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Writing

The Accidental Symbol: Performance as a Conduit (On Jennifer Lacey)

Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts
Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.
Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

2021

A woman enters the room she has been directed to by the museum guide, the low heels of her sandals click-clacking as she walks. Almost emptied of its art collection, the space feels different than she remembers it. Crossing the checkered tiles, Rozalia feels exposed, like the last pawn on a chessboard. She hurries past a painting en route to the table and two chairs that form her destination. Glancing sideward, she notices that it is an old painting of the National Gallery itself, surrounded by vintage cars and a motley crowd.

A second woman, performance artist Jennifer Lacey, is waiting for her to arrive and be seated. She greets Rozalia with the studied warmth of a receptionist. Rozalia thinks the artist resembles a nurse with her crisp white dress, but also a fashion model, with her red lipstick and bleached hair. Seating herself on the assigned chair, Rozalia looks down at the multi-colored plastic cards, spread out on the tabletop like samples in a carpet shop. The artist speaks to her in a soothing voice, telling her that the art works in the museum will be used as a performative divining system through which she can imagine that these works concern her directly. Asked to share her problem, Rozalia pauses and lowers her voice, wanting to be heard only by the artist. She looks downwards, catching a glimpse of the artist’s silver glitter shoes, hidden under the white tabletop.

The artist asks her to select her first card to establish the history of her current situation. Turning the card over, Rozalia sees the symbol of a door with a pool of tears underneath. She does not know that this image is inspired by Cally Spooner’s performance, “Fake Tears and Outsourcing”. She recognizes instead that her problems have come from feeling shut out of life, even as she appears to be actively participating in it. The artist describes the symbols using words that ring true with her own intuition. Rozalia is invited to choose her second card, which, the artist explains, will sketch out how the problem might develop into the future. Rozalia hesitates between the blue and the orange cards, finally settling on the blue one. The artist turns it over, revealing a picture of a winking eye. Recalling the performance of hypnotized bodies by Xavier Cha that prompted this symbol, the artist suggests that Rozalia will continue to be in denial, keeping her eyes closed to her problems and allowing others to determine the course of her life. Rozalia sighs in quiet affirmation.

A young couple enters the gallery, pretending to look closely at the few paintings that still adorn the walls, but clearly waiting for their own turn to take part in the performance. Rozalia realizes at this moment that she too is performing. She imagines the couple watching the scene of two women leaning over a table of cards and the ritual mutterings of the words they exchange. Her time is almost up but she still needs to choose a final card. The artist tells her it will bear a text relating to one of the paintings in the room that will act as a tool for Rozalia to move forward with her situation. The artist overturns her chosen card, which bears the text “Accidental Protagonist”. Rozalia does not know that the words relate to the picture of the museum she had glanced at en route to the table or that the painting was first hung here in 1922 when the first president of Poland was shot by a right-wing artist while looking at the exhibition. Rozalia does know that she feels like life is happening to her, almost randomly, as she struggles to get by and that this strange experience has prompted her into imagining something less accidental.

Rozalia leaves the museum, slightly flushed in her cheeks, wondering whether she should go home after all, as she had promised. She walks past the painting again, noticing this time that the women’s faces are almost drowned out by their cloche hats; that the men seem to rule the streets, that the cars are like insects prowling for prey. She notices too that she feels more alive, strangely free. She remembers how much she has always wanted to travel.

The artist greets the couple, asking them to seat themselves, distracted slightly by how, once again, the cards seem to fit the circumstances of the co-performer’s life so perfectly. She tells herself that this comes from everyone’s wish to imagine their lives as legible. Of course art does not have any powers of divination! She hears herself reminding the couple that this is a performance.

Notes

This is a fictive scenario based on a real-life performance by Jennifer Lacey entitled “What should I do and if I do it, will it make me a better person?” that took place at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in 2017 as part of “Better Self”, a performance series curated by Magdalena Komornicka. The painting referred to is Bronisław Kopczyński, “Pałac Sztuki, Zachęta” (1922).

Publication: This is one of seven text portraits by Lucy Cotter, commissioned for and published in Fieldings – Propositions for 3rd Cycle Research in the Performing Arts, published by DAS Publishing, the new publishing platform of DAS Research, the lectorate of the Academy for Theatre and Dance in 2021.

The book was edited under the chief editorship of Sher Doruff, in collaboration with editors Julien Bruneau, Konstantina Georgelou, Rosie Heinrich, Marijke Hoogenboom, and Nienke Scholts.

