Who was Barbara Cleveland? Despite an extensive body of work and active involvement in the ’70s performance art scene, Barbara Cleveland is a figure who seems to have disappeared from Australian art history. Sydney’s Brown Council are determined to find out more about Cleveland, her work and her mysterious disappearance from art history. Part of an ongoing project, This Is Barbara Cleveland is a video work that presents a portrait of one of Australia’s forgotten performance artists. The work will be presented as part of Performance Space’s 30th anniversary celebrations, the You’re History showcase.
The group’s interest in Cleveland started when Diana Smith (one fourth of Brown Council) was working as a researcher on a project at the University of New South Wales’ College of Fine Arts. Here Smith came across an archive box of Cleveland’s work, which contained lectures and instructional performances. Smith was intrigued by the fact that she had never heard of Cleveland, so took the box and showed it to the rest of Brown Council. Ever since then they’ve set themselves the task of recovering the memory of Cleveland.
The project started in 2011 – its first iteration was at Artspace as part of Nothing Like Performance. This stage of the work involved the re-enactment of a lecture from the box, remembrance performances twice a week where the artists would stand and remember her, as well as limited edition t-shirts that people could take away and wear to spread the word about Cleveland. Since then Brown Council have been researching their subject, talking to her contemporaries and have even travelled overseas on a pilgrimage of sorts to visit the places Cleveland had been in an attempt to discover more about her.
This research has culminated in a new documentary-style video work, This is Barbara Cleveland, which not only tells Cleveland’s story but involves re-enactments of her works. Brown Council say that the video is created with the intention of breathing new life into Cleveland’s work as well as making an attempt to reinsert her into performance art history. “We’re very interested in the way that history is written … historically women have been left out of history and since the ’70s there’s been a lot of work done to [rectify this]… When we found this box of Cleveland’s work we realised that this was an artist who had suffered a similar fate so we decided to take on the role of almost art historian [and] reinsert her back into history.”
Performance is known for its ephemeral nature and Brown Council say that it leaves a lot of room for confusion around fact and fiction. Often the only evidence of performance work taking place is through blurry black and white photographs and what has been written about it. Brown Council describes the relationship between performance and its documentation as a “kind of slippery space between what actually happened and what has been recorded through writing about these kinds of works. In Australia there has been very little written about performance art and certainly women are often left out of that story more broadly.”
This work continues themes Brown Council has explored in previous works – not only the relationship between the performance and its documentation, but also between performance and feminism. “We’ve been looking at the idea of disappearance and appearance within performance practice. We’ve been interested in the fabrication and re-enactment of performance documents and performance itself and Barbara Cleveland seems to be a figure that encapsulates those threads as well.”
BY EMMA MCMANUS
The Brown Council presents This Is Barbara Cleveland at Performance Space, Carriageworks from November 20 through December 1.
