The act and the object

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

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.

Viewers also got to experience almost simultaneously the lyrical and the crude formalism that brought the scrutiny of the line into pleasing comparative focus: Mowry Baden's Instrument (1969), an elegantly conceived aluminum and steel serpentine structure into which a viewer may fit his or her head; James Lee Byars's Untitled Object (1962-64); Tom Marioni's line drawings of 1972-73; and Howard Fried's All My Dirty Blue Clothes (1972/98), a line of the aforementioned items that embodies an adolescent energy.

A few rooms dedicated to the divas of U.S. and French feminism, such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, Suzanne Lacy, and Orlan, account more for difference than contradiction in handling the issues of nudity, body image, and male dominion. In a similar way, juxtaposing the pseudo-documentation of Lynn Hershman's 1970s Roberta project and the faux advertisements of the 1970s British group COUM Transmissions (Cosey Fanni Tutti) plays off the quirky distinctions in alter-ego art. The works Hershman produced as the fictional persona Roberta, including the exhibition's bourgeois display of clothing, bills, and checkbook, look utterly respectable and cast a rather slavish shadow on excerpts from COUM Transmissions' satiric "Prostitution Exhibit" of 1976, which predated Annie Sprinkle's soft-porn parody by several years.

Viewers leaving these particular installations were most likely to walk up a ramp to meet Austrian artist Valle Export's conceptual and guerrilla work, including Genital Panic (1969) - two monumental, black-and-white offset prints brimming with even greater confrontational sexuality than one encounters in Schneemann's Interior Scroll (1975). For Los Angeles viewers, the large photograph of a gun-toting Export standing spread-eagle with big hair and a cut-out crotch projected an uncanny air of Patty Hearst in her S.L.A. days. Export's ironical audacity outstrips her French and U.S. counterparts and is just the tip of the Austrian iceberg that melts down into an edgy, cathartic revelry, like the dark saturnalia we find in Viennese boy art.

The exhibition includes substantial evidence of that activity. In the early 1960s Viennese Aktion artists Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Gunter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler recalculated the ecstatic effects of painting and the darkly voyeuristic avenues of photography to formulate what, in the international vernacular thirty-odd years later, constitutes a standard-bearing vocabulary of abject art. Look across the grotesque group of their messy, bloody works, and you will find both human and animal body boundaries so disrupted, defiled, and calculatingly redetermined that only a taste for the apocalyptic and old-time pagan religion could be said to dignify the work. That a fullout attack on Prussian repression was the order of the day seems to explain in part the frothy look on Muehl's face in one photograph, as he proceeds to annihilate the humanness of his female participant. Anyone who has read his politics of psychoanalytic regression is well aware that his desire to dehumanize the body extends to the penis people, but in the context of this exhibition the images still challenge the best political instincts of female viewers.

Therefore, by the time viewers arrive at the photograph of Aktion-inspired Peter Weibel's 1973 tongue-in-concrete insertion (which we are told resulted in the deformation of his tongue), the Austrian school of self-sacrifice looks positively Catholic - that is, redemptive. It is also curious to note that while Viennese body art eventually led to the arrest of Brus or the self-imposed exile of other artists, it incited actionism in artists in the United States and Australia. Almost a decade later, Chris Burden and Australia's Mike Parr ventured into treacherous forms of self-sacrifice, betting on the kind of purgative manipulations that made the Viennese work seem vital, hieratic, and potent, but respectively pulled empiricism and psychoanalytic narrative back into the domain of self-inflicted violence.

The years that followed the demise of the Nazi regime in Europe constituted a contradictory period of collective soul-searching and decadent denial. With respect to the feminist issues forcibly bound up in this work (pardon the pun), many women in these postwar performance cultures were known to collude with the power of the masculine unconscious, allowing - if not aiding - men to orchestrate their blatant objectification. In the case of the female pawn-brokering that produced the kittenish splatter effect in Yves Klein's ubiquitously-known blue body paintings, "Out of Actions" manages to level the idea of nymphomania and Faustian domination by opposing it with documentation of self-orchestrated performances by women working in Eastern Bloc countries or outside the European context.

Documents of works by Marina Abramovic or Yoko Oho certainly rival the Viennese in art-world stature, given their radical plotting of public self-offerings, which threw the spotlight on the issues of intimacy and trust rather than on primal regression. The exhibition also illuminates the strange tools of self-examination invented by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, whose holistic studies of what catalogue essayist Guy Brett calls the permeable membrane often go unmentioned in U.S. discussions of performance art.

"Out of Actions" also captures the paradoxical weight of spatial manipulation, especially where the transmuted body is implicated in the operations of industry, science, and fashion. It was hard to resist the envy and regret of not being present for "The Second Outdoor Gutai Exhibition" in Tokyo in 1956, when Gutai member Atsuko Tanaka first performed in her brilliant electric dress (in the exhibition it is accompanied by a group of magical little drawings that give the viewer some idea of Tanaka's light body). One also needed to use imagination to visualize the gravity-in-action of Rebecca Horn's luminous, black-leathered armature, accompanied by photo-documents to give an idea of what it was like when being worn.

But herein lies the crux of "Out of Actions": it is the drawings, sculptures, photographs, and texts that remain to conjure a history, narrative, and myth about prophetic artistry. To that end, MOCA has gone to some expense to dust off and in some cases reproduce the curio cabinet of now near-religious artifacts, securing numerous photographs as evidence and introducing the magical grocery store wand that allows each viewer to zap a bar code to download the desired montage of extant video imagery. The irony is that many of these objects produced for performance were done so in a direct assault on a devouring military-industrial complex (remember the term?) that has proven itself through electronic means to have, for the moment, won the high-stakes war on culture, at least in the Euro-American sense of the term. In that regard, the exhibition locates performance in mid-century Europe, the United States, and Japan as a project that straddles a rueful Arts and Crafts rejection of high technology and the out-and-out embrace of its Leviathan possibilities.

