On Performance, As Usual

A one-year project, A Year of Roadkill is a conceptual work engaging witness and empathy, repetition and duration; all certainly related to my performance practice. The publication is a small document of the work; both the project and its record are scaled to fit inside my much too busy workdays leading a university art department.

At the link ^ read all about the recently recent.

In their beautifully crafted book, the authors document and critically question the 10 years of their collaboration across time, across national and continental borders, and against cultural expectations. Playful and poetic in their practice, Longva and Carpenter explore basic human needs in a variety of settings, often physically tasking. They pose questions about the rare and raw predicament of being a vulnerable and fragile human in a world in crisis. —Pavel Drábek, Best Publication Award curator with jurors Donatella Barbieri and Aziza Kadyri

The PQ Best Publication Award 2023 was announced as part of the awards ceremony at the Prague Quadrennial festival in Prague, CZ, 13 June 2023. On stage with the Jurors (L to R): Pavel Drábek, Aziza Kadyri, Terese Longva, Laurel Jay Carpenter and Donatella Barbieri.

Introducing the book at the Shortlisted Author’s Roundtable, PQTalks, the evening before the awards ceremony.

TENDER CUSPS is a new series of performative video and printed textile works. Informed by the artist’s thirty-year practice in visual performance, the exhibition reconsiders the body in our current era, extending intimacy and duration to domestic material processes and digital technologies. This particular body: white, female, fleshy and aging, attempts to suspend time and prolong the tipping point: the moment right before collapse, dangling, almost falling, almost overflowing. During the months of pandemic anxiety and countless self-tests, the artist noticed a large white spot forming in her throat. The doctor said it was of no concern, just a seed under the surface, gradually getting coated. The image of becoming like an oyster, the body under strain producing pearls, inspired two body-based videos and a series of textile works with beaded embroidery. Interior images of the artist’s own body—including a capture of the white spot and various medical scans from breast to eye to brain—are pigment ink printed on oxford cloth, lightly altered with kitchen solvents, and hand-stitched with glass beads and actual pearls, indicating the vulnerability, familiarity, and lusciousness of the flaws within. The exhibition also includes an edition of diptych Riso prints, as transportable and affordable companion pieces to ‘Horizon,’ a 5.5-meter (18-foot) textile work. http://www.oberwelt.de/

Pleased that our pandemic project is still stretching toward discourses around practice-based research, feminism and equity. Thanks for the nod of recognition, PQ! Our work here is not yet done!

Prague Quadrennial Best Publication Award Short List.

“The Norwegian publication '10 Together: Performances by Longva+Carpenter 2010–2020' (PABlish Forlag) is a beautiful and even moving account documenting and reflecting on a decade of collaborative work between artists Laurel Jay Carpenter (USA) and Terese Longva (Norway) that they realised across half a dozen countries in the Northwestern sphere.

[…]

Of particular importance are the works that examine feminist, post-colonial, decolonial, intercultural and ecological perspectives, given the current state of affairs. Furthermore, the presence of practice-based publications, such as '10 Together' […] in the “Competing” list, alongside academic works, is equally significant. This inclusion has the potential to foster a more equitable environment and horizontal space…”

Pleased to learn that our book, 10 Together: Performances by Longva+Carpenter has been longlisted for the Best Publication Award at the Prague Quadrennial. Honored to be in such a diverse and international group of fellow author/editors foregrounding Performance Design in the expanded field. Here's a throwback image to 2013 to celebrate--that's the fabric for the dresses on the book cover!

A new art newsletter, covering the previous 3 years, is now available. New work! New methods! New thinking! And a reflection on timelining a life. (Are we there yet?)

10 Together: Performances by Longva+Carpenter is an artist-edited monograph of collaborative practice in durational visual performance, providing a chronology of work presented from 2010 to 2020 in galleries and public spaces, in city centers and small towns from the rural USA to islands in Norway, with stops between in Finland, Poland, Germany and Czechia. With vibrant images and descriptions of each work in English and Norwegian, the performances are made accessible to a public beyond the initial viewers at each site. The publication provides an international, intersectional and practice-focused survey of the collaboration with insightful essays which detangle and designate the artists' creative methodologies as vital to current performance discourse.

