Contemporary Australia: Women

173 Embodied Acts is a focus program of performances, events and actions taking place in and around the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) during ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’. Involving a diverse group of artists whose practices crisscross between disciplines and interests, Embodied Acts foregrounds site-specific, performative and ephemeral art forms. Each of the participating artists — in variously humorous, critical and sensual ways — presents works that interact with the everyday, offering new vantage points on the worlds we inhabit and negotiate. This focus on the performative seeks to titillate the viewer’s curiosity, to activate visual and auditory senses and shake up taken‑for-granted notions about life and art. The program is timely: live and performative art forms are enjoying a resurgence internationally and, in an Australian context, particularly amongst early career and experimental women practitioners. Many younger artists have moved to distance themselves from feminist discourses, yet, whether consciously or not, reference the performativity of 1970s feminist practices with their intense focus on the body as both subject and object. While the range of influences is as diverse as the tone of their approach, this new generation of artists is making works that employ a startlingly direct gaze and is forthright in its engagement with viewers. Embodied Acts will see Rebecca Baumann collaborating with a pyrotechnician to send sheets of candy-coloured smoke into the sky; Lauren Brincat performing a tambourine sound happening with percussionist Bree van Reyk; an endurance event by Brown Council, Performance fee , where for two dollars the viewer can procure a kiss from one of the artists; Jess Olivieri and Hayley Forward with the Parachutes for Ladies intervening into the Gallery spaces, working with GOMA’s own Gallery Services Officers (GSOs); Soda_Jerk’s multi‑channel performance lecture on the temporality of cinema and its relationship to death; and, at night, a projection on GOMA’s glass façade will be visible from the Maiwar Green, showing Kate Mitchell swinging from a chandelier. These works will be documented and will have an ongoing presence in the exhibition — whether as video, installation or as performance detritus; as a YouTube clip or web resource. In this way, Embodied Acts draws out the relationship between temporal and embodied practice and its documents. Whether recorded images or texts, the program gives presence to the tangible residues that counter the disappearance of performance from the realm of discourse. Alongside the works themselves, this will testify to the continuing relevance of dialogues addressing ephemeral work in the art museum: it appears, disappears, then reappears in various guises. Performance is a volatile, highly reflexive form and one that artists continue to use to articulate change — as much a driving force today as when the Italian Futurists used it to capture the speed and energy of the new twentieth century. As a medium, it remains as provocative and unpredictable as it ever was. 1 * * * Between December 2011 and February 2012, I emailed artists participating in Embodied Acts — Lauren Brincat, Brown Council, Kate Mitchell, and Jess Olivieri and Hayley Forward with the Parachutes for Ladies — with questions about their work and their perspectives on performative practice more broadly. Here are their responses. Perhaps you could begin by talking broadly about the performative aspect of your practice in relation to the work you’re presenting in Embodied Acts — what concepts and ideas has this particular mode of making opened up for you? Brown Council (BC): Performance is at the very centre of our practice — both in form and content. Through a range of live and mediated forms of performance, which draw on the historical lineages of both the visual and performing arts, we critique the way in which we ‘perform’ in contemporary society. In recent times, we have focused specifically on the performance of gender — the performance of the artist Brown Council Australia est.2007 Photo with the artist 2011 Offsite project, installation view, ‘Primavera 2011’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Photograph: Alex Davies Image courtesy: The artists and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Embodied Acts Embodied Acts Live and alive — an email round table