Talking Outside The Boundaries
🗓️ Thursday, 25 June — 3:50pm
- 4:30pm
(40 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
A lecture performance from a peripheral ‘fan’ or ‘fantasist’ position, in relation to the live art scene centred in New York between the late 1950s and 1970s. I explore the creative potential of this orientation and the feelings of embarrassment, inferiority, and pleasure it generates. I work atop feminist strategies of re-contextualisation developed from within and after the aforementioned scene by figures like Yvonne Rainer, Kathy Acker, and Marie de Brugerolle.
The form that defined this scene was the ‘Happening’, coined by Allen Kaprow, who also claimed, “the history of art is not in books but in gossip” (Post-Performance Future Method, 2024). Though presumably this statement was meant to valorise the ephemeral and anti-canonical, it is through gossip that the scene he helped found is now arguably the least ‘endangered conceptual world’ imaginable, thanks to the mythologisation of its leading figures. My gossip-heavy presentation highlights its ambiguous status: as a countercultural tactic and as a mechanism that maintains American anglophone cultural hegemony.
I weave together my imperfect historical knowledge with anecdotes in which I try to consummate my yearning by travelling to the US. I draw on Argentinian artist Oscar Masotta’s text I Committed a Happening (1966), reflecting on his first-hand experiences of happenings, and his own produced in Argentina’s repressive political climate. I consider how Masotta and I each metabolise conflicting desires for another scene—mine from boredom, his from political necessity.
My methodology stems from the ‘talk poems’ of David Antin, culturally adjacent to Kaprow, in which he discussed a range of subjects in front of live audiences, thereby bringing “a private occasion to a public place” (Talking at the Boundaries, 1976). Unlike Antin, I record the text and receive it via headphones. By inevitably revealing its artifice, I perform a re-animation of a ‘dead’ scene into a ‘living’ present through language.
The form that defined this scene was the ‘Happening’, coined by Allen Kaprow, who also claimed, “the history of art is not in books but in gossip” (Post-Performance Future Method, 2024). Though presumably this statement was meant to valorise the ephemeral and anti-canonical, it is through gossip that the scene he helped found is now arguably the least ‘endangered conceptual world’ imaginable, thanks to the mythologisation of its leading figures. My gossip-heavy presentation highlights its ambiguous status: as a countercultural tactic and as a mechanism that maintains American anglophone cultural hegemony.
I weave together my imperfect historical knowledge with anecdotes in which I try to consummate my yearning by travelling to the US. I draw on Argentinian artist Oscar Masotta’s text I Committed a Happening (1966), reflecting on his first-hand experiences of happenings, and his own produced in Argentina’s repressive political climate. I consider how Masotta and I each metabolise conflicting desires for another scene—mine from boredom, his from political necessity.
My methodology stems from the ‘talk poems’ of David Antin, culturally adjacent to Kaprow, in which he discussed a range of subjects in front of live audiences, thereby bringing “a private occasion to a public place” (Talking at the Boundaries, 1976). Unlike Antin, I record the text and receive it via headphones. By inevitably revealing its artifice, I perform a re-animation of a ‘dead’ scene into a ‘living’ present through language.
Biography
Francesca Hawker (born 1992, UK) is an artist and performer living in Brussels. She works across the fields of performance, poetry, installation, music and self-publishing. She often works collaboratively within the “slapstick of ordinary relation”, defined by Lauren Berlant as a way of “trying to stay in the same enough conversation in order to build something together that neither of us could build by ourselves." She is currently a PhD candidate and teacher at LUCA School of Arts in Gent, where she is researching the role played by embarrassment in performance frameworks.