Interview with Laurel Jay Carpenter
Newcastle, UK, 29 August 2019
Q: Why / when / how did you start to work with performance, what is your background, how did you arrive at doing performance?
Fittingly, I found performance through life experience. My first job after undergraduate study (in English Literature and Art History) was at the experimental art center Mobius in Boston, USA. There I met Marilyn Arsem and many other working artists; I was exposed to the world I didn’t even know I was missing: sound and video art, installation and performance. Mobius also taught me about collaborative processes and artist collectives—the larger effects catalyzed by coming together. Within a year, I had moved to New York City and eagerly pursued other jobs at alternative art spaces. I became the PR Director at Performance Space 122 (now PS New York). If Mobius was my first kiss as an artist, PS122 was my first love. This was the early 1990s, at the height of the culture wars and AIDS crisis, and so much significant, activist work was being made by artists who became leaders in the field: Karen Finley, Diamanda Galas, Holly Hughes, Jennifer Miller. I saw so much performance during this time; yet, this work fell within the theatrical/dance lineage (either narrative in structure or framed, however loosely, within a proscenium experience), and my inclinations and skills were defined by a tradition of visual art. I initiated my practice by making found object, sometimes interactive, installations. Then, in 1994, a curator suggested I add performance elements, initiating the next decade of my work in performed installation. When I left the city for graduate study, my work shifted away from the constructed setting of installation for site-inspired performance in the public realm. In 2004, during my MFA, I also met Marina Abramović who invited me to join the short-lived Independent Performance Group (IPG) with many of her former students from Braunschweig. My early explorations in visual performance opened methods that remain in my current practice including extended duration and the sculptural garment. These experiences also introduced me to the international performance community, a world I am no longer missing—which I feel privileged to consider my home.
Q: What is your process like when you make a performance, from idea to actual work?
As a visual artist, I deal in images. I always see it first: how the body in space, gestured or tasked, appears from the perspective of a viewer, what colors, textures, depths, shapes. This image may be inspired by a memory or other residue of emotion, or something I’ve read, from poetry to political commentary. It may just be a flash of material affiliation, but the image is primary. The body, space and time, and the relations between all of these, are vital to constructing the image, to be able to make it felt, as in Laura U. Mark’s definition of “haptic visuality.” The process activates this potential. First, I draw and describe the image, just quickly in my sketchbook, to hold on to it; then I invest in material and scholarly research, sometimes quite protracted, to garner as much information as possible to fill out the image. I usually need to make something as part of this process, for example, sewing together 300 white shirt sleeves into an oversized dress, or gold leafing a dozen stones. The studio practice defines the connection to both the original image and the ultimate content of the work, from inspiration toward intention. Of course, this is all performance preparation, that which “makes the work work” as Erin Manning would suggest. As the performer, with a slowness and order that is just in my bones, I engage a single focused task—simply dropping pins as at the PAO Festival—which occurs in the deliciously complex field of visual, spatial, material, temporal and social constructs, allowing meanings to shuffle and tumble over the duration of the performance’s offering.
Q: Can you tell us about your latest project?
Most recently I performed a new work, Lineage, with my long-term collaborator, Norwegian artist Terese Longva. Sculptural, durational and designed for public space at the Prague Quadrennial, the performance opens with two women standing back-to-back in matching custom-made dresses in a glistening saffron shade. The women walk apart, so slowly, their movement almost imperceptible; over many hours gradually revealed is bits of text on the single, connected train, sewn in contrasting pink fabric. The walk continues, the train extends to 30 meters, shifting its scope from garment to banner, from body to assembly. The quote is then at its most accessible. The material choice and specific phrase incorporates both a poetic and an activist feminist ideology. After researching many inspiring slogans of the historic suffragettes, Longva and I chose a quotation from female writer Ryan Graudin, to include a contemporary and inclusive political vernacular. Here is a silence broken. The sculptural garment, claiming space and reclaiming our voice, serves as both a protest sign and a signifier of protest. Current feminist discourse is comprised of many actions, conversations and declarations from before. This conceptual layering through time becomes a visible repeat in a single strong line, slowly unfurled. The oversized and shared dress is both a weight and a bond, a measure and a lure; it signifies this moment as a metaphor of moments past, and the directionally of moving into our shared future.
Q: Can you describe your current doctoral research in performance?
My research examines a particular slippage of identity within durational, visual art performance prompting a reassessment of dominant theories of presence, character and persona. Extending the conception of a segmented, layered or constructed other-self within performance practice, the research originated in the dichotomy between the I (artist) and she (performer) of the performance, noticed but never notated over years of my practice. Developing a new body of work provided a means to narrow in on a conceptualization and definition of the alterself, as well as determine the circumstances of its emergence. My own experience from within the performance is substantiated by live encounters with other artists’ work, including Amanda Coogan, Kira O’Reilly, John Court, and Hancock & Kelly. These artists provide a comparative study in at least one strand of investigation in the research: immersion, duration, or a heightened visual element. Indeed, conditions of the alterself require a layering of these strands of connection, indicating an embodied scale: a deep, funneled focus (micro), a sustained intimacy with another (meso), and a sense of awe within the spectacular (macro). Troubling the notions of subjectivity and selfness, the new term alterself provides a link between the concrete, corporeal material of performance work and the attributes of the unknowable therein. She is there, embodied, willful, but equally immaterial and fleeting. She is the signified other—inside, intertwined, superimposed—in the performance-reality and to the performer-self. The thesis is titled, This Is She.
