Epilogue

This year’s Visualeyez Festival took as its thematic the notion of the city, which became a departure point for performance works challenging habitual assumptions and perceptions of how bodies encounter urban landscapes. In particular, many artists sought to challenge the idea of utilizing the urban setting as a stage or proscenium to be encountered by a festival audience. The performances exhibited a tendency to augment and generate systems and relations flowing within networks already present in the city. In this sense, many of the works created mutually parasitic relations, adding to the various urban systems without destroying them. Most of the works sought to leave little disruption and did not explicitly embrace overt political tactics.

The parasitic relation differs from the expected performer/audience or performance/site relation in that it doesn’t function independent of its host. For example, Nicole Fournier’s guerrilla gardening was playful and unobtrusive as we planted green spaces in abandoned lots and harvested plants from a parking lot. Amber’s strategic appropriation of the marketing iconography on Whyte Avenue to legitimize her “Amber” product line, was similarly playful. Lori Weidenhammer’s quasi-educational performance about the plight of the disappearing honey bee and Colony Collapse Disorder was surprisingly informative as it was meditative. None of these works can be distinguished from the already existent urban network in which they are presented, confusing an expected distinction between artist/audience or stage/artist. These works operate in symbiotic relation, mutually enhancing systems through dynamic exchange that cannot be reduced to cause and effect.

What makes these interventions interesting is that they question their own mode of display and function, as much as they created modes of experiencing and perceiving the city. In other words, these interventions are also operating as forms of research into strategies for developing new relations between audience and performer/artist. The tension between the expectations and conventions of artistic and cultural production are felt in the official promotion and schedule that outlines times and locations for public audiences to attend and see performance art. But in reality, audiences often were frustrated by the fact that there was nothing to see, as performances were nomadic and at times difficult to distinguish from regular occurrences. It was the accidental audience, or passersby, who often experienced the performance---but did not know it to be such. For the artists, this accidental encounter was often the most successful. Other times, the artists themselves were the main audience for the work.

Many of the artists explicitly articulated a desire to erase the ‘stage’ of performance and challenge the audience/performer relation by becoming imperceptible as performers. (This is articulated particularly in the works of Emma Waultraud Howes, Marc Couroux and Juliana Pivato, and Sara Wookey). In this way, becoming imperceptible can be seen as an extension of a parasitic relationship, where imperceptibility follows from indistinguishable separation between site and event. However, the artists’ desire to become imperceptible was subverted by the festival program schedule that listed locations, times and dates for festival audiences to attend works. The assumption that the artist/performer must be physically present during “the performance” still continues as a conventional trope in many performance art festivals and is often expected by festival audiences. This assumption is embedded in an ideology that privileges an ontological framing of performance and the physical body (championed by Peggy Phelan in the 80’s) based on notions of temporal presence. Phelan’s ontology of performance work links the work’s existence to the presence of artist and audience in the “same” temporal frame and geographical space when in fact many encounters with performance may occur through the document, as argued by Auslander. Many of the festival artists expressed the need to both create and experience the zone of indiscernability, where time and space are not fixed. This is a zone where perception is vague—the audience and performer’s roles are not formed - and things are (as noted in the intro) openly sociable: not gridlocked.

One of the issues raised in discussion with the artists was the problematic expectation that the artist’s intention match the project’s realization. Often this is the criteria by which performance and other art works are evaluated. In current discussions in the art conservation and documentation communities, the artist’s intention is often used as the benchmark by which to preserve works. The reality is that often in artistic production (as well as in documentation and conservation) the intention is often not realized in the work: something else happens. When enacting performance in the city, something else must inform the work beyond what was planned. Amber Landgraff explicitly worked with this as a conceptual premise in her work—knowing that philanthropic gestures are not always realized in practice, despite these ‘best’ of intentions. Sometimes the realization supersedes the intention. Indeed, in blogging a record of these events, something different from the artists intentions or the performance event occurs.

The festival blog, a form of urban digital sprawl itself, in some cases superseded its intention to document. Many of the performance works will be experienced by a larger audience and over a greater duration of time than the works were through the live encounter. Festival artists are aware of this fact, and many expressed an interest in this platform as an extension of their performances as self-reflective research. The performance documents, as seen in the parasitic blogs and comments reflect the processual quality of the projects. In this sense, the documentation process is utilized as a platform for processual performances. There is not the sense that the performances are finished but in the process of becoming—and this is the very quality that lends to the dynamic of research and creation or performance research.

Afterthoughts before the epilogue

The festival is over and all the artists have left Edmonton. It is really quiet in the gallery--a little eerie. Todd, Josh and I sit in the kitchen and catch up on emails. I try to correct some travel plans. If all goes as planned, I depart on Wednesday.
I will post an epilogue on the blog after I have had a week to reflect on the events some more. (I encourage those of you who want to post more comments on the blog to please feel free to do so!).

Live Dining, Nicole Fournier

Live Dining (second event) Nicole Fournier Video Still: Tagny Duff

Live Dining is a two-part performance facilitated by Nicole Fournier inviting participants to create polyculture ecosystems in the city. Polycultural agricultural systems, which feature diverse types of plants and ecosystems, have become a rarity within the rapid growth of monoculture systems that yield larger crops returns. Live Dining raises issues around the growing presence of mono-agriculture production, a mode of food production conducted in rural areas and urban sprawl that can have devastating impact on the balance of the natural environmental habitat. (This has been noted as one potential causes of the disappearance of honey bees and is discussed further in Lori Weidenhammer's work). In this work, Fournier, gallery staff, festival artists and participants work together to both harvest natural food sources in the city and create a polycultural agriculture system with both cultivated and wild plants. In both works, the ritualistic practice of eating food is performed.

The first Live Dining event takes place in a parking lot. We meet at the gallery and pick up various objects –like chairs, eating utensils, and cultivated plants for seeding. Then we walk in a procession to the parking lot a few blocks away. Nicole instructs us where to set up the table, chairs and planters. Then she shows us the different kinds of eatable plants in the parking lot, which we begin to harvest. Soon we have a pile of green eatable “weeds” on the table. Nicole invites us too cut, chop and cook the various plants and food items from the natural and cultivated plants on an electric stovetop.

We occupy the parking lot (a private space) while we cook and eat. As part of the ritual of dining we also drink wine- another illegal form of conduct. A police officer drives up to the group and asks, “what is going on”? Juliana tells him that this is part of an art festival and invites him to join us for dinner. Many of us strike up a conversation with the police officer for about 20 minutes and we talk about the current housing crisis in Edmonton—which he says is media hype. The cop soon realizes that we are not trouble, asks us to stop drinking and then drives away. We keep eating (and drinking) until everyone is full and then return to the gallery.

The second action conducted for Live Dining takes place in a vacant grassy lot located in residential neighborhood. When we arrive at the site, Nicole is there planting corn and squash according to an early Mayan polyculture design. We all help dig and plant the garden. People driving in cars and walking by stop and ask us what we doing. When we tell them we are planting a garden, they seem fine with it- even though this is obviously not our property. Nicole forages for Burdock which grows in abundance on the lot while some of us start cutting food for dinner. Again, we have set up the dining room with the electric stove to cook vegetables.


Live Dining (second event), Nicole Fournier Video Still: Tagny Duff


Both these actions conducted as part of Live Dining speak to and create sustainable agricultural practices in the urban landscape. The piece enacts guerrilla gardening and utilizes an interventionist strategy employing direct action to create green spaces and food sources in unexpected and often illegal spaces in the city. These kind of guerrilla actions seek to generate and sustain polyculture ecosystems in areas that have been neglected or perhaps mis, or under used.


Live Dining (second event) Nicole Fournier Video Still Tagny Duff

As with other guerrilla gardening innitiatives Live Dining employs a grassroots community sensibility. The gallery staff has laboured to find suitable spaces for the events, and gather the plants, materials and items needed for the event. The festival artists have harvested, planted, cut and cooked the food. The staff at Latitude and another local artist, Lance, has offered to watch the garden over time after Nicole leaves. In order to generate Live Dining and the polyculture systems it creates and comments upon, the social network system used to deploy the piece becomes an extension of the “performance”. In other words, the event of foraging, cooking and eating—is as important as the relations created in the planning and actualization of the work.

