Tuesday 23 January, 5.30 – 8.30pm
Gordon Douglas hosted Performance Standards, an evening session drawing on amateur re-interpretations of art historical performance work as fan-made legacy. Through devising, rehearsing and performing historically significant performance art works from edited dossiers, Performance Standards intended to introduce participants to new ways of appreciating and playfully understanding this rich and eccentric history, as well as talking through the diverse politics, values and contexts that each performance originally took place within. What does it mean to re-enact these works in our contemporary political sphere, and what might we be able to learn from these complicated logics?
Gordon Douglas is a performance artist and independent curator based in Glasgow. He works in close partnership with groups and organizations towards deconstructing the acts of performance, education and collaboration within institutional habit. He graduated from the Environmental Art department at Glasgow School of Art in 2013, and attended an exchange semester at CalArts, California. From 2013-15, he served on the Transmission committee, co-instigating a series of workshops aimed at interrogating the governing documents of the institution. Since then he has jointly conceived of projects and events with a diverse array of practitioners including: anthropologists, dermatologists, curators, fanfiction writers, jewellers, journalists, physicists, post-punk musicians and theatre-makers.
His most recent project Habits of the Coexistent, a curatorial-residential dialogue with The NewBridge Project, Newcastle; Edinburgh College; and Platform, Easterhouse; researches the performativity, values, and ideologies that we inherit through close quarters. In February 2017, Gordon concluded Introduction-to-Performance, an elective course he devised with HND Contemporary Art Practice students from Edinburgh College. In June 2017, Gordon co-programmed Shoulder-to-Shoulder, the annual Fieldwork International Summer School at Hospitalfield with Cicely Farrer. The Summer School borrowed the performance vernacular of the scratch night in order to open up a testing ground for how we might communally perform or enact a political ‘fizz’ from positions within the global artistic multitude.
Image: Group response to Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, 1967, as part of Shoulder-to-Shoulder, the annual Hospitalfield International Summer School co-programmed with Cicely Farrer. (Photo credit: Annie Crabtree)
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