The blog explores pigment white paint and how it has been utilised in 18th century paintings as a method to create white ideologies that are still prevalent today. Through the active deemed white body I aim to dismantle these ideologies and create new associations undermine connotation’s that elevate the white female subject as something of beauty, virtue, submissive and static. Unlike my current blog, this blog goes back and fourth between 2016 – onwards and will analyse more than one research method leading with performance and the body as a multi modal research method, but will also seek the positive of photography and video within the discussion – rather than the disparities between performance and photography/documentation. (My other newer blog is an in depth exploration of the disparities).
Updated Statement
I often refer to performance art as ‘doing’, as I don’t necessarily see the work as a performance in the traditional sense, but rather gestures, movement, a dance with/in material that’s often not choregraphed. The location and settings are often premediated, for their pre-existing frame/context. The interventionist/ performance work aims to disrupt and contest pre-existing context and knowledge. There are possibilities in the vulnerability of such acts that cannot be ‘corrected’, and these possibilities offer an opening for new discovery for both the viewer and performer. The process embedded in my performative practice is experiential and shaped by an intuitive exploration of the external and the internal – simultaneously my own ever-changing interrogation of history and experience. ‘Nothing disappears completely, however nor can what subsists be defined solely in terms of traces, memories or relics’ (Lefevre, 1974, p.229). Lefebvre speaks of social space and the remanences that cannot be solely defined, implying that history isn’t fixed and it lives with and in a person and that it is ever changing. ‘Performance’s only life is in the present…performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive. It is this quality which makes performance the runt of the litter of contemporary art’ (Phelan,1993 p.146-148). However, what may seem a threat to knowledge reproduction encapsulates a radical alternative to positivist thinking about knowledge and knowledge sharing as fixed and absolute. There is an intensity within performance due to its ephemerality, the spectator must be engaged in the present and that is part of its strength. As discussed by Phelan:
‘…[I]n performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in . Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present- and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control…The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the laws of the reproductive economy are enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the “now” to which performance addresses its deepest questions valued’ (pg.149-147).
Performance is the only ‘artform’/expression that addresses knowledge in real time, it cannot be stored and put away. ‘Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies’(Phelan, p.149). A single gesture has the power to dis-locate knowledge, as illustrated through Kershaw’s examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein and P.Sraffa argument over ideas of Tractatus (Malcolm 1958, quoted in Mehta 1965:85) (2010, p.104).
As Phelan has pointed out, ‘To attempt to write about the undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document thereby alter the event itself.’(1993p.148) As a research practitioner I do share these anxieties, however, I do not accept text/writing as the event itself nor will I try and disguise it as so. Performance generates research and bridges the space between viewer and artist, a shared immaterial indwelling, which cannot be documented. It is arguable that you cannot alter something that cannot be documented. A memory or snapshot will never be the event. Memory offers a malleability to research to reform in many different an unexpected ways. The lived experience offers its witnesses an ever-evolving sculpture, that disperses and takes shapes in many different ways…an anti-positivist movement.
The work contests the division between representation and the live active body. Starkey develops forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based on subjective associations and formal parallels, which aim to incite the viewer to make new personal associations. Starkey explores her female position and marked white body as an active premises exposing structures and devices usually hidden in medium and subject matter. With a focus on 18th century paintings, through live actions historical associations created through semiotics/ideologies are ruptured.
Live art is key to Starkey’s practice as the ritual is live, there are new possibilities in the vulnerability of such acts that cannot be ‘corrected’, and these possibilities offer new openings for both the viewer and herself. Starkey does not consider the viewer as passive but also a receipt of research and while simultaneously a co-producer. While work is made in the presence of other people and while in the same space, even a person seemingly standing still communicates and affects the performance’s dynamics and conversation. For me, live acts amongst other living breathing bodies is unpredictable and offers evolutionary knowledge sharing, creating a space for live discovery.
