This program brings together early performance works by artist, art critic, poet, filmmaker, and novelist Brian O’Doherty. At age 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”, and who led the first national funding for performance and media art at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1970s, making 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 traversing a 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 of the 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. Unlike peer Conceptualists and post-Minimalists in New York, O’ Doherty explored the relationship between language and identity, with the “Structural Plays” “rotating” sentences (and thus testing the stability of) being one person, here, now. They manifest a decolonial gesture in their juxtaposition 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.

Biographies:

Brian O’Doherty is an artist, art critic, novelist, filmmaker, and poet, who has worked under several identities. Born in Ireland in 1928 and trained as a doctor, he began his art career in the 1960s in New York. As an artist he works with drawing, installation and performance, exhibiting in museums and galleries worldwide. He is the author of two books and three novels, one of which was Man-Booker prize nominated. He was art critic for the New York Times in the 1960s and editor of Art in America in the ‘70s and is best known for his paradigm-shifting* Inside the White Cube* essays (1976). Recent publications and monographs include: the artist’s novel A Crossdresser’s Secret, Sternberg Press, 2014; the critical anthology Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique edited by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, 2017; Brian O’ Doherty: Collected Essays published by University of California Press, 2018; and A Mental Masquerade, edited by Thomas Fischer and Astrid Mania, Spector Books, 2019.

Lucy Cotter is an Irish curator and writer whose practice embraces the intersections of art, politics, and the unknown. She is based in Portland, OR, where she is Curator in Residence 2021 at Oregon Center for Contemporary Art. Previous projects include being curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017) with Cinema Olanda: Wendelien van Oldenborgh. She is author-editor of Reclaiming Artistic Research (2019) and a contributor to journals such as Flash Art,* Frieze*, and Mousse Magazine. Cotter holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and lectures in Critical Theory at Portland State University. She is currently working on an experimental play entitled The Entangled Museum, a solo exhibition with Katarina Zdjelar (2021), and an exhibition exploring the archives of Maya Lin’s Confluence project (2022).

Ekmeles is a vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of new and rarely heard works, and gems of the historical avant-garde. Praised as a "brilliant young ensemble... defining a fresh and virtuosic American sound" by The New Yorker, they have given US premieres of works by Beat Furrer, Luigi Nono, and Salvatore Sciarrino. In 2019–2020 they performed with the MET Museum's first commissioned sound installation, Oliver Beer's Vessel Orchestra, and released their debut album "A howl, that was also a prayer" on New Focus Recordings, with works by Taylor Brook, Erin Gee, and Christopher Trapani.

Holland Andrews is a vocalist, composer, and performance artist whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build soundscapes encompassing both catharsis and dissonance. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics. Andrews also develops and performs soundscapes for dance, theater, and film, and their work is toured internationally with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Dorothee Munyaneza, Will Rawls, and poet Demian Dinéyazhi. Notable musical collaborations include William Brittelle, Son Lux, Christina Vantzou, Peter Broderick, and Methods Body.

Undoing Language: Early Performance Works by Brian O’Doherty is made possible with endowment support from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; annual grants from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Howard Gilman Foundation, and The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.