PERFORMANCE//PROXY II: Curators’ Note
Our second iteration of Performance//Proxy has been in the works for many months now, and it is strange that its premier date is during the international COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent quarantining. The idea has always revolved around how to engage remotely, at a distance, and how that endeavor can either fall short of expectations or open up new avenues, how the proxy alters the way we form meaningful relationships and find mutual understanding in the present. However, we feel that this unique circumstance adds a new, urgent layer of meaning to our theoretical foundation. With the public openings for the show being cut altogether, it asks how we will continue to engage with exhibitions, installations, even institutions beyond the physical? In what ways have these proxy performances acted as a dress rehearsal for this exact scenario? Can they help us rethink former structures and methods of engagement?
An important aspect of this show is a conversation around how the proxy alters time and space, constantly renegotiating the definition and concept of ‘live.’ Philip Auslander expands this understanding in his essay Live and Technologically Mediated Performance stating that:
...the experience of liveness is not limited to specific performer-audience interactions; it is the feeling of always being connected to other people, of continuous, technologically mediated co-presence with others known and unknown. Understood in this way, the experience of liveness to which [Nick] Couldry points are not easily assimilable to a simple performer/audience model; in such interactions, each of us functions simultaneously (or perhaps alternately) as performer and audience member. It operates primarily in the temporal dimension rather than the spatial one; its main affect is the sense that one can be in contact with others at any given moment regardless of distance.[1]
Here Auslander expands popular conception of ‘live’ beyond an absolute condition, beyond the binary of live or not live to include complex combinations of temporal, spatial, and emotional proximities. He points to a Walter Benjamin quote about how human sense perception evolves alongside historical circumstances, implying the possibility of our sense of ‘liveness,’ of an intimate or connected experience, is changing with emergent technologies and under new cultural conditions.[2] Each artist in this series embraces this new position and continues to expand our conception of both mediated performance and the proxy—simultaneously expanding and collapsing time through engagements with past selves or invented personas; pushing the boundaries of the intimacy of shared space through acts of love, storytelling, and making; and exploring loneliness within the space of collectivity or celebration, or connectedness within the space of solitude. There are various levels of engagement for viewers of the works, complicating the roles of audience and performer. We are constantly recalibrating to new technologies, locating the shortcomings of one to expand new ways of connecting with another.
The decision to go through with this exhibition was not necessarily an easy one to make. With so many variables rapidly morphing, we weren’t sure if it would be possible to not only execute, but execute at a caliber that would meet our personal standards and do the work justice. We questioned the accessibility of having an online exhibition and how that might affect who can and cannot engage the works. Perhaps the limitations to access of the internet are still less than the limitations of access to a physical space? With so much going on in the world, we struggled with whether now would even be the right time to attempt this at all. For that last quandary, we came to the overwhelming conclusion that, yes, now is in fact the time for attempts like these. Author and activist Arundhati Roy talks about the importance of acknowledging the historical rupture of this pandemic, its portal-creating force.[3] How can we use these tools, the new ones and those that have remained useful during this time of slowness and reflection, to refuse a return to the old normal, to choose the portal? In a Facebook status made by the ever-present Jerry Saltz on April 3rd, 2020, he simply states, “We are here to go the distance for what we love.” And that is precisely what we plan to do, with whatever tools we have.
Rachel Pontious and Finn Schult
10 April 2020
[1]Philip Auslander, “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance,”In The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, edited by Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 111.
[2]Ibid p. 109.
[3]Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is A Portal,” Financial Times, 3 April 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca