Re:Site (after R.M.), 2018

Martina Schmuecker, Re:Site (after R.M.), 2018, video, 18’, 2018.

Originally commissioned by Beaconsfield 2018 for the exhibition ‘In Whose Eyes?’, this work is an adaptation of the performance piece Site by Robert Morris. In the original, Morris ‘dances’ with an 8 x 4 ft. sheet described as plywood, while Carolee Schneemann sits naked on the bench (in the pose of Manet’s Olympia). A four page long choreography script of this performance describes the movements in detail. I asked the artist Robert Luzar to work with me on this idea, and we subsequently developed the current version of this performance together.

In my adaptation of this script by Morris, the roles of the performers are swapped: here, ‘Robert’ sits on the bench – with clothes on, in no particular pose – while I follow the choreography of the original piece, still naked, as Schneemann had been in the original performance.

The original script of the choreography had to be changed at certain points, to be adjusted to new bodies. Working through the script together with my co-performer, we compared the scripted movements to a ‘working reality’ of handling 8 x 4 boards of plywood. We discussed the possibility of executing these instructions without causing injury. The instructions make no allowance for safe handling, even for a strong and highly experienced performer. Indeed the gestures – presented as dance movements inspired by a physical work situation – don’t correspond to anything a person in their right mind would do on a construction site/in a workshop. Looking at available footage of the original performance, we concluded that either the original board wasn’t plywood, or Robert Morris is a super humanly strong man. Thinking further about the roots of the movements both in dance and working environments, we decided to use our experience in the latter to change parts of the script to suit our abilities, while still retaining as much of the overall original choreography as possible.

At a point half way in the performance, I drop the board and break from the routine as it was scripted, sit down next to Robert on the bench, and take off my working gloves. Robert takes the gloves, puts them on and gets up to do the next part of the routine for about 2 minutes. He then stands still. I get up, he hands over the gloves, and I do the rest of the routine, ending with him hidden behind the boards, as in the beginning. The performance is 15 minutes long in total. For me, the interaction – the break and swap of positions in the performance – is crucial to the work. Apart from the art historical references which this work makes to minimalism, painting, and dance performance (including the break and swap of active and passive role in it), in doing and showing it I want to know what my version does to address power relations. I also want to know what it does in terms of dealing with specifically work-related movements and their relation to different bodies. To simply swap the roles without the interaction between the performers would turn the work into something less interesting and questioning for me. It would also only retrace the power relations which are already questionable in the original, without disrupting them.

This led me to question the supposedly work-related choreography, whose roots are described as a situation of physical labor. My reactions to this are twofold. First, in a real-life work situation, physical labor with this kind of material means different things for men and women. We handle material differently because the physical makeup of our bodies is different – women’s gravity centers are lower, and all of us regardless should lift ‘with our legs’ as opposed to our arms. But these fields of labor are so male-dominated that potential changes to the language of instruction are never raised. Yet in this case my co-performer and I were both in the same situation, we needed to do the same work. Secondly, the performance required of us to deal at once with the reality of the instructions (written for the male body of Robert Morris in the 1960s) and with our own reality at the time of the re-enactment: a physical reality grating against that of its precedent. In a way, we had to learn how to ‘collaborate’ with a pre-existing performance. Our own performance based on a re-enactment thus required working together not only as a duo, and not only with a script, but also with individuals and bodies from the past.