The Artist and his Shadow

The performance art manifesto that hasn’t been written yet

A performance artist is not an actor. He doesn’t perform a character and isn’t asked to pretend. Pretending – what a beautiful and misleading statement!

‘Pretending’ articulates the gap between what you are and what you want to become. In the positive sense of the word, it refers to marking a goal. But it is usually used as a negative term, referring to something being over-stylized. Pretending is reminiscent of pretentiousness, false pretext, little lies followed by smiles or feelings of guilt. The word ‘pretending’ has a surrealist feel to it, often pornographic.
If I will need to reply to the question ‘are you pretending?’ I will probably claim my innocence; I’m obviously not pretending. Or am I?

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The manifesto which hasn’t been written yet on performance art will call artists not to want to seduce the audience. Not to arouse or be aroused. Not playact. And above all – not to please. To look at the audience with apathy and indifference. To look at them directly, but avoid eye contact. A performance artist, a kind of a contemporary monk, tries to resist the temptation, but realizes it’s not always possible. He wants to look at the audience the same way one looks in a mirror that doesn’t reflect his own image. As long as that desire exists and is alive within him, the equilibrium is severed.

Apathy?

How close-yet-removed is apathy, and how easy and difficult it is at the same time, to achieve it. You’re curious, you want to experience the audiences’ point of view, the way they see you – to understand how you look in their eyes and what they think of you…to avoid that try and expand your gaze and function as a kind of surveillance camera surveying the area. Take some space from the happening so you can have a fresh perspective or be in the frame. The camera moves back and forth, surveying the area.
Don’t befriend your choices, don’t use your power, charm, and stage presence. You act, performing an action. It's hard to get used to the idea that you are the subject of the action, not its object, that you’re filling a role. But it’s not meant to be identified with you. Attributed, not identified.
 
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I’m hiding between the tree branches overlooking the street. What is my role? Am I binding myself to an action? A scenario? Am I obliged to take a stand or respond? Which ‘me’ are we talking about when ‘me’ is supposed to make myself scarce, to hide.
I’m wearing Marines camouflage. My face and my hands are camouflaged as well. During the show I put chalk make up on the tree branches, creating the right condition for my camouflage within the bushes I’m surrounded by.
A surveillance camera is placed on the centre of the road, somewhere where I can see it. It shows a panoramic view of a section of the street, including me and my tree in it. The footage is screened in real time on a wall or a nearby fence. Everyone who passes me by consciously chooses to focus on the screened image. The simple effect of having people accidentally caught on camera in a public space grabs and bemuses them. They don’t bother to look for the show. They’re certain they’re at the centre of the happening. So many passers by ‘get stuck’ in front of the camera. Making funny faces, kissing on camera, documenting themselves. They know they’re being watched. They don’t think it’s a real documentation, or that someone watches them while they watch themselves. Only after having finished their ego pleasing ritual and moving on, they realize I have been watching them from the tree branches. A double-take back brings to their attention the fact the camera is in fact focusing on me.
 

Where is Danny?

Danny isn’t hiding between the tree branches. Danny is the subject of an inter-active action. Danny is Godot. There is no Danny. Danny’s supposed to do nothing even if someone intervenes with the action, or simply takes the camera and walks away with it into the night. Danny’s gone. Danny is the peculiar premise of the artistic act, which chooses transience and the fictitiousness of the image as an alternative space to reality. In other words, being a performer doesn’t mean doing, expressing, taking a stand on something, or relating. The action may take place in a private or public space, hidden or in full view. You can be an artist that only works within the sphere of consciousness. You assume tasks on yourself taking responsibility. You (and only you) know if you’ve achieved your goals.
 
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A performance artist keeps a distance from the action by watching it. But when the boundaries between play and reality blur, you break the rules and you quit the game. When a football player hurts his opponent, it’s enough for the referee to whistle and the game’s stopped. A performative action also requires an external perspective, meaning a physical, mental or emotional distance.

