FLORIAN MALZACHER
FEELING ALIVE
THE PERFORMATIVE
POTENTIAL OF
CURATING
he concept of curating has arrived in the ield of performing arts, and with it the understanding that programming perfor-mances, theatre works, dance pieces, or music can be more than just selecting or producing shows and then inserting them into a time slot and space. here is a necessity of puting works into larger contexts, to have them interact with each other and the world that informs them. And there is a possibility of creating a collective experience not only within the performance itself, but rather turning a programme, festival, event, or venue into a larger ield of communication and communing.
Even though concepts of curating within the ield of visual arts are clearly more elaborated than within the performing arts, the relation between them has always been more reciprocal than is oten acknowledged. Ater all it is no coincidence that Harald Szeemann, in many ways the prototype of a contemporary cura-tor, compared his work to that of a theatre direccura-tor, and that art theorist Beatrice von Bismarck emphasises the propinquity of an exhibition-maker s task to that of a dramaturg.
But taking Szeemann s idea of staging exhibitions seri-ously takes us even further. It raises the question of how curation not only generally borrows (and oten without any awareness) the tools of theatre, performance, and choreography but rather how it could gain even more from these practices by conscious-ly integrating their very strategies and techniques, and by understanding curation itself as performative.
Performing the Performative
he impressive (and sometimes exaggerated) career of the concept of the performative began with J. L. Austin s speech acts , intro-duced in his set of lectures How to Do hings with 0ords ( 9 ). As a precursor to the idea of performativity it described verbal uterances that exercise the transformative capacity of an act that constitutes or changes reality. he mainly linguistic discourse that followed Austin was, in the early 99 s, the base for Judith Butler s radical interpretation of gender as something that is performed and constructed via speech or physical action: reality
„Feeling Alive. The Performative Potential of Curating“.
Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy.
as a social construction coming to existence by permanently repeating and quoting. Performativity for Butler is, as described in Bodies that Mater ( 99 ), that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.
0hile deinitions of performativity are numerous, oten contradictory, and regularly rather vague, most are connected to a constructivist belief that there are no fixed concepts of objectivity, reality, or truth, and that everything is constructed individually, inluenced by context and interaction.
Inluential impulses in theatre and performance studies came next to the linguist arguments from ethnographical and anthro-pological discourses: the term cultural performance was intro-duced in 9 9 by ethnologist Milton Singer s book Traditional India: Structure and Change. Singer believed that in many cultures
performances, like dances, theatre, and rituals (deined by having a dramaturgy, a division between performer and audience, a framed time, a speciic reason and place etc.) enable people to reassure themselves of their traditions and identities. Anthro-pologist Victor Turner continued to develop the concept of cultural performance, which was picked up by theatre makers and theorists like Richard Schechner, who collaborated with Turner, applied his discoveries to theatre, and pushed them further. As diferent as all these concepts of the performative are they all emphasise in one way or the other its reality-making capacity , as Shannon Jackson puts it in this book.
2et there is another strand of the use of the word performa-tive equally vague and additionally rather colloquial. It describes, again in Jackson s words, art works that are theatre-like but not theatre , mainly to provide an umbrella to cluster recent cross-disciplinary work in time, in space, with bodies, in relational encounters. Jackson calls this the intermedial use of the perform-ative vocabulary that oten foregrounds the sometimes produc-tive, sometimes uncomfortable, relation between the performing arts and the visual arts.
Keeping Szeemann in mind, it is this very notion of theatre-like but not theatre that despite oten being dismissed as too literal, opens up a whole range of possibilities when applied to the processes and products of curating: how can the understand-ing of dramaturgy, time management, narration, process, use of space, the co-presence of the audience, role play etc. many of
which were already important for Singer s deinition of cultur-al performance inform curatoricultur-al work?
To my belief the curatorial potential of the performative does not lie in dividing these two strands but rather in thinking about them together as diferent aspects of the same approach: adapting theatre-like strategies and techniques enables the curation of reality making situations that not only describe reality but create an awareness of their own realness. By puting the focus less on the product or the result (as Austin s speech act still does) but on its own becoming, performative curating high-lights liveness, the co-presence of all participants, the (temporary) community all this being core aspects of most deinitions of theatre and performance.
