Sophia Kidd on Alastair MacLennan
Representation, Reiteration, and Recognition: Alastair MacLennan
In her introduction to Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, Jennie Klein recounts chairing a panel at the 2007 National Review of Live Art on which sat a “roster of mid-career artists whose accomplishments warranted more critical attention in a performance art community that is predominantly based in the west.” In this grouping we find Alastair MacLennan sitting alongside Anne Seagrave, Silvia Ziranek, Robert Ayers, Monali Meher, Chumpon Apisuk, Boris Nieslony, and Marilyn Arsem. In reading Klein’s account of how Arsem and a prolific body of work fell between the cracks of performance art history; I thought about representation, reiteration, and recognition. I began to consider what it was in Alaistair MacLennan’s prolific body of ‘actuations’ consisting in action/situations which, as representations, resist reiteration and evade recognition. Based on a presentation given by MacLennan on April 21, 2021 for the Flow Performance Symposium, curated by Chicago Out of Site director, Carron Little, I located these threads with which to weave an explanation of how one of the UK’s most significant performance artists with over sixty years of work provides us with so much ‘unarticulated’ and ‘unread’ material.
In his presentation, MacLennan compiled a selection of ten artworks: 1943 (date unspecified), Hand to And (2015), Holding Time (2014), Alchemist (2010), Bbeyond Zoom Meeting (2020), Black Market International (2019), Hand to Sand (2019), Ink Ash (2010), Wave by Waive (2020), and In and Ease (2020). Notably absent in this selection are artworks from the first five decades of MacLennan’s oeuvre, indicating the artist had not chosen to display the full spectrum of his practice. Rather, these artworks were notably a collection of works esoteric in aspect, that is inward in representational orientation, as opposed to exoteric, or outward in representational orientation. Rather than displaying the outward aspect of his practise in its full variety, the artist had chosen ten examples of his creative practise adept at conveying a sense of warp and weft, of texture, textuality, a tech-tonic archipelago of intuition, cognition, and feeling. This provided me with my first thread, that of representation. Let us first look at this thread, and later at the other two threads of reiteration and recognition.
Bbeyond Monthly Meeting, 2020
Of the ten works, seven consisted in video documentations of MacLennan’s actuations. Of the other three, the Alchemist, is a short film; and the other two, Bbeyond Zoom Meeting, and In and Ease are products of the 2020/2021 Covid-19 pandemic, consisting in Zoom videos. ‘Bbeyond Zoom Meeting’ (Online, 2020) is a collaborative piece, picturing nine Zoom cells with each individual participant performing unrelated live actions on camera. These actions range from holding an empty wine glass at various angles, to composing costumes as bodily installations, to drawing on one’s arm and wrapping a coarse string around one’s body. Sound appears to be added in post-production, a soundtrack repeating the words ‘summer solstice,’ with accompanying sound effects, quite possibly compiled from the nine individual performances, looping in a leering manner. Although this particular iteration of Bbeyond was online, on the Alaistair MacLennan Archive website we find an archived Bbeyond monthly group performance pictured in the courtyard of Hambly and Hambly Gallery as late August 29, 2020. We see here MacLennan’s willingness to embrace new representations of performance art through the online format, particularly relevant to the Flow Performance Symposium, an entirely online collation of performances, lectures, workshops, and texts. We detect the fluidity of the artist’s perception of form, his ability to adapt and further fibrillate the form. Fluidity and fibrillation are particularly averse to market-forces, especially repulsive to an art world that fails to detect important contraindications betrayed by quivering muscles and uncoordinated contractions.
In and Ease by Alastair MacLennan, 2020, University of Dundee, Scotland
In and Ease (University of Dundee, Scotland, 2020), then, consists in what has become the ubiquitous Zoom lecture. MacLennan has selected a moment from a longer talk, cutting right to the artist discussing how to ‘draw breathing.’ As with much of MacLennan’s work, the textual play of titling plays a role in the artwork. Often, too, there is inter-textual play between artworks, with titles playing off one another, as in ‘Hand to And’ in 2015 morphing into ‘Hand to Sand’ by 2019. The poetic is prevalent in the mythos of MacLennan’s oeuvre. In this lecture titled In and Ease, MacLennan addresses the viewer, invoking a plea that we trust our intuition, and cease with our thetic acts of perceiving, remembering, even acts of imagining. He invites us to ‘draw breath,’ which can done as easily as ‘drawing breath.’ We do not need to not think or even imagine what drawing ‘looks like.’ We are asked to ‘BE drawing (…) Breath is not rigid and jagged. There’s a flow there.” As if to invoke our autonomic nervous system, the artist then launches into the performative mode, leading with his left hand, as he sometimes does; then shoulders rolling, arms slithering. He closes his eyes, and reiterates the pathway inside of thought, a porous pathway composed of land, air, water, fire, and time. Here we have subverted representation altogether, no longer in the mind of representing self to self, much less to the world.
