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The act and the object

Art Journal, Fall, 1998 by M.A. Greenstein

Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979. Exh. cat. Edited by Paul Schimmel and Russell Ferguson. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Essays by Schimmel, Shinichiro Osaki, Hubert Klocker, Guy Brett, and Kristine Stiles. 408 pp., 200 color ills., 250 b/w. $45 paper.

Exhibition schedule:

The Museum of Contemporary Art at the Gelfen Contemporary, Los Angeles: February 8-May 10, 1998; MAK - Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna: June 17-September 6, 1998; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona: October 15-January 6, 1999; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, February 11-April 11, 1999

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The much-heralded exhibition "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979" is not about undocumented, site-specific, painterly, or sculptural performance, nor does it wield a single-lens focus on time-based gestures, actions, and events. Furthermore, making its debut at the Museum of Contemporary ArCs Geffen Contemporary, it neither presumed to be a next-generation follow-up to Surrealist theater, nor did it go on about the scathing leitmotifs of Dadaesque acting out. It was, as its curator Paul Schimmel succinctly explains in his catalogue essay "Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object," a genealogical tracing of the relation between aestheticized actions executed by mid-century artists in Japan, Europe, and the United States and the objects that were involved in or resulted from these actions.

Anyone familiar with Schimmel's previous ambitious record of visionary curating will no doubt recognize his need to sniff out an origins thesis. Resolutely framing "Out of Actions" in terms of the post-World War II history of painting and sculpture, Schimmel begins his history by placing John Cage's scores of silence and indeterminacy on a par with Jackson Pollock's gestural drips and Lucio Fontana's and Shozo Shimamoto's punctured paintings. He bases his argument on Cage's proven influence on Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and the unruly wave of Fluxus artists who entered the performance circuit beginning in the early sixties, not to mention successive generations of artists who simply bypassed painting to excavate the transgressions of history, society, and the soul. But what reveals Schimmel's great knack for organizing the unorganizable even more dramatically is who he fits into his timeline of nodal history and why he has put them there. As someone who has kept his eye on Los Angeles art, the exhibition's timeline may begin in New York and Tokyo, but it ends with the work of homeboys Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy in Los Angeles.

Whatever the conceits of the exhibition (and there are many), the richness of "Out of Actions" resides in its hefty, quasi-encyclopedic catalogue, as well as in the accompanying symposium, artist-lecture series, and performance programs. All these events represented an effort to reach back into the increasingly tooled history of performance art and bring forward for reconsideration the artifacts and documents of some of the most daringly innovative, compelling, gut-wrenching, and prosaic actions and events that have come to be considered linchpins of the post-World War II era of painterly, gestural, and conceptually motivated performance art.

This long-arm approach confidently cuts across time and the world map (sometimes in an unexpected manner) to include the antics of and objects marked by Japanese Gutai, French Nouveau Realisme, Italian Arte Povera, U.S. Happenings, cross-continental Fluxus, Viennese Aktionism, and Czech AKTUAL. Schimmel also includes evidence of phenomena discharged by a number of art-world pariahs in England, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States - artists who, by virtue of their associations with the European art community, left their idiosyncratic mark on the scene. The exhibition, in other words, unmodestly circumscribes a slice of internationally recognized material culture that the curator views as brackets to the rise and fall of modernism in the United States, Japan, and Europe in particular. This is a position that will undoubtedly irritate orthodox and regionalist followers of performance who regard gestural actions as a postmodern project of antiobject art.

Of course, Schimmel, Los Angeles's most notorious connoisseur at work in a bureaucratic machine, dares to excavate and conflate several art histories to unearth the earliest stuff, from traditional paintings and sculpture to film to props to out-and-out garbage that implied an act of creation. This is material that had accumulated over a thirty-year span of artists performing actions in galleries, down city streets, on the beach, in the woods, on top of buildings, in bedrooms and bathrooms, and even in front of oncoming trains. Faced with an onslaught that begs to outwit and wear out viewers, Schimmel opted for paradox as his reigning principle of organization. Thus we saw rote examples of the split shamanistic persona, joining the detritus of Joseph Beuys's garbage sweep with Raphael Montanez Ortiz's freshly deconstructed piano. The show also resurrects such significant artists as Allan Kaprow, one of the first to take art out of the frame and into the world.

The act and the object

Art Journal, Fall, 1998 by M.A. Greenstein

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