In my performance The Milky way I produced goat flock milk cheese using the heat of my body while walking for 24 hours straight around the road that circles kibbutz Nachshon. I was tense since I had no prior experience at making cheese. The whole process was experimental and was done in fairly harsh outdoor conditions. It was hot. The cheese water dripped on me. The smell of the sweat mixed with the cheese smell. It worked very quickly! The milk started to curdle and many hands were stretched towards the ‘udders’ – the pockets of my pants where during the show the curdling cheese was stored – and take a bite of the cheese. Our later came the sobering stage. A Saturday night. The kibbutz members were back in their rooms. The audience went back to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I stayed alone, wet and reeking. Feelings of frustration and a sense of emptiness, like a court jester whose jokes don’t make anyone laugh anymore, were taking over my mind. What to do? To get into the car and take a thirty-minute drive to Jerusalem? I mean, no one’s watching anymore, no one sees, and without that ‘no one’
the game can’t go on… On the question of the boundaries of performance hovers the individual’s consciousness. The artist sets the boundaries and their location. He is also in charge of the supervision of those boundaries and the way in which he operates. There is no need in hanging the ethical code of performance art on the wall.
 
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I’m sitting at a small square table. Someone sits on the opposite chair. Via headphones we listen to prerecorded personal stories. People speak of their first loves, breakups, missing a family member that’s gone. At the centre of the table is a silicon hairy tail. It turns around powered by an electric engine. I’m wearing transparent plastic gloves, maintaining the stability of the tail and brushing its black hair. At some stage I rip out the tail from its base and operate it manually. I stare at the listener/viewer opposite me. His gaze continues to follow the tail’s movement, avoiding my own. There is something perverse and evocative in the presence of an erect tail. There is something compulsive and intimate in our close physical proximity and the fact we both share a private testimony, whispered secretly in our ears. The viewers who gather around can see a listening action, and a tail movement, but they can’t hear anything. The action is discrete, secretive, slippery, the relationship between a pair of earphones and a microphone is similar to the messages being passed between a fisherman on a beach and a fish swimming in the ocean. The game exists between the performer and his audience. Every minute or two the story changes. Each story has its own voice. A slice of life and a carved memory. A listener makes way for a curious viewer. A voice of a woman is heard via the headphones, sharing that she had never experienced intimacy with a man. The listener’s flickering gaze of the listener meets my own for a split second. The animal has been hunted. It’s looking for escape roots. It focuses on the movement of the tail again. It knows that its lot has been decided. It’s my captive. An easy one too.

 

There’s something threatening in a tail, but also funny. The soft-rough touch of silicone, its grey-black color, its thin pubic hair, the way it erects then falls back down, looses weight, thrashes the table, then becomes erect once more. You want to touch it. Only few have the courage to, and even then they do it only with their fingertips. The tail is a distraction.

A trick. It’s full of expression. Attractive. Repulsive. Daring. Ugly. The back tip of a wild animal. Taken from a dark-ages fair or a Thai porn museum. Acts as if it doesn’t belong in the show. It knows you’re looking at it just so you don’t have to look into my eyes. Suddenly it turns to you as if saying: hey you, aren’t you ashamed with yourself? Doing it with a tail…And do me a favor, before you make room for the next person, pick up the hairs I’ve dropped, and stick them back with tweezers. Thanks.
 
The performance transmits resistance. The unscripted treaty between an artist and himself, similarly to the one between an artist and an audience, changes something in the social world order. It’s agreed that an artist isn’t a clown. He may be ridiculed, but it’s clear he works consciously and with self-control. He will forsake his own body in a public space, but never his consciousness, it’s attached to him like a shadow. His life’s doctrine isn’t nihilist like that of the fool. The classic fool doesn’t have a silhouette; doesn’t have a shadow; he’s blinded by his own foolhardiness. He has no perspective on himself. Even when he amuses his audience, and even when he threatens it, he’s perceived as an object. A public punching bag. Not a glimpse of subjectivity. Lacking all self-awareness he has no horizon in sight, no purpose.
 
The performance artist is a total subject, with an awakened self-awareness. His guiding principal is the right to scream. His art often causes disturbance to the social order but not out of a desire to cause a stir, but from a personal need to go all the way, to play the game.

Even if his actions threat the politically correct, the socially accepted, the artist follows a personal set of rules and regulations, which he creates for himself. The rules of the game of performance are functions of those self-assigned limitation, we are all familiar with from the religious and sexual ethos: to bear a heavy cross, to push a heavy rock up the hill, to roam blindly between those who see, to sail a rhapsody from one bank to another.
A performance artist must stop the traffic, make a comment, deviate the attention somewhere or just yell, in front of the masses, or in front of emptiness. Most likely no one will listen, or they will just turn their heads away. It’s hard for them to hear the scream. They don’t think you’re performing, they think you’re protesting.
 
There is a role-reversal going on here. The artist, who is supposed to feel rejected, outcast, ridiculed, achieves through his action a certain freedom. Acting out on his right to scream liberates him. It’s the audience who feels that the performance destabilizes him, pulling the rug underneath his feet.
 
