Performance Art

Cy Twombly Wilder Shores of Love (Bassano in Teverina), 1985. Cy Twombly Collection © Cy Twombly.

As I recently wandered around the Cy Twombly retrospective, my eye was caught by a series of 24 drawings called Poems to the Sea. Executed on small squares of white paper whilst Twombly was staying in Sperlonga, a tiny fishing village perched on the coast between Rome and Naples, these works are at once drawings, poems, and, it seemed to me, musical scores. Numbers march at intervals across the surface of the drawings – you can almost imagine the artist beating in time as he put them down – ‘one, two, three, four – five.’ Horizon lines merge into stave lines. Splodges of plaster and accented pencil marks – whilst conjuring up waves and spray – become a score for their own performance.

The Theatre Of Possibilities, a concert held last week by the Almeida Ensemble directed by Richard Bernas, brilliantly complemented the drama and musicality of Twombly’s works. As Tom Service observed on the Guardian blog, this was no mere shoe-in to coincide with the exhibition. Instead, it opened up an illuminating perspective on Twombly’s performative mode of working, aptly summarised in Bernas’ programme notes by a quote from the New York critic Harold Rosenberg, made in 1952: “at a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act… what does on to the canvas was not a picture but an event.”

The importance of music for Twombly, and the extent to which it has influenced his painterly vocabulary, was clearly evidenced by the evening’s programme. It opened with a recording of Voile d’Orphee by Pierre Henry, a pioneer of electronic composition, which, with its complex textures and classical allusions, forms a musical correlative of Twombly’s painterly technique. Two songs by John Cage, who was with Twombly at Black Mountain College between 1951-52, followed; Experiences 2 and The Wonderful Widow of 18 Springs, which both transpose modernist texts (by e.e.cummings and James Joyce respectively) into unaccompanied folksong arrangements for the voice, whilst the evening ended with Monteverdi’s Combattimento, performed with relish and gusto by the Mezzo-Soprano Sally Burgess.

A particular highlight was John Cage’s Fourteen, an orchestral late work imaginatively staged at the Almeida (for what was, incidentally, its European premier) by Ellie Rees, with the musicians positioned between a fretwork of cables. As part of the piece, Bernas delicately threaded fishing wire into the bowels of a grand piano and slowly scraped it across the steel strings, to emit an almost continuous frail keening sound. The noise, according to him, is akin to ‘strangling a hamster’ – but at least you know the hamster dying a ‘slow but interesting death.’

The timings and tensions of Fourteen make for a listening experience during which you become intensely attuned to the moment of enactment. Twombly has said of his technique “each line is now the actual experience with its own history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realisation.” This sensation of realisation is apparent in Fourteen as it is in Poems to the Sea.


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A thing about things

Cornelia Parker is obsessed with things: old things no-one wants any more, things salvaged from the dump, things unearthed in pawnshops, fleamarkets and dingy antique shops, things tarnished with a thick patina of accumulated history – things that have the ability to ‘make the hair on the back of your neck stand up’ with their sense of presence and past.

Throughout her talk, the joyous and groundbreaking exhortation of the American Modernist poet William Carlos Williams – ‘say it: no ideas but in things’ – hummed through my mind. Parker may be working on the other side of the pond, decades later, and in a different medium, but like Williams she is attuned to and tremendously excited by the power that can be exerted by an old cup, a ring, some scrumpled up newspaper.


This, though, is to misrepresent Parker a little bit. When things are around her, they often don’t stay things in their pure state for long: she likes to tamper with them, add things to them, or insinuate them into places they shouldn’t really be. She enthuses about having bought a piece of the moon and lobbing it into a pond, and talks with a mischievous glint in her eyes about an attempt – vetoed by a combination of authorities – to smuggle a piece of Emily Bronte’s hair into that of Nelson’s on his column.

She seems to delight in visual – and verbal – tricks and puns of the kind that are at once entertainingly silly and gracefully eloquent. I am particularly taken by her account of a work that involved throwing a lead mould of the work ‘gravity’ over a cliff, to see what effect ‘the thing itself’ would have on the human linguistic representation of it. Unsurprisingly, it reduced it to a garbled lump. Williams might well have been cowed by such a violent coalescence of idea and thing.

Parker’s work gleefully inhabits the varied uses of the word ‘thing’: at once used to refer to the specific and physical (the very thing), together with the vague and indefinable (something). This duality gives her plenty of room with which to play, and stops her work from either becoming restricted to the purely physical or lost in the tortuously theoretical. Interestingly, she distances herself from the ‘conceptual’ label, saying that she thinks of herself ‘as an intuitive rather than a conceptual artist.’ This is also underlined by the fluidity of her approach to ‘things’, repeatedly describing their capacity to accrue meaning, to mutate and change.

Her attitude to her own work is, refreshingly, by no means an exception – ‘once you’re done with it, it has a life of its own’ – she enjoys the fact that objects and images can take on extra significance after their making. For Parker, we are surrounded by stuff, and she ‘likes the idea somehow that stuff stands in for us’, taking continued inspiration from the transference of histories, thoughts and emotions that results from our everyday interactions with the things around us.
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