In the art context, the enactment of guerrilla gardening references earlier land art movements and, in this case, earlier Fluxus works that often employed the ritual of eating and food. All these works explicitly use collaborative working networks in order to create the work. However, the collaborative frame of this kind of community based artwork is not always fully rendered in art practices today. Conventions around accreditation that demand noting authorship (often single) often continue to be perpetuated in the context of performance art. This pretense can impede the intention of a work—particularly works that are not meant to be performances by one artists, but in fact, is created through many facilitators/enablers and participants. This is important to note. Live Dining raises questions about the role of multiple participants and their own sense of accountability to not just the “art” but to the practice of eating in everyday life.

As we know, the concept of sustainability is fore grounded in many contemporary debates regarding the state of the global environment. The Kyoto Accord emphasized the need to reduce green house emissions by 55 % from the developing countries years ago. The accord was drafted in 1997 and just started being reinforced in 2005. Many of the goals of the accord are not being met. Perhaps guerrilla gardening in inner cities is one way to prompt immediate, albeit small change to the environmental practices in cities. Nicole’s Live Dining is an attempt to bring these ideas to light though aesthetics of care- one that seeks to foster life systems. The shift in the way such environmental conscious practices are enacted also calls for a rethinking of systems of artistic collaboration and the value placed on such relations.

Sara Wookey, Walking Edmonton

Sara Wookey, Walking Edmonton


Sara Wookey’s walking performances prompt encounters with the city as a form of memory. For two days she invites people to enact a walk through the city. However, it is not necessarily the walk that is the arena of this “performance”. It is in the informal conversations with walkers after their trip that facilitate a performance in and through retrospect. The remembering and telling of events becomes exaggerated and personalized through informal exchange of memoirs. The city, in this case becomes one of memory constructed through future recollections of past experiences.

I start at the gallery. On the reception desk there is a sign that gives me an option to choose one of two papers that are folded and stapled. I choose the one that says “Directed Tour”. It invites me to take a 45 minute walk through the city. The directions tell me to walk continuously and if I reach a red crosswalk light, to cross the other side. So I leave the gallery and the tour begins.

I wander out of the gallery and walk towards Jasper Street. I relax. I have time. I give myself over to the directive constraints of walking for 45 minutes. This is strangely comforting. For the last week I haven’t had the time to wander the city. Now I relax and feel the sun on my skin and hear the conversations from people I pass by. I find myself stumbling upon the river shortly after walking through the downtown core. I walk up and down a steep set of stairs and feel my heart rate race. My mind wanders and I forget that I partaking in “a performance”. When I get back to the gallery, I realize that I have not followed the directions since I often stopped at stoplights. I think about it some more and realize that standing still is to be in motion, so perhaps I haven’t unwittingly corrupted the directions.


Walking Edmonton, Sara Wookey
Video by Tagny Duff

During the walk I hold my video camera and put it on 6 second interval record. I am not sure if I will even use the footage. I forget about the camera. When I look at it later I find it amusing that it evidences my stillness while waiting for the street lights to turn green. The pixellated quicktime video creates a different sense of rhythm than the one I experienced on the walk.

When I return, I enter back through the gallery. Sara has set up a map of Edmonton with an index of different coloured pins, each corresponding to particular signification. An orange pin connotes when something memorable occurred. A red one is noted as referencing “where you felt desire”, and a white one marks when you stopped performing the walk. People have indexed their experiences according to these markers and pinned them on the map to correlate where “it” happended. Participants have also hand written thoughts, drawings and notes based on their responses to walks onto the wall of the gallery.

My immediate response was to resist the placing of my experiences on the map. Why qualify, archive and index my sensations on a grid? For some time, that I cannot fully remember, I was off the grid. Drifting. I wandered. I was walking in the city following constraints facilitated by the artist. However, other events and sensations occurred outside of those parameters. I thought about my mother, wondered if my visa payment had gone through yet, enjoyed the sunny warm weather, watched as two people walked slowly down the long steps to the river while complaining about low back pain, and noticed a man sleeping on the bench at the river lookout point.

I meet with Sara at a coffee shop and we continue to talk about my experiences and thoughts about the walk. She tells me that she has been conducting informal follow up discussions with most of the walkers/participants. Similar to our talk, the other conversations she has had tend to be casual and informal. Stories are told and exchanged. This is as much a part of the walk, it seems, as the walk itself. The remembering of the walk becomes the dislocated site of “the performance”. The ritualistic exchange of conversation between strangers and acquaintances becomes, not only the performance, but also the performance of art histories. Oral tradition and the telling of events as one remembers them is often a means of reproducing and creating memory of performance. The construction of personal histories becomes another critical dimension of this work. The impossibility of recording events as we might think they happened and to qualify them as facts is exposed in these dialogues. This oral memory is a kind of nomadic archive that cannot be inserted into horizontal and vertical measurements outlined on a predetermined grid.

Evening of "emerging" artists' performance work

Last night we attended an evening of performance by emerging and not-so emerging artists. ( I wonder at the need to qualify artists in terms of “emerging”, “mid-career” and “ established”--- classification models usually employed by funders).

It is Gabriela Rosende’s first performance and for Jason Chinn and Katherine Krampol it is an opportunity to show and develop some new material. Then there are Julianna and Todd who have been practicing performance for years. Julianna wraps the audience up in a 250 square foot radius floorspace with rope and equates this cramped space to the allotment of living space for alternative low-income housing currently being designed in Vancouver, Tokyo and other cities at the moment. Todd Janes declares that his performance is influenced by all of us and is a personal thank you to all the artists. He eats strawberries and weeds (from Nicole’s and Irene’s performances), uses chalk from Emma’s performance, posts notes on a clothesline (reminiscent of Sara’s archive across the hall), and performs other references to his own experience as curator and artist within the context of living in Edmonton. I was particularly affected when he spoke about how the sound of a thunderstorm and rain on the prairies frightened him, as he poured baking soda over his body, and then vinegar. The chemical reaction between the soda and vinegar created a bubbling and crackling sound as the vinegar ran down his body and dropped to the floor to the sound of intense rain.

The festival is over tomorrow and so this event marks the impending end of our time in Edmonton. It is a small, personal and intimate crowd—mostly the artists from the festival, Latitude staff and board members and the gallery crowd. These kinds of gatherings- a staple in many artist-run and parallel centres in Canada and abroad- still have a grassroots ethic that encourages artists to develop ideas and work within a community of peers. This is a necessary forum for developing art practices and fostering cross-dialogue with other artists, interested publics and arts supporters. It remains me that artists are a public audience too. So often this fact is overlooked.

Digital and Urban Para-Sites

All the works to date have utilized various locations in the city as site-specific to their artistic projects. The artists use the city landscape as the medium for artistic research and performance works. Sometimes this frame is deliberately obscured and falls outside our perception of what we assume to mean the city. Assumptions of how to move and encounter the city are implicitly challenged. The preconceived notions of how bodies move through the ephemeral and physical territories demarcating city space are explicitly reconfigured.

I begin to see each artist's project as a network that expands on potential ways of reinventing the city. Emma explores the potential of expanding everyday habitual gestures articulated within the architectural framing of the downtown core of Edmonton. Amber focuses on questioning the tactical and false promises of “free” exchange in the flows of capital and personal relationships. Lori brings to light the alarming problem of disappearing bees as a result of urban sprawl and dwindling green spaces. She brings a playful analysis and solution to the issue by promising to relay messages to the bees.
Nicole re-imagines ways that natural food sources found in the cracks of parking lots and other unexpected urban spaces might be harvested. Juliana and Marc reconfigure the sound ecology of downtown Edmonton by appropriating musak. Josh brings to light the way bodies work to create relation and movement while navigating through various urban environments – from the dance club, the west Edmonton mall to the exercise club. Irene amplifies how social and private drinking generates undercurrents of violence. Jackson 2Bears illuminates strategies of digital expropriation of First Nation's archival history within the form of live urban VJ/DJ culture so prevalent in large metropolitan cities. Tomorrow I will take a walk with Sara and become a flaneur in the streets of Edmonton. On Sunday, I will participate in creating a sustainable garden designed by Nicole.

All these pieces form a mutual parasitic relation to the city. The cityscape mediates the works as much as the works mediate the city. The trace of this relation continues in the extended “digital sprawl”, as Todd so insightfully noted, on the www via the blog and website.

