Classic workout
Burgoyne, Greig (2022) Classic workout. [Drawing, Exhibition/show, Film, Installation, Performance, Sculpture, Site-specific work]
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'Whatever I do I cannot control what is going to happen' (1).
As part of Il Nuovo Mondo curated by Camilla Boemio, UK based artist Greig Burgoyne has been invited to explore the connectivity or not, between places, people and actions, and in doing so reveal our presence. In the hegemonic system of capitalism, imposed synchronicities reign. This is where high-performance culture and the fall out that is human impotence collides with a faceless technological futurity. Whatever we do short of becoming automatons, being human is an obstacle to that digital future, neither fast enough, efficient enough, nor reliable enough.
Yet Presence is made by encounters. Those encounters are determined by our actions and gestures. In this, it is a dialogue between things and events, between object and subject. It is where habits are formed, but also where they mutate, rupture or disperse.
Based on the collection of statues within the classical art museum, Burgoyne, working with an invited group of performers, observe, record, and collate a set of gestures and articulations that reflect the energies and movement within the figures that reside in the numerous corridors of this vast collection. The result is less to extend what these statues look like, but instead animate and contest that space between object and viewer as a dynamic field of potential, surprise and absurdity. Maximum effort, minimal gesture.
Walter Benjamin writing on Berthold Brecht tells us gestures are found in reality, the now, but to duplicate those gestures of the past is little more than imitation. Indeed, in And- phenomenology of the end Berardi states ‘Language is becoming more and more fragile, as a new generation of humans is learning more words from machines than from their mothers’ (2).
Paradoxically, through repetition and accumulation, Classic workout imitates body language of old whilst leading to divergence, through our inability to follow to those very actions in the first place.
This is less an event watched by the spectators, but a participatory keep-fit routine of sorts, performed within the exhibition halls of the museum. Classic workout is where participants mimic one statue or pose after another, as the original gestures are shared and repeated, they mutate, and new energies and synchronicities emerge perhaps indicative of actions and activities we have yet to know or define. The classifications and imposed constructs of duty, strength, power and heroism are intensified, in doing so, paradoxically revealing vulnerability, fragility- Immersing us instead in a non-hierarchical if precarious state of emancipation.
Classic workout is to live beyond what is seen and as a collaborative work, go to places one might not have gone on one’s own.
References:
1. Benasayag, Miguel. (2019). The tyranny of algorithms. Europa editions, Paris.
2. Berardi, Franco “Bifo" (2015). And-Phenomenology of the end Semiotext(e). MIT press, Cambridge Massachusetts & London England.
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