Liberty Paterson Introduction A n Ideology In a world of laptops, ipads and smart phones, visual awareness seems to have trumped over bodily awareness. While we are impressed by these new technologies, very few pause to contemplate the incredible complexity of the human body and its potential as a tool for gaining understanding and knowledge. resist? What happens when we walk against the crowd? Stop dead? Enter the exit? Or walk right when the arrow to come into contact with the world around us can lead and liberation. In this realm space becomes co-produced by the body and its surroundings, transforming space from something through which we move, to something 2 expressions, including artworks that invite the exhibition’s visitors to perform certain movements, and installations that are made complete by the viewers’ participation. We see close links with choreography in artworks where elements of movement are expressed through trace and investigations of choreographic structures, such as architecture and furniture, as well as those that record movement using mnemonic devices such video, - My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension’.1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty world, and it remains a constant throughout our lives. It enables us to come into contact with our surroundings by continuously feeding us information about the spaces we inhabit. It perceives through both external senses and internal bodily sensations – if we close our eyes we know the position of our body, where our feet are, if our arms are crossed and the direction our head is tilted in. Furthermore, as humans we can feel our own motion, the passage of our bodies through space, our body’s proximity to everything that surrounds it and its relationship to gravity. When we begin to consider our everyday movements – such as the way we zigzag in the kitchen when preparing a meal, the way we compress ourselves on the over-crowded metro or the physical relief our body feels upon leaving a narrow alley and entering a vast plaza – we become aware of how the physical environment choreographs our movements and the way we behave. We become particularly aware of how structures, such as architecture and furniture, shape the routine of our daily lives. In the domestic sphere the objects around us may feel like an extension of the body, designed for our convenience, yet informing our every move. In public spaces and in the workplace we may notice how similar our behaviour is to those around us; it ken rules for how we should conduct ourselves, as if our movements are already mapped out. If we think of choreography as a set of instructions or as self-willed actions, not only our environment, but also the decisions we make about how to interact with our surroundings come into play. What happens when we 14 scripting of movement, scores and other forms of instruction. Art meets Choreography and Dance Over the past 50 years, visual arts and dance have enjoyed a rich exchange of ideas and forms; instead many of them exist in the intersection between installations, dance, sculpture, choreography, performance and video. this cross-practice collaboration can be traced back to New York in the 1960s when artists, dancers and choreographers began collaborating through vari- Choreography and dance can provide artists with the tools to explore corporeal experience deeper understanding of the a gathering place for the exchange of ideas and discussion. choreography enable artists to create an expanded awareness cluded Carolee Schneemann, Kellom Tomlinson, from The Art of Dancing, explained by Reading and Figures, Book II: of how we come into contact Robert Morris, Trisha Brown London, 1735, Plate XII with our surroundings, and to and Yvonne Rainer, worked colinvestigate the various choreolectively to present choreography for criticism, on a weekly basis from 1962 to 1964. graphic forces and power structures that shape our lives and script our behaviour. In addition, choreography and eliminate expensive production costs. Furthermore, can enable artists to explore the ways in which the body they rejected the aesthetics of ballet and modern dance can take action to assert a language of its own and demto concentrate on movements from everyday life such as onstrate not only how the body operates within space, - but also how it can be used as an instrument to create tre and other facets of the 1960s minimalist movement space. know them now. Today an increasing number of visual artists are working with choreography as an integral part of their prac15 In a time where collective, organised, self-willed actions have overthrown governments across the Arab world, and where the Western world has seen an increase in civil resistance through movements such as Occupy Wall Street; it is hardly surprising that today’s artists in their role of zeitgeists utilise the language of choreography to focus on self-willed counter-action. The SHOW TIME Exhibition SHOW TIME brings together eight artists that investigate the relationship between the body and its surroundings. Most forms of entertainment today offer an escape from our physical selves; in contrast, SHOW TIME positions the body as our first means of perceiving the world. From this stance the exhibition explores how the surroundings can choreograph the body and the potential for the body to move beyond this choreography to assert a language of its own. verse of possibilities for the body in motion and enable the audience to traverse multiple sites and times. In one space we find a skateboarder pirouetting on a concrete shelf above the crashing waves of Bondi Beach (Storm Sequence, Shaun Gladwell); in another, a Turkish harem where women’s conjoined bodies twist and grind like the cogs in an engine (Harem, İnci Eviner) and towards the end of the exhibition we are transported to a dream-like scenario, where factory workers dance between rows of labourers hunched over their machines at the Osram lighting factory in south China (Whose Utopia, Cao Fei). The exhibition’s title SHOW TIME – Choreography in Contemporary Art has a twofold meaning. Firstly it indicates the performative elements of the exThe artists – Pablo Bronstein, hibition and the theatricality of Cao Fei, Jacqueline Doyen, presenting the body on a stage İnci Eviner, Shaun Gladwell, for an audience to view. At the Nina Saunders and Sans Façon same time it positions the world (Charles Blanc & Tristan Suras stage, inviting the audience tees) – take