2025 reflections on an unsanctioned performative practice responsive to public space

 
‘subway stories and other shorts’  1978-9 / remastered 2024
reflections on an unsanctioned performative practice responsive to public space

 

During the latter part of the 1970’s I practiced as an artist in an ad hoc performative manner in urban public space. The work utilized the deployment of recognizable body oriented props with which were carried out simple repetitive tasks. Both the choice of object and associative task were directly responsive to conditions of the chosen location. What survives of this ephemeral practice are the super 8 films and b&w photographs. My understanding of this early performative work had remained unexamined even as the work continued to have a life of its own as film over the following 5 decades, almost exclusively to a European audience. The recent re-editing and mastering of a more complete inventory of performative works from this time offered an opportunity to consider this practice to a fuller extent. To this end I have gathered the following thoughts so that one may better come to reflect on the work. I will be focusing specifically on the films as, as a time based medium, they provide the most succinct chronicle of the performative dimensions the work, while at the same time hold their own as film succinct in themselves.

 
the films—history and technical information
 

The film documentation of unsanctioned performative acts in crowded public locations, was shot between 1977-79. In 1980 a selection of the original super 8 films were screened once in Cologne, Germany, after which the films were packed away and not publicly presented again until the 1998 exhibition ‘ann messner: subway stories and other shorts’ curated by Nina Felshin and presented at Dorsky Projects in New York. Within that exhibition, the films were projected full wall and sequenced back to back as a loop. The exhibition included b&w photographs of the subway story acts along with additional non-performative works carried out in the same spirit in public space. The exhibition received positive reviews in Art Forum, Art in America, Arts International, the New York Times and Village Voice.

On this occasion ‘subway stories’, had been transferred from the original S8 film to analog 3/4 beta tape. That tape was subsequently transferred as digital technology had progressed, producing an acceptable, although second generation, digital master. The 3/4 beta tape had been exhibited only once for the Dorsky exhibition in the US, whereas the second generation digital copies were widely screened in Europe (specifically in Germany and the Netherlands), and over the following 25 years developed a supportive following within the underground culture scene, which persists to this day. Most recently in 2023 the original S8 (and a small amount of 16mm) raw footage was directly transferred—technology now providing for HD transfer directly from the master film—producing a facsimile much higher in quality and true to the original media. 

Included in this recent transfer were several additional performative works from the 1970’s that had as a personal choice remained ‘unknown’ and are now included within the data base of the performative work from the 1970’s. By this time 45 years had passed since those public encounters documented in the films had taken place.

The newly mastered edition of films of performative works, including the until recently ‘unknown’ works, were screened under the title ‘subway stories and other shorts’ at Metrograph in New York in October 2024. This was surprisingly only the second time this body of work has been screened in the US (aside from ‘stealing’, a single screen projection, which was included in the exhibition ‘lifting: theft in art’ curated by Atopia Projects in Fort Worth, Texas in 2008).

 
revisiting the archive—2024
 

Going back into the archive of this early performative practice almost five decades later with the task of compiling a more complete data base of the primary documents, renewed my curiosity about the early desire to test the conventional boundaries within public space; and to put into perspective my abrupt curtailing and dismissal of that quasi-guerilla performative practice that I had initially found so compelling and its inevitable impact on the work that followed; and finally how to measure the films that survive which remain distinctly different from that ephemeral practice of public encounter which had been my primary intention. 

 
developing a practice—1970’s
 

I do not have, nor have I ever been interested in developing, a signature style, neither have I felt the need to cultivate a signature attitude. Predictability would have been counter to how and why I maintain a creative practice. This early work developed out of encounters or situations where I experienced the impulse to re-configure, to somehow shift perceptions of that encounter or experience. I was searching to engage in an active poetics of subversion with the raw encounters that reality offered. I was attracted to the ordinary everyday, aspects of which I found hypnotically banal. These were the impulses out of which the performative works of the 70’s developed.

The work was accomplished simply with a performer and a cameraperson. The structural simplicity facilitated the guerilla-like agility that affords the work its direct situational responsiveness. Likewise this is mimicked in the editing style of the film, with the simple use of the full roll un-cut reality, with no special effects. I consistently chose to self-edit and master the films without assistance beyond the technical digitization of the original raw footage, as it was in a similar method of direct trial and error that the performative acts and their filming took place.

 
influences
 

My exploration of the spatial dynamics of urban public space through an engagement of anonymous performative acts developed organically, prompted by the convergence of multiple factors. I had grown disillusioned by a cumbersome studio practice of building interior spaces one could physically journey through with a gnawing sense of isolated disengagement from a peopled world. The built environments were not too far removed by design, although not in scale, from the spatial configurations of a subway system. I had been the only live-in tenant in a midsized commercial building in business heavy Lower Manhattan. The building workday did not coincide with the worknight schedule I maintained. Gradually my curiosity shifted to the workday initiating physical activity within the building itself, and eventually to considering how some form of public in-person engagement might provide a direction from which to proceed. Entering the commute space as provocateur became the initiating act. 

