Paper and Performance: The Bent Page
Saturday, April 25, 2015 - Sunday, August 9, 2015
Paper and performance are strange bedfellows. Performance happens in the moment, while paper is associated with documentation and reproduction. Yet historically, the beginning and afterlife of many artworks are often found on paper. Artists use it to make scripts and preliminary sketches. In addition to its role in the artistic process, paper can also perform different functions as a material: it can project a sense of fragility or bring the final seal of authority to something taking place. This exhibition explores many kinds of work that paper does in contemporary art, including moments when paper "performs" as something other than itself.
"Paper and Performance: The Bent Page" includes certificates of authenticity, instructions and scores for performance artworks, photographs that double as postcards and surfaces for drawings, and bureaucratic documents turned into sculptures. Many of the featured artists use paper's natural tendencies –its cheapness and, its blankness, its malleability– to subvert assumptions that an art object should be rarified, permanent, and whole. Some of them make violent gestures that reveal paper's resilience; others use conceptual strategies to play with paper's ability to document and verify; still others use paper to create new forms in space. The works, which date from advent of Xerox technology in the 1960s and continue into the present, all show that paper is neither neutral nor passive, but rather a dynamic medium that can perform unexpected roles.
"Paper and Performance: The Bent Page" includes certificates of authenticity, instructions and scores for performance artworks, photographs that double as postcards and surfaces for drawings, and bureaucratic documents turned into sculptures. Many of the featured artists use paper's natural tendencies –its cheapness and, its blankness, its malleability– to subvert assumptions that an art object should be rarified, permanent, and whole. Some of them make violent gestures that reveal paper's resilience; others use conceptual strategies to play with paper's ability to document and verify; still others use paper to create new forms in space. The works, which date from advent of Xerox technology in the 1960s and continue into the present, all show that paper is neither neutral nor passive, but rather a dynamic medium that can perform unexpected roles.