Performative Attitudes

Featuring seven international positions, the group exhibition Performative Attitudes brings together various aspects of performative attitudes in which different relations between object, body, space and time are under discussion. Both questions about the production, presentation or reception of art and the status of the artist as actor and performer are of interest. While a performance was originally designed as a unique and largely unrepeatable live moment for a present audience, and at best transferred to a video recording for later documentary purposes, contemporary artists increasingly use performance in the form of an unfinished, flowing process that can begin at various points in the emergence of the work. The performance can constitute an early stage of the work, it can appear as a ‹leftover› or a ‹re-enactment›, or it can activate and recontextualise performative conventions. The artists involve and interweave concept, perception and interpretation. For the generation represented in the exhibition it is no longer only a matter of structuring a performance as a unique event; instead, the traces of their actions are shifted to the centre, and the conventional ideas of the history of performance art are challenged.

Artistic working methods such as those of Hanna Schwarz and Seb Patane, are close to the aspects of the moving body and the visible performative act. Visitors become witnesses to performances during an opening or the duration of the exhibition. What remains is installations revealing traces of the past act. In the form of a temporary result, certain works are manifest as film projections which are seen more as an integral component than a pure documentary record of the work. Or else the work continues to exist in a setting that strongly recalls a theatre stage and stimulates discussions concerning aspects of the leftovers or theatricality. Apart from these rather formal aspects, the relationship between the human body and the objects surrounding it are at the centre of artistic practice. Objects, space and time interact and exert a reciprocal influence on the perception and reflection of the work.

In the works of Nina Beier/Marie Lund, Stefan Burger, Nina Canell, Florian Germann and Navid Nuur, on the other hand, the processes may be experienced as an inherent part of the work. The artist’s body or the physical presence of a performing body is of secondary importance or even non-existent. Beier/Lund, for example, often leave the performative part of their work to the staff of an institution or visitors to an exhibition. In their context the performance, temporally limited but continued for the duration of the exhibition, is not carried out by the artists themselves, rather the act is, so to speak, passed on to a possible recipient. In this way the role of the institution as well of that of the visitor is both stressed and called into question. Nina Canell works with found (technical, chemical or physical) material, and refers to its transmutable status by assembling experimental arrangements from it. Central to her installations is the aspect of natural metamorphosis. The work does not remain static or mute, but alters its aggregate state. At the same time its sculptural and ephemeral qualities and the performative potential contained within it are examined. One central point in Florian Germann’s working method is the transformation of shape, form or structure in which the substance is not lost. The concept of transformation is, with regard to his treatment of word, image and material, essential. Navid Nuur, on the other hand, directs his attention to the aspect of thought processes. The artist involves the viewer in his feat of interpretation as an integral part of the work, since the viewer has to understand the narrative basis of a work performatively, and complete it as an extensive whole. Stefan Burger’s photographic works are illustrations of performative situations, captured on paper, wood or wall. In line with the view of the artist as an ‹inherent performer›, Burger addresses the theme of the relationship between production and reception.

SHORT TEXTS ABOUT THE ARTISTS

The work of Nina Beier and Marie Lund (b. 1975/1976 live and work in Berlin and London) consists of performances, objects and immaterial interventions, and moves between the parameters of concept, perception and interpretation. Their works are often site-specific, and adapt to the exhibition context. Thus, for example, very simple instructions to the public or the institution can lead to an involvement of the various actors. Subsequently, it is not only the remaining traces that are important; the situation in which the protagonists issue such an artistic instruction also gains in importance. For instance in the work The Imprint, presented in Glarus and elsewhere, the two artists invite the staff of the institution to memorise the descriptions of the works that the curators originally wanted to integrate into the exhibition, but finally for various reasons failed to do. Visitors to the exhibition are only informed of the existence of this work in narrative form on a series of labels.

Through his artistic practice, Stefan Burger (b. 1977 Germany, lives and works in Zürich) always challenges the possibilities of his chosen medium and the viewer. In most cases photography forms the starting-point for his works. But it often extends into the space and becomes a stage as the artist applies the photographic pictorial supports directly to wood or cardboard walls. Often installations, video works, 16mm films, objects and quasi-theatrical stagings are the product of a working process that had its beginning in photography. In terms of both form and content, the issues of the conditions of the production and presentation of art are at the forefront of his works. Self-reflexively, he analyses his role as an artist in the process of the work’s emergence. Equally he takes as his theme the relationship between producer and recipient, or creates critical references to art history. Many of his works finally emerge from an artistic attitude of doubt, and have the character of an experimental arrangement. For Kunsthaus Glarus, Burger has developed a completely new work which refers particularly to the architectural conditions of the building. He guides the visitor’s eye to ‹unimportant› procedures that are played out behind the scenes of the everyday life of a museum building. We become actors, and thus a functional link within the museum structure.