The experimental work of the early 1970’s was easily accessible through low cost b&w publications (art rite, avalanche, etc) that served to record the more ephemeral often radical directions of culture to which I had become a convert. Two performative works in specific were influential: Acconci’s 1969 subversive ‘Following Piece’ and the encapsulated circling of Abramović and Ulay’s 1977 ‘Relationship in Movement’. Both works, although they took place in public space, were hermetically sealed from engagement with a public outside of an art context. I remember questioning that set apartness that culture appeared to traffic in. 

I had met several young German artists through the PS1 studio exchange who had studied under Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy and with whom I discovered an affinity. They were keen on breaking through the barriers between creative production and everyday social life, and held somewhat unstructured concepts that culture as social production could be linked to societal change. In rapid succession I stopped the studio practice and began to work in a performative manner in public space. Youthful camaraderie fostered a lack of concern about possible consequences resulting from the interventionist practice. Collectively we formed a small team of rapid tech support and although the conceptual framing of these early works retained individual authorship, the work was dependent on this assistance. In the future I was on occasion to work within fully collaborative structures, but in this early period I preferred my individual autonomy as I developed a personal language that could capture public experience. 

Organizing for the work was unpredictable and accompanied by urgency (most likely displaced nervousness). Perhaps messy but it was inspiring to work in this manner, in a spirit of ad hoc generosity, assisting according to need rather than contractual clarity. The quality of the camerawork is not insignificant to the final outcome of the films and photographs, I was fortunate to have colleagues who were skilled in addition to being generous.

 
public space—the live encounter
 

Congested urban space exemplifies the phenomena of pack behavior. The pack moves anonymously in dense compliance, holding its unified structure based on a behavioral contract. Within the pack, there remain individual spheres of autonomy, free will and an underlying tension that this unity of structure is in fact precarious.

I was attracted to urban space that was in some aspects transgressive or intrusive to bodily instinct. These were spaces within which, through simple and repetitive tasks, with or without a body oriented prop, I could affect the public’s perceptual understandings of the conditions of that space. The process of ‘working’ in crowded public space was provisional and chaotic. There was a demanding intensity in the ultra-crowded spaces not only physical but psychic. Within the highly charged space of containment, we needed to accommodate random behavior while maintaining both the performative task and the recording in sync for a duration (duration defined by one roll of super 8 film set at 18 fps, as shooting slower speed increased film time). Each action required a single take of film, keeping the resulting footage as true to experience as possible—real time is not a cut and paste but rather a continuous run— often requiring multiple attempts to assure the visual integrity of the resulting recording. Within the sphere of the action the public was spontaneous in random response, often, however, simply ignoring. In ‘frogman’ I am both assisted and pushed as I loose my balance to the sway of the moving train throughout the film. Laughter is clearly audible above the signature screech of the NYC subway.

The real-life durational quality of the acts, once translated to film transition from a physical but fleeting reality to an ephemeral but fixed time based medium. The performance with its spatial reality and unpredictable random audience is over, and in its place the film, with its own spatial experience within the frame and time based qualities. The two are remarkably different. The risk encountered in the work is durational within the live event alone. The film viewer is passive, not a live witness with agency and the possibility to act.

For the public the performative actions were experienced as unanticipated one time encounters within the continuum of a random day. The films provide a repeatable impression, they have replaced the live performative act and now represent the work. It should not be overlooked, however, that the ephemeral duration of the live physical performance itself with its direct in-person audience is at the core of the meaning of this work. The live event and the residual films remain separate, although linked. What we have for the record are the films (and the photographs), they have come to represent in a very different medium the performative acts, acts which in the continuum of time no longer exist. The performances in their physicality took place at a specific time in a specific place witnessed by a live random but specific audience. At the time they had the impact of unexpected lived experience. That live event was impermanent and importantly cannot be re-enacted. I have always felt re-enactments of historical performance trafficked in interests that denied the reality that time based performative practices are unique in that they are specific at the time of occurrence, impermanent and fleeting.

 
the camera—is present
 

In the work the recording lens is always present and as such so the cameraperson. Both should be acknowledged as a second actor in the configuration of the performative space. For the film audience the work is seen from the point of view of the recording lens. We see the subject as the cameraperson recorded, now removed from the reality of the uncontrollable surroundings at the time of recording. In viewing the films we do not experience the camera from the perspective of inclusion as does the public at the time of the performative work. The cameraperson as an actor, becomes a subject in their own right. It is their presence that provides the anchor, tethering the destabilizing unanchored performer within a construct of social order. The camera declares the performer the subject of its gaze and in its declaration  infers the performer as legitimate. There is a confirmed relationship between the two, the performer and the cameraperson. Lacking that mutual association both the performer and the cameraperson become individually suspect, possibly threatening and vis versa vulnerable to threat. 

