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Denaturalizing Time: On Kris Verdonck's Performative Installation End

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2014

KATIA ARFARA
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Abstract

Originating from the avant-garde's attempt to supplant the structural limitations of perspective which ‘bound the spectator to a single point of view’, installation art emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s as a critique of the pure, self-referential work of art. Belgian artist Kris Verdonck integrates that modernist debate into his hybrid practice of performative installation. Trained in visual arts, architecture and theatre, Verdonck uses sophisticated technological devices in order to blur binary distinctions such as time- and space-art, inanimate and animate figures, and immateriality and materiality. This study focuses on End (Brussels 2008), which shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes. I analyse End as an echo of the Futurists’ performance tactics, which prefigured a broadening of the formal aesthetic boundaries of performance art under the major influence of Henri Bergson's theory of time.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 47 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 See Bishop, Claire, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), p. 81Google Scholar.

2 The term ‘installation’ was transferred in 1967 from its use in the field of household technology to the art field. It was at this time that Dan Flavin referred to his neon light works as ‘installations’, rejecting the term ‘environment’ because it was too sociologizing. See Nollert, Angelika, Performative Installation (Cologne: Snoeck Verlagsgeselshaft, 2003), p. 11Google Scholar.

3 On the presentness of the modernist work of art see American art historian and critic Fried, Michael's famous essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum, 5, 10 (June 1967), pp. 12–23Google Scholar. Fried appropriated the term ‘theatricality’ to explain the condition brought about by the hybridization of genres. More specifically, he characterized the theatrical in terms of a particular relation between the beholder as subject and the work as object, a situation that takes place in time as it implies a continuing attention on the part of the viewer.

4 On Verdonck's broadened notion of choreography, which assigns a central performative role to non-human elements, see Laermans, Rudi, ‘Impure Gestures towards “Choreography in General”: Re/Presenting Flemish Contemporary Dance, 1982–2010’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 20, 4 (2010), pp. 414–15Google Scholar.

5 On the audience's ‘disturbed’ and ‘displaced’ perception of the installation see Vanhoutte, Kurt, ‘Two-Fold Origin: Performing Hybrids between Theatre and Media’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 20, 4 (2010), pp. 475–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a complete overview of Kris Verdonck's projects refer to A Two Dogs Company's website, available at www.atwodogscompany.org

6 In his latest project – inspired by the apocalyptic science fiction novels of J. G. Ballard and presented in September 2013 at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York – Verdonck extends the principle of filmic projections in containers by demonstrating innovative stereoscopic techniques (three-dimensional) in microscopic sets built on the theatre stage.

7 Nollert, Performative Installation, p. 13.

8 Ibid., p. 9.

9 Berghaus, Günter, ‘The Futurist Body on Stage’, in Roelens, Nathalie and Strauven, Wanda, eds., Homo orthopedicus: Le corps et ses prosthèses à l’époque (post)moderniste (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), pp. 333–48, here p. 338Google Scholar.

10 For a comprehensive documentation of End see van Kerkhoven, Marianne and Nuyens, Anoek, Listen to the Bloody Machine: Creating Kris Verdonck's End (Amsterdam: Utrecht School of the Arts and International Theatre and Film Books, 2012)Google Scholar.

11 After End, Verdonck continued to work with texts. In his last project for a large theatre, H, an Incident, which premiered in Kaaitheater in May 2013 within the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, he was inspired by very short, utterly absurd stories of twentieth-century Russian writer Daniil Harms (or Charms).

12 Van Kerkhoven and Nuyens, Listen to the Bloody Machine, p. 85.

13 Ibid., p. 62.

14 Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 48, 63Google Scholar.

15 Van Kerkhoven and Nuyens, Listen to the Bloody Machine, p. 62.

16 On the idea of the Figure in Verdonck's work see Eckersall, Peter, ‘Locations of Dramaturgy – Kris Verdonck’, Performance Research, 17, 3 (June 2012), pp. 68–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also Bouko, Catherine, Thétre et réception: Le spectateur postdramatique (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 64–5Google Scholar.

17 Berghaus, ‘The Futurist Body on Stage’, p. 338.

18 See Lista, Giovanni, Futurisme: Manifeste, proclamations, documents (Lausanne: L’age d’homme, 1973), pp. 363–6Google Scholar.

19 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Selected Writings, ed. Flint, R. W. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), p. 138Google Scholar.

20 Veroli, Patrizia, ‘The Futurist Aesthetic and Dance’, in Berghaus, Günter, ed., International Futurism in Arts and Literature, Vol. XIII (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 422–48Google Scholar, here p. 436. On Futurist dance see also Lista, Giovanni, Le Futurisme: Création et Avant-garde (Paris: Editions L’Amateur, 2001), pp. 189–202Google Scholar.

21 Veroli, ‘The Futurist Aesthetic and Dance’, p. 436 n. 23, remarks that Marinetti never undertook any practical steps towards a training method that could be compared to Meyerhold's system of ‘biomechanics’.

22 Marinetti, F. T., ‘Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1917)’, in Rainey, Lawrence, Poggi, Christine and Wittman, Laura, eds., Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 234–9, here p. 237Google Scholar.

23 Berghaus, Günter, Theatre, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde (London: Palgrave Studies in Theater and Performance History, 2005), p. 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Italics in original. On Prampolini's vision to overcome the dichotomy between ‘the human element’ and ‘the environmental element in a living scenic synthesis of theatrical action’ see also his manifesto ‘Futurist Scenic Atmosphere’ (1924), trans. Victoria Nes Kirby, in Michael Kirby, ed., Futurist performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), pp. 225–31.

24 Kris Verdonck in Van Kerkhoven and Nuyens, Listen to the Bloody Machine, p. 51.

25 In Futurist nights both performer and spectator were clearly involved in an almost choreographed dynamic situation. For more on Futurism's break with conventional modes of spectatorship see Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), pp. 42–9Google Scholar.

26 Deleuze, Gilles, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Les Editions de minuit, coll. ‘Critique’, 1985), p. 79Google Scholar.

27 Deleuze, Gilles, Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, coll. ‘Quadrige’, 2004), p. 78Google Scholar.

28 Deleuze, Cinéma 2, p. 110.

29 Kirby, Futurist performance, p. 47.

30 Van Kerkhoven and Nuyens, Listen to the Bloody Machine, p. 39.

31 Author's electronic interview with Kris Verdonck, 10 September 2013.

32 Ibid.

33 Kirby, Futurist performance, p. 208.

34 Berghaus, Theatre, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde, p. 116.

35 Reith, Gerda, ‘Living with Risk: Chance, Luck, and the Creation of Meaning in Uncertainty’, in Welchman, John C., ed., The Aesthetics of Risk: Southern California Consortium of Art Schools Symposia, Vol. III (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2008), pp. 57–80, here p. 58Google Scholar.

36 Author's electronic interview, 10 September 2013.