Corridors of Practice I: Technology and Performance Art on the North American Pacific Coast in the 1970s and Early 80s

Caroline Seck Langill

Lecturer, Canadian Studies

Trent University

Peterborough, Ontario

Canada

Abstract

In 1969, the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted the first Intermedia exhibition, Electrical Connection, featuring a broad range of works. It appears that the Intermedia collective were riding the Whole Earth wave from California, connecting technology to ecological systems, hoping for a utopic solution to the crisis that the world was seemingly facing in 1970. California was the site of both ecological and technological revisionism in the sixties. Married through systems theory, the back to the land movement parlayed computer science as the means to foster new collectivities, and cross-disciplinary endeavours. Much of Intermedia’s mandate was equally drawn from these two fields, likely inspired and mentored by those who found themselves on this side of the Canada / US border in the late sixties. Beginning with Intermedia, I will track the corridor of practice that existed between LA and San Francisco, and Vancouver and Victoria from the mid-sixties to the late 1970s, for artists working with electronic media. The link between artists living in S. California and the Pacific Northwest was much stronger than links between artists on a E/W axis in Canada, despite an intense nationalistic imperative at that time. Much of the communication occurred through pedagogical institutions where artists were teaching and learning, but the legacy of this N/S (travel) can be seen in the work of Canadian artists Mowry Baden, and Diana Burgoyne, produced in the 1970s and 1980s

Intermedia

In 1968 dancer/choreographer Deborah Hay gave a workshop in Vancouver at Intermedia, a collective that, according to Joan Lownes, “stemmed directly from McLuhan’s insights on the cross fertilization of disciplines made possible by the electronic revolution” (Lownes quoted in Lewis n. p.) In Performance au.in Canada 1970-1990, Clive Robertson connects the genesis of Canadian performance art to the community that produced 9 Evenings via a workshop delivered by American artist Deborah Hay in Vancouver at Intermedia in May, 1968. Hay had participated in 9 Evenings with her husband Alex Hay, and brought with her methodologies developed in conjunction with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) Hay, as well as Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Barbara Lloyd, all performed, and gave workshops, at a time when there was, according to Helen Goodwin, “a lot of to and fro between Vancouver and New York” (Goodwin quoted in Rombout 180).These are examples of many cross-border events between Canada and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, suggestive of a contingent Canadian new media history. In this paper I propose a regional history of Canadian new media art or electronic media art that is not nationally-located, but contingent on, and distributed by, international traffic and contact. For purposes of brevity and time I will focus on the Pacific Northwest bioregion and the corridor of practice in place during the 1970s and 1980s involving travel by artists – namely Diana Burygoyne, and Mowry Baden– between Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, and Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.

Since 2006 I have been working with Fondation Daniel Langlois to construct a history of early electronic media practice in Canada between 1970 and 1990, by naming exemplary works of art produced by pioneers in the field. My interviews with twenty artists from across the country revealed undocumented nuances to that history, most notably the impact of pedagogical sites on early practices in new media. This discussion will revolve around art schools and studio practice, equal partners in this narrative of cross-border historical production. With so few artists working with technology and electronic media in the period when analogue was waning and digitalization was waxing, my sample size is understandably limited, but this allows a closer consideration of these artists working within the threshold of art and science, with the attendant technological tools, in Canada.

Paradoxically, the formation of the Intermedia collective suggested otherwise, and the expectation, if one surveys media coverage of the group through the late sixties and early seventies, predicted a burgeoning field of electronic media practice in Canada.

In 1969, the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted the first of three Intermedia exhibitions, Electrical Connection, featuring a broad range of works filling every space of the gallery. In her review of the exhibition, Charlotte Townsend quoted then director Werner Aellen who saw Intermedia as “unique in the world,” and in a constant state of “inquiry and experiment.” A catalogue for the exhibition exists, albeit barely, as an unbound portfolio of images, prose and poetry, and includes schematic circuit drawings for a JK flip-flop and mixer set-up. Intermedia at the Vancouver Art Gallery occurred the following year. The catalogue for this later exhibition depicts artists constructing geodesic domes acting as a design trope, formally and philosophically. It appears that the Intermedia collective was riding the Whole Earth wave from California, connecting technology to ecological systems, hoping for a utopic solution to the crisis that the world was seemingly facing in 1970. Much of Intermedia’s mandate was equally drawn from systems theory and the back to the land movement, likely inspired and mentored by the influx of Americans to Canada in 1968. Al Razutis, a young California filmmaker, established the first ongoing “underground” exhibition program at Intermedia featuring American underground films, along with work by Vancouver-based avant-garde filmmakers (Rombout 1983, 164). For Tom Shandel, Intermedia was a “child of Expo 67.” For Glenn Lewis, it was the reinvention of art. For Iain Baxter its roots were in the Bauhaus, “[I]t was a new cycle coming back to the new energy of American technology. So you could call E.A.T. the American Bauhaus. We were probably aware of E.A.T. but we also had another dimension of our own and we wanted to move beyond E.A.T. to Intermedia to the kind of consciousness of that…” (Rombout 181).

