The Performative Impulse
Marianne Hirsch opens chapter 9 of her book The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust by outlining Hal Foster’s identification of an ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art around the turn of the millennium. For Foster, it is an impulse in contemporary artists to connect the unconnected and redress failures in cultural memory through creating imaginary pasts and futures. Hirsch, however, applies the notion to readings of postmemory, aftermath work that seeks to ‘reclaim historical specificity and context’ (pp. 227–8). A similar turn, or at least something in between the two, can be drawn from the sort of work I studied for my PhD on visual culture in contemporary, post-Agreement Northern Ireland. But that’s if you look at the more widely known names in art and film there. Beyond them, something else has been going on, but a lack of regular critical engagement and analysis – itself lacking appropriate platforms and resources – means the ecosystem forms somewhat of a monoculture where only the same names or well-known visitors circulate on a loop.
During my previous studies, something I identified that I always wanted to probe further was a performative element of installations and live artworks that demanded interactive participation from a viewer or gallery visitor in some way. In Willie Doherty’s work, it was having to navigate uncertain turns in completely blackened corridors that temporarily remove your ability to see, or double-channel videos that required the viewer to choose one screen over the other at any time and ‘live edit’ their version of the video that denied them a ‘full picture’, such was their sculptural positioning in the space. And then there’s the vibrant and active live performance community that has emerged largely from the centrifugal force of Alastair MacLennan’s presence since his arrival in 1975, a book about which is due for release next May.
The former students of Doherty, MacLennan and their contemporaries at the University of Ulster Belfast School of Art have emerged and become fully fledged artists in their own right. Many of them have continued their studies or completed residencies elsewhere and returned, granting them the benefit of both first-hand experience and clarifying distance. Their methods of drawing out participation does not implicate visitors in the various roles or feelings of paranoia and suspicion stemming from thirty years of conflict. Rather, they involve people in bringing their art alive, whether it be collections, kinetic sculpture, live performance, storytelling or experiential narratives constructed in a space.
It was from talking to my good friend Johanna Leech last week about the state of things back home that prompted this train of thought. We remembered both being involved in Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell’s ‘There’ for FIX 13, the live art biennale hosted by Catalyst Arts. I still have and use my ‘uniform’ from this public live installation in which 40 of us all dressed in the same distinctive way performed some sort of action along the left side of the Belfast to Larne express bus route exclusively for passengers on the left side of the bus who took notice. We talked about how Johanna’s own shows involving collections are at their most engaging when accompanied by her stories attached to the objects and places from which she retrieved them. She mentioned that Alastair MacLennan, who generously conducts free one-to-one sessions to help other artists clarify their ideas, through his gentle nudging and questioning helped her see that her acts of storytelling are intertwined with the artefacts on display; she is a package with her work, a medium of it, just as a performance artist’s body is at once their primary material and medium.
We also thought about Dorothy Hunter’s sculptural installation practice. I mused about how when I see them, I can imagine Dorothy doing the welding, banging and shaping involved in the making of the objects and placing them into specific environments. It all led me to remember the live or contingent temporary environments constructed or facilitated by Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell, Tonya McMullan, Colm Clarke, Katrina Sheena Smith, Paul Moore, Robin Price, Emma Campbell and many others I can only recall in flashes or haven’t met because they joined the fray after I left in 2014. It all makes me feel homesick for Belfast. It all beckons me to redress the gap in discussions of their work.
The morning after our conversation and since, my head has been swimming with notions of hammering out a book outlining and exploring these artists and the ideas emerging from their practices. So how to go about such a project? What shape and structure should it take? The work and many of the artists are in Belfast or thereabouts and I am in Newcastle upon Tyne and there’s a global pandemic on. Should it even be me who undertakes it? I have ideas for three other books I’m struggling to get near and I’ve managed to overstretch myself with a podcast I’d hoped would be more collaborative and paying its way by now. Marrying the two and using the podcast as a research tool could be a useful approach. I’m calling to mind Katy Deepwell’s Dialogues, a book of interviews with women artists in Ireland. Using the podcast as a research tool, could I collect up material and testimony from the artists themselves, perhaps capping it at twelve to stave off overwhelm and leave the door open for further volumes?
