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
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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
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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.
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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
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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?
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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
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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