Virtual Closing Party: Performer
2 September 2016
Our ‘Performer’ channel highlights performance art in film. These works help us develop a wider understanding of film both within a conventional contemporary art setting and within the broader cultural context of theatre, comedy and narration.Painting / Retoque (2008) by Francis Alÿs
Painting / Retoque (8 minutes 31 seconds), combines painting with performative action, merging the poetic with the political in a statement on national borders. In the film, Alÿs meticulously re-paints a yellow median strip on a road in the former American Panama Canal Zone, the territory joining the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The act creates a ‘found painting’ in public space, charged with memories of past political conflict, where the wielding of the brush becomes an act of healing for a traumatised territory. Alÿs’s retouched line is echoed by the scene’s slowly moving backdrop in which barges obediently conform to the physical restrictions of the canal’s shipping lanes – a cogent reminder of political boundaries that define and delimit the rights of passage.
As it presents itself (2008) by Ryan Gander
Produced by Wonky Animations in Bristol, As it presents itself (25 minutes) by Ryan Gander brings together plasticine characters based on the comedian Spike Milligan, curator Matthew Higgs, Mrs Frances Gander (the artist’s mother), the Lumière Brothers (Auguste and Louis, who were among the earliest of film-makers); and a generic animator’s armature that stands as the skeleton of the other characters. The characters seem to be auditioning for a piano piece, but appear nervous. Visitors to the exhibition become spectators of the film, and in turn, the audience. A tongue-in-cheek contradiction occurs between the action and the narration, the staged, the un-staged and the upstaged, the directed and the happenstance. As an investigation into the notion of entertainment, the work is an attempt to look at the relationship between performer and spectator and to rigorously discuss the stereotypes of performing art.
The Hunt (1992) by Christian Jankowski
The Hunt (1 minute, 11 seconds, 1992) is an early work by Christian Jankowski, where the artist is filmed visiting supermarkets and ‘hunting’ for his groceries with a bow and arrow. Following the hunt, Jankowski queues and pays for his goods, playfully subverting his hunter-gatherer role and humorously suggesting that natural self-supply and capitalist circulation are not necessarily mutually exclusive.