TERMINAL CITY WEEKLY

OCT24-31, 2003 9

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THEORIES HMD
HYBRIDITIES
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Theories and Hybridities, the first panel discussion of the
6th LIVE Vancouver Biennial of Performance Art took place
Monday at the Grunt Gallery on E.2nd, consisting of Kristine
t I Stiles, Jocelyn Robert, Warren Mean and Glenn Alteen,
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director of Grunt and one of the directors of the board for
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LIVE. All respected, practicing artists from across Canada.
Essentially, it was a casual discussion finally thrown open to
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the audience for questions. I struggled to keep notes, but the
ideas flew so fast and freewheeling, what follows is an amal' : gam of things said, mostly without attribution, and my own
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reactions. Robert and Stiles bandied all sorts back and forth
- 1 and Arcan acted as a second moderator, chipping in or redi?
recting occasionally the conversation while Alteen looked on,
a beaming and benevolent host.
"As both an artist and an historian" says Christine Stiles,
f - one of dozens of artists presenting/performing as part of the
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Biennial, "I operate on three different levels: History,
1 Mythology and Intuition. I can't separate lived experience-1
i I don't experience what I experience when I am experiencing it;
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it's only when I look back I understand. Perhaps Intuition is a
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fluid space in which we can 'look back' as something is
i I occurring." As an historian, Ms Stiles attempts also to be
aware of actual events, the real social and human necessities
J around those events and their impact on everyday lives.
According to modern physics and neurophysiology, Time,
as much as we understand it, "moves" in any direction it likes
;1.
and only appears to crawl linearly forward because our
brains process stimuli one chemical synapse reaction at a
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time. However, while we exist in the present, we live in the
> I past, because by the time our minds have made sense of
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what is happening to us, the moment is gone.
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Some performances can't be photographed/videoed with
justice. Telling people, describing in words, sometimes gives
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| a better sense of what occurred in a performance or the effect
it had, especially on the audience. The transmutation of intuition, materialising fluid understanding of the present
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through the lens of human experience into something con"d
crete and repeatable, is the creation of art via one technique
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or another. Drawing a line constitutes a filtering of everything
n - I you have experienced into a communicable expression,
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which is technique. To draw a line you must first draw a line,
ts.
and there is a whole tradition of that in art. So, should artists
h e jj be concerned with developing a tradition of performance art?
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Institutions, even progressively minded arts funding
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councils and established galleries, are creatures of tradition.
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Because performance is by its nature ephemeral, funding
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bodies require documentation, and, even more so, publica-^tion. Institutions need to look back and assess, which is why
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academics are always one step behind practicing artists in
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terms of theory. Artists are actively creating theory out of
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intuition while academics are attempting to understand retro•* I spectively. Art is out there renewing our perceptions of the
world, while the institutions try to ground this creation, rein
it in, keep balance-they may desire progress, but not too
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quickly. Therefore, the substance of performance art and the
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difficulty (impossibility?) of stuffing it into the square holes
v i required by application forms, of being considered by reac1
tive academia, marginalises the field,
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Here the conversation went on tangents constituting the
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other major theme of the discussion: the placement of artists
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within the pond-ripples of society. As became apparent during question time, the audience seemed to feel the panel were
regarding artists as being on the fringes of society- and that
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J hurts!- whereas in fact the panellists had stated numerous
times they saw artists, within the context of creativity and
» J society, at the centre radiating out. Economically, in terms of
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being viewed as small businesses, yes, artists are marginf
alised, but that is another article.
jj

ALAN HINDLE