[Summer 2021]

The artist’s body, a camera, and various performative interactions
by Didier Morelli

“The body art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological ‘anchor’ of its indexicality.”
— Amelia Jones
Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998)

#SteveGiasson. You probably know Steve Giasson. You are likely to have seen his actions in print or somewhere online. If you are lucky, you may have witnessed them in person. They often leave a lasting impression even in their simplicity: maintaining a pose during a vernissage, staying close to the ground in a white-walled studio, kissing Daniel Buren’s flags, or being heavy atop a mound of snow. These performances are documented on social media, on Giasson’s personal website, and on certain artist-run-centre portals. They are also hidden in the pages of specialized art magazines and sometimes garner media attention in local newspapers. They are brightly lit on computer screens, tablets, or smartphones. Stopping to consider what Giasson is saying with his body and his carefully chosen context in these events, one is struck by a mix of glee and awe.

In addition to producing remarkable visuals, Giasson’s performances for the camera are a trove of inspiring propositions. He uses the basic score for each action as its title and then spirals out from there with layers of citations. This shrouds the work in references while simultaneously luring audiences into the inner reasoning of his mind. In Berlin, he is pictured being distractedly desperate, tucked under the monumental Marx-Engels forum. In Lac Saint-Jean, he appears watching over nothing, standing atop a lifeguard tower. In Mexico City, he takes on being superfluous, re-enacting Francis Alÿs’s Turista (1994), and in New York at the Dia Art Foundation he is stretching against a work of art with the support of a basalt stone by Joseph Beuys. In all of these interventions, Giasson is playful yet precise, intuitive but calculating, historically savvy while looking toward unknown horizons.

#perfinvisibles. New Invisible Performances was presented by Le Lieu, Centre en art actuel in Quebec City. For Giasson, who started a series of micro-interventions titled Invisible Per­formances in 2015 at Dare-Dare in Montreal, this is an ongoing dialogical process that pairs art history, wordplay, and movement. Each performance is enacted in public or in private and starts from a score, derived from a work of art, so that it stands alone or evokes other minimalist enigmatic gestures.

Performed by Giasson and documented by Daniel Roy and Martin Vinette, this exploratory process places the artist’s body, a camera, and various performative acts in relation to each other. Building on the premise that a “photograph of per­formance is the product of a break carried out by the photographic apparatus in the very action of the perfor­mance,” Giasson uses the self-fashioned, often fictional aura of the artist, the artist’s works, and the art world to concoct suggestive live tableaus and dense indexical universes.

For New Invisible Performances, Giasson approached the COVID-19 pandemic closure of cultural institutions in Quebec by sharing close to 110 new performative actions for the camera starting on May 1, 2020. This ongoing virtual exhibition, presented throughout the year on social media and grouped on a dedicated website, closes on April 30, 2021. The du­rational series represents a year in lockdown, translating socio-political and cultural events into stilled moments, assembled objects, and other compositions. All of the photographs invoke one or more cultural markers, transposing and reperforming mythical canons or more obscure figures, and also give life to inorganic material with a certain animism. Making these insular histories accessible, Giasson crafts an imagery that is visually rich, deeply researched, always incisive, and sometimes lighthearted.

#appropriationart. New Invisible Performances embodies a premise that Anne Bénichou discusses in Ciel Variable’s special issue “Performance”: “It seems to me, however, that perfor­mance images may take the place of scripts.” Giasson redeploys the connection between the indicial and notational aspects of performance art documents that started in the 1960s. His actions re-mediates the image while questioning the contextual underpinnings of conceptual art, which initially insisted on a pure sign. Appropriation invites transformations of the original artwork by introducing ulterior histories, new theories, and the fallibility of memory and technology. The veracity of the archive is continually disputed and the integrity of the photograph as the marker of a unique moment in time is disturbed.