methodologies and to reconsider their own body. ideas from the worlds of choKellom Tomlinson, from The Art of Dancing, Secondly, SHOW TIME refers reography, dance and architecexplained by Reading and Figures, Book II: to the time-based nature of the ture and use these to explore London, 1735, Plate XIV artworks in the exhibition and how the environment effects our movements, habits and gestures. Many of the art- their approach to the elasticity of time – past time, susists work across the boundaries of specific art forms to pension, acceleration, deceleration and duration being combine sculpture, installation, film, performance and reoccurring traits in many of the artworks. dance. The combination of performance and video plays a strong role throughout the exhibition. While most of Gl Holtegaard as Stage the works do not require the viewer to perform some The SHOW TIME exhibition is created specifically for kind of action, they are participatory in the sense that Gl Holtegaard, located in an 18th century country house the performing bodies and objects in the artworks can with a baroque garden. Many of the recurrent themes in act as a focal point for the viewer’s own bodily experiences the exhibition are motivated and enhanced by its unique and desires. location. Furthermore, baroque notions of the body in movement and slippages in time unlock the potential of The SHOW TIME exhibition as a whole also seeks to Gl Holtegaard as a historical site for contemporary art. play with the fluidity of time by presenting an array of In connection to the exhibition there are a number of works that reference multiple times and unfold at vary- site-specific works; the artist-architect duo Sans façon ing speeds. Within this remit video works provide a uni- will undertake a residency at Gl Holtegaard. 16 The choreographer Luis Lara Malvacía will work with dancers to create a series of dance installations that will take place in the galleries towards the end of the exhibition period. A stroll in Gl Holtegaard’s garden is intended to be a sensuous and bodily experience; guided through a mathematical grid of hedged passage-ways, visitors are surprised and delighted by the spectacular scenes of cascading waterfalls and sculptures that are gradually revealed. As art historian Mårten Snickare notes in his essay Body, Movement, Space – Baroque Revisited, the body in motion, choreographed walks and convoluted gestures are at the very core of baroque aesthetics. Notions of ornate pattern, elaborate gesture and everyday theatricality – are central themes in many of the artworks, and also in the curation of the exhibition. The topics of the exhibition and the selection of the artworks aim to hold true to the baroque logic of eradicating the boundaries between life and art. the history of a site seeps into our present experience. Nina Saunders’ sculpture Sincerely Yours takes the shape of an armchair, one of the most choreographic objects in our daily lives. While its presence draws our attention to the domestic scale of Gl Holtegaard’s interior it does not allow us to comfortably slide into the mundanity of the familiar, for this armchair is more creature than chair. Caught in mid-motion, its bulbous body totters on its tiny gold wheels as it appears to half-waltz half-stagger through the gallery. The curatorial approach to the exhibition takes its cues from choreography with a focus on creating a sequence of environments, as well as a rhythm for the visitors’ passage through the spaces. The final organisation of artworks is designed to create a stream of frictions and currents that increase the visitor’s awareness of their own body’s motion, as it ebbs and flows through the galleries of Gl Holtegaard. In this sense, SHOW TIME becomes a stage, a moment of suspension where the visitors become aware of their physical existence in space and time. The rich history of Gl Holtegaard provides the perfect stage for an exhibition that explores the fluidity of time. Dancing the Everyday A number of the artworks use the present as a platform All of the artists in the SHOW TIME exhibition examine the physical movement for viewing the past. The artist of the body in relation to space Pablo Bronstein has produced and time. In her paper Walking a site-specific work for that inand Other Choreographic Tactics, corporates fully functioning Professor Susan Leigh Foster deantique clocks. In the same way scribes how choreography moved that Gl Holtegaard’s tower clock out of the theatres and into life. has been showing time since its Dance began to investigate peinstallation in 1756, Bronstein’s destrian movement and moved clocks call to mind past times, from the black box to public while measuring the present. spaces, the streets, roof tops and In present time, however, these The SHOW TIME parks. The choreography was clocks take a new value as anexhibition model, 2011 designed to displace theatricaltiques. This value is not calculated on their practical function or necessarily their design ity – “to use theatricality as a tool with which to see the world differently”. The artist-architect duo Sans Façon but the fact they are preserved from another time. also use theatricality to reveal spectacles of everyday life Gl Holtegaard’s previous life as a country home resonates and tempt interaction with the surroundings. Their pubin its interior spaces, which feel distinctly domestic. A lic art installation Limelight replaces a streetlight with couple of the selected artworks play with the idea that a theatre spotlight transforming the street into a stage 17 for spontaneous performances from passersby. They will undertake a residency during the SHOW TIME exhibition to create a site-specific work considering how the body comes into contact with its surroundings, particularly with Gl Holtegaard’s distinctive surroundings. The artist Jacqueline Doyen’s practice often involves extracting corporeal gestures and postures from their context so they can be experienced in their fundamental nature. The work L’ élaboration de la spontanéité is one of three works Doyen will present as part of the SHOW TIME exhibition. The work comprises of an ongoing archive of politicians’ gestures, their frozen articulations meticulously cut from the daily newspapers and placed on a white background. Doyen carefully orders the gestures in to groups of similar expressions. The remarkable similarity of the gestures from politicians from around the world draws attention to the universality of gestures, that