Luke Rombaut, in his catalogue for the Vancouver Art and Artists, 1931-1983, notes that, around 1970, Intermedia splintered into smaller groups as “divisions became evident along the lines of sexual preference, media interests, and ideology.” He then proposes that “this was, in effect, the death of synaesthetic innovation” (164). Fortunately, in Canada, the broad legacy of Intermedia is slowly coming into relief. In 1995, Art Metropole celebrated book works and other ephemera of Intermedia with the exhibition Intermedia Society, noting that it was virtually ignored critically at its inception. Also, scholars looking for a uniquely Canadian new media historical narrative are increasingly including this significant collective as a pivotal point in that history.

Mowry Baden and Chris Burden: Teacher > Student

But what was Rombaut suggesting when he wrote the death of synaesthetic innovation as synonymous with the death of Intermedia? Clearly, he was basing this on activity in Vancouver, since there were artists, albeit very few, across the country producing interactive art that resisted the ocular domination of visual art, demanding interaction involving whole body participation, most notably Mowry Baden in Victoria. Writing in 1969, Jack Burnham remarks that Baden’s early works, Phantom Limb (1967), I Walk the Line (1968), and Stop Gap (1968), designed according to the artist’s specific body calculations, were not physical forms, but instead acted as “instructions” (45). For Burnham these works were not to be taken lightly: “Consistent with Marshall McLuhan’s description of audio-tactile tribal sensibilities, Baden’s constructions inevitably forsake Renaissance perception and the sequential habits of phonetic reading,” (Ibid). Baden’s approach points to technology and the potential for art works to exist outside the realm of the image, instead offering systems that extend human activity, and that show that “the separation between artifact and bodily senses is arbitrary,” (Ibid).

Mowry Baden was born in Los Angeles in 1936, educated at Pomona College and Stanford University. Baden has referred to his work as kinaesthetic, engaging our proprioceptive capacities. Liane Davison has suggested that Baden’s sculptures create a bridge between our “biological inheritance” and our “technological environment”. “By creating sculptures that cause us to question the contemporary idolization of a technological utopia, he gives us the opportunity to assert our independence and autonomy and to refuse to be ‘servo-mechanisms’” (25). Jack Burnham, in his conclusion to his discussion of Baden’s “task-oriented” sculptures, proposes that Baden’s work forces us to reject internalized habits of perception, perceiving the work as erasing the line between “media” and the central nervous system.

Baden produced Seatbelt (Figure 1) in 1970, at the dawn of digitization. With its nod to the car that Andrew Wilson has referred to as “a technology that fits well with the North American psyche” (37), it is suggestive of the personal electronic apparatuses that are to come, that will enhance our self-perception and distinguish us from each other. As Baden has said, he considers his work “indifferent and uninteresting” (Burnham, 1969, 45), precipitated perhaps by the work’s tentative nature and spare fabrication. Nevertheless, Seatbelt embodies an inquisitiveness about the body’s response to technology, and grapples with its effect.

Figure 1. Mowry Baden, Seatbelt (1970)

