Individual works clutter and distract performance art event

Minimalistic sounds of ambient music and bizarre imagery of various performance videos furnished the setting of the Alpha Delta Phi Society’s brownstone on Saturday, Dec. 3, from 8:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., during “re: performance.” “re: performance” is an art event party exploring the ideas of original authorship and the interactive potentials of performance art.

Presented by Postcrypt Art Gallery, with Columbia New Poetry and ADP, “re: performance” featured a series of concurrently running original and reinterpreted pieces through a diverse compilation of performance art, music, and poetry.

The intent of the event was to “see how may layers of performance and re-performance can be created and make people aware of their own performance,” Rachel Valinksy, CC ’12 and Postcrypt director, said.

Attendees were given small squares of paper upon entry, which recommended an action as an interactive aspect of the event and which beckoned them to assume the roles of performers themselves.

Kat Balkoski, CC ’12, chose to re-perform Yoko Ono’s, “Cut Piece,” which streamed in the background alongside her performance. Balkoski sat like a rag doll with the same deadpan gaze as Ono and invited viewers to take up a pair of scissors to strip away her long black dress.

Ono has re-performed her piece multiple times, thus the presentation of the concept through a different subject brought up an interesting discourse on the ephemeral aspect of performance. The original intentions of Ono, captured through the contextual elements of time and place, are impossible to replicate.

Thus Balkoski’s examined the validity of a re-performance. “Juxtaposing my body against the original [performance] questions the ideas of originality. Can a performance be re-performed?” Balkoski asked.

The conventional presence of gallery wall text was left out of the layout of the event, leaving viewers the task to identify where and when each performance began and ended.

Coordinators Valinsky and Adrienne Rooney, BC ’12, described that removing the structured layout implicated by wall text allowed the event to move away from the confines of a gallery space.

“We don’t want people to contextualize what is going on and be told what is going on,” Rooney said.

Yet for concrete art pieces, such as Anastasia Vartasaba, BC ’ 13, and Valinksy’s re-performance of Vito Acconci’s “Following Piece,” there was something to be desired about the lack of context. Although the piece itself was an active performance, its documentation rendered itself into an art object made of photographs and observations.

Acconci’s original work rests upon the concept of inconspicuously following a stranger while photographically and textually recording the experience. Yet this is hardly a specific and truly novel concept, thus a reinterpretation of it could stand by itself as an original piece.

Thematically, both the re-performances and performances were loosely connected by their use of modern media and technology, which, as Valinsky noted, “permeates our general life performance.”

The newly conceived group, New Poetry, presented “Poetry Upon Request,” in which attendees drew up guidelines for New Poetry members to compose a poem.

“Poetry can often feel like a very isolated activity and writing a poem based on the formal restrictions of other people creates a collaborative experience,” Rebecca Liu, CC ’14, said.

The event can be considered a unique social experiment, yet the concept of the exercise rests on shaky ground in its categorization as a “performance.”

Considering performance as a singular event, the simultaneous existence of multiple performances, made it difficult to absorb each piece as a whole. While the concurrency of the tableaus created another layer of interaction, it also diluted the meaning of each isolated performance. Rather than being a deep exploration of performance art, the event as a whole acted more as a platform to create awareness about the medium of performance art.