Alicia Frankovich

Alicia Frankovich’s video Free Time (2013), documenting a performance at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, resembles a crowded scene from a picture book. People on their way to work, on mobile phones; people after work enjoying free time: playing sports, taking a stroll, riding bikes. One sees suitcases and yoga mats, ties and leggings. A group of pensioners with walking poles do stretching exercises; boys play football. At some point, a group of joggers arrive: red in the face, puffing and panting, their shirts soaked with sweat. Nearby, a girl lowers her bike to the ground as if she were joining her friends for a picnic in the park. At one point, someone hands out oranges.

Free Time – which had an earlier iteration in Sydney the same year – is part of a larger body of works loosely grouped around the idea of dissolving boundaries – the first being The Opportune Spectator (2012). Structurally, it achieves this by removing the differences between performers and viewers and by the interlocking of various versions of Frankovich’s individual pieces. Thematically it does so by examining the wooliness of the concept of ‘performance’ in the age of neoliberal conditioning. In Free Time, it is no longer possible to distinguish who is one of around 70 performers and who is just visiting the museum. One can’t say for sure when the performance begins and ends. If pushed to describe the event here it is one of constant comings and goings. Everyone seems to be doing something and yet nothing at the same time. To put it pointedly, one might say that Frankovich’s work links ‘performance’ the art form with ‘performance’ the achievement – subject to constant evaluation and always capable of betterment. After work there’s still work. Leisure is labour.

Earlier works likewise show Frankovich’s interest in competitive culture and in playing with roles and physical conditioning. There is the vaguely adolescent trials of strength in her performance Bisons (2010), where a succession of contestants face off against the artist; locking shoulders they try and push each other out of the picture – an action borrowed from rugby, the national sport of the artist’s native New Zealand. Or Volution (2011), for which she had a number of people re-enact the clownish boxing scene from Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) in the middle of the street in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. It is obvious how much fun the participants are having and how wrapped up in the action they become – the re-enactment forgotten. They continue to play a role even (and especially) when they stop acting.

For Today this technique is the other way around, her solo show at Kunstverein Hildesheim in 2013, Frankovich brought her latest cycle of works to a kind of conclusion, as well as raising it to a new level. The resulting video of the same name functions less as the documentation of the show and more as a documentary film, seeming instead to ‘perform a format’. Atmospheric footage shows early actions by Frankovich – people performing among passers-by in public places – as well as snippets from the Sydney version of Free Time. This is interspersed with shots of people hanging out in Berlin’s Mauerpark, and a ‘test pattern’ recalling the fact that prior to the only temporary pause of your computer’s screensaver, there was a time when television programming actually ended. Above all, however, the film features people speaking over laid-back electronic music, people from Frankovich’s own milieu, members of the so-called ‘creative class’: they talk about their work, their expectations, how they make a living – their everyday life in an age when work has no clear boundaries. Here, the subtly conditioned bodies from Frankovich’s earlier performances begin to speak, they have faces and opinions. They are aware of their situation and they can’t help submitting to it with a faint sense of unease. At the end, a choir sings ‘Just try to understand / I’ve given all I can / but you got the best of me’ from Madonna’s song Borderline (1984). Beforehand, the film showed various clips of them limbering up to sing.

Rather than being content to merely deconstruct roles and attributions, Frankovich’s works go one step further, communicating via mood. A strange calm lies over everything: a gentleness in exhaustion, diffuse contentment in action. People do things together, they have active bodies, alert minds. They see themselves and others, they know they are playing a role. But still: there is a vita activa beyond the curriculum vitae. And the beauty of this life exudes from every pore of their bodies, making them gently radiant.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell