On a cold, rainy day in April, a group of artists and curious friends of art gather in Artsi, an art museum in Myyrmäki, Vantaa, to witness and celebrate the art of live bodies, actions, and sites – and specifically the site of a/the museum as a space tangled and loaded with different meanings, associations, and tensions.

One-Day Stand No. 3 was the third edition of a series of events hosted by The Other Side, the first of which took place in August 2024. “One-Day Stand events provide a platform for both emerging and established artists to showcase their live performances, explore a variety of themes, and engage with audiences”. The events have previously spread out across several different locations – from the streets of Myyrmäki, to a partly abandoned shopping mall, the most recent editions taking place in the cultural center Mosaiikki and Artsi museum. In each of these instances, the location or the site has had a focal emphasis on the curating and creation of the performances.

Museum (or maybe, rather, gallery) is not, of course, an unlikely location for practicing and viewing performance art. But, “[t]o be ‘specific’ to such a site [...] is to decode and/or recode the institutional conventions so as to expose their hidden operations – to reveal the ways in which institutions mold art’s meaning to modulate its cultural and economic value; to undercut the fallacy of art’s and its institutions’ autonomy by making apparent their relationship to the broader socioeconomic and political processes of the day," Miwon Kwon, curator and art history educator who specialises in contemporary, land and site-specific art, writes in her foundational One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. In the same book, now 20 years old but still providing some focal ideas on site-specificity, argues implicitly that site-specificity is what made contemporary fine art performative (referring to the 1960’s). For the sake of the argument, one could even say that site-specific art is what essentially created performance art!

During these past 60 or so decades, “site-specificity” has gone through multiple phases, ranging from strictly phenomenological, physical-reality-oriented treatment of the space to the consideration of the historical, sociocultural and institutional dimensions of the construction of a “site” and the site. Many of the first instances (in both of these cases) bring the immediate and familiar environment of the museum/gallery into debate. My personal favorites include Mierle Laderman Ukele’s “maintenance art” pieces in which she spent hours scrubbing the entry plaza, steps and exhibition hall floors of Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut to reveal the hidden and devalued labor of daily maintenance that is required to keep such an institution running. Arriving to the 21st century, boundaries between different art forms keep dissolving and fine art works like paintings and sculptures pull more and more from performance – durationality, changeability, and multi-sensory qualities, to name a few. Respectively, even traditional theater and other performing arts begin to lean more and more towards fine art’s paradigm of stationary, possible-to-grasp-at-one-glance artworks. Performance is still seen in galleries, of course (still, most oftentimes), but these contemporary works don’t usually respond to the immediacy of the site of the gallery itself (perhaps the museum/gallery as a site has been approached by artists far too many times already – perhaps there is nothing new to say?). In this sense, One-Day Stand No. 3 represents both a return to the roots (traditional, intervention-based gallery performance event), and a refreshing turn back towards the materiality and phenomenology of the space – which, in its modern treatment, carries also institutional and sociocultural meanings.

Well, whatever the case, at One-Day Stand No.3 it was clear that the site itself played a crucial part in the construction of the evening and – even if not explicitly – the individual performances. Whether the gallery space (not white but pink and green and yellow!) was treated as concrete spatial material (walls, floors, paintings, echoes, sculptures, and the classic high ceiling) with which to interact and to bounce off of or the gallery as an institution (containing certain regulations and contexts, discursive potentials, opening speeches and awkward small talk) every inch and corner of the museum space was there in its tangible, visible, audible, and imaginable essence. The event was curated in the context of the ongoing exhibition in the museum, “Steps in the City," which “explores the layering of cities” and “how issues related to the physical, cultural, and visual construction of cities have been dealt with in the visual arts.” In the context of the event, the exhibition became one of the performers of the night (co-performing in everyone else’s performance as well), practicing the uncovering of the tensions between “high art” and urban cityscape. The outside leaked in and the inside leaked out; the walls were, momentarily, transparent.

Absorbed/absorbing

The first performer of the night was interdisciplinary artist Alyssa Coffin, whose body movements started to creep into the space already as we gathered in the big museum hall and were introduced to the program of the night. The performance was perhaps the most traditionally site-specific piece of the night, as it was created in intense contact with the space. Prior to the event, Coffin spent three days at the museum and walking around the area of Myyrmäki - her performance was borne out of her time spent in and relating to the site and gathering notes, thoughts, materials, and sounds.

