Filmoteka Muzeum

Being and Doing, a visual essay created by Stuart Brisley in collaboration with the director Ken McMullen, is an attempt to present the artist’s own concept of performance art.

Stuart Brisley, an artist working at the intersection of manifold creative disciplines and a key figure in British art of the 1970s and 1980s, seeks an alternative perspective on the sources of performance art. Brisley attempts to show its connection with folk rituals in European culture, as opposed to the Modernist discourse of art history, which perceives performance art as an extension of the field of theatre. Seen from the proposed ethnographic point of view, performative activities, which tap into community affects and abolish the strict division between the artist and the viewer, offer a response to the sense of alienation of the individual in modern-day industrial societies.

Brisley approached perfomance art as a tool to unmask the obvious aspects of everyday life. He discerned in it a utopian potential for developing forms of social communication free from sanctioned conventions. Aside from presenting works by British artists, Brisley also features artists from the communist bloc, whose works – he believes – fully implement his postulates. In the 1970s, while holding a scholarship in Berlin, Brisley came to Poland following the traces of the director Józef Szajna. It was then that he discovered the Polish art scene and established collaboration with Galeria Studio.

Being and Doing is an early attempt to reflect on the question of film documentation of performance art pieces. Initially, in the 1970s, Brisley staunchly opposed recording such works on camera. He believed that the essence of performance art consists in the emotionality generated between the artist and the viewers, which is therefore ephemeral by principle. With time, he began to analyse performance art as something to be viewed: what is it from the viewer’s perspective? In Being and Doing, footage of performative activities is discussed in detail by a voiceover narrator. Its function is not merely illustrative, however, and the filmmakers wish to go beyond a purely chronicle-like record. Their goal is to convey the impressions that accompany the unmediated reception of a piece, to construct a filmic memory of an event. To this end, they tap into numerous film editing tools.

The film features performance footage from the following artists: Tibor Hajas (Hungary), Rasa Todosijevic (Yugoslavia), lain Robertson (Scotland), Zbigniew Warpechowski (Poland), Milan Knizak (Czechoslovakia), Natalia LL (Poland), Ewa Partum (Poland), Jan Micoch (Czechoslovakia), Sonia Knox (Northern Ireland), Jerzy Bereś (Poland), Stuart Brisley (England), The Haxey Hood (England), Padstow Hobbyhorse (England).

(MP)