Episode 2: LIVE ART CLICHES
(AND HOW TO AVOID THEM)
[INTRODUCTION]
The best thing about live art, or performance art, or whatever you choose to call it, is also the worst thing about live art, performance art, or whatever you choose to call it.
There’s no barrier to entry.
All you need is a body and a mind.
You don’t need props, or venues, or fancy lighting.
You just need an idea and the will to do it.
Sometimes you don’t even need an audience.
And that’s great. It is what makes it so vibrant, so polyphonic and multi-demensional. It’s pure, distilled punk ethic art.
That’s what makes it my favourite form.
However, that lack of a barrier means that there is also an absolute torrent of terrible live art.
Most of you have probably sat through some. Some of you will have sat through an awful lot.
What I’ve tried to do here is condense down some of the common traps that unwitting artists plummet into when making. It is not done to shame anyone, rather to act as a soft guide, because the more good live art the better, right?
And so I won’t be naming names or citing specific examples of what I think are good and bad pieces. Please feel free to insert your own memories where they feel comfortable.
Cliches are cliches for a reason. Usually that they belong to a category of idea that is so resonant with a form that it is the first thing we go for. That doesn’t necessarily make them bad, rather it means that we need to use them carefully, thoughtfully. By understanding them, their causes and effects, you’ll be able to wield them with judicial power.
Again, remember that this is for the love of the form. If you find yourself wincing at some of them, perhaps because they cut a little close to the bone, feel comforted in knowing that self awareness is the mark of a good artist.
All art is a conversation. It is a way of communicating. It is a way of listening.
[#1 DIY DOESN’T MEAN SHIT]
I think we can all agree that you think what you are doing is important. That what you are trying to say with your work is worth listening to.
It is necessary and probably quite urgent.
This is the reason why you have to think about how it is delivered.
Presentation.
The medium may be the message, but the set design and costume are the surface you are painting it on.
There’s a misconception about DIY and the aesthetic that accompanies it. Essentially, that it should look like it was made in five minutes out of whatever happened to be in the closest bin.
Now, it can be that. That’s valid. If those are the parameters you have to work in… a tight time scale with no resources.
However, you are trying to communicate here, and the aesthetics need to work with the message. Consider how the work looks and how that either helps or hinders what you are trying to say.
There was a period in the 2010s when an awful lot of live art was sporting this cardboard aesthetic that made everything look like a slightly more serious episode of the Mighty Boosh. Again, that’s fine, but if you can’t explain why how you look is related to what you are trying to communicate, I’d suggest you spend some more time thinking about this.
Similarly, there’s a tendency when making art about the environment to go straight for plastic bottles as set dressing and costume. It’s a good call, to use the materials of the argument, but be aware that this is very much a cliche and without care and attention you’ll end up looking like Marjory the Trash Heap from Fraggle rock.
You don’t want how you look to distract from what you are trying to communicate.
Live Art is often a DIY pursuit. It is often made with no money or support, but that doesn’t mean it has to look like it. Be inventive, but be as precise and articulate as you can when designing the aesthetics of your work. The action is important, and you should treat it as such by making sure it is presented in the best possible way.
[#2755 NAKEDNESS]
There is something particularly striking about a naked human in front of an audience. It is often a series of repeated inversions of power and vulnerability.
A figure may be naked as a way of confrontation. Or a symbol of honesty.
It is the most human you can be.
A naked figure demonstrates the mechanics of the human body. The muscles and sinews, the scars and marks.
You want to see the dignity of the human body? Try brushing your teeth vigorously and naked in front of a bathroom mirror.
A naked human can also be funny.
There are a million reasons why a live artist would perform naked, and all of them are worthwhile. However, the number one reason you will see performers naked on stage is because they are doing it for themselves. That is, it is a right of passage for live artists to appear naked and as such they tend to crowbar it into performances that don’t really need it. Furthermore, it can often distract from what they are trying to communicate.
There’s also a use of nakedness by artists that want to shock their audience with the notion of nakedness. This too is a common cliche by early career artists. The truth is that everyone has a naked body, and people aren’t as shocked as you’d expect.
[#26 WORD MECHANIC]
The word ‘Silence’ looks a bit like ‘Science’, therefore science is about silence, it is about repressing sound and voices.
