Bodies Moving: The Independent Performance Group and Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel with Egon Schiele
James Westcott
A large survey of Egon Schiele’s drawings and paintings closed this weekend at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It was the first ever exhibition in Holland devoted to Scheile, the Austrian expressionist who died of Spanish flu in 1918, but the event was most notable for a bold, and apparently unprecedented interdisciplinarity: live performance art, live dance, and video documentation of both were neatly interspersed with Schiele’s works in the galleries.
Krisztina de Châtel’s dance group and Marina Abramovic’s Independent Performance Group (made up of Abramovic’s ex-students) were given the task of animating, and often literalizing, Schiele’s taut, traumatic bodies. In the upper gallery—which exhibited Schiele’s early works up until 1912, when he went to prison for 24 days for exposing minors to "pornographic" material—a series of 12 week-long performances took place on a shelf, about five feet off the ground. The idea for the shelf seems to be derived from Abramovic’s 2002 New York performance "The House With The Ocean View," in which she lived for 12 days on three balcony-type constructions—open-faced rooms that were almost brutally exposed to the audience. IPG performers were similarly exposed but had even less space to work in on their single shelf. This physical constriction of movement was partly the point—it was supposed to accentuate the strain and contortion in Schiele’s bodies. In the lower gallery, de Châtel, in collaboration with Abramovic, had created a metallic stage and a set of magnetic shoes for dancers who performed a deliberately sticky and clumsy routine called "Gradual and Persistent Loss of Control" twice a week. They also used a series of glass boxes to press against and wind their bodies around—more instruments of constriction.
I went during the ambitious exhibition’s final week, when Snezana Golubovic had her turn up on the shelf. Dressed in a silky black slip, stockings and wearing heavy eye shadow, she was impersonating one of Schiele’s models (whom he got whenever he could afford to pay them; at other times he used street children, his sister Gerti, his girlfriend Wally, and eventually his wife Edith Harms). In between languorous poses—feet propped high against the wall, body supine with the knees jutted up or flopping over—and dramatic vacant stares at the audience, Golubovic spent eight hours a day for a week writing letters to Schiele on her Powerbook. The text appeared for the public to read on a screen next to the shelf. A lot of it was more-or-less unmediated thoughts and often banal memories mixed together with direct addresses to Schiele that were at turns presumptuous and a bit irritating in their implied, and maybe accidental, flattery?the performance was called "Dear Egon."
And that’s the problem with interpreting Schiele’s work—or any work—right there next to it in the gallery. Even a critique, which Golubovic’s might have been—about the way Schiele looked at women, and didn’t give them a voice—ends up being another kind of flattery, and risks stifling the source material with pre-emptive interpretation. Both tendencies—the unintentional flattery of the constant address and the relentless interpreting—end up betraying a disturbing lack of faith in the supposedly revered subject matter. The paintings and drawings are already breathing; they don’t need to be brought to life before our eyes.
They don’t need to be, but need is hardly the point. The exhibition was above all a radical curatorial experiment that went beyond what is normal and necessary, and it was alternately frustrating and inspiring as a result. Some previous performances on the shelf—excerpts of which were played on a screen on the other side of the shelf/stage—did resonate powerfully both as works in their own right, and in relation to Schiele. Anton Soloveitchik is blessed with a wiry body that’s like a twin of Schiele’s in Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing (1910). So Soloveitchik didn’t have to do much for his performance except just stand there in his underpants—a live painting, a silent and solid presence in the museum. Nezaket Ekici’s Noblas Opak performance had a similar electricity to it. Wearing a black and white-striped cape—reminiscent of a decorative dress in Klimt, who was a big influence in early Schiele—Ekici twitched and jerked her body non-stop in a mechanical, but somehow sensual, broken-down kind of Oriental dancing. It was addictive watching the irrational, paranoid movements in the video, but one can imagine that this incessant motion, and the constant clattering of the bracelets on her wrist, must have dominated the upper gallery when she spent her week up on the shelf. Even with Golubovic’s more serene performance, there was a disconcerting competition between the disciplines for attention. It was difficult to give either the physical presence of the performer in the room or the paintings the dignified attention they both deserved.
So, weirdly, it was easier to concentrate on the video works displayed on various monitors in between paintings—one didn’t feel guilty about turning away, or about the inevitability of turning away. Two of the best were Declan Rooney’s Self Portrait, Boy Facing Front, a re-working of Schiele’s Girl Facing Front, in which a girl holds out her limp hands in front of her. A bare-chested Rooney did the same, but holding his hands slightly higher, the fingers hanging down, creating a frame for his intense stare, and a gesture that was both accusatory and utterly resigned, desperate. Daniel Muller-Friedrichsen, together with Franko B, also illuminated the importance and the intelligence of hands in Schiele. In Trying to write a heart in the air, they made apparently spontaneous, stuttering configurations with their fingers and thumbs and flashed them to the camera for a second.
One way around the problem of the various disciplines simultaneously competing for attention is for one of them to unashamedly take center stage for a while, as two of de Châtel’s dancers did in a scheduled afternoon performance. As they glided into the lower gallery, the lighting changed and the public turned and focused on the center of the room. The dancers, a man and a woman, performed a silent, slow, and tortuous chase of one another, writhing around the glass boxes, smushing body parts against them, and seeming always on the verge of a very elegant collapse. It was a mesmerizing, primal acting out of the angular bodies and their erotic charge in the paintings?and, because it was a fleeting performance that asked clearly and directly for complete attention, there wasn’t time for it to develop a passive-aggressive relationship with the exhibited works.
Image gallery
Anton Soloveitchik, Gradual and Persistent Loss of Control, 2005. Photo by Declan Rooney.
Daniel Muller-Friedrichsen, Trying to write a heart in the air, 2004.
Snezana Golubovic, Dear Egon, 2005. Photo by Monali Meher.