Baden sums up his method as follows, “It really became clear to me that I needed a laboratory, and so I would just use my own body, my body would be a laboratory. I set up these conditions for this body to experience and report back.” Before settling in Victoria, British Columbia, Baden taught at Raymond College, from 1965 to 68, and then at Pomona College from 1968-71. Artists Charles Ray and Chris Burden were both students of Baden’s, and the reverberation of his kinaesthetic approach is palpable in their work (Schimmel 94). Chris Burden’s sculpture from the late 1960s evidences Baden’s influence, iterating the “task oriented” nature of Baden’s work, and eventually, like Baden’s, morphing from autonomous sculptures to apparatuses that “demanded specific and awkward physical postures from people interacting with them” (Singerman 20). Burden quickly moves on from incorporations of viewers to incorporations of his body; performances that demand the viewer engage, if not physically then ethically with the work itself. They are quick and efficient, “With my pieces there is one thing and that’s it” (Burden quoted in Singerman 19). Often public, rarely private, the narratives surrounding the initial actions become another iteration of the performance itself. Philip Auslander, referring to Shoot, argues against the impact of such rhetorical resonance, since it is the documentation that insures its continued life. For Auslander it makes no difference whether or not an audience was present (84). While I can agree with this regarding additional performance artists he names to build his argument, such as Vito Acconci, in the case of Burden I deviate from Auslander’s position, primarily because the presence of the audience for Burden, at least in Shoot, created a tacit contract that bound the audience to the action of the shooter, a contract that they perhaps did not fulfill. Burden’s performance consisted of the artist allowing himself to be shot in the arm by a trained sharpshooter, before a small invited audience, in a cooperative gallery. As Kathy O’Dell notes, this work was one of many 1970s performance art works that shared a number of characteristics: “the mechanics of alienation in art and everyday life; the psychological influences of the domestic site on art and everyday life; the sensation of being both a human subject and an object; the function of metaphor in art; and, especially, the relationship between the artist and audience” (2).

Chris Burden and Diana Burgoyne: Teacher > Student

Where is new media in all this? One close example lies in the interactive performance work of Vancouver-based artist Diana Burgoyne, who describes her practice as follows:

“I investigate these relationships [between society, technology, and environment] through the use of sound, performance, and installation. Sound stimulates another sense in the viewer and I use it metaphorically as communication. In creating the sound, I use integrated circuits. When manipulating this technology, I think it is important for it to look "hand-made", in hopes of humanizing this dehumanizing material. Performance uses a powerful tool: the body. This tool juxtaposed with technology creates tension and situations analogous to society. Installation allows me to connect the viewer physically to the piece. Giving the viewer an active role makes them part of "the system" referred to in the work.”

Chris Burden was Burgoyne’s advisor while she was a graduate student at UCLA. In my interview with her, in response to a question regarding the development of her process, Burgoyne cited a formative discussion with Burden regarding the similarity between the work she was doing, and early work that he had produced that included electronics.

She recalls:

“Chris Burden, had done a piece where he had people enter a space individually, where they were supposed to take their clothes off, put electronics on and then enter into a completely blackened space where they would be walking around completely naked with electronic devices. The only way they would know that someone else was in there, was when their electronic device got close to someone else’s it would start to beep, so you had no concept of who else was in there [until you had a response].”

This germinal discussion with Burden generated a series of works produced in the late 1980s by Burgoyne that involve electronics worn on her body, responsive to the viewer’s presence. In Performer with Light Sensors (1985) she lies in a rectangle of light with twenty light sensitive oscillator circuits attached to her. The circuits emit unpleasant high- frequency sounds that viewers can silence only by casting their shadow on her body. While this is hardly reminiscent of the actions undertaken by Burden, the sensibility is similar. The relational aesthetics of the work demand an action from the viewer, if they hope to quell the sonic barrage of the tones.

We might surmise that Burden acts as the conduit between Baden’s ideas of kinaesthetics and proprioception for Burgoyne. However, Burgoyne received her BFA from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where she was a student of Baden’s. Consequently, she already had his body-as-lab approach as part of her regime of production. While at U of Vic, Charles Ray gave an artist talk in which he described a work where he became a mechanical component of a cuckoo clock, manually moving the clock’s hands, with his legs hanging out the bottom, for twelve hours, learning how time worked. It was Burgyoyne’s interaction with Ray after the talk, as well as his critique of her work, that led her to graduate studies at UCLA where she studied with Ray, Burden, Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy.