The parasitic relation and strategies exhibited in this festival raise some important questions. What happens when the artists leave the host city? What remains of the events and interventions? A parasite usually exchanges nutrients with the host in order to sustain itself and the host. When the parasite is removed, the host dies. In this case, the artists are concerned about not leaving the landscape depleted of resources as a result of their performances. Rather, there is an intention to produce connections that grow through person contact and accidental encounters that have occurred through the full ten days of the festival. This is made apparent by the tremendous effort everyone is making to generate parasitic links to the blog, so that the works and ideas continue to grow when the festival is offically over.

Marc Couroux and Juliana Pivato, The Fetish Character of Music and The Regression in Listening.

Marc Couroux and Juliana Pivato, Video: Couroux and Pivato
The Fetish Character of Music and The Regression in Listening.


The sound ecology of each cityscape is littered with prerecorded and live ambient sound. The continuous presence of these frequencies is filtered out through selective attention, and often goes unnoticed. Often the visual is privileged as the sense of navigation, and the aural is disregarded as background or unnecessary excess information. However, the aural dimension of urban life has the potential to move bodies through spaces. For example, muzak, original and remixed versions of popular music, is a staple of urban centres. It bleeds from shop windows and mall entranceways. The constant spillage of ambient music harmonizes with the sounds of mall shoppers and street sounds. Muzak is slyly insinuated into corporate spaces to lubricate the movement of bodies. Pedestrians are soothed into contemplative window-shopping. The steady drone of muzak is intended to deter street loiterers from hanging out. It plays in the background and blends into the sounds of cars driving by, of people conversing.

Juliana and Marc roam around the downtown core in a “performance- van” – a nomadic studio- where they repurpose muzak for passersby. Curtains are strung up around the windows of the van to hide the process of production. The visual effect renders the van as a kind of inaccessible shelter. Marc and Juliana take 4 fragments, randomly generated by MAX (a computer program) from 40 Carpenters’ songs, and attempt to “smooth them out”. Marc works on the keyboard and Juliana sits with headphones and a mic that is amplified. The speakers blast the live remix of the fragmented music emitting a lyrical form of music-muzak out from the van window. This blends with the sounds and muzak that circulate around the outer parameters of urban centres, like The Bay Department Store, Shoppers Drug Mart and other such places.

In order to locate the nomadic van, Marc and Juliana have set up maps of locations and times accessible through their blog. People are invited to find the van and encounter the soundscape Marc and Juliana create. Sometimes they are found, other-times not. Like many other works in the festival, this piece is not intended for an invited audience.

The visual cue of the curtains in the van attracts more attention than the loud oddly repetitive muzak. I find it after wandering around for twenty minutes. I hear the loud sound of the Carpenters’ music and see the van across the street from The Shoppers Drug Mart on 102nd Street. At first glance, it appears as though someone is camping out in their car and listening to a cd that is skipping. Some people stop to see if there is anyone in the van. They might see Marc playing the keyboard through a crack in the curtain. Most people just walk by. The subtle articulation of the sound performance is barely perceptible. Like Emma Howes’ performance, Marc and Juliana also seek to de-emphasize the proscenium and the traditional staging of the performance of music, in order to amplify its trace. In the attempt to de-emphasize the staging, another staging occurs. In the context of Edmonton’s current media focus on the tent squats and growing issue of homelessness due to rising housing costs, the van becomes a display of nomadic shelter. This is further evidenced by the fact that they rent parking space for hours at a time in order to both rehearse and generate muzak for incidental audiences.


When I walk towards the van I am taken by the way the motion and speed of my walking gait is implicated in the growing amplitude of the sounds emitted from the van. My motion determines the volume of Juliana’s singing voice. As I walk past the van, the level increases. The frequencies are reverberated against the cement enclave of the City Centre façade. If I didn’t know that the van was part of the performance, then I might think that the music was coming from a speaker on the building. I look up to the cement ceiling overhangs and search for outdoor speakers, and find none. I sit on a ledge just across from the van and listen. A sentence is repeated over and over. This is not the conventional melodic repetition of chorus lines forming the structure of a popular song. This original and live remix of oddly familiar lyrics and melody is as soothing as it is irritating. I close my eyes and listen for rhythm in the glitch. I discern the sounds of the cars passing by from the flow of this madly repetitive phrasing. I try to discern the music from the ambient- as figure and ground, and realize that this muzak is embedded in the ambient environment. Rhythms that Marc and Juliana create play with the rhythms of the continuous flow of motion in the streets. These are not “dotted rhythms” as Juliana explains in one of her postings on their blog. There is difference created in this repetition. The phrase takes on another form through each re-articulation.

They are not performing for the audience, but inserting an expanding field of unexpected encounter with the frequencies we travel through everyday, perceptible and imperceptible as sound or noise. They don’t want to perform for people, or have people encounter the work as performance. Rather it is the body moving through the aural field and moving the aural field that is the performance. As each body encounters this differently, it becomes impossible to locate the “place” of this performance.

The work illuminates a substrate of time-space that we move through and create in the city, that is rarely consider as a site of performance. Often we think of site-specific work as having to take place in a space or place, at a certain time. The definition of site connotes “a location”. But in this case, I encounter an auralscape that seeps through the parameters of the the visual markers of place. When the van is no longer in my field of vision, the soundscape Marc and Juliana create becomes ubiquitous with ambient sounds of the city. I cannot locate the “place” of this aural encounter on an X/Y axis, even though they created a map to direct me to this area.

Thoughts on Documentation

The morning meetings held every other day throughout the festival focus on the problem of documenting. This is a key concern in the festival given the fact that most works are nomadic and do not lend themselves to the same aesthetic preoccupations as staged performance. In the discussions many of the artists voice a desire not to index the events in a moment in time or as evidence of “what happened”.

Often documentation of performance art (or live art) is recorded with video or photography in order to record the so-called original and authentic moment of a performance. Documentation has often been used to legitimize and historicize performance art and function as evidence of activity to funders. The obsessive and excessive presence of video in performance events has now become normalized. The presence of a videographer lurking in the background of performance works, or audience members using camcorders have become conventional props augmenting the performance event.

Our discussions focus on how this performative presence of a documenter (videographer or witness) might be employed in the works of the festival. I ask each artist how I can engage as an audience member and documenter in each of their works. I ask, might it be more advantageous to include documenters in the creative process of the work rather than after the fact, (as is so often the case of performance art festivals). We talk about the process of documentation as being integral to the development and production of some of the works.

As noted in the previous post, the Visualeyez blog is the site of documentation and reflection for a durational audience. By this I mean that audiences will experience the blog through various lenses of time, (Ie. As a current blog and as an archive). The blog extends the potential experiential dimension of the events through time in a very different way than the accidental encounters with the nomadic performance do. Playing with diverse strategies to encounter the audience and for the audience to encounter the creative impulse of the works, many of the artists have created parasitic blogs that reflect on their own processes of creation throughout the festival. (See the links).

Thoughts On "The Audience"

Besides the performances that I write about everyday, there is a rigorous production of other planned and impromptu works that take place undocumented. Most of the works are nomadic and drift through the city at various points in the day. It is hard to locate the works, and often audiences looking for performance actions end up finding residue and traces. (Especially in Emma Waultraud Howes', Juliana Pivato's and Marc Couroux's works).

The invited audience is in most cases not the desired witness/participant for the work. There is a tension played out everyday between the officially published schedule of the festival performances and the unofficial one that changes everyday. What is the artist's obligation to audiences who expect to find performances as “advertised” and then do not? Traditional festivals intend to build audiences by fulfilling the promises of their schedule and programming. In the case of Visualeyez audiences are expected to find both the information and the performances. Indeed, it is through the process of finding the work, either through deliberate searching for it or stumbling upon it through chance encounter and anomaly, that one fulfills the intent of many of the artists here.

Interestingly, the blog is the most constant and stable site for invited audiences to encounter the performances featured in the festival. The artists are very aware that there is a larger audience watching the progress of their works. In morning discussions, we talk about the impact of the blog audience on the works. Even though there are few comments posted in response to the blog, artists appreciate the fact that audiences can access the processual development of their works throughout the ten days of the festival.

Common Ground, Joshua Schwebel

Common Ground, Joshua Schwebel Photo: Emma Waltraud Howes

To walk in another’s shoes is an empathetic gesture. Joshua Schwebel takes this anecdote to its literal extreme and constructs wearable sculptures made of found shoes that are conjoined at the sole. Josh invites people to wear the shoes and engage with him in various activities such as walking, dancing and exercising. He also invites people to exchange their shoes with his own and walk though the city.

