Dialogues Past

I think I have mentioned before (on more than one occasion) the recent surge of performance artists re-visiting and re-assessing their earlier works. Once again another exhibition came to my attention highlighting this particular phenomenon, ‘10 Dialogues’ at the Royal Scottish Academy, so here I am, yet again, bloging about other artists reliving previous successes. The thing is that many of these performances are only deemed as being of seminal importance in retrospect. Now Marina Ambramovic (the mother of all performance artists) draws thousands to her events, as seen in the Manchester International Festival 2010. Yet in 1975, when she first scored a star on the floor in paraffin and set it alight with herself inside, it was not to a jostling collection of well-to-do gallery goers but a concerned bunch of students who then had to drag her from the charred zone on her loss of consciousness. At least if Ambramovic was to re-create this work today the MoMA would probably have ten firemen on queue to lift her out the wreckage and a helicopter on hand to airlift her to safety, while filming it all of course.

Ambramovic was not however the artist I started of writing this article about (she is merely a useful study for the matter). The piece that particularly caught my attention in ‘10 Dialogues’ and made me reconsider the recreated performance was a simple film of a car journey, itself a recreation of a previous film made from a car journey by another artist. The work was shown on one TV split into two screens so that original film and recreation showed in tandem. The piece was perfect, each camera angle, close up and panning-out had been recreated and yet rather than the two images looking the same the scenery had changed so much in the thirty years or so between them that the two films melded into polar opposites. Where once there had been a lamp post, later there was not, once a hedgerow, now a block of flats.

It bought to mind the futility of attempting to re-create past events. No doubt someone will always have barged in in the interim and built a block of flats or situated the fire brigade on stand-by. This is what I took away from ‘10 Dialogues’. It was an exhibition that celebrated the past and an analysis of how it impacted on the future. It was not about trying to keep events in cotton wool but mapping how things changed. When I was at college I once spent months making the most god awful mess of paper mache wires. It looked horrific! I then spent the next few months trying to work this revolting lump into every installation I created to no avail. After seeing ‘10 Dialogues’ I took a photo of this piece and promptly binned it. It was a mess, it didn’t work and I’m moving on. It is not our job as artists to dwell on previous disasters, to drag a reluctant success story out of them. Perhaps they will in time hold that status but dwelling on the past has always been acknowledged as an unhealthy occupational hazard likely to catch fire and blow up in our face.