The Hanging Works

Figure 2. Diana Burgoyne, Hanging Piece I, 1989

In this brief, vacillating account of Burgoyne’s travel between Vancouver, Victoria and Los Angeles, we are given a glimpse of the cross-border influences on the artist’s performance practice. Burgoyne’s works Hanging Piece I (1989) (Figure 2) and II (1990) contain the traces of her travels and interactions with artists on both sides of the borders. Hanging Piece I incorporated simple electronics that Burgoyne had utilized in previous works. Utilizing the 555 timer circuit, she developed a work which found her suspended from the ceiling, hanging from hooks in a very contorted position. When Burgoyne began this work she was aware of the intense performance pieces of the Australian artist Stelarc, in which he suspended his own body from hooks, that pierced his skin, over various locations such as an ocean, or a Berlin street. Burgoyne’s investigation of Stelarc’s practice determined that his Cartesian approach to the body, with his utopian belief in the potential of body obsolescence, was actually the reverse of what she intended, “I’m talking about the physicality of the body and the relationship of the body to technology, and to other viewers, and into the social picture, [It was within] the social framework that I was creating with these works.” Burgoyne’s performed suspension was dependent on the participation of the viewer, who was invited to put on a helmet that she or he could move back and forth, and which was indirectly attached, via ropes, to Burgoyne’s waist. Through their movements the viewer could slowly affect the levels of sound in the space.

“I hung the 555s, tuned at different frequencies, around the space, and I put a helmet on myself and a switch in front. But the only way I could get to that switch to turn the sound off was to change the sound in the space, and to have the viewer help me by becoming part of the system that I was creating…The piece evolved to have thirty circuits… and the ones that were around me were all set at very low frequencies, so they were all clicks and clacks. As [the circuits] physically came closer and closer to the viewer, they got higher and higher in frequency, so the longer the viewer moved their head back and forth, more and more of these got turned on, and as more and more of these got turned on, they moved closer and closer to them, and the frequency would get higher. So, you would start off with these clacking noises and work up to a real cacophony of sound surrounding the viewer. If you moved it one more time it would reset to zero. So [there was] a real sense of communication between myself and the viewer.”

Burgoyne’s recollection of the performances in situ implies geographic difference regarding reception of the work. In Canada men comprised the majority of participants, but both men and women came up to her afterwards telling her that their lack of participation was due to their inability to place themselves in a position of control. For Burgoyne this acknowledgment signified their willingness to engage with the intention of the work, even though they did not physically participate. When the work was performed in Holland it was only children who interacted, and when it traveled to the United States, specifically Cleveland, men and women lined up to ‘do’ the piece. The aggression on the part of the latter viewers caused the piece to break down several times over the course of the evening. These various responses led Burgoyne to the following conclusion: “So for me it really started to talk about social interaction, social relationship and the readiness of people to insert themselves into a system where they felt like they were in control.”

In 1964, Yoko Ono also experienced different levels of audience participation in her various performances of Cut Piece, a work where she kneeled on stage in a traditional Japanese position of subservience with a large pair of scissors before her. Viewers then approached her and proceeded to cut off portions of her clothing. First performed in May 1964 in Kyoto, it was later performed in Tokyo, and then London and New York. While viewers were tentative about their participation in Japan, audiences in New York were relatively aggressive, cutting off much of Ono’s clothing. Burgoyne’s work sets up a similar paradigm, but how does the inclusion of technology affect the outcome?

Burgoyne has suggested that the work makes evident a social space between the viewer and the artist, primarily due to the interactive nature of the event. For artist David Rokeby, “interactivity is about the intimacy between the artist and the audience” (Brouwer and Mulder, 46). Jake Brouwer and Arjen Mulder remark on this comment noting that it goes not only to the core of human experience, but also to what the human-machine experience might mean. Drawing a parallel between rules of intimacy between humans, and the rules necessary for a human-machine or a machine-machine relationship, the authors suggest that a code of conduct is at play. Kathleen O’Dell might refer to this as a contract, but a code of conduct within a relationship is not necessarily a contract, which is a legal entity, one not built on trust, but on the law. For Brouwer and Mulder the model of interaction is “reciprocal and dialogic” (46). Although these authors are referring to a more recent, and highly sophisticated digital work by Rokeby, n-Cha(n)t (2001) as well as to works by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, and Sponge, Burgoyne’s work foreshadows the potential of new media to open up increasingly complex social spaces, by bypassing ‘reactive’ interactivity and highlighting the potential for intimate relationships with machines that extend beyond the limits of our bodies.

