Seven Easy Pieces, exhibition and international symposium. The exhibition Seven Easy Pieces presents for the first time the video documentation of the re-enactment of seven performances by Marina Abramovic in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York at the end of 2005.
Seven Easy Pieces, exhibition and international symposium
On May 5, 2006 the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, opens the exhibition Seven Easy
Pieces that presents for the first time the video documentation of the re-enactment
of seven performances by Marina Abramovic in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York
at the end of 2005. For this project she chose programmatic performances of the
1960s and 1970s that she re-enacted in a seven hour performance at a time in front
of an audience. Beside six historical performances by Marina Abramovic, Vito
Acconci, Joseph Beuys, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman and Gina Pane, she also performed
one of her new works.
The questions arousing through the exhibition Seven Easy Pieces and the common
practice of documenting ephemeral art will be the central issues for the symposium
taking place on Saturday, May 6, 2006. Artists, art historians, art critics and
curators are invited for the discussion panels and lectures to confront the practice
of performance with its historisation. This exhibition situation and proposition as
regards the challenge of tracing ephemeral art works raises several highly relevant
issues that the symposium will be addressing. Our prime concerns are thus the
re-enactment, embodiment, authorship and authenticity of performances in both the
present and historical contexts of performance art.
Re-enactment means acting out a performance again, re-making it with all the
sentiments and knowledge engendered by the initial event and the here and now. It
differs from pure mimicry because it entails a translation from one time to another,
one narrative to another, one performer to another, and from one audience to
another.
The symposium will focus on re-enactment as an act of re-positioning historical
performances as well as the recent developments of performance art today.
Performances relate in a particular way to time and presentation epitomized in the
question of mediation (to an audience) e.g., in a museum and on the art market. Many
performances from the 1970s can be accessed only through documentation and relicts
or are now simply inaccessible. Contemporary performance artists now often integrate
documentation as part of their performances, yet some insist on the particularity of
the moment in which a performance takes place - why? What is the relationship
between initial performance and re-enactment? How is meaning and experience
transported in time through repetition of a performance? Can one speak of an
‘original’ performance?
Speakers:
Marina Abramovic (Artist, New York), Maja Bajevic (Artist, Sarajevo and Paris),
Monica Bonvicini (Artist, Berlin), Erika Fischer-Lichte (Theoretician of Drama,
Berlin), Judith Hopf (Artist, Berlin), Jaroslaw Kozlowski (Artist, Poznan), Steven
Henry Madoff (Art Critic, New York), Sandra Umathum (Theoretician of Drama, Berlin)
Dorothea von Hantelmann (Art Historian and Curator, Berlin)
How to perform? - Re-enactment and documentation in performance art
Symposium, May 6, 2006, 11 am - 6pm at Auditorium of the Hessisches Landesmuseum Gebru'mlder-Grimm-Platz 5 34117 Kassel
Opening: 5 May 2006
Kunsthalle Fridericianum
Friedrichsplatz 18 - Kassel
Hours: Wednesday - Sunday 11 am - 6 pm