From the point of view of curatorial praxis, it is at least an unnecessary limitation to separate the more linguistic, anthro-pological, or philosophical ( reality-making ) concepts of the performative from its rather literal theatre-like use. In diference to Dorothea von Hantelmann who in he Experimental Turn ( ) dismisses the later deinition as a mere misunderstand-ing , I would insist on the connection to the tools of live arts. Not only because Austin, Singer, Turner, and Butler themselves clearly referenced theatre in their writings, but because in turn their discourse was referenced again by theatre and performance makers and changed the artistic practice. One could say that by performing the performative a new reality of performative performances was created.
heatre has always been a social and a self-relexive art form, as much as conventional approaches have been trying to neglect it. heatre is a paradoxical machine that allows us to observe ourselves while being part of the performance. It does not create an artiicial outside of pure criticality but neither is it able to lure in mere immersive identiication (even though it sometimes tries). heatre marks a space where things are real and not real at the same time, it creates situations and practices that are symbolic and actual at once. A curatorial thinking that makes conscious use of this knowledge underlines its own rela-tional aspects and highlights social and political implications
it creates spaces of negotiation (as several examples in this book clearly show).
conversation with Beatrice von Bismarck in Cultures of the Cura-torial ( ) poses the question of how to instantiate 4the
cura-torial6 as a process, how to actually not allow things to harden, and how to create a public platform that allows people to take part in these processes . The curatorial is a dynamic field (Bismarck) of liveness, transformation, and ephemerality.
his very fear that the work may seem too complete, too much like a inished product is an integral part of all live arts, where the permanent possibility of failure, chance, mistakes, and loss of control are not seen as unavoidable laws, but rather as the core of the medium. Instead of ignoring these obstacles, embracing them may be seen as a key curatorial strategy for creating a tension that emphasises the very aliveness that is inherent even in the most conventional repertory theatre, dance company, or music ensemble. Expanding, shortening, interrupt-ing, or varying time (thus navigating the physical or mental strength, exhaustion, boredom, or enthusiasm of the collective body of the visitors) can create such an awareness, as well as creating specific densities of spatial complexities. Inventing speciic dramaturgies or playing with the potential and limita-tions of narration or scores is another option, along with confront-ing works that might not be compatible at irst sight, in order to create both tension and openness through their friction. he list can be extended and the possibilities are vast. he many concrete examples in this book developed by curators as well as artists, dramaturgs, and activists reveal how much understanding the curatorial as performative means by puting a focus on the here and now. At best it creates a temporary reality particular but porous that connects to many other realities, thus enabling art works to be experienced not as autonomous entities, but well within their own rights, their own lives, and in relation to others.
Empty stages, crowded lats
heatre still is mostly bound to certain spaces reserved exclu-sively for its practice: proscenium stages and black boxes. But even in the most conventional settings an awareness of the speciicity of the space can produce artistic or curatorial added value. How does the audience enter the space? 0hen does the performance actually begin? At the entrance to the theatre? In the foyer, in the auditorium? 0hat diference does it make when I have to enter a diferent way than usual? Is that part of the
performance or mere pragmatics? 0hat are the rules of the theatrical contract in that case?
Even conventional theatre spaces are not neutral. On one hand they provide the necessary technical equipment, protect the work from unwanted encounters with the surroundings, enable concentration, protect artistic clarity, and so on. On the other hand the spaces themselves already largely deine the possible outcome. Not only are they limited in terms of architec-ture and possible spatial arrangements, they also represent a certain idea of the institution as it was mainly formed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. heir inherent struc-tures not only reproduce certain conventions of what theatre was and is supposed to be, but also a certain image of society. hey frame and oten tame artistic as well as political visions. It is therefore no surprise that many curatorial projects in the ield of theatre either leave these predetermined spaces behind or try to challenge them (as the choreographers deufert&plischke together with dramaturg Jeroen Peeters did with their project
B-Visible, as described in this volume).
he hype around site-speciic works, mainly from the mid-99 s on, brought a special focus on space by leaving theatres and occupying supposedly non-artistic spaces, seeking something authentic or to contradict the seemingly authentic. his move into the city (and very oten to the outskirts of the city, to empty industrial areas, half-ruined factories, and vast storage places) is closely linked to the desire for the real behind all strands of so-called documentary theatre, which only a few years later became so extremely popular. But it also its into the logic of gentriication, at least symbolically occupying spaces that were reserved for others.
neces-sary. Such work gains momentum when it adapts the logic of the circumstances, pushes them or purposely contradicts them. It needs to be context-responsive and make the space as such (and not merely a limited portion of it, the set, for example) part of its form and content. But not by surrendering: obedience to the space easily creates boredom, and when narration, atmos-phere, movement, space, and the rest come too closely together, it may simply result in a semantic shortcut and all the artistic tension is gone.
