Here is a quick write-up of an event I attended a few weeks back:
http://adrienneskyeroberts.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/performance-act-ritual-art-and-mourning-panel-discussion-at-performance-art-institute/
On April 6th San Francisco’s Performance Art Institute presented a panel titled “Performance, Act, and Ritual: Art and Mourning. Panelists Cooley Windsor, Adrienne Skye Roberts, and Julia Goodman gave unique interpretations of the subject matter. The presentations were primarily just that, three separate interpretations without major crossover content beyond the general ideas (art and mourning.)
Maria Porges, who moderated, opened the event with a reading of Jack Spicer’s “Love and Death”. Porges teaches at CCA, and is an artist and writer. The poem, which concentrates geological metaphor to locate, or ground, reflections on meanings in mourning, in love and loss, reminds us that there are ways to remember and grow in times of loss. Setting the tone for the following presentations, “Love and Death” warmed the listeners to hear the panelist’s situated perspectives on art and mourning.
Cooley Windsor read his short story “50 Blue”. Lines such as “You already know everything you need to know to perform” and “Buy a light bulb”, sweetly portrayed the poetic inconsistencies of being-in-mourning. Windsor went on to elaborate “a series of gestures” which combined to construe fragmented memories of a poet and past lover who had died from AIDS before Windsor could personally confess his feelings. He interprets that love and loss under the banner “Don’t give me a funeral, give me a demonstration”. Drop all the bodies fallen by AIDS off on the White House lawn. More introspectively, Windsor reflects that this loss cannot be approached directly but at a slant.
Julia Goodman discussed recent artwork as a calendared response to her fathers death, and relates that experience to work she’d previously done in Chile, working with muralists who had been repressed during the brutal Pinochet regime. She inquires: How do we make room for death in secular society? She mourned her father through Jewish custom, making and impressing into paper every day for the eleven months proceeding from his death. She discusses the need to refer to mourning by “moving” across time vertically and horizontally, simultaneously. She also discusses the conditions in which muralists in Chile experienced literally unspeakable grief as inhabitants of their community continued to ‘disappear’ under Pinochet. Necessarily ephemeral, murals make temporary use of public space. Throughout the dictatorship muralists were unable to work outdoors and only secretly indoors, as their work was of mortal consequence. Goodman: “Pressure builds when one’s interior world does not have external expression.” That pressure leads to real pain. Collective gathering is a crucial part of coping with grief. Public mourning provides the space to expose one’s heart.
Adrienne Skye Roberts presented on Linda Montano’s 1977 video piece “Mitchell’s Death”. Like other feminist artists of the era, Montano used autobiography to make art in the spirit of a performative life-art. She made this piece after hearing of her ex-husband’s sudden death. The video is shot in black and white, high contrast, and the content is Montano’s face in close-up. She caked gray makeup onto her face, which functions as a mask and a veil though none of her feeling seems to be veiled, and 12 acupuncture needles protrude, further texturing the filmic impression. The audio is Montano narrating her emotional reaction to the news, the details of which appeal to the listener’s emotions in extreme. She speaks in monotone – the grain of her voice and constant tempo force the narration to sound like chanting, imbuing the work with a ritualistic tone resembling Buddhist chants and also the ritualistic time of Greek tragedy, which sink into the skin of the listener. Roberts showed a portion of the piece and then added her insights. This document functioned as both a site of private mourning, and as a publically displayed art piece illiciting a collective experience though intensively mediated – but still able to touch. She recalls a Lucy Lippord piece of criticism on the work: “Ritual is about repetition, death is not.” Roberts inquires, “How do we stay present with death and what is the witness?” She also brings the audience’s attention to the site of this discussion, a gallery; carving a space to discuss mourning at a gallery as taking an active role in considering the importance of appropriating time and place for mourning in secular culture.
-Rachel
