Intermedia performances by Concha Jerez and José Iges

Gloria Picazo

One of the most significant aspects of the performance, which since the 1970’s has taken its place amongst other forms of artistic expression, has been the attempt by artists and critics to define this form in a manner that can express its complexity. However, two aspects have imposed themselves throughout the 20th century since the initial experiments by the Futurists and Dadaists. In first place there was the need to incorporate life experience –the moment lived, the time that passes– into the artistic discourse itself. In second place, and as a consequence of this, came the obligatory participation of a public that until then had been able to approach a work of art without being questioned directly by the artist. Concha Jerez made her first incursions into body art in 1984, and she continues to work in this artistic idiom, which she has made to evolve from her initial actions, performances and ceremonies to her current intermedia performances and concerts, staged since 1990 in collaboration with José Iges.

Their performance work in partnership over the past decade has served to show together, in a single space and a limited time, some of the aspects that make up their respective artistic careers, Concha Jerez’ in the visual arts and José Iges’ in the art of music and sound. Though they work together on common projects, they each defend their freedom to understand performance from different points of view, offering parallel paths that converge in a unique space in which the visual and auditory frame a given space-time situation in which the performance takes place. Concha Jerez refers to her performances as a series of individual actions, carried out though mechanical and hieratic movements, closely related to her pieces and installations, and which we daresay represent the placing before the spectator of the very processes of conception of her work. For Concha Jerez, the performance is an act of being which is totally removed from what we might understand as a theatrical action. The latter, however, is the position defended by José Iges and is based on an act of representation. He thinks up a character and interprets it. He represents himself as an author, as for example in Nick en La Habana [Nick in Havana] (Barcelona, 1995) in which he appeared disguised as an emigrant wearing an ironic cap. Consequently, his contributions to the ensemble of the proposal tend to be more theatrical, textual, almost pataphysical, as he himself hints, and they become something like an act of prestidigitation with the technological devices that have taken on increasing importance in the conception of his works.

Concha Jerez was nourished by the experience of Fluxus and the intense activity in the 1970’s of that group of body artists, while José Iges has gradually formulated his principles relating to the performance in literature and theatre. For Concha Jerez, performances are constructed from tasks that are carried out before the public, in keeping with a pre-established scheme, but without excessively strict patterns.

Their intermedia performances are quite different from their intermedia concerts. In the latter there is a score and performers who may be themselves, although other musicians and performers may take part.

Concha Jerez y José Iges. Alimento para la luna. 1994

Taking up again one of the crucial aspects of the art of performance –its expression before a live audience, which often wonders whether to react as it were attending the theatre, or whether to keep a greater distance, as if visiting an exhibition– Concha Jerez says she is not concerned by the presence of spectators. The artist tries to create a strong tension between herself and the actions she conducts with her objects, and which are often situated in the context of installations, as was the case with her performance entitled The Scenary (Cologne, 1999) which took place in the framework of her exhibition Shadows of the Scenary at the Schüppenhauer gallery. There she performed a series of actions for the public, calling them rites, which made up the process of creating a work, which previously had been shown only as an end result, such as the action of burning a series of papers, placing the remains in glass vessels and situating them in her installations. However, the artist says she experiences a feeling of great solitude during her performances and consequently the attitude she adopts is one of self-protection, when in fact she is exposing herself. The outcome of all this is that Concha Jerez carefully keeps her distance from the public, and this matches with the practice of José Iges, although he rejects the idea of ritual and advocates the utilisation of the public by conveying the sensation that the performer is very close, when in fact his actions and readings are intended to create an abyss between himself and the public.

Concha Jerez y José Iges. Del Arte de la Razón a la razón del Arte. 1994

These linked actions that will lead to the realisation of a performance normally take place, as we have mentioned, in the context of an installation made by Concha Jerez, or a space conceived specifically for her, and in the latter instance what prevails is more the need to create a situation, a particular circumstance, than a physical space defined artistically by a series of elements, and thus sound become an unsurpassable resource for enveloping and lending unity to the narrativity previously established by the artists.Estas acciones encadenadas que conducirán a la realización de una performance suelen tener lugar, como ya hemos señalado, en el contexto de una instalación de Concha Jerez o bien en un espacio pensado específicamente para ella, y en este último caso, lo que prevalece es más la necesidad de crear una situación, una determinada circunstancia, que un espacio físico definido artísticamente por una serie de elementos y para ello el sonido se convierte en un recurso inmejorable para acoger y dar unidad a la narratividad previamente establecida por los artistas.

