Double Exposures: Performance as Photography, Photography as Performance (Intellect Books - Intellect Live) - Hardcover

Vason, Manuel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783204095 ISBN 13: 9781783204090

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Synopsis

Double Exposures is a new collaborative venture between Manuel Vason and forty of the most visually arresting artists working with performance in the UK. Ten years after his first, groundbreaking book Exposures, Vason has produced another extraordinary body of work, which sets out new ways of bridging performance and photography. For Double Exposures, Vason has worked with two groups of artists, using two distinct types of collaboration, to produce a series of double images. Artists who had previously worked with Vason were invited to create two images, one of their own practice and another, where they took on the role of the photographer, shaping an image with Vason’s body. A second group of new collaborators were invited to create a performance, which could be captured in two photographs. All the images exist as doubles – pairs – diptychs.

About this title

About the Author

Manuel Vason’s artistic practice explores the relationship between photography and performance, presence and representation. He considers the capturing of a moment as an act of creation, as a ritual towards the illusion of immortality and as an exchange between who is in front and who is behind the camera. The collaborative nature of his practice shapes a unique hybrid art form and forms new vocabularies. His collaborations to date have become some of the most iconic images of performance, and his work has been published and presented internationally.

Vason was born in Padua, Italy in 1974. He discovered his interest in photography while working in a black and white professional darkroom. After having assisted some of the most celebrated fashion photographers of his generation in Milan, New York, Paris, London and Los Angeles, he decided to pursue a Masters degree in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins at University of the Arts in London. The focus of his research shifted from the body as subject into the relationship between photography and performance. In 2002 he presented two books: Exposures, a publication on the body in Live Art (Black Dog Publishing, 2002) and Oh Lover Boy, a two-year collaboration with artist Franko B (Black Dog Publishing, 2002). In 2007, Vason’s first solo exhibition Encounters was presented and accompanied by a 230 page catalogue (Arnolfini/Cornerhouse). Vason is continuously developing a practice integrating different mediums and collaborative methods.

Manuel Vason website: www.manuelvason.com 
Manuel Vason online archive of all his collaborations to date: www.artcollaboration.co.uk
Double Exposures project website: www.double-exposures.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Double Exposures

Performance as Photography Photography as Performance

By Manuel Vason, David Evans

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2015 the individual contributors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-409-0

Contents

INTRODUCTION DAVID EVANS, 7, 
DOUBLE EXPOSURES MANUEL VASON IN DIALOGUE WITH HELENA BLAKER, 11, 
MANUEL VASON - FRAMING LIVE ART LOIS KEIDAN, 17, 
PERFORMANCE, PHOTOGRAPHY, COLLABORATION, REVISITED: A HISTORY OF MANUEL VASON DOMINIC JOHNSON, 21, 
PAST - PRESENT - FUTURE ALICE MAUDE-ROXBY, 31, 
MERELY A STAIN IN THE PICTURE? CHRISTOPHER TOWNSEND, 35, 
DOUBLED UP: THE ART OF THE BODY DAVID BATE, 39, 
PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTUALISM: DOUBLE SENSE, DOUBLE FRACTURE, DOUBLE VIEW ADRIEN SINA, 42, 
THE LIFE-MAKING POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY JOANNA ZYLINSKA, 48, 
DOUBLE EXPOSURES, 52, 
REVERSING THE GAZE, 54, 
DOUBLE IMAGES, 96, 
PARTISTS' NOTES, 139, 
BEHIND THE SCENES, 151, 
BIOGRAPHIES, 165, 
100 EXPOSURES, 177, 
AFTER DOUBLE EXPOSURES, 192, 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, 195, 

CHAPTER 1

DOUBLE EXPOSURES: MANUEL VASON IN DIALOGUE WITH HELENA BLAKER

Helena Blaker: You have described Double Exposures as 'an opportunity [...] through dialogue and exchange to test some things out, to establish certain things that were not clear, and also to open up to a lot of different inputs.' What are you referring to? Is this about your system of collaboration or about the photographic image?