I meet up with Josh in an exercise gym in the downtown core. It is a trendy and spacious training centre. Josh meets with the manager, tells her we are from Visualeyez, and asks if we can exercise on the treadmill wearing the shoes. He notes that we will be videotaping. Somewhat surprisingly, the manager doesn’t find his request strange and generously agrees to let us use the gym as we see fit, free of charge.

This is my second time participating in Josh’s project. Last Saturday I danced with Amber, and also in a triangular connection with Josh and Amber at the Roost Club. Today I try on a different pair of conjoined shoes with Josh. We sit on exercise bikes and attempt to push the pedals wearing absurdly inappropriate shoes.


Common Ground, Joshua Schwebel
Video Tagny Duff

When I push forward, his foot resists my force. My other foot struggles to maintain balance. I try to relax into a rhythm with the least resistance. But even then, Josh’s foot slips and throws us both off balance again. I concentrate on finding the movement of his foot. I wait. I let go of waiting. Then, somehow we feel the movement continue and we are cycling. Something has happened in the lag between feeling like falling off the bike onto the cement floor below, and falling into an unfamiliar sense of balance. This balance relies on interdependence with Josh’s movement. The sense of ground shifts. My own internal sense of balance and horizon line is fundamentally reconfigured. I feel like I am simultaneously falling and sitting.

Josh is concerned with the often-imperceptible negotiations that we encounter between self and other at the level of these physicality-challenging encounters. Proprioception—the internal sense of the body’s movements correlating to its external positioning through muscular sensation - is an interest of Josh’s, and is the sense that he activates in these encounters. The site where the events occur are not as important as are the sensations experienced between Josh and the people wearing the shoes. It is the sense of struggle, the negotiations of dependence and interdependence that produce discomfort, that are evoked. The lag becomes a site of encounter. This lag is in-between the time when one’s body moves with another and when one consciously is aware of the movement.

Josh’s work suggests that the relations we encounter and produce within the city are not external from and of the body. The city is not only an external structure that we wear on our bodies, but it is one that our bodies create in relation. In this case, my relation to the city is created through the movements of our interdependent bodies. I think of Lori Weidenhammer’s ongoing interventions from the “Madame Beespeaker Project”, and recall her explanation of how bees navigate their relations between each other and the hive through the use of pheromones. I think of how birds flock together to form interdependent migration patterns. Josh’s piece also alludes to the potential for humans to navigate with one another through the city via the muscular dimensions of the human body. In his presentation last night, he noted how his physical orientation and sense of balance shifts when encountering a new city, or a new acquaintance. Then the balance stabilizes and the ground solidifies under his feet. Between these disorienting (and uncomfortable) shifts, he learns to navigate. Common Ground facilitates the potential for participants to move through the city as much as create new ways of moving the city.

Drinking In The Kitchen, Irene Loughlin

Irene Loughlin, Drinking in the Kitchen Video still: Tagny Duff

We enter into the kitchen of Latitude 53 and find a place to sit on the floor. Irene Loughlin stands behind the table and grabs a bottle of dark scotch whisky. She proceeds to take copious amounts of drink from the bottle. Then she sits down next to the kitchen table. Slowly she sinks into the chair and lays her upper torso across the table.

This is a semiotics of the kitchen – of sorts.

However, it is not the same kind of Semiotics of the Kitchen performed by Martha Rosler on video in 1975. Whereas Rosler performs (while deconstructing) the engendering of gender in language through kitchen objects, Loughlin performs the excess of the sign experienced in the throws of drunkenness. She makes martinis and margaritas to the rhythm of Rosler’s video which plays as a loop on a VHS monitor placed on the kitchen table. The two performances collide and converse. At moments, Rosler’s articulation of “fork” and motions to jab the air is juxtaposed to Irene’s chopping of lemons with a butcher knife. The audience laughs at Rosler’s exaggerated mocking gesture and simultaneously grimaces nervously at Irene’s vigorous cutting motions. The collision between Rosler’s and Loughlin’s actions produce slippage and breakdown of language. I feel it. So does the audience as Irene serves us martinis and margaritas for the hour long performance.

I watch as Irene stumbles around the kitchen. The ice dispenser on the fridge is stuck. So she walks back to the sink and grabs some ice from the bag. She proceeds to put the ice and vodka in a martini shaker and shakes vigorously. Then she pulls at the lid to open it. But it’s stuck. She tries everything to open it. It won’t open. Members from the audience offer to help. They can’t open it either. Finally Todd leaves the gallery with the shaker and comes back with it opened. Irene proceeds to make martinis and adorns them with olives and lemons. She walks around the table and hands them to people who gratefully accept them.

She pours the ice into a blender and fumbles to switch it on. The smell of burning quickly fills the kitchen. Someone from the audience suggests she put some alcohol in the blender. It needs liquid, otherwise it might burn up the motor. She pours too much vermouth in. Everyone groans. The pouring and mixing of the margaritas continues to intermix with the rhythm of Rosler’s voice “ ladle”, “knife” and “apron”. I am offered a margarita and begin to drink it, even though I am video taping.

The laughter amplifies and gets increasingly louder through the hour of drinking and watching Irene make the drinks. We are complicit and participate in her drunken, clumsy stupor. This kind of social drinking is acceptable. No-one in the room turns the offer for a drink down. The drinks are too strong—too much vermouth and vodka—mixed with strange, horrific garnishes like cucumber, creamcheese, donuts and lemon.

When all the liquor is gone, Irene stops her work. She takes a quick swig of the bottle. Before it disappears, a slight foam appears in the bottle. I realize that it is coke in the bottle. Irene is performing her drunkenness. Everyone in the room, on the other hand, is noticeably intoxicated.

Irene grabs a gun.

There is more laughing. We follow Irene out of the kitchen to the street. She walks in her high heels and apron, with determination ahead of the crowd of people following her. As we walk past a bar, one guy sees us and says, “If you were a native and carrying a gun, the cops would be here in two seconds”.


Irene Loughlin, Drinking in the Kitchen
Video Still: Tagny Duff

We reach a parking lot. Todd, Juliana and other people set up a shooting range against the brick wall of a building. Irene watches intently as 12 cans of beer are shaken and stacked on top of each other. The beer cans tumble, and have to be reset. We wait.

I hear the sound of cop sirens. They grow louder. I look at Irene standing in the parking lot holding the gun, and notice the nervousness in the crowd. The sirens get louder. I wonder what will happen when the cops come. Who will the take the fall for possession of a firearm- Irene or the gallery? What about the public drunkenness and consumption of alcohol? Will the cops let it slid because we are participating in art, which is often the case? I wonder at the complicity we engage in. No-one interferes with Irene’s excessive alcohol consumption. No-one in the audience or on the street stops Irene from walking down the sidewalk with a gun. Unlike pedestrians in the street, we, the invited audience, know this is a performance, and want it to “go well”.


Irene Loughlin, Drinking the Kitchen
Video Still: Tagny Duff

The sirens never arrive. Irene turns her attention to the beer cans and takes aim. She shoots. She’s a straight shooter. All the cans are marked off, and one by one geysers of beer fountain. The crowd is relieved. We clap.

Irene’s staging of drunkenness in the intimate space of Latitude’s kitchen and its spillage on the streets addresses the affects of private and socially legitimized forms of substance abuse. Loughlin reverses the audience-performer role, through the manipulative strategies often employed by social drinkers. “I will drink if you will”. “I will join you in a drink”. But the drink is more than a drink. In this case, the exchange drinking is in excess of its own signification of “alcoholism” or “addiction”.

To join in a drink is potentially as invigorating as it is dangerous. Like Irene, Brian Jungen also brought beer to an art audience in a recent piece Beer Cooler (2002) to “share” in a friendly exchange of “spirits”. The pretence of drinking as a form of friendship may simultaneously be read as a ritual of territorialization. Irene’s friendliness with the audience was similarly a strategic ploy. Getting the audience drunk shifted the terrain of the performance. The audience welcomed her generous gift. Yet her generosity of gift was given on false pretence, she was sober and intended the audience to experience the effects of intoxication. We followed along with her offer and directions. When she takes out a gun, we don’t doubt her motivations. We know that she will be firing the gun at some point because the program said so. But we don’t know how or when or even why, but we go along with it. We trust her, even as we walk down the street with an armed weapon, albeit only a pellet rifle.

