Contemporary Australia: Women

176 a ladder while sawing the rungs from underneath, or swinging from a chandelier, but I like to embed these actions into the realm of the normal — that is part of their beauty. Going about these actions as though they are the most normal things in the world, like buying bread and butter. I like that rupture in the expectancy of the everyday. What do you think is driving the resurgence of interest in performative art practices at the moment? (BC): There are a number of overarching factors driving this resurgence: developments in technology that have made it easier than ever before to document, edit and present performance; the rise of celebrity culture and mass media; along with trends towards self-surveillance via online video platforms and social networking sites. We live in a culture saturated by ‘performance’, so it makes sense that artists are responding and critiquing this, either explicitly or implicitly through a range of performative modes. The increased availability of early performance documentation from the 1960s onwards, through online video databases, has also influenced the current generation of artists — there is now a ‘history’ of performance for artists to respond to. Performance artists from the late 1960s and 70s, Canon and Canon detail are a play on both dance formation and musical composition. This follows on from Changing of the guard: Rotation 2011, a work we made for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in collaboration with their Visual Service Officers (VSOs). In Canon we work with GOMA’s GSOs — by making them more audible we make them more visible and, in doing so, acknowledge their often overlooked presence within the Gallery. Kate Mitchell (KM): Mostly I am concerned with ideas, and these ideas seem to manifest in a variety of ways: performance art, video art, or as sculptural elements. My practice is about trying to tweak the expectations of convention; I like to play around with what is sensible in a cartoon way, and performance seems to best articulate these ideas. Often my works are like science experiments, where I’m exploring a scenario which is laced with conceptual rigour. It’s like being a pop culture bandit, as I re-enact, re‑imagine and remix impossible scenarios. There is a playfulness to my work, and perhaps through enacting these familiar actions I am trying to escape the scenario, and, in doing that, escape the program of ‘society’. There is an attempt in doing it, to get beyond it, to see behind the face of it all. There is also a self-effacing nature to my work. The actions may be odd or unlikely, for example, sawing a hole in the ground and falling through, climbing