Nordic Performance: Identity, Time and Space

by Peder Jansson

The being of performance art is such that it is created for and in the instant, where it has excellent conditions at the emotional level for bringing artist and audience together in an intimate space. In something of a contrast with the performance medium’s often personal/ autobiographical approach, it is also manifested like a breeze, like something transient and capricious. Just like other contemporary art, performance art, for better or worse, is quite free of any specific content-related framework. It does however have a temporally bound quality, a direct communicativeness in the encounter between a direct human act and the immediate reactions of an audience. The prime factor of the performance medium is thus the meeting among people, which cannot be compared to other visual art, since the observation of an artefact, which is of dead material, can never fully manifest the idiom of a human being, far less substitute for being human.

It is still disputed today who originated performance art. The important thing is not, however, the given and family name of one or more founders, but the fact that the process of artistic creation (which in most cases takes place behind doors closed to the observer, since the artistic creation is work done alone) is in itself the origin of this idiom. In action painting, for example, the action itself, "painting in public", was primary rather than the secondary, framed result of the performance. The essence was in the instantaneous and improvisational creation. When the object increasingly lost its function in performance at the end of the 1970s there was soon nothing left in principle but the artist and the action. In the light of this concept it is easy to see that performance art has no direct connection with either the dance or the theatre, since in the great majority of cases performance lacks a spoken monologue/dialogue, choreography and directing. Nor does the artistic action have anything to do with traditional acting; it is rather a kind of searching and/or exploring of a more ritual character. Unlike the limited artificial art that exists in a state of non-time, performance art thus stands for something living in an "unlimited" spatiality. Regardless of the number of time lapses and sequences in a performance the great challenge consists in getting a message across within the time the exploration is meant to take. In my conversation with Allan Kaprow in the spring of 2000, he expressed the idea that a happening is quite unlimited by time, that it is a processual phenomenon which can thus go on for just as short or long a time as one wishes.[2] According to this attitude the most important task of the performance artist is to try to achieve a simultaneous interpretation by the observer of what is being presented. Just as "films should be seen in the cinema", performance should be experienced live. Performance can in no way be stored, nor reinterpreted from documentation photographs or video recordings, since the human presence can neither be copied nor registered.

During the lifetime of performance art the succession of schools of thought in the different periods have had good reasons for their multiplicity of different sub-concepts such as action painting, theatre of mixed-means, kinetic environments, happenings, Action art, body art, performance art, relational aesthetics and Live Art. Over the past ten years we have seen that this tabula rasa in art has in innumerable ways strengthened its position in the art and media worlds, partly as living and surviving idioms in their own right and partly as a form of inspiration for many other idioms, not least photography, video and recently even the Internet. For some time now the simplified concept "performance" has been most frequently used, and now functions as a kind of catch-all term for the majority of the many development phases that the performative idioms have had since the end of the 1950s.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century performance art has been a flagship of the avant-garde that has constantly shown itself to be more or less rebellious and challenging. However it was not until the middle of the 1970s that performance art reached its highest stage of development so far, when identity and the body came into strongest focus in the genre body art. Inspired by the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and the contemporary Vienna 'actionists', about ten years later several American performance artists, such as

Vito Acconci and Chris Burden were active with the body, often represented as a lost object and sculptural substitute in their performances. Action as absence was the important thing. From these processes the human body was soon established as a new artistic material, rocking the foundations of the concept of object/subject. The psychiatrist R. D. Laing wrote an apt parallel (from which several performance artists drew direct inspiration) to this perplexing practice in his much-debated book, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1959) with the words:

"The body is felt more as an object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being".[3]

The Return of the Artefact and the Medialized Avant-Garde.

