Thinking Business:
Barbara Cleveland Amelia Wallin reflects on career highlights of the Barbara Cleveland artist collective (Diana Baker Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, and Kelly Doley) ahead of their survey show ‘Thinking Business’ on now at Goulburn Regional Gallery.
The year was 2010, or maybe 2009, and you performed at Serial Space or possibly Carriageworks. It went for hours, it was violent and uncomfortable, and I can’t recall any specific details, just murky lighting and dark humour. There might have been hecklers. How much of this memory is influenced by documentation I can’t say. I’m thinking of those iconic photos of you in homemade costumes, spotlit against a red curtain. Back then you went by the name of Brown Council and, as well as these live feats of endurance, you created durational performances for the camera. Your choice of costume, props and actions was deliberately citational: they became tools through which you situated your practice within the genealogies of performance art and feminist activism. Your early video works focused on the completion of a set task, drawn out over an unnaturally long time, but without the slipperiness of being “live”. Which is to say, without an audience other than the rolling camera, you maintained control of how these actions were recorded or remembered.
The year was 2013 and Performance Space turned thirty.
SUMMER 2020
In the twelve months prior I had been working on Performance Space’s archives with Julianne Campbell, sorting and cataloguing ephemera from Sydney’s experimental performance scene, some examples of which were included in the catalogue for You’re History, the anniversary program that celebrated Performance Space’s legacy and “the future of performance in Australia”. For this program, you presented an ode to a forgotten figure of Australian performance art, in the form of a video portrait titled This is Barbara Cleveland. Like you, I was thinking about the archive, its gaps and omissions, and what the future of performance might be when so much of our local art history remains unrecorded (as you have pointed out, Anne Marsh’s seminal book on Australian performance extends only to 1992). Barbara Cleveland never really existed, but to labour that misses the point. Through reenactment and restaging, your multifaceted and multi-year investigations into Cleveland radically rethought how one might approach performance archives, proposing alternatives to the “traces” of performance typically held within archives. Performance does not disappear or vanish as I had been led to believe in art school: it lives on in memories and bodies, no matter how unreliable.