One of the most famous site-speciic curatorial projects in the performing arts X Apartments ( -) by the German
cura-tor Matthias Lilienthal actually has an even more famous predecessor. For his iconic exhibition Chambres d’Amis (Guest Rooms) curator Jan Hoet in 98 convinced more than
inhab-itants of the city of Ghent to let artists work in and with their residences. His concept of displacement , which he later also used for documenta I1, aimed for the shits in perception that occur when something is experienced in an unusual context. He removed the art from the exclusive gallery spaces it usually is bound to: I am disturbed by the idea that art is here, and reality is there, separated, as he stated in the New York Times article
Avant-Garde Art Show Adorns Belgian Homes ( 98 ). In Cham-bres d’Amis one should have the impression that you are in the
work, not just in front of it. Each artist (among them Joseph Kosuth, Sol Le0it, and Mario Merz) used one or two rooms to create a work that relected its surroundings. Since these were residences in use, encounters and discussions with the owners were an integral part of the concept.
0hile Chambres d’Amis exclusively featured works of
visual art, it efectively created its own performativity by trig-gering the imagination of the visitors: the walks between the homes enabled very diferent individual narrations and drama-turgies, and in the private seting of a residence were just as open to interpretation as the artworks themselves.
Mathias Lilienthal further enhanced this dimension years later with X-Apartments, commissioning mainly theatre directors,
choreographers, and performers to invent small performances within the diferent lats. By introducing a time structure the audience remains for the whole time of each short performance and then wanders on as the next group arrives it collectivises the experience for the visitors. Not only the diferent venues ,
but the bodies moving through them from one space to another become part of the experience, much more than the sum of the performances. X-Apartments plays with the spirit of an
expedi-tion, connecting the audience, which is arbitrarily mixed and might not have previously known each other.
0hile the quantity of lats, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the shit of perception towards everyday setings are key to X Apartments, Polish curator Joanna 0arsza chose for her project Finissage of Stadium X ( - 8), as described by Ewa
Majew-ska in this book, a venue with symbolic power. he tenth Anni-versary Stadium in 0arsaw was built in 9 from the rubble of the war-ruined Polish capital. It stood for the idea of Communism and a new Poland but by the mid- 98 s it had been abandoned and itself became a modern ruin. New life was brought to it by Vietnamese and Russian traders who took it over as pioneers of a newly arrived capitalism. he heterogeneity of the site, the debates around the new national stadium built for the Euro-pean soccer championship in and the lack of a critical debate on Poland s post-war architectural legacy inspired the three-year Finissage that included acoustic walks,
performanc-es, a radio station as well as subjective excursion guided by artists and activists.
An almost ironic twist to the notion of site-speciicity was brought by the project he heatre by architect Tor Lindstrand and choreographer and theorist Mårten Spångberg. heir long-term interdisciplinary project International Festival, created in
, positioned itself somewhere between theatre, choreography, architecture, and curating. Playfully and at times subversively, they isolated and investigated diferent aspects of what a festival consists of: he Welcome Package (Tanz im August, ), for example, was just a bag, seemingly like the ones festivals give to invited artists, but here designed to focus a heterogeneous atention to the conventions of festivals. he idea of curating not only other artists but also performers and even other festivals, was then further radicalised with IF Plastic Bags, thousands of
them, with the IF logo given out by International Festival to theatre venues all over Europe for them to use and distribute.