Nina Canell (b. 1979 Sweden, lives and works in Berlin) assembles self-made objects and found objects from nature into fragile, experimental, changing arrangements that could be described as experiments in mutability. In her exhibition Five Kinds of Water for Kunstverein Hamburg, she developed five works which in their different ways approach the transitory properties of water. In the work Perpetuum Mobile (40 g) 2009, shown in Glarus, she gives water presence in different ways: water is set in motion with ultrasound and steam is created, to spread slowly over the rim of a container in to the exhibition space. This process is intermittently amplified via a microphone and speaker, making the moment of transition to the various aggregate states audible as sound waves. The spreading mist in turn affects some paper bags willed with concrete, which alter their mass over the duration of the exhibition. The shapeless and mutable nature of water thus forms the starting point for questions concerning the shaping of substances, their properties and their potential mutability. Objects and natural events contain a temporary sculptural, almost performative form in which the individual materials influence one another and remain constantly in motion. Another group of works with neon tubes, for example, reflects the transformative possibilities of light. In Nina Canell’s works, the materials thus themselves become the carriers of the action, and unfold their own temporal and narrative logic.

By his own account, Florian Germann (b. 1978 lives and works in Zürich and Kreuzlingen) walks through the ‹inner library, tracking down as yet undeduced possibilities›. His works are a collage of childhood memories, research and invention. Both the myth of the werewolf, machine technology, artist mythologies, elements from science fiction, childlike experimental gadgets as well as philosophical ideas are all used. Florian Germann appropriates objects or relics whose histories are then lost in the new arrangements in the artwork, or else charged with different levels of meaning. His working method might be compared with the meticulous precision of a watchmaker: time and again the way to the definitive form of the work leads repeatedly via perfect craft and the material experiments that it involves. His works rarely exist as individual pieces, but repeatedly cohere into larger work complexes. Florian Germann narrates his stories with drawings, objects, installations and performances. But his narrative structures do not follow a linear structure, and develop further through their materialisation; transformation of shape, form and structure are at the centre. Thus the work presented in Glarus is not a completed cycle. A wreck made from a hollowed-out car rear floating in mid-air hangs in the Oberlichtsaal. A weight violently opens the car part like an oyster.

Navid Nuur (b. 1976 IR, lives and works in The Hague) refers, in the context of his work processes, to the term ‹interimodule› and describes his works as thought-modules. Nuur uses the word ‹interimodule› to refer to a way of seeing that might be described as a temporal ‹in-between› status of things, whose existence is more or less short and whose interpenetration can be more or less pronounced. Against this background, his artistic practice cannot be adequately described either in terms of sculpture or installation; both terms are too static to do justice to the spatial and temporal factor of the work with its surroundings and its viewers. Nuur uses ‘module’ to refer to his way of thinking and the conceptualisation of his works, while he uses the word ‹interim› to define space and temporal limitation, and thus defines the process-based character of his works in a terminological blend. The relatively simple structure of his works and the choice of effectively banal everyday materials such as wax, florists’ sponges, Polaroid photographs, food, rubbish bins and packaging material such as Tetra Pak are part of his artistic rule-book. Also, Navid Nuur always establishes a very close connection in his works with their titles, which is what establishes the context of their content and their thematic message. One immediate example of this is the work Where you end and I begin 2008-2010), which is explained in the appendix to the press release. In this work critics, readers and institution staff equally become an essential component of an artwork.

In her work Hanna Schwarz (b. 1975, lives and works in Berlin) recontextualises different traditions of Minimalism and early performance art. Her films, videos, drawings, objects and sculptures can be read as the traces of absent sceneries. For example in her work Rehearsal, which is being shown with new sculptures in Glarus, the artist refers to the choreographer Yvonne Rainer and thus to the feminine body in post-modern dance. Four dancers are watched through the camera while rehearsing poses for tableaux-vivants suggested to them by the artist. For her presentation of Rehearsal she has developed an installation specially adapted to the spaces of Kunsthaus Glarus. The elements of the installation also revolve strongly around the theme of dance, of movement, music and rhythm. The arrangement of a piece of fabric gives the whole installation a stage-like mood. Other works by Hanna Schwarz refer to various traditions of the history of performance, as for example to Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) or Bruce Nauman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967/68), which also establishes a connection with the theme of the acting or non-acting artist in the studio. Hanna Schwarz belongs to a young generation of artists examining the history of modern art and reassessing its influence on contemporary discourse.

Seb Patane (b. 1970 Italy, lives and works in London) develops three-dimensional tableaux to which he applies drawings, found pictures and objects. Sound and music performances also represent important components of his artistic practice. He quotes sources that he finds interesting, and which often revolve around themes such as tribalism, urbane mythologies and political protest performances. Through the process of filtering and simple interventions, he arranges pictures and objects in minimal settings, which in turn find expression as leftovers of a performative situation. In Kunsthaus Glarus Seb Patane is presenting two new work complexes first shown recently at Maureen Paley in London. Here the artist combines found historical-political picture-material from the early 20th century with a vintage photograph of his grandfather. Uniformed soldiers can also be identified in other photographic depictions in an Eastern European setting. Seb Patane will also present his new video/sound installation Chariot, Fool, Emperor, Force (2009), which was presented as a performance in London at the opening of Frontier, Frontier! (Patane’s music project, which he founded along with the musician Giancarlo Trimarchi). In Glarus this work will be present as a partially staged documentary record of the performance. The title of the work particularly refers to the tarot poems of author and artist Alejandro Jodorowski.

The Hague