Steven Cohen/Manuel Vason

Encounters
Performance, Collaboration, Photography: Manuel Vason
Editor: Dominic Johnson
Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007
£19.95
ISBN 978090773842

Encounters by photographer Manuel Vason reproduces 162 images created in collaboration with 36 solo artists and artist collaborators working within performance and live art. As Dominic Johnson describes in his introduction, these images were created with a collaborative approach specifically for the camera – though usually based on the artists’ live performance practice.

It’s difficult to generalise over such a broad range of images, but for the most part the images present the variously altered bodies of the artists, framed clearly with little extraneous clutter. They are bold and striking images, showing bodies in states of extremity or with extraordinary appendages or costumes. They seem designed to have an immediate impact: I am compelled to linger over each one, because they take time to process the emotions and connotations they evoke, but almost always the information of the image is completely available at first glance.

Like the work of the artists represented in Encounters, the images range widely in style and setting. Some depict interactions or interventions in specific environments, while others are set against neutral backgrounds. Some artists stare directly at the viewer, and others are depicted in mid-action. In all of them there is a clear interaction between an artist’s sense of performance and the photographer’s sense of composition. This interaction between the composition and the represented action creates a beguiling paradox of reality and artifice. It’s hard for me not to feel as if the power of these images comes largely from the reality of the unusual and often extreme acts which they portray: yes, those feathers go completely through Kris Canavan’s arms; yes, that’s real wreckage of a real building within which Veenus Vortex is intertwining her real body; and so on.

But although the strength of these images derives partly from the power of the events they document, they are not the same as those events. In looking at this collection of images, I also think of the images photographed but not reproduced in the book – the number of approaches, angles, and photographic adjustments that were tried in the production of each image. The image I am seeing on the page is the one which is most sharp, where the lighting was most effective, where no one blinked or there was no unwanted interference, and so on.

In other words, the real and presumably often painful acts notwithstanding, these images are fabrications, even simulations*. I know this is, of course, the paradox of the photograph itself – it resembles the real so well that it is no longer real (even though we usually prefer it to the real). And I’m not suggesting that there’s any unacknowledged duplicity in these photographs – they are very aware that they are constructed. But the way the images in this book work with the tension between reality and artifice makes me reflect on the way this happens not only in the photographic image, but also in the live performances of these artists.

Most of the works in this book address the nature and vulnerability of the body, and an obvious interpretation of these works might be that they affirm the reality of the artists’ bodies, and of “the body” itself. But what if we instead think of these works as challenges to that apparent reality? For even when the bodies are really in the room with us – bleeding, breathing, contorted, exposed – they are carefully planned fabrications. The images in Encounters might be seen not as presentations of the reality of these bodies, but of the ways in which we represent them – and, less obviously, the same thing might be said about the work upon which the images are based.

Along these lines, some of the pieces I like best in this collection are those that rely least on the extremity of what they represent, but instead those that question the processes of representation and seem most aware of themselves as photographs. The way Stuart Brisley is concealed and revealed within the site of fabrication, his studio. The way Miguel Perreira, his body obscured by black tufts of something animal, seems also to have been scratched into place from the border of the page that holds him. Or the way the image of Steven Cohen in costume atop a giraffe’s head seems simultaneously to both claim and refuse the authority of an anthropological document. These images reject any potential truth-value of the image (and of the body), and instead seem to embrace a value that derives from artifice, from simulation, and from everything that surfaces when we encounter the bodies and lives of others.

*Dominic Johnson makes a similar point in his 2005 article on Vason’s work, “Geometries of Trust: Some Thoughts on Manuel Vason and Photographic Conditions of Performance”, Dance Theatre Journal, 20, no. 4 [April 2005].

Written by Theron Schmidt

Related links

Encounters is available from Unbound: http://thisisunbound.co.uk/

Manuel Vason’s website: http://www.manuelvason.com/

Battersea Arts Centre 7 Jun 2007
Shown as part of Brunel University's MA Contemporary Performance Making Showcase Festival

Like millions of women across the UK, Ellen Duckenfield has an unhealthy obsession with food. However, her obsession does not stem from a modern concern with organic produce, weight gain or calorie counting. Duckenfield realises that food - and eating- is one of the things every human needs to do everyday (the other being sleep). Food is the ever-present witness to the drama of our lives and is therefore a perfectly ripe subject for a piece of performance.

In The Ideal Recipe Duckenfield follows a specially made instructional recipe booklet, preparing real ingredients in her makeshift on-stage kitchen whilst telling autobiographical tales through food: how food has moved throughout the defining moments of her life, acting as the familiar backdrop to family gatherings, political protests, personal disasters and deaths. Duckenfield's stories of her own life-in-food serve as a clear reminder that the preparation and consumption of this seemingly benign substance is more than a necessary daily duty or domestic act. On page two of The Ideal Recipe booklet, Duckenfield mirthfully squeezes lemons for 'Lemon Drizzle Cake' whilst recounting a bitter story of sibling rivalry. Its not clear whether the sister ate the cake, and if so survived. On page 8, Duckenfield proclaims herself 'Queen of Dips', confessing she never fails to impress at parties with her home made Guacamole. In short, food in The Ideal Recipe acts variously, both politically and psychologically, as retreat, reminder, gift, fashion statement, revenge and even competition. It follows that each one of us has a story to tell both with and through food and The Ideal Recipe prompts us to recall these childhood vegetable aversions or adult dinner party traumas.