Alchemist, Film Still by Richard Ashrowan with performative actions by Alaistair MacLennan and Sandra Johnston, 2010, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art
Alchemist, (moving image installation by Richard Ashrowan, performative actions by Alaistair MacLennan and Sandra Johnston, part of the 2010 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approximately 8 minutes) was performed on the Scottish borders. It is a careful and mediated video performance, filmed in black and white. MacLennan’s choice to present it here in 2021 perhaps indicates the artist’s cognition that if the market has failed to reiterate his modality of non-representation, then perhaps it is wise to create one’s own reiterations, by collaborating with digital artists. Alchemist pictures moody silhouettes, hands splashed in high-key contrast, light against darkness, striations of twigs and sticks of the wilderness setting. After some minutes, the upper portion of the artist’s body is pictured in company with an androgynous appearing Sandra Johnston, and an alchemical text in latin script is added in accompaniment. The camera pans down to the hands of the two artists, which hang at their sides, palms up. Then cut to a sheep pictured in the hills, first as a wide shot, then viewed through a closeup picked dry ram carcass. After which the camera frolics through fresh white pulled wool, focusing on three pairs of hands pulling and processing this wool, a much more yellow, dirty, and viscerally repulsive wool, which passes between fingers sweaty, dirty, and relentlessly kneading at the fiber, forming a ring of wool which passes from hand to hand. The next scene is of water flowing in a river, getting caught in a swill as bubbles accumulate, possibly from detergents used to wash the wool. The camera pans into a close-up so intimately concentrated on bubbles, the light now so low, that the film of the bubbles appear as filmy eyes staring back at us. The short video is obscure, resistant to interpretation, and esoteric in signification. It is interesting that the artist, at this stage in his life and work, is choosing to highlight the alchemical nature of his practise.
Looking for more clues as to what he is wanting to communicate, I found in the online Alaistair MacLennan Archive another recent short video focusing on the artist’s alchemical views. Drawing Remains Drawings Remain: Works by Alaistair MacLennan 1976-2020, a video work by Roddy Hunter, 2020, produced for the exhibition Alaistair MacLennan: Air A Lair (Edinburgh, Scotland). The short film begins with a hexagram from the Yijing 易经 (Book of Changes) (#51, Confirmation, Coagulation) and ends with another (#63, Successful Movement). Hexagram 51 serves as the cover thumbnail image for the video and is composed of a doubling of the trigram ‘thunder,’ symbolising arousal; the first winds of early spring, setting the forces of growth and generation into motion after a frozen winter. Hexagram 63 ends the video, symbolising fearless flowing water nourished by the energetic force of fire. In the spoken text overdubbed throughout Drawing Remains Drawings Remain, there is reference made to the androgynous, goat-headed Baphomet, a figure made famous by Eliphas Lévi in his Dogme de la haute magie (1854), a figure which Levi associates with “a symbolisation of the equilibrium of opposites.” The Yijing is also a play of opposites, of yin 阴 (broken) lines and yang 阳 (solid) lines, symbolising the dark and light, or passive and active, respectively. Its hexagrams are dualistic representations of all forces and entities in existence, which come into being through reiteration and permutation, changing all the time. The artist’s large oeuvre works in similar ways, repeating with nuance, developing in subtle reversals and traversals through his own creative practice. What the art world media has failed to articulate, his own works have taken on the responsibility of enunciating in inter-textual and textural practices and texts.
Hexagram 51 & 63
My last thread is that of recognition, and while MacLennan may not have received the recognition he deserves until recently, as alternative performance histories emerge from the rubble of meta-narrative; I am more concerned with the actual notion of ‘re-cognition’ as an epistemological structure. When talking about his life and work in the Q & A moderated by Carron Little, MacLennan talks about Zen Buddhism, to which he was first introduced upon moving to Vancouver shortly after getting an MFA at the School of Art at the Institute of Chicago in the late 1960s. “At a certain stage I became aware of wanting to move beyond how and what we’d learned. I felt we’d learned how to represent the illusionistic appearance of a human being.” “If I was painting someone, I wanted to be able to do it from the inside out, not just get their appearance.”“I want to know why I’m alive.” MacLennan develops art to be a vehicle for discovering meaning in life, as an instrument of cognition and re-cognition. Performance art, then, provides the means by which the body and the body’s idea of itself, i.e. the mind (Leibnitz) merge, a vortex for interrelations which come into play while making an artwork. Zen Buddhism is a Japanese variation of a Chinese Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) form of Buddhism known as Chan. The Rinzai school which MacLennan was trained in is known as the school of ‘instant enlightenment,’ as opposed to the school of ‘gradual awakening.’ This ‘instant’ school seeks escape from cognitive structures through total embodiment which is trained through ‘drawing breath.’ Thus we see that MacLennan’s performative practice is quite focused and disciplined, although it manifests in semiotic complexity and visual structures that challenge narratives of interpretation. I am saddened that we do not have room here to discuss how these three threads of representation, reiteration, and recognition weave into and throughout some of the other selected artworks featured in Maclennan’s 2021 Flow lecture. There are more stories to tell, and to forget, as we throw away the ladder of knowing once we’ve climbed to the source of being.
#sophiakultur #alastairmaclennan #flowsymposium
Endnotes:
Jenny Klein, “Introduction,” in Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, Jennie Klein, Natalie Loveless, eds, Bristol: Intellect, 2020, p. 12.
Cf: Bbeyond Group Performance, Enniskillen, Northern Ireland: 2020, https://amaclennan-archive.ac.uk/2020/12/07/bbeyond-group-performance/ (accessed 6.30.21)
Cf: Fritz Blok, I Ching: A Spiritual Guide, New York: Steward, Tabori, & Chang, 1997.
Julian Strube, “The ‘Baphomet’ of Eliphas Levi: Its Meaning and Historical Context,” Correspondences, 4 (2016), pp. 37-79. p. 39