Two Map articles recently discussed the performance lecture format.

1. ‘Performance and Pedagogy: All Talk, Some Action’ Karen Archey, Febuary 2010

2. ‘Temporary Experts: a Response to Karen Archey’s All Talk, Some Action’ Joanna Fiduccia, march 2010

There seemed from reading these articles that there is much confusion to where this format originated and a fluidity, and questionability, of this as a medium at all. What really defines the performance lecture? Both articles seemed to want to place it within a history – referencing Joseph Beuys, Andrea Fraser, and John Cage among others. However, for me this ambiguity is its strength. Like video art of the 80s it has emerged as a hybrid, indefinable medium, picking and pulling from history in an unashamedly liberal manner. In my last entry I discussed how, while art itself is pushing at the gallery structures, the legitimising texts somehow seem to be ever pulling this expansion back into the spatial confines of the white cube. At the moment critics seem confused as to how and where to place the performance lecture in a historically linear framework, into a singular discipline and as a result the medium has retained a contemporary freedom – after all, the only way to keep something contemporary is to keep history at bay! In the book Liminal Acts A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance 1999 by Susan Broadhurst, she discusses Foucault’s notion of the unity of statements such as medicine, economics or grammar. “What appears as a well defined field of objects is no more than a series full of gaps, interplays of differences, distances and transformations.” Broadhurst says that the grid of specification must be analysed. Having sat through many a university lecture and many a fine art performance, I am now troubled by the idea of defining my work as a ‘performance lecture’. A lecture implies factual information, a performance, as Roselee Goldberg suggests in her essay, ‘Performance: A Hidden History’, assumes access into the world of art itself. Pairing the two suggests a hybrid when in fact I believe that one necessarily negates the other. Maybe I should call my works, ‘NOT a performance lecture’, ‘opposed to the performance lecture’, ‘an inverted performance lecture’. I do not want to offer people access to this ‘art world’ that I’m not sure I inhabit, or exists, nor offer them knowledge that I don’t necessarily have. Instead I wish to make them aware of a system beyond our own control.

http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=418