What: Call for Papers for publication in Performance Research

When: October 2012 Issue

Deadline: Dec 1 (proposal)

The idea of duration has always been essential to the experience of performance from the briefest execution of the smallest gesture on a stage to the expansive Ram Lila events in India or Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performances. Duration often refers to the actual time it takes to do things, like drop a brick onto your foot or nail your arm into a wall (Mike Parr), or cut a star onto your stomach or even to walk the Great Wall of China (Abramovic and Ulay). For performance artists, duration refers to the time it takes to break away from the things that inhibit creativity, empathy and intuition, yet the extent to which any performance develops its object in real time forms the basis of what we might call the durational aesthetic.

In recent times, the citational performance forms of postmodernity have constructed a temporality of the eternal return, an endless loop or action replay within which the object's precarious place in the flux of time became key to the aesthetic strategy. We might think of re-enactment in this regard, as a key marker of the postmodern turn in performance art. The time based work of multimedia artists with its renewed emphasis on replay and remix might also constitute a useful example of this notion of temporal circuitry.

In performance, duration can mean a specific quantity of time as in a musical rhythm or even in Henri Bergson’s terms, a quality of time, characterised as the absolute time of the lived body, multiple and heterogeneous. This issue will explore the aesthetics of duration in performances which foreground the passage of time in the work and the experience of time for the spectator. ‘On Duration’ intends to develop ways of re-thinking the perceived space/time templates of performance, its modes of presencing, and to suggest different models for its interpretation.

Possible Topics:

Forms of Duration

  • The chronotopes of performance: Bakhtin and time

  • Bergson’s Matter and Memory as a paradigm for thinking about time as real duration

  • Time signatures in performance

  • The loss of temporality

  • Micro-narratives v. durational events

  • Inverted and intensified temporalities

Real Time Performances

  • Happenings, John Cage and the emergence of time based art

  • Fluxus and after

  • Endurance art: Marina Abramovic, Tehching Hsieh, Mike Parr

  • Time is money: Antony Gormley, Martin Creed, Coco Fusco, Santiago Sierra

Time Shifting in Video Performance

  • Video and the remediation of art and performance traditions

  • Re-enactments

  • Manipulations and distortions of time: Martin Arnold, Douglas Gordon

Temporal Environments and Architectures

  • Temporal embodiments of place /the trans-architectural

  • Temporary architectures: Diller and Scofidio

  • Projections and ‘relational architectures’: Lozano-Hemmer, Krzysztof Wodiczko

The volume will gather perspectives from a range of fields, including architecture, sound-art, media-art and a range of performance practices: proposals are invited from any relevant area. The format of Performance Research allows for artists’ pages and other visual representations alongside articles, interviews, documents or reviews.

First drafts are due 8th March 2012, final drafts: 1st May 2012. ALL proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to: Becci Curtis <rec12@aber.ac.uk>. Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editor: Edward Scheer <e.scheer@unsw.edu.au>.