BERLIN.- Persons Projects is presenting, as part of the European Month of Photography in Berlin (EMOP), Grey Crawford’s third solo exhibition. His self-performances from the early 1970s encapsulate the spirit of an era in Southern California, in which Performance Art moved away from the platform of the audience and into the photographic framing of the moment. During this time, performance art can be best described as any type of self-absorbed activity that questioned the essence of sculpture by eliminating the object itself. The focus was on the body and its movement, and how these activities created conversations rather than answers. It was a period of experimentation, and Los Angeles - along with its extended suburbs - was the perfect place for these happenings to evolve. Local artists such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden, and Judy Chicago were all crossing artistic boundaries, and opening up new opportunities that challenged the existing parameters of what the establishment considered to be art. Anywhere and everything became potential stages for artistic intervention. It was in this cultural setting that Grey Crawford’s performances began to evolve. His experiments incorporated locations ranging from the Mojave Desert to the infamous ceramic slip installations of Douglas Humble in his own home.
Discover the radical photography of Grey Crawford's Chroma, 1978-85, Vol. 1. Explore 70s Los Angeles through his unique lens.
Understandably, performance art needs photography to be able to last. Yet, photography plays an even more important role, not only as a means for documentation, but especially when the performance is staged solely for the camera. This close relationship between photography and performance was what Crawford explored in great detail. His actions were staged and carefully planned as photographs, without any other autonomous events surrounding them. The selected works for this exhibition share a conceptual context on how Crawford used sequencing and grids to extend a frozen moment in time as his primary form of expression.
Crawford encapsulates his body inside black trash bags to crawl around the back of buildings and through the bushes, standing in the middle of the road, or stepping into the lake. He conceived of performance as a conceptual exercise that can be appreciated in the absence of the performing body. He wrapped himself in silver foil and, like an alien in the desert, experimented with the physical and psychological limits of his body, as well as the relationship between the object (body) and the horizon. At the end, Crawford’s interest was not about finding answers, but in turn about generating conversations. These early performances by Crawford were inspired by his notion to reconfigure the traditional American image of a figure in a western barren landscape. These staging actions, intertwined with his other photographic bodies of work El Mirage, help open another chapter in the depth of Grey Crawford’s artistic career.
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