PERFORMANCES of catalogue of studio activities — Helen_Grogan_series

^{Catalogue of studio activities (SLOPES), 2014
site-responsive ensemble performance, scores from Catalogue of Studio Activies (2002-present), variable materials and equipment. w/ Matthew Day, Geoff Robinson, Anna Varendorff, Helen Grogan.

at: Slopes Gallery, Naarm Melbourne, curated by Joel Stern and Helen Hughes}

^{Slopes documentation by Laura May Grogan}

^{From Charlie Sofo’s responsive text:}

^{Grogan’s work is in dialogue with
a range of artistic forms unveiling
connections between disciplines. It is
inclusive without being sentimental.
A participant can have a deeply
satisfying and sensual experience;
they can draw out material pleasures
and appreciate subtle shifts in
perception, mood and environmental
conditions. Difference is not only
accommodated, it is instrumental
to the realisation of the work. I feel
that with Grogan’s work we arrive
at a performance that can actually
frame and intensify life. It reflects
the artistic imperative to affirm the
bare existence of things. By butting
up against the limits of language
and matter, avenues are opened
up to clear thinking and deeper
experience.An intensification of a physical
and lingual awareness has political
implications. Through the whittling
away of social warranties (the
absence of Indigenous land rights)
and the rise of social technologies,
the real has undergone profound
shifts. What historically constituted
the real feels like it has been fast
tracked into the status of cultural
ruin.

A sense of ruin is articulated
in the final action in Grogan’s work
THIS SITUATION WITH METHOD
FOR THIS SITUATION (2014),
which occurred at Slopes gallery in Fitzroy. In
this action, Helen Grogan and Geoff Robinson
carefully gathered up all of the materials used in the
performance and compacted them into the end of
a driveway. They essentially trashed the gallery. This
action seemed to speak to the context of Slopes,
which is essentially a showroom for a property
development, destined to be sold off, demolished
and then rebuilt. This is a performance concerned
with materiality, time and embodied experience
that directly connects with the violence of
gentrification. Like the performance, we are
both viewers and participants in it.}
^{^{1. This is a reference to a tweet by Danny
Butt: “Teaching painters taught me that media
art was a thin concept, like nationality: every
medium has opposing camps seeking external
allies.”
2. This sense of art being an intensification
of life has been inspired by reading Elizabeth
Grosz’s “Chaos, Territory, Art”.
3. “The whittling away of social warranties” is
vaguely extrapolated or mis-interpreted from
Franco Berardi’s book “The Soul at Work}}