Thirty years after some of the facts, this paradox no longer seems as chilling as it once did. Still photographic confirmation of pieces from Eastern Bloc countries lends evidence of a mystical clarity wrought through the audacious banality of actions and executed in the name of art. Rasa Todosijevic's Drinking of Water - Inversions, Imitations, and Contrasts (1974), Ion Grigorescu's Pole Vault - River Traisteni (1976), and other modest Promethean tests burn their mundane black-and-white austerity into memory, making us forget for a moment, the fantasy French rationalism in Klein's Leap into the Void (1960) or whether or not photography lies. In this regard, the exhibition takes its usual position as church sanctuary and laboratory, encouraging us to contemplate the phenomenological truth of gestures - some innocuous, others patently corrupt.

But performance art before 1980 is no stranger to boredom, nor to petty crime. In fact, what comes about after 1979 could be said to constitute a significant break from the Schimmel thesis, with artists turning to themes of social and psychological identity worked out through often funky and scandalous autobiographical confession, thereby rendering objects mere theatrical props (cf. Karen Finley's yams). Schimmel himself indicates the change with his inclusion of Rasheed Araeen's "Paki Bastard" (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) (1979). This British artist's self-reflective photographic expose on migration, cultural isolation, and imaginary homelands precedes the eighties and nineties popularization of fake journalism and border identity.

The genealogical thread thus sews up an argument about the art historical validity and impact performance has made on world art since the bombing of Hiroshima. And nowhere is the speed and energy of world destruction better captured than in representations of Japan's own Gutai spectacle that played out post-Hiroshima rage and desolation full-tilt in the fifties. Unfortunately, given Butoh's relationship to Gutai, through its pioneer the outrageous Tatsumi Hijikata, it is a shame MOCA wheedled down this artist's object relations to a mere photograph.

However, in the history of firsts, "Out of Actions" will firmly establish what many in the art community have been discussing for years - namely, that Gutai put dehumanizing body art on the map by almost a decade before the group's Viermese counterparts. In keeping with its temple/laboratory theme, MOCA has installed the fresh remnants of Saburo Murakami's reenacted Breaking through Many Screens of Paper, first executed in 1955, as the official entrance to the exhibition. A photograph of Kazuo Shiraga's Challenging Mud (1955) remains a stunning Noh-like portrait of post-Hiroshima frustration. Akira Kanayama's high-frequency, painted strokes from 1957 look as if they are ready to fly off the canvas.

"Out of Actions," which fortunately travels to Europe and Japan and, unfortunately, to nowhere else in North America, is a high-rolling ethnography of ritual action and paraphernalia, a gargantuan gamble that writes otherwise ignored moments in world art history into deeper questions about the ambivalence of postwar economies toward globalism, about the decadence of sagging social hierarchies, about the primitive instincts of collective consciousness, and finally about the power to reassert magic in a lost world. If the objects in the exhibition are joined in rehashing what Nitsch called the politics of experience, they can do this because they have survived, not just as art but as artifacts of cultural metamorphosis and sewage - as nostalgic references to a time when innocence was expected to make scary artworks actually work. In years to come, "Out of Actions" may prove to have assembled the biggest collection of spiritual party favors from one of the most flagrant and fun-filled cultural revolutions enacted nearly world-wide.

Until then, its viewers may experience sudden feelings of ownership evoked by no other exhibition in recent memory. (This will happen particularly to those who were around to watch comical Fluxus operations or vomit over Nitsch's animal sacrifice, which MOCA's attempt to recapture turns into silliness rather than horror.) One of the most affecting aspects of the exhibition was its function as a reunion of artists worldwide. During the opening week of receptions, reenacted performances, and the symposium, the "I remember" and "I was here" commentaries abounded, often turning the otherwise academic project into a celebrity roast. Sentimentality aside, the exhibition represents a remarkable moment in international art history, the least of which is due to its white elephant stature: an overstuffed exhibition in an oversized warehouse with the most famous, the most obvious, and some of the most arcane examples of documents that presuppose and paradigmatically reify the art historical category. In this case, the heroic effort should be lauded for already dazzling a new generation of self-styled shamans, phenomenologists, and exhibitionists now ready to strip naked like their predecessors, again in the name of cultural transgression, spectacle, and authentic gesture. Only this time we now hear the words pixelated and bytes of information and see performance turn the futurist corner into a playground of fantasy simulation.

The exhibition catalogue is an essential document for students and scholars, lavishly designed, illustrated, and researched. The objects themselves - so seductive, so immediate in the grainy vintage photographs that illustrate the book - are more problematic. Blown out into the orbit of the new science fiction, these objects - once the apogee of hipness - now have acquired an archival patina that makes them look menopausal and avuncular in the same way that Dada's artifacts now often look antique. As exciting as the exhibition is for its masterful skewing of postwar modernism, and its retrieval of work often marginalized by mainstream art history, it ends up suggesting that you really had to be there and that performance art dressed as relic is musty, no matter how you cut the historical pie.

M. A. Greenstein is a Los Angeles-based art theorist and critic who writes on world art and performance and who, in a past life, performed as a member of Women of the Dream Shift. She is on the faculties of Art Center College of Design, Otis College of Art and Design, and The Claremont Colleges.

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