Writing

Lucy Cotter is a prolific writer; publishing art criticism, cultural criticism, art history, art theory, ficto-theory, poetry, exhibition, performance, cross-disciplinary texts, and catalogue essays. She seeks to create a more generative relationship between art making and writing.

She is the author of Reclaiming Artistic Research (Hatje Cantz, 2019, expanded 2nd ed. 2024), a book foregrounding the singular nature of artistic thinking in dialogue with acclaimed artists worldwide. She is a regular contributor to books on contemporary art by academic presses, and has published in catalogues and monographs on Haegue Yang, Rabih Mroué, Katarina Zdjelar, Brian Maguire, Manuela Infante, and Brian O’ Doherty, among other artists.

She is the editor of several exhibition catalogues, including Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh for the 57th Venice Biennale, and has guest-edited a number of art journals, including Third Text. Her work has appeared in Flash Art, Mousse, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Oregon Artswatch, CARA, Field Day, The Brooklyn Rail, Typishly, Cirque, and Frieze, among other journals.

Books

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research: Expanded Second Edition

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    Expanding the original book with additional artist dialogues and a new essay, this edition explores the changing stakes of artistic research in a world reckoning with social justice, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence through a series of 24 in-depth dialogues with artists worldwide.

    2024

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    In twenty conversations with leading artists worldwide, Lucy Cotter maps out an epistemology of artistic creation. She manifests a type of research that is dynamically engaged with other fields, but thinks beyond concepts into bodily and material knowledge that exceeds language, revolutionizing our perception of art from the ground up.

    2019

Books in Progress

Books Chapters & Essays

  • unraveling: practice-led curating

    Companion to Curatorial Futures

    Bridget Crone, Bassam el Baroni, Matthew Poole, eds.

    Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Global Engagement and Modalities of Looking in the Work of Brian Maguire, Richard Mosse, and Yuri Pattison

    Routledge Companion to Irish Art

    Fionna Barber and Fintan Cullen, eds.

    London: Routledge

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Haegue Yang: Day and Night

    Haegue Yang: The Great Forgetfulness

    Fergal Gaynor, ed.

    Cork: National Sculpture Factory

    forthcoming 2024
    2024

  • Delegitimizing the Continuum of Violence

    Brian Maguire: The Grand Illusion

    Dublin: The Hugh Lane National Gallery

    2024

  • Fact as Fiction: A Dialogue with Rabih Mroué

    Rabih Mroué: Interviews

    Nadim. Samman, ed.

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    2023

  • Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge

    Manuela Infante: Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking

    Giovanni Aloi, ed.

    Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

    2023

  • The Warp and Weft of History

    Kristina Benjocki: The Warp and Weft of History

    Amsterdam: Looiersgracht 60

    2023

  • Braiding: Transgenerational Artistic Comradeship

    Katarina Zdjelar (monograph)

    Middlesborough: Institute of Modern Art & Teeside University

    2022

  • (tropisms) away from and towards the thing, it, she

    Natasha Pike (artist's book)

    Dublin: Arts Council

    2022

  • Beyond the Walls of National Identity: The Triangulation of Art Criticism, Curatorial Discourse, and Artistic Practice

    Irish Art 1920–2020: Perspectives on Change

    Yvonne Scott and Christine Kennedy, eds.

    Dublin: Royal Hibernian Academy

    2022

  • After a While, Reflectively: Performing an Ecology of Composition Practice (On Alison Isadora)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Body as a Crease of Knowledge (On Mike O' Connor)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Preparing for Liquefaction (On Siegmar Zacharias)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts, eds. Julian Brumeau, Nienke Scholts et al. Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/Amsterdam University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Accidental Symbol: Performance as a Conduit (On Jennifer Lacey)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Between and Beyond the Dramaturgical (On Nienke Scholts)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Walking the Wrinkled Plane (On Gustavo Ciríaco)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Space Beyond Boundaries (On Rosie Heinrich)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Art Stars and Plasters on the Wounds: Why Have There Been No Great Irish Artists?

    Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader

    Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy, eds.

    Cork: Cork University Press

    2021

  • Unknowing Culture

    Persistent Traces of Things to Come

    Marjoca de Greef and Anastasija Pandilovska, eds.

    Amsterdam: Sun and Stars

    2020

  • Mercurial States: A Curatorial Reflection

    Art and Education/Classroom

    2019

  • Towards an autonomy of self, towards a community of self

    Katarina Zdjelar: Vladimir

    Lucerne: Centre of Contemporary Art

    2019

  • Cinema Olanda: Toward a Platform, Realized and Anticipated

    Blessing and Transgressing: A Live Institute

    Defne Ayas, ed.

