European Festivals and Performances

SPECIAL REPORT European Festivals and Performances Europerformance 1977 Peter Frank My experiences with artists' performances in Europe this past summer resist summation. It is not that I was unable to draw generalized deductions about the state and nature of European performance from the works I saw. Rather, I do not trust my experience to have been broad or "natural" enough to support such observations. As in New York, the summertime is not peak season on the continent . Most activity transpires under the rubrics of local or international festivals, and those artists and entrepreneurs active in mounting performances have either flocked to the festivals for several days of unnaturally intense activity , or have chucked it all for a month or season in the country. Seeing performance works in the context of art fairs and super-exhibits, where such works are modified by manifold contingencies (not least of which are administrative and/or curatorial idiosyncracies), does not really give one a good sense of what normally tends to happen. Finally, and most importantly, my cultural context distances me significantly from almost all the performance work I did witness. The language problem figures, of course, especially as so many performance artists capitalize on the nuances and social complexities of their native (or adopted) tongues. Despite my disclaimer, I did receive distinct impressions from the performance work I saw with regard to the current state of the art in Europe. It seemed to me that European performance is just beginning to come out of an extended minimalist phase, a phase Americans passed through about three or four years ago. This is probably due in part to the fact that one of the things that European performance artists almost all share is a heritage in Fluxus. Fluxus was for71 mulated, as an aesthetic and as a movement, in New York (with many West Coast elements figuring significantly in its genesis), but it took root in Europe. There it influenced, or at least clarified, the work of a wide variety of avantgarde artists- from Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell to Ben Vautier and Dieter Rot. The term "Fluxus" is now used in Europe as a virtualsynonym forall intermedial and marginal art activity. Marina Abramovic and Ulay in Imponderabilia As pervasive an influence as Fluxus has been on American performance art, Americans have understood it only as a vaguely-defined methodology or as suggestions for the evolution of one's own personal style. In Europe, by contrast, artists work with Fluxus, against (and thus trapped by) Fluxus, or in slavish imitation of other artists who themselves have often misunderstood Fluxus, adopting its name and a few of its superficial characteristics in their own work. With more self-indulgent, less ironic, or playful artists the Fluxus emphasis on gesture rover procedure leads to a disregard for the shape of dramatic time and experiential address which alienates the very audience that, according to the Fluxus 72 aesthetic, should be actively engaged. A willingness to illustrate, orchestrate, narrate, even entertain- that is, to draw upon certain traditions of the peforming arts- only enhances the artists rapport and communication with the audience , as the best recent American performers demonstrate. The conceptually reductive but gesturally expansive, even excessive, tone of much recent Body Art is a case in point. Most Europeans concerned with ritual, self-mutilation, symbolic atrocity, and transvestism succeed only in trying my thresholds- of sympathy, patience, and appetite. There are those Body Artists, however, whose efforts are substantiated by originality or at least by a flair for succinctness or humor. The power of simple, direct action realized with the unadorned human body informs, for example, the collaborative work of Marina Abramovic and Ulay. Abramovic realized austere and moving confrontational pieces in her native Yugoslavia before teaming with the Dutch Ulay several years ago. In both the piece they realized as part of the International Week of Performances that accompanied the Bologna Art Fair and the one they created at Documenta 6, the huge survey of contemporary art in Kassel (West Germany ), the pair situated their bodies in clear and symmetrical relationships to each other and to space. In Bologna they stood facing each other on either side of an...