Comment and art news
VOLT—The New Performance was held as part of the inaugural Brisbane Festival. Produced by Maree Cunnington, Volt featured established and emerging artists in a "strident performance-based visual arts program', including performances, installation events, and a two-part seminar. Unlike works in the main program, most of the works in Volt were developed specifically for the Festival which, to my mind, increased the status of the Festival as a whole. In fact this aspect underlines (yet again!) how hard the visual arts work on such little resourcing compared to the performing arts.
The Volt events were of a high standard, with possibly the weakest part being the lack of a printed curatorial rationale to cohere and conceptualise the program as a whole. This was particularly unfortunate since the aim of the program was to "widen the scope of 'performance' ... and, most importantly, to encourage true collaboration and critical discourse." Certainly the works themselves were able to do this, and it can be said that performance art has been doing this for a long time, but whether Volt and/or the Brisbane Festival, in either its format or rationale, were able to achieve this is another question. Achieving such things as "true col laboration" and "critical discourse" is ultimately a question of infrastructure and the support of performance art is a valuable initiative of the Festival.
The increasingly central and radical position of performance art and the performative/ephemeral dimension of visual art, can be seen as part of an intellectual trend in cultural and social theory. Performance is a central notion in the enunciation of theories of gender, sexuality, postmodernity, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and the philosophies of difference. While a curatorial thematic for... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline