Aaron Williamson - text for anthology Performing Knowing Goldsmiths College /Article Press 2010

THE COLLAPSING LECTURE Introduction

It seems to me that the formally delivered academic lecture, dependent upon arguably precarious conventions (someone reads aloud off a page for no discernible aesthetic purpose: often the voice is at, the delivery dull and the language of academic theory too dense for the hearer to grasp), is by and large predisposed towards collapse. As a deaf student I sat through much of my education without the provision of a sign interpreter and to counter boredom I would spend the hours observing peripheral distractions such as the lecturers body language, attitudes and interactions with their lecturing apparatus. Above all, I watched closely for those moments when the objective of the lecture to educate and inform was disrupted or stymied by intrusions, technical breakdowns, or simply by a loss of nerve; since, quite often, assertion and bluffing appeared to be required. My opinion formed that this peculiar expression of cognisant propriety the lecturers performing of knowing was often predicated upon essentially transparent forms and methods of address that, sooner or later, like any over-inated edice, are inclined to fall apart. It was

with some glee then, that over the past year I accepted several invitations to present a performance whose hidden objective was to reveal the dubious premise and scaffolding of the formal lecture, to deliberately collapse it.

Performance Theory My area of expertise as a Lecturer on BA and MA Fine Art courses is in classic performance art of the 1960s and 70s perhaps the single most subversive period of art making, constituting as it did, a concerted radical attack upon any and all artistic securities to that time. Since I am also an artist in the eld of performance, I have always experienced a vague sense of unease and ambivalence towards the formal teaching of performance theory via the lectern. Occasionally, I face a room of expectant faces and expound about performance presenting the artist with an expanding frame that can stretch out from the work to surround all of the conditions of art making and its presentation; to include or analyse them as part of its effect. This imaginary, elastic frame, I aver, can be stretched to include ie make apparent - all the processes of the arts manufacture, including the performative actions of the artist. In this specic way, performance is a useful medium through which to contest the transparent conventions through which most art traditionally comes into existence. I advise students interested in performance then, to

methodically stage an observation of the periphery to look to the edges of a piece of art to grasp and deploy its wider impact and intent. Sometimes I will be discussing this conceptual periphery and describing examples of how it might be methodically observed, whilst being only too aware that the lecture itself is antithetical to this premise. It has struck me at various instances that the performative aspect of my lecture (which, according to my sweeping assertions, must necessarily circumscribe it) was entirely ignored since, following the conventions of formal lecturing, there were many aspects to it which, whilst observable in plain view, were not intended to be signicant. As I negotiated the whiteboard, drawing diagrams and writing phrases, loading up the video projector, digressing from my notes and so on; I experienced some unease that in fact, the theory of performance art amounts to an argument precisely against the assumptions and actions that fortify the conventional lecture through which I was attempting to describe or impart them. I began to wonder what would happen if this fortication (which became ever more perceptible, or less ignorable, as time went on), fell apart, began to collapse? Quite aside from the larger question of whether performance art is in fact a teachable subject, this sensation of self-contradiction remained with me as students fell drowsy, re drills were observed, late arrivals excused, I forgot my notes, the technician had to be

fetched from afar; or as exciting moments of pedagogic discovery crashed into long periods of clock-watching. Over the years of teaching performance theory this doubt that I was presenting a warped inversion of the knowledge area - grew, largely because of the fact that I was acting from the decidedly non-performative, valorised role of a Lecturer, attempting to describe a philosophy that seemed intrinsically antithetical to that position.