Again, I think of the guy at the bar who stated that Native people would not be so invisible when carrying a gun. Irene knows this. The performance of shooting is a direct reference to Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s performance “Shooting the Indian Act” presented in Surrey, England. In this piece Yuxweluptun shoots a paper copy of the Indian Act to protest the ongoing effects of the legislation on Indigenous People. Irene, similarly shots at cans of beers to reject the gift of alcohol and the legacy of ritualized dependency and consumption of intoxications. Within this legacy, the intimate space of ones own kitchen has the potential to become a public shooting range fraught with undercurrents of violence. Casual exchanges between friends and strangers become suspect. Micro-exchanges of these gifts (bottles of wine) are to be received with some trepidation. The semiotics of Irene’s kitchen is overfull. They spill out of the bullet-ridden holes of language, urban dwellings and city streets.

The Madame Beespeaker Project, Lori Weidenhammer

The Beespeaker Project by Lori Weidenhammer
Video Still: Tagny Duff

The urban planning of Edmonton has noticeably reduced allocation of green space in the downtown core. Across from Edmonton City Hall there used to be a large green park where workers in the surrounding area would go to have their lunch. Now it’s a huge square floor of cement that is a parking lot for pedestrians. Workers sit and eat their lunches on benches and cement chairs. Security guards watchfully patrol the perimeters. On the far side of this urban park, a small patch of green space remains as a fragmented trace of what is buried under the clean smooth surface. A fence surrounds it and a sign says “stay out”. It is intended to deter tent squatters and protesters who are currently squatting in city parks to illuminate the growing issue of increased housing costs, underemployment and homelessness in the city.

Protesters, the underemployed, and the homeless are not the only ones being restricted from accessing green space. So are honeybees, now rapidly disappearing due to reduced natural habitat. Bees are often observed and symbolized as functioning within complex communities and systems of mathematic, spiritual, scientific and sociological interest. The movement of workers in the city is sometimes likened to a hive. Human social relations are likened to the behaviour of “worker bees”. Human cellular processes are founded on the notion of the cells of honeycombs. And, the process of pollination is necessary for the evolution of the world’s food crops. More than a metaphor or a symbol of vitality, the hive and the honeybee is integral to life processes. The relation between the reduction of green spaces, beehives and shelter was a poignant metatext in the site.

Lori Weidenhammer draws our attention to how urban planning affects the eco habitat and the necessary symbiotic relation between humans and bees. Dressed as a cross between a beekeeper, biologist, spiritualist and anthropologist, Weidenhammar embodies the persona of Madame Doolittle, a beespeaker who has acquired the scientific knowledge and developed extra-sensory perceptions to communicate with bees. When people approach the kiosk Weidenhammer speaks openly and matter-of-factly. She invites people to design, stamp and write a note to the bees on a tag card, which she then pins on to a large hive structure located next to the kiosk table that displays various honeybee paraphernalia. There are tags from the previous performance she did in Saskatoon and others collected from a previous site in Edmonton (The Strathcona Market). The tags function as prayers from people of all ages sending well wishes to the bees.

The presentation of this intervention is strangely endearing and the sincerity is a little jarring. Madame Beespeaker/Weidenhammer speaks earnestly about the plight of honeybees. The exchange of conversation is relaxed, as she talks about the social, scientific, educational and spiritual dimensions of the bees to people. There is no pretension, no meta-text. She makes it clear to people that the kiosk is a performance art project. Signs on the kiosk clearly state this fact.

In the context of this location, the kiosk functions as an information display centre on both the honeybee and performance art, as much as a kind of psychic booth as an art fair. The dome tent with the tags, intended to represent a hive, in this case evokes the tent squats. Interestingly, the interior of the dome/hive is not accessible and we are invited to read the well wishes only on the exterior of the hive. Neither bees nor humans can enter “the hive,” or attain shelter from the elements in this context of the park and the performance props.

This disjunction evokes the growing phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder, where the occupants of beehives abandon the queen bee and the hive. One hypothesis proposed is that the recent spike in cellphone use is to blame for the bees’ disappearance. Theories suggest that satellite signals cause interference that prevents honeybees from finding their way back to the hive. It may not be the symbolic and physical barriers that prevent the bees or tent protesters from finding “the hive” or shelter. Weidenhammer’s performance alludes to the fact that imperceptible fields (electromagnetic, psychic, chemical and otherwise) affect the environmental and social habitat of both bees and humans.

Sample Kiss, Amber Landgraff

Amber Langraff "Sample Kiss", Photo: anonymous

Amber Landgraff stands outside of The Spa, a beauty salon on Whyte Street. She has set up a portable kiosk stand to display “Amber” a product line of “break up kisses”. As people walk by Amber offers to give people the “ends of relationships” for free. Most people don’t acknowledge her offer and keep walking. One man stops and asks what she is selling. Amber replies in a friendly, yet professionally confident way, that she is offering four different types of break-up kisses, “goodbye kiss, jealous kiss, bitter and unwanted.” He laughs. Then walks away.

I get up from where I sit observing the situation. I approach Amber and ask what it is that she is selling. Her demeanour is approachable and likable, her tone is clear and confident. She repeats the same script, “ I am giving away the ends of relationships. Would you like to try one?” I say “sure” and decide to select the bitter kiss. Amber writes the word “bitter” down on a blank white business card. Then she takes a pink lipstick from the display and applies it to her lips. Looking straight into my eyes, she glares at me while her face slightly contorts, before she says “bitter kiss”. It is a moment when something in our interaction shifts. I laugh a little nervously, a little uncomfortably. I know this sensation, a mix between humiliation and relief. It’s a sensation I have felt before when giving and receiving bitter kisses in public spaces. This sensation shifts quickly to an intellectual realization that this is an action intended to evoke a kind of derive and detournement of social exchanges. I find my own reaction strangely delightful, and I laugh. She kisses the card bitterly as promised, leaves an imprint and then hands it to me. I thank her, not entirely sure why.

Amber offers to give away “the ends of a relationship”, a paradoxical claim that cannot fulfill its premise. The beginning and end of relations are often signified by performative utterances. For instance, the vows of a marriage promise everlasting love, which as we well know, is often compromised. While divorce, the ‘end’ of a relationship, is arguably the initiation of a new type of relation (ie. the ‘ex’, the friend, the co-parent etc). Ritualized events are used to mark beginnings and endings - to mark key moments of relation in time. They are measurements that signify entry into predetermined and recognized forms of relation. Amber’s bitter kiss, given to me in our encounter, was neither a measurable beginning nor ending, our ‘breakup’ is a relationship that is continuing through different forms of encounter.

I would argue that Amber’s kisses are also not free. She offers what appears to be an altruistic and philanthropic exchange with passersby. Like many marketing strategies, corporations and businesses offer their clients free gifts or free use for ‘trying their products’. Inevitably, these ‘free’ gifts work to socially acclimatize clients to the products as a way of insuring future purchases. Does Amber’s kiss oblige me to her somehow? What is it that she gets in exchange for our transaction? I question my own sense of indebtedness to Amber’s kindness and generosity. I am suspicious. Within the flow of capital exchange and the barter system, free gifts and acts of kindness tend to mean that there is something owed later down the line.

In a conversation I had with Amber, she explains her interest in what she sees as ‘the failure of relation’ in this work. She is aware that the intention to do something for free, for the good of people through altruistic gesture is rarely realized. From the performance, it is clear that many participants do not care about the gesture, as they walk by her or walk away from any relation with her (ironically, these passersby have failed to not have a relationship with Amber). Sometimes the affect Amber may hope to evoke is never realized. Amber also raises an interesting key question. What happens when the intention for a performance is conveyed but never realized? This is an aspect of performance that is rarely questioned. The artist’s intention for a work is usually the gauge for determining the success of a work. When there is not a correlation between the intention and the actualization of a work, it is said to fail. This is often the value system used in the art world to assess and conserve performance art works. But how do we account for the multitude of relations and events that occur not as success or failure, predetermined frames of art reference, but outside the conventions that delineate these values of exchange?

There are moments I feel that, as an “invited and knowing audience” it is too easy to fall into the role of a social anthropologist who perceives actions as quantifiable evidence. When observing interventions in public spaces, I try to sit and watch as “a pedestrian on the street,” but this is compromised by the fact that I possess “insider information”. My presence also renders the event more of a spectacle- with the pedestrians unknowingly performing for me and future art audiences through my presence as blogger.

