Engagingly close encounters

IT is curious the press release for 13 Rooms describes the event as groundbreaking when the heyday of performance art was really some decades ago.

Laura Lima

IT is curious that the press release for 13 Rooms describes the event as groundbreaking when the heyday of performance art was really some decades ago, but such expressions come to publicists like conditioned reflexes.

Perhaps it would have been more accurate, though, to speak of a rediscovery of the immediacy of the performer's physical presence at a time when performance art -- which is so inherently time-bound and finite -- has often been replaced by video, and when our cultural experience has grown increasingly disembodied and our relationships with each other more virtual and remote.

The latest Kaldor project -- a sort of anthology of performance art projects by a collection of artists who range from the very famous, such as Marina Abramovic, to the very new, such as the duo Clark Beaumont -- is anything but disembodied or remote: the performances draw visitors into involvement, sometimes even into participation, and more subtly into interaction with each other as well. And the overall effect, on the evening I was there, was warm, engaging and humane.

This quality of engagement is achieved in the first place by the layout and structure of the event. Thirteen little box-like rooms have been built inside the hollow space of Pier 2-3, rather as they used to construct indoor cabins for the cardinals during the papal conclaves in past centuries. Each of the rooms is very small and nearly all of them are square. The visitor, walking around inside the vast interior of the wharf, has, in almost all cases, to open the door of each room, enter and submit to being confined at close quarters with the performer or performers.

In the theatre, especially in less conventional settings, you can be simultaneously aware of the actor as a person and as the character he embodies. But in performance art, the man or woman before you is not acting in the usual sense of the word: not assuming another persona -- a word that originally meant a mask -- but simply going through some predetermined routine without ceasing to be, ostensibly at least, themselves. They are, in a sense, naked, and it is not entirely gratuitously that they are sometimes literally naked as well: it serves to emphasise the physical presence of the body in the space before us.

Nakedness also helps to evoke the vulnerability of the body, and this is a frequent theme in performance art, a form that developed in the shadow of totalitarianism, genocide, the atomic bomb and the less dramatic but dehumanising effects of mass society. In the face of a world that can seem indifferent to the individual, performance art commonly offers vivid but inherently ambiguous spectacles of physical and mental endurance that may be interpreted variously as acts of defiance, as displays of masochistic exhibitionism or even as a variety of ascetic practice.

Abramovic represents the extreme of exposure and ritual suffering, and her work, like that of some others, engages the viewer in a relationship with the performer that is on the borderline of voyeurism, sadism and compassion. There is a warning at the entrance of this and one other room, because the performer is naked; but it is not the nakedness of the performer so much as the viewer's response that is likely to be confronting.

The image is memorable: a woman is mounted, seated on a bicycle seat attached to the wall, her arms and legs spread wide like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. Because her legs are not weight-bearing, she does not stand like a statue but is pinned to the wall like an insect in a display case.

Altogether gentler and at the opposite extreme of visibility and exposure is Xavier Le Roy's dark room into which visitors enter with trepidation in almost pitch dark, before their eyes slowly adjust to the gloom and they make out a strange and moving shape that could be some disconcerting amoeba-like organism but turns out to be two figures, clothed and hooded in black.

They move and roll around, sometimes suggesting pre-conscious life and at other times a couple making love. Some visitors complain they can't see anything; a woman sitting in the dark urges them to be patient, that their eyes will adjust with time; and indeed, unlike so much contemporary art that is designed for the momentary glance of desultory crowds, performance art does require that you surrender yourself to real attention.

Perhaps no piece epitomises both the physical reality of performance and the ambiguous engagement of the spectator as effectively as that of the least well-known artists in the show, the two young women who work under their combined surnames as Clark Beaumont. Their performance consists of standing or sitting together for the duration of the exhibition on a small plinth, like a two-handed version of the early Christian ascetic St Simeon Stylites, except that the latter spent 37 years living on top of his column.

Clark Beaumont's ordeal is not quite so extreme, but it is still greater than that of most other performers, who rotate on 30-minute shifts -- and you can hardly begrudge them a break after an intense half-hour that can leave muscles shaking with fatigue. But Clark Beaumont, I was told, take only two 10-minute breaks during the day, which runs from 11am to 7pm, a daunting test of their determination.

The physical difficulty the women suffer as they intertwine limbs to remain balanced on a tiny platform is clear to see and feel, but so is the necessary mutual consideration, even tenderness; and the performance becomes a compelling allegory of the discomfort inseparable from intimacy, the pain that is part of love.

These are not concepts or ideas, much less moral injunctions or warnings, but what performance art does best: the straightforward enactment, and in this case constantly moving re-enactment, of a tangible and corporeal evidence.

PERFORMANCE ART
13 Rooms. Pier 3-4, Walsh Bay, Sydney. Until Sunday.