GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE FEBRUARY 25, 1994

ENTERTAINMENT

The challenge of documenting the artistic process of performance art

Reviewed by Barry Daniels

Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art is the first major exhibition to examine Performance Art as it has developed over the past 25 years. It is both informative and a great deal of fun. It is a smashing opening for Cleveland's Seventh Annual Performance Art Festival which will offer over 100 performances during the next two months.

Curators Robyn Brentano, who is working on an MA in Performance Studies at New York University, and Olivia Georgia, Director of Visual Arts for the Snug Harbor Cultural Center (Staten Island, NY), have put together a very useful time line that traces the history of performance art from 1881 to the present. It is enlivened with photographs and reminds the viewer how important the attempt to radically destroy established conventions has been part of the history of modernism in the 20th Century. It also makes the point that performance has been a very important part of the modernist tradition and is helpful in understanding how postmodernist work plays with the various elements of modernism.

Once you've studied the time line you'll be prepared for the exhibition which has the paradoxical problem of trying to document work that, in Brentano's words, "is an interdisciplinary art form in which the primary focus of the work is the artist's acts or the artistic process itself, rather than on an object such as a painting or a sculpture."

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The exhibition, of course, must rely to some extent on objects, or as CCCA Project Director David S. Rubin, noted in his opening remarks at the press preview, "It contains relics, objects and props." Photographs and videotapes provide records of the events, but they are traces inside the frame. Complementing these necessary objects are a good number of installations that are performative and do engage the viewer in a process.

Among the various relics of performance events on display are a number of costumes that are particularly engaging. I enjoyed the dress with a skirt made of dollar bills and a bodice of pennies created by Liz Prince for Fit the Bill (1989). For Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Goes to the New Museum (1981), Lorraine O'Grady made a gown out of 180 pairs of white gloves. Gay artist, Nyland Blake's 1991 nylon body suit hangs like an eerie shadow on the wall. A hat worn by Jack Smith as part of a leopard woman costume (Genoa, 1981) next to a photograph of Smith in the costume reminds how the drag aesthetic overlaps with aspects of conceptual art.

Small screen video installation by Anna Hamilton.

Videotapes are adroitly used in combination with objects. For Robert Wilson's Alley Theatre staging of Danton's Death (1992) interviews with various artists in-

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volved in the production and clips from the play supplement the sketches by Wilson and a prop, Robespierre's bathtub. There is a brief clip of Chris Burden's Through the Night Softly, a 1973 performance in which the nearly naked artist, with hands tied behind him, crawled across a street covered with broken glass. Next to the video screen is a plastic box containing some of the broken glass.

There are also works created as vide tapes or installations incorporating video. These include three tapes by Bruce Nauman from the late 1960s and a recent untitled small screen work by Anna Hamilton that shows a mouth full of stones. It is mesmerizing and vaguely erotic.

The installations and interactive pieces are the real highlights of the exhibition. I especially enjoyed Yoko Ono's Mending Piece (1966-1994). Broken white cups and saucers are placed on a white table against a white wall with a shelf. There are two white chairs and a bottle of Elmer's glue. Spectators are asked to mend the cups and saucers and place them on the shelf when they are done. The piece is an ongoing process completed by the audience. Laurie Anderson's Handphone Table (1976) invites the viewer to sit at a table facing a large photograph and place his hands on his ears and elbows on two spots on the table. Recorded music is conducted through the arms, making the viewer part of an electronic

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circuit. I was deeply moved as I walked through Peter Schumann's installation, Ex Voto for Bosnia (1993). His cardboard and papier mâche figures and crude paintings are an eloquent plea for peace.

The series of events on the opening weekend demonstrated part of the process of creating this exhibition. They were live events whose remains became objects in the show. These events began with You Can't Make an Omelette without Breaking Some Eggs by Raphael Montanez Ortiz with Monique St.Patrick-Lorenz. Ortiz destroyed an upright piano covered with chicken feathers while St.Patrick-Lorenz sang stories from children's books. Ortiz then extracted eggs from under St.Patrick-Lorenz's skirt, broke them into plates that formed a circle around the performance space, and asked the audience to beat the eggs. The performance ended as Ortiz gathered the eggs and cooked an omelette in an electric frying pan.

On Friday night John White presented a piece about the homeless and the jobless called, Desperately Seeking. It started with a lecture demonstration by White and concluded with an encounter between a white collar worker and streetcorner car window washer, played by two of White's students. It was a thoughtful political piece that ended with a postcard to Cleveland that urged us, "Don't avoid the eyes of the jobless and the homeless." Continued on next page

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