specific expressions of the body are commonly understood to express a range of feelings from power and strength to humility and compassion. Power Structures Unsurprisingly the relationship between architecture and the body is a common thread throughout many of the artist’s work in the SHOW TIME exhibition. Buildings often provide a concrete display of social and political values. Power is perhaps one of the commonest values articulated through architecture and in these artworks choreography often represents the architectural power structures that control aspects of our behaviour. Much of Pablo Bronstein’s practice combines architecture and dance to critique how power is constructed in architecture, choreographed pedestrian movement and artificial behaviour. And along a similar vein İnci Eviner considers architectural spaces with areas that are set apart or reserved to certain groups or societies and are therefore mysterious to outsiders. In the video Parliament we experience the utopian architecture of the European Parliament in Strasbourg – the ultimate power structure – as a scene from Hades. The limbolike state of its inhabitants is a comment on the suspended situation of Turkey as it waits to hear if it will be excluded or The consideration of everyday included by the European commovements that runs through The Pastorall: munity. Furthermore, the Eurothe SHOW TIME exhibition Mr. Isaac’s dance made for Her Majesty’s birthday, 1713 pean parliament appears to have seeks to draw parallels between degenerated to the point where the artworks and the exhibition visitors’ daily lives. Not only to reveal the potential of its members have lost their minds – they eat the dirt, the body to connect with its surroundings, but to read merge with animals and manically pace the corridors. the body’s non-verbal communication. And maybe, just The connection between architecture and behaviour maybe, next time we open a newspaper and see a politi- is inextricable from this work as it is from many of the cian frozen in mid-gesture, we’ll take a second glance to other artworks in SHOW TIME. consider what her body language is telling us. How is she standing? Where are her hands? How are her lips mov- Counter-action ing? What do the furrows in her brow tell us? Are her Included in SHOW TIME are artworks that acknowlgestures controlled and effective or does her body invol- edge the external forces that impact the body while demonstrating possibilities for counter-action and intuitive untarily tell us another story? 18 behaviour. Here the body’s expression through movement and dance overrides structure and instruction to offer moments of liberation and spontaneity. These artworks give an expanded awareness of how we can come into contact with our surroundings and demonstrate the potential of individual expression over generalised mass activity. Both Shaun Gladwell and Cao Fei use movement and dance as an expression for liberation and individuality. Gladwell’s video work Storm Sequence records the artist pirouetting on his skateboard on a concrete ledge in front of tempestuous sea. Behind him waves crash as if stirred up by the energy that is released from his momentum filled body. Cao’s film work Whose Utopia melancholically documents the daily life of a factory that produces light components. During the 20-minute film a number of the factory workers dance through the aisles of workers at their machines. Their moving bodies are such sharp contrast to the rows of machines and the functionalist architecture of the factory that one becomes acutely aware that this is not the expected and perhaps not allowed behaviour in the factory. Whose Utopia is profoundly poetic in the way it gently rebels against a world of programmed behaviour and mass production. The Production of Space and Time Space is often viewed as a container into which things are placed and time as something governed by the twenty-four hour clock, although in reality our experience of space and time is quite different. Space is shaped by our activities, our use of it, and time does not always pass at the same speed – it can accelerate, stall and even stop. The artists in the SHOW TIME exhibition demonstrate how our body’s movements are capable of producing space in collaboration with its surroundings, and correspondingly, how time can be transformed by the body’s velocity. In her short story Ghost flat (a modern couple) the novelist Marie Darrieussecq imagines living in a twenty square metre flat in a thirty-six floor building in Tokyo. The 19 result is a versatile space that is not stable but constantly fluctuating according to the physical and physiological needs of the body. The body’s movement also defines space in Shaun Gladwell’s video work Woolloomooloo Night, in which a capoeira practitioner carves her own space on the forecourt of a garage. Despite the constant activity that surrounds her, the practitioner’s movements – a combination of dance and battle – are deliberate and controlled as her body claims a territory of its own. Additionally, slow motion enables Shaun Gladwell to effectively stretch time so that every movement is pronounced and our attention drawn to the universal force of gravity that constantly brings her body back in to contact with the surface of the earth. Conversely Jacqueline Doyen’s steal structures suspend both the body and time, whereas the unceasing motion of bodies in İnci Eviner’s video works extends time. In conclusion, the SHOW TIME exhibition places an emphasis on its site Gl Holtegaard, while inviting accomplished artists from around the world to present and discuss their work in Denmark. It is an exhibition that presents a variety topics which are brought together by the theme of choreography. And while it seeks to bring the body back in focus and reveal its potential for experiencing and understanding the world, neither the artists nor the exhibition as a whole seek to give set answers. Instead SHOW TIME provides a stage, where scenarios, movements and behaviours are lifted out of their context by the artists for the audience to experience, enjoy and reflect upon. Liberty Paterson Curator SHOW TIME Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, English edition translated by Colin Smith, Routledge: New York, 1962. p. 273 2 Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing Your Move” Move Choreographing You – Art and Dance Since the 1960s, Hayward Publishing: London, 2010. p. 37 1
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