A atlas of performance?
Thursday 19 of January
Aby Warburg, Gerard Richter and innumerable creators have shown how productive can the work with archival materials be. Now that internet constitutes the biggest archive in history we have the opportunity to re-organize the materials it offers us again and again on order to generate different unities of meaning.
The following list is inspired in the sheets of Atlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg. It is recommended to follow a lineal path from 1 to 11, but you can also play and create other combinations. In order to understand some connections it would be good to know that Viennese Actionism by Nitsch is freely inspired in bacchic rites; that “Neuer Wiener Bioaktionismus” reproduces some fragments of Nitsch’s pieces but uses beetroots and other vegetables instead of viscera and blood; that “Red not blue” is a feminist reply to Klein’s Anthropométries; that Keith Boadwee in turn offers a gay reply to Klein’s work; that in “Dyonisius in 69” there were men kissing on stage; and that Isadora Duncan took inspiration for the backwards movement of the head from the bacchants that she observed in the ceramics of the British Museum and the Louvre.
1 Death of Penteo at the hands of the bacchants
2 Hermann Nitsch “Das Orgyen Mysterien Theater”
3 Amanda Piña, Magdalena Chowaniec and Daniel Zimmermann “Neuer Wiener Bioaktionismus”
4 La fura dels Baus “Accions”
5 Yves Klein “Anthropométries”
6 Rachel Lachowicz “Red not blue”
7 Keith Boadwee “Untitled (Purple Squirt)”
8 “Dyonisius in 69” The Performance Group
9 Greek ceramics with dancing bacchants
11 Hibiscus by the Cockettes
Quim Pujol (1978) is writer and artist in the field of contemporary performing arts. he is also co-curator of La Estrategia Doméstica and of Sección Irregular.
