Experimenting in the Galleries: Performing with Vernon Lee
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
The first ‘scratch’ showing of a collaborative performance project that originates in the work of the late nineteenth-century ghost story writer, aesthetic theoretician and queer thinker, Vernon Lee. This project’s guide is an extraordinary Victorian woman who, over one hundred years ago asked ‘[w]hat is a work of art? What does it do for us, or rather do with us?’ This performance piece used Lee’s experimental practices as recorded in Gallery Diaries in which she meticulously charts her experiences of looking at art. With Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson as guides, you were invited to explore the body’s unknown territories to re-think, re-feel, and re-imagine art, beauty and ugliness. There performance offered gallery and museum visitors a blueprint for an experience of art – what our bodies do to art, and what art does to and with our bodies.
Contact name:
David Mcallister