Side by Side

Side by SideFriendship as Critical Practice in the Performance Art of Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger John P. Bowles (bio) Artists Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger commemorated their friendship in 2006 by making a collaborative video, Side by Side, surveying thirty years of creative dialogue and exchange. Reflecting on the importance of having supported each other’s work since they met in 1970s Los Angeles, the artists present a succession of video clips and photographs documenting their participation in each other’s performances. As a result, Hassinger and Nengudi introduce friendship as a crucial condition for the production and reception of their work. To mark the significance of the occasion, Hassinger wrote a “Manifesto” emphasizing how important it has been to develop their practices together in solidarity, “side by side,” exchanging ideas and supporting each other during difficult times: We’ve kept each other such good company all these years and we’ve had so much fun doing it, that it’s hard to separate the abiding friendship from the issues of theory and practice ... We’ve collaborated and those times together have kept us making art, maintained our curiosity (when much else failed), and stepped up the ante in art history. Our times together making work have healed many difficult moments wrought by (these only childs’) lives. Nengudi subsequently reciprocated with her own statement, “Maren and Me,” which she wrote in 2009, when both artists were invited to participate in the African American Performance Art Archive. According to both artists’ statements, they came to know each other through shared circumstances and interests around 1977, when they were invited to participate in the Professional Artist Employment Program, a federally-funded workshop organized by Brockman Gallery Productions, the business of artists Alonzo and Dale Davis that provided crucial support for a broad community of black artists working in Los Angeles.1 Nengudi and Hassinger composed Side by Side as if to demonstrate what Nengudi asserts in her statement, that having met in the workshop, “a true friendship developed as we discovered that we had in common sculpture, a dance background, and a need to play out conceptual ideas through sculpture and performance art” (“Maren and Me”). The video comprises photographs and video clips of performances presented chronologically from 1977 to the present in which the artists and their friends interact with installations and sculptural materials through dance. By creating the video collaboratively as a sort of retrospective of shared ideas articulated through participation in each other’s work, Has-singer and Nengudi render their friendship manifest as one of the crucial circumstances of their work. [End Page 400] In Side by Side, Hassinger and Nengudi highlight friendship as the contingent circumstance that connects their work within the structure of a decades-long and on-going dialogue. Performances created with the participation of friends and for audiences of friends ensured that even in the absence of a prominent venue, collectors, or art critics, the work had an audience for whom it also had meaning and value, an audience that could not help but be affected. As Nengudi explains, “We would meet in different spaces around LA ... and perform and play out our concepts. Then we would return to our separate studios charged up by our encounters” (“Maren and Me”). She does not detail the results, only that the experience of sharing in a friend’s practice might provide motivation, inspiration, critique, or support. Hassinger referred to the experience similarly, as “nothing explicit—but a shared moment individually interpreted” (“Manifesto”). Expressing conviction the artists provided each other with a mutually supportive audience, she and Nengudi do not provide details. Given such ambiguities, how do we recognize the role of friendship in the performances represented within Side by Side? In some of the photographs, such as those of Hassinger’s High Noon, evidence of friendship appears in the joyful expressions on the performers’ faces as they share in the interpersonal experience of Hassinger’s installation, providing an alternative to the distanced observations of modernist criticism. In other examples, Hassinger and Nengudi appear to address black women’s experiences of objectification and sexualization, as in Nengudi’s Performance Piece – Nylon Mesh and Maren Hassinger

Aesthetics · Art · Curiosity · Friendship · Manifesto · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Solidarity · Visual arts · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Diversity and Impact of Dance · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Theatre and Performance Studies

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