Performance art does not lend itself easily to institutional spaces – partly because they are often designed to inspire static contemplation, partly because it’s a term with almost as many different definitions as there are artists who practise it.
So this summer’s opening of Tate Modern’s Tate Tanks, the UK’s first permanent exhibition space for artists involved in “theatre or event type work”, was a striking moment in art and museum history.
This type of art has been boosted further by this year’s Turner Prize, on show at Tate Britain until 6 January, which includes performance artist Spartacus Chetwynd on the shortlist.
Tate aside, many of the UK’s museum leaders agree that a demand for – or at least curiosity about – event-based spectacles is on the rise. Recent examples include Art of Change at the Hayward Gallery (until 9 December), the first major UK exhibition to focus solely on contemporary installation and performance art from China.
There have also been one-off ticketed live “interpretations” of paintings, such as the National Gallery project this summer that saw artists Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger collaborate with the Royal Ballet on performances inspired by three Titian masterpieces.
The Science Museum recently announced a collaboration with theatre producers as part of a planned temporary exhibition about Cern, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva that is home to the Large Hadron Collider.
Ruth Gill, head of interpretation at Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), which runs Kensington Palace and four other sites, says performance is an increasingly important strand of interpretation.
However, working with performance art and theatre is not straightforward. HRP’s recent collaborations with theatrical companies Wildworks and Coney did bring in a more varied audience to Kensington Palace than its usual crowd, according to Gill, but she says they can be “quite a flighty bunch” and won’t necessarily come back.
Performance is expensive, often impractical, and not only can live events go wrong, but they can run the risk of alienating existing audiences and, at worse, particularly in traditional spaces, contaminating a trusted brand. But the shift in public attitudes to live and interactive spectacle over recent years means that performance-based activities cannot be ignored.
Alex Poots is the artistic director of the Manchester International Festival, a biennial performing arts event (4-21 July 2013). Poots comes from a music background, but in 1999 Tate director Nicholas Serota asked him to help stage a performance at Tate Britain featuring artist Steve McQueen and singer Jessye Norman. He has been involved in performance projects ever since.
“Performance is not a mediated experience,” says Poots. He argues that this makes it appealing in today’s world. “Right now, as we become more internet savvy, we’re removed from the so-called ‘authentic experience’. We need to live shared experiences.”
In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, staged a live performance-based retrospective of the work of Marina Abramovic. What was interesting about the show was not so much its staggering popularity (it was one of the top 15 most-attended exhibitions in the world that year), as why people liked it.
The artist sat in a chair every day of the show and, in silence, gave her full attention to whoever took the seat opposite her. Abramovic’s varied audience queued for hours, even sleeping outside at night, just to spend time in her gaze. Her presence was so moving that many who witnessed the performance were moved to tears.
The rest of the exhibition, all historic works from the artist’s career re-staged by artists trained by Abramovic, was conversely dismissed by critics as “bad theatre”.
In a way, this proved her point that all audience-dependent performance art can only work once. But this means that, in order to stage a truly successful performance, both artist and institution must be prepared to invest in risk.
Another vital ingredient is the space. All curators agree that a good show depends on a room being tailored to an artist or vice-versa. How the audience will engage with the performers must also be thought through.
One public UK gallery with a successful history of adapting its spaces for performance art is the Manchester Art Gallery. In 2011, the gallery was emptied of all visual art and divided into 11 Rooms (the title of the show).
People had to walk down a corridor and by opening doors to these rooms, they were already participants.
Maria Balshaw, director of the gallery, says she is dedicated to providing gallery space for performance because it can help people relate better to objects.
“Performance became interesting to me when I started talking to artists about how people view art, not just how they view performance,” Balshaw says. “The kind of attention that we were able to solicit for these events is the kind of attention I want for all of our artworks.
“You’re not looking at art very well if you’re checking your phone or thinking about your next appointment. Marina Abramovic’s thing is: take a deep breath and concentrate on one thing at a time. In that way she’s really marvellously old fashioned and that feels quite radical.”
Annette Mees, co-founder of theatre company Coney, which specialises in bringing work in which “the audience plays a central role” into institutional spaces such as Kensington Palace, believes that the same can apply to historic sites and museums too.
“The difference between our work and the more traditional use of actors in museums is that we don’t believe in live interpretation that is ‘done at you’. We avoid anything that simply creates a mouthpiece for curatorial opinion.”
The company prides itself on site-specific research. One of Mees’s favourite interventions at Kensington Palace involved creating a game in the King’s Apartment.