There. That’s word mechanicing. The act of making up dodgy pseudo-etymology and creating red-string links between ideas based on very flimsy notions of linguistic proximity.
Another one would be to take a word or theme, say, ‘Sea’ and then use it as an acrostic in your work.
Does anyone really enjoy an acrostic?
Often, word mechanicing is an attempt to create meaning where none exists or to crowbar ideas the artist already has about the world into a different subject. It presents as smart wordplay, but is ultimately fabricated whimsy.
Similarly, taking a word and pretending it means something it doesn’t.
Whilst this can be mostly harmless, great care has to be taken when getting that word wrench out. Word mechanicing is the realm of conspiracy theorists and purveyors of fake news. It can often complicate conversations and discussions around very serious themes and issues.
It isn’t poetry either.
If you are going to create a live art performance around words you need to know what they mean to people other than yourself, and remember that words have power before you treat them flippantly.
If you want to communicate with your audience, rather than starting by redefining words, maybe use a common language.
[#29 IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU]
It all began when I was born…
We all have an ego.
I will need you to justify what, exactly, is interesting about you, specifically, to demand that an audience sit there and watch you talk about yourself for an hour.
You may think that you are relating to your audience, but you’ve made it about you, not them.
Again, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have something to say, based on your own life experiences, but if it can be said over a coffee, at a table, then pick that method of presentation.
Perhaps find a way of letting your audience in. Maybe make it about *all* of you. Right there in that space. It is about ‘us’, not ‘me’.
Try not to make the climate crisis about you, for example. Don’t insert yourself into other people’s stories just so that you can talk about yourself.
Good art takes something that is very specific and is able to open it up to make it general.
Bad art takes something general and somehow makes it about the artist.
[#34 SITE SPECIFIC]
You probably heard the term ‘site specific’ in your first year of performance studies. The notion that certain acts respond to particular locations.
Site specific work can be wonderful. It is a response to an environment. It is a geographical, and chronological narrative. It co-opts terrain into art.
However, if you are just doing it somewhere because that place, whether it is a disused factory, a popular landmark, then you are not so much making site specific work as you are using it as a nice backdrop.
It’s a common mistake to describe work as site specific just because it is being performed in a particular space. An easy test is to imagine the work in a different location. If you can, it isn’t site specific.
[#142 DURATION AS THE POINT]
Durational performance is just a performance that is determined by a specific duration.
It doesn’t necessarily mean it has to go on for a long time. An act that only lasts exactly two minutes, and is defined as that, is durational.
I mean, technically everything that exists in time is durational.
However, there is a fetishisation of work that lasts a long time. The time itself is seen as heroic.
The interesting thing is that in the world of performance art, anything longer than a traditional play is seen as being a long time.
If you do something for four hours and describe it as durational, you can expect to be applauded for your commitment to art. The physical stresses that must have occurred, and the emotional resilience that you have demonstrated by sticking with it for all that time.
The rewards are such that a cliche has arisen where artists pick an arbitrary amount of time to perform for and describe the work as ‘durational’. There is often no need for the work to last as long, and no dependency upon it doing so.
Sometimes you will witness an artist dragging out a performance just to make it last longer.
The thing that really makes all of this a cliche though is that it is likely someone in your audience has recently put in an eight hour shift at work.
So when you finish after four hours, expecting an applause for your heroics, perhaps consider that no one stands outside Primark giving every worker a much deserved cheer when they leave work.
[#156 REPETITION]
If you do the same thing more than once, is it the same thing?
It isn’t.
Context is everything, and the context of having done something once before changes it. The context of having done it many times before changes everything.
This is a cliche though. A simple act repeated can be seen in many works. Sometimes it is the accumulation of that act that creates interest, other times it is simply a device for stretching out a performance for the sake of a festival slot or to make the cost of travel worth it.
Sometimes, live art is like a magic trick too. Repeatedly doing it in front of the same audience is not advisable as not only does the act begin to lose potency on each repetition, but with each repeat you also diminish the potency of the first.
[#157 REPETITION]
No, this isn’t a demonstration of repetition. It’s about cheap jokes. If you want people to take work seriously, avoid them.
[#128 SMASHY SMASHY]
Building something is always going to be harder than destroying something.
