TBA: Time Based Art
- Katherine Bovee -
Annually, since 2003, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) has assembled a group of artists, musicians and performers under the rubric of “time-based art.” Embracing a broad and multidisciplinary definition of contemporary art, the ten-day Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival consciously strives to erode divisions between “the performing arts” and “performance art.” The festival encompasses everything from social interventions that take place on the street to elaborately staged productions in formal performance halls.
An international group of visiting artists and attendees mix with the local milieu, all becoming temporary “residents” of the TBA experience. But unlike an art fair, biennial or gallery attendee, the denizen of the TBA festival is not merely a cultural consumer but a participant—a collaborator in the time-based experience. Ad hoc communities form around time, place and action, communities linked by shared experience and participation. And there is ample opportunity to be absorbed into the festival, be it intentionally or unintentionally, through chance encounters with roving artists, by attending a performance or by engaging in post-performance discussion over beers at the festival’s late-night venue, The Works.
The TBA’s attempts at inclusiveness—the diversity of the types of events, the broadness of the label time-based art and the presence of projects taking place in situ around the city—are balanced by a tightly controlled curatorial vision. Here, performances that defy easy categorization but engage established arenas of contemporary art are favored. It comes as no great surprise that, accordingly, a number of artists in TBA:07 specifically addressed and challenged the relationship between artist/performer and viewer/participant/audience, some by blurring—and others obliterating—notions of established relational propriety.
The opening of TBA:07 was appropriately staged on the steps of Portland’s central square, where dozens gathered en plein air, without introduction or ceremony, to perform Rinde Eckert’s On the Great Migration of Excellent Birds. The performance—a contemporary choral work that also involves a set of scripted gestures and planned silences—was variously subtle, tasteful and odd. But more importantly, Eckert’s Migration drew in everyone within the surrounding proximity—a public square—creating a mix of both voluntary and involuntary audience members as witnesses to this scripted, albeit unorthodox action/performance.
Stan Shellabarger, Untitled, 2007; performance; photo by Jörg Jakoby
Several roving pieces shared Eckert’s sensibility—including the Reading Out Loud project in which poets, actors and artists recited passages from great American literature on street corners and in cafes—dissolving the notion of stage and creating unintentional audiences in the process. Others, like Stan Shellabarger’s untitled piece, left remnants that far outlasted the duration of the performance itself, which very few people witnessed, demarcating a mysterious path across four adjoining crosswalks with chalk-soled shoes, creating a space for contemplation. Some performances elicited a straight-up role reversal. Sincerely, John Head (SJH)’s Box Set, for instance, invited audiences to recast themselves as performer, offering instruments and a recording studio to anybody willing to cover a song off the 1970s album Foghat Live.
Other performances required greater acts of faith from their audiences, including Liz Haley’s Polygraph project. Here, the artist offered to honestly answer any question posed by visitors, casting doubt on the validity of performance as well as our very capacity to judge honesty, even in a controlled setting. Further, Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Haircuts by Children was an act that surpassed theoretical notions of the participatory viewer in situational or relational aesthetics. This Toronto-based collective jumped through the city’s bureaucratic hoops and organized training for a group of local school children between the ages of ten and twelve to become hairdressers for a day. Over the course of two afternoons, a fleet of underage stylists inhabited a local barbershop, as dozens of adults gave them free rein over their visage. The children undertook the task at hand with great sincerity, as aware as the subjects in the barber’s chair that their actions essentially inverted socially normative child/adult roles and behavior.
The Dutch experimental troupe Kassys also disrupted normative expectations by undermining the comfortable distance between life and stage. Further, they violated the role of the actor, casting each in a double role by combining live action and video to purportedly present the “real life” stories of the onstage performers. The first half of their performance took the form of absurdist theater where a group of characters come to terms with the death of an unseen friend/husband/relative. The cast stumbled through sketches, demonstrating the awkwardness that results when people attempt to maintain a degree of social propriety while dealing with private grief. As the play ended, the audience saw—through what appeared to be a closed-caption video—a behind-the-scenes, post-performance celebration. In the video, each cast member reenters the “real world” and confronts the general sorrows of the human condition in isolation through their own set of private rituals and behaviors. One actor, clocking in to her second job as an airline hostess, locks herself inside an airplane lavatory and destroys it in an act of rebellious and unexplained rage. Another actor pathologically binges on junk food and listens to records alone in his apartment.
Kassys, Kommer, 2007; performance; photo by Sally Garrido Spencer
Throughout this reality-TV-type video, the audience is subjected to all-too-personal behavior from characters they have just become familiar with as stage personas. Yet behavior permissible onstage by professional actors suddenly becomes taboo when presented in the context of the world beyond. Although their behavior on- and offstage was equally outlandish, the shift in perspective when witnessing the “second identity” of these actors proves disturbing, disrupting the emotional distance between actor and audience.
New York-based artist Claude Wampler’s PERFORMANCE (career ender) easily elicited the most dialog and response at TBA:07. Conceived as if it were the artist’s last performance, Wampler categorically undermines the unstated relationships that play out within the theater. She ostensibly maintains the notion of a performance with a set beginning and end, the familiarity of the stage and the relationship of audience to the performance, only to later violate the sacrosanctity of these relationships. The first half of the show was dominated by footage of the John Carpenter Band rehearsing a single song. Ghostly images of band members were projected onto mist spewing from several fog machines onstage. Props—a drum set, keyboard and microphone—were enigmatically animated through the presence of the projected figures. The audience was made privy to all the false starts, the casual banter—the mistakes, experimentation and happy accidents that are an inevitable part of the creative process.
Claude Wampler (with John Carpenter Band), performance (career ender), 2007; performance; photo by Jon Springer
Sincerely, John Head, Box Set, 2007; performance; photo by Nat Andreini
The performance was also marked by the physical absence of the band. Both practice and performance were negated, as practice became the subject of the piece. In the last moments of the performance, however, a band emerged from offstage to enthusiastically perform a live rendition of the song, the band’s frontman stripping down to silver underpants at its climax. Those sitting in the theater chairs were returned from their status as witnesses to the creative process to members of an audience. But Wampler’s challenge to the audience/performer relationship did not end there. At the moment of the “final” performance, it became all too clear that the accumulation of odd behavior from certain audience members throughout the show—inappropriately loud and unsolicited commentary, candy-eating, uninhibited dancing, abrupt exits at inopportune moments—was in fact the work of plants surreptitiously embedded in the audience.
Manipulating every aspect of one’s experience inside of the black box, Wampler seems interested in more than the Cagian notion of recognizing ambient experience as an inseparable part of live performance. She seeks total control over the experience, bringing to mind Yves Klein’s staging of L’exposition du vide (1958). Wampler thoroughly disrupts the role of the audience, putting into question whether the performers onstage, the infiltrators or the uninformed audience are the subject of the piece.
One is, at various times throughout the festival, not necessarily included but implicated—as spectator, as voyeur, as participant, as subject. The sum of this shifting and ever-evolving role is that each individual becomes an essential part of a multifarious organism that defines a time-based experience. As a collective event, the unifying impulse that drives the festival—bringing a wide-ranging program of staged performances, curated visual art exhibitions, interactions, films, lectures and workshops together under an overarching premise—foregrounds a very specific set of relationships at play, to varying degrees, in each performance. These interactions and relationships contribute to the festival’s existence, cohesion and life as a complete organism rather than merely a series of performances to be considered singly. The inevitable link between time, place and event opens up the potential for change, interaction and the variable experiences that constitute live performance.