Performance Matters: Performing Idea – Performative Writing8th October 3.00-7.30pm (not 7th as stated on disk))Toynbee StudiosWith: Hélène Cixous (on video), Matthew Goulish, Adrian Heathfield and Peggy PhelanNew forms of writing on and around contemporary art and performance have emerged in recent years, alongside the emergence of the artist as cultural critic and curator. These forms of writing often problematize the notion of critical distance, deploying creative, dialogic and autobiographical strategies to engage with the multiple affects of the artwork. To what extent may critical thinking and writing be an art form? Speakers will examine the histories, limits and possibilities of the forms of ‘performative writing’, the dynamics of the performing idea.This session on Performative Writing will also comprise a preview of Trashing Performance, the second themed year of Performance Matters, with contributions from Oreet Ashery, Mel Brimfield, Gavin Butt, Dominic Johnson and Bird La Bird.

PromisesJoe Kelleher, Giulia Palladini, Silvia Bottiroli9th October 2010, 3.30pm Toynbee StudiosThe dialogue has already begun. It begins with the appearance of the work. A 39 year-old theatre festival, for example, in a town without a theatre; a festival that breaks with four decades of tradition in order to re-examine and renew that tradition; that addresses the urban texture not as a void that needs filling but a space of generation; that imagines a spectator in motion, whose trajectory is governed, as curator Chiara Guidi writes, by a sensation of lost powers, and by tiredness perhaps, but who may be capable of conjuring from this trajectory ‘a place filled with promises.’ Or else the emergence of a new practice, work still in its nascence, work being done with the young, for example a company dedicated to the non-spectacular rigours of collective dance, and to mining the minimum pause, tracing the presence of a rhythm, as director Claudia Castellucci puts it, between one beat and another. But also then the channels, the forums, the platforms of exchange through which events and practices such as these and many others are debated over and contested and sustained, by a self-reflexive critical writing, and also by a commitment, as the editors of the journal Art’O: culture and politics of the scenic arts put it, to the idea of a future of performance even in those spaces most emptied out by current ideology.Joe Kelleher’s dialogue for Performing Idea is being pursued through an engagement with events, practices, and platforms such as these, and with the people doing this work, artists, curators, arts administrators, writers and other spectators, who have taken into their care and are mapping out, sustaining, and re-inventing the promises of performance in the Italy of the early twenty-first century.

Performance Matters: Performing Idea Dialogue ProjectIn Silence – a conversation with Graeme MillerTim Etchells and Graeme MillerEtchells’ research project In Silence convenes a series of encounters with experts and professionals whose daily work and life practice leads them to an interest and investment in silence. Silence – death to the comedian, transcendence to the priest, a right in the eyes of the law – is after all not the negative space of speech but rather a complex piece of social communication, which functions in contexts as a statement, as transitional state (instrumental route to something) and indeed as a goal or objective all of its own. In a linked set of videotaped interviews Etchells will explore the diversity and complexity of silence as it is constructed and read, investigating both its utility and its blankness, as it is deployed and broken in different situations. Tim Etchells has begun his weblog for In Silence.

A video-lecture, a playful complex analysis of the use and misuse of images for political and ideological purposes in Lebanon and the Middle East

Lecture given by Guillermo Gomez Pena from Live Culture Symposium: Performance and the contemporary at TATE Modern, 29-30 March 2003.This documentation has since been presented with the permission of the artist as part of the Performance Matters, Performing Idea, Performance Lecture Archive; an interactive video archive housed at the Whitechapel Gallery between 2-9 October 2010. The archive looked at examples of the performance lecture as a form of artistic and critical expression and its potential to address a broad range of cultural issues and philosophical ideas.

Lecture given by William Pope.L from Live Culture Symposium: Performance and the contemporary at TATE Modern, 29-30 March 2003.This documentation has since been presented with the permission of the artist as part of the Performance Matters, Performing Idea, Performance Lecture Archive; an interactive video archive housed at the Whitechapel Gallery between 2-9 October 2010. The archive looked at examples of the performance lecture as a form of artistic and critical expression and its potential to address a broad range of cultural issues and philosophical ideas.

Performance Matters, Performing Idea – Living Archives6th OctoberLiving Archives 3:00-7:30pmToynbee StudiosWith: Anne Bean, Rose English, Hannah Hurtzig, Janez Jan a and Heike Roms Gripped by a kind of ‘archive fever', contemporary art and culture is driven by the desire to document, store and preserve. The archive is now a vast global edifice, crossing cultures and forms and reaching further and further into the past. Fleeting exchanges and moments are everywhere evidenced in contemporary art's multiple but unstable papers, artefacts and traces. But what happens to the life of art in its archival forms? What is the archive doing with performance, performers with the archive? Speakers will address the relation between artists and the archival drive, the artist's experiences and body as a kind of living archive.

This item is part of the 'Glimpses of before: 1970s UK Performance Art' Study Room Guide by Helena Goldwater (P2497)

Performance Matters; Performing Idea – Other Durations5th October3:00-7:30pmToynbee StudiosWith: Janine Antoni, Matthew Goulish, Bojana Kunst, Boyan Manchev, Fred Moten and Lara ShalsonTime in Western Cultures continues to accelerate and a slower unregulated life is seemingly nowhere to be found. Contemporary art has seen a resurgence of performances of long and short durations and a re-valuation of historical works of duration. Artists are increasingly playing with, inhabiting and transforming the time of the artwork. Speakers will address questions of how we can now think of the time of performance? What are the relations between performance, time and cultural value? How is performance reconfiguring and othering our understandings and experiences of time?

Performance Matters, Performing Idea – Other Durations5th October 3:00-7:30pmToynbee StudiosWith: Janine Antoni, Matthew Goulish, Bojana Kunst, Boyan Manchev, Fred Moten and Lara ShalsonTime in Western Cultures continues to accelerate and a slower unregulated life is seemingly nowhere to be found. Contemporary art has seen a resurgence of performances of long and short durations and a re-valuation of historical works of duration. Artists are increasingly playing with, inhabiting and transforming the time of the artwork. Speakers will address questions of how we can now think of the time of performance? What are the relations between performance, time and cultural value? How is performance reconfiguring and othering our understandings and experiences of time?

Performance Matters, Performing Idea – Living Archives6th OctoberLiving Archives 3:00-7:30pmToynbee StudiosWith: Anne Bean, Rose English, Hannah Hurtzig, Janez Jan a and Heike Roms Gripped by a kind of ‘archive fever’, contemporary art and culture is driven by the desire to document, store and preserve. The archive is now a vast global edifice, crossing cultures and forms and reaching further and further into the past. Fleeting exchanges and moments are everywhere evidenced in contemporary art’s multiple but unstable papers, artefacts and traces. But what happens to the life of art in its archival forms? What is the archive doing with performance, performers with the archive? Speakers will address the relation between artists and the archival drive, the artist’s experiences and body as a kind of living archive.