ORDER NOW! longvacarpenter.com

and please join us: BOOK RELEASE PREVIEW: August 20, Between Sky & Sea performance festival

25 November: Honored to have been in the company of artists Francesca Steele, Traci Kelly, EL Putnam, Elizabeth Short and Lady Helena Vortex to share experiences of the cusp: spaces and states of mid-transition. We each shared our understandings of cusps in our work or body or world: if we define them, how we manage them, what modes and methods we use to derive meanings from them. The idea for the on-line conversation, Upon the Cusp arrived as I was reconsidering performance practices in the Covid-era, and experimenting to extend live and embodied practices to digital realms. This transition of personal creative practices, reflected against the shifting socio-political landscape, catalyzed a sharpened awareness of the cusp as its own experience: we had departed, but not yet arrived. I was curious to delve additional aspects of art and life in the midst of transition, from the micro to the macro—including partisanship and the pandemic, midlife and the middle path, gesture and gestalt.

‘Say Ahhh’ is an up-close, 28-minute performance for video. Wooden depressor pushed to tongue, pin light searching the frame of the wide-open mouth, I allow the camera to expose the cavity of palate and throat and tonsils in a messy test of self-diagnosis, revealing the site of anxiety, the cause of this extended isolation.

Drawing on a long practice of durational performance, ‘Say Ahhh’ pushes up to the limits of the body—jaw tightening, breathing labored, throat filling and becoming quickly red and raw—as the visual becomes increasing abstracted, and the sound aligns with a chant or drone. I encourage all types of engagement: perhaps coming and going along the timeline, similar to how the public encounters the performances I usually make over 8 or 10 or 15 hours, or staying with it: a surrender to subtle shifts in a tight frame and a reassessment of proximity and sensuality, scale and scope.

In reconsidering the intersection between the live and the mediated, performance and its document, I use this work to till the lineage of Peggy Phelan’s purist ontology of performance toward Philip Auslander’s redefinition of liveness, and further reference Laura Mark’s collapsing of the visual and the haptic. As a visual performer, I have particular spatial, durational and embodied experience, but I have been video-resistant in my own practice, so in this suspended Covid time I began looking back in order to move forward, and this piece certainly pays tribute to both Annie Sprinkle’s 1990 live performance ‘Public Cervix Announcement’ as well as VALIE EXPORT’s 2007 video work in which her vocal cords were recorded with a medical camera, ‘the voice as performance, act and body.’

I am thankful for this opportunity with the Performance Research Network at Newcastle University to uncover new possibilities in my practice, and from within my lineage, as I explore what liveness means now.

"After all, monumentalizing a woman, in any form, is still a radical act."

I quote myself, above, and feel it with clarity and certainty these days after the US Primary Election results.

I'll be performing at the Performance Art Oslo festival in late November. As part of PAO's mission, they interview and archive commentary from the invited artists, to build a significant resource, over many years, of first-hand information about process and procedure by performers. Here is a peek at my short interview. (photo: Arto Polus)

The new art journal "Afterimages" out of the The Academy of Fine Art in Łódź, Poland is launched this month. It is huge and gorgeous! The premiere issue focuses on fashion in the expanded field and includes a stunning 10-page spread of my recent work using the sculptural garment in performance, with some tendrils reaching back to older work too. The essay I authored is titled, "I Live in this Dress: Materiality and Identity in Visual Art Performance." It's been translated to Polish, so here's a look at just the first overleaf. Thank you to editor (and fellow performer) Marta Ostajewska for the invitation to contribute.

Comparing works from the span of my career, ‘Sliding Scale: Oversized Dresses and Small Moments in Visual Art Performance’ traces the elasticity and slippage in the consideration of scale through a reflective analysis of the sculptural wearable. The body serves as a standard measure; the oversized garments in Red Crest (2003), Again with Gusto (2009) and Of Wanting (2017) each adjust the scale of the performer with a linear extension from the back, connecting and conflating the body with larger space and site. The woman extends, connecting to architecture, to earth and to the surrounding community. In these performance garments, she is also tethered, contained and burdened. Yet, her determination transcends the circumstance, overlapping and inverting multiple measures—shifting scale to scope, and revealing subtle gradations across additional aspects of each performance, from spectacle to intimacy, archetype to identity, and self to collective. This is the sliding scale of scale: the range of small to big, equally balanced, and big to small, revealing how scale, in its relationality, can never be fixed.