Curated by Virginia Barratt
The performance season at the IMA brought together the work of five artists, Michelle Andringa, Gary Warner, John Gillies, Hiram To and Adam Boyd. Curated by Virginia Barratt, the season not only presented some thoughtful performance art but also raised questions about the parameters of the medium itself.
Using aspects from such diverse traditions as music, film, dance, theatre and spectacle the performances revealed how fluid and difficult to define performance art can be and also highlighted the way in which the genre recontextualized the borrowed traditions.
Barratt noted in the catalogue that, "out of the Jungle of Texts, and inbetween the definitions of "interdisciplinarianism" and "new theatre"; there, somewhere there, lies, simply, performance…" Yet perhaps there can never be 'simply' performance since the interplay of meaning is always mediated by the context of the critical, institutional framework.
John Gillies' drumming accompanied by recorded keyboards exhibited a strong physical presence that was emphasized by video images of the playing gestures of the absent keyboard musicians. The heightening of the gestural against the aural was assisted by the visual art context. In the same way its presentation as performance art elaborated a different set of meanings for the IMA audience than it would have done in the hotel venues in which Gillies also performs. This is the work's strength. It is fluid enough to shift contexts and at the same time challenge them.
Michelle Andringa's tightly structured performance, One Show Only, analysed the romantic myth of the performer as doomed, tragic and yet heroic. Against a background of repressive romantic clichés, the character rejected the role of victim to take up the mask of the tiger. Yet this seeming emancipation
Michelle Andringa, Circle Cirlicue, Clinch, Institute of Modern Art Performance Season, December 1987. Photograph: David Gofton.