Evening Presentation, May 20

Tonight’s informal artists’ discussion featured Lori Weidenhammer, Amber Landgraff and Emma Waultraud Howes. All three artists briefly summarized their works that have been actualized over the last three days and raised diverse issues that carried through in the informal discussion.

The problem of a performing for an invited festival audiences was raised through Emma’s series of performances for the project,‘Subtle Architecture’. Many gallery audiences seeking to witness the performances are unable to locate her movements. There is a noticable tension in the desire by audiences to witness the events, and the artist’ desire to challenge such a witnessing. An important question was raised. How can the festival accommodate this “zone of indescernibility” when art’s venues like latitude 53 are obliged to host art “for the public audience”? This question is certainly not a new one, but it continues to impact the presentation and therefore the potential content of works- by its insistence on audience participation. There is an implicit assumption by funding structures that artists need an audience to witness the event, in order to authenticate it as performance or art. This follows the notion of artists as cultural workers who’s role is to speak to “the public”. While this is most certainly a desire and motivation for the production of some site-specific performance works for by artists in the festival, most are questioning the assumptions of how one witnesses a performance and how publics are amorphous and multifaceted.

The notion of exchange with audiences soon followed. If works are not to be exchanged with invited audiences from the festivals, then how does exchange function in such a context?

Questions around problems of documenting are also raised. Key points of concern include:

In what ways does documentation impact the reception of site-specific work?
How might documentation function in duration through time?
How does documentation affect modes of access, encounter and reception with the audience?
How is history and mythmaking of performance events created via documentation?
How the excess of documentation functions in artistic practice?
How is the fragility and shortened life span of electronic media documentation vs analog media impacting performance art practices today?
Interestingly, surveillance as a form of documentation and evidence was not brought up.
(This is an issue particularly relevant to the theme of the city and is present in many works, especially Emma's recent performances.)

Morning Discussions Part 1

With so much happening in the festival, I have made a point of holding morning discussion sessions at Latitude 53 so that artists can regroup, reconnect and talk about issues that surface from the previous days performances. It is valuable time to get feedback and further develop concepts and ideas for upcoming performances. For me, its an opportunity to get a sense of what concerns are being explored from the artists as a group, which I hope will expand my focus on each artist’s work. This festival fosters a collaborative spirit of artistic research, production and presentation, and so these informal gatherings are generative of conceptual and applicable influences that will most probably surface in the festival works, and/or spin off into other works.


Josh and Emma dance with conjoined shoes and wearable sculpture at the Roost Club
as part of Common Ground by Joshua Schwebel.

This morning we (Josh, Lori, Nicole, Amber, Emma, Irene, Caitlyn and I) met up for the first informal group discussion and a breakfast at Latitude 53. I wanted to explore some of the concepts and issues raised in Jackson 2Bears VJ performance The Iron Tomahawks at the Harcourt House last night and get a sense of other thoughts about the work before I met with Jackson to talk one on one. But before we began the conversation, we reminisce about Joshua Schwebel’s intervention that took place late last night at the local queer bar, Roost, for those who were not there. Josh offered his wearable shoe sculptures for us to use when dancing at the club. Josh and Emma awkwardly stumbled onto the dance and moved together constrained by the shoes and extended soles that bound them together. The play of tension between the movements of their bodies reminded me of Emma’s performances earlier that day. (See Subtle Architectures posting for more info). The playfulness of this intervention contributed to the social architecture of the club scene, offering a subtle critique of the concealed effort and negotiations that occur between the sexual and platonic relations on the dance floor. The vision of Josh and Emma dancing and stumbling off balance also reminded me of T.L. Cowan’s monologues about urban angst and alienation on the opening night. This is a theme that Josh also explores in his site-specific works that will be conducted next week. (Don’t forget to sign up for an appointment with Josh by emailing him at privatejosh@gmail.com).

Jackson 2bears, Iron Tomahawks

Iron Tomahawks, Video and VJ performance Jackson 2bears

It is serendipitous that Jackson 2bears VJ’ed and brought the club context to Harcourt House hours before we found ourselves reversing the context, by bringing art to a club and dancing to DJ’ed music later on at night in Joshua Schwebels shoes. ( See Part 1 Morning discussion). The presence of VJ performances, most often experienced in club settings, is becoming increasingly more visible in performance art festivals.

Last night The Iron Tomahawks By Jackson 2bears was presented at Harcourt House in partnership with Latitude 53 and Visualeyez. This live performance utilizes digital encoded vinyl and software developed by the artist to mash-up and remix found film and video images of Native stereotypes ( Ie. White male actors dressing up like “Indians” from Hollywood films and also anthropological studies of Native dress and dance). Jackson 2bears remixes and reappropriates media images depicting Native stereotypes as a both a critical intervention into and “ a self-reflexive path of engagement with his native heritage”. (Noted in the festival program).

During the performance the audience sits on chairs on the edge of the exhibition space. Club lights strobe through the room, and a large screen displayed the mixed video. Jackson stands behind a table and a set of turntables, mixing throughout the performance. Some audience members comment on how it is staged like a high school dance or local gymnasium performance. Irene Loughlin notes that it reminds her of inner city gymnasium or community performance venues. Interestingly, no one dances, even though there is a large empty floor in the centre of the room. In the context of the Harcourt House, the event functions as a form of storytelling or a video presentation consisting of a 28 minute VJ mash-up remix of archival film and video material.

Technically speaking, the integration of video image and rhythmic beats is well crafted and performed live the use of the digital-encoded vinyl and custom made software give the mix a quick and smooth correlation between audio and image. See a short clip from the performance above.

One of the criticisms that often surfaces around the performance of DJ/VJ mixing is that the convention of display and staging is rarely critically considered. Performance art audiences have come to expect a conceptual engagement with the audience/performer relationship. Given the context of the festival, one that is very much about site-specificity and audience-performer relations, the site where the mixing occurs also becomes integral to the performance. In this case, the audience is left unsure of how to engage with the work. Do we dance, as if we are in a club? The chairs set up in the room, suggest to the audience that it is expected that we sit and watch. If I had been at a club, I would have been inclined to dance—but as it was, I would have been the only one on the room and then I would be implicated as a “planted” performer-so I didn’t.

Perhaps it is the nature of the introduction to the event that added an air of austerity and sobriety to the context. The directors of the galleries made a point of thanking all the funders, the city counselor (who was in the audience), noting how important it is to prevent racism against Native and First Nations People. While this is certainly necessary, the focus on first nations representation as a highlight of the festival was extensive and disproportionate to the full scope of the artistic expression of Jackson 2bears performance. This may have more to do with the site specificity of the Harcourt House as a venue that relies on government funding that requires specified allocation of funds towards diversity initiatives. While it is necessary to insure that moneys are allocated to artists traditionally underrepresented in the arts, the need to insist that this be the main point of focus rather than the work and ideas brought forth by the artist is disconcerting. It is for this reason that the context and site of the performance was perhaps more somber than what might have been intended within the delivery of the performance.

Jackson 2bears seeks to re-appropriate stereotypical images by decoding and recoding them. He changes the visual syntax and the stereotypes are reordered through repetition. Deleuze makes the case for difference in repetition, where movements that are reappropriated bring with them a shift or drifting. Others disagree with this, like Tanya Lukin-Linklater one of the artists who performed the first night, who commented to me that the tactic of appropriation does not change the stereotypical representation of First Nations People. Some images—like those of the Pow Wow are sacred, she notes. I wonder at the site of performance in relation to the images and sound---how might the frame of presentation be recoded and shifted to confront the desires and promixity of funders, audience and performer? How might this engage a politic of (re)appropriation that both challenges stereotypes and entices audiences to share in divesting images of racist inflections?

Opening night at Latitude 53

From left to right, Juliana Babaras, Todd Janes, Irene Loughlin and Tagny Duff

Last night was my first opportunity to meet and greet all the artists and local folks at the very stylish artist-run centre, Latitude 53.

Local Edmonton-based artists Tanya Lukin-Linklater, T.L. Cowan & Mickey Valley, and Lance Mclean open the festival with a diverse series of performances. The artists provide a local context- a necessary component for the theme of the city.

















