The Stuart Brisley Interviews: Performance and its Afterlives

A significant theme which runs through these conversations is the impossibility of containing, completing or reconstructing a performance work which by its very nature is destined to remain unfinished and elusive. The recent invitation from Raven Row for the artist to participate in a form of re-staging of ZL656395C, 1972 – a work made forty-five years earlier as part of an exhibition curated by Sigi Krauss at Gallery House in south west London – underscored the impossibility of remaking a performance from the archive: ‘I try not to repeat, I have done things once or twice again, but it isn’t re-enactment. I could make a work which refers back to any of the works I’ve done but they can’t possibly be the same. They can only have resonance.’ Stuart described our conversations looking back at his work similarly as references, a process of referring back figuratively to performances which cannot be revisited literally.

The artist’s narration of the environmental, social and institutional circumstances in which a performance comes about provides a compelling and critical context for understanding the artist’s works. It is in Stuart’s words ‘very much part of… the activity itself’ but as it is the artist’s memory that holds the narrative of what happened, it is inevitably slippery and tentative. Nonetheless, the telling of the story about the work, the photographs, these interviews offer a measure of completeness through what the artist describes as ‘a process of distanced clarity’, or as Maya Balcioglu calls it ‘an enhanced notional archive.’ 

What comes through powerfully in the artist’s narration of his performances is an unswerving resistance to controlling the narrative or fixing the meaning of his works. Citing the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Stuart Brisley emphasises the critical importance of error to the creation of his performances: ‘You can say what you’re going to do, you can think about it, you can prepare it, and then when you start, it’s all disappeared because it’s actually meaningless… errors make for where the key value lies.’ The enduring resonance of Stuart Brisley’s work lies in its formless and slippery characteristics that resonate so poignantly with our shared human condition.

© Gilane Tawadros, 2021.

From the Introduction to The Stuart Brisley Interviews: Performance and its Afterlives, (edited by Gilane Tawadros), London: Book works, 2020.