The More You Ignore Me The Closer You Get: A Study Room Guide on socially engaged practice

Documentation from an online lecture by Ron Athey on Penetration in Live Art and Video. This lecture formed part of LADA’s 2020 Summer Programme.

Penetration – be it bodily, spiritual or sexual – is a recurring motif in Ron Athey‘s work. In this lecture, which comes as he begins work on a new project, Athey will explore the artistic potential of the contemporary post-porn movement in relation to his practice.

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

Field Notes II documents the second Summer School on Cultural Diversity and Collaborative Practice, held in July 2019.

Ron Athey is one of the most important, prolific and influential performance artists of the past four decades. Queer Communion, an exploration of Athey’s career, refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey’s performative practice and each community he engages.

Final Transmission is a book of intergenerational dialogue between artists, scholars and activists about what it means to transfer the skills, ideas and mysteries of performance through pandemic and crises.

The book is the final edition of NS, Brian Getnick and Tanya Rubbak’s 6 volume archive of performance art and community in Los Angeles.

Chump Change was produced by Aislinn Evans and features contributions by Stephen Pritchard, Raju Rage, Harry Josephine Giles, and Maz Murray (therightlube).

La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society marks a transformation from its sister book, Exercises for Rebel Artists, into a pedagogical matrix suited for use as a performance handbook and conceptual tool for artists, activists, theorists, pedagogues, and trans-disciplinary border crossers of all stripes.

Text and photographic documentation of the work of Jörg Köppl and Peter Začek.

Kindly donated as part of the Swiss Live Art Study Room Guide.

Text in German.

This book focuses on the possibility of rethinking the static model of installation and exhibition and exploring the way in which ‘performative’ approaches, adopted by artists and curators alike, can reframe the exhibition and its work as an environment subject to formal, temporal or relational transformation.

A collection of ‘found’ writings about and around Live Art that were originally published, shared, sent, spread and read between January 2015 and December 2017. Selected through recommendations and an open call for submissions, Volume 5 reflects the dynamic, international contexts that Live Art and radical performance practices occupy.

Part of Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

Using interdisciplinary cultural studies to examine the gothicism in queer art, literature, and thought the author argues that during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a queer culture has emerged that challenges and responds to traumatic marginalization by creating a distinctly gothic aesthetic.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

Follows two nurses, both named Jackie, who create biographical slideshows for patients as a tool for reflection on posthumous digital legacies, withdrawal, friendships, cultural and social loss, and memory as identity.

Part of LADA Screens 11. The film was available online 16-29 May 2016 on the LADA Screens Channel. Includes a  compilation of episodes 1 – 7, split into two files.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041).