​Notes on viewing Mark Rowan-Hull’s documentation video of “Gesture” performance

Nina Danino

Maggie Nicols drinks tea on stage and now Matthew Collings is talking and his talk is incredibly informative on Gesture and Painting.

He makes me think about the wise man, his beard gives him an extraordinary Rasputin-Marx look.

What is a stroke? How is the performance undoing the model of thinking about making painting? The unfinished look in art, the unfinished gesture in painting as political. De Kooning, Joan Mitchell – Gesture as Freedom – he is very critical of this association.

Global domination of American art. People making gestures and forming gestures on the stage politicises this as the freeing up of humanity.

As an ideological framework. Art as having a real freedom as opposed to the political lack of freedom. Maggie Nicols rants and whitters about Murdoch and The Sun. British museum, spoken word and breathing and vocals – North Vietnamese art, a small child comes up to her.

The child interrupts the play of the adults. Vietnamese had creative writing. Revolutionary. She goes off. I feel it must have been quite an endurance for you Mark – it’s a long time to be on stage performing having to invent new movement and take the work forward.

Maggie Nichols’ comments are heard as you pour paint on the canvass. There is music from the side. I’m not sure about the dancer –

Her gestures seemed touch-based, holding hands and smearing, holding each other.

Matthew Collings comes in again with macho abstract paintings – he offers new readings of their supposed machismo – this is very informative; presents them as shattered characters.

Difference is the emphasis, as AE was always pictorial within the rectangle in the tradition of painting. The investigations of mid-50s by Alan Kaprow, Yves Klein in Paris were not pictorial ideas but used Gesture as an extension of the body which was more important than pictorialism – the body and physical impulses.
Mind-body electricity which is inferred in painting but in your art/performance it is focussing on bodies, minds, on people more than on paintings as objects.

It made me wonder how much had been agreed in advance as topics to cover. MN comments on agreeing and disagreeing,

Play - a playground for adults – the tactility and the sound coming from toys and whistles enforces the idea of play. Improvising with the painting,

MN puts paint on her face. She keeps talking and singing, commenting – I’ve always loved butch women and womanly men.

She starts tap dancing. Mark you are pouring paint on the tilted canvass, the dancer is acting like an assistant. It has an erotic or sensual quality.

Your arm is coming over the canvass from behind. MN seems to collapse or flop into the arms of the dancer – “I can still do this at 76.”

It seems to be leading to a crescendo? The squeaky sound is great. Mark is focussing on the plastic layers.

I wonder whether the painting produced including the plastic layers will be shown? Matthew C starts again on Pollock’s idea of getting acquainted with the painting – a balance between accidental effects and control.

There is no chaos, it is controlled flicking and throwing as a deliberate gestures. Pollock as the most mythic figure, a horrible death and manic depression. He maps Pollock as the ugly myth of America -

Abstract Expression, trembling delicacy against the myth of rough, tough macho movement. They did not describe themselves in paintings but the myth was written around them.

The event is sympathetic, a beautiful painting, could it also be embarrassing, shimmering, playful, blobs and splashes and twittering Sounds, half thoughts, poetic thoughts, audio bodily, visual, the record of it will be the painting – a record being a recording of the body’s movement.

Everyone gets up from the floor, Mark helps Maggie up and applause.