CC Editor Lydia Bell interviews artist Yelena Gluzman, co-editor of Emergency INDEX, a new book series dedicated to documenting performance. Over e-mail, they discuss INDEX’s unique approach to texts that address the gap in critical dialogue around performance practice. For those who want to document a performance they made and performed in 2011, submissions are open until January 3, 2012.
Interview date: November 30, 2011
Download a PDF version of this conversation
Thumbnail photo: “42: A stonewall Prospective” by Pioneer Winter and Jared Sharon. Performed in Miami, June 28, 2011. Courtesy of Pioneer Winter.
Lydia Bell: I first heard about Emergency INDEX through Ugly Duckling Presse (UDP) in Brooklyn. Can you tell me about how Emergency INDEX came to be a project of UDP? Is it important that Emergency Index is in print, not online?
Yelena Gluzman: Emergency INDEX is part of a book series based on the legacy of the Emergency Gazette (1999-2002) a free, biweekly broadsheet edited by Matvei Yankelevich and myself, and published by UDP. At that time, critical dialogue about performance was all but non-existent. There were specialized academic journals, or ordinary see-it-or-don’t reviews, and little in between. We began the Emergency Gazette as a place where performance (even events that were short-lived, on the margins, or otherwise questionable) could be considered in a serious and subjective way. We printed reviews, interviews, manifestos, proposals for impossible theater, and anything that provoked or activated serious thinking about performance.
Now, in 2011, the world has changed. The Internet provides an amazing forum in which conversations can happen. At their best, developments like comment boxes, Twitter, and Facebook democratize the authoritative voice, allowing anyone to enter the conversation. When people care about what is being written, they read, they comment, they share, they discuss, and they consider. It seems to me that now, more than when we started the Emergency Gazette, people are hungry to talk and think about performance.
Since online media provides many of the forums once covered by the Gazette, Matvei and I decided to publish other kinds of performance texts, and meet needs that no one else is addressing. That is how Emergency expanded into a three-book series: Emergency PLAYSCRIPTS prints performance texts which highlight issues of notation; Emergency ANALYSIS, still in planning stages, will be a series of analytical pamphlets on performance; and the forthcoming Emergency INDEX, an annual compendium of performance works, spanning genres and national borders, as documented by their creators.
It is difficult and costly to commit to publishing a book, but we believe it is important that INDEX is a print publication. Though the Internet boasts ease of access, a book, trapped in its physical body, is unchanging and durable. Since performance is exactly the opposite—ephemeral and in flux—it is important that the documents will endure, and will keep their place among the other performances made in the same year.
Lydia: Can anyone “index” a performance? Do you curate the selections?
Yelena: Yes, anyone can index a performance. Emergency INDEX is inspired by the “Artist’s Chronicle” of the now-defunct (but always funky) performance art magazine High Performance. In “Artist’s Chronicle,” the editor (Linda Frye Burnham) invited artists to send descriptions of their performance art works. The result is an amazing document of what performance art really was in 1977, in 1978, etc. Famous works are alongside unknowns, celebrated artists next to one-offs. The ideas that people were working with, though, emerge with force. INDEX, like Artist’s Chronicle, is an open invitation.
We do not curate the selections in the traditional sense: we do work with authors to ensure that the description is clear, especially in terms of explaining the reason for the piece, or what problems (be they formal, political, aesthetic, or whatever) drove the making of the work. In this way, works in radically different genres can still communicate with each other, since they can understand each other’s context. The other curatorial act we do is to provide a very simple index, linking the language used by various authors. So you can look at the index and find every performance description that used the word “embodied” or “capitalism.” In this way, the book documents not only the performances, but also the language used when talking about performances.
Lydia: As I understand it, you are interested in broadening the definition of performance, calling for “political, commercial, scientific, therapeutic, or other works not typically documented as performance.” Why is it important to you to broaden the definition of performance?
Yelena: “Artist’s Chronicle” was specifically about performance art, which at that time was totally new and obscure. What is it? Who makes it? That is not true anymore, as performance art is probably the best-documented performance genre of the past 50 years.
Today, we see the mystery as being the case for performance in general. So, instead of resorting to the endless debate of “Is it performance?” we propose other questions: Why is it made? What ideas/structure/techniques can I use from it? What do I not want to repeat? It isn’t that we want to force a broader definition of performance; its that we want to broaden the forum so that many different types of performance can talk to each other, sniff each other’s butts, and get some ideas.
Lydia: Do you see Emergency INDEX as documenting the process of performance or the product?
Yelena: I see it as documenting the techniques or tactics used in the performance. Most importantly, INDEX documents whatever the author believes to be most important to document, for the purpose of documentation. Without worrying about using it as PR, as a grant application, as a final report, the document can be written just to mark the most significant aspects of the work, in the words of the people who made it.
Lydia: Tell me about your first issue—when does it launch and what content are you especially excited about?
Yelena: The first issue will launch in spring of 2012. We are so excited, and in the process of designing the layout and cover now. We are planning a launch party in 2012 in New York City, and thinking of inviting some of the authors to perform a new work based on their own description of their old work.
