Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Author:Hans Ulrich Obrist
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141976648
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

MA: You mean doing this project? I think in my case you’ll have to be disappointed. I don’t think it’s a revelation. It’s forty years of performance work, developing and coming to this conclusion. That actually, for me, the only transformative force in performance is the long duration of the work and this really comes from experience and doing it for a long period of time.

When we spoke the other day you said that it came from even further back in the past.

MA: Actually the first idea ever to do something more durational came in ’79 when I spent an entire year living with Australian Aborigines and Ulay my partner in the desert, at the west of Lake Disappointment. Why was it called Lake Disappointment? Because there was never any water, or the water comes only every seven years. So we went there to stay with the Aborigines for several reasons. For us this was a real nomadic culture, it was completely based on performance, as a way of life. It’s a culture that doesn’t have any possessions: they live in the present time, here and now. All the stories to do with time are done in this moment: songlines. There are all these incredible things. Like they only count to four in their language, after that is ‘many’. They don’t use five or ten, like the fingers, like other cultures do. They don’t have ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in their language because they never doubt, because they’re always clear about what’s going on. It really was fascinating. But being there is basically confronting yourself with an enormous amount of heat. So you can’t walk, you just have to sit for long periods of time during the day. You can only make the food before sunrise and after sunset and most of the time there’s not even shadow. You just have a piece of canvas you stretch around the trees because there are no leaves. So you sit there. In this kind of sitting position that you are forced, physically, to understand what time means and what a long duration means or what happens to your mind if you don’t move. This was the beginning, actually, of the idea of long-durational work, which we executed later on.

That’s really the beginning of pieces like Nightsea Crossing [1981–7] and others, but when we spoke you also mentioned that there was another kind of trigger that goes further back in your work, to your very early instruction pieces, which kind of relates here to ‘the drill’. That is very much related, I think, to your early instruction pieces.

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