This program brings together early performance works by artist, art critic, poet, filmmaker, and novelist Brian O’Doherty, and is followed by a new performance by Holland Andrews, commissioned in response to his oeuvre. At the age of 93, this program recognizes O’Doherty’s role as an artist who created a substantial body of performance works engaging with the performativity of language and how it interacts with the performance of the “self”. It celebrates his legacy as the instigator of the first national funding for performance and media art at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1970's, which made an indelible mark on the New York performance art scene.

The works being presented at The Kitchen stem from the period in which O’ Doherty developed a series of ten “Structural Plays” (1967-70) that “perform language” in ways that expose its instability, forming a performative precursor of post-structuralism. (Notably O’ Doherty was also the first person to publish Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” as guest-editor of Aspen 5&6 in 1967.) The event at The Kitchen will include live performances of two of these works, followed by a newly commissioned vocal work by Holland Andrews, responding to this oeuvre.

The evening will mark the first ever performance of Vowel Chorus for Five Voices (1968), the most elaborate of several “voice-works” made by O’ Doherty between 1967 and 1970. In this work, each of five performers are designated one vowel sound, as well as different times in which to sustain his or her vowel, and a choice of pitch (high, low, and middle registers).This work was influenced by O’ Doherty’s friendship with Morton Feldman, with whom he shared an ongoing interest in seriality. Perhaps because of the necessity of five trained voices, the work was never previously realized as a performance, being exhibited to date as a score/drawing. More than fifty years after its conception, it will be performed live by Ekmeles, a New York-based avant-garde music ensemble.

“Structural Play: Vowel Grid” (1970) will also be performed live; this is a work for two performers, who utter vowel sounds while traversinga grid-like floor drawing. This grid is a visual translation of the vowels; a kind of “phonic drawing” that spatializes language, made up of the linear alphabet of Ogham. Seeking to translate language into a serial notation, O’ Doherty turned to this ancient Celtic notation from his native country as “a non-expressive compositional tool” (Brenda Moore-McCann). The horizontal and diagonal lines that form the basis of the colored grid are “abstract” visual translations ofthe vowels, rotated and transposed to make a drawing that can be performed as an open-ended score.

O’ Doherty’s engagement with Ogham manifests his interest in serialism as an open and polyvalent thought-process that poses an alternative to classical thought. His emphasis on the physicality of language reflects an affinity with (Irish) oral culture, as oral literature inhabits the body rather than the page.Unlikepeer Conceptualists and post-Minimalists in New York, O’ Dohertyexplored the relationship between language and identity, with the “Structural Plays” “rotating” sentences (and thus testing the stability of) being one person, here, now. Theymanifest a decolonial gesture in theirjuxtaposition of the ancient language of a colonized country with the language of Conceptual art.

The guttural vowel sounds in O’ Doherty’s linguistic performances will form the departure point for a newly commissioned work by Holland Andrews, an extended technique vocalist, composer, and performer who use combined vocal layering to create dissonant soundscapes. Their work will extend the embodied to language of O’ Doherty’s vowel performances, unpacking their layers in a soundscape.

O’ Doherty’s interest in the embodiment and performativity of language formed part of a wider interest in the performativity of the self. Alongside his practice under his given name, O’Doherty further explored the “self”as a fluid entity by working under four additional identities constructed for specific conceptual functions: Mary Josephson, a feminist academic; Sigmund Bode, a linguistic theorist; poet William Maginn, and Patrick Ireland, an artistic identity created in a 1972 performance in protest of the loss of civil rights in Northern Ireland during Bloody Sunday.

This program is guest-curated by Lucy Cotter.