Contemporary Australia: Women

180 Kate Mitchell Australia b.1982 Being punctual (production stills) 2010 Single-channel HD video projection (looped), 16:9, colour, silent, 38:17 mins that makes you understand what has happened to an object, and I especially like the idea of viewers thinking about the action that took place. It’s like the creation of the tall tale, the performance can live on through the re-telling of the work, which is also just as powerful as seeing it first or second‑hand. All the levels are just as significant and potent. It is clear that your work is informed by the history of performative art (whether outwardly or implicitly). Can you talk about your interest in history and how this is manifest in your work? Have feminist art practices, which foregrounded the body as both subject and obect, influenced your practice? (BC): Yes, our practice is most certainly informed by the history of performance art and feminist art practice from the 1970s, and many of our works reference performances either directly or indirectly from this period through re-enactment and appropriation. We are particularly interested in the way performances are recorded and remembered throughout history — and the theories around ‘liveness’ and ‘presence’. Work in progress: Dawn to dusk 2010, like many of our video works, investigates the relationship between the live performance and the subsequent document or trace. In this work, we confuse the relationship between what the audience can see and what may have actually happened, playing with the audience’s perception of time and space. There is something appealing about conflating reality and illusion and fact and fiction in a medium like performance art, which has long been associated with notions of ‘truth’ and ‘realness’. In our most recent performance installation, Performance histories: Remembering Barbara Cleveland 2011, which premiered at Artspace, Sydney, earlier this year, these ideas were taken one step further. This work, made up of a single-channel video, a series of three performances and limited edition printed T-shirts, pays homage to Barbara Cleveland, a seminal figure of early Australian performance art (a completely fictional character, created by Brown Council). Throughout the exhibition we undertook a series of two-hour performances necessarily has a privileged relationship to the performance or the artist’s intent, a point Amelia Jones makes in her 1997 essay ‘“Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’. While the live situation may enable the phenomenological relations of flesh-to-flesh engagement, the documentary exchange (viewer/reader‑document) is equally intersubjective. 4 So, just because you weren’t there to witness Carolee Schneemann pulling a scroll out of her vagina in her now infamous Interior scroll 1975, that doesn’t mean you can’t engage with the political, cultural and feminist rationale of the work through the documentation. Often it is easier in retrospect to engage with the artist’s sensibilities and to understand the context of the performance. (LB): Engaging with anything via media will inevitably assist and detract at the same time. Nothing ever supplements for the actual live act entirely, and there are always shortfalls in the transfer of actual experience and the removed experience. There are, however, huge benefits to a digital recreation of performance. This is the main medium in which my performance work is presented, as I infrequently perform live. The quality of digital media, with high definition cameras and projectors, means there is little to no loss in the quality of the image, and the performance can happen outside the gallery or venue and be specific to landscape or environment, which is also a significant part of my practice. I don’t think I would have been inclined to be a performance artist if it was restricted to live performance in front of an audience. I very much enjoy the option of re-presenting a rare and distant moment via media in another context. It is far better than a recreation or re-staging, which seems like a watered down copy of an original work without the aspects that made the original work interesting. (KM): I actually like to flip to the other end of the spectrum — I get quite excited about the relics of performances and actions. Even though I don’t always work in this way, I really like works that set up an idea in the viewer’s mind — like the game ‘Mouse Trap’ — setting up indicators for them to come to their own conclusions about how, why, when and where. It could just be the title