Negating Blank II: Performacy
painting by Dolanbay // digital image from the sound installation in response to the paintings by Elo Masing
Thu–Sun/Do-So 14.00 – 19.00

Closing event // Finissage
Sun, 29.09 16.00

Exhibition program:
06.09 - 29.09    Continuous sound installation by Elo Masing 
07.09, 16 - 19h Durational sound performance by Elo Masing (violin), Vincent Laju (cello) 
14.09, 16 - 19h Durational sound performance by Jack Adler-McKean (tuba, feedback)
21.09, 16 - 19h Durational sound performance by Francis Heery (electronics), Malwina Kołodziejczyk (saxophone), Elo Masing (violin) 
29.09, 16 - 21h Durational sound performance by Elo Masing (violin), Vincent Laju (cello), Francis Heery (electronics), Malwina Kołodziejczyk (saxophone)

The sound events are part of the Month of Contemporary Music Berlin, initiated by Neue Musik e.V. / field notes berlin.

Negating Blank II: Performacy

A single strand of hair is flying in the air.
It is hard to chase because its colour so matches that of the air. It moves as the air moves, in all directions, falling and rising, spinning and shifting – it mutates. It does not settle into any shape, and neither does its journey. It will never return to any Kopf. 

How to do with the world? Performacy – the performing paradigm of late Capital or The End of Democracy

Although the transition had begun some decades earlier, the millennium was a new beginning; the fall of the Berlin Wall was a symbolic landmark, however, 9/11 marked the political turn after which nothing was ever going to be the same again. Thus, to understand our time, one must acknowledge the fluid performativity of late Capital, progressing towards the ending of nation state power and the ending of its governing democracy. During the 1980s, late Capital manifested its independence from nation states and gradually moved towards globalisation, thus, to be sustained by its own economic and political power. This transformational happening is not to operate freely on the conditions set by determinative democracy; hence, a phenomenon of Capital has emerged into present conditions. Though it has not yet been introduced into the common vernacular, the appropriate term to be coined here is performacy.

In contrast to determinative democracy, performacy is an indeterminate model that has no underlying principles— no ideology, orthodoxy, or structural beliefs. In other words, it is not representational. To exercise and maintain its own power, it manifests in accordance with ever-changing situations as an amorphous and self-reflexive performative act. 

The performative phenomenon is not a paradigm solely for contemporary art but can simultaneously be observed in the concurrent politics of economy within late Capital that has gradually rejected the basic characteristics of modernist heritage and set on a new journey. Through the performative phenomenon, the journey itself denies the certainty of form. In our contemporariness the basic tenets of performativity are experienced on an everyday basis. The current manifestations of this performativity are defined by uncertainty; anything can happen at any time, political and social events unfold nonlinearly and occur situationally, everything is possible, failures are built into the system. These happenings grab the observers and cast them into liminal space. In our present time, performativity merely sub-serves the fluid interests of late capital. Within this fluidity, no person—regardless of their empowerment or disempowerment within the system—is operating under a self-assured claim to performacy.

How to do art?

This text takes as an axiom the concept that life and art are hand in hand. In our present time, for example, actual performacy politics and the aesthetics of contemporary art correspond to each other in simultaneity— both are in motion, in constant transformation on their own terms and in their own space, and both derive from performative modes of manifestation. It is generally acknowledged today that art after the post-modern era is no longer about representation. Neither is it about ideas, concepts, or communication. Art is an act that manifests through its mode of doing. The mode embodies energeia, the performing of singular presence towards actualities. Hence, the act occurs amorphously into situations conditioned by actual circumstances and its occurrences are transformative. Inherited from the 1960s onwards, trans-mutating within themselves and between the disciplines, mobility, fluidity, ephemerality, repetition, contingency, and indeterminacy are some of the basic tenets, which are still marking today's art doing. 

Negating Blank II: Performacy

Painting as performance

A persona without identity, with no concept or idea, as raw material, reduced into an act in a mode of performativity. A perpetual movement of lines are released, one after another, upon the canvas. The act is not conditioned, it is both differentiated and repetitive, occurring as movement in continuity. Indifferent to the actual time and space, it flows in simultaneity and gradually generates its own presence through longevity. Within the continuum of its own presence, each of the lines retains their singularity, even while together they accumulate into unity and towards an inward totality. The canvas transforms into a spatial surface with depth and textures, which consubstantiates the dichotomy of negative and positive spaces. 

The dripping of the lines on a canvas is a silent resilient act in response to the world of performacy. Each of the dripping lines are opposing generality and each painting occurs through repetition. The surfaces resemble a unique sounding instrument, as if silent sounds were concealed in liminal space. The inner space is waiting to be unfolded and the sounds of the lines are waiting to be revealed in a participatory act. 

Dolanbay, 2024

www.dolanbay.com

Sound is immanence in the paintings in silence... 

A subtle sound vibrates the space, emerging from and fading back into silence, at times accumulating into a gentle layered crescendo, then falling back into near inaudibility.... A sounding, resonating, vibrating silence... Like particles of dust quivering and dancing in the light of a sunbeam...

The sound works accompanying Negating Blank II: Performacy is sensitive to the shared performative underpinnings of painting and sound art. Imbued with the musicians' experience of the artworks, they expand the compressed temporal and spatial layers of the paintings into time-based media, revealing the sounds latent in these and responding to the exhibition context as a whole. The works will be realised in collaboration with live musicians and by means of recorded media.

Elo Masing, 2024