Collapsing Lecture 1 - Byam Shaw School of Art (9th Oct. 2008) As a Cocheme Fellow at the Byam Shaw School of art in October 2008 I was invited to give an inaugural lecture to describe my work and artistic concerns. This was to be only 20 minutes long but the convenor, Anna Hart, suggested that I approach it as a performance as well as a lecture - a hybrid presentation. Wondering how that could be done, I was reminded of two events that seemed relevant: the rst was the infamous lecture/poetry recital by Antonin Artaud at the Vieux-Colombier theatre, Paris in January 1947. Artaud had recently been released after spending the years of the Second World War in a harrowing mental hospital at Rodez and his artistic reputation and character had reached legendary status in artistic circles during his absence. The event was billed somewhat exploitatively - as The Story of Artaud the Momo (1) and Parisian

society was out in force (a capacity audience of 900) to observe the spectacle. Witness accounts describe Artauds initial nervousness as he read stiltedly from his pages at the lectern for the rst hour. Returning to the stage after an interval he started again but accidentally scattered his large pile of notes all over the stage oor. Rather than collect them up, Artaud simply began screaming and tearing at his face and hair he spent the next hour improvising a wild performance of exclamations, chanting, vocal eruptions, crude gestures and curses that appalled the astonished audience (2). The second example that Id recalled - of a lecture that surpassed or deliberately sabotaged its formal premise - was by William Pope.L which Id attended at the Tate Modern as part of the Live Culture event in 2003. As Pope.L leant on the plinth, peering over his spectacles in time-honoured professorial manner, he spouted a stream of gibberish for 30 minutes to a baffled audience. An American artist who subverts white/racist perceptions of black people, Pope.L, it later transpired, had been speaking in a bastardised version of Klingon a dialect borrowed from Star Trek movies. Most of the audience (along with the sign interpreters) appeared to believe that he was an artist of obscure nationality, who unfortunately had not warned the curators that he would be speaking in his native language (3).

So, for my inaugural lecture at Byam Shaw, inspired by Artaud and Pope.L, I devised a short repertoire of setbacks or collapses. These included the inevitable crashing computer and malfunctioning projector; dramatising being unable to nd my reading glasses; dropping my notes a la Artaud; suffering from a pronounced coughing t; stammering through a sentence and repeating it ponderously for a minute or more; drinking copious amounts of water. . . each time approaching the lectern again as if now, having nally surmounted these insufferable setbacks, the lecture could begin. Until, nally, after 15 minutes, it was announced by the Convenor that the lecture was in fact over.

Collapsing Lecture 2 - Goldsmiths College (December 4th 2008) Invited by Jenny Doussan and Gavin Butt to present a formal lecture to Goldsmiths Colleges MA Visual Cultures Department, I decided that I wanted to continue developing The Collapsing Lecture and expand it to a full-length 1 hour-long performance. I could see how this might in fact serve to illustrate my concerns with performance art much more effectively than a conventional, illustrated lecture ever could. By now, I had become methodical in gathering material. I canvassed friends who lecture in Universities and on the conference circuit for anecdotal accounts of mishaps and misfortunes at the lectern and thus amassed a stockpile of wryly amusing tales. By far the commonest

were those involving computer incompatibilities and the ever-elusive link to the digital projector. But also, there were tales such as the one about the cocky Don who had slapped his disc on the desk of the school secretary instructing her to print his conference paper in time for its delivery an hour hence. At the lectern, in front of a packed audience, he opened the envelope containing his paper and was mortied to discover that it had been printed at 8 point-type which he was unable to read. Another story had a Conference Lecturer taking the lectern almost immediately upon arrival from the airport so acutely jetlagged, he literally fell asleep on his feet midway through and had to be startled awake. Many accounts made it sound as if the material world had reared up and refused to submit to the speakers will: whiteboard pens ran out of ink, lights dimmed down and ickered on, microphones squealed and chairs collapsed. Several of those I spoke to mentioned the curious button on the remote controls of digital projectors which, when pressed, rather than ring up the light, closes the machine down after which it then takes an excruciating 10 minutes wait to come back on (or to warm up) again. Many of my lecturing friends told of reading their pages out of sequence, having forgotten to insert page numbers, and one recounted how he had misplaced the crucial page that spelt out the central formula in his thesis after he had spent half an hour building