Tanya Lukin-Linklater, photo Jessica Tse

Tanya Lukin-Linklater, a local performance artist featured in last year’s festival who incorporates Alutiq dance, performance and installation, starts the evening with a performance that touchs upon the current issue of homelessness in Edmonton. Given the current boom in Alberta’s economy and the mass migration of people across the country moving to find employment, the reality of rising rental costs, and reduced funding for missions and shelters, (issues often underreported in the media) the performance is quite pertinent. Her performance takes place on the outdoor patio of Latitude 53. Carrying garbage bags and blankets, she walks to a water faucet and sits down next to it. Taking a handkerchief, she turns on the water and dips it in before wiping her body with the damp cloth repetitively. This, she later told me, referenced an article she recently read in the paper about a women living in Edmonton who has been sharing her outdoor faucet with people who do not have access to clean water. Soon, she turns the water off and stands up, grabs the garbage bags and walks to the other side of the patio. Laying down a tarp, she then proceeds to take out “Five Alive” 2 litre juice boxes from the garbage bags to build a wall around her in the shape of an igloo. Lying down in this makeshift shelter, she moves in such a way to break the wall, sitting up stiffly and issuing low, truncated throat singing.

T.L.Cowan, photo Jessica Tse

T. L. Cowan expands on the spoken (and unspeakable) rituals expressed in the minefield of personal relationships enacted in urban centres. A staple of the spoken word festival circuit, Cowan presents a provocative three-piece monologue with soundscapes by Mickey Valley. Cowan smashes through sexual stereotypes and embraces the subtle and vast modes of sexual behaviour, intimate relations founded on fear, obsession and mania. Cowan delivers three separate, yet interrelated, carefully crafted monologues. They intertwine humour with explicit observations about the struggles embedded in maintaining and developing relationships with friends, families and lovers in various urban contexts. She later tells me that such risky content is not welcome in other spoken word festivals where audiences expect artists to follow conventions of entertainment culture. Cowan notes that audiences at performance festivals are open to experiencing discomfort and fear and are willing to subvert expected conventions of audience behaviour- such as mandatory clapping at “the end” of a performance. (Before she started the performance, Cowan asked the audience to refrain from clapping in between the three sets of monologues).

Lance McLean, photo Jessica Tse

Also exploring rhythms of fear and provocation, Lance Mclean places the audience in the role of participant. As we walk into the gallery, we see a body with its head encased by a white plinth. The audience is invited to use a large handsaw to cut through the plinth on a line located (dangerously) near the covered head. The first cut takes time. Audience members take turns sawing. The relations among the participants shift as the energy levels ebb and flow. Some choose to help hold the plinth to aid the process of sawing. Others egg people on to share the labour. Most stand by and watch closely. Once the first half of the plinth is sawed, the cell phone in the bodys’ (Lance’s) back pocket rings. Todd Janes grabs it and answers. A voice tells him to ask people to cut on the second line marked on the plinth. Some members of the audience take action and grab additional plinths and set up a makeshift sawhorse to help speed the process of cutting through the second line. When that is done, people clap, somewhat grateful that the process is over. Then a planted participant proceeds to direct the body (with the head still in the plinth) to lie on the floor, as he continues to cut very dangerously close to the head. So close, in fact, that I am seriously concerned that my first aid classes are going to come in handy. There is a moment when I think that it is my responsibility to stop the process for the sake of Lance’s safety—yet, I do nothing. I watch as Lance’s head is freed from the plinth, and he walks out of the gallery.

The sense of suspension, impending accident and of a lag in time proliferates all the events. A fitting prelude for the rest of the festival perhaps. As an audience member I experience and feel the affects of the performances. I hold my breath. I shift the weight of my body while sitting, standing and leaning. I strain to watch. I am uncomfortable- in a productive sense. When Tanya sings, the hair on my arms stands up. I feel sick. When T.L. talks about being obsessed with pain and trauma, I uncomfortably shift my sitting position. When Lance puts himself in such danger, I experience back pains. At this point, time takes on a different kind of duration. It speeds up and slow down. My concentration shifts from intellectual focus to abstract sensations.

My memory of conversations and details that occurred from last night are not so clear. In retrospect, the evening is becoming something else. I know I have forgotten details and reconstructed events according to my faulty and fragile memory. (In fact, my short term memory is notoriously bad—but thankfully I have a vivid long term memory. Not a useful quality for immediate blogging, though). This lag in memory plays a major role in documentation and writing on performance in general. Things get omitted, forgotten, overlooked and, ultimately, recreated. This fact, I am sure, will be ever present in upcoming posts through the next nine days of the festival.

Subtle Architectures, Emma Waultraud Howes

Emma Waltaud Howes "Subtle Architecture", May 19, 2007
photo by anonymous videographer

Today starts off with a number of performances dispersed throughout various downtown locations. Lori Weidenhammer begins early in the morning at the Strathcona Market, Amber Landgraff finds a spot for her piece in front of the American Apparel, Juliana Pivato and Marc Couroux park their roaming van by the Hudson’s Bay Department Store and Emma Howes begins her nomadic performance in various spots situated in the downtown core. There are so many events happening each day throughout the festival- too many for me to see at once – so I have decided to focus on writing about one work a day. In the morning I met with various artists at the gallery to set up times throughout the week to talk about the process of their work and how they see my role in the documentation of it. In the early afternoon, I spend time with Emma Howes in conversation and witness to her first series of performance actions.

Subtle Architectures: A Practice in Enabling Constraints is a new research project conceived by Emma Waltraud Howes. The project explores and investigates movement of the body within various constraints and structures in the cityscape. Using a yellow chalk, Emma wanders through the city drawing chalk lines on the pavement, and creates subtle gestural movements within them. When her movements become noticeable to people, she stops, leaves the site and then continues to walk on to another location. The point of the project, Emma explains to me when we speak about the work, is to engage with and move through the city as an anonymous body- a body that moves through zones of indescernibility. She intends to remix and recreate gestures of the body found in the urban landscape. In a sense, she is interested in exploring Spinoza’s age old question What can a body do? within the constraints of the city. Emma takes the question one step further to explore how a moving body become “a motion machine” where “the spleen spits at the liver, slosh through the kidneys, gurgles towards the bladder.” (1)

Emma’s project is deliberately imperceptible in its execution. It asks audiences to find what they cannot already perceive. So how does the audience engage in a work that has no obvious entry point- no declared or established point of view, no clear frame of reference? Emma’s conceptual premise explicitly raises these questions. The timeframe and place of performance is denied to the audience. There is no fixed and predetermined stage. Like many of the other artists in the festival, Emma’s nomadic performances cannot be assigned to a schedule- much to the exasperation of audience participants who want to see the performances, but can’t find them. Emma explains to me that it is her intention to challenge the performer-audience divide conventionally upheld in performance, - especially professional dance, a field she is well trained in. Emma proposes accidental encounters with unsuspecting audiences and pedestrians. The festival audience must work to both find and see the “performance”—and in many cases, will fail. But this constructed intentional failure challenges expectations of art presentation and notions of audience.

When I meet with Emma prior to her first performance, we discuss the problem of documenting the work, given the fact that it intentionally seeks to be imperceptible. I ask Emma how my presence and that of a video camera might be relevant to her performances. How might the remembering of her intentions and actions be best evoked? Might another form of media and lack thereof be more desirable? What are the parameters that she envisioned for future audiences accessing the work? Was there a future audience for this work? At what point does the work begin and end, from her perspective as an artist, and mine as a documenter? Knowing that the presence of cameras in a site-specific context (or any event for that matter) inevitably shifts the dynamics of the event itself, I explained to Emma, I want to be clear about how my involvement in the documentation process might impact the work. Emma and I decide, based on the premise of her concept, that it would impede the work if I take any visual documentation. We agree that I will follow her movements as a silent witness.

Emma begins by walking out of the gallery to the street below. I watch her from the patio and see her walk up to a street parking sign two floors below. With a piece of yellow chalk she draws a box around the post, and steps inside it. The chalk marks echo the centre street dividing lines and the parking lots. Emma’s makeshift “stage” is nomadic. She steps inside the lines and begins to move within them. The subtle gestures seem to move the space around her. The chalk lines become abstracts marks that extend beyond their intended function, to create an unexpected harmony with the horizon line of the street and the sky. Her gestural movements are odd. Her arms move vertically along the parking meter. Her legs bend and she sits. Then she stands. Watches. The legs bend slightly, and she collapses ever so slightly. The motion of falling turns to standing motion. The impact of the movement bleeds through the constraints of the “stage” creating a ripple affect. A car driving by, stops. The man inside says something to Emma that I cannot hear. Then drives away. Emma picks up her backpack and chalk, then crosses the yellow line, walks away.

