00 CO _J "5 co Q_ O CO E CO o Dressed in a March Hare costume, Judy Radul had herself videotaped as she walked across downtown Vancouver. Now Have I Got Your Attention? Vancouver's galleries highlight the city's rich tradition of performance art by Nick Rockel 24 The Canadian Forum When artist Tagny Duff lay down naked in the middle of Vancouver's Pacific Centre mall in May 1998, needless to say she caused a scene. Little did surprised and curious shoppers know that they were witnessing a staged performance — an "intervention" partly designed to test society's reaction to a public display of nudity. What mall security guards thought might be a bomb-detonation device attached to Duffs body was actually a series of switches that made the large prosthetic ears of her persona, Simone Cage, utter phrases such as, "The audience is culturally manifested to consume spectacle." The puzzled guards eventually carried her out of the mall wrapped in a medical blanket. Duff had Simone's performance videotaped and photographed for posterity. Duff, a young graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design who describes herself as an interdisciplinary visual artist, is part of a long line of Vancouver performance artists stretching back to the early 1960s. During the sixties and seventies — before it gained international recognition as the home of photo-conceptualists Stan Douglas, Jeff Wall and other members of the "Vancouver October 1999 School" — the city was known throughout the art world for its thriving culture of public spectacles, theatrical happenings, poetry events, new-music concerts, unpredictable cabaret evenings and experimental film installations. In retrospect, all of these activities fell under the general category of performance, a term that is perhaps not as openended as it once was. From October i to November 6, the "Live at the End of the Century" festival is bringing performance art to galleries and spaces all over Vancouver. "Today, most people have an idea of what they expect from performance art," says Brice Canyon, who is organizing the festival on behalf of the grunt gallery, a Vancouver artist-run centre. "Back then it was a lot looser." If, as Vancouver magazine art columnist Reid Shier recently noted, public interventions and other varieties of performance have grown steadily less visible, you won't know it during "Live at the End of the Century." To celebrate Vancouver's rich history in performance, Canyon enlisted n other galleries and spaces — from the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery to artistrun centres Video In Studios and the Western Front. "One of the reasons I did this is to show some of the other galleries that, yes, you too can put on a performance," Canyon says. Canyon spent several years as exhibitions curator at the Western Front, which since its 1973 opening has been a busy venue for languagebased performance, video, contemporary dance and other art forms not supported by traditional galleries. Artist-run centres such as the Western Front arose as a reaction to the limitations of the gallery system, which for the most part still does not accommodate performance art. Today in Vancouver, only the Western Front, the grunt gallery and the Helen Pitt Gallery have formal performance art programs. In keeping with the esthetic of performance as a singular happening, many of "Live at the End of the Century"'s events are one-offs. But there are also several exhibitions. The Vancouver Art Gallery is opening a 15-year retrospective of work by influential American artist Ann Hamilton, including video and sculpture related to her larger installations — Hamilton once created an exhibition in a gutted three-storey row house — and several book projects dedicated to the physical and intellectual process of reading. Beginning October 23, the Contemporary Art Gallery hosts Vancouver artist Judy Radul's "Rehearsal," an installation that was still shrouded in mystery at press time. Suffice it to say that visitors will likely encounter what looks like an unfinished movie set, dividing the gallery into three spaces: backstage, stage and audience. On October 29 the public is invited to become the performance by participating in a rehearsal event. During the early sixties in Vancouver, it took people with vision to show audiences that art wasn't just about looking at paintings on a wall. In February 1961, B.C. Binning and June Binkert organized the first-annual Festival of the Contemporary Arts at the University of British Columbia. In subsequent years the event attracted poets Robert Ferlinghetti and Leonard Cohen, filmmaker Stan Brakhage and composer John Cage. The 1965 festival hosted one of Vancouver's first home-grown performance events: "Beauty through Destruction Disintegration and Disappearance" by artist Iain Baxter, who used fire, rain and air to destroy a two-ton block of ice. In 1967, Vancouver Art Gallery director Tony Emery instituted a program of noon-hour performance events. Under the direction of Marguerite Pinney, the Special Events Program soon grew to include daytime and evening performances of every imaginable description, and guests from Vancouver and all over the world: performance artists Gathie Falk and Tom Graff, filmmakers JeanLuc Godard and Al Razutis, dancers Yvonne Rainier and Anna Wyman, and composers Al Neil and Philip Glass. On one occasion, a couple staged their wedding as a theatre piece. Another