Sometimes you have rage. Sometimes you want to demonstrate rage. Sometimes you want loud music and violence against inanimate objects that you have curated and brought specially to a place to obliterate it in front of an audience.
Anything you can imagine smashing, I can almost guarantee another artist has smashed it before you.
The art of unmaking an object is old.
Furthermore, smashing things you don’t care about… radios you’ve bought from a charity shop… old crockery that people have donated specifically for the performance… that sort of thing… reduces the act down to the simple mechanics of making a mess.
[#739 BUZZWORD BINGO]
You know your work is important and you want the rest of the world to know it.
You have about 100 words of blurb to describe it.
Do you try to succinctly and honestly relay the work as accurately as possible, or do you cram in as many art buzzwords as possible to make yourself feel legitimate.
Are you *interrogating* something?
Is it *liminal*?
Does it explore *ecologies*?
These words are so cliche that they are rendered meaningless.
Almost meaningless.
They still convey the art world equivalent of corporate speak and jargon.
If you are hoping to attract an audience, or create a conversation, you are off to a terrible start by using identikit words.
[#1274 NEW TO ME]
This is a particularly common cliche and a terrible pitfall.
You have discovered something that resonates with you. It has sparked a thousand ideas and million possibilities.
It may be a new technique. A story you have heard. An object.
You launch into making work about it, you have to tell the world about what you have discovered. You have the fervour of a convert.
Except…
Just because it is new to you doesn’t mean it is new to everyone.
There will likely already be a load of people very interested and possibly much more knowledgeable about the thing you have ‘discovered’ that they have known about for a long time.
This is particularly common with artists visiting somewhere for the first time. I can’t list the number of times artists would arrive in my hometown to tell me about the witches we used to have there. The same ones that we all grew up hearing about, that we went on school trips for, that some of us are actually related to.
They will talk at length about how we need to know these unheard stories. The ones that we’ve heard in much greater detail a thousand times before.
The artist assumes the role of expert.
Furthermore, the artist has somehow managed to make it about themselves too. How really, our witch trials are actually about how they felt at secondary school. That really happened.
What is really happening here is appropriation. It is taking the story from the mouths of the people who’s story it is. It is a form of narrative colonisation. It is taking ownership of things that don’t belong to you.
Don’t do this.
Repeat this mantra, “just because it is new to me, doesn’t mean that it is new to everyone”.
[#1535 IN JOKES]
You are graduating. Congratulations!
It’s been a few years of fun and hard work, and now you are going to top it off with your degree show.
The audience is a mixture of your peers and a bunch of older looking people that you don’t really know. They seem a little artsy. They are here to see you. How exciting is that?
In reality they are probably other artists, people who work in the arts, reviewers, producers, programmers. They are here because student work can be the best place to find new and exciting work.
Your performance seems to be going well. Your peers are hysterical. You look out over the audience but the older folk don’t seem to be enjoying it quite as much. You wonder why.
I’m willing to bet that you’ve loaded it with a bunch of in-jokes for your classmates. References to the daft things that have happened to you all over the last few years. Hints at stories, nicknames. You have a Pringles can at the side of the stage, clearly visible but never explained. Your pals think this is hilarious.
Context is everything. And whilst playing to the home team might make you feel good, you’ve managed to alienate a large chunk of your audience.
In a year's time you probably won’t be performing in front of your friends. Your audience will be mostly strangers, and the tropes you leaned on tonight will be completely ineffective.
[#1735 SET DRESSING FOR A PARTY]
Live art is exciting. It is exciting to make and exciting to watch.
Mostly.
It is also rather flexible when it comes to staging. Many festivals and arts organisations leverage this to place artists in non-traditional spaces. Empty shop fronts, village halls, wandering the streets.
One context that has become a cliche though is the party.
There’s music going on, the alcohol is flowing well. You have been placed in a corner to do that weird thing you do and people walk past treating you like a sideshow geek.
A gig is a gig, right?
You are set dressing for someone else’s party.
An aside.
Your work has value. That's why you are doing it. You want to tell the world something. How will you be heard over this din?
[#142357 TAPE ACROSS THE MOUTH]
A simple act used to signify being silenced.
You tape your mouth shut. A big line of black gaffa right across the mush.
This is as much a protest as it is a performance.
Except, semantically.
Who, exactly, has silenced you here?