The lens defines the visual field, the film audience cannot see beyond that framed boundary. The cameraperson has agency within the live act to define the parameters of that visual field, keeping steady the boundary of the camera lens. In ‘balloon’ the soft expanding membrane shape shifts organically attached to the performer’s breath as it expands within the hard fixed boundary of the frame. Interior compression increases as does tension constrained by the set parameter of the frame. We anticipate the breaking point as the balloon fills the screen . . . the film ends. This abrupt premature end was not an editing decision, rather the roll of film came to its end in the camera, the breaking point was not captured on film. The ending of the film is perfect.

 
camera as mirror as doppelgänger
 

In ‘stealing’ the recording camera(s) both mirror and mimic. There is the surveillance camera, a panoptic closed circuit apparatus live feeding the transgressive act to a b&w monitor suspended nearby. The flickering resolution is bad, the shirts being ‘stolen’ just as awful. There are two live camerapersons—one records this same closed circuit monitor from a distance, the other records directly the ‘act of stealing’. In the final double screen projection we see on one screen the recording of the monitor transmitting the act live at the time and on the other screen we see in sync the direct recording of the act. 

Live, both camerapersons, doppelgänger interlocutors, expose and interfere with the surveillance apparatus enforcement of social order. ‘stealing’, the double screened film, provides evidence of that interference through both the filmed surveillance record of the transgressive act and the direct filming of the steal. Both recordings are evidence of witness thus establishing both camerapersons collusion. ‘stealing’ the film is a mirrored double exposure of complicity and as such itself a doppelgänger.

‘traffic’ similarly borrows from the structure of the panopticon lens of control. The lone camera person atop the parapet, motionless sharpshooter style, filming the intersection below. The lone camera performer below centered within the intersection tracking vehicle to vehicle as they pass quickly from multiple directions, the lens now and again piercing the bubble of the automobile as the driver waits to move on. The two cameras mirror each other in that they are recording in sync, and when viewed as double screen they provide systematic tracking. The film appears prescient in its rudimentary surveillance structure as precursor to the live traffic webcams so commonplace today. 

In ‘frogman’ both the camera and frog person move in unison through the train—cameraperson, lens trained on the approaching dark figure, moves backwards. It is the cameraperson that first announces their lock-step presence as he enters backing into each car moving methodically through the train. What the live public experiences is not what the film audience sees—the live audience witnesses a cameraperson stepping backwards, followed shortly by the figure head to foot in black neoprene. The camera’s presence confirms frog person as a subject and not an untethered sample of psychic instability. In the film we see the frog person alone stepping forward towards a receding lens, subway car through subway car, trapped within the frame.

 
conclusion
 

In 1980 I ended the performative practice of working live in crowded public space. I could no longer tolerate the intensity of the gaze while immersed within a pool of anonymous humanity and had begun to question the objectives of this form of activity. It seemed the practice had taken on an automatic quality, that I was less enthusiastic in pursuing. It was not until 1998 with curator Nina Felshin’s persistence that I became open to reengaged with that body of work—20 years had provided the objectivity needed to evaluate the accomplishment of the work.

I had known at the time, in 1980, that the anonymous performative practice had been not only challenging but complicated, and I hit hard a wall of critical doubt. Partially attributable to the insecurities of a young artist but I had real questions about the social implications of the hit and run style that needed time and distance to work through and develop from. This would ultimately resolve in the non-performative temporary public projects of the mid to late 1980’s, significantly with ‘meteor’ sited on the median triangle at Times Square, my first permitted but still temporary projects in the public realm.  

Looking back at the work now I find the public to have been very generous in response to my uninvited and at times invasive presence. You can see evidence of camaraderie between strangers in the films. I find the work withstands the test of time perhaps also colored by some nostalgia for the 1970’s in New York. I also have come to admire that young artist who was so committed and hopeful and whose vulnerabilities at that time got the better of her. That is if nothing else beautifully human.

ann messner     2025