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Q: Why / when / how did you start to work with performance, what is your background, how did you arrive at doing performance?
Fittingly, I found performance through life experience. My first job after undergraduate study (in English Literature and Art History) was at the experimental art center Mobius in Boston, USA. There I met Marilyn Arsem and many other working artists; I was exposed to the world I didn’t even know I was missing: sound and video art, installation and performance. Mobius also taught me about collaborative processes and artist collectives—the larger effects catalyzed by coming together. Within a year, I had moved to New York City and eagerly pursued other jobs at alternative art spaces. I became the PR Director at Performance Space 122 (now PS New York). If Mobius was my first kiss as an artist, PS122 was my first love. This was the early 1990s, at the height of the culture wars and AIDS crisis, and so much significant, activist work was being made by artists who became leaders in the field: Karen Finley, Diamanda Galas, Holly Hughes, Jennifer Miller. I saw so much performance during this time; yet, this work fell within the theatrical/dance lineage (either narrative in structure or framed, however loosely, within a proscenium experience), and my inclinations and skills were defined by a tradition of visual art. I initiated my practice by making found object, sometimes interactive, installations. Then, in 1994, a curator suggested I add performance elements, initiating the next decade of my work in performed installation. When I left the city for graduate study, my work shifted away from the constructed setting of installation for site-inspired performance in the public realm. In 2004, during my MFA, I also met Marina Abramović who invited me to join the short-lived Independent Performance Group (IPG) with many of her former students from Braunschweig. My early explorations in visual performance opened methods that remain in my current practice including extended duration and the sculptural garment. These experiences also introduced me to the international performance community, a world I am no longer missing—which I feel privileged to consider my home.
Q: What is your process like when you make a performance, from idea to actual work?
As a visual artist, I deal in images. I always see it first: how the body in space, gestured or tasked, appears from the perspective of a viewer, what colors, textures, depths, shapes. This image may be inspired by a memory or other residue of emotion, or something I’ve read, from poetry to political commentary. It may just be a flash of material affiliation, but the image is primary. The body, space and time, and the relations between all of these, are vital to constructing the image, to be able to make it felt, as in Laura U. Mark’s definition of “haptic visuality.” The process activates this potential. First, I draw and describe the image, just quickly in my sketchbook, to hold on to it; then I invest in material and scholarly research, sometimes quite protracted, to garner as much information as possible to fill out the image. I usually need to make something as part of this process, for example, sewing together 300 white shirt sleeves into an oversized dress, or gold leafing a dozen stones. The studio practice defines the connection to both the original image and the ultimate content of the work, from inspiration toward intention. Of course, this is all performance preparation, that which “makes the work work” as Erin Manning would suggest. As the performer, with a slowness and order that is just in my bones, I engage a single focused task—simply dropping pins as at the PAO Festival—which occurs in the deliciously complex field of visual, spatial, material, temporal and social constructs, allowing meanings to shuffle and tumble over the duration of the performance’s offering.
Q: Can you tell us about your latest project?
Most recently I performed a new work, Lineage, with my long-term collaborator, Norwegian artist Terese Longva. Sculptural, durational and designed for public space at the Prague Quadrennial, the performance opens with two women standing back-to-back in matching custom-made dresses in a glistening saffron shade. The women walk apart, so slowly, their movement almost imperceptible; over many hours gradually revealed is bits of text on the single, connected train, sewn in contrasting pink fabric. The walk continues, the train extends to 30 meters, shifting its scope from garment to banner, from body to assembly. The quote is then at its most accessible. The material choice and specific phrase incorporates both a poetic and an activist feminist ideology. After researching many inspiring slogans of the historic suffragettes, Longva and I chose a quotation from female writer Ryan Graudin, to include a contemporary and inclusive political vernacular. Here is a silence broken. The sculptural garment, claiming space and reclaiming our voice, serves as both a protest sign and a signifier of protest. Current feminist discourse is comprised of many actions, conversations and declarations from before. This conceptual layering through time becomes a visible repeat in a single strong line, slowly unfurled. The oversized and shared dress is both a weight and a bond, a measure and a lure; it signifies this moment as a metaphor of moments past, and the directionally of moving into our shared future.
Q: Can you describe your current doctoral research in performance?
My research examines a particular slippage of identity within durational, visual art performance prompting a reassessment of dominant theories of presence, character and persona. Extending the conception of a segmented, layered or constructed other-self within performance practice, the research originated in the dichotomy between the I (artist) and she (performer) of the performance, noticed but never notated over years of my practice. Developing a new body of work provided a means to narrow in on a conceptualization and definition of the alterself, as well as determine the circumstances of its emergence. My own experience from within the performance is substantiated by live encounters with other artists’ work, including Amanda Coogan, Kira O’Reilly, John Court, and Hancock & Kelly. These artists provide a comparative study in at least one strand of investigation in the research: immersion, duration, or a heightened visual element. Indeed, conditions of the alterself require a layering of these strands of connection, indicating an embodied scale: a deep, funneled focus (micro), a sustained intimacy with another (meso), and a sense of awe within the spectacular (macro). Troubling the notions of subjectivity and selfness, the new term alterself provides a link between the concrete, corporeal material of performance work and the attributes of the unknowable therein. She is there, embodied, willful, but equally immaterial and fleeting. She is the signified other—inside, intertwined, superimposed—in the performance-reality and to the performer-self. The thesis is titled, This Is She.
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