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Alberto Guatti, Intervals. Artist's Space (April). Speed and issues of representation coded this nine second performance work, Intervals , by Italian performance artist Alberto Guatti. For the past few years Guatti's work has been seen internationally; many of these pieces have been based on scripts that Guatti suggests can be performed anywhere at any time by any performer. Intervals appears to have been a departure from Guatti's earlier work, not just in its minimal aspect, but in its absence of dramatic text. It does continue, in a rather unobtrusive and neo-rationalist way, to suggest a general distinction between peoplewho -watch and people-who-do, between things "public" and "private" that appear in a concrete represented fashion in an arbitrary public space. The work is performed in an empty gallery space that has been set up with a long arcshaped "J" of folding chairs. A spring board sits on the floor in the band of the "J" and gymnastic mats lie on the floor behind these chairs. Once the audience is seated, the lights go out, and a strobe light begins to blink. The strobe slows down for a moment, then quickens its pace. A whistle blows and a man in blue starts to run toward the audience . The flashing light and accompanying sound breaks the image of the runner into frames. He hits the springboard with both feet, sails into the air and somersaults above the audience and lands on the mats behind them. The piece is over. The work lasts only nine seconds, but is visually powerful in a rather uncanny way. The mind perceives the instantaneous speed of the event with the clarity not unlike the inINTERVALS stant flash of perception that occurs during an automobile accident. Rather than play with distended images, Gugtti contracts the temporal demands on the viewer and greatly intensifies the interplay between time and image. The unconscious faculties compensate for the speed and heighten the overall sensations of perception. This then is completely distorted within this infinitesimally, short interval of activity. Intervals evokes the early Muybridge animal locomotion studies where physical movement was photographed in sequences and then printed as a series of images in succession . More important is the possibility that Guatti might be seen as part of the current trend in Italian arts toward neo-rationalism. There is undoubtedly a strong sense here of a re-enactment of certain futurist manifestations . Sensation and concern with speed, fragmented motion presented in fractured static frames, motion appearing in a completely visual plane, these are caught in much the same way that Duchamp captures the figure in his "Nude Descending the Staircase ." Guatti obviously has condensed and heightened the scheme, but his roots remain clearly planted in continental thought. JillSilverman Joan Jonas, Upside Down and Backwards. Sonnabend Gallery, May. Sylvia Whitman, South. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June. Mel Andringa with the Drawing Legion, Belshazzar's Feast. Time and Space Ltd. Theatre, July. After a period of being watched and made use of by a "theatre of images," a staple performance genre that might loosely be termed "imagistic personality display" now appears to be looking back. To the typical format of visually-oriented vignettes built around props and audio-visual equipment, some per41 formers have selectively added theatrical trappings ranging from narrative as dramatic graph to lengthy duration complete with acts and intermissions. Also, the tendency to merely exhibit rather than develop events seems influenced by new concerns for thematic coherence and flamboyant subject matter. The result is an altered product which resembles something more than a didactic outline but less than theatre. It's an unwieldy hybrid guaranteed to startle both purists of the performance-as-gesture school and theatrical performers of no matter how unconventional an attitude. The promise of something novel has been delivered in performances documented throughout both issues of Performance Art, but like any other of the recent cross-bred fashions, this one has its ungainly offshoots. Three examples: Joan Jonas's Upside Down and Backwards attempts to exploit classic narrative while short-circuiting its psychological consequences . In performance, this approach adds up to a non-theatrical show of theatrical material. So the piece begins with Jonas...

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