event, held offsite at a warehouse, featured New York performance artist Ralph Ortiz using an axe to destroy a piano filled with animal blood. By 1970, the VAG was holding three or four noon events a week, creating such a buzz that scores of office workers would come and eat lunch in the gallery while taking in the performances. As the work of Judy Radul, Tagny Duff and others proves, Vancouver performance didn't exactly vanish with the 1970s. But its practitioners are keeping a lower profile these days. It has been a long time since anyone has seized the media spotlight the way John Mitchell and Vincent Trasov did when they entered a giant Mr. Peanut in the 1974 Vancouver mayoral race — and got a few thousand Performance art creates a rare opportunity for audience and performer simply to look at each other, without the audience's attention being directed in a conventional or predictable way November 1999 25 votes in the process. Meanwhile, the most sensational local performance in recent memory was in fact a nonevent. In 1990, artist Rick Gibson incurred the wrath of the SPCA by threatening to squash Sniffy the Rat with a block of concrete outside the old Vancouver Public Library at the busy intersection of Robson and Burrard streets. And just what do people today expect from performance art? During the past 20 years it has become closely aligned with the visual arts, for the most part retreating into gallery spaces where mainstream audiences fear to tread. A few 1980s superstars notwithstanding — Americans Laurie Anderson and Karen Tagny Duff as Simone Cage pedFinley, for example — alling a stationary bicycle while trigperformance has never gering spoken word fragments from audio switches under her shirt recovered from popular (above) and causing a scene in the associations with 1970s Pacific Centre mall (right). flakiness and, well, bad art. It is commonly perceived as being art for other artists' sake — an obscure and arcane medium, definitely not for public consumption. Some people argue that at its best, performance art makes people uncomfortable by assaulting their preconceptions of reality. But in a rapidly changing world where everything is a spectacle, interventionists such as Tagny Duff simply don't stand out the way they used to. "That was always the most stinging thing you could say about performance art — that it was bad theatre," Judy Radul says. Radul — whose internationally recognized work encompasses video, audio, photography, readings and critical writing — prefers to be known as an artist with an interest in performance. Although she is moving away from text-based works, Radul got her start with performance poetry and staged many of her early works at Western Front, where she continues to perform. According to Radul, performance art differs from other "skill-based" performances such as wrestling, modelling or striptease because it creates a rare opportunity for audience and performer simply to look at each other, without the audience's attention being directed in a conventional or predictable way. Another virtue of performance is that it 26 The Canadian Forum can be a direct means of sending social and political messages. For women performers, it has become a way of reclaiming their bodies — or, as Radul puts it, "physically, in real time, inserting yourself into history." "Part of my interest in doing a performance is just having a reason to have a group of people called an audience come together," says Radul of her "Rehearsal" installation. To that end, in June 1998 at Vancouver's Or Gallery, Radul showed "Documents for Performance," a series of blackand-white photographs and video stills of performances she had staged throughout the city, along with a brief text description of each event. One, "Not Really," took place on the Saturday of Easter weekend: dressed in a March Hare costume and holding a ghetto blaster blaring wild animal noises, Radul had herself videotaped as she walked across downtown Vancouver, stopping to interact with onlookers (most of whom didn't catch on right away). "Part of my interest was in doing it as an experiment," she says. "But the art of it was, How am I going to describe it and represent it to people?" For Radul, her public appearance was only the beginning of the performance: it continued at the Or Gallery, where the audience restaged her actions as they looked at the images. When "Live at the End of the Century" is over, Vancouver performance art will likely once again become the domain of a few artist-run centres. One could argue that performance has marginalized itself by being too esoteric and "difficult," even downright silly. But if that is the case, then why do artists from outside the tradition sometimes turn to performance to deliver the weightiest of messages? Take Vancouver-based First Nations painter Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, for example, who in 1997 blasted holes through copies of the Indian Act at a tony British firing range. For some reason, Yuxweluptun (who later exhibited a video of the event) chose to cause a scene rather than paint one. Unwilling to settle for an imitation, he saw in his performance a chance for art to become life. For more information about Live at the End of the Century, contact the grunt gallery at 604875-9516. a> > o _Q> "o O 00 >> a. o O < < O o CO t) O o CO Nick Rockel is associate editor at Vancouver magazine. O o sz Q. October 1999