“It was a place to network, a place to get on in court life,” she says. “As you move through the apartment, you literally climb the ranks – getting closer and closer to the king. It’s interesting because the room itself is layered like a playing board.”
Despite Coney’s growing reputation, Mees says there is still a long way to go to combat the live interpretation naysayers.
“There’s still a lot of dull work around,” she says. “There’s room for live interpretation to be more sophisticated, and by that I mean not authoritative but collective.”
Florence Waters is a freelance arts journalist.
There is a session on theatre and museums at this year’s Museums Association conference (8-9 November, Edinburgh)
"Avoid terms like ‘live art’ and ‘performance art’. I just try to work with artists who have a real understanding of what they’re trying to do in that area and then describe to people what they’re doing. It’s taken us six years to build the trust of our audiences by drawing them in with more established artists. The Tate Tanks are in a good position to promote new talent.”
"What was most important was to have true flexibility. I didn’t know if the scale of the spaces [at Tate Tanks], and the fact that they’re concrete, would make them overwhelming for some work. Anne Teresa’s [de Keersmaeker] work, for example, relied in parts on a single dancer… [She] stripped the space and the lighting back very severely to give the whole set-up a pure, minimal feel.
Conversely, Eddie Peake used dramatic lighting, dry ice and dancers painted head-to-toe in gold, and this made the space feel vast and theatrical-industrial, utterly different.”
"We talk to audiences at every level of planning. We work closely with the gallery, which can involve everything from liaising with security staff to spending time there and getting an understanding of the building.
There’s a stage we call ‘scratches’, where we take a rough theatrical idea to an audience and talk about it so that we can understand where the excitement comes from and where the frictions are.
As a general rule, when you engage with your audience, they return that engagement.”
"I’m not entirely enamoured with the idea of making audiences feel comfortable. It’s not that I want to torture people, but I want them to be surprised.
Two of the best performances in our 11 Rooms exhibition were successful for different reasons. Roman Ondák asked audiences to bring an object to swap. It was popular because people had to bring a part of themselves to it.
Tino Sehgal’s piece contained performances by three child actors whom he had worked with for months. People think performance lacks discipline. That’s a great misconception.”
Update
So this summer’s opening of Tate Modern’s Tate Tanks, the UK’s first permanent exhibition space for artists involved in “theatre or event type work”, was a striking moment in art and museum history.
This type of art has been boosted further by this year’s Turner Prize, on show at Tate Britain until 6 January, which includes performance artist Spartacus Chetwynd on the shortlist.
Tate aside, many of the UK’s museum leaders agree that a demand for – or at least curiosity about – event-based spectacles is on the rise. Recent examples include Art of Change at the Hayward Gallery (until 9 December), the first major UK exhibition to focus solely on contemporary installation and performance art from China.
There have also been one-off ticketed live “interpretations” of paintings, such as the National Gallery project this summer that saw artists Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger collaborate with the Royal Ballet on performances inspired by three Titian masterpieces.
The Science Museum recently announced a collaboration with theatre producers as part of a planned temporary exhibition about Cern, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva that is home to the Large Hadron Collider.
Ruth Gill, head of interpretation at Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), which runs Kensington Palace and four other sites, says performance is an increasingly important strand of interpretation.
However, working with performance art and theatre is not straightforward. HRP’s recent collaborations with theatrical companies Wildworks and Coney did bring in a more varied audience to Kensington Palace than its usual crowd, according to Gill, but she says they can be “quite a flighty bunch” and won’t necessarily come back.
Performance is expensive, often impractical, and not only can live events go wrong, but they can run the risk of alienating existing audiences and, at worse, particularly in traditional spaces, contaminating a trusted brand. But the shift in public attitudes to live and interactive spectacle over recent years means that performance-based activities cannot be ignored.
Alex Poots is the artistic director of the Manchester International Festival, a biennial performing arts event (4-21 July 2013). Poots comes from a music background, but in 1999 Tate director Nicholas Serota asked him to help stage a performance at Tate Britain featuring artist Steve McQueen and singer Jessye Norman. He has been involved in performance projects ever since.
“Performance is not a mediated experience,” says Poots. He argues that this makes it appealing in today’s world. “Right now, as we become more internet savvy, we’re removed from the so-called ‘authentic experience’. We need to live shared experiences.”
In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, staged a live performance-based retrospective of the work of Marina Abramovic. What was interesting about the show was not so much its staggering popularity (it was one of the top 15 most-attended exhibitions in the world that year), as why people liked it.
