Interview with Oreet Ashery, Professor of Contemporary Art
Oreet Ashery is a visual artist, Professor of Contemporary Art, the Director of the MFA programme at the Ruskin, and the Director of Studies in Fine Art at Exeter College.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on quite a few things, mainly object-based, very short films and writing. I've been involved for a while with an inclusive Jewish community farm called Sadeh in Kent and I’m working towards a workshop with them, with some other staff members of the Ruskin. We’re looking at ideas around commons, of doing things together, like bees, how bees collectively operate, and ideas around messengers and networks of messages. I'd like to end up with a public sculpture at the farm, so I'm looking into fundraising for that, and continuing to evolve my relationship with the farmers residents and the community there.
What place does performance have in your work?
Performance and performativity are probably the crux of my practice. Performance played a huge role when I was young. It was really to do with walking. I was brought up in Jerusalem; I was walking and, in a sense, deterritorialising certain zones where someone like me was told they shouldn't be, particularly not a young girl. Later, as a teenager, I did performances on the edges of high roads, in relation to the driving culture in Jerusalem, that is dangerous and quite macho. I also performed regularly by wearing my dad's clothes in public places.
I didn't know that they were called performances or interventions, that they might have been gender queer or feminist, I didn't have the language, it wasn't professional, it was just something that I did. I performed daily as a way of living.
Later, when it became professionalised, when I move to the UK and trained as an artist, I continued to do street interventions... Using public spaces, thinking about what audiences are – implicit, complicit, knowing – is it a performance? The edges of performance – where and when does it start and end? Because my work was so close to everyday life.
As the work became more institutionalised, I started to make large-scale performances with a lot of people in them, and always commissioning original sound and music. For example, I did a performance called Passing through Metal where forty local people – wherever I did it internationally, forty local people – were sitting in a grid and knitting with black wool, a snake like shape that merges with the electrical cables in the space. The eighty metal needles were attached each to a small microphone, all connected to a main mixer that amplified the sound scape into a metallic rainlike effect. Simultaneously a death metal band was moving between them, making instrumental and vocal sounds as well as playing their own songs, so it was like a deconstructed metal concert, a sonic landscape performance, bringing together metal and sawing fans.
A lot of the work I've been doing is around bringing together different communities, bringing different audiences into certain spaces. I did a large performance at the Tate, The World is Flooding, in the Turbine Hall; it was a reenactment of Mystery-Bouffe, Mayakovsky’s play from 1921, with a group of asylum seekers engaged with the charity Freedom from Torture and Rainbow Migration. The original play is about “the clean” and “the unclean”, in a world that is flooding. The play has a clause that it only be re-enacted or adopted if it's relevant to our times. We made the play relevant to our times by performing and speaking about the experiences of the participants in our own presently drowning world. It's a clever clause that Mayakovsky put in.
In recent years, I’ve moved from performing live to camera, or documenting performances to making short videos. The films are performative, and employ much of my performative methods, so there's always people who are acting to camera, or dressed up, or performing in the streets, or performative interviews that oscillate between fiction and real… I did a large-scale web series around illness, death, friendships, technology and digital legacy, called Revisiting Genesis and there's a strong performative aspect to that work. Workshopping it was also kind of a set of performances, the development of the twelve videos. And now that I'm working slightly more object based – 3D and paintings and printing – there's more material performative aspects to that work.
Where do you see performance research (or performance and research) coming together across disciplines in Oxford?
Where do I identify it happening? Oh my God, I mean everywhere! It's from theatre studies to technology, to sound, to art, film, to performance studies, to physics. I think it's hugely interdisciplinary, and I think it's not just strictly around the idea of performance, but the idea of performativity and the kind of paradigms of thinking around what performance is, which is so elastic, exciting and forwards thinking in so many ways.
I’ve looked a lot into aging and care, because of my mother, and into creating little experiments with robotic creatures that bring comfort. I am more interested in the poetics of the experiments than in developing that fluffy robot. I was working for a while with a computer scientist from Oxford, and we looked at the meta idea of an AI art assistant. What would that look like? I wrote a whole fictional dialogue, or a performance script, between the AI assistant and the artist, and that helped me and the computer science person to think what does it mean and what is at stake here. What are the desires and where are the dangers. There are a lot of ideas around AI technology and around narration and around art tools, but without performative imagination, wilderness and intimacy, without care and interconnectedness the tools become extractive.
What is your dream for performance research in Oxford?
My dream is…. There are a lot of dreams! A subject that is always running through my work is auto fiction, auto-theory and autobiography. I’ve been making and looking at the concept of what it is to consent, I don’t think there is something more ambiguous, cryptic or oblique currently than saying YES. We live in such co-optive culture. That sense of opacity (Glissant) is a kind of playful freedom that art and performance must continue to maintain under any circumstances. It is like survival. I'd love to do this performance with three people wearing Y-E-S. You know, a big letter each. And constructing movement for them, with machines alongside to animate the idea of the YES. That would be my dream performance. No one is allowed to steal this idea though!!
Tell us about a performance that's special to you.
When I was maybe 16, I was hitchhiking to Acre on my own, to this experimental performance festival. I wasn’t exposed to anything resembling performance then, it was just a hunch. There was this dancer performing around a person sat passively on a chair, to Laurie Anderson’s O Superman song on a loop. The performer was covering the slumped figure up with bandages from head to toe... until they were totally covered. It just had a massive impact on me. I mean, I think this is probably where I understood I wanted to be a performance artist. So that was a big one.
The other influence is my dad, who is a great performer – unintentionally! I've used it in one of my films – for no reason, he would take kitchen paper towels and cut them exactly in half to make them into the size of toilet paper. And that was just so performative and fascinating to me growing up. Or grating super-hot horseradish root by hand at 4am with a t-shirt tied all over his mouth and nose and eyes streaming tears. It's something things that really stuck with me, as being a really playful, everyday, low-economy way of just playing with things we have around us domestically and kind of perform them.
He was a big influence for me. He did a lot a lot of walking all over Jerusalem, entering gateways to secret gardens and forbidden places, he was extremely gentle and a lot of the things he did were funny and performative. Like – that's also in the film about him aging I made [Dying Under Your Eyes, 2019] – he used to sing the whole newspaper, just made-up music to read it in, animating the terrible news. It was just so much fun, you know. Things like that really affected me. Those kind of minor gestures I just love in terms of performance, not always the big productions, but just those kind of small things that people do.