The inactivity that descended on performance art in the 1980s has several times been explained by the economic upswing in the then prevailing art metropolises Cologne and New York. It is probably a relevant reason for the phenomenon, since performance art has never had any real relationship with the art market. During this period artists like Chris Burden went back to the lost artefact and started to work more sculpturally. Since then he has been seen more as a sculptor with a past as a pioneer of exposure in the performance art of the 1970s. It was above all in the 1990s that performance art gathered new energy, although the medialization of the medium has become rather the opposite of an avant-garde. In the mid-1990s in the USA one could register several signs of a medialization of performance art - for example the film Seven (1995) included a brief condemnatory dialogue sequence about the nature of performance

art as something absurd and repulsive. The dialogue describes the dismissal of a suspected murderer, who because of his deviant behaviour and dress is ironically assumed to be a performance artist rather than a brutally violent criminal. This sarcasm is however not without justification. In the early 1990s a new kind of explicit/grotesque performance art emerged, among other places in New York; in recent years it has mostly been called Live Art. Most of the artists of this school have had their background primarily in stand-up comedy, poetry and more rarely in the visual arts. Karen Finley and Ron Athey are two examples of American artists of this persuasion, whose performances took the restricted freedom of expression in the USA to its outer limits. How far is one permitted to go? Explicit art has almost always been mass-media fodder, and in the case of Karen Finley for example, she and many like her have been regular guests in sitcoms and talk shows like Ellen, Roseanne and Jerry Springer, thanks to an aggressive vociferousness.

Beyond the explicitness of these artists’ performances there is also another logical explanation of the attention given to them – which their group affinities and fields of interest have lain close to the images purveyed by the hosts and main characters of the programmes.

Nordic Identity: A Historical Heritage?

In contrast with the many fierce debates about explicit American performance art in among other newspapers The New York Times and The Village Voice, in the Nordic countries we have very rarely seen anything corresponding to this phenomenon. Interest in performance art has however increased in the Nordic area, as demonstrated by a larger number of practitioners and more festivals. Important initiatives have been One Night Stand (Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, 1995), UpDate (Turbinehallerne, Copenhagen, 1996), Nordic LiveArt (Pusterviksteatern/Nefertiti, Gothenburg, 2000) and EXIT (Kabelfabriken, Helsinki, 2001), just to mention a few. Nordic performance art, in most cases more subdued, poetic and sometimes self-ironic, can absolutely be seen as a contrast to Live Art. This manifests difference in terms of technique and inwardness as against outwardness not only suggests how varied the expressions of performance art are; the difference also raises an interesting question: why is most of the Nordic performance art more contemplative and minimalist than politically aggressive? The question should of course be put directly to a leading expert in the field of Nordic social anthropology. Without such professional expertise I would however venture to assert that there is a historical fostering that the Nordic peoples share: the Lutheran heritage - sitting quietly and separately in church with bowed heads before learned pastors and the mighty God. If one mixes part of the Lutheran catechism with part of the Danish author Aksel Sandemose’s novel, En flygtning krydser sit spor (1933), which states the ten commandments of the infamous "The Laws of Jante",[4] this mixture gives us a possible explanation of why the Nordic peoples time and time again are considered taciturn and reserved by foreign visitors. How often I have myself been part of an audience and been pained by the deafening silence that permeated our lecture hall after a foreign lecturer asked the magic question: "Any questions?" This phenomenon of diffidence is undoubtedly a feature of the shared Nordic identity, and is also found in Nordic performance art: a "self-censoring". Concerning explicit and socially critical performance art, the Norwegian performance artist Kurt Johannessen replies that he is "not so interested in screaming so loud".[5] Of course this means that he has found other more contemplative approaches to expression, and this stands in contrast to the trends in international contemporary art. Johannessen’s art is also in close contact with the natural surroundings of his native city, Bergen - this is something that has always been a hallmark of Nordic art.

However internationalized Nordic contemporary art has become in recent years, this has hardly been able to undermine the Nordic folk-soul. If, just for a moment, one thinks of Nordic contemporary art as miraculously headstrong, there is presumably also something to be said for figuring forth nature, as much as for clenching your fists in your trouser pockets and not screaming too loud?