The artist sat in a chair every day of the show and, in silence, gave her full attention to whoever took the seat opposite her. Abramovic’s varied audience queued for hours, even sleeping outside at night, just to spend time in her gaze. Her presence was so moving that many who witnessed the performance were moved to tears.
The rest of the exhibition, all historic works from the artist’s career re-staged by artists trained by Abramovic, was conversely dismissed by critics as “bad theatre”.
In a way, this proved her point that all audience-dependent performance art can only work once. But this means that, in order to stage a truly successful performance, both artist and institution must be prepared to invest in risk.
Another vital ingredient is the space. All curators agree that a good show depends on a room being tailored to an artist or vice-versa. How the audience will engage with the performers must also be thought through.
One public UK gallery with a successful history of adapting its spaces for performance art is the Manchester Art Gallery. In 2011, the gallery was emptied of all visual art and divided into 11 Rooms (the title of the show).
People had to walk down a corridor and by opening doors to these rooms, they were already participants.
Maria Balshaw, director of the gallery, says she is dedicated to providing gallery space for performance because it can help people relate better to objects.
“Performance became interesting to me when I started talking to artists about how people view art, not just how they view performance,” Balshaw says. “The kind of attention that we were able to solicit for these events is the kind of attention I want for all of our artworks.
“You’re not looking at art very well if you’re checking your phone or thinking about your next appointment. Marina Abramovic’s thing is: take a deep breath and concentrate on one thing at a time. In that way she’s really marvellously old fashioned and that feels quite radical.”
Annette Mees, co-founder of theatre company Coney, which specialises in bringing work in which “the audience plays a central role” into institutional spaces such as Kensington Palace, believes that the same can apply to historic sites and museums too.
“The difference between our work and the more traditional use of actors in museums is that we don’t believe in live interpretation that is ‘done at you’. We avoid anything that simply creates a mouthpiece for curatorial opinion.”
The company prides itself on site-specific research. One of Mees’s favourite interventions at Kensington Palace involved creating a game in the King’s Apartment.
“It was a place to network, a place to get on in court life,” she says. “As you move through the apartment, you literally climb the ranks – getting closer and closer to the king. It’s interesting because the room itself is layered like a playing board.”
Despite Coney’s growing reputation, Mees says there is still a long way to go to combat the live interpretation naysayers.
“There’s still a lot of dull work around,” she says. “There’s room for live interpretation to be more sophisticated, and by that I mean not authoritative but collective.”
Florence Waters is a freelance arts journalist.
There is a session on theatre and museums at this year’s Museums Association conference (8-9 November, Edinburgh)
Alex Poots, director, Manchester International Festival
"Avoid terms like ‘live art’ and ‘performance art’. I just try to work with artists who have a real understanding of what they’re trying to do in that area and then describe to people what they’re doing. It’s taken us six years to build the trust of our audiences by drawing them in with more established artists. The Tate Tanks are in a good position to promote new talent.”
Catherine Wood, curator of contemporary art and performance, Tate Modern
"What was most important was to have true flexibility. I didn’t know if the scale of the spaces [at Tate Tanks], and the fact that they’re concrete, would make them overwhelming for some work. Anne Teresa’s [de Keersmaeker] work, for example, relied in parts on a single dancer… [She] stripped the space and the lighting back very severely to give the whole set-up a pure, minimal feel.
Conversely, Eddie Peake used dramatic lighting, dry ice and dancers painted head-to-toe in gold, and this made the space feel vast and theatrical-industrial, utterly different.”
Annette Mees, artist, co-founder of Coney theatre company
"We talk to audiences at every level of planning. We work closely with the gallery, which can involve everything from liaising with security staff to spending time there and getting an understanding of the building.
There’s a stage we call ‘scratches’, where we take a rough theatrical idea to an audience and talk about it so that we can understand where the excitement comes from and where the frictions are.
As a general rule, when you engage with your audience, they return that engagement.”
Maria Balshaw, director, Manchester Art Gallery
"I’m not entirely enamoured with the idea of making audiences feel comfortable. It’s not that I want to torture people, but I want them to be surprised.
Two of the best performances in our 11 Rooms exhibition were successful for different reasons. Roman Ondák asked audiences to bring an object to swap. It was popular because people had to bring a part of themselves to it.
Tino Sehgal’s piece contained performances by three child actors whom he had worked with for months. People think performance lacks discipline. That’s a great misconception.”
Update
07.11.2012
The article originally stated that the exhibition 11 Rooms took place at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. It actually took place at the Manchester Art Gallery.