*

You, your body shape, your mental state, your specific gravity, your shadow.
Observe the feeling your movement generates, not the movement itself. It will help you let go of your hold on the physical body and offer you a sense of lightness.
Me? not me.
Me, no, not me, buy me, eat me, wear me, have me, me, not me.
Your character is an image; you can create it in the form of thought. A body without a skeleton. Your memory of yourself. The patch of light filling the space the only seconds after you have already left. The character is an anchor. It allows your consciousness to drop away the physical weight of your body and float. The character gives you a dimension of consciousness, of knowing yourself, and withholds the pain.
A character has no emotion, but anyone can be emotional in response to her.
A character allows you to treat yourself as a foreign entity.
 
It follows you; it lies down, kneels, sits, walks with you. you wonder if it’s in you or hovering above you. it doesn’t touch you, sometimes it floats, taking you glances with it, not the eyes. You can even stare at yourself.
It has no hands it doesn’t grab hold, and isn’t being held.
A character is a possibility.
A character is willingness.
A character is an acceptance.
Don’t try so hard observing it, so you don’t lose it. Your lesson is to lower the volume of your action, and reduce the strength. Not to push. The action does happen in the physical realm, but isn’t achieved via the body.  
The body is getting ready for the performance. You discipline yourself in regards to everything to do with the maintenance of your body, your diet, and metal balance. The plan is to go on a three-day boot camp. To be in a state of readiness, imbue the internal tension of being focused and available.
And then when the performance time arrives, for some reason, you are not ready. Despite the months of preparations, when it begins, you struggle to identify the moment, to go with the flow of it, as it had surprised you.
You’re alert, going over the actions, trying to apply the action and shape your presence. Trial and error. You change rhythm, stance, gaze…. Enlarge/reduce your distance from the audience, measure the proportionality of the action. Slowly the action cleans itself of over stylization, removes any conceptual humps you’re supposed to present and express; the action becomes clearer. It’s not a question of clarity or performance qualities, but of internal precision. The sense of precision is essential. It’s achieved in the same way the action is achieved, the body and the image that inspired the work merge. You are not carrying out the action; you act it. You are an action. That’s the difference between you and an actor, between you and a dancer.
 
In this merging between object and subject, between the acting and the action, the essence of the show is revealed. Only then will you be able to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it.

You can’s round corners the way you can with the pre-editing of rehearsals like you do in theatre and dance. Preliminary rehearsals discipline the work, inform it and structure it. The show maybe to well done. In the worst case you will be titled as talented and the show as virtuosic. Performance art requires real friction, the kind that characterizes passing through world, between real life materials and performance materials. Without it the work will lose altitude and crash to the ground. Life and performance are two different levels of reality. A metaphysical process our monk goes through. This is a time of struggle for performance art – although it may use an image, it makes sure it positions itself on the brink, where a real friction exists, not a seductive one and often even repulsive, between the artistic act and life.

Struggling with the image, as well as the image of yourself, is struggling with an angel.
The struggle can be you prisoner, tying you down to your image or your persona, this awareness bothers you: how much do you identify with the artistic role you assigned to yourself? Is your action authentic? Are you acting out of choice or compulsion? Is it you or your shadow? And perhaps, liberated from the forces of nature, you surprise yourself when you manage to step on your own shadow…
The struggle with the angel may become a moment of liberation.

From Hebrew: Sivan Gabrielovich - Gal

 

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Hadas Ofrat is an multidisciplinary artist. He creates performance works, sculptures, media and sound installations in various exhibition spaces in Israel and abroad since 1994. He exhibited solo at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the University gallery at Tel Aviv University, The Hebrew University, to name a few. Earlier on he also wrote, designed and directed 30 plays, and many interdisciplinary events.
He co-initiated the foundation of Hakaron Theatre, School of visual Theatre and Hazira in Jerusalem, and served as their first Director. He is also Artistic Directed the International Puppetry Festival, Phenomena Festival and The Sound of the Word Festival.
Today he heads the Board of Directors for Hazira in Jerusalem, as well as Arteam, a cross-genre artists’ team, who recently set up a library for non-Hebrew speaking communities and Levinsky Park in Tel Aviv.
Ofrat published an artistic biography (Ever Never, 2004), Eight Performances 2002-2005 (DVD), Conversations With a Puppet, on contemporary puppetry (2007) and two poetry books. He also published four catalogues of his solo exhibitions.
Ofrat is the recipient of the 2008 Ministry of Culture Award
Portfolio link HERE