Sandra Johnson - Barbara Knezevic - Johnny Salmon
performance text photos
A letter to the artist concerning time.
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00:00:01 enter 00:15:08:09 an attendant tells me I cant let you in until someone else comes out 00:15:31:06 I'm in. it smells damp, your heels are dusty. Your eyes are closed, a chair in front of your body, a pair of shoes on a string twisted over you like they do over power lines. I’m here with you though you don’t see me. Your eyes are closed 00:20:45:02 your forehead is against the wall. a filament of spiders’ web dangles near you, blowing in your wake. your right thumb is black. your left arm is marked 00:23:08:02 we are alone 00:24:16:04 a white dust streaks your back, the ball of your foot is grey brown with the floor, slide to the corner almost fall 00:25:43:07 I leave 01:08:57:05 I cant get in, theres a crowd at the door 01:11:10:04 I join the crowd. I stand outside and wait. 01:15:17:06 outside. I just notice this place is a prison 01:22:04:08 Fanny Kelly of Abbey Leix is etched into the door I’m standing next to. I try to imagine what you are doing inside 01:38:25:07 wait. I’m at the top of the queue. 01:41:07 I’m here behind you. 03:23:16:08 I’m inside, your feet are blackening on the top 03:23:56:04 a small piece of plaster in your hair, and an object inside the tube of the chair rattles as you lean 03:28:22:07 you seem to rest 03:29:01:00 you are against the door again, one woman creeps away from you biting her lip. Your head in the corner 03:30:30:02 I leave
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One of the distinguishing elements of the practice of performance art is the unspoken contract undertaken between the performer and the viewer in respect of time. It is a contract where a commitment is made to be mutually present in a time and space, for a nominated duration. Your performance amplified this consideration of the durational and time based nature of performance through the intimacy of the work, performed in the presence of no more than 3 or 4 viewers at time, and the process the viewer undertook to wait to be admitted that necessarily became part of the work. Your performance became an essay in the passage of time, it’s construction, it’s tyranny, it’s anxiety, it’s very nature.
Undertaken in the sealed environment of the cell at Kilmainham Gaol, your performance posed questions for me about the spatial, epistimological and experiential intersections in the understanding of time. During the passage of your performance, the construction of time for me as viewer became subject to a Kantian ‘reversal’ that Deleuze describes in Kant‘s Critical Philosophy, that is that ‘Time is out of joint, time is unhinged.’[1]
Undertaken in the sealed environment of the cell at Kilmainham Gaol, your performance posed questions for me about the spatial, epistimological and experiential intersections in the understanding of time. During the passage of your performance, the construction of time for me as viewer became subject to a Kantian ‘reversal’ that Deleuze describes in Kant‘s Critical Philosophy, that is that ‘Time is out of joint, time is unhinged.’[1]
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The understanding of time became confused and dislocated when your movements were repetitive, exhibiting only subtle changes in a static spatial environment. Largely time seemed suspended, punctuated only by the movement in and out of the space by myself and other viewers. Deleuze writes
Time is no longer defined by succession because succession concerns only things and movements, which are in time. If time itself were succession, it would need to succeed in another time, and on to infinity. Things succeed each other in various times, but they are also simultaneous in the same time, and they remain in an indefinite time. It is no longer a question of defining time by succession, nor space by simultaneity, nor permanence by eternity. Permanence, succession and simultaneity are modes and relationships of time. Thus, just as time can no longer be defined by succession, space cannot be defined by coexistence. Both space and time have to find completely new determinations. [2]
Recording the increments of time in code was my attempt to determine time in what became an almost timeless experience. I formed a forced corrolary between these increments and my annotated observations of the nuances and adjustments made by you, the performer. At the same time, in the crucible of the cell that contained you, performer and me, viewer, it was impossible to judge which of these, that is the ideas of succession, movement, or simulteneity, were producing my sense of time.
In the context of the surrounds of the victorian gaol, it would be impossible not to refer to the tyranny of time; it’s inextricable relationship with penal punishment. Gaol is time given and taken. It happened right here in this cell. It is as though you are communing with this notion of crime and punishment by your physical contact with the architecture, placing your forehead, your temple, the back of your head, your shoulder in contact with the walls to support yourself, and to guide your passage around the circumference of the space.
The whole nature of crime and the subsequent remittance of time by a prisoner in exchange for their infringements is one that was developed in the 18th century in London by Jeremy Bentham. The taking of time from a prisoner as punishment in itself replaced the role of the prison as a holding space while further (usually corporal) punishment was negotiated. In modern parlance we often refer to ‘doing time’, a colloquialism for a prison sentence.