the audiences expectation towards it. Perhaps the most bizarre example of all though, was the ballistics expert in Orlando, USA who, during a lecture on Methods of Gun Safety, accidentally managed to shoot himself in the thigh. By now then, I was armed with a collection of mishaps that I intended to string together in order to form an hours Lecture. It was agreed with Gavin and Jenny that I would arrive 15 minutes late: a novelty in these days of University lecturers customer accountability to students. Gavin gamely took on the task of lling the 15 minutes waiting for my entrance by laboriously itemising my biography and CV to the students, all the while nervously checking his watch and mobile phone. Dragging a huge suitcase and with a copy of The Racing Times poking rakishly from my tweed jacket (with elbow patches), I nally made an entrance by nervously poking my head around the door to the packed Theatre, querying in a mumble whether anyone was expecting a Dr. Williamson? My regular sign interpreter, Chloe Edwards was present and - in on the ruse - spent the rst few minutes laboriously and repetitively introducing me via nger-spelling, after which I proceeded to work through the following script:

Collapsing Lecture Goldsmiths College, 4th December 2008

Turning up at the lecture theatre in a uster, fteen minutes late, rolled-up Racing Post in pocket. The laptop slowly starts up before crashing, (pull plug lead). The projector won't respond to the handset, request replacement batteries (Jenny). The replacement batteries don't t. The dry marker is out of ink, (tape secretly covers the nib).
Williamson Jan 24, '11, 2:11 PM Added Text Williamson Jan 24, '11, 1:57 PM Added Text Williamson Jan 24, '11, 1:58 PM Added Text

Cause alarm by attempting to marker pen the expensive-looking projection screen. Remain oblivious to mobile phone ringing in my pocket (I'd arranged with a friend for him to call me at some point during the performance). Request a jug of water - the plastic cup springs a leak. Request that oor is mopped. I can't nd my spectacles, unable to read. I drop the thick pile of notes. Find glasses but drop and tread on specs. An extended, violent coughing t, much chest beating etc. The technician nally arrives to help. Gets the projector working. But my desk top les will not open corrupted notice. Try to recall password, audibly mouth A-N-A-R-C-H-Y-I-N-T-H-E-U-K. Nervously remove jacket and jumper, before replacing them again. Discourse obscurely on the pink forms that I was told everyone was supposed to collect from the Dean's office does anyone know about this? Further improvised slapstick business with interchangeable use of water, newspaper, the pile of notes, batteries, handset, crashing computer, broken specs, ink-less pen and so on. Threaten formal complaint to college about the parlous state of their technical services. Become irate.

Conduct conversation with Chloe in sign language about last nights television (Unless there are other deaes present!) Become very sad, withdrawn/defeated. Start laughing/giggling/crying. Draw meaningless diagrams on whiteboard: vernacular vs perfunctory modes of action. After 45 minutes: Any questions?

When I reached the request for any questions after an excruciating, seemingly endless 45 minutes I asked the students whether they knew what Id been doing? They had been remarkably patient throughout, chatting while something was supposedly being xed but focussing back on me immediately when requested. After the 30 minutes mark I noticed some students were becoming amused and were trying to stie giggles, but the majority seemed to take the lectures sequence of collapses at face value. Most of the students seemed unsure as to the implication of my question but someone eventually asked tentatively whether it had in fact been (gulp) a performance? So at that point I switched to normal mode and a discussion ensued about the essential performative aspect to even the most familiar, habitual activities. It was agreed that a conscious acknowledgement of the performed dimension of any given situation was a condition of performance art per se and that attempting to lecture on the subject without deploying this consciousness was intrinsically a contradiction. 10

The subject was also raised about the inert objects/paraphernalia of the lecturing trade and that they seemed to take on a life of their own during the performance-lecture. Someone pointed out this was reminiscent of silent cinema comedy and indeed, preparing the Collapsing Lecture, I was inuenced by an article titled Slapstick Theory (4), by Brian Dillon in which he proposed: just as humans are rendered thing-like, so by the logic of slapstick things themselves start to rebel, to take on a life of their own. While we were discussing these and other ideas in the question and answer session I experienced the very curious sensation of being unable to return to the normal discursive mode upon which lecturing is premised and I kept lapsing back compulsively into the collapsing state. Brian Dillon, in the same essay cited above, mentions the slapsticians tragic impossibility of escaping oneself, describing how the subject of the pratfall or collapse experiences a curious split (which I had throughout the Collapsing Lecture) into the falling self and the observing self. This split is at the core of performance art generally, and so it was with some vindication, (I was alert to the career suicide element to the Collapsing Lecture) that I felt sure I had hit the mark precisely midway between performance and lecturing in a visceral as well as theoretical way.

