Tate Modern
30 March – 27 March 2003
Live Culture is a programme of Live Art performances, presentations and an international symposium. It brings together distinguished artists, theorists and curators to consider the cultural value of ‘live’ art practices in the context of Tate Modern’s Collection Displays and more broadly within the visual arts and other cultural spheres. Contributors include Marina Abramovic, Ron Athey, Franko B, Carol Becker, Catherine David, Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells, Coco Fusco, RoseLee Goldberg, Matthew Goulish, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Lin Hixson, Amelia Jones, John Jordan, Keith Khan, Yu Yeon Kim, Oleg Kulik, Alastair MacLennan, Hayley Newman, Peggy Phelan, Andrew Quick, Alan Read, La Ribot, and Henry M Sayre.
Live Culture opens on 27 March with live actions by Russia’s celebrated artist, Oleg Kulik, making his London debut with Armadillo for Your Show. The programme over the following three days includes the performance installation, Ex-Centris (A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others) by the eminent US/Mexican artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and a team of international collaborators. Award winning Spanish movement artist La Ribot presents for the first time Panoramix 1993-2000, the complete series of Distinguished Pieces and Forced Entertainment present the durational works Quizoola! and 12am: Awake and Looking Down. The programme closes on 30 March with Franko B’s acclaimed ‘catwalk’ performance I Miss You!
These performances are accompanied by Hayley Newman’s fictitious photographs, Connotations - Performance Images 1994-98 and a series of Live Art screenings curated by British artists Rona Lee, Aaron Williamson, Pope & Guthrie and Blast Theory (Level 4 Galleries West 28-30 March). Marina Abramovic, RoseLee Goldberg, author of Performance Art, from Futurism to the Present and Yu Yeon Kim, curator of Translated Acts will present illustrated lectures and personal overviews (Starr Auditorium 27, 28 and 29 March). The international symposium, Live Culture: Performance and the Contemporary, (29 and 30 March, 10.30-18.30) will consider the political power and social effect of Live Art and its relationship to cultural change.
A resurgence of interest in experiental and performative practices within the visual arts and the idea of ‘liveness’ as a prime object and value in the media-dense environment of contemporary culture, make Live Culture a timely and critical intervention into current discourses. Live Culture is a framework to appraise key shifts in performance art over the last few decades: its spread out of the gallery and into other spaces and forms; its increasingly hybrid nature and disruption of global and cultural borders; its use of risk and extremity in confronting the art and politics of the body; its impact on social activism and political intervention; its interface with the digital world; and its role as a site for expressions of new identities beyond the distinctions of ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Live Culture sets out to highlight the ways in which the term Live Art has come to represent an array of contemporary practices that employ performance as a generative force to destroy pretence, to break apart traditions of representation, and to open different kinds of engagement with meaning.
Live Culture is curated by Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine, of the Live Art Development Agency, and Adrian Heathfield who lectures in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. Live Culture is produced by the Live Art Development Agency, the leading development organisation for Live Art in Britain, and is supported by the Arts Council of England, London Arts, The Regional Arts Lottery Programme, The Felix Trust for Art and The Henry Moore Foundation. Live Culture will be followed by a major publication,
Live: Art Performance and the Contemporary edited by Adrian Heathfield and published by Tate Publishing.
Book online at www.tate.org.uk/tickets or call Tate Ticketing 020 7887 8888
For more details of performances and events see www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/liveculture