I found many of my interests reflected in Mengting Zhuo’s lecture. She categorises sound as a’minority medium’ that can be both heavily coded and sensually powerful. Never fully controllable. Existing within the boundaries of memory and expectation.
Zhuo describes her work as composing situations. Simple gestures, repetitions. Emptiness and resonance.
there is no stasis is a site-specific installation and performance: ‘The activated architecture reveals different states, sounds and moods whilst the visitors become part of the energy field of the space, enhancing or absorbing the resonating frequencies generated by a microphone-speaker feedback loop in an oval room.’ (https://www.zhuomengting.com/there-is-no-stasis.html)
She shared many influences throughout the lecture, some of them seemingly contradictory. The two that stuck out to me was Saussurean sign theory and Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto.
Language, sign, symbol – these seem to point at representation; in the context of performance, they are linked to ritual and artifice; spectacle;
Yvonne Rainer’s ‘No Manifesto’ (1965) summarises an attitude that acts against representation. Rainer’s approach was explicitly against symbol.
The main lines that stick out to me are: No to spectacle. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to involvement of performer or spectator. But then what is a performance without a transformation occurring? without some level of make-believe?
Rainer was inspired by chance operations forwarded by John Cage and Mercy Cunningham.
John Cage and the removal of the intention of the artist came up in a comment from the audience during this lecture. The process as the work itself. Egoless art. Egoless performance. I wonder if this claim to non-authorship does not suggest an even holier, more virtuous authority? the deity in action itself? What does the stripping away of the signifiers of representation claim to uncover?
I recently came across a passage about Yoko Ono criticising John Cage and indeterminacy, calling this egoless art ‘plant-like’. Yoko Ono comes from a place of criticising prevailing orientalism post-war. John Cage was famously inspired by zen philosophy.
Another case that comes to mind is Antonin Artaud and his theatre of cruelty sprung by the witnessing of a Balinese ritual at a colonial fair in Paris. A separate post on Orientalism in post-war performance would probably follow.
The Analysis of Performance Art, by Anthony Howell, was used as a source for some listening exercises we tried during this lecture. Having up the book, it contains much information on repetition and othering in performance and will most probably reoccur in my research.