Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019)
Q&A with Goshka Macuga

Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019) is a year-long programme of interviews, podcasts and contributions from some of the artists who participated in the twelve editions of the celebrated Evening of Performances. Highlighting the evenings’ extraordinary legacies, we will be exploring what the next wave of contemporary performance can become with the artists who have shaped it so far.

What is the first memory that springs to mind when thinking back to your performance at Evening of Performance 2016? 

The first memory I have of the evening itself is the size of the crowd surrounding the piece. It was a large audience and I was worried that it might be difficult for everyone to see the work, but ultimately this added another layer to the piece.

The space complemented the intensity of the experience, involving the interplay of music, props, the moving conveyor tables and dancers. The performers were used to working with an audience, so the presence of so many people did not create an obstacle for them. I probably would have felt intimidated by it, as I have always suffered from stage fright… perhaps this is what stopped me from pursuing a career in dance and pushed me into the intimacy of studio practice within a visual field.

Is there a performance that made you want to perform yourself?

There are various approaches to performance that fascinate me. I specifically chose to work with contemporary dancers for Evening of Performance in 2016 as I have a personal history with experimental dance from a very early age. 

I really enjoy the work of the Israeli choreographer Sharon Eyal and I recall being very inspired by her performance at Bold Tendencies (Love) in 2019. The work bore resemblance to dancefloor or club dancing which has always been ‘my kind of thing’.

What are you working on at the moment? 

I am working on several projects with very different tasks involved in each. Sadly, none of them are performance based. The outbreak of COVID-19 has drastically changed all our lives, regardless of profession or geographical position. No country in the world is free from this pandemic. We have all struggled with such a forced adjustment to new living/working conditions and the re-evaluation of our lives during such a challenging time.

What are some things we can do to make performance more sustainable and accessible?  

Paradoxically, our current situation is the perfect catalyst for creative transformation in arts, music, or disciplines of creative interaction –– especially for those who use an audience or environments where an exchange between artists and spectators take place. Marcel Duchamp called this exchange ‘transubstantiation’ and directly linked the use of ready-mades as art to a ritual usually practiced by priests in the Catholic Church. We need rituals in our lives, and making or seeing art can be considered as such. The dilemma is how to participate in such an exchange during this time of social distancing and self-isolation – something we have experienced so often recently.

Sustainability is another issue that relates more to the nature and format of performance. In some ways, one thinks that performance can be made of nothing, like a song, it’s free for all and is created in the intimacy of the artists’ space. The truth is vastly different. One often needs huge budgets, massive consumption of energy, space and — the most mundane of all — fulfilment of health and safety regulations (particularly in the UK). I really like to think of performance as a concept rather than logistically, however, sustainability is very much about logistics. Of course, conceptually, performance art can address issues of sustainability and use different means to support such a position, but ultimately, it’s an individual choice of how people approach this subject. I recently watched the Norton Lecture 4 by Laurie Anderson called The Road. She used a very simple format of monologue accompanied by some audio and video footage to talk about Humanity and Technology, and it worked incredibly well as a lecture, video and performance. It’s often the case that simple ideas can be far more effective than logistically complex works.

How has collaboration informed your practice? In what ways does collaboration in performance differ from your other collaborations?

Collaboration has been a large part of my practice, present in both my past and current projects. In the 90s, when I studied at Goldsmiths, art students were very involved in the management of their own scene, and many of us would do exhibitions in our homes and studios. An exhibition would involve a number of people, who would then invite more people onto the next chapter and then on to the next one. This is the model I followed in my first curatorial house shows. I was fascinated with how the context of a domestic environment reflected on the work, how the work fitted into it, how people produced ideas in relationship to each other, and how this culminated in a reading of the work collectively. I scrutinized all of this and then made the decision to commit to this as a strategy: dealing with the dynamics of a context; creating a context, using something else to influence the context that is provided.

By then I was making some pieces of my own art in a bigger environment, borrowing things such as artworks and objects — it was a large operation on a very small budget. This went on for quite a long time, and then I was invited to create these works in gallery spaces run by other artists; I did a show at the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow (Homeless Furniture, 2002), I went to Sweden to present Cave, (Kunstakuten, Stockholm, 2000), then I made work for Fundacja Galerii Foksal (Untitled, Warsaw, Poland, 2002). My practice wasn’t so much based on the British scene; I’d already started doing things abroad, which was pretty great for a young artist. From then on, the work became much more complicated.

I wasn’t only working with friends. I was also borrowing pieces from collections and doing research in different museums. The high point of this (and where I really became recognized as an artist) was the exhibition I did at A Foundation in Liverpool (Sleep of Ulro, 2006), where I pushed myself to explore how I could work as an artist — how I could develop my practice and exercise my working methodologies. Sleep of Ulro involved so many collaborations with other artists as well as relationships with numerous collectors and museums. This has been such an important element in my working practice — the development of these different relationships. The involvement of other people means that of course you end up doing things that you maybe wouldn’t have done by yourself. For example, I have collaborated with a theatre director on the production of an opera, and also worked with scientists on a work I presented in Bildsmuseet, Sweden.

Collaboration in its best form is about the chemistry you can have with another person, which materializes in the birth or creation of a new idea. Usually, the outcome is much greater when the expectation to produce a work at the end of the process is a choice rather than an obligation. Working with a composer, choreographers and dancers was an amazing experience for me. From our recollection of this process, both sides felt enriched and inspired.