Lecturer Talks Experience Through Art

What is art, and what defines art as worthy to be in a museum? These are the crucial questions Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Catherine Cabeen will raise in her gallery lecture-performance “Embodied Experience: Creating/Witnessing/Dancing” this Friday, March 14 at 12:15 p.m. in the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Cabeen will present this talk/performance as part of the Museum of Art’s “Off the Wall: Informal Discussions about Art” series of lectures and conversations about our relationship to art in the museum. In an attempt to broaden the view of museum collections as more than just fixed pieces of art on the wall, the series highlights the interactions of artist, medium and audience in the conception, creation and presentation of the artistic process.

While the series consists mostly of lectures about the art in the College’s museum, Cabeen was inspired by the current exhibit “Performance Now,” curated by RoseLee Goldberg, which bravely explores the crossings of performance and visual art. In deciding how to share her connection to the art of “Performance Now,” one thing was clear for Cabeen.

“I wanted to make my point through performance art,” Cabeen said.

After her Carol Rifelj faculty lecture in January on “Dancing with Nouveau Realism,” in which she spoke live and showed videos of herself dancing, Cabeen decided to flip that standard format for this presentation. She will play a video of her talk while presenting her physical expression of performance art live.

“It’s more along the lines of kinetic sculpture … of using my live body as an example, uncontainable in the fact that I am three-dimensional,” Cabeen said.

By presenting a live performance in a museum space, Cabeen will dare the audience to confront the norm of cold anonymity that often characterizes art museums. The art is on the wall and the viewer is outside, able to choose whether to observe carefully and engage with the art or to simply take a glance and walk on. In this often silent and passive relationship between art and viewer, it is easy to forget that art is about communication.

“Art is something that humans make to talk about some aspect of their understanding of what it means to be human,” Cabeen said.

By displaying art in museums, curators have to make decisions about what qualifies as art and what is worthy of display. In doing so, however, performance art is usually left out because of practical concerns of the ephemerality of the art form. Through her performance, Cabeen intends to embody the questions of why performance art is often left out of museums and why it is difficult and hard to understand. In framing her body as art, she will encourage the audience to acknowledge the accountability of live performance.

“I’m interested in how uncomfortable it is to look at someone when they’re looking back,” Cabeen said.

While this doesn’t necessarily mean Cabeen will be staring down unwitting audience members, it does mean that she wants the audience to consider the ease with which we can gaze at a static piece of art, in contrast to the discomfort of being confronted with real, live intimacy.

This uneasiness with intimacy has greater cultural implications than just eye contact; as Skype conversations, phone calls and texting normalize digital, non-physical interaction, our culture seems to be literally losing touch—losing awareness of the importance of physical presence and communication.

By juxtaposing herself against a familiar video of herself giving a lecture, Cabeen will be physically present as a dynamic expression of art.

“Fear of live bodies is translating more and more in our culture into a fear of intimacy and relating in a live way,” Cabeen said.

In confronting this fear Cabeen challenges the way our society places value on art—a process largely colored by commodification in our consumerism-based culture. Since performance art is difficult to contain and commodify, it is all too easily left out of the category of so-considered museum-quality art.

But if we remind ourselves that art is an expression of human experience, then what does categorizing and valuating art mean to how we view our human experience?

Cabeen will explore how this valuating perspective translates into our culture in her presentation. Light lunch will be served, and the event is free to college ID holders.