You.
You have silenced yourself.
You put the tape there.
You have a platform to talk and communicate and you have chosen not to.
When right-wing grifters such as Katy Hopkins are using the same methodology as you are, you need to ask yourself if there is a better way to perform.
[#95 LYING DOWN]
Have you looked at photographs from live art festivals? I strongly suggest you do. It will tell you about the sort of aesthetics and work being made and shown.
It will also show you at least one artist lying down somewhere.
The inert body in a space.
The body as landscape.
The body as sculpture.
Lying down has a long tradition. It is also a massive live art cliche and a stand-in for when an artist wants to do something but doesn’t know what to do.
The reason this is a cliche is that, as an act, it is performed extensively. You will need to explain why doing it is vital or necessary.
You’ll also notice it occurs in protest contexts. More recently, Extinction Rebellion have utilised this as a form of performance sit in.
The most cliched (if something can be called such a thing) version of this act is pretending to be dead. Generally, pretending to do anything is not great practice within live art as it comes perilously close to acting.
Besides, we can still see you breathing.
[#445 FACE COVERING]
When we communicate, the face is often the centre of our focus. We use it to read emotion, to intimate intention, or to simply lip read.
Eye contact is one of the most intimate forms of animal communication, and fluctuates between attraction and predation.
The face is important, is what I’m saying.
And so is the absence of face. A body without a face is a blank canvas. It is the absence of identity. It is blindness.
It is a potent symbol.
It is also a very common live art cliche, and one which sometimes leaves an audience with a feeling that the performer is merely hiding their shame.
[#445 ADDITIONAL: FACE COVERING AND LYING DOWN]
What if there was a form of live art performance that was both easy and anonymous?
Try lying down somewhere with your face covered and join the ranks of thousands of artists that have tried this world wide.
You can choose the material, from lace to plastic, depending on the aesthetic considerations of the point you are not really making.
[#43 NEON WORDS]
The middle of the road, please everyone, refuge of the inspirationally bankrupt.
If you are unsure what action to take, place some bon mot on the side of a building and make them appear in neon.
Everyone likes that.
There’s nothing better than having to trudge home from work every day, stuck in a routine of poverty and uncertainty just in order to read the words, “If you can dream it you must do it” shining out over the rain-soaked pavement.
Strangely, this seems to be the cliche that live artists fall for whenever they get the urge to make public visual art.
If you do decide to add a slogan to a space, remember that your audience is probably unwilling and that they will have to read your work long after you have moved onto the next gig where you are ‘currently interested’ in something else and you have it tied to a chair as you ‘interrogate’ it.
[#23465 MY WHOLE LIFE IS A PERFORMANCE]
Gilbert and George are cunts. Actually, George is a cunt and Gilbert is a shit, at least according to the title of their 1970 work in the National Galleries of Scotland.
I wouldn’t be so harsh, but they have fostered a common cliche in the live arts.
That cliche is artists claiming that their whole life is art.
They say:
“Art and life became one, and we were the messengers of a new vision. At that moment that we decided we are art and life, every conversation with people became art, and still is.”
And that’s valid too. It’s an interesting way of looking at the world. That really every human act is an act of performance and that we are never ‘real’ except when we are on our own.
It becomes a true cliche though when artists are unable to separate out being an ‘artist’ with being a ‘human’ and as such demand special consideration or attention for the very act of existing.
Or worse, they use the label of ‘artist’ to commit awful acts of bad behaviour that they then attribute to ‘art’ as an excuse.
Art may be a reason. It may be the point. But art is not an excuse for anything.
[#135 EGGS]
Maybe this is going to become less of a cliche as the cost of living crisis continues.
Eggs are a great source of protein and they are absolutely packed with meaning.
Fragility, motherhood, life.
The combination of this meaning and their relative abundance, plus their ability to dramatically transform from a simple oval into a messy goop of colour and slime, has led to eggs being a staple of live art.
Trying to describe the ways in which eggs are used in performance reads like an advert for silly putty. Throw them, smash them, cradle them, balance them.
Maybe this is a good point to mention that novelty is sometimes overrated. Not everything you do has to be unique. However, if you do find a new use, or a new context, for eggs in live art performance, you’ll be an exceptional human.
