STUART BRISLEY, Before the Mast, 2013-14

Before the Mast, 2013-14

Video, 27 minutes 30 seconds

Dr Sanja Perovic on: History as Live Action - Performing the Past with Stuart Brisley

2nd INTH network conference:


The Practical Past: on the advantages and disadvantages of history for life


Ouro Preto, Brasil 23-26 August 2016


History and performance studies are often considered antithetical. History typically emphasizes distance and events firmly ‘in the past’, while performance focuses on presence, bodily immersion and action. Recently however there has been a rapprochement. The archival impulse within contemporary art since the 1990s and the orientation towards reenactment suggests a historical turn within the art world (Foster 2004; Merewether 2006; Enwezor 2008; Schneider 2011; Bishop 2012). This is mirrored by a performative turn within history (de Groot 2009). Historians increasingly emphasize ‘affective’ relations to the past (Phillips 2013; Agnew and Lamb 2004) while leading theorists have described historical discourse itself as a social action or performance that establishes boundaries between past, present and future (Lorenz 2014). This raises the question: under what framework can live performance be considered historical knowledge? Implicit here are related questions about the epistemological claims of performance.  How and in what way can performance reactivate a relation to the past?  What is the role of physical, lived time in this experience?  And how can performance be used to think critically about history?

This paper explores these questions through the work of Stuart Brisley, the British performance and multi-media artist whose career is now in its sixth decade.  A key formulator of performance art as it emerged in the 1960s, Brisley became well-known during the 70s for a series of actions, some of long duration, that were also feats of endurance, as he subjected himself to hunger, extreme discomfort and exhaustion. But he is equally known for engaging with a number of well-known historical conflicts (revolution, the Troubles, WW I and II, labour history) as well as his pioneering work in public history.  The archival Peterlee Project: History within Living Memory (1976-77) attempted to extend performance into the social field and is an acknowledged precursor of today’s archival art projects.  Peterlee began as a ‘town without history’, founded in 1948 after the closure of neighbouring mining villages.  As part of his placement with the Peterlee Development Corporation, Brisley helped inhabitants document their own collective history in order to create a platform for political action.  The goal – to create a practical past for a new present and future life- emphatically failed, although the 2000 photographs, 1000 slides and 50 taped interviews did succeed in achieving a certain archival ‘presence.’  



My paper takes this failure as a starting point to ask: what is the relation between history understood as a future-oriented ‘live proposal’ and as past event?  I begin with Brisley’s analysis of Peterlee Project’s failure.  I then consider two virtual institutions he formulated as a response to this failure:  the Georgiana Collection (1981-86), a fictitious institution, featuring his own street and the homeless people who lived there as the subject of the collection, and the Museum of Ordure, a virtual museum whose mission statement is to examine the ‘cultural value of ordure, shit, rubbish’. I conclude by considering how Brisley’s performative museums illuminate occluded aspects of our own historical practices, including the conventional opposition dead history, live art.