Flow embody • in site
Sophia Kidd on Paul Couillard
On Thursday, June 2, 2022, the Flow • embody in site 2022 symposium kicked off with an online lecture given by queer performance artist, curator, and scholar, Paul Couillard.
The latter two thirds of Couillard’s hour long talk, GESTURE: The materiality of animateness, was given against a virtual backdrop of a moving-slide representation of his performance art corpus. These traces of the artist’s body in past movement works were populated by the curator’s accessible and generous tone as well as scholar-speak in real-time. Host Martine Viale integrated the lecture with our own understanding, conscientiously leading into an introduction to Couillard’s multi-dimensional career, and inviting us to join in a Q & A after the lecture. We were encouraged by the artist to take advantage of any glitches in technology of his presentation to get up and stretch, move about, or make a cup of tea. This unique approach to technical difficulties was one of many gestures animating the soul and presence of Paul Couillard.
Jacq Garcia on Victoria Stanton
I have been thinking non-stop about stopping. What does it truly mean to stop and be in the present? Victoria Stanton’s “What motivates you to stop?” was a refreshing and much needed lecture to start my own process of stopping.
Victoria began to think about nothing through thinking about stillness and interstitial spaces. The in between of doing became places of something that wasn’t exactly concrete. The transitional space became a moment where time could be bent as these were considered to be temporary, however if the temporary is made longer or the moment became a focus the expectation would shift and the nothing becomes something. This rethinks what spaces are, what they can do, and what they can be.
Jennie Klein on Finale Flow Lunchtime Concert
Memories of Shelter by Yaryna Shumska was livestreamed from a suburb of Lviv, Ukraine, where she teaches in the Department of Contemporary Art Practices at the Lviv National Academy of Arts (LNAA). Lviv is a city renowned for its medieval architecture and cobblestoned city center and a designated UNESCO world heritage site. Largely untouched by the fighting going on elsewhere in the Ukraine, Lviv has become a sanctuary city where Ukrainian refugees from besieged cities are welcomed. Shumska’s performance made reference to a humanitarian crisis that was not readily apparent in the quiescent streets through which she traveled.
Jacq Garcia on Carali McCall
’I miss the land, but does the land miss me?’ was lecture all about place, longing, stillness, and endurance. The lecture opened with a land acknowledgment: transmitting from Council of three fires Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi Nations also known as Chicago, Illinois there was also an acknowledgment of immigrants, migrants, black and brown ancestors as well as the extractive and colonial infrastructure of digital computations which uses electronics and servers all of which are made possible by occupying places where other beings live currently or once lived.
Jennie Klein on Dimple B Shah
During the seventies, feminist artists turned to performance art in order to make ritualistic pieces that invoked a non-patriarchal religious spirituality. At the time, invoking a mother goddess to counteract 50,000 years of patriarchal rule seemed like a radical act. Just ten years later, invoking the mother goddess and using ritual was no longer viewed as being so radical. In fact, western feminist scholars and critics, many of whom were being appointed to positions within the academy, were somewhat embarrassed by cultural feminist art, which they saw as essentially flipping the patriarchal binary hierarchy of male/culture/language vs. women/nature/the body without questioning what it meant to embrace that binary, and why it was embraced in the first place. What had previously been radical was seen as hopelessly naive, simplistic, and guilty of cultural appropriation. Thus the critic Craig Owens, in his much cited two part article “The Discourse of Others,” published in The Anti-Aesthetic (edited by Hal Foster) in 1983, did not mention any artists who were working with images of the goddess, even though artist such as Marybeth Edelson and Betsy Damon were working in New York City, where Owens was based.
Elisa Shoenberger on lo bil
The power of public performance art is the unknown encounter. It’s watching performers interact with the outside world, whether it’s the physical landscape they inhabit or their relationship to people and other animals around them. Naturally, the level of improvisation varies per performer and performance. Some are contained pieces, requiring little audience input, but not fully isolated from the world. Other pieces and performers invite participants into the performance.
Jennie Klein on Frans van Lent
Thirty years ago, Peggy Phelan published Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge), in which she argued that the power of performance as an art forms lies in its inevitable disappearance. Published in 1993 as video technology was just becoming available, Unmarked referenced a different, earlier economy of performance art, one in which description was more important than documentation, and it was often difficult to find either, since most were tucked away in limited run catalogs. Within 15 years, the iphone and the internet had changed everything. Performance art no longer disappeared. Instead, it continued to live on social media platforms, artist websites, and art publications.
The workshop Performance on the Border of Visibility, led by Frans van Lent for the 2022 Flow Festival, was about returning to the idea of the unmarked/unremarkable performance. Over two days, van Lent encouraged participants to think about making public performances that disappeared into the public space. Only the artist would know that they were performing. The public audience who encountered the piece would not be aware that anything was different, out of the ordinary, or amiss.
Elisa Shoenberger on Hector Canonge: Communicating in the Gaps
In this age of dizzyingly fast communications, we forget how mere decades ago mail was most people’s form of contact. People sent handwritten long letters or even postcards telling them about their adventures. People would have to wait days, sometimes weeks, even months for letters to arrive to learn how their loved ones were doing. There was no guarantee of a reply. This world seems ancient compared to our communications today where we can zip off an email, hop on a video call with someone across the city, the country, or the world.
Welcome to Flow 2022 by Carron Little
After the intimacy and warmth of community feeling created at last year’s online public performance symposium, we have decided to organize another. Flow • embody in site 2022 an online public performance symposium will bring practicing public performance artists together to create new work, to be in community and share work at the finale weekend of live public performances from around the globe.