[#13 SAME BUT WORSE]
Whether it is through ignorance or hubris, performing work that is very similar to another artist rarely leads to a decent outcome and almost never leads to work that is better than the original.
I’ve sat through an awful lot of young artists acting as Marina Abramovic cover bands.
…What’s that you have on your table? Is it? Really? Couldn’t get a gun though? I suppose so...
Often this cliche exists because an artist has found something they are very interested in, and rather than respond to that in their own voice, they’ve ended up mimicking someone else.
This is absolutely fine in private, or in the rehearsal room, as you seek to understand a work, or even to experience it, but it falls down when presenting it to the public as your own work.
In the worst instances, I’ve seen students perform work that is an almost carbon copy of the guest lecturers that have taught them. I’m even aware of one instance where legal advice was sought.
To avoid this cliche you have to find your own voice and your own agency.
[#887 PERFORMING EXHAUSTION]
This probably belongs under a greater heading of ‘performing rather than doing’, but it warrants a special mention because of how frequently it occurs.
You want your audience to feel what you feel. You want your audience to see your work as the Herculean task that it is. You are tired, it is hard.
So you lay it on a bit thick.
A little heavier in the breathing, a wipe of a not-that-damp brow.
You are performing exhaustion.
If you have the energy to perform being exhausted you are not exhausted.
[#889 ASSUMING MATERIALS]
This, like performing exhaustion, belongs under the ‘performing rather than doing’ heading, but has a different root cause.
The cause of this cliche is a fundamental misunderstanding of the materials being used.
I have seen a performer pick up a VHS cassette and unspool the tape. They then lifted it to the light and peered through it, scanning for the images.
They described it as celluloid.
The thing is, VHS cassette tape is made of Mylar, not celluloid. The image does not exist as single frames that can be seen like a film strip. Instead it is encoded magnetically as a spiral.
Even if you had magic glasses that meant you could read the magnetic encoding, you would have to pull the tape past your eyes at a rather rapid speed to make any sense of it at all.
I’m pretty sure that anyone who has encountered video tape knows that you can’t just see the images.
This is a cliche about lazy assumption about materials and the use of tropes in performance. If you were doing rather than performing, you would innately understand that this was nonsense. Instead, you are in a world of make believe that really only exists for the person on the stage.
And if you find yourself using something in a performance, something you have deemed vital and important to your work, perhaps give it a cursory look on wikipedia first before making yourself sound daft.
[#88 SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF EVERYONE]
“I am a Northerner, which means when I am on stage I speak for all Northerners.”
“I once met a working class person and they said this, which means all working class people think that.”
See how silly this sounds? Then why do people keep doing it on stage, in front of an audience?
If I’m being kind, I suspect it comes from having to engage in the rhetoric around funding applications that encourage people to talk in such grandiose terms. With long tracts about presumptive engagement and representation which, ultimately, are all supposition and gross generalisation.
Understand that the only person you ever really speak for on stage is yourself and that whilst it is fine to talk about how other people act and think, unless they have specifically asked you to represent them, you are, at best, self elected.
[#724 ALL FIREWORKS ALL THE TIME]
Everyone loves spectacle.
There’s a real pressure to entertain in the arts. Again, this might come from a notion of engagement or somehow feeling that the more people you please the more valid your art is.
It’s a corrosive mindset that betrays how easy it is to replace deep and thoughtful practice with novelty and entertainment.
In Boston, they have a contemporary art magazine called, ‘Big Red and Shiny’ which is a sort of joke about this too.
‘If you can’t make it good, make it big. If it doesn’t look good big, make it red. If you want it to sell, make it shiny.’
Have faith in what you are doing. If you find it important, the chances are someone else will too.
You don’t have to stick sparklers in it.
[#01001010 TECH SHOW]
Technology is pervasive. Our lives are a rapidly spinning spiral of new devices and new ways of interacting.
It provides us with new ways of communicating and new ways of making art.
I once watched Andy Warhol paint Debbie Harry on an Amiga. Groundbreaking stuff.
But there’s a trap. A cliche that hides in the wings.
It is so very easy to go from making a piece of work about a technology to merely demonstrating that technology.
You are no longer making live art. You are a tech show.
More recently this has happened with social media-based work, and before that it was projection mapping.
They are exciting at the time because the tech is new. But as people get used to it, their interest in the art dwindles because there isn’t the content to back it up.