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As you wound your way around the cell, your forehead, your back, your chair, your head making sucessive contact with the cold walls, I wonder were you considering the Panopticon, and surveillance, the architectural and spatial device that accompanied Bentham’s notion of time as punishment. The Panopticon, writes Bentham is 1.) A Circular, or Polygonal Building, with cells on each story in the circumference; in the centre, a lodge for the Inspector, from which he may see all the prisoners without being himself seen, and from whence he may issue all his directions, without being obliged to quit his post. He goes further, to describe not only the the mechanisms of seeing within the prison, but that which is observed from outside, as a deterrent to crime. [3]
Your closed eyes both point to and refuse the notion of Benthams’ Panopticon that presents itself in the architecture of Kilmainham gaol, and signified to me the anxiety that the convergance of time and surveillance produces. The panoptic ‘omnipresence’ is both present in your body and in the activity of the spectators to your performance. You cannot (or will not) see, but we as participants see you constantly, we are all seeing. Foucault famously examined the function of the Panopticon and it’s relationship to surveillance and noted the anxiety that time (here, a prison sentence) in conjunction with space (the cell) produces
The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.[4]
An interstice appeared between time, performance and the spatial. Within this narrow opening is the experience of the viewer, confined in a psychological sense; I found myself caught at a junction between time, memory, presence and space. This is the contract I entered into with you. The nature of it is that you are there and I engage, or I leave, or I stay or feel or don’t. I watch and you in turn reject and invite my looking. Your trajectory persists, forwards. Within this mutual exchange my notions of time are played out, inverted, distorted.
Barbara Knezevic, November 2010
[1] Gilles Deleuze, Kant‘s Critical Philosophy, The Doctrine of the Faculties translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London; The Athlone Press, 1984) vii –xiii. Deleuze paraphrases Hamlet ‘Hamlet: Let us go in together, And still your fingers on your lips, I pray. The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right! Nay, come, let's go together. Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 186–190. He further divides his enquiry into ‘four poetic formulas which might summarize the Kantian philosophy.’ These poetic formulas are framed by the afore mentioned Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Arthur Rimbaud ‘I is another‘, Kafka. ‘The Good is what the Law says‘, and another Rimbaudian notion ‘A disorder of all the senses.’
[2] Ibid, pg vii
[3] Jeremy Bentham The Rationale of Punishment (London: Robert Heward, 1830), 351. Bentham continues the notion of seeing and punishment, expanding it to outside the walls of the penitentiary ‘It would be placed in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, where the greatest number of persons are collected together, and especially of those who require to be reminded, by penal exhibitions, of the consequences of crime. The appearance of the building, the singularity of its shape, the walls and ditches by which it is surrounded, the guards stationed at its gates, would all excite ideas of restraint and punishment, whilst the facility which would be given to admission, would scarcely fail to attract a multitude of visitors---and what would they see?---a set of persons deprived of liberty which they have misused; compelled to engage in labour, which was formerly their aversion, and restrained from riot and intemperance, in which they formerly delighted; the whole of them clothed in a particular dress, indicating the infamy of their crimes. What scene could be more instructive to the great proportion of the spectators?’
[4] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) p 202
Your closed eyes both point to and refuse the notion of Benthams’ Panopticon that presents itself in the architecture of Kilmainham gaol, and signified to me the anxiety that the convergance of time and surveillance produces. The panoptic ‘omnipresence’ is both present in your body and in the activity of the spectators to your performance. You cannot (or will not) see, but we as participants see you constantly, we are all seeing. Foucault famously examined the function of the Panopticon and it’s relationship to surveillance and noted the anxiety that time (here, a prison sentence) in conjunction with space (the cell) produces
The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.[4]
An interstice appeared between time, performance and the spatial. Within this narrow opening is the experience of the viewer, confined in a psychological sense; I found myself caught at a junction between time, memory, presence and space. This is the contract I entered into with you. The nature of it is that you are there and I engage, or I leave, or I stay or feel or don’t. I watch and you in turn reject and invite my looking. Your trajectory persists, forwards. Within this mutual exchange my notions of time are played out, inverted, distorted.
Barbara Knezevic, November 2010
[1] Gilles Deleuze, Kant‘s Critical Philosophy, The Doctrine of the Faculties translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London; The Athlone Press, 1984) vii –xiii. Deleuze paraphrases Hamlet ‘Hamlet: Let us go in together, And still your fingers on your lips, I pray. The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right! Nay, come, let's go together. Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 186–190. He further divides his enquiry into ‘four poetic formulas which might summarize the Kantian philosophy.’ These poetic formulas are framed by the afore mentioned Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Arthur Rimbaud ‘I is another‘, Kafka. ‘The Good is what the Law says‘, and another Rimbaudian notion ‘A disorder of all the senses.’
[2] Ibid, pg vii
[3] Jeremy Bentham The Rationale of Punishment (London: Robert Heward, 1830), 351. Bentham continues the notion of seeing and punishment, expanding it to outside the walls of the penitentiary ‘It would be placed in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, where the greatest number of persons are collected together, and especially of those who require to be reminded, by penal exhibitions, of the consequences of crime. The appearance of the building, the singularity of its shape, the walls and ditches by which it is surrounded, the guards stationed at its gates, would all excite ideas of restraint and punishment, whilst the facility which would be given to admission, would scarcely fail to attract a multitude of visitors---and what would they see?---a set of persons deprived of liberty which they have misused; compelled to engage in labour, which was formerly their aversion, and restrained from riot and intemperance, in which they formerly delighted; the whole of them clothed in a particular dress, indicating the infamy of their crimes. What scene could be more instructive to the great proportion of the spectators?’
[4] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) p 202