RDEČE NITI (IZOLA, 2021)

RDEČE NITI | RED THREADS

Translacija | Traslación is a platform for production, exhibition and research on performance art created by artists Tatiana Kocmur and Francisco Tomsich in 2017¹. Its first edition was produced in Ljubljana, Slovenia, between March and June 2018, and included a series of public activities (performance art events, publications, exhibitions), as well as the first application of a model of artistic research focused on narratives and memories around historical performances, entitled Rdeče niti (Red threads). The title of this research model refers to methodological aspects and displaying devices, as it was seen for the first time at the exhibition Rdeče Niti: Where is the line? (Rampa/Lab (Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, May-June 2018). Rdeče niti: TV Dražba (SCCA Ljubljana, 9.10.2019) is Translacija|Traslación’s second presentation and exhibition. The place where Rdeče niti’s exhibitions or presentations of preliminary results are proposed are strongly connected with the studied artwork: Kapelica gallery was the place where the first studied performance (Franc Purg’s Where is the line?) was supposed to be done (then the artist decided to make it somewhere else). SCCA, on the other side, is the institution mediating our first knowledge of the analyzed performance: the documentation of Martina Bastarda’s TV Dražba (2003)integrates SCCA’s DIVA archive and the place where we are presenting our research on this work hosted in 2006 a presentation of Bastarda’s achievements which also included a discussion about the context of TV Dražba’s production.

Performance art happens in a specific time, in a concrete space, and no documentation or registry substitutes the uniqueness of the experience of having been there. Each performance creates a number of non-fixed images, stories, rumors, memories and narratives, sometimes contradictory, obfuscated, fragmentary. In Rdeče niti, we want to approach this phenomena by choosing one significant performance art piece from the past and therefore generating an exploration of its persistence on the bodies of the persons² who were there or heard something about what happened there. Memories and remembrances from witnesses are able of being articulated as stories, discourses and images, and they can be represented in different ways. We are interested in how individuals and groups remember, articulate and tell stories about what happened in one performance art event from the past.

These approach to historical research on performance art tries to operate afar from three common current trends: re-enactment as re-construction, “the shift to the objects remains of performance”³ and the fetishism of documentation. It tries to avoid the “presence of the original” instead, it eludes relics, and refrains from interpretation. All these aspects can be illustrated by the way we applied our research model to the study of memories and narratives around Franc Purg’s performance Where is the line? and Martina Bastarda’s TV Dražba all along 2018 and 2019.

We decided to produce this first research project about Where is the line? because that piece provides many interesting aspects in the framework of our study. It was a work which followed a very simple idea. It was developed dramatically in different rooms of the gallery and even incorporated the public space into its scope. It is easily understood in universal terms (i.e. it was not exotic), but it deals at the same time with very local issues. It included the participation of the public, and also the essential assistance of a non-artist professional in order to carry out one part of the action. It was attended by a considerable number of persons, and it was documented through photos and videos. It is reviewed in books and articles. In addition, it was shocking and very controversial, and probably it would be even more difficult to make it nowadays than back then. This latter point is remarkable, since revisiting Franc Purg’s work in current times poses many questions about politics, ethics and even morals of art practices, and about the contingency of the ideas articulating the discourses about them. Each one of these interesting aspects proved to be extremely rich in reverberations and secondary red threads.

For the second (formally the third) application of our research model, we have chosen TV Dražba (TV Auction), a 2003 artwork from Martina Bastarda, then an art student (the performance was in fact her graduation work from Ljubljana’s Faculty of Visual Arts) and later an active artist, even if briefly, since she have abandoned art production long time ago and currently works as a professional editor for National Slovenian TV. TV Dražba was a performance made specifically for TV live screening. The artist appropriated, emulated and parodied the model of an already existent weekly live TV series of art auctions produced by a professional gallery owner in which she actually worked as assistant. The artist impersonated a TV host and showed, commented and encouraged the public to buy (by calling to the TV station’s phone number) her own paintings, which were (some of them) eventually sold. The registry of the action is a 0:59:44 video hosted in SCCA’s DIVA archive. There is almost no additional information about this work, apart of what DIVA (and SCCA) archive provides, and it is not inscribed in Slovenian art history narratives. It was a student’s work and it deals humorously with very serious concerns of young artists: how to make a living of an art vocation, how to sell one’s own work, how to update to new media, how to adapt to new communication trends and channels.

It is easy to notice the huge formal differences between Franc Purg’s performance and Bastarda’s work, not to talk about contents and models. Those differences concern, among many others, notions, function and role of the public, methodologies of documentation and ways of approaching the performative itself, its very core. These differences can also be read as symptomatic of more general differences of age, gender and education between both creators. Both art pieces, though, share a certain ironic gesture, a kind of visual shamelessness and a radical way of solving the problems posed by the chosen media.