Concha Jerez y José Iges. Bazar de utopías rotas. 1998

One of the fundamental aspects governing any performance is the introduction of the time factor as a primary component which will not only help to establish its development, but at the same time will be crucial for the response of the public, which, as we already pointed out, finds itself obliged to adhere to some particular patterns of behaviour which are not normally followed in other types of manifestations of the visual arts. Many artists have said that their interest in the performance is rooted in the fact of being able to share a particular time with the public and that everything occurs in real time. This meaningful fact has meant that today some basic concepts of the performance are revised and retaken by those young artists interested in promoting what has been called an aesthetics of the event, for which a fragment of reality becomes an aesthetic experience thanks to the role of the artists as mediator. But also contributing to this revision has been the use of new technologies, from video to net-art, which has meant that representation and temporalisation are becoming inseparable factors.

In the case of Concha Jerez and José Iges this interrelation is shown in all facets of their work, both as individuals and as a partnership, through their installations and intermedia performances, their concerts, their works for radio, and, more recently, their net-art proposals, such as Net-Opera (1999-2001), which also introduces the interactivity factor, offering a new protagonism to the spectator. At the same time, this spectator can enjoy a real presence and can act in real time thanks to other devices such as surveillance TV cameras, as in Bazar de utopías rotas [Bazaar of Broken Utopias], presented at the MACBA in Barcelona on 10 December, 1998. These live interferences produced on a screen upon which there appear all kinds of images and words usurped from the communications media are a kind of commercial, and they act as if intended to return the falsity of discourses to reality and in a way pattern a narrativity that is highly important to their work. The narrativity, in this instance, is designed to make absence lack of great utopias in contemporary society, and to do so using little utopian spaces, as Concha Jerez points out, that have their origins in the welfare state: those Barbie dolls and a raft of merchandise from the everything for a dollar shops that contribute to the creations of these artificial paradises.

Concha Jerez y José Iges. Labyrinthe de languages 4. 1991

The incisive criticism used to portray some of the social and political discourses in their performances likewise evince the need to turn to objects and actions charged with large doses of irony. Objects such as those dismembered Barbies that Concha Jerez places in a bowl to mix them as if they were ingredients of a salad, and actions like the supposedly respectful attitude both artists display when the anthems of different nations are heard.

In their work, the imaginary –and to a degree utopian– world that the toys help to forge in our society today becomes narrative elements that cause a certain destabilisation in face of the seriousness of the contents posed: those plastic soldiers crawling on the tables, those kitsch music boxes like another interference in the general sound of the action, that boat the José Iges holds under his arm in the performance Nick en La Habana, and those little flags of the European Union countries which he distributes on a table and which end up losing much of their reverential symbolism. But they turn not only to toys –gambling games have been of great importance in some instances, although they are used from a totally different viewpoint from that of children’s games. Games like snakes and ladders or ludo are use to perform some actions, as in the several renderings of the Laberinto de lenguajes, in which dice helped mark out the rhythm of the action; and dice were also used as a symbolic value in the case of snakes and ladders, being portrayed here as a path to knowledge.

The question of language, whether in the form of the negation of meaning, with the illegible texts that Concha Jerez makes before the viewers, or as an affirmation of her critical sense, with the incorporation of written words, as in de Kosovo, Macedonia, Pristina,... that appear on a score that José Iges handled in The Scenary, or as passages read aloud by both, as in Del arte de la Crítica a la razón del Arte [From the Art of Criticism to the Reason of Art] (1994), is basic to the performances of these artists, as is the mixing of all kinds of sounds, which contribute to the creation of an ephemeral visual and auditory architecture inside that other architecture that frames their diverse actions. The complexity of resources used in the actions today, with the technological means that they employ, allows us to speak of performances as temporal spaces in which spoken and/or written language appears as a transmitter of ideas, while the language of space, of vision and sound, and the language of radio, along with habitual concepts in them such as that of measurement and time, serve to transgress contents, aesthetics and concepts; and above all, they are gestures that serve to put the spectators at risk, and to make it difficult for them to position themselves in the face of their proposals.