"Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979."

ArtForum, Sept, 1998 by Bruce Hainley

In his introduction, Schimmel issues an explication and proviso: "This exhibition brings together a very specific group of works to represent that crucial period in which performance both informed and altered the nature of artists' practice. 'Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979' - the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue - make no attempt to survey performance, per se. In that respect, extraordinary work made by dancers, musicians, playwrights, authors, architects, and social scientists (all of whom had a profound effect on and an interaction with the visual arts and performance) are not explored." In other words, as long as those involved were known as "artists," their performative work was viewed and/or discussed, even when it was secondary to what made them famous - or even more oddly, secondary to the medium of which it partook. What is the investment in the term "art," especially when at the moment of instigation much of the work included was removed from the givens, the parameters, the limits, of art? Of all the contributors to the catalogue, only Guy Brett ponied up on what was at stake in this show via his discussion of the "ceremoniously burned" paintings contained in glass grenade flasks of Susan Hiller's "Hand Grenades," 1969-72: "Who can say we are not looking at paintings here? We may also, inadvertently, be looking at a cunning allegory for the dilemmas of the MOCA exhibition itself. Can the ashes of live art explode, by some process of poetic re-presentation, into new life?" The answer "no" is as possible as the answer "yes" - which keeps the show vital and the stakes of the questions it raises high.

What "Out of Actions" paradoxically displayed was the move away from objects toward concept or idea - a precursor of Conceptualism in which objects that trigger thinking are to be understood as "complete" in spite of the fact that what brought the thing into being (and especially why it's being displayed), i.e., the body, is no longer physically present. Seeing a photograph of Lygia Clark's Are pedra, 1966/1998, a stone nestled in a small plastic bag of air; or Yoko Ono's Painting to Hammer a Nail, 1961/1998; or Alison Knowles' Gentle Surprises for the Ear, 1975/1997, found detritus with written instructions for making the trash musical, left me wondering why Schimmel resisted allowing the audience to interact with these pieces, which would have allowed the viewer to re-perform them, breaking down the barrier that this work implicitly and explicitly, as originally conceived, wished to break down. Why not a stack of plastic bags and stones? Why not a canvas that could still be nailed? Why not let people pick up a shard or bit of something and follow the instructions for activating the music of the discarded?

A similar resistance to what is not serious, stable, fetishizable as art, caused some weird omissions. Through his work in movies, with the Velvet Underground, and in socializing, Andy Warhol's entire career is something made out of action; the work of Paul Thek, who opened the object's innards and installed his hippie body among the free fall of his endless accumulations, is apposite to everything going on; in terms of the dizzying breaking down of generic categories of "performance" and the "object" the radical interventions of, say, Jack Smith should have proved inescapable.