There is a disturbing objectification of the food that Duckenfield shares the stage with. For example, each carrot is lovingly chopped in a diagonal twenty first century style, not, you must believe, in a passé seventies straight chop. Then later on, the artist illustrates her complex extended family with vegetables and then proceeds to callously chop the items, including the red onion - her step sister - roughly in half. Something inside of all of us tightens at this point: Duckenfield can and will do harm to the food she charmingly personifies. As such it is all the more disturbing to see the TV monitor close ups of her chopping, slicing and boiling the items in question.

Every so often Duckenfield steps out of the kitchen to enact structural and narrative asides, recalling the life of her alter ego - a glamorous and would be deadly assassin- into a small voice recorder. These interior monologues are important; they represent the artist's urge to escape her womanly domestic food-hell, a desire many can and will sympathise with. But moreover, in contrast to the kitchen scenes, the dialogue in these soliloquies appears raw, un-rehearsed and spontaneous. Duckenfield herself seems surprised with what unfolds in her imagined adventures. The audience gets the sense that she is genuinely yearning and practising for another life, her fantasies unravelling before both her and our eyes.

The performance of The Ideal Recipe and its on stage set up clearly mimes the contemporary trend for on-screen cooking programmes such as Ready Steady Cook and Saturday Kitchen. In addition, the TV equipment on the counter top, the adjacent video camera and discarded cartons recall a rare behind-the-scenes look at what these messy TV studios might look like beyond the frame. It is also important to note that Duckenfield uses the domestic interior - particularly the kitchen - as site for the work. In doing so she references overtly feminist work of the 1970's in which women artists (in particular Martha Rosler with her 'Semiotics of the Kitchen', 1975) made this typically 'female' space political and deeply problematic.

However, the ultimate achievement of The Ideal Recipe is successfully transforming food into much more than simple nostalgia trigger. Duckenfield manages to perform food as physical or body-to-body memory; cooked and consumed as a loaded and tangible gift moving from one person to another, thus creating a network and community of its own. At the end of the performance the artist ensures the audience is complicit in this particular food gift economy. Leaving the stage she invites everyone to dine out on her wares, to eat the fruits of her labour. However, faced with Duckenfield's 'gift' of food we are left, mid bite of Guacamole, wondering what, or who, is passing between us. What elements of Duckenfield's life, her family, have we consumed?

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

For more information on the artist Ellen Duckenfield see http://ellenduckenfield.com/

For more information Brunel University's showcase go to http://www.brunel.ac.uk/...

Performance
Saturday 9th June 2007
Bristol Arnolfini

"Ecstatic is a new piece designed for the context of Manuel Vason’s exhibition ‘Encounters’ at Arnolfini. Athey’s work explores the relationships between desire, sexuality, control and suffering, it challenges physical and emotional boundaries." (Arnolfini)

I feel it’s necessary to state where I’m coming from as a viewer because my own reaction to this work surprises me. I’m relatively new to performance, its history: I’ve read a couple of books, I’ve seen some iconic photographs, including one of Athey himself in performance, butt-naked and tattooed.

I vaguely knew he might do something extreme, something that took him to his limits – there was a lot of that kind of talk about – of something that would be from the ‘outsider’ place. Which in the context of that days Arnolfini’s ‘Encounters’ exhibition and symposium seemed quite like an insider place: all that power undressing; all that fierce physical control. In art, if not in life, you don’t haplessly wander up to the edges by accident.

We file into the dark theatre, dispersing across the floor around a large table. The artist crouches on the table under a warm spotlight. He is naked except he is covered in pattern and iconography, a lush severity of design. His head is bowed. He has a long blond wig on back to front, so the fringe is at the nape of his neck and the rest of the wig conceals his face. In front of him, vertical, a double pane of glass, transparent from one side but mirrored on his. A hairbrush beside him. There is an ominous low-key sound.

He began to brush the hair, quite hard. I wondered how come the wig stayed on. You still couldn’t see his face. A crouched anonymous figure, brushing its hair: strain was evident in the body, the skin of his thigh was twitching, there was trembling. The mirrors, the long blond hair, the blood which eventually poured from Athey; the pain, the strain. This particular enactment – embodiment ? – was interrupted by the Arnolfini fire alarm, which made the experience even more disorientating. When the audience returned to the performance the intensity of the action escalated, stopping, I suppose, once a limit had been reached. An assistant helped the artist from the scene, out of the light. A thick pool of blood was left on the table.

It’s what resonances with what happened (what happened?) that surprises me. When it comes to barrel-chested battle-scarred old codgers, minus the tattoos, I have one of those at home. I would not have thought to find my partner so graphically referenced in such a venue, in such a manner. Regarding pools of blood left behind in the wake of a body, well, that’s usually the result of significant transitional circumstances – woundings, deaths or births, except, of course, for every woman who wakes up on the first day of her menstrual cycle and thinks: damn. I am nonplussed and stunned that this very specific body, Ron Athey’s; a body that testifies to struggle, pain, love, representation and the self, could resonate so tenderly with what is routine and commonplace as well as what is heightened, expressionist and singular.

A drastic sacrifice; Athey takes the pain of living within himself so we don’t have to? He represents and we're the congregation? "This is my body which will be given up for you... This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, which will be shed for you and for all (people), so that sins may be forgiven." I'm getting into contested territory. I think I'd better stop. Or could it be that I’m just not getting it?

Written by Osunwunmi

For more information on the Encounters exhibition go to http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/...

for more information on the artist Ron Athey see http://www.ronathey.com/