My Interview with VestAndPage on Performance Art (Patreon)

More on VestAndPage here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VestAndPage

Valerie Sharp: What is unique about performance art to you? What sets it apart from other art forms?

Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage): Art essentially affects the people who see and understand it, and to understand it, one needs both an education and a frequentation. The problem is that people who understand art are usually the ones who are better off than those who need some changes in society and the system. Performance art and Live art unhinged this way of understanding things, differentiating from other classically understood artistic disciplines for the immediacy in communicating urgencies (social, political, personal) for a change within the system. However, as performance is a time-based practice, ephemeral by its very nature, it does not act so much as an agent of change. Instead, it is a companion for change: a way for the performer to express their moment as it happens. After all, all art, and even performance, is personal expression. Even if the artist or performer is confronted with universal, public domain themes, they always deal with what is happening around them, which affects them personally. That is what they ultimately express.

If the legendary performances of the 1970s had been positive agents of change, they would have made us all a better society. Still, in reality, they were only a means of expressing discomfort, sometimes a protest. Transferred to museums and galleries, performances now increasingly become the prerogative of a so-called "cultured" audience, an "institutional audience," since, in recent years, performance art has significantly been institutionalized and has entered some academies and universities as a teaching discipline. However, apart from a few exceptions that have also made history, most institutions present performances that are often well-conceived marketing operations or whose contents do not compromise the reputation of the institution itself and of those who support it financially. Today, we often see in museums, galleries and foundations performances by dancers rather than radical performers since the general idea remains that dance is less compromising, more understandable, enjoyable to the eye, and above all, entertainment. The same word "performance" is now so much used and abused in all disciplines and common language to the point that its original semantic value is being lost.

Returning to performance as a device for social change, the real contributor to positive change is educating the public about performance art by offering adequate tools to understand how performance can accompany this change. It is a matter of ethical education too. It is what we have been trying to do since 2012 with the Venice International Performance Art Week—a live art exhibition project which is not a festival, but "a gathering reunion among people and artists of different cultures who looked for the pearls in the rivers of human civilizations and joined together to share what they found." (Lee Wen)

Since the art of performance moves in a different time, it is still possible tit contributes to positive changes in a nutshell. The creative imagination of each performer concretizes, however partially, the possibility of new realities.

As for the uniqueness or what distinguishes the practice of performance art from other artistic disciplines, one could say about bodily presence, embodiment, time-based, space, direct communication with the other: issues that are all foundations of performance art. Although it is said that performance art, by its very nature, escapes any square definition, each one may describe it differently.

Performance is an expressive moment in the shift between intention and natural outcome, where the accidental and the unpredictable can be incorporated. Performance art is metaphoric visually. It is time-based, site-specific, risk-taking, ephemeral in its essence, durational at times. It involves a particular body performing in a specific place at a specific time, rather than just being informative. It is about intuition and the intensity of effective, affective effort. Rather than requiring explanations, it evokes experiences. It might be methodologically structured, but it is certainly not scripted a priori. Performance artists must assume the physical consequences of their ideas. Finally, performance art can be messy, political, psychologically disturbing, pornographic, physically demanding and even dangerous. Rather than affirming itself as an expression of skill or virtuosity like dance, rather than being formal as an expression of design, performance art is, on the other hand, a radical relationship of the body and the other of this body with other bodies. To perform does not mean providing answers, translating concepts, interpreting and representing them simply, but failing, disturbing, generating ambivalence, ambiguity, anxiety and reflection. To perform is also to take the courage to tackle the precariousness of the system and the

human, staying authentic to oneself, which makes it unique compared to other disciplines.

Performance is an artistic practice whose medium is the body in its "naked" authenticity since what it expresses takes it outside the domain of other art disciplines.

In the philosophical debate, art is considered substitution of semblance to be. However, performance is an unlikely work of art: it expresses itself and is deeply human. In performance, the question of time is crucial. In durational performances, for example, time seems to repeat itself indefinitely, precluding the semblance of being from realizing the possibility of its future since the life of the performance does not go beyond the limit of an instant. The shadow of being, its expression, is eternally imprisoned in this instant, its destiny, from which the performer, accomplishing their work, cannot escape.

Performance does not dare to transform "time into images" as sculpture and painting do. It relates ephemeral images to time itself, highlighting the transience of life and everything else which the capitalist system would try to neutralize.

By procuring emotion and sensation, performance counteracts the object as reality. Performance does not require the understanding of an object by conceptualizing it or representing it. However, it permeates cognition otherwise, relating different feelings to questions it raises, thus implying the need for an encounter and relationship between oneself and the other within the constituted time of the performance and beyond. There is a potential and a vitality that escapes the pre-established suffocating power norms in encountering oneself and the other, albeit temporarily. Thus, performance is a poignant force that offers the self a temporary release from the anguish of dying and a simultaneous confrontation with death. To the extreme, in performance, even suicidal and murderous impulses translate into a cry for freedom or a cry for poetry, at least to the level of self-identification or determination of one's identity.