Manuel Vason: I felt the need to create images that were less 'photographic' and more 'critical'. I felt the aspiration to change my relationship with the medium. I felt the desire to sabotage my photography and my role as photographer. But I think a work is strong when there is a necessity behind it, and for me the necessity here was the struggle inherent in the meaning of the word 'collaboration'. I was 'collaborating' with artists prepared to take any sort of risk, to put in question their autobiographical material and subvert every convention; for years I was holding on to the fact that I was producing high quality images and fulfilling a role as skilful image-maker. Now 'collaboration' was about giving the control away, re-setting my expectations, exchanging rules and roles.

I felt I had to make a gesture against the canonical and I came up with the idea of splitting the image. This split has an incredible power of connecting, separating and generating a gap. So Double Exposures is an opportunity to propose the diptych as the most truthful way of representing performance ... the gap generates confusion and the forced comparison of the two images activates the viewer. Each interpretation is more personal and in constant discussion. The movement between the images subverts the fixity of its reading. The entire process feels closer to the live performance.

HB: It seems there is always a very clear structure to the work you make with your collaborators, and you can see this in how the artists were brought together for Double Exposures. It's an incredibly systematic approach, where artists you have worked with before suggest other artists for you to work with now on an exchange of gazes, and members of the community around you also suggest connections with other, younger artists. It is as if the connections within this area fan out in an organic field like a natural organism, which has its own integrity.

MV: That's beautiful, because I find this idea of the organism very appropriate. When I thought of the title Double Exposures, I thought of Actions of Exchange as a subtitle. I could push it further and say that all the images in this book are 'conversations'. All my best ideas come out of dialogue, they take shape only when I need to imagine or explain them, and dialogue helps me to force them out.

I think the agent behind this project is an idea of 'contamination'. I see contamination as a positive virus or as an intra-pollination between artists. I have used photography as an excuse to be in close contact with these incredible artists. These artists have contaminated my view and have influenced my ideas, my practice and my understanding of what art is. I share with them a real need to celebrate diversity and I live for the illusion of being able to contaminate the viewers through the work produced. This mutual contamination is building a real family. Where else would I find 40 artists prepared to put so much time and input into an experiment? This is a real gesture of exchange. Can you imagine 40 painters all working on the same canvas?

HB: So you are driven by a constant enquiry about methodology as well as being inspired by this community of artists. Could you talk me through some of your previous projects?

MV: It was really difficult to get accepted into the world of performance art with a camera around my neck. A few of the artists I worked with had been deceived by photographers who had used their images without permission, publishing them in the wrong context and making a profit selling prints. Many of the artists had a real issue against any form of documentation and conceptually they were embracing ephemerality in opposition to consumerism and mainstream gallery business, so it was not a choice to build a transparent methodology but a real obligation.

In Exposures (1999-2001) the methodology was driven by photographic instruments. I was using an 8" x 10" plate camera and Polaroid film, and the 19 collaborators, who were all live artists, were asked to perform their actions for the static camera in exchange for an immediate result. Through dialogue, we reached the photographic result and approved it with the minimum amount of attempts. The unprecedented collaborative nature of the process led me/us to split the copyright of the images produced.

In Oh Lover Boy! (2000-02) I worked with a single artist, Franko B, for two years to become more intimate with his work and discover different ways to interpret /translate/document the same work into photographic images. Then for Encounters (2003-07) I invited 52 artists whose work had had a big impact on me through their live performances to collaborate on producing a 'symbolic' image, a site-specific action for camera. In contrast to Exposures, these images in most cases represented actions never performed in front of a live audience, so Encounters was the only medium for accessing the work.

In Still Image Moving (2012) I collaborated with passersby in the streets of Bristol to transform a particular message into an action to be photographed and projected large onto key buildings in the city. In Still Movíl (2010-13) I collaborated with 45 choreographers in South America towards the creation of a photographic image that would stand as a piece of dance in its own right, or a photographic 'score'. During this project I was introduced to the concept of improvisation, and for the first time I was asked to use my body and perform under instruction.

HB: The body is central to your image-making. What is the body? What does the body mean to you?

MV: In the body I see the primal material that associates me with others. I have always been caught by the idea of identification – who you are, what you have been, what you want to be. It's like a drive. It's an engine of research. It can be internal, this research, and it can also be externalized and projected, but it is very much an expression of correspondence, of relationship.

