Radical Presence: Archiving Performance Art for the Future

lorraineogrady

Lorraine O’Grady’s “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire”
Courtesy of the artist’s website, http://www.lorraineogrady.com/

By some work of serendipity, I saw that The NYU Fales Library & Special Collections were hosting an event that sounded fascinating and completely aligned with the themes and issues we are exploring in this class. It was last minute, so unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to invite you all, but here are some findings.

Event description:

Archiving Performance Art for the Future: A Roundtable Discussion with Lorraine O’Grady
Thursday, October 3, 6:30-8:00 Free and open to the public.

Should activist and/or situation-specific performance art be re-performed? Can images, video, and critical reviews adequately convey the experiences of those who witness performance works? What is the role of the archive? These questions and others will be considered in the context of the Lorraine O’Grady archive at Wellesley College. Joining Radical Presence artist Lorraine O’Grady are moderator Glenn Wharton, Art Conservator, Museum Studies, NYU; Lisa Darms, Senior Archivist, Fales Library; and Thomas J. Lax, Assistant Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Organized in conjunction with the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA-NA) and co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Museum Studies.

Resources and Organizations

Definitely check out the websites for these great resources, which could come in handy in your practice(s) and for the final project.

 The International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA-NA): http://incca-na.org/ “is dedicated to developing knowledge through collaborations between artists, art professionals and collectors that will ensure the preservation of modern and contemporary art and provide educational programs for a wide public audience in North America.”

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art http://radicalpresenceny.org “is the first exhibition to survey over fifty years of performance art by visual artists of African descent from the United States and the Caribbean. Black performance has generally been associated with music, theater, dance, and popular culture. While the artists in Radical Presence draw on these disciplines, here their work is considered in relation to the visual arts. The show begins with examples dating from Fluxus—a loose international network of artists from the 1960s and ’70s—and Conceptual art of the same period, and continues up to the present day.”

Lorraine O’Grady is trying to build an archive of her “installations, performances, and texts address[ing] issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity,” which have made up her art practice since 1980: http://www.lorraineogrady.com/

Lisa Darms created the Riot Grrrl collection at Fales, where she is the senior archivist: http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/riotgrrrltest.html

Glenn Wharton “served as Time-Based Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),” founded INCCA-NA, and is currently a Clinical Associate Professor in Museum Studies at NYU: http://glennwharton.tumblr.com/

Thomas J. Lax I can’t seem to find much additional info about online, which is unfortunate because he certainly touched on many cross-disciplinary points regarding art and the archive, and cited the same key texts which we have examined (Foster, Derrida, etc.)

 

Thoughts/Ideas

The event in general didn’t necessarily answer the question of how to preserve performance art for the future, but then again this entire practice is about asking questions, isn’t it? I’ve contacted Lisa Darms for a copy of her speech, in which she examines crucial issues of gaps and absences in the archive, especially as influenced through historical and political events (loss of affordable spaces, items from AIDS history being tossed rather than preserved, etc), as well as the significance of performances that have no audience (which rekindled some of my own ideas and gave me new ones for our project and my thesis as well), and that underlining of the importance of the question: “Although as an archivist, I cannot create more documents to fill them in, I think talking about the gaps is a form of documentation.”

Some quotations for thought from Lorraine O’Grady’s presentation:

– “I wanted to recapture from that very public source a private language of my own.”

– “What are the possibilities between the museum, the library, the archive, and the internet?”

– “The process of turning a performance into an object works through (a) memory.”

There was more talk on this theme from both O’Grady and Lax, with questions such as “How far can you extend the physical body into object?” and notions of “The thingification (of black people, etc)”—a term which echoes the Ashberian obsessions of TNS, I’m sure (see The Ashbery Digital Archive still in the works: students with the password can see a previous semester’s exploration thereof in the class, otherwise you can read his biographer’s essay here: http://www.raintaxi.com/ashbery/roffman.shtml; and The Vera List Center’s theme of Thingness from last year: http://www.veralistcenter.org/learn/3/focus-theme-/).

– “I wasn’t privileging the democratic over the elitist. I had such an elitist education, it was already becoming outdated as I was doing.”

Thoughts like these were what intrigued me about O’Grady the most: making room for everything rather than picking sides. She both acknowledged the romance of and interrogated the problematics of the opposing yet interactive forces of institution and dissent, the “elite” and the “common,” the artist and the curator, etc.