| art.description.project | London’s Raven Row gallery is recognized as one of the UK and Europe’s pre-eminent exhibition spaces. It has a strong research focus towards marginalized and obscured practices and specifically in determining the relations between artworks and artistic processes via exhibitionary concepts.
In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes was the first curated survey of the works and practices of the artists-group The Theatre of Mistakes (1974-81) and funded by Raven Row, The Swedish Research Council, Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation, via funding applications and review processes conducted at board and committee levels with significant expertise.
As research, in practice, In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes introduced the concept of ‘ante-curating’ (Bowman, 2017) as a means to distinguish the extended methods of curating employed by artists during and subsequent to their process of production from those employed by an external curator. Fundamental to this concept is the potential it opens out in terms of what may become ‘exhibitable’ and the methods employed to do so, but also to question and challenge dominant notions that restrain the potentials of exhibitions to actively research complexities of practice in public, such as the limitations of particular processes being seen to be extra-artistic or ‘apparently marginal’ (Filopovic, 2016). In this case, the exhibition sought to complexify this via multiple curatorial registers that would allow for consideration of the working and organisatonal practices of the Theatre of Mistakes as being conceptually driven towards the delivery of a form of artist-organisation described across a series of artworks, objects, administrative documents and live works.
Secondly, via the employment of multiple registers of curating, exhibiton-organisation and display methods that were hyper-temporal and poly-spatial; thus contributing to burgeoning discourse of the Choreograhic (Joy, 2015 and Schmitz, 2017) and temporal curating (von Bismarck et al. 2014) the project contributed new knowledge to the field of ‘performative curating’ (Hechler, Warza. 2017) by challenging its limitations to ‘liveness’ whilst simultaneously challenging Foster’s (2016) notion of ‘grey’ and ‘zombie curating’ in the reconstruction of live works.
The process included years of ethnographic, archival, and conservationist work conducted intermittently and most intensively for 24 months prior to the exhibition. The ethnographic research revealed the multiple perspectives of the group on their own work, both in agreement and disagreement, which informed the selection and content of the work displayed and its use of choreographic methods in space and time. The archival research resulted in a museum-standard catalogue of over 4000 entries, which informed the ability to understand the complexity of the prolific nature of the group’s work and labour, but also to challenge orthodoxies of categorization.
Importantly, The Theatre of Mistakes’ records revealed documentation that suggested that their ‘project’ was itself durational and challenged dominant notions of art and extra-artistic, as they deemed what may otherwise be read as documentation or ephemera as ‘Soundings’ and thus constitutive of being art within a larger conceptual endeavor. Thus, this exhibition researched the relations between artworks in objecthood and live performance, video, photography, scripts, manuals and instructions and administrative ephemera. Importantly, these ‘things’ were self-described by the group as ‘Soundings’, which collectively constituted a larger conceptual endeavor that rejected the notion of administration, processual, diagrammatic and instructional, and notational components and their corrections as being as extra-artistic or marginal, and thus constitutive of the group’s art.
The conservation work allowed for the re-digitisation of three key video works (Table Moves and Homage to Morandi, both 1981 and GOING, 1977) and importantly the production of a new video of the work GOING (1977-2017) in its 40th anniversary year.
This exhibition with its multiple components of archival material, 2D and 3D and live art works required a complex process of exhibition design with each vitrine being hand-made for its contents and the spatial choreography of the spectator in a near symmetrical building with 12 galleries where corridor spaces were also used. The exhibition gathered members of the group together, mostly for the first time in almost 40 years in reconstructing multiple works and phases from their oeuvre. The exhibition therefore included the reconstruction of three key works, Free Sessions (1974-81), Elements of Performance Art Workshops (1974-79) and GOING (1977). The latter two of which were used to introduce new constituents to the group’s work via transferal under the directorship of their originators. The live element in this exhibition commenced on the opening night with a ‘Free Session’ by The Theatre of Mistakes, their first in almost 40 years. Throughout the exhibition, Anthony Howell ran performance workshops every afternoon, while each Friday and Saturday evening there were performances of GOING (1977). The work GOING (1977) was reconstructed by six young performers and directed individually by multiple members of the Theatre of Mistakes who had previously produced and conceived of the work. In this way it tested the Theatre of Mistakes’ claims to possible reconstruction of their works and concepts beyond their own authorship. Thus aspects of the exhibition became active via the occupation of bodies in live work, able to be viewed by ‘publics’ in processual and inchoate forms and then towards conclusiveness over the exhibition’s duration. Key to the construction of these live works was the potential to investigate works that are produced via multiple - as opposed to diffused authorship - and therefore take into consideration multiple and conflicting perspectives from group members.
Fiona Templeton and Anthony Howell distilled the performance exercises into a publication, Elements of Performance Art (1976), arguably the first manifesto for performance art in the UK, which was republished on the occasion of the exhibition. A new publication was produced for the exhibition with the first significant chronology of the group’s work, the first chronology of GOING and an exhibition essay by Jason E. Bowman that was the first to pay attention to the interface of the group’s organisatonal practices as a form of art. | sv |