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Collapsing Lecture 3 - The Whitechapel Gallery (19th June, 2009) Gavin Butt was to curate a conference day titled Performing Knowing at the Whitechapel Gallery and invited me to continue developing the Collapsing Lecture as part of it. I felt it was worth taking the piece further since Id been rumbled by a signicant section of the student audience at Goldsmiths, and thought that it could be done more schematically and with greater subtlety. Gavins prcis seemed appropriate: It (ie: the day) raises issues about the efficacy of performance as 'convincing' scholarly argument; about the ethics and politics of performance presentation. By agreement again the audience would not be forewarned of my real intention and I decided to explore this version of the performance more as an extended put-on than as a sequence of slapstick actions as in the Goldsmiths version. I also wanted to work closely with the technical staff at the Whitechapels lecture theatre and so I arranged to visit Richard Johnson and Nicola Sim the week before. They were enthusiastic about the concept of the Collapsing Lecture, and had their own horror-stories of technical mishaps to share. Admirably, they were undaunted by whether the piece might cast aspersion upon their professional efficiency and so we spent an hour together exploring the Theatres technical facilities to devise a repertoire of collapses and mishaps.

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Additionally, to heighten the Collapsing Lectures veracity to that of a conventional one, I provided Gavin with an abstract for him to circulate in advance. This abstract was stylistically similar to the type of thing I wrote whilst developing and presenting parts of my Doctoral thesis at conferences in the mid-1990s. It is worth reproducing here since in fact it is a disguised description of my lectures actual concerns, but expressed in a wildly abstruse, academic prose (5) that was an equivalent put-on to the eventual performance-lecture itself:

Performance: The Unwalled Laboratory, or: A Language in Search of its Metalanguage ABSTRACT: For the artist, performance provides a medium to make statements about the physical language of everyday living; through which, that is, to experiment and then formally present a metalanguage of gestures, interaction, object-deployment, utterances and so on. But performance also occurs apart from this laboratory of controlled experiment that proposedly produces a designed impartation of meaning and its reception. Beyond the walls of this lab, at the intangible periphery of a staged event, there will always exist supposedly surplus occurrences that in themselves invite interest and observation. Here, unaccountable, (yet equally valid), autonomous accidents, disruptions or alimentary spasms of intent arise to defer the willed direction of meaning (ie: on the part of both the artist and the audience).

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My question is: how can this phenomenon be represented? Can there be a languge that does not have a metalanguage? In this presentation I will explore how perfunctory, habitual acts subjected to the laboratory of performance - can unexpectedly, perhaps unwelcomely, become alien, confusing or awkward. I will attempt to demonstrate how an unanticipated turn of events can rear up, intractable to will, to ultimately surpass intent. This excess (to requirement), I will argue, is in fact an ungovernable vernacular issuing from the metalanguage circulating around any given performance. Thus, in a schematic, perhaps fanciful model, performance is an unwalled laboratory that can always reward observation beyond its proposed frame.

This time, at the Whitechapel, I delivered the performance in a more deadpan way but with the added, helpful factor that the theatre technicians, Richard and Nicola, distracted much of the attention as they fussed about, seemingly in the throes of a nightmare technical meltdown. This diversion allowed me to explore another aspect of formal lecturing that is incompatible with performance art: its dependence on the lecturers air of authority and control over the situation. Often, performance requires the artist to relinquish precisely these aspects in order to open the work out to unpredictable responses and occurrences (such as unexpected malfunction or collapse). And so, I performed more realistically as a haughty, authoritive gure constantly undermined by the repeated ickering on and off of 14

