country could tell you George Bushs middle initial. Even your speech patterns have changed; in 1993, my accent was confusing to most people in Scotland; this trip, they understand every word. And not just the words, they understand my references. I used to have to explain and set up and contextualize almost all of my conversations just to be understood. Now, its like youre my cousins from Boston; bit of an accent, but other than that its almost like we grew up in the same house. You know the old saying about how to boil a frog? If you drop him in a pot of boiling water, he jumps out. But if put him in cool water and increase the heat slowly, hell sit in the water until he boils to death, because he cant feel the incremental change. (and every city the whole world round will just be another American town...) So unlike the Randy Newman song, America never dropped the big one, which everyone would have noticed. Instead, weve just been turning the heat up slowly year-by-year. Which, you dont notice. Just like the frog.
And besides the occasional Weakest Link or Absolutely Fabulous, I dont see this inevitable globalization being a two-way street. Nine eleven may have signaled the beginning of the end of the American Century, but for the foreseeable future, you might as well use the United States as your own personal crystal ball. Cause what we got is headed your way. And right now, weve got a decimated performance art world, weve got an apathetic arts public and weve got chicken-shit funders that wont risk offending their symphony patrons to fund something as dangerous, as unpredictable, and as potentially controversial as performance art.
Conclusion
As artists, as patrons and supporters of the arts, as future gallery owners and arts administrators, as citizens of this wonderful country that strongly supports the avant-garde, you must choose wisely. Because you will determine if Archives like these are destroyed through neglect and cowardice, or if the art form will continue to thrive here in the UK. I urge you to be courageous and not inhibit yourself for fear that your art might upset someone. I plead with you to follow your vision in whatever direction it leads you. And dont be afraid and dont be cynical and dont censor your self or any other artist, and dont despair.
You the artist you the citizen, have the power.
Theres the hammer. Its your choice.
2002 Thomas Mulready
Thomas Mulready is the Founding Director of the Performance Art Festival+Archives (http://www.performance-art.org/), has worked for Campbells Soup and Vicks Vapo-Rub and recently served as Senior Vice President of eCommerce and Internet Strategy for the 10th largest bank in the USA.