So when I think of the body, automatically I think of a multiple body in constant transformation, and the research is really about trying to still it and analyse it. Because the moment it is captured by the camera you have the illusion of being able to determine a kind of analytical comprehension that is more difficult when it's overloaded with constant change and transitions and movement.

This idea of identification for me is basic, because you reach everybody. We all have this substance, this primal material. And the body also has a double aspect: the body as an emotional object, which triggers both rationality and irrationality, and at the same time the body as a container, which is huge, and it's full of chemistry. This goes beyond my personal research. I think the fascination of the body is inevitable.

HB: How does your technical expertise enable you to do the work you do with these artists?

MV: I don't think the images I generate now can be categorised as highly technical. I think photography has this 'duality': you can grow as a professional technician, or you can grow as a professional amateur. For example the photographic studio is a very controlled environment, where you can make sure everything is determined. As a photographic assistant I learned that I could generate 'the studio' in every situation, on location, with light, with whatever I could find or bring in, props, background. But this is really about commodifying the way you are looking at things: you always have two images in your mind, the existing one and the one you can create through the photographic lens. But I always thought that this technicality was about referencing, and about pre-arranging the image. So it has been an encounter with the pathos of allowing things to come to me, encouraging mistakes and playing with possibilities; that has allowed me to make the work I do now with these artists. Ultimately I wanted my images to become unpredictable.

HB: You have chosen this amazing subject matter that is as strong as you are; the subject matter of live performance by artists who are taking risks ... and of yourself as their witness.

MV: On the Double Exposures website I have written: 'I recognise myself in the other.' And I think that is such an important line for me. Because I do think those bodies, those actions do represent something I wanted to be associated with. Maybe it's something you don't have, that you need to develop, and the only way to develop it is to have it in proximity. So you have to find a way in which it is no longer strange territory and it becomes very familiar, and you become accepted in to the point where you are part of it, you are breathing the same air.

HB: What do you think live art is doing then, if you are now familiar with it? Is performance art an important field for you to represent? Or are there other things that you might research and analyse, that are as important to you?

MV: I don't know if it was fortuitous, that I was there at the right time, but I found in this field of enquiry a completely common ground. And when I am thinking of live art, I am thinking of all the work I have experienced and all the artists I have encountered and shared work with, all the talks, the books, and the theories, the discussions and the strategies. I believe this body of work is beyond definition, it is about behaviour. I think underneath we all want to transform the world and we want to take care of each other.

HB: I'd like to go back to your saying that technically you can make the outside world a studio. When you started to work with live artists I wondered what it was that you thought the image could be.

MV: I always had the presumption that the image was a space, a sort of parallel space. Photography allows me and the artists I collaborate with to connect to that space and elongate its temporality. So I suggest thinking of the studio as a laboratory or a device.

HB: I want to know if you had an agenda. What did you want the image to be, in that early period of Exposures and Encounters, when you thought the image could be something?

MV: What I really wanted to achieve was to reach an image of veneration.

HB: That's fantastic. For them? Or for it, for what they were doing?

MV: For what they were doing. I wanted those images to become the testimony of my respect. I wanted those images to function as a meeting point between the artists and their legitimate public. I think my Catholic upbringing had a major influence on the way I was framing those actions, and giving them light. I used a low point of view, altars, pedestals and physical suspension. I wanted those live actions to become iconographical. It was not enough to present them. I really wanted to gain immortality for these images and these artists.

HB: There is a wonderful set of dialogues in Double Exposures. You seem to find a way of attuning yourself to what is important to each different artist.

MV: Well flexibility is really something you need to embrace. But any relationship goes by the rules. You need to establish what can be changed or compromised and what can't. And I think it's very beautiful when you're working in collaboration and relationship because it's sculptural. You say 'This can go! This can go! This can go!' and what doesn't go is the work. I think that's a great system for defining the core of your practice. And it's about learning how to show your teeth, how to defend your property as well.

HB: I must say that I like having the two images together, because it's like language. Language works by ... close distinctions between similarity and difference.

