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.

References

Acconci, Vito. 1970. Trademarks, performance photographs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

Aquila, Simotron. 2020. Have You Ever Been a Human Being? - Simotron Aquila, GitHub <https://github.com/Garrettlynch/a-haunting-of-haunts/blob/master/performances.md> [accessed 16 March 2022]

Auge, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso)

Auslander, Philip. 2006. ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 28.3: 1–10

Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge)

Auslander, Philip. 2014. Surrogate Performances: Performance Documentation and the New York Avant-Garde, ca. 1964–74. Walkerart.org <http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/surrogate-performances> [accessed 20 March 2022]

Benjamin, Walter. 2007. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 217–51

Beuys, Joseph. 1974. I Like America and America Likes Me, performance, René Block Gallery, New York

Brace, Patricia. 2020. Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 2020 Remix – Patricia Brace, GitHub <https://github.com/Garrettlynch/a-haunting-of-haunts/blob/master/performances.md> [Accessed 16 March 2022]

Burgon, Ruth. 2016. Pacing the Cell: Walking and Productivity in the Work of Bruce Nauman Tate Papers, 26 <https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/26/pacing-the-cell> [Accessed 20 March 2022]

Curry, Andrew. 2007. Dresden’s World-Class Art Gallery Duplicates Itself Online, Wired, 13 September, <https://www.wired.com/2007/09/gallery-dresden/> [Accessed 16 March 2022]

Davis, Douglas. 1995. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991–1995)’, Leonardo, 28.5: 381–86

Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press)

Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Durland, Steven. 1987. ‘Defining the Image as Place: A Conversation with Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz, and Gene Youngblood’, in Social Media Archeology and Poetics, ed. by Judy Malloy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), pp. 163–77

Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books)

Horn, Rebecca. 1974–75. Scratching both Walls at Once, performance, Tate Gallery, London

Jansonn, Mathias. 2009. Interview: Orhan Kipcak (ArsDoom, ArsDoom II) (1995–2005), Gamescenes.org, 11 April <https://www.gamescenes.org/2009/11/interview-orphan-kipcak-arsdoom-arsdoom-ii-1995.html> [accessed 16 March 2022]

Lucier, Alvin. 1969. I Am Sitting in a Room, performance, MoMA, New York

Lynch, Garrett. 2012. ‘A Metaverse Art Residency: Garrett Lynch Yoshikaze “Up-in-the-Air” Second Life Residency’’, Metaverse Creativity, 2.2: 161–79

Lynch, Garrett. 2018a. ‘Exploring the Networked Image in “post” Art Practices’, Virtual Creativity, 8.2: 131–43

Lynch, Garrett. 2018b. ‘The Transformative Nature of Networks within Contemporary Art Practice’ (doctoral thesis, London South Bank University, 2018) <https://openresearch.lsbu.ac.uk/item/86v0v> [accessed 20 March 2022]

Lynch IRL, Garrett. 2020. ‘I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL)’, Scene, 8.1–2: 213–18

Lynch, Garrett and Rea Dennis. 2013. ‘Body, Space and Time in Networked Performance’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 10.1 <http://liminalities.net/10-1/remote-encounters.html> [accessed 20 March 2022]

McHugh, Gene. 2011. Post internet (Brescia: LINK Editions)

McLean, Bruce. 1971. Pose Work for Plinths I, performance, Situation Gallery, London

McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press)

Mendieta, Ana. 1973. Untitled (Rape Scene), performance, The Estate of Ana Mendieta, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

Milgram, Paul and Fumio Kishino. 1994. ‘Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays’, IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, E77-D(12): 1321–29

Museum of Contemporary Art. 1969. ‘Art by Telephone’, exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Nauman, Bruce. 1967. Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, performance, MoMA, New York

O’Dell, Kathy. 1997. ‘Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s’, Performance Research, 2.1: 73–81

Orlan. 1993. Omniprésence, performance <http://www.orlan.eu/works/performance-2/> [accessed 20 March 2022]

O’Sullivan, Simon. 2005. ‘Fold’, in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. by Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 102–04

Phelan, Peggy. 2005. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge)

Salter, Chris. 2010. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press)

Vague, Aaron (ed.). 2020. At A Distance #4 (Wichita, KS: Alastria Press)

Tip

Tip