Live Art: radicalism and complicity in a scene of constraint is special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review co-edited by Stephen Greer and Phoebe Patey-Ferguson. Originating as part of the Live Art in Scotland project, it offers a critical snapshot of live art as field of experimental, political and sometimes radical arts practice.
With contributions from Nando Messias, Eleanor Roberts, Daniel Oliver, Simon James Holton, Toni Lewis, Demi Nhandra, Bryony White, Amit S. Rai and Diana Damian Martin – alongside me and Phoebe – the issue explores the contingency of Live Art’s existence as a sometimes wilfully marginal field of practice with a resistant relationship to conventional forms of institutional power and stability, characterised by the complex interactions of complicity (being involved in systems whose values we oppose) and radicalism (taking action in the service of political reform or revolution).
From the issue’s editorial introduction:
One of the original titles we considered for this issue was ‘Live Art is Dead, Long Live Live Art’, born of wondering – seriously and because we were drawn to cause trouble – what it would mean to declare a post-Live Art moment. Whose interests might such a gesture serve? What might emerge in the spaces abandoned by Live Art or from which Live Art chooses to depart? In the spirit of DAG’s slogan ‘Disability Art is Dead, Long Live Disability Art’, this declaration can express discontentment, disappointment and frustration with how things currently are, as well as a hopeful provocation of possibility for whatever might come next. However, in a passing conversation, an artist friend said to us ‘I hope you’re not going to say Live Art is dead!’ – a concern that might be revealing of the imagined if not actual authority extended to academic exercises of this kind in shaping the field. If Live Art is ‘over’, the likely cause of death is not academic analysis but a funding environment resulting from a decade of cultural policy led by successive administrations disinterested in culture and often actively hostile to the communities of queers, disabled, working class and Black and global majority folk who create and sustain Live Art, and for who Live Art offers a space of expanded possibility.
But Live Art persists, both in ways which might sustain hope and pleasure, and in a manner that demands a renewed critique of its material and cultural politics. Understood as a sector or a context rather than a defined field of artistic practices, four decades of practice have seen Live Art settled under a reliable and even predictable set of terms and histories. It shares kinship (and institutional spaces, logics and critiques) with performance art but is sometimes more closely related to theatre, except when it is something more like music, film, a video game or an installation that is mainly but not quite entirely paintings, photographs or sculpture. It can feel like going to a birthday party or a funeral, or sometimes a long walk in nature or floating in a lake, and occasionally like an apocalyptic rave. It is characterised by open-ended, exploratory and experiential practices except for all the times it tours as a show with a script and cast who have learnt their lines in work that does not change much, if at all, from night to night. It is known for its progressive, if not always radical, politics in offering space for queer, disabled, working class, Black and Global Majority artists and communities, apart from when it reproduces all the forms of hierarchy and structural violence that characterise the cultural sector at large. Live Art breaks from conventional expectations for where culture might be encountered by privileging the possibilities of art made in streets, schools, fields and community centres except when it much prefers to live in galleries and theatres; it does DIY, grass-roots artistic development and rejects conventional modes of professional organisational practice, except when it very badly needs an HR department. It questions what counts as cultural value except on application forms when it tells funding councils, cultural embassies and international foundations precisely what they want to hear about the capacity of the arts to address urgent social issues.
Fiercely and necessarily critical, the problem with such rhetoric is that it risks a discourse in which Live Art is always already constituted in the failure to make good on its claims to radicalism, as if to imagine there is a place of pure intention beyond the contingencies of the present from which to act. Alternatively, it prepares the ground for a cynical reading in which complicity is the price of limited freedom and wherein neoliberalism is so close to hegemonic that the practice of imagining or practicing alternatives is always compromised in advance. In attempting to explore new horizons for Live Art – and Live Art criticism – this issue and its contributions arrive at what seems to be a constitutionally precarious moment. But is not this already, always where Live Art positions itself?
You can read the issue’s full editorial for free here with many of the issue’s articles published as open access.