KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

KEYNOTE ONE-THURSDAY 19th April-11.30-12.30 ADRIAN HEATHFIELD

Adrian Heathfield is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Roehampton University, London.
He curates, creates and writes on performance. He is the editor of Live: Art and Performance (Tate Publishing 2004) and Small
Acts: Performance, The Millennium and the Marking of Time (Black Dog Publications 2000). He co-edited the box publication  Shattered Anatomies:
Traces of the Body in Performance (Arnolfini  Live 1997) and On Memory, an issue of Performance Research (Vol.  5, No. 3, Routledge 2000). His essays have been published in numerous books and journals including Cabinet, Hybrid, Performance Research,  Cultural Studies,  Frakcija,  Art and Design, Yishu, Connect, and Space and Culture. www.adrianheathfield.net

Adrian is represented here by the abstract of his keynote paper which can be read in full in his forthcoming publication Out Of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh.

 

'Walking Out of Life'

How might we think of the repetition inherent in performance events, and the repetition inherent in their re-writing through documents and critical theory? My contribution will look at the notion of duration in philosophy and aesthetics in order to question the models of temporality through which performance art has predominantly been interpreted. Taking the long walk of Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance (1981-1982) as a prompt for an ambulatory mode of writing, the paper passes through the questions of the relation of exile to being (as subjectivity cast out of its own state) and of movement's relationship to opening. Retracing one day of Hsieh's course across Manhattan, the writing engages with the interplay of document and event, narrative and the trajectories of action, spatial transformation and time, memory and the present. In so doing, the writing arrives at a notion of lived duration - rather than the shattering moment - as the paradigmatic temporality of performance in this particular art historical and cultural phase. Walking emerges as a repetitious opening, an aesthetic practice of perpetual reflective exile, a belonging to restlessness alone.