Pandemic performance: A Haunting of Haunts

Garrett Lynch IRL

During the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020, galleries, theatres, and performance venues closed in accordance with social distancing, lockdown, and confinement policies. Art practice, and in particular performance art, faced an existential crisis: adapt its form or cease to exist for audiences. To adapt, performance art adopted video on the internet as a means through which to perform posing immense challenges to its understanding of performance, liveness, and what is considered physical or ‘real’. As a response, I started to create a body of work employing the methodology of practice as research (PaR) during periods of confinement of the pandemic. Titled A Haunting of Haunts (2020–ongoing), the practice is designed to be situated within networks and is therefore classified as networked performance. The practice aims to enable artists to create performance under conditions of social distancing, lockdown, and confinement, to explore the idea of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces, and to critique video as the dominant and largely accepted visual form employed in networked performance. This exposition proposes that while A Haunting of Haunts facilitates practice and assists in the development of a visual language specific to networks that consists of what are termed as networked images, thereby contributing to networked performance as a field of practice, it also highlights the hauntological condition of such a practice.

A Haunting of Haunts

The adoption of video in performance art and the problem it poses to its principles is only one of many caused by the transposing of performance and its conventions from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces. These include: how online performances during the pandemic continued to employ tickets, often downloadable and/or printable and so still inferred the physical; limited audience numbers and therefore the suggestion of available space or seats; the requirement that the audience not be seen or heard by disabling webcams and microphones, which is analogous to a darkened auditorium; and that the audience did not interact with each other or the performer(s), for example through chat or direct messages, maintaining a fourth-wall-like distance and invisibility from those performer(s). Each of these ‘real’ conventions requires a radical rethink within the context of ‘virtual’ online performance, what is typically termed networked performance (see Glossary), and ongoing crises such as the pandemic. As a practitioner, however, it is performance form and how it is affected by the relationship between performance and media, liveness, and reproduction, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ that interests me and which I will focus on in the discussion below. →

As a response to the problems of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces and its impact on performance form, I started to create a body of work employing the methodology of practice as research (PaR) during periods of confinement of the pandemic. Titled A Haunting of Haunts (2020–ongoing) (Figures 1–8), I modelled scenes in a 3D application that recreated the spaces of notable historic performance art that had occurred in interior spaces. The historic performances were selected according to the spaces they had employed and how they mirrored the current confined circumstances of studios or homes to which artists were limited to during the pandemic. The 3D scenes were created based on photographic and video documentation of the historic performances sourced via the internet. Where visual detail was unclear in documentation owing to quality, elements within scenes were interpreted through a combination of historical research and speculation. When completed, the 3D scenes were exported as digital still images and 3D models to be distributed as media kits designed to enable artists to create networked performances. →

Figure 1: A Haunting of Haunts' recreation of the René Block Gallery employed in Joseph Beuys’ performance I Like America and America Likes Me (1974).

The title A Haunting of Haunts is based on Jacques Derrida’s term hauntology, a portmanteau of haunting and ontology. As a concept, Derrida’s term refers to the ghost-like return of elements from the past. Originally employed in relation to Marxism and Western society, hauntology has been increasingly connected with practices that employ various forms of media (Fisher 2014). In A Haunting of Haunts, the haunting refers to both the spaces and the media, in particular video, of historic performance art. By employing the images from kits as ‘virtual’ backgrounds in video call applications and through chroma keying in streaming video, or by employing the 3D models in ‘virtual’ worlds, gaming environments, and ‘virtual’ or augmented reality, artists can appear out of their confined living or studio spaces in another space. In doing so, they ‘virtually’ occupy the original spaces of the historic performances; they assume the role of the absent artists who originally performed them through an avatar (3D, photographic or otherwise), and are in effect haunting their haunts. However, in turn, the spaces of historical performance art, as well as its photographic and video media, become an integral haunting part of the newly created networked performances.

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