MV: We are also used to looking at images in a certain way. You know, you open the pages of a magazine and you see two images alongside each other, and we are not bothered by the fact that there are two distinct images – but we are confused when we call it one image. I have constantly asked myself why we have two eyes when you can actually live a decent life with just one. I think the double is something that exists within ourselves, and we are preoccupied by it. We learn by confronting something or someone else and we need two viewpoints to make one. I'm not sure if this unity is our invention but I have the feeling fragmentation and uncertainty are more human. While I was working on Double Exposures I saw the diptych as an apparatus of sensitivity and most of all a reaction to the arrogance of the single image.

HB: It seems you're reflecting a community and a passionate artistry, and contributing to the visibility of this work, but you're not trying to create an overview or a historical record.

MV: I do believe in the community and in part this project is about strengthening us as a group of artists. But I simply want to present this work with a fresh view. I am a big fan of collective actions, like in my workshops. I like to lead and participate in workshops, and I'm really excited about this now as an art form. I call it 'Becoming an Image': initially the actions are provoked by instructions and they function as exercises to generate intimacy and build a sense of trust within the group; and then the group becomes an organism that generates collective actions to be transformed into images. But I'm not exploring this with the purpose of making documents; I'm exploring image-making as behaviour. The fact that we have a camera in front of us means that we can strip naked in Trafalgar Square and we're not going to get arrested. We are 'allowed' to infringe the law ... and we have a passport to creativity. We want to raise the flag of diversity.

HB: Images of actions can be very powerful, and we are talking about the power of image-making as well as the power of the image. But I'm talking history and you're talking now. For you it's about human activity, it's about living in the world.

MV: The area of 'image' alone, as a concept, is too big for me. 'Image' is huge. I do have a very specific idea of 'image', which is an action image – there is always a body in relationship to a specific action. The action is the trigger for the message or an interpretation, so it becomes behaviour; it's not a document any more. And the document for me is in any case in flux. But the point is that it may trigger a new form of behaviour in other people.

HB: That's why I am so affected by images of live art from the 1960s and 70s – VALIE EXPORT, Gina Pane ... in fact I need those images.

MV: That's power, you know. And it beats any form of oppression, of containment, of homogeneity. Come on. VALIE EXPORT holding a rifle in front of that bloody cinema – that was raising a punch and suddenly finding the motivation to do things. And this is what I think a lot of the artwork is about. Even if you don't say it, nevertheless the work is political.

HB: The title Double Exposures reminds us that the vibration between things that are dissimilar but brought together is incredibly important. Because that's where meaning lies. The title Double Exposures is so good, because we know that it's about photography, but we know at the same time that it's about something else – about exposure on another human level. We know it's about both things and each thing at the same time.

MV: It's about being a receiver. It's active and passive: this idea of the gap and the indefinite, and the constant switch, the split image, the connection and separation, the cyclic correspondence. That for me is the engine of the work.

CHAPTER 2

MANUEL VASON – FRAMING LIVE ART

LOIS KEIDAN

Manuel Vason's Exposures was the first book published by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), produced in partnership with Black Dog Publishing in 2002. Looking back, the significance of that book, to both LADA and the Live Art sector more widely, cannot be overestimated – it was a catalytic moment for LADA's work in publishing and, more significantly, for wider awareness of what Live Art was, and the new forms in which it could be represented, in the twenty-first century.

Exposures began as an experiment in performance photography by Manuel – a series of collaborations for the camera that might somehow suggest another way of looking at an artist's practice. But the extraordinary images he created with a group of radical artists working with their bodies as fiercely politicized sites, demanded to be made into a book – to appear on the printed page, and be seen by audiences who might never experience such work in situ (for all kinds of reasons at the time). Exposures not only brought challenging artists and ideas out from the margins and into wider public discourse, but did so in a way that asked us to reconsider questions of documentation and representation, as well as the nature of Live Art itself. For LADA, Exposures opened up a new set of possibilities for what this area of practice could be.

Since, and to a large extent because of Exposures, LADA has developed its own publishing policy, producing over 50 artists' books, DVDs and Editions in partnership with major publishing houses, artists, and independent organisations. Indeed, LADA are co-publishers, with Intellect Books, of Double Exposures. And we are not alone. In recent years, aided and abetted by massive advances in technology and heightened public appetite, there has been an explosion of interest in Live Art documenting, writing, archiving, and publishing.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Double Exposures by Manuel Vason, David Evans. Copyright © 2015 the individual contributors. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783204095
• ISBN 13: 9781783204090
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200