For the steirischer herbst festival , International Festival
develop-ment was accompanied by a series of workshops involving vari-ous artists, architects, theoreticians, and the like itself a kind of social performance with an open result. he heatre turned everything that in theatre is not theatre into theatre including the x -metre lexible stage. As important as this conceptual trick, which enabled a diferent view of the notion of space by turning it into a performance and thereby into a time-based art work, was the lack of interest in things that would normally have also played an important role: the aesthetics of the architecture were rather generic and pragmatic, and the programming of the space mainly delegated to the festival s curators.
Escaping the highly determined and symbolically loaded spaces of theatre can mean ending up in spaces that are even more determined and symbolically loaded: the white cubes of museums and galleries. he increasing interest in all kinds of living in the last years has many causes, some as profane as trying to break into other markets or into discourses with seemingly higher prestige. But for most artists and curators the initial motivation is still close to Hoet s idea of displacement . By changing the institutional, aesthetical, and architectural frame, the grids of perception and relection change as well.
Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has been for many years one of the main protagonists in integrating performative aspects into visual art exhibitions. Since the 99 s he has been collaborating with choreographers like Meg Stuart and 1avier Le Roy, and later produced several time-based shows, like Il Tempo del Postino in
(together with Philippe Parreno). Tino Sehgal, probably by far the best known contemporary artist inserting live arts into museums and galleries, always produces his work on the edge between choreography and visual art and many of his thoughts on performance are shared by 1avier Le Roy, who has collabo-rated with him, as in Project ( ). In Le Roy presented for
the irst time his live Retrospective, an exhibition conceived as a
choreography of actions that will be carried out by performers for the duration of the exhibition, as the artist s website states. Le Roy uses the format and genre of a retrospective to revisit material from his solo choreographies by leting the performers re-create their own memories of and stories connected to them. And he emphasises the moment of time by producing frictions between the diferent time experiences that are brought
togeth-er: the time span of the revisited œuvre, the time spent by each visitor, the working time of the performers, and the duration of the whole exhibition, which creates with its permanent changes a dramaturgy of its own.
Boris Charmatz s expo zéro ( 9-), part of his Musée de la
danse, is an exhibition, a living, dancing, talking exhibition, and
as a permanent exchange. Experts from various ields chore-ographers, writers, performers, directors, theorists, visual artists, architects irst spent four days together in a kind of think tank and then open the space to the public, presenting movements, thoughts, words, and more, engaging with each other in verbal and non-verbal communications. 0hat belongs in a Musée de la
danse? hinking the museum means simultaneously creating it.
A museum of dance can only be ephemeral (the zero in the title refers to the absence of objects).
Speeding up, slowing down
0hile in Retrospective and expo zéro time is considered an
impor-tant factor, for many other live exhibitions it seems to be rather an accessory. As much as Obrist verbally stresses his interest in duration, looking closely at his time-based curations, the real potential of liveness seems rather neglected. 11 rooms (co-curat-ed with Klaus Biesenbach), for example, is an exhibition placing
But time is a more powerful tool than this, as consequently shown in post-dramatic theatre that replaces the ictional time of drama with real time, insisting on creating a situation rather than representing it. heatre in this understanding is not neces-sarily deined through a story, through iction, through make-believe, and dramaturgical arcs, and the like (even though it may include all this). It is deined by creating a temporarily shared reality. And this, too, is an opportunity for performative curating.
Curation as public sphere
he theatre is the space in which societies have long explored their own means, procedures, ideals, and limits. It is, as Hannah Arendt states in he Human Condition ( 9 8), the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere transposed into art . Taking this heritage into the ield of curating in a time when presumed political certainties have been pulverized and our democracies put under permanent threat poses a crucial challenge to our practice. Chantal Moufe s concept of agonistic pluralism, aiming at bringing out diferent positions in struggle
and disaccord, for example in he Democratic Paradox ( ), enables us to think about democracy as a public sphere that allows for the possibility of conlict. Much in the same way that the concept of the curatorial can be thought of as performative, the concept of agonistic pluralism almost seems like paraphras-ing theatre. It is not by chance that Moufe adopted this term from Greek agon, contest , in the plural games , the competition
of athletes and arguments before an assembly in Greek epic, sport, and tragedy. On a small scale, theatrical and curatorial concepts can create such spheres of open exchange, even in societies in which free speech is scarce or in 0estern democra-cies where the space between consensus and antagonism is becoming increasingly narrow. Art not in but as public space
to use a distinction drawn by art theorist Miwon Kwon in One
Place Ater Another ( ) might be one of the most important contributions of performative curating.
