festival of intervention

The term "Postmodernism" is somewhat worn out and exceptionally imprecise. However, it can be useful if, on a working basis, we assume it defines the state in which one gives up the value-based division into more and less modern art. True, its combination with the concept "performance" may sound illogical, if one was to assume the point of view of, e.g., Dick Higgins (see the text The Post-cognitive Era), for whom the Postmodernist era began in about 1958 and, accordingly, all performances are Postmodernist. Higgins has some argument there, however, taking into account the consciousness of many artists in this field of art, it would be safer to consider the late 70's as the beginning of the Postmodernist optics. From its viewpoint, the discovery of a new area of art ceased to be a value per se.

Given all the variety of actions, within the "Interscop" there appeared two current, interrelated performance trends. It is descriptive to call them "current"; it is neither positive, nor negative valuation of these trends. What turns out in both is going beyond the pure exposition formula.

On the one hand, it is the presence of elements making it resemble happening, out  of which performance has emerged: the presence of some interference with the attitudes and behaviour of the audience (witnesses) of the performance. In the 1970's, the performance authors abandoned this happening-like area of influence, discerning, to put it briefly, that the shock-attacked audience demonstrated in its direct reaction mainly passivity based on confusion or schematic responses - in fact, defensive ones.

The present return to provoking external public reactions has a more private, individual character. Within the framework of their actions, Alain-Martin Richard or Antoinette de Robien turned to persons treated individually with a gesture or question. Short replies were included in the whole which was much larger than the sum total of these reactions. In turn, Marek Janiak proposed to every person separately that he/she might experience specific impact of the performance operator. In this respect, the external reactions of those present (in contrast to the internal ones) were the background in terms of meaning, almost the margin of the action.

Actions by Alistair MacLennan were at the border between performance and happening. However, the "historic meeting" by Richard Martel, carried out even in the 1960's, called a guided tour by Alan Kaprow, was already a classic kind of happening. The audience following the author created, even if not out of its own will, the aura of significance and absurd around his story.

Another orientation entailed including staged behaviour in performances, behaviour which purists tend to call a negative name of "acting". I am not foreign to this viewpoint -however, one can be more liberal. Over the last decades performance artists have worked out the means specific only of this genre to such an extent that some lack of homogeneity does not entail the concepts becoming vague any longer. It is not a result of uncosciousness, but of choice. Exhibitions by Valentin Torrens, Jan Świdziński or Frances Leeming were of this nature. Apart from the bravura of Torrens, the "acting" was kept under control, and, moreover, it worked in principle as "quotations", reproducing some behavioural cliches.

The turning to using the happening-like or paratheatrical means of expression is not, in contrast to what one can hear sometimes, the result of the exhaustion of the possibilities of pure performance, but an expression of the need to bring some values back to one's mind. In this context, I dare say, the slogan "Postmodernism -the culture of exhaustion" is not apt.

It is comletely erroneous to call two of related trends outlined here new ones. Exactly, they are t o p i c a I, being symptoms of the present.