Recording conversations for the podcast and transcribing them for the foundation of the book could be a helpful method for identifying patterns and points of interest. I would want the writing itself to be performative. After all, that is what I did any time I mucked about with Bbeyond during their monthly meetings when I could go regularly. I often experimented with performative approaches to live writing and live documenting the actions going on around me. I have tried to carry on this interest in Newcastle, but despite the efforts of my friend Richard James Hall, Performance Art Newcastle struggled to find traction in pre-pandemic times.
This blog has become a site of experimentation in developing a voice that I’d like to come across to the reader as if I’m telling it to you personally. This time last year, I mentioned my research and writing on Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable to my friend Juliana Mensah who writes prose and plays, and explained that the blog was a drafting space to write in a freer way as if it were me talking with the intention of making it more academically robust in redrafting for a manuscript. She sagely pointed out that maybe that’s my style and it didn’t have to be ‘academic’, and that readers might engage more if it reads like you’re telling the story of your research journey while presenting the research and ideas. It might not make it any less robust than impenetrable word salad.
And so a challenge of undertaking a project on ‘the performative impulse’ lies in not having witnessed enough of the events first-hand. I’ve been frequently told by reviewers of my work that my writing really comes alive when I describe what I experienced from memory and that it’s flatter when I’ve had to rely on secondary accounts. I suppose that’s where interviews come in and mixture of experiences is necessary.
A further challenge is how to fund such a project. I must admit, I am weary of working endlessly for little or nothing. Finding a publisher and a way to subsist while investigating, gathering data and writing is the dream. Is there scope to crowdfund a project like this? What would I need? Should I try Unbound? I’d love it if ACNI would support such analytical writing. When I won the contract for Old Borders in 2012, I met with them to discuss the possibility of applying for SIAP (support for the individual artist programme, with the upper award at about £1500 at the time) or similar to buy time to take two to three months full-time to work on preparing the manuscript for publication, but no dice. If there are funds out there that support art criticism and analysis, do send them my way.
I’ll also have to overcome the guilt of my other project ideas staring at me from neglected shelves and folders stuffed with scrappy notes and draft sections. I also feel guilt because I have been trying to plan a North East Creatives podcast series that keeps encountering obstacles. The honest, brutal truth is that my heart’s not fully in it. It’s somewhere else. My brain is somewhere else. They’re pulling homeward. Leaving Belfast was never a choice, only a necessity. There have been no jobs to facilitate what I’d need to move back, and my freelance, self-employed efforts are simply not enough. I normally visit two or three times a year, but it’s unsafe to travel for an indefinite amount of time. I do feel a special fondness for Newcastle, and there is a similar energy here and some wonderful people. Before the pandemic, I was working hard to find a useful role in the arts community, and I think I was doing okay at that. Now that I’m separated from folk, but more in touch now with home through means of telecommunication, my own performative impulse to be of and in Belfast is strong – quare parful, if you will.
This feels urgent and necessary, and I possess a degree of insight that I do not possess for the North East of England where there are a glut of critical writers vying for space. As far as I know and have been told – and I’m very happy to be corrected with evidence to the contrary – no one else is covering these artists or modes of practice, at least not in a meaningful or substantial way. By that I mean going deeper than reactive reviews recorded in the moment. If not me, who? If not now, when? These are my initial thoughts and I’d love for this to be a conversation. Please get in touch if you’d be interested in being interviewed or are happy to chat about the subject.
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| me and Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell at Johanna Leech's Wanderlust & Fantastic Oddities, Millenium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, 1 November 2019 |
References
Deepwell, Katy, Dialogues: Women Artists from Ireland (London: IB Tauris, 2005).
Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)
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