17.12.26, 19:00, Mike Sperlinger, Ian White, “I am not an archive”: Ian White and the afterlives of performance

Ian White – a British writer, curator, artist and performer – died in 2013 at the age of 41. He left behind a unique body of performance works, and a set of problems: How to treat the documentation of White’s performances – were they works in their own right? What status did White’s published scripts have? Could these works – full of intimate detail, delivered in White’s inimitable voice – be performed by others? In short: how, if at all, could these works have a life after his death? Mike Sperlinger, a friend and collaborator of White’s, has been reckoning with these questions and others whilst working on his artistic estate. That has included co-curating a posthumous gallery exhibition, overseeing restagings of White’s work by others and, most recently, preparing ‘scores’ of several of the performances for acquisition by an art museum. This process – informed by conversations with many of White’s collaborators as well as others – has been necessarily tentative, following the route of what White himself called “repetition and failure”. The result is not a formula to follow, but perhaps a new and more interesting set of dilemmas. In this talk, focussed on the work Black Flags, Sperlinger will talk about some of these dilemmas and their practical consequences, such as: which parts of a performance resist notation; whether it is possible to conserve qualities like irreverence; the difference between reproduction and transmission; the agency of the re-performer and its limits; and friendship as a form of art history.

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