Performances celebrate studio closing

By Stephen Melville

Norfolk resident and artist Tom Burr organized a day of performances and exhibition at his studio in Torrington on Oct. 26, marking an end to what he has called “The Torrington Project.” For the past three and a half years, Burr has rented a vast—15,000 square foot—former industrial space in Torrington to house a shifting collection of some 35 or 40 works from across his career, from early work at the seminal New York gallery American Fine Arts, to his most recent show at his current American gallery, Bortolami, as well as a range of European shows. 

Although the Torrington space continues to be strongly marked by its industrial past, Burr also did considerable work on it—altering the windows and lighting, setting up new walls, and so on. Between the coming and going of various pieces to various exhibitions and Burr’s own periodic re-arrangements of the material, the Torrington studio has provided him with a valuable space in which to think through the past, present and future of his work.  At the same time, it has served as an exhibition space for a wide range of invited groups and individuals—often other artists, sometimes groups from schools or museums.  

The space as Burr used it entails a collapse of the usual distinction between “making” and “showing”—a collapse that has arguably been active in Burr’s work from the beginning. The project continued and extended this thread of institutional reflection.

Burr’s work over the years has also been characterized by a notable density of art historical reference and an often-surprising conjunction of highly formal, often geometric, abstraction and an active interest in the most concrete forms of embodiment and lived engagement with things—used clothes, books read, materials collected in service to one project or another. It has also been notably mobile and continuously contextually alert, with works created for one site reworked for another, with the result that the status of some particular bit of material taken simply on its own is often unclear.  

There’s an undertone of performance, then, that runs through the work that is embedded, in one way, in Burr’s ability to repeatedly rearrange the studio, bringing out new relations among its various elements and, in another way, in the various group visits Burr organized and conducted in the space and that amounted in many ways to his “performing” the work. 

From early on, Burr and the dancer Maria Hassabi were in conversation about the possibility of her performing in the Torrington space, and as those conversations developed the day grew to include several additional works: The sculptor, performer and writer Gordon Hall gave a lecture-performance, entitled 1-2 pm, in which he talked about “waiting” and about the work of the sculptor and performance artist Scott Burton (Burton became best known for his sculpted chairs, and the chairs and tables used in Hall’s performance counted as components of it). 

The multi-disciplinary artist Nick Mauss presented a complicated sound piece, The Image Runs Away, which played a translation of Jean Genet’s ’adame Miroir across several different speaker systems (Genet called this text “a badly identified choreographic object,” and it is most often described as the scenario for a ballet subsequently created for it).  Additionally, Burr brought in for the day works by two other artists he admired and was particularly close to—Alvin Baltrop and Ull Hohn. Both bodies of work, especially Hohn’s, recall and re-create especially close relations around Burr’s life, education and early work.

The audience, a lively mixture of Norfolk residents and artworld denizens, came and went throughout the day, often just finding its way through the work, but at other times tracking the Genet piece as it moved around the studio; or settling into the organized space of Hall’s talk; or standing around, sitting on the floor, or leaning against a wall for Hassabi’s extraordinary, slow dance, White Out.

Next fall should see the publication of The Torrington Project, a book, put together in collaboration with curator and writer Blake Oetting. It will both document and extend the project with writings by Burr and further artists and curators who were involved one way or another with the life of the project.