VS: What is an example of a performance you have created and/or seen that exemplifies this quality of performance art?

AP: I find it difficult to choose a specific performance of our repertoire. Indeed, those where constricting situations and risk-taking are more evident, both for the dangerousness of the materials we use and for the actions we perform with them. In our performances, we often build installations that give rise to constricting situations within which we perform, for they don't leave us room to pretend but act decisively and not merely intentionally. Durational performances also allowed us to perform in an authentic sense to us, under the prolonged duration of the effort, endurance and ultimately exhaustion. Performance is a medium to poetically tackle and cathartically resolve issues like pain, trauma and suffering, which essentially inform our poetics.

The performances I performed inside a dog crate are still very dear to me for several factors. The dog crate was a recurrent element-object in our performances between 2006 and 2012. I chose it as it metaphorically represents moments and experiences of my life. These performances culminated in the durational performance of five days and four nights "Without Tuition or Restrain."

I am attaching to my email a .docx: "The Cage Storyline" from which you can get all the information about it, and if you need photos, do not hesitate to ask me.

Also, I link two academic papers to your acknowledgement where you can read more about these issues:

1. Studio Research Journal: Two Bodies In Space: Durational Performance | The Quest For Authenticity In The Vestandpage Experience By Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage)

http://studioresearch.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/052_15_STUDIO_RES-TEXT_Web.pdf

2. Repertório Journal: Consideration on Pain and Suffering in VestAndPage Performance Art By Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage)

https://09486d6f-69e4-45f6-bed3-e698b73b1be3.filesusr.com/ugd/fa6502_e83ea6e6d2524fd8bb37be2cfb203189.pdf?index=true

3. How would you describe your creative process?

Either for a live performance, a performance-based film, an exhibition or a workshop, our creative process is foremost to generate new ideas, making connections between them and think how we can make art based on those ideas. We conceived projects and produce artworks looking at the originality of our visions. We nurture our inspiration, hoping to contribute to something new and innovative.

We apply a method where the phases of our creative process flow logically into each other.

The initial phase involves preparatory work and idea generation. We research topics that respond to our urgencies and concerns. We read and gather materials. We investigate and explore in a way that could spark other ideas for a performance or a performance-based film. Being in two, we constantly brainstorm these ideas together, let our minds and spirits wander. We write divergent thinking from each other and confront them later. It helps us consider all possible approaches to building out and realize our ideas, testing their efficacy. In this first phase of the process, we also dig into our memory bank to draw on knowledge and past experiences to generate something original.

Then we incubate in the back of our mind the ideas we have generated. It is as if putting away what we found in a drawer to make it settle. We take a step away from them before fleshing them out. Also, in the meanwhile, we might work on other projects.

We attach great importance to insight, self-analysis and self-criticism. We ponder through associations, leaving space to a creative syncretism where spontaneous new connections between ideas and things may form, emerge, merge and fall into places. Hence, we eradicate obstacles and blocks, figuring out where and how to begin our new production.

When we begin to produce tangibly, we continue to evaluate, consider the efficacy of our ideas and weigh them against alternatives. We look back at starting-point concepts or problems to see if the solutions we have found to concretize the project align with the initial vision. During our working process, we forge our ideas to bring them to life through our art. Eventually, In between all that, there is a lot of physical, mental and spiritual training to which we dedicate ourselves.

We have merged our knowledge of art, crafts and theory, to develop what we call a "Poetics of Relations." For us, the "poetic" relies on the interconnectedness between persons – bodies, beings, space, objects, matters, thoughts, actions, emotions – all that resides and springs from the folds of our everyday life.

Besides our live performance practice, and more specifically to our movies, since 2010, we have embarked on a path of performance-based filmmaking. We have created six short and feature films in Antarctica, Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, India, Kashmir, the Balearic island of Formentera, Germany, Poland, and Russia. These films served as the base of examination and visual material for a manifesto-insight on our creative process. Please see here: https://jer.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/jer.37/

Our process is a tight collaboration between the two of us at all stages of the film projects' conception, execution and post-production. We develop the theoretical research and logistical preparations and produce materials, costumes, and masks. Because the world is our studio, production begins as soon as we venture into new places – whether remote or urban – where we encounter sites that inspire us to react and respond with performative action. In a backpack, we carry with us our basic performance costumes and materials, as well as a tripod, a video cam, camera and sound recorder. With these tools, we are ready to perform whenever inspiration strikes. Once this happens, one of us films the other, usually without any rehearsal. Along the way, we collect additional visual and audio material and write process-related poetry, which may later become the film's voiceover. We take all this material home and, in the next accretive step, we let it all fall into place, editing it into film work. As in an alchemical operation, the confluence of our cultural backgrounds, artistic visions, collaborative practice, and union in life make up our artistic creation.