Blood;Flat;Still

Payne, Antonia (2006) Blood;Flat;Still. Performance Research, 11 (3). ISSN 1352-8165

Abstract / Summary

These three, 300 word entries resulted from an editorial invitation to put forward proposals for a ‘lexicon of performance’; texts were subsequently accepted for the ‘Lexicon’ issue of Performance Research (eds Prof David Williams and Dr Ric Allsopp), which was PR’s contribution to the Documenta 12 Magazines project.

Payne’s approach to these texts built on her approach to an earlier commission to write about a work by artists, Wood & Harrison. She set out to produce texts that, in both form and structure, and through linguistic ‘play’, constituted ‘equivalents’ of aspects of the writer’s life-long ‘felt experience’ of ‘performance’ in all its variety and multiplicity. The writing of each was developed out of, and around, a single work that provided a ‘meditative focus’ for thinking: in the case of ‘Still’, this was overt in the text’s final presentation (Abramović and Ulay’s ‘Rest Energy’); in ‘Flat’ and ‘Blood’ these foci were entirely sublimated (‘Flat’: Steve McQueen’s video work, ‘Five Easy Pieces’, 1995; ‘Blood’: certain performances by Franko B). One entry – ‘Blood’ - attempted to enfold aspects of the particular historical moment of its writing (US/UK occupation of Iraq) into the moment of Payne’s writing-remembering of her experiences of performance. ‘Flat’ and ‘Still’ attempted something different, seeking to bring remembered experiences of performance and the writer’s contemporary personal experience of motherhood and deafness into fruitful correspondence.

Allsopp and Williams, in their editorial for Lexicon, cite Payne’s entries, amongst others, as reminders of the materiality of performance, “that performance is both immaterial and material (like radiation or weather); it is shot through with both ghosts and the stumbling blocks of the real, the ‘most ordinary debris of our lives’.”

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