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.

Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 2020 Remix (2020) (Video 2) by Patricia Brace explores the emergence of social media dance videos during the pandemic, what has colloquially been called social disdancing, and their correlation with early performance and video art. Brace’s performance employs A Haunting of Haunts’ kit for Bruce Nauman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) (Figure 2). The kit’s scene features Nauman’s studio space containing a square on its floor outlined by masking tape. By compositing video of herself and the digital still image from the kit through chroma keying, Brace ‘virtually’ transposes herself from confinement to Nauman’s studio. In Nauman’s original performance, one of a series for which Nauman did at times employ music (presumably from the radio that is clearly visible at the back right-hand side of the studio) and which have been compared with dancing and exercise (Burgon 2016), he walks in an exaggerated manner around the square. Serving as both an act of dancing and exercise, Brace interprets Nauman’s walk to contemporary dance music that is characteristic of social disdancing and has had its tempo slowed down. While Nauman took visual prompts from the spatial demarcation of the square to navigate his studio physically, Brace navigates Nauman’s studio by referring to the composite video displayed on a screen out of view while moving within her own actual space. The resulting performance space is a hybridized visual one composed of Nauman and Brace’s spaces, what Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz have referred to as an image as place a “composite-image space” (Durland 1987: 166), and Brace’s avatar is a ghost within it who is not fully aware of its physicality. The music’s tempo serves to reinforce the care and sometimes awkward coordination that is required by Brace in such a space, and the square she navigates becomes a metaphor for the condition of confinement during the pandemic (Brace 2020).

Video 2: Patricia Brace, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 2020 Remix (2020). Courtesy of the artist. Music CC Infinity Music.

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