Truth is Concrete to add an example of my own practice was
an ambitious curatorial project that took place in September in Graz, Austria, in which we (the curatorial team of steirischer herbst festival) atempted to push this notion to an extreme. he starting point was the strong impression made by the role of
artists in the political turmoil all over the world, as well as the open question of the role artistic strategies might play in these situations. Perceived well before the Occupy movement began and happening shortly ater its irst anniversary, the Truth is Concrete marathon brought together more than artists,
activ-ists, and theorists. hey were joined by students and young professionals, as well as by a local and international audience, to meet on the small but common territory of art and activism: a -hour-a-day, -day-a-week marathon camp with hours of lectures, performances, productions, and discussions to pool useful strategies and tactics in art and politics.
he marathon machine ran nonstop oten too fast, some-times too slow producing thought, arguments, and knowledge, but it also created frustration and exhaustion. It used time as a tool to generate an extreme social experience. But by doing so, was it not it just creating a mirror or even a fulilment of the neo-liberal agenda of more and more, of extreme labour and permanent availability? Truth is Concrete aimed in the opposite
direction: this machine did not set a task that could be fulilled. It could not be easily commodiied, nor easily consumed. here was no right time; it wasn t built around highlights. So there was actually not one marathon, but many individual ones: having to miss out was part of having to make choices. Truth is Concrete
was not only interested in the intellectual intensity it produced. It was also interested in physical intensity, in the impact this encounter had on our bodies. In the here and now.
It was as machinic, as rigid as a marathon, running in the centre: surrounded by a camp-like living and working environ-ment developed by raumlaborberlin, a social space with its own needs and timing, creating a one-week community, mixing up day and night, developing its own jetlag with respect to the outside world. he vertical gesture of the marathon machine was embedded in a horizontal structure of openness, with organised one-day workshops and several durational projects and an exhi-bition, but most importantly with the parallel open marathon based on self-organisation, the contents produced entirely by participants spontaneously stepping into the slots.
Knowing and not-knowing
recent years many approaches were developed combining performative tools and formats of knowledge productions, creat-ing theatrical conferences, choreographed panels, and staged lectures. Notably, projects by scholars like Sibylle Peters, Stefanie 0enner, or Gesa 3iemer but also curator Mathias von Hartz s
go create™ resistance ( - ), a series of evenings focussing on
art and activism at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg (and an inspira-tion for Truth is Concrete) have created formats of theatrical
conferences, choreographed panels, and staged lectures. Unfriend-ly Takeover & Multitude e.V. s Dictionary of War ( - ), or
the performative conference Appropriations ( ) I devised for
the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, can also be seen in this line. But probably best known and most inluential in the ield of artistic and curatorial knowledge projects are Hannah Hurtzig s installations for knowledge distribution: in her work, theory and praxis, content and form are hardly divisible any more. he Kiosk for Useful Knowledge, for example a format she originally
developed together with curator Anselm Franke (who originally coming from theatre) is a construction of public spaces experimenting with new narrative formats for the production and mediation of knowledge, as the project s website states. Professional knowledge and theoretical discourses meet indi-vidual narrations: the distribution of knowledge becomes grasp-able for an audience that is at once voyeur and witness to an almost intimate conversation: and two protagonists exchange their expertise in form of a personal narration, which we can only participate in in a mediated fashion by transmited image and sound. his principle is ampliied in the Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge, an installation for
experts seated at small tables. Here everyone can buy a half-hour of intimate and expert knowledge for one Euro: from scientists and artists to hairdressers and fortune tellers, facts, experiences, self-help, or simply some insights into areas of knowledge completely unknown to you, and knowledge that is always connected to the person who is passing it on. And in the way it is passed on: in all her knowledge installations Hurtzig has emphasised the performative character of knowledge exchange.
All these examples, and the many others collected in the second part of this book, emphasise in one way or the other the poten-tial of a curatorial approach that uses performativity as a tool to
create discursive spheres. hey combine both aspects of the term performativity becoming themselves partly theatre-like by using tools, strategies, and methodologies of the live arts in order to curate reality making situations and by this push the possibilities of curating as a social or even political practice.