the auditorium lights, extreme microphone feedback and a shivering light projection. Having unpadded the doors just outside the theatre, they would bang loudly when people passed through, whilst Nicola and Richard climbed onto the stage pretending to assist me for lengthy periods, thereby adding further plausibility to the ruse. Chloe Edwards was again present as my interpreter and during the lengthy periods of repairing the fake technical breakdowns we conducted banal conversations in sign language once again. Part of Chloes character was to play a truculent, unhelpful jobsworth and so, when asking her verbally for even minor assistance on stage she would chastise me with a response to the effect that she was there only to sign-interpret. I had made two video works which I introduced at length titled Stick 1 and Stick 2. These were made to be stylistically reminiscent of video art identied with structuralist minimalism of the 1970s: in the rst a handheld stick cautiously enters the frame but as it reaches the front of the camera, the video is edited to stick in a visually equivalent way to a vinyl record. Maintaining that this sticking was down to malfunctioning equipment, another bout of wiring and knobtwiddling ensued in the control booth (visible through a window onto the theatre). Abandoning Stick 1, I requested we play Stick 2: another banal piece in which a hand in close-up attempts to open a pot of glue until, once again, the DVD disc apparently becomes stuck.

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And so it went on, the audience becoming dgety during the excruciatingly dull and stuttering Lecture, which, while being painful to watch, somehow managed to kill 45 minutes. Resolving to end this Collapsing Lecture in a different way to the one at Goldsmiths, I wanted to avoid the gradual slide back into the normality of the question and answer session. However, I did want the audience to realise that the whole lecture-performance had been a put-on. The solution was satisfyingly simple: having achieved the 45 minutes, I collected my notes and stood dramatically poised as if about to attempt another restart, but instead froze in place, holding the pose for 5 very long minutes. This freeze effectively served notice to the audience that all had not been what it seemed and, as I looked out at them, I could see the audiences dawn of realisation as they started to laugh and debate what on earth had just happened.

POSTSCRIPT:

Not long after the Collapsing Lecture at the Whitechapel Gallery, I was brushing up on my knowledge of mid-20th century existentialism and came across the following text in one of those philosophy Introduction books rendered through cartoons:

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In Kean, Sartre comes close to saying that since we have no choice but to play a role, we should do so with a conscious enthusiasm that may even give us a degree of authenticity [6].

For the introduction to my book in 2008, Performance / Video / Collaboration (7) I had been interviewed by Marquard Smith to whom I described my performance works as a series of mock-authentic portrayals of sham-shamans, cod-feral children, charlatan Saints, bogus hermits and dubious monsters. . . To this list could now be added the Collapsing Lecturer who (following Sartre) whilst being a played role, had also managed to give audiences interested in performance art a degree of authenticity.

FOOTNOTES:

(1) Momo is Marseillais pejorative slang that roughly translates as loony or idiot.

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(2) For an account of Artauds Vieux-Colombier performance, see Stephen Barber Blows and Bombs (1992, pp 136 138). It is worth recording that, in 1998, I had been invited to deliver a formal Lecture on Artaud at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, (at the invitation of the performance artist Professor Brian Catling). Reading from my recently completed thesis for half an hour it was clear Id lost the room since half the students had fallen asleep. Choosing the moment, I paused, took a sip of the glass of water on the lectern and then launched into what I considered to be a faithful impersonation of Artauds Vieux-Colombier Lecture, suddenly screaming and releasing a stream of improvised, vocal exclamations and yellings for the second half hour. In many respects this was my rst collapsing lecture, although it was fuelled by an entirely different aesthetic premise to the later, devised performance. (3) Lois Keidan, the Director of Live Art Development Agency and curator of Live Culture later described how William Pope L.s performance had actually commenced when they collected him from the airport he greeted them in gibberish and refused to respond in any other way. This continued until he had set foot back on his home soil in USA. (4) Brian Dillon: Slapstick Theory in Frieze 110, October 2007.

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(5) Gavin Butt had characterised this mannered style of academic writing as sclerotic theory in his introduction to After Criticism New Responses to Art and Performance (Blackwell, 2005). (6) Introducing Sartre, Philip Thody and Howard Read, (Icon Books, 1998). The quote is from page 107. (7) Aaron Williamson Performance / Video / Collaboration, (Live Art Development Agency, 2008). See page 15 for citation.

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