First, we saw Coffin crawl around the exhibition space. At some point, the artist climbed inside a huge partition wall holding some of the artworks of the exhibition; she opened the small “door” on the bottom side of the wall, crawled in, and closed the door – becoming absorbed by the museum. The audience was invited to practice a similarly close relationship to the wall: we were leaning and pressing our ears to it to hear Coffin’s subtle, barely audible noises from inside the wall. This went on together with a soundscape coming from a speaker high above on the museum ceiling. This again radically and swiftly extended the space and turned our attention away from where we were already getting used to looking (the floor and the bottom of the partition wall). After a while, Coffin came out of the wall and, still on her knees, continued all the way out of the museum to the rainy streets of Myyrmäki, where the performance ended on a small nearby dirt hill with three cut-down birch trees. (Later Coffin wrote to me that these birches, which at the beginning of her stay were still standing tall, impacted her performance the most.) The piece tied the themes of the exhibition, as well as the event, together. After the institution had swallowed Coffin whole, it was time for her rebirth – somewhere else, outside of it all, in the rain and dirt of the world.

Ilze Mazpane, a Riga-based performance artist, whose background is in philosophy as well as experimental theater, turned the relations of absorption upside down by slowly and carefully “swallowing” things under her long, cape-like dress. She started by absorbing herself, piece of clothing by piece of clothing, finally finishing with shoes. Then, slowly moving further into the space and amongst the people, several members of the audience ended up under her motherly, yet monster-like mouth of a performing body. The psychoanalytical connotations and interpretations are difficult not to draw yet seem too obvious – I notice I am, again, more drawn to think in terms of the space of an exhibition hall. I felt as if Mazpane was creating parallel spaces inside the institution that at the same time offered a place for escape and invited “make yourself at home”.

The performance was at the same time extremely gentle, yet menacing – hypnotic to watch, provoking feelings of both fearing and wishing to take part in it. The cape-creature became a soft place for hiding while taking up more and more space as a newly born, collective creature.

Small gestures to uncover the loaded institution

niko wearden’s piece, made in collaboration with Dr. Clair Le Couteur, focused on subtle, yet striking gestures of rather not doing than actively doing. The space was shrinking, perhaps already starting with Ilze Mazpane’s slow annihilating acts, and curling up to point towards the institutional by occupying all the site’s corners.

wearden (who has a practice of generally refusing to talk about their practice, which I find brilliant – what is this thing called practice anyway?) together with Clair Le Couteur who is a vocalist, artist and scholar had created a brilliantly executed, hilarious sound piece focusing on the not said. The message was quite literally between the lines, as the text piece was created out of cut voice messages sent between the two. This resulted in combinations without any actual meaning and full of uhms and ehms and ands – something we in the art world are more than familiar with. It prompted the audience to question the nature of the place, site, and space we occupied. Accompanying the sound piece, we saw wearden’s playful, small gestures with a bunch of limes. He rolled these limes towards the audience and around the space while also positioning himself in statue-like poses.

At one point in the recording, Claire Le Couteur asks: “What does it mean to be a place? What does it mean to be a museum?” What is allowed inside the museum walls and what kind of knowledge this reproduces inevitably become the central questions of the performance. wearden wonders whether he really has anything to say and what their specific relationship to the museum is (again, is there really anything new to say about the museum/gallery?) - and contends to ask questions and make tiny, sharp observations. Emptiness, metaphor. “Look at how sharply aligned all our plug sockets are!” Le Couteur's voice pierces the air. That is the site of a museum in a nutshell.

Another theme close to wearden’s practice, waiting, was tangible in the performance as well. wearden stayed still for long periods of time or only engaged in minor and repetitive acts of playing with the lime or simply looking at it. The affect of a museum is indeed often that of waiting, for your turn to enter or to get your work up on the walls and approved institutionally.

Eero Yli-Vakkuri is an artist with a long professional history of creating “annoying street interventions," according to his own bio. In One-Say Stand, he too mostly played with what was not said and not done, what happened in between the amusingly awkward gestures of, for example, sighing as if meaning to begin a speech (the kind of speech we only hear at exhibition openings and other art happenings) or going through your pockets to find your notes only to look at them as if in disbelief and put them back. Yli-Vakkuri quickly created an atmosphere of shared amusement and equal confusion, resulting in bursts of laughter by gathering us audience in a circle over and over again, barely in a different spot, almost starting to speak, looking at notes, repeating, repeating. Slowly growing towards absurdity, at one point, Yli-Vakkuri was cycling around the already so familiar partition wall. We ended up running after him like headless chickens – what were we trying to catch? In the performance, almost actor-like theatricality and one of the most effective tools of performance – repetition – created a thought-provoking, hilarious, and surprisingly heartwarming experience with a starting and an ending that dissolved somewhere in the AC-cool air of the museum.

Precise, gentle, even bittersweet humor tied the performances of the evening together. Small gestures and absurd interventions all uncover different layers of the space – at the end, we are standing with all of those naked threads hanging around us, vulnerable and touched – the tension still tangible.

References

Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another. Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. The MIT Press: London, 2004.