Claire Bishop- Delegating Performance: outsourcing Authenticity

Irma's aim of interest:

I'm at a starting point of developing work wich could be interesting to "use" services from this website fiverr.com. You could ask freelancers to produce several things, such as testimonials, voice-overs, green screen dialogues, etc.

Notes: Delegating Performance: outsourcing Authenticity by Claire Bishop

Since the 90's its a hype to hire nonprofessionals to do performances. 60s/70s artists (Abramovic, Chris Buden, Gina pane)etc) use to perform more themselves. Artist takes a more theatrical approach and take the role of a director, but hire people to perform in their own socioeconomics category. Claire noticed that the responses towards this new form o performing repeatedly elicits. One of her aims for her essay is to argue against these dominant responses.

Claire outlines three different manifestations of this tendency, and the different performance traditions they draw on:

Body Art Judson Dance and Fluxus Docudrama

first type: outsourcing actions to nonprofessionals who are asked to perform an aspect of their identities, often in a gallery or exhibition. examples :

Pawel Althamer, working with homeless men in Observator, and with female guards for the Zacheta exhibition Germinations (1994)

Elmgreen & Dragset where they hire gay men to lounge around the gallery. Try (1997) or unemployed men and woman to be a gallery guard Reg[u]arding the Guards (2005)

Maurizio Cattelan an Italian Artist who assembled a soccer club of North African immigrants to play local matches in Italy. They were wearing a shirt with a fake sponsor called Rauss the german word for Get out. The title of the work was Southern Suppliers FC

Music was also an element of collaboration for Swedish artist Annika Eriksson's work Copenhagen Postmen's Orchestra (1996) and British artist Jeremy Deller's work Acid Brass (1997) They both invited workers bands to perform, they agreed to participate in an artistic playful experiment.

A rapture arrived in 1999 with the work of the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra who displayed low-paid workers wich where developing his installations, he paid people to remain inside a cardboard box. Many interesting works, so I decided to research his work further a different page Santiago Sierra

Claire finds it telling most of these works were developed in Europe since the tone was light and playful comparing to the forms of identitarian politics that were crucial to American Art of the 80s.

In the later 90's concerns the use of professionals from other spheres of expertise, for example: Allora and Calzadilla hiring opera singers Sediments Sentiments (Figures of Speech) (2007) or pianist with the work Stop, Repair Prepare (2008)

Tania Bruguera who hired policemen to demonstrate crowd control techniques in the work Tatlin's Whisper #5

According to Claire, the best example is artist Tino Sehgal who doesn't see his work as performance art but as situations with performers to be referred to as interpreters. You can tell he was trained in choreography. Personally, I think his performance art is not something I would like to dig into. This also counts for Dora Garcia, who works in a form of invisible theater, for example in her work The Messenger (2002) has a performer who has the task to give a message to the public visiting the museum. Claire analyses several artists who work, what I would call a more theater performance form. She draws the line with the Judson Dance and Fluxus movement.

A third strand comprises situations constructed for film and video. Recorded images were crucial since the situations where to crucial or difficult to repeat and where participants are asked to perform as themselves. It's often confusing if the event is staged or scripted. Key Artists are Gillian Wearing

Arthur Zmijewki Created a work titled Them (2007) were he had set u a series of painting workshops for several in Warsaw.

Ladies from the Catholic Church,
Young socialist
Young jews
Polish nationalists

Each group produced a depiction of its values, which were printed onto t-shirts were worn by each member of the group in the subsequent workshop. Zmijewki encouraged them to respond to each other's paintings. This ended in a violent situation, often it is hard to tell in wich degree the participants are acting. or being gently manipulated as the artist adopts an ambiguous role. Many participants were angry after viewing the film, feeling it's a pessimistic representation. However, the artist is less interested in making a faithful documentary.

See full movie :

Phil Collins made a work called The shoot Horses (2004) where he auditioned and paid 9 teenagers in Ramallah to undertake an eight-hour disco-dancing marathon in front of a garish pink wall. The work is shown as a two-channel installation, projected so the dancers are the same size as the viewer. He aims to universalize his participants.

not relevant today

(a view things don't seem relevant at the moment, but could be in a further stage of research(?) Note: Bal-Blanc exhibition, taken from Piere Klossowiski's book from 1970. Economics of performance, the relation between voyeur and voyant, seems not relevant for this moment. p103 till 1/2 of p 110

The general conclusion relating my interests:

By relocating sovereign and self-constituting authenticity away from the singular artist(who is naked, masturbating, shot in the arm, etc) and onto the collective presence of performers, who metonymically signify a solidly sociopolitical issue (homelessness, immigration, disability, etc) the artist outsourced authenticity and relies on his performers to supply this more vividly, without the disruptive filter of celebrity. By setting up a situation that unfolds with a greater or lesser degree of unpredictability, artists give rise to a highly directed form of authenticity: singular authorship is put into question by delegating the work to the performers. By creating, for example, a film of the performance the artist both relinquishes and reclaims the power by the representation. Using amateurs often provokes a sense of moral outrage.

Artists use people as a medium (tool) for many reasons:

challenge traditional artistic criteria by reconfiguring everyday actions as performance.
To give visibility to certain social constituencies and render them more complex, immediate, and physically present.
To introduce aesthetic effects of change and risk.
To problematize the binaries of live and mediated, spontaneous and staged, authentic and contrived
To examine the construction of collective identities and the extent to which people exceed these categories.

Notes for self-directing research

Typecast people, a certain gender, class, age, that fits the profile of the (my) story. I've got intrigued with this conceptual approach of artists who work with "real" people and can see my work develop in a more realistic way by using and directing more these people instead of actors, I've been using typecast actors in the past, also using their real identy, but searching for this unconvertable border between fiction and reality could take my work to a different level. Artist I would like to research more Santiago Sierra

Other interesting artist to remember : Tania Bruguera who hired policemen to demonstrate crowd control techniques in the work Tatlin's Whisper #5 and Gillian Wearing