Between Performance and Performativity: Ginta Tinte Vasermane

Slapstick of Daily Life

The opening of Vasermane’s new video installation Formed by the Gaze, Twisted by the Beast was celebrated with an Artist Talk within the Eye on Art series. During the introduction to the film programme Vasermane tells us, without wanting to date herself, that she was born in Latvia in times of the Soviet-Union. Whether the artist being born in Latvia under the Soviet Union’s rule is in direct relation to the provocative nature of her work, Vasermane dismisses. In the global north we are just as much subject to regulatory power influencing our actions, she suggests. She proceeds to show us videos of Black Friday sales in which people lose themselves in fanatical consumerism. Like madmen, they storm shops and get in fights to get hold of the biggest and cheapest television screen. Vasermane calls it ‘slapstick of daily life’, because just like the slapstick films of the previous century, these videos stir up laughter by exaggerating human behavior. In her work, Vasermane regularly refers to this kind of ‘slapstick of daily life’. For example, in her earlier work Almost Never Present II she was directly inspired by the Black Friday videos, choreographing fights in front of storefronts. In Formed by the Gaze, Twisted by the Beast the references are more obscure, however present.

If you walk up the stairs of the Eye between 2 and 9 December, you will come across the first work of the video installation at the end of the stairs. The scene that is shown also takes place on a staircase; but this one is adorned with red carpet. The staircase in the video is reminiscent of the staircase of the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès. Every year the staircase is used for major gala premieres for the Cannes Film Festival and is likewise decorated with red carpet. But whereas in Cannes celebrities from the film industry climb the stairs in a seemingly organized manner, the figures in Vasermane’s work slip on their dresses, fall down the stairs and get into fights with each other, in which even their gala outfits are not spared.

Yet even the scene from Formed by the Gaze, Twisted by the Beast is not far removed from reality. During this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival, an internet scandal broke out when videos of a security guard having apparent run-ins with celebrities during various red-carpet moments surfaced online. The videos were widely shared and analyzed by social media users and entertainment websites. Who was to blame for the confrontations? Was it the security guard, who enforced the festival rules, but by doing so transgressed the (physical) boundaries of its guests, or could the blame also be attributed to the celebrities for not following the festival’s rules? The disruption of the status quo as seen in the videos proved to be an endless source for contemporary entertainment.

Choreography as anarchism

In Eye’s archive, the artist researched Vaudeville and slapstick films that showed violence, chaos, women’s oppression and revival, or absurd choreographies. Vasermane’s focused mainly on unknown authors. In the films she wanted to analyze depictions of human behavior and ask what these films can tell us about our own behaviors.

During the opening, Vasermane showed a silent Vaudeville film. In the film, accompanied by live music of a new piece of music composed by Elizabete Beāte Rudzinska, five dancers in colorful costumes perform short choreographies and acrobatic stunts in a lavish ballroom. Inside the cinema laughter can be heard when three of the dancers grab each other by the legs and start somersaulting, or when one of the dancers lifts two others above her shoulders with ease. The acrobatic performances in the film defy the audience’s expectations.

The film formed the starting point for another scene in Formed by the Gaze, Twisted by the Beast. The dancers in Vasermane’s film perform similar choreographies in an equally richly decorated ballroom. However, what is shown in Vasermane's work is more rude and unpolished. Dressed in ballgowns, the dancers are rolling on the floor, crashing into each other, and are dragged off the ballroom floor by their hair. Even more apparent than the Vaudeville film Vasermane plays with the expectations of the viewer, for which choreography plays an essential part.

In her works, Vasermane collaborates with dancers and choreographers. She uses choreography to bring about a temporary change in time and space, she explains in Eye on Art. The figures in her work unconventionally move through conventional spaces, like a shopping mall, an office, or a restaurant. By doing so, the artist comically exposes our social norms. The bodies of the dancers, she explains, cause a temporary shift in the human order.

Perhaps, this is best understood with the concept of 'performativity' as used by American philosopher and feminist Judith Butler. In their influential book Gender Trouble, Butler argues that (our experience of) gender is produced by and constructed through social and cultural inscription. By repeatedly performing certain actions, these acts become naturalized and consequently normalized, supporting the discourse of gender. In other words, gender is something you do, not something you are.

When certain acts are not performed in support of the discourse of gender, in simple terms, when ‘women’ do not behave ‘womanly’, for example, this transgresses the regulatory power through which gender is defined. It breaches, as Vasermane suggests, the human order. In this way, we can read Vasermane’s work as a provocation against regulatory power, thus anarchistic. The artist uses choreography to exaggerate certain human behaviors, and by doing so exposes the ways in which submit to the governing power of social norms. You might feel uneasy when seeing someone being dragged by their hair, but doesn’t Vasermane make our preconceptions of human behavior painfully clear?

As if out of nowhere, musicians appear from the audience. Vasermane uses the opening of Formed by the Gaze, Twisted by the Beast to turn things upside down once more. The anarchist approach that she similarly uses in her video installation seeps through into the performance. The disruptive mood the performance discloses is affectious. One of the guests steps into the performance and starts moving along. Once again, Vasermane shows us she knows how to use performance to question performativity, flawlessly walking the line in between where the two meet.