The practice and analysis of Translacija|Traslación research model, even if still fully undeveloped, produces very interesting and specific consequences on the theoretical level, aiming us to start sketching a typology of performance art in relation with the strategies, methods and potentials of the research itself, thus proving it to be what a scientific approach to art history demands. That means that each application of our research model produces a set of specific questions and issues in relation with the kind and type of the studied performance in the framework of our methodology. Franc Purg’s Where is the line? represents a type of performance artwork extremely dependent on action itself, on dramatized (but impulsive) action. There were neither discourses to remember nor music or sound, there were not even words in the performance’s script and formalization. In the context of our research, that means that we must look for a specific type of memories and remembrances. This is why the space of the gallery where the work was done acquired such an importance, this is why stories focused so much on the order of events, in actions’ dramaturgy. Being the work very simple from the point of view of its articulation in space, but complex in meaning and emotional responses from the part of the public (and the artist himself), it allows us to delve into the very difficult task of remember even the less puzzling events and the devices and objects involved on them while producing at the same time recreations of emotions and feelings which superimpose with ideological discourses.

Bastarda’s performance is minimalist in comparison but, paradoxically, had a wider scope of potential and probably real public, even if only a bunch of persons (the technicians on the TV studio) were presence in the place and time in which the performance “proper” happened (the spectators who were watching TV at the moment and saw the action, by chance or not, witnessed the events with some delay). The artist’s selection of the media determined the difficulties and limits of our research, especially because the TV channel which produced and transmitted the performance does not exist anymore, its archive is fragmentary, and there is not available documentation on audience rating. Additionally, we found extremely difficult (and Bastarda’s restraint from the art scene has much to do with it) to find people who actually watched the program, and this is why we decided to launch our own spot asking potential viewers to contact us. The strong media-decoded character of the whole project (from conception to realization to documentation) lead us to think the way we approach the work in the same way, so we decided to use only TV sets and rely only in the moving image to display the documentation of our research, mimicking and emulating some formal aspects of the studied work. Contrary to Purg’s Where is the line?, TV Dražba relies strongly in language itself (the ironical use of TV code of non-stopping chat, with its repetitions and tics is one of the more enjoyable aspects of the action), and sound, as well as some technical and technological aspects of the performance’s visual elements are very representative of the times when the performance was made, and this also counts for the performer’s costumes and gestures. In that sense, TV Dražba was an impulse to introduce ourselves in the history of Slovene TV and particularly the history of the TV channel TV Pika, as it is seen in the edition of one seminal interview included in Rdeče niti: TV Dražba (another important related issue has something to do with the inevitable comparison between past and present TV standards, and its appearance in our work for this project speaks about its aesthetic and ideological resonances). We understand this development of this specific investigation as natural consequences of our basic intend of reading performance art as a source of stories and histories which are always expanding in time and space and produce knowledge not only about art, artists and art history but also about the addressed society and culture as a whole.

Due to the distinct character of performance artworks, our research included conventional methodologies (organizing interviews, visiting archives, deciphering photos and texts) as well as some not-so-common operations, like the one in which we got to know at least the name of the butcher who assisted Franc Purg in his action, completely erased from the memory of all participants, organizers and the artist himself. Something similar happened this time with the “man”, “the gallery owner from Maribor” (his name often elided) who invented the local TV auction format that Martina Bastarda borrowed and manipulated in order to create her own performance. Curiously and interesting enough, Bastarda’s auction have survived in its registry, while we have not still find any archival piece of the alleged model, as if it only exists (for now) in stories and remembrances.

1 The name refers to the artists’ main interests, as stated in the general presentation of the overall project: “We are interested in works in which the body takes the quality of an artistic object: a presence in a space with aesthetic values producing potentially infinite images and interpretations. The characteristics of the place where each work is produced and introduced to the public also offers the opportunity to deconstruct, fragment and re-combine former artistic processes in order to be shown as performative events in a different context and in a specific space. We are aiming to create an international platform for collaborations and exchanges with artists and institutions from Slovenia and abroad. The intention is to emphasize processes and models of translating and exhibiting performance events happening in another location and in a parallel time and space.” The use of Slovenian and Spanish on the association’s name also alludes to the non-translatable singularities of that word in those languages, as well as to the bilingualism or biculturalism of Translacija|Traslación’s founders. See: https://translacija.wordpress.com

2 See: Belting, Hans, Bild-Anthopologie: Fink Wilhelm GmbH + Co.KG, 2011.

3 See: Jones, Amelia, “The shift to the objects remains of performance. Material traces: time and gesture in contemporary art” in: Dertnig, Carola and Thun-Hohenstein, Felicitas (eds.), Performing the Sentence. Research and Teaching in Performative, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. Sternberg Press, 2014.