Niko Raes

Performance
8 June 2007
Arnolfini, Bristol

Niko Raes’s performance of Shattered Dreams at the Arnolfini in Bristol accompanied the launch of Manuel Vason’s book Encounters (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007), a collection of photographs Vason created in collaboration with a wide range of artists working within performance and live art. Shattered Dreams has only been publicly performed a handful of times, in 2001 and 2004, so most people familiar with his work (myself included) would have encountered it through images of it – including those created with Vason. The photographs of Shattered Dreams in Encounters present the image of Raes’s naked and painted body suspended in mid-air to be considered as image. But the live performance is quite a different experience in which, as a spectator, I am inevitably aware of not only the image being presented but also the act of presentation. For me, this live event is an opportunity to question not only the meaning of the images themselves, but also what it means to present these images to a collected audience.

As I enter the theatre, the room is dark. There is ominous music. There are no seats, and everyone is gathering in a circle around Raes’s body crumpled on the floor. His body is naked, covered in white paint, and attached by ropes to a frame suspended from the ceiling. The lights dim even more, the music swells, and the frame from which Raes’s body is suspended is hoisted into the air. Each of his arms is attached to each leg by a rope through a pulley so that, with effort, he can raise one limb by pulling down on another. For about twenty minutes, Raes creates images in mid-air with his contorted, straining body. They become increasingly difficult to create and sustain as his body becomes exhausted. Eventually, he can no longer move; the frame is lowered to the ground where he lies exhausted; the music stops; the audience applauds and leaves; and Raes remains exhausted on the floor in the empty room.

My most basic experience of this piece is of being part of a group of people gathered around the image of a naked, muscular body suspended and twisting in the air, made anonymous and aestheticised by the paint covering the body. For me, there is something disturbing about this experience, not because I find the image of Raes’s body to be disturbing but, quite the opposite, because it is so beautiful. This collective celebration of the beautiful has uncomfortable connotations for me, as it resonates not only with entertainment, athletics, and fashion, but also with fascism, in both its both popular sense (as in body-fascism) and political sense. For me, a culture that celebrates beauty as an end in and of itself is one which is dangerous, violent, intolerant, destructive… so gathering in a room to praise the beauty of a muscular body under stress is for me a suspect cultural practice.

But as Raes’s body tires, I feel as if the suspect beauty of the piece works productively against itself. The piece becomes less and less able to manifest itself, less and less a triumph of the body-as-object. I’m no longer (worryingly) admiring the beauty of the exertion, but instead watching that beauty consume itself. It’s possible to regard this exhausted body, as it is lowered to the floor, as a continuation of the celebration of the body-in-extreme (Christ/sport/pornography). It’s also possible to regard this exhaustion as the cost, undesirable but necessary, which must be paid for the attainment of beauty. But I think the piece asks us to regard it in its entirety, in which the images of beauty which it produces are only part of a longer arc which works both to produce and to undermine that beauty.

In this way, the piece doesn’t end when the music stops and collective applause (somewhat disappointingly) recuperates that collapse into a nameable experience. The arc of the experience includes this applause, as a figure lies unable even to stand, but also includes the room slowly emptying while he is still lying there, and then the room being empty, and him able to stand, and showering, and putting on his clothes, and beginning, with every action he makes in every day, to prepare for the next performance, whether it is weeks or months or years away.

All of this is perhaps implied by the more widely experienced photographs of Raes’s work, but in the live performance these issues become acute. In a reversal of what might be expected, these performances, more seldom experienced than the photographs of them, work as a kind of reflective critique of the images of exertion and beauty.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Niko Raes’s website: http://www.bodyrefuse.be/