Performance art is internal and intrusive – it is like surgery without anaesthetic. Static visual art is like an anaesthetic without surgery … – Steven Cohen
Peet Pienaar, he of the oke-ish good looks and rugby-inspired aesthetics, doesn’t really want to talk to me. He’s had enough of interviews, he wants to stop explaining what his art is about. But he talks anyway, about his recent exhibition with Steven Cohen at the Goodman Gallery, about rugby, about psychotherapy – not on the couch, but on a sunbed in the gallery.
With a real live therapist and an audience of 700 people or so looking on.
With some impatience, he takes me on a brief tour of the objects that stand or hang in the Goodman, in mute or musical testimony to the performance that has evaporated along with the excited, puzzled, prurient crowd.
After our interview, like Pienaar, I wish we hadn’t had it. Partly, this is because Pienaar doesn’t seem to know what it is, what he is, who he is when he’s the physical centre of attention. ”I’m not a performance artist,” he demurs in a series of interviews for radio and television, ”I’m like a painting, I’m just another artwork, an extension of whatever work I’m making.” But of course paintings don’t lie on sunbeds and chat to therapists, so later: ”I suppose I am a performance artist,” he says, considering that performance artists ”bring with them the baggage of the real person, and of course interact with their viewers in some way”.
Performance art as it is emerging in South Africa – largely, it must be said, due to the tireless efforts of Cohen, Pienaar’s co- exhibitor – is a confusing phenomenon. This is not only because, globally speaking, it is a largely deracinated art form, divorced from its lofty anti-market origins, but because it is an attenuated latecomer to the local art world, washing up on our shores some 20 years after its European and American heyday.
Although, in Johannesburg, Robyn Orlin has been flirting with the term for many years, her work has for the most part remained in the formalised arenas of theatre and dance, only occasionally dipping a toe-shoe into galleries or public spaces.
It is Cohen whose indefatigable nine-inch limping and crawling to dog shows, fashion shows, races, the zoo, and most recently the Independent Electoral Commission, has begun to define what performance art in a localised context might mean.
Cohen, whose latest work is made, he explains, not from a position but from a condition (of exhaustion, middle age), ironically seems to be finding the ”new vocabulary” he’s been looking for in the past 18 months, and with it the receptive audience that his art is seeking. Before the exigencies of the gallery (product, profit, etcetera), Cohen was the sole work, his body the communicative scandal, not as complex or encoded as a Beuys but certainly as prosthetically devastating as a Bowery.
Cohen’s look is, increasingly, less about drag than about costume: the horns, heels, and hooves become longer and almost impossible to wear; meat is stuffed into a gas mask worn above a winged saddle that screams, ”Fly”! When Cohen went upside-down crawling, fly-like, along the runners in the Goodman three weeks ago, dropping headless chickens as he went, viewers were not appalled, but moved.
Cohen’s courageous and (locally) groundbreaking work is in many ways clearing a path for contemporary artists to engage with performance as a focal point for product. For her exhibition ex-posed, which opened at the Market Theatre Photogallery on Sunday, Carol-Anne Gainer installed herself as Manet’s Olympia – the reclining nude whose brazen gaze undid the patriarchal and conservative viewers of her time.
Although Gainer’s photo-based, multi-media objects added little to existing theory about the ”geographia” of the female body, and despite the fact that Carolee Schneeman did a similar thing in the Sixties, her hour-long performance achieved its goal: to unsettle the conventional relationship between the nude female body as to-be-looked-at, and the power of the viewer’s gaze. In spite of the potential vulnerability of lying, perfectly still and naked, in a confined and densely populated space, it soon became apparent that Gainer held the power. Viewers shifted uneasily, knowing that if they looked they might be guilty, that if they didn’t they were guilty anyway.
One of the many questions that remains, particularly in South Africa’s financially beleaguered artworld, is whether performance and product speak to each other effectively. For Cohen, the nature of performance is in its transience, an elusive act that must continually re-invent itself in new spaces.
For Pienaar, the commodified works of art are something he would rather do without, an aspect of the work that diminishes the pleasure and power of performance. Gainer, on her opening night, was happy to ”sell” her Market Theatre performance as the second in an edition of five: there is now a buyer who ”owns” the Johannesburg event.
There are few exhibitions in the past year that have received as much media coverage and public attention as Cohen and Pienaar’s Outrage Us, and Gainer’s lower-key opening night pulled in a substantial and new audience to the Market. It might truthfully be said that, in South Africa, a little nudity goes a long way towards pulling in the crowds, but as performance grows there is also a real sense of excitement about its effects and possibilities for educating about the mechanisms of looking at all art forms.
Cohen’s ”ordeal art”, Pienaar’s pastel, poignant, emasculated gruffness, Gainer’s fulsome gaze, supercede shock and dispel embarrassment.
They remind, and even teach us that, in Cohen’s words, art should provoke a journey.
Carol-Anne Gainer’s ex-posed is on at the Market Theatre Photogallery, Newtown, Johannesburg until April 10