June 30, 2011, 7 p.m.
Held as part of the exhibition unExhibit, the performance The Purloined Letter repeats a scene captured in photographs documenting another performance: A Steven Paxton Dance Workshop at Intermedia, Beatty Street, Vancouver, CA, March 31, 1969. The point of departure for that workshop Paxton held at Intermedia with forty-eight laypeople was the 1967 performance The Stand/The Little Dance, which studied the dynamic of a group constellation—the open placement of individuals in relation to one another and their spatial context—as well as the physical work on the movement of standing, which implies both conceptualization and enactment or action.
Steve Paxton argued that standing, keeping the body upright, can be understood as an internalized and habitual labor and techne of the body in response to the balance of forces of gravity. By reconsidering these reflections regarding a "technology" of standing, an embodied knowledge of the generation and production of movement, The Purloined Letter addresses the body’s unconscious in the ways it is attuned to its environment and the forces at play in it. The shifting and decentering interrelation of body and environment, an "underlying structure of a latent repetition," is a movement, and be it indeed that of standing, that gives shape. In an ongoing differentiation of the interplay between inside and outside, in keeping the bodies upright, in aligning and positioning them, The Purloined Letter models, for example, a standing group as an open interrelation of bodies in their mutual attunement. Once this group has taken shape, another, looser or more formless group will immediately join it that observes the scene and yet also practices standing.
In speaking of performance as the repetition of a photographic document, we home in precisely on the entanglement of live moment, representation, and reproduction that cannot be grasped in the mode of the identical, instead playing out in a continuous unfolding of differences. It is at the same entanglement that we aim by recording the performance The Purloined Letter, this time in the medium of film.
This repetition at once also raises the question of what it means when that group stands still in a room in Vancouver in 1969, and how the (discursive) context of the exhibition unExhibit as well as of contemporary social conditions comes to stand with us as we repeat this standing. For if self-activation—performance and (commercial) realization—must be understood to be a fundamental entrepreneurial parameter under the sign of a New Spirit of Capitalism, the suspension between act and non-act (standing: doing something and yet not doing anything) can harbor an opportunity no less than the repetition itself. To put it with Gilles Deleuze: "Modern life is such that, confronted with the most mechanical, the most stereotypical repetitions, inside and outside ourselves, we endlessly extract from them little differences, variations and modifications. Conversely, secret, disguised and hidden repetitions, animated by the perpetual displacement of a difference, restore bare, mechanical and stereotypical repetitions, within and without us. […] Repetitions repeat themselves, while the differenciator differenciates itself. The task of life is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed." Repetition means here to highlight difference in the mutual relation of two historic moments; to highlight difference as the elsewhere and nowhere of both moments, and to do so in the mode of possibility.
Johannes Porsch
is an artist, curator, and author. He is an artistic researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in connection with the research project "Troubling Research" (since 2010), and was a curator at Architekturzentrum Wien, Vienna (2001–2007). Writings, exhibitions, und publications that examine politics of representation and the associated processes of subjectivation, including Sturm der Ruhe. What is Architecture (2001), The Austrian Phenomenon (2004/2009), Ottokar Uhl. After the Rules of Architecture (2005), Un jardin d’hiver, presents (2006), Chinaproduction (2007), Suche Bauplatz für Moschee/Aa (2008/2010), Transitory Objects (2009), and To Make Oneself Similar in this Sense (2010), together with Tanja Widmann and David Jourdan.
Tanja Widmann
works as an artist, curator, and writer and teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She writes for Texte zur Kunst, springerin. Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, and other journals. Her publications include To Make Oneself Similar in This Sense (2010) (with Johannes Porsch and David Jourdan) and Ambiguous Case. Casco Issues XI (2008) (with Emily Pethick and Marina Vishmidt). Her exhibition Sich in diesem Sinne ähnlich machen was on display at Kunstraum lakeside, Klagenfurt, in 2008. For Manifesta 8 (2010) she conceived the work Hard Currency. Revaluation 2010.