    London: Cornerhouse

    2018

  • Cinema Olanda: Projecting the Netherlands

    Cinema Olanda: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, ed. Lucy Cotter, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, p. 11–21

    2017

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Aspen 5+6

    Brian O Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique, ed. Christa Maria Lerm Hayes. Amsterdam: Valiz

    2017

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6, An Early Exposition

    The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia

    Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, eds.

    Leiden: Leiden University Press.

    2014

  • Close Listening: Katarina Zdjelar’s My lifetime (Malaika)

    Katarina Zdjelar: Of More Than One Voice

    Vitoria-Gasteiz: Artium Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art

    2013

  • 180 Degrees: The University after Artistic Research

    Art Education: A Glossary

    Tom Vandeputte, ed.

    Amsterdam: Sandberg Institute

    2013

  • Libia Olafur: The Future of Hospitality

    Under Deconstruction: Icelandic Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale

    Ellen Blumenstein, ed.

    Berlin: Sternberg Press

    2011

The above contributions are selected from 2011–2024. A complete list from 2005–2024 is available on request.

Art Journals

  • TBA Review: FORCE! an opera in three acts

    Performance review, Oregon Arts Watch

    11 September 2024
    2024

  • Empathy and Eros: Ralph Pugay’s The Longest Journey

    Exhibition review, Oregon Arts Watch.

    11 December 2023
    2023

  • Brian O’ Doherty and his Many Selves

    Tribute article, Brian O’ Doherty memorial publication,

    Brenda Moore-McCann, ed. The Brooklyn Rail.

    May 2023
    2023

  • Brian O’ Doherty, Paradigm-Shifting Artist Dies at 94

    Tribute article, Hyperallergic.

    9 November 2022
    2022

  • The Weft of History: Kristina Benjocki at IKOB, Eupen

    Exhibition review, Metropolis M

    1 June 2022
    2022

  • The Promise of “Opacity”: Takahiro Yamamoto’s Opacity of Performance at Portland Art Museum

    Performance review, Oregon Arts Watch

    24 June 2022
    2022

  • Disintegrating Language: Will Rawls’s “Amphigory”

    Exhibition Review, Oregon Arts Watch.

    23 November 2022
    2022

  • The Art of Zoom

    Essay: “The Art of Zoom”, republished, In the Pause of an Echo, There May Be A Shadow, online symposium publication.

    2020

  • The Art of Zoom

    Essay, RUUKU Journal for Artistic Research, Vol. 14

    6 August 2020
    2020

  • Design as Relationality, Aesthetics as Agency (On dach&zephir)

    Essay, Sophie Krier, ed. Issue 4, Field Essays.

    2019

  • Plants as Other: Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art

    Performance Review, Mousse Magazine

    17 May 2019
    2019

  • Wendelien van Oldenborgh at CA2M, Madrid

    Exhibition Preview, Artforum, Summer edition (print and digital).

    2019

  • The Exhibition after Time and Space: On Mario Garcia Torres’s Survey ‘Illusion brought Me Here’

    Essay, Mousse Magazine

    Spring 2019
    2019

  • Beyond the White Cube: Sixty Years of Brian O’ Doherty’s Letters

    Book review, Frieze.

    25 February 2019
    2019

  • Rob Halverson, Enthusiastic-Remotest-Tree

    Exhibition review, Flash Art

    5 June 2019
    2019

  • An Intimate Dance of Objects: Gordon Hall

    Exhibition review, Mousse Magazine

    11 June 2019
    2019

  • Mia Habib, ALL – a physical poem of protest

    Performance review, Flash Art

    27 September 2019
    2019

  • Writing as Experiment: A Dialogue with Sher Doruff

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1, 2018

    2018

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research… First Thoughts

    Introductory essay

    2018

  • Sound as Knowledge: A Dialogue with Samson Young

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

  • Knowledge as Production: A Dialogue with Liam Gillick

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

  • Black Urban Choreography: NIC Kay’s Pushit!

    Performance Review, Mousse Magazine.

    26 October 2018
    2018

  • Becoming the Archive: A Dialogue with Euridice Kala

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1.

    2018

  • Beyond Language: A Dialogue with Falke Pisano

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1.

    2018

  • Research as Play: A Dialogue with Ryan Gander

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

The above contributions are selected from 2017–2024 only. A list of earlier journal publications from 2003–2018 is available on request.

The keys of a computer are not entirely different than those of a piano. Fingers moving across a plane, producing sounds that are spoken or read. Tracing how material and embodied sensibilities can undermine the imposition of language; how words can act as placeholders for emerging subject positions and worldmaking. Embraced as a medium, writing aligns itself with the internal logic of art making.