Gesture: A Symposium and Performance at the University of Oxford 2024.

The Gesture Symposium was a three day investigation organised in conjunction with Dr Jennifer Johnson (St John’s College), Dr Rachael Coombes (Downing College, Cambridge)  and Dr Tim Ashley ( St Hugh’s College) with the History of Art department) at the University of Oxford) of where I am a lifetime member . There are details of this and the evolving of this exciting and ongoing project and publications can be found on the “Gesture Symposium Website’

For this project we worked closely with each invited speaker and artist offering them the opportunity to contribute and also experiment with live work. The central performance developed over a year long period which included R&D conversations to explore performance and staging.

The investigation involved many speakers from different areas of the Arts and literature and from around the world: and focused upon the fields of Painting, Performance, Music, Dance and literature. The contributors included former collaborators together with many others. For more information on the fascinating abstracts and further writing on this please look at the Symposium website

Gesture Performance.

Performed at St John’s College Auditorium, Oxford in 2024.

The piece was my largest collaboration to date , improvised and yet structured to echo a choir and response as in a church. The improvisation is on the theme of Gesture and flows seamlessly  between the performers and features a running commentary from painter and critic Matthew Collings, responding with ideas to what he sees taking place and  feeding into the work placing it historically and politically. Unusually, it placed the critic as central to the performance itself. The performance was devised around ideas of Gesture. Lavinia and I had spoken about Feldenkrais and slow movements and gestures of care. I also know that Christoper Redgate and Maggie Nichols would naturally musically understand each other and create a myriad of gestures and colours. Emmanuel Spinelli had also mentioned that he was using a device that created sounds from gestures rather like a theramin, and I know having worked with him on many occasions  before, that he creates an exciting and unique pallette of sound.

The painting itself was solely in Blue like an earlier performance (at the Sequences Real Time Festival) concentrating on breath, and Buddhist practice. In this case it was to help focus the mind upon Gesture alone. Occasionally with certain sounds just yellow and ochre was used.  

Here is a great observational response to the Performance, written by the Filmaker, Artist and Academic Dr Nina Danino whom herself contributed a performance and film to the event.

Maggie Nicols drinks tea on stage and now Matthew Collings is talking and his talk is incredibly informative

On Gesture and Painting. He makes me think about the wise man, his beard gives him an extraordinary Rasputin-Marx look.

What is a stroke?, how is the performance is undoing the model of thinking about making painting? The unfinished look in art,

The unfinished gesture in painting as political. De Kooning, Joan Mitchell – Gesture as Freedom – very critical of this association.

Global domination of American art.  People making gestures and forming gestures on the stage politicises this as the freeing up of humanity.

As an ideological framework.  Art as having a real freedom as opposed to the political lack of freedom.  Maggie Nichols rants and whitters about Murdoch and The Sun.  British museum, spoken word and breathing and vocals – North Vietnamese art, a small child comes up to her.

The child interrupts the play of the adults. Vietnamese had creative writing.  Revolutionary.  She goes off.  I feel it must have been quite An endurance for you Mark  – it’s a long time to be on stage performing having to invent new movement and take the work forward.

Maggie Nicholls’ comments are heard as you pour paint on the canvass. There is music from the side.  I’m not sure about the dancer –

Her gestures seemed touch-based, holding hands and smearing, holding each other.  Matthew Collings comes in again with macho

abstract paintings – he offers new readings of their supposed machismo – this is very informative; presents them as shattered characters.

Difference is the emphasis, as AE was always pictorial  within the rectangle in the tradition of painting. The investigations of mid-50s by Alan Kaprow, Yves Kien in Paris were not pictoral ideas but used Gesture as an extension of the body which was more important than pictorialism – the body and physical impulses

Mind-body electricity which is inferred in painting but in your art/performance it is focussing on bodies, minds, people more than on paintings

as objects- It made me wonder how much had been agreed in advance as topics to cover.  MN comments on agreeing and disagreeing,

Play a playground for adults – the tactility and the sound coming from toys and whistles enforces the idea of play.   Improvising with the painting,

MN puts paint on her face. She keeps talking, and singing, commenting – I’ve always loved butch women and womanly men.  

She starts tap dancing. Mark you are pouring paint on the  tilted canvass, the dancer is acting like an assistant. It has an erotic or sensual quality.

Your arm is coming over the canvass from behind.  MN seems to collapse or flop into the arms of the dancer – “I can still do this at 76.” 

It seems to be leading crescendo?  The squeaky sound is great.  Mark is focussing on the plastic layers.

I wonder whether the painting produced including the plastic layers will be shown?  Matthew C starts again

On Pollock’s idea of getting acquainted with the painting – a balance between accidental effects and control.  There is no chaos, it is controlled flicking

And throwing as a deliberate gestures. Pollock as the most mythic figure, horrible death and manic depression. He maps Pollock as the ugly myth of America –

Abstract Expression, trembling delicacy against the myth of rough tough macho movement.  They did not describe themselves paintings but the myth was written around them.  The event has sympathetic, a beautiful painting, could it also be embarrassing, shimmering playful, blobs and splashes and twittering

Sounds, half thoughts, poetic thoughts, audio bodily, visual, the record of it will be the painting – a record being a recording the body’s movement.

Everyone gets up from the floor, Mark helps Maggie up and applause.

Nina Danino.