HEINRICH LÜBBER
PERFORMANCE INDEX

September 21 - 24, 1995, Warteck, Basel, SwitzerlandPerformance Index, a four-day performance art festival produced by a group of artists (organized by Heinrich Lüber and Karin Roth, Basel) included nearly forty different events. One aim, as described by Lüber, was to explore performance as a social body, ... how do I feel as somebody, who does performance and what if I were to stretch this feeling like a huge skin over the group?" Other aims were to bridge a generation gap and initiate contact between an older generation of performance artists and a younger one; to provide exposure for new Swiss artists; and, to support discourse in general. Participants were from Switzerland, Germany, France, Austria, Canada and the U.S. A few lectures by artists and theorists were included in the program. This was not meant to create a seminar, but rather to fuel the discourse, i.e., the small talk while waiting outside in the foyer or at the bar.

Most events took place in the Warteck, a registered historic (late nineteenth-century) center piece of the former Warteck Co. beer brewery, which once covered the entire block. The building was only recently redefined as an alternative arts center and is thus in a charming condition of decay and renovation. Events took place primarily in three rooms of distinctive character, still called after their former brewery functions. (Other works took place in the elevator, in the cellar, and on an outdoor terrace. There were also works at a gas station, in the city, and one performance was a daily, four-hour live radio coverage of the festival transmitted to a Zurich station.) The Sudhaus (cooking bran) is the amphitheater of the Warteck. A long hall, three-stories in height, with a platform balcony at one end (used as the cafe bar), it was once the brewery showcase a magic chamber behind a window wall with huge copper tanks, no fonger in place, and colorful tile murals and floor. One flight up and down the hall past the canteen is the Kaskadenkondensator (cascade brewing water condenser). In this 30' x 40' concrete-surfaced room there are no windows. The prime feature is a full-length, 1 5' wide x 1 0' deep pit. A further flight up, the Stiller Raum (cleaning water) about the same size but with a higher ceiling has been designated as a permanent neutral space. Other than its new window, the room is as it was with no new fixtures (not even electricity). Formerly open to the outside, there is a special charm in its pealing walls which resulted from exposure to the elements.

Heinrich Lüber (Basel) and Ute Ziegler (Berlin) In Echt Sehen Sie Ja Ganz Anders Aus Als in Wirklichkeit (In the Real, You Look Completely Different than in Reality) was a juxtaposition of an animated image and a philosophical text. Lüber paced on an automated walking machine with a 30-ft. white fabric stream stretched in tension from his back to the wall. On his front side was a motion projection of his walking from the back side. As if walking in two directions at the same time, Lüber's countenance became a meeting place for past, present and future. Lüber mumbled to himself as he paced while Ziegler, seated at some distance away at a table and lit by a spot, read in measure with the turning of her pages. The title of the work was taken from a comment by an elderly woman to the TV-showmaster and actor Hans Joachim Kuhlenkampf upon meeting him face-to-face following his performance in the theatre. In her jumbling of language, she revealed a basic confusion in perception, Mr. Kuhlenkampf's more-real-to-her presence on TV and his incredible (and unbelievable) materialisation in the flesh-and-blood. Ziegler spoke about the power of the pictorial in determining perception and how new technologies (e.g., photography, film, microscopy, computers, etc.) influence perception. Into the philosophical text addressing perceptions of reality and the use of modeling in scientific theories, Ziegler cut in quips about the radical constructivists, DNA, and quarks. She suggested that the more technology we have, the less we know and any reality by one person's terms might be another's fake.

LindaCassens for p-form, 1996


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