The new media works I am addressing here demand interaction, but Burgoyne’s in particular leads me to consider whether performance theory may be a necessary lens through which to consider all new media work. What Burgoyne contributes to the historical development of new media practice is her recognition that machines work in tandem with us to achieve certain goals, and some of them fall under the purview of human intimacy. Auslander has admitted, in an interview with Kevin Brown, that machines can be performers, but only machines that perform by themselves and are autonomous have presence (Brown, 6). In Hanging Piece I the machine is not autonomous; rather it is a distributed system that contains both the artist and the viewer. In Bodies in Code Mark Hansen discusses Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of body-schema, as outlined in The Phenomenology of Perception, and offers a model by which to consider the system proposed by Burgoyne. Hansen distinguishes body image, a visual apprehension of the body, from body-schema, which emerges from a “preobjective process of world constitution that, by giving priority to the internal perspective of the organism, paradoxically includes what is outside its body proper, [and] what lies in the interactional domain specified by embodied enaction” (39). The body-schema is the cognitive discernment of the body as existing within and without. Hansen sees three consequences arising from this distinction: “first the body is always in excess over itself; second, this excess involves the body’s coupling to an external environment; and third, because such coupling is increasingly accomplished through technical means, this excess (which has certainly always been potentially technical) can increasingly be actualized only with the explicit aid of technics” (39). Body-schema provides a paradigm for understanding the network of artist↔machine↔participant↔machine set up by Burgoyne, and enables a reading of Hanging Piece I as a model for our human-human and human-machine interactions, as distributed systems that rely on each other demanding certain levels of respect and behaviour, whether or not there is a contract in place. The participant’s willingness to engage with the work is also a willingness to engage with the artist herself, attached to the machine that is the interactive sculpture. Artist-audience, artist-machine, machine-audience, all are networked, bound in an ecosystem of interaction. That this was achieved with the most basic digital components, 555 timers, makes the work all the more surprising as it anticipates the potential of human-machine interaction to catapult us into the posthuman.

Histories and Contingencies

While Burgoyne was scooting across the border developing her practice, Mowry Baden was maintaining his ties to his birthplace through National Endowment Grants in 77/78, 80/81 and 84/85. Exhibitions of his work occur as often in the United States as they do in Canada implying a cultural citizenship that is dualistic. This discussion has been a close reading of Burgoyne and Baden, but I could have examined the practice of the late Victoria-based, interactive-robotic artist Roland Brener, who emigrated from South Africa to Canada in the early seventies, by way of Santa Barbara, where he spent two years as a visiting artist. Or there was the case of The Direct Media Association, organized by Victoria-based Bill Bartlett, which mounted a series of public information expositions on teleconferencing. Either “Pacific Rim – Slow-Scan”, based at the Vancouver Art Gallery, or “The Artist’s Use of Telecommunications,” held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1980, would make interesting case studies. Undoubtedly, there are many others, moving up and down the California and British Columbia corridor.

Conclusion

What my research has suggested is that new media histories are “always already” distributed, or indicate what Roy Ascott has referred to as “dispersed authorship”. While we as scholars and researchers may propose new media histories that are nationally bounded, these histories will not necessarily reflect the reality of early electronic practice with its peripatetic practitioners who had long since rid themselves of patriotic obligations to place. Not that this has been the case until now. Mediaarthistories, Oliver Grau’s text resulting from REFRESH!, is, more or less, boundaryless, but at this conference we have listened to located histories as we all clamour, on behalf of our places of origin, for recognition within the evolving canon.

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California was the site of both ecological and technological revisionism in the sixties. Married through systems theory, the back to the land movement parlayed computer science as a means of fostering new collectivities, and cross-disciplinary endeavours. For deeper descriptions of this period see Gere, 2002 and Turner, 2006.

The effects of Intermedia reverberated through the Vancouver art community as it split into the following groups: Image Bank (1968), the New Era Social Club (1968), the Granville Grange (1969), New York Corresponge Dance School of Vancouver (1970), Metro Media (1971), Intermedia Press (1972), Pacific Cinemateque (1972), Satellite Video Exchange/ Video Inn (1973), the Western Front (1973), Reelfeelings Women’s Collective (1973), Women in Focus (1974) and Co-op Radio (1975). It is striking that none of the new collectives focused on producing electronic media art exclusively.

Burgoyne, Diana. http://www.eciad.ca/~dburg/main.htm

From my interview with Diana Burgoyne at her home in Vancouver, July 24, 2006.

The New York performance of Cut Piece can be viewed on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1hekrMheGk.

‘Reactive’ interactivity would be considered a first level of interactivity where the participant’s options are solely to interact with an object and receive a pre-programmed response.

Grundmann, Heidi. “Introduction.” Inhalt. Vancouver, Canada and Vienna, Austria: Western Front and BLIX, 1984, 4.