from the freezer... thaw
A collaboration by Maya Balcioglu and Stuart Brisley with the Museum of Ordure
"what's past is prologue: what to come"
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1, 245-254
"Making present the voices of what is past, not to entomb either the past or the present, but to give them life together in a place common to both in memory."
Mary Carruthers, Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990) p.260
Genesis of this work from the freezer … thaw goes back to 1988 when Stuart and I collaborated on the Cenotaph Project. That project marked the beginning of our continuing discussions on time, memory and archive.
Specifically with performance and questions of approaches to archiving performance Stuart has argued that the afterlife (my term) of a performance cannot be found in an authentic documentation of the live event. There is no such possibility. The moment has passed, the event has ceased to be. What comes after are new works either by him or in collaboration with others. This proposition shifts the focus from the archival record (as authentic primary scientific document) to a more contextual social paradigm in our broad present. It is an acknowledgement of the limits of performance and what we in our discussions have termed as mise en abyme.
As Sanja Perovic argues in her recent text on Stuart Brisley, "the result is an embedded or nested effect in which a new work is used to frame both a previous performance and to reflect on the situation in which it took place… Rather than imprison the original performance in what Brisley calls 'the tyranny of the moment of its revelation', retrospective analysis forms part of an extended process 'influential in defining the form, feel and outcome of the original concept'."
Dr Sanja Perovic, Dead History/Live Art: Encountering the Past with Stuart Brisley, Rethinking History, vol 21 (2), spring 2017
While acknowledging the origins with an echo of one of the titles of the 1972 Gallery House performances, from the freezer … thaw is a new work realising that once the matter is removed and the thaw begins, we must either cook it or junk it.
Maya Balcioglu, 2017