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Performa Biennale, NY 2009
Tragédies Charnelles: Valentine de Saint-Point
Performance, War, Politics and Eroticism
Summary of Project
Sarah Wilson
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This interdisciplinary project
is conceived as a two-hour multimedia performance, within the
program of Performa Biennale to be held in New York in November
2009. Founded and curated by performance art historian, Professor
RoseLee Goldberg in New York, the Performa 2005 project will
introduce an American public to the powerful and charismatic
figure of Valentine de Saint-Point. It will in addition foster
this remarkable artist's recuperation into the history of performance
art and politics in France, preparing the way for future performances
or exhibitions in France and internationally. Saint-Point has
started to reemerge as a pioneer in academic and dance circles:
a symposium to be held at NYU in October 2005 should lead to
a significant France/US publication as part of this project.
Recognition is long overdue.
The project is conceived by Adrien
Sina, Paris-based media artist, curator, theorist and performance
art specialist, who has created the most complete digital archive
dedicated to Valentine de Saint-Point in existence.
Valentine de Saint-Point, great-niece
of the poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine, was the only
French member of the Futurist group, and author of the Manifeste
de la Luxure (inaccurately known as the 'Futurist Manifesto
of Lust'), the 'Manifesto of the Futurist Woman' and Le Théâtre
de la Femme: the first attempt to define what would now be
classified as female performance art. At a time when Europe was
programming its own destruction in the first world war, she was
the first woman - functioning at the heart of the twentieth-century
avant-garde - to explore the relationship between the personal
and the political. She thus anticipated the American Feminists
of the 1960s whose work of self-transformation was framed by
the Vietnam War. She was both a performer (dance and drama),
theoretician, a prolific writer in poetry and prose, and political
activist. An 'Orientalist' in the fullest sense, she became an
active voice in Middle Eastern politics, living in Cairo from
1925 to her death in 1953. During a period when both French and
British colonial regimes were challenged, she advocated cultural
cooperation instead of armed conflict; her battle for female
liberation in Egypt and Syria, however, confronted resistance
as great as any faced in Paris.
Like Loie Fuller and Isadora
Duncan, her precursors, she brought her work and ideas to an
American public, collaborating in New York for her 'Métachorie
Festival' debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1917 with the composer
Dane Rudyar. She was profiled by Djuna Barnes and by the New
York Times. A striking contemporary comparison is with Marina
Abramovic , currently a New-York based artist. Her celebrated
Venice Biennale performance Balkan Baroque of 1997 - like
Saint-Point's work, a Tragédie Charnelle with its
pile of blood-soaked bones which she scrubbed - synthesized the
personal, the feminist, the political. Individualing the tragedy
of the Balkan War, it created a powerful visual symbol (commemorating
the pain of all lovers, wives or widows) that has outlived day-to-day
political reportage.
A Nietzschean in the most profound
sense, Valentine de Saint-Point's thought was structured by the
precepts of Greek tragedy, whose heroines, from Hecuba to Antigone
and Medea, focused upon the conjunction of personal trauma and
cruelty with the outer world, from the city, polis, to
the politics of war and domination. The cathartic and 'citizen-forming'
functions of classical tragedy were ever present in Saint-Point's
reformulations. The crossover between historical axes and images
and contemporary resonances are central to the conception of
Adrien Sina's multimedia project.
Performance / New technologies
Performance, War, Politics and
Eroticism : challenging brief. Adrien Sina will engage with Valentine
Saint-Point's contemporaries, from Rudolph von Laban, Mary Wigman,
Vaslav Nijinksy (The Swan Song, Saint-Moritz, 1918) to
Martha Graham (Heretic, 1929; Lamentation, 1930)
and contemporary figures whose works may be seen to echo and
extend Valentine's preoccupations, such as Joseph Beuys, Gina
Pane, Chris Burden, Yoko Ono, Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat.
Rather than 'performing' a Saint-Point
manifesto against a backdrop, or 'recreating' a dance or theater
piece (no choreographical record remains), his conception acknowledges
the fictional and imperfect nature of historical reconstruction
based on fragments.
Rare drawings and woodcuts by
Valentine herself illustrate her writings; she showed at the
Salon des Indépendants. But most of her artistic output,
taken to Egypt, alas awaits rediscovery. Model and muse for Auguste
Rodin and Alphonse Mucha, Valentine de Saint-Point was costumed
by Leon Baskt while her futurist dances were depicted by the
futurist Baldo, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Valentine Hugo, Vivian Postel
du Mas and the American synchronist Morgan Russell. Part of this
project will involve the 3-D animation of drawings made for or
by the artist, using motion capture and interactive technologies.
The performance space will therefore
blur the limits between real bodies, film, video, voice, music,
kinesthetic perceptions, perfumes, real and virtual presences.
Mirroring this environment, the intellectual atmosphere created
will be one of suggestions, questions, theoretical propositions,
unstable emotions - always avoiding the banality of literal reconstruction.
The performance space may fade into darkness, images disappear
or reappear... Sina's 1995-6 exhibition Fluctuations Fugitives,
which involved artists from America, France and Japan (Espace
d'Art Yvonamor Palix, Paris. La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel) initiated
this working process, which continued with a video and performance
festival in the underground vaults of the Chateau Pommery, Reims
and the publications Tragédies Charnelles
and Immanences Spatiales (special issues of La
Mazarine, 2000).
Symposium / Publications
This project should give rise
to two publications: a program for the evening performance and
a more substantial book on Valentine de Saint-Point. The souvenir
program would be conceived as an art work and would include a
biography, photographs of Valentine and her contemporaries, extracts
from seminal texts and manifestos, her drawings and woodcuts,
plus list of participants etc.
The book, conceived as an alternative
display space for a full treatment of the concept Tragédies
Charnelles by Adrien Sina, will present a filmic progression
of images of and by Valentine de Saint Point - reconstituting
a life from the scattered fragments which remain. These will
be interspersed and overlaid with texts, not only the Manifesto
of Lust, but lesser known political texts and actions for example.
Her contemporaries - indeed all those whose works may be seen
in dialogue with Valentine around the axes of war, performance,
politics eroticism - may also find their place here. A biography
and critical bibliography, together with contributions from conference
participants will help make this a complete introduction to the
artist. The book will offer a visually powerful hommage to Valentine:
while standing as an art work in itself. A co-edition partnership
with French publishers is desirable and would help spread costs.
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