Invisible Performance Nº217 (Being one’s own model) encapsulates the looping inner logic of Giasson’s world-building. Posted on the @nouvellesperfinvisibles Instagram account on February 9, 2021, Giasson is caught naked standing in the corner of a white-walled room, holding up a black-and-white portrait of himself that obscures his own face. For the purposes of social media, a black square covers his genitals – which is not the case on his website, although a “nudity” warning is included. Below the main heading, translated into English, French, and Spanish, Giasson offers three subtitles: “After Francesca Woodman. About Being My Model, Provi­dence, Rhode Island. 1976. After Elina Brotherus. About Being My Model. 2017. After Steve Giasson. Invisible Performance no. 200 (Still being here). November 29, 2020.” Cycling between a self-portrait by Francesca Woodman, a restaging by Elina Brotherus, and a deviation into the anterior Invisible Performance Nº200 (Still being here) from which the headshot is taken, the piece interweaves artistic corpuses to create new conceptual constellations. Expanding and collapsing the archive, lifting it off of the two-dimensional page and giving its historicity volume and mass, Invisible Performance Nº217 oscillates between the then and now of performance.

Invisible Performance Nº165 (Acting like an artist) re-enacts Artist (1971) by William Wegman. Published on August 20, 2020, it depicts Giasson sitting at the base of a white wall, legs outstretched, holding a wide brush covered in black paint. A small rectangular canvas with a few successive brushstrokes hangs in the top right corner of the photograph. An open pint of paint rests to the right of Giasson, who seems downcast, gazing toward the ground. The punctum of the image is his paint-slathered mouth, an anatomical void that evokes both deep existential emptiness and overflowing excess. In the original black-and-white photograph, Wegman captures the zeitgeist of the early 1970s with his provocatively minimalist title and the sculptural properties of a frozen performative moment. Giasson re-mediates and re-actualizes the reference in his coloured rendition, gesturing toward contemporary discourses with the hashtags #censure #autocensure.

#gaymale #whiteman #whiteprivilege. The contemporary politics of the image – more precisely, the policing of content by social media platforms – is one of the many areas in which New Invisible Performances employs the archive to confront social mores and normalized codes. In Invisible Performance Nº221 (Lacking of color), published on February 19, 2021, Giasson juxtaposes Ion Grigorescu’s The Ritual Bath (1979), Yves Klein’s Untitled Anthropometry (1960), and Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965). In this series of twenty-five images, Giasson gradually covers his nude body in International Klein Blue paint with his fingers. Queering these events, he formally and conceptually unsettles their heteronormative origins and legacies through an act of disidentification. Despite a black square covering his genitals and the privilege he is afforded as a cisgender white male navigating the public sphere, Invisible Performance Nº221 was flagged as sexually explicit on Instagram and removed. Unlike @yves_klein_artist and @yvesklein_archives, two popular accounts in which uncensored photographs of Klein’s female nudes in Anthropometry are freely shown, Giasson’s contemporary gay male body, with all of its natural imperfections and fleshly realness, was seen as disruptive and suppressed, so it remains invisible.

The exploitation of one’s own likeness for political and economic gain surfaces in Invisible Performance Nº186 (Selling oneself). Parodying Ivanka Trump’s absurd Twitter post by holding a can of GOYA beans in front of a white curtain, Giasson harnesses re-enactment to trouble more current images. The body art event of Ivanka’s ridiculous public relations stunt, which is mirrored by various other happenings from the Trump presidency, “needs the photograph to confirm its having happened,” to quote Amelia Jones. Giasson’s response recognizes how the photograph also “needs the body art event as an ontological ‘anchor’ of indexicality” – in this case, the Trump children’s dependency on their likeness as carrier of authenticity, power, and wealth. Unmooring the photograph and its context, dislodging it from its signs and symbols, Giasson links today’s image-obsessed culture to histories of conceptual art. Caught in the act of constructing the self and the audience, he revels in the aftermath of performatives caught on camera.

 

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Didier Morelli’s research focuses on the relationship between the built environment and the kinesthetic nature of performing bodies. A writer, cultural critic, and visual artist based in Montreal, his work was recently published in Art Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, Esse, and TDR: The Drama Review. He is currently completing a PhD in performance studies at Northwestern University in Chicago.

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For conceptual artist and poet Steve Giasson, ideas and language are primary sources, followed by images and shapes. The final work varies depending on the intention and creative context, giving rise to photographs and videos, writings and performance, and sculptural micro-interventions. Adopting the position of an engaged and deadpan artist, he favours fragile, ephemeral materials. He is currently completing his PhD in practical art studies at UQAM and is represented by the Edmund Felson Gallery in Berlin. www.stevegiasson.com – www.performancesinvisibles.com

 

[ See the magazine for the complete article and more images : Ciel variable 117 – SHIFTED ]