Integration is the key. If the show can’t stand on its own without the tech, it is usually a sign that it is solely about it.
[#867 LABCOATING]
This is the deliberate, or less deliberate, use of scientific facts and procedures to support vague artistic notions.
I’ll give you an example.
I was once in a lecture by an artist that had used plants in their work. They said, out loud, to a room containing at least three biologists and two chemists, “scientists still do not fully understand photosynthesis” before continuing to talk about why they thought they had a better idea.
That’s technically true. Scientists don’t know everything about anything at all. That’s why we still have scientists. However, the artist was presenting this notion so that they could further their own theory. They had put on the lab coat of science.
The notion that artists have some special understanding of the world that scientists can’t understand is a terrible cliche.
Another example that is more common in live art is describing work earnestly as an experiment, or using lab equipment to add validity to what the artist is imagining.
You will also see famous scientific experiments that might be exciting (usually because they produce smoke or fire or loud explosions) being presented as some sort of artistic demonstration.
Or worse, presented as magic.
[#7627 LECTURING]
People are here to see a work of art. Don’t lecture your audience unless that is specifically what you have told them you are going to do.
By that I mean, feel free to educate and entertain, but don’t gather a group of people there only to spend an hour telling them off like school children.
If you are going to do this, at least print certificates to hand out afterwards.
[#16749 HYPOCRISY]
Of all the cliches, this one is perhaps the most cliched.
The artist as the hypocrite.
Flying halfway around the world to festivals and shows and then going straight on facebook to promote a new work about the environment.
The excuses are just as bad.
“I took that money from that awful political group that is clearly harming the very people I work alongside because I wanted to do some good with it”
It’s always desperately disappointing when an artist you like slips into this cliche because, unlike the rest of them, this one is about the artist and not their work. Once they cross this threshold it is very difficult for them to come back.
[#665 (AW)FULL//TITLES_HAUS]
Vagueness, puns, punctuation.
My particular favourite is the use of brackets in titles.
(IN)SOLVENT
Although a well placed forward slash does wonders.
OUT/SIDE
Failing that a popular tactic is just to take two words and mush them together to create a brand new compound.
ARTJOLLY
In case of a cliche emergency, you are also permitted to use German to make things sound legit. May I suggest adding ‘haus’ to the end of absolutely anything in order to create a live art cliche title.
[#42 OVERSELLING]
Your art is worthwhile, I promise you.
It won’t cure cancer or cause world peace to break out.
Furthermore, the chances are you have no idea about the impact it is going to have on anyone. To presume so might be taken as arrogant.
The best you can hope for is that you make something you are proud of and that maybe other people will enjoy.
Again, partially to do with the way we have to sell work to funders and potential programmers, there’s a possibility of the oversell.
You detail the massive audiences it will bring in. You spin yarns of engagement and representation. You narrate the many ways in which it is pushing the form to dizzying new heights.
Just avoid the cliche of overselling to the audience. They won’t thank you for it, and often they will let you know. Keep it in the funding applications and out of the promotional materials.
Trust your work.
[#14 NOT SEEING OTHER WORK]
The more observant will have picked up on my tendency to liken art to a conversation.
It is a conversation with your audience, for sure, but it is also a conversation with every other artist that has ever existed and made.
It is a grand narrative. It is a discussion about humanity.
But here’s the thing.
How can you effectively take part in a conversation if you don’t listen?
If you love the form so much that you want to take part in it, you should be grabbing every opportunity to see other peoples work too.
This isn’t about them or their ego. This is about you.
You want to sharpen your tools? You want to make your work as good as can be?
Go and see work.
You want to make sure there are venues and platforms for you to show your work for years to come?
Go and see work.
You want to be part of a community that supports you and helps you make?
Go and see work.
You want to avoid making live art riddled with cliches?
Go.
And.
See.
Work.
Almost every single cliche listed here can easily be avoided by going to see other work, making yourself familiar with the conversation.
Listen to what is being said and how it is being said.
You will see things you love.
You will see things you do not love.
Learning to articulate why that is will make you a better artist.
It may even stop you from turning into a cliche.
[POST CREDIT CLICHE]
Stay tuned for the next episode of Modernist Punk, where we return with…
TWO VOIDS
