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