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PRS and Eva & Franco Mattes. Chaired with introductory presentation by Nick Kaye

158 Views Length: 79:37 After a brief introduction by Nick Kaye, Paul Clarke presents a paper entitled Performing the Archive: the Future of the Past. This presentation draws on Paul's work with the Performance Re-enactment Society and the Great Western Research (GWR)… After a brief introduction by Nick Kaye, Paul Clarke presents a paper entitled Performing the Archive: the Future of the Past. This presentation draws on Paul's work with the Performance Re-enactment Society and the Great Western Research (GWR) project. Performing the Archive: the Future of the Past. With reference to Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces, Eva and Franco Mattes, Lilibeth Cuenca and the work of Ian Forsythe and Jane Pollard, Paul discusses the emergence of re-enactment as a creative strategy.

Eva & Franco Mattes, who are renowned for their masterful subversion of public media, will then informally introduce their work as pioneers of the Net Art movement. They will show some cut-ups of the video documentation of their previous synthetic performances which restage historical performances of the 1960s and 70s in an online videogame. The series, which is continuing in Plymouth as part of The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow, arose out of the artists's polemical stance towards performance art. This lead the Mattes on the one hand to breach the classic rules of performance, and on the other to present these works - the efficacy of which was based on the radical way they explored the issues of the body, violence, sexuality, identity and public space - in a context where these issues acquire completely different, paradoxical meanings. More