I continue to follow Emma for the next hour as she repeats the drawing of chalk lines on the pavement and creates strange bodies in motion. After the second performance, Emma and I discuss the possibility of videotaping the event in order to experience a sense of the motion she is in the city. Given the public responses to the work, Emma decides that video taping the next few performances may be a worthwhile exercise. I agree to stay inconspicuous in the background, as I tape with my small camcorder.


Subtle Architectures, Emma Waultraud Howes Video: Tagny Duff and Emma Waultraud Howes


The process of witnessing and documenting these performances, in a sense, becomes a major component of the performances themselves. After the performances were done this afternoon, Emma and I revisit the video footage and speak about how the performances were both perceived and imperceptible to city dwellers in the different locations. I note that the video evokes a different sense of timing and rhythm than what I remember seeing during the performances. Emma’s comments, when seeing the video, that she didn’t realize that her movement was not as amplified as she had felt them to be. She also notes the responses from people and recalls the conversations she had with a number of concerned citizens, which at the time I could not hear. We decide that three of the video segments will be interesting viewed on You Tube. Emma decides to keep a log of her observations and additional video footage on the Subtle Architectures blog.

The negotiation process of documentation is often overlooked in performance art festivals and live art presentation. In this case, my involvement with Emma’s project impacted on the development of creative content and the reception of that content. The potential for documentation to be a creative component of performance work is current under realized. Documentation practices (i.e. video and photography) are often seen to be taken from a neutral observer perspective. But this is far from the reality. As documentation is collected and reconstructed, often by gallery documenters, volunteers and/or staff in the pre and postproduction stages- the conceptual constraints of a work are affected. Rather than produce documentation “after the fact”, it is useful in the context of relational art practices, to approach documentation in collaboration with the artist before the performance takes place in order to express the conceptual frame of work. In this sense, Emma’s project along with many of the other works in this festival, ask for such a new methodology and relation between documenters, audiences and her work.

(1) From Emma’s bio in SEE Magazine. May 17-23, 2007, pp 22

Introduction

From the microscopic birds-eye view of the plane window, the city is a circuit board soldered together with asphalt conductors and patches of green space. Like most cities, it spreads out in the form of a grid. The perspective from the plane renders the city abstract. Walking and navigating from within the city is a completely different experience. The streets follow a numbered grid system flowing north and south, making the navigation of the city easy, despite the constraint of cement walls and electronic signals. Grids seek to contain excess movement and relation and bodies, but the spillage of the unexpected is in constant flux. From an abstracted point of view, the city may be seen as an impersonal force and node of networked systems. In the concrete sense, our movements in the city may creatively generate novel relations within and off “the grid”. What interests me, as an artist and researcher, is how abstracted and concrete movements- individuated, singular and collective- create and overflow through the cracks in urban gridding- social, environmental, political and architectural and otherwise.

For the next two weeks artists from Canada and abroad will explore the theme of the city through performance and live art as part of the 8th Annual Visualeyez Performance Art Festival (May 18-28, 2007). Curator (and artist) Todd Janes notes in the festival program; “Specifically, I am interested in how the city grows to enhance or to contain the human elements. A city has systems, flows and rhythms. I am interested in how the individual navigates these entities.” (1) The upcoming events, actualized in multiple forms of performance inclusive of interventions, in situ infiltrations, site-specific performance, cabaret performance and walking performances, will explore and create relations in unexpected ways. In many cases, they will reinvent relations with and of the city. More specifically, the invited artists’ works propose to reinvent and create novel modes and rhythms of relation.

Relation, commonly defined as an aspect or quality that connects two or more things or parts as being or belonging or working together or as being of the same kind, is a concept explored in these works. One might say these work fall under the rubric of Relational Art and/or Relational Aesthetics, terms often used to describe art works that take ‘relation’ to be a social praxis and social engagement between people as a medium for artistic exchange. Nicolas Bourriaud is amply credited for theorizing this genre, which he described in the late 90’s as a new democratic art form that departs from earlier Fluxus and conceptual performance art practices. (2) However, I suggest that the concept of ‘relation’ is under-explored by Bourriaud and may be further considered through the works of contemporary artists now working with/in post-studio practices. A rethinking of relation as an affective force generative of dynamics and rhythms embedded in urban life is necessary. The works featured in this year’s Visualeyez present an opportunity for audiences (both on and off-line) to rethink predetermined mechanisms driving current modes of relations that engender the city. The works in this festival further propose imagining the potential of openly-social networks and “ a sociability in a manner ‘prior to’ the separating out of individuals and the identifiable groups that they end up boxing themselves into (positions in gridlock).” (3) In this sense, the relations to be created by invited artists stand to challenge the definition of relation whereby encounters with the city are not homogenous experiences, but rather, of multiple potential relations.

Visualeyez further proposes a rethinking of relational praxis in the structural form of the festival. As one of the few annual performance art festivals in Canada, it offers artists and audiences up to ten days of networking, performance production-presentation and experimentation. Invited artists focus on developping ideas and praxis shared with audiences. The flexibility of the festival format encourages audiences to take risks, as much as the artists. The delineated roles of ‘artist’ and ‘audience’ are often deliberately subverted, and one could wonder, “where’s the art?”- much to the exasperation of funders who require statistics such as “bums in seats” and audience outreach data. As Janes so eloquently notes, “ You will not find the traditional, much loved, meat on a stick festival environment…” (4) At a time when the Canada Council For the Arts and arts funders are focusing on presentation, audience numbers, and canceling funding for research-creation projects, this festival has been a favorite among artists desiring to experiment and develop new ideas and artistic forms: to think off the grid.

In my role as the resident animator and daily blogger, I also take up a relational praxis that engages with the artists, potential audiences and the city. With my trusty laptop and camera in hand, I migrate through the city streets in search of wireless internet cafes, conversations, chance encounters and site-specific performances. I become documentor, archivist, audience and artist. In the next ten days I will attempt to create memories of the events for and with you: the online audience. This, I suspect, will be a kind of performance of remembering and of creating future memories that unfold through other forms of documentation such as conversations, written comments, and viral proliferation of material via the web. It’s a kind of proliferation I enjoy. Memories of performance do not have to move through a grid of predetermined documentation standards. The standard practice of (over) documenting performance via video and photography, often solely for the purposes of funding support, must be rethought. The document cannot represent the event as it was, as it is often believed to evidence. On the other hand, performance, as event, is not so pure. Some theorists, like Peggy Phelan, have argued that you have to be there to experience performance in the moment, but this is not necessarily the case. Documents of performances from the past have an uncanny way of creating new performances of the future. Philip Auslander recently argued that it may not even be necessary for audiences to see live performances, as documents are generative of performative experiences. (5) Rather than taking these two polemic arguments to task, I will say that it is this very tension-the binding relation between performance and documentation- that makes performance so engaging as a concept, artform and practice. This blog is an attempt to put into relation the spirit of the performances and documentation as they potentially shift our experience or understanding of relationality and the city.


(1) Edmonton SEE Magazine. May 17-23, 2007, pp. 20
(2) Bourriaud, Nicolas (1998). Relational Aesthetics. France: les presse du réel. ISBN 2-84066-060-1. For a well considered contestation of Bourriauds’ notions of relational aesthetics read Claire Bishop’s Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, OCTOBER 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51–79
(3) Massumi, Brian. Parables For the Virtual. Duke University Press. 2002, pp. 9
(4) Edmonton SEE Magazine. May 17-23, 2007, pp. 20
(5) Auslander, Philip. The Performativity of Performance Documentation. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 84 (Volume 28, Number 3), September 2006, pp. 1-10

To become a friend of Visualeyez, visit http://www.latitude53.org/visualeyez/images/2007_friendsOfVisualeyez.pdf

Visualeyez 2007: Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture presents the 8th annual Visualeyez festival of performance art 18 to 28 May 2007. Visualeyez is Canada's only annual performance art festival and 2007 features over 15 artists from Canada, France, South America and beyond coming to Edmonton to focus upon the curatorial theme of THE CITY. Over ten days artists will present site-specific work, performances, interventions; as well as panel discussions, feedback sessions and events for artists and audiences to connect and discover the diversity of performance art. Visualeyez welcomes Festival Partner Harcourt House Arts Centre with special artist Jackson 2bears for a limited engagement.

Visualeyez is supported, in part by Canadian Heritage, the Inter Arts Office of Canada Council for the Arts, Imperial Tobacco Canada Arts Council, The City of Edmonton and Latitude 53.