‘Before And After George’

Ivan Lupi ‘Before and After George’

Julia Ilina, Art historian

Any object of art has a material and a method of working with it. However, such art forms as performative practices are difficult to define, as the boundaries between material and methods are blurred. An art historian RoseLee Goldberg wrote: “Performance can be a series of gestures of a personal nature or a large-scale visual theatrical act, lasting from a few minutes to many hours; it can be performed only once or repeated several times, follow a pre-prepared script or not, be spontaneous improvisation or rehearsed for months [1]”. In other words, performance has material—the human body—and a method of working with it—an artistic gestural act that unfolds over time.

The most radical form of performance is an artistic gesture that ignores the generally accepted concept of safety — the deliberate injury of one’s body or the infliction of indelible marks. Such practice is used, as a rule, in the artist’s conversation with the viewer about any acute social, political or ethical issues, since such gestures are aimed at breaking the existing order and strive to fall outside the normative framework of artistic practice.

The artist Ivan Lupi has created a performance entitled ‘Before and After George’, which is difficult to classify under any conventional category. Firstly, the narrative of this work is a conversation about police brutality towards African Americans, which has resulted in the shameful list of Black Americans killed by police. It is not a popular subject for art. The only work I can quickly recall is a monument by the artist Ulrike Truger in Vienna dedicated to the story of Marcus Omofuma, a Nigerian asylum seeker who was strangled in 1999 as a result of police abuse of power during his deportation. Secondly, Ivan Lupi brings to the fore the artistic gestural act of offering one’s own body, or more precisely face, neck or head, so that invited tattoo artists can fix the names of these dead people on the artist’s body by tattooing them.

Thirdly, the artist takes a passive stance, leaving the realisation of the performative gesture to tattoo artists, which is achieved by sending emails to tattoo artists, sending personal messages, or suddenly showing up at a tattoo parlour with a request to donate some black ink, as well as their time and skills, to do a free tattoo without a stencil with one name from the list. Fourthly, one of the fundamental dimensions of performance is time. Ivan Lupi’s performance is based on a special organisation of time. Thus, having begun in Italy in 2024, this performance continues to the present day. However, Ivan Lupi’s project consists of a multitude of events of different natures, united under the same umbrella title. In addition to meetings with tattoo artists, one of the events will be a performance lasting about 7 hours at the Arts Centre in Christchurch, where the artist will sit and wait for tattoo artists to show up to apply another name. The performance will continue, as the artist plans to visit as many tattoo conventions as he can to attract as many tattoo artists as possible.

Thus, the material of this performance is the artist’s body, in particular the skin, which is used as a kind of parchment that historically preceded paper for capturing information important to humans. That is, the artist uses the technique of self-alienation, splitting into a passive subject and an active object, which allows him to explore the intersections of the private and the public, to test subjective and social boundaries. The name is fixed in the form of a tattoo, that is, a practically irreversible method of applying information. Irreversibility, the artist’s skin, self-alienation — all of this symbolically reflects the indelible wound that was inflicted on the collective memory of African Americans and all those who were not indifferent. Conversations of this kind always provoke heated debate, as sociology professor Ron Eyerman points out in his article ‘Cultural Trauma and Collective Memory’: “African Americans struggle to be seen and heard as equals, even though social conditions prevent this. This struggle for representation manifests itself in literary, visual, and more traditional political forms. It is embodied in the battle to be seen and heard, and in the question of who determines the criteria for visibility and audibility [2]”. The controversy in determining who has the right — and in what ways — to represent events of African American collective memory is emphasized by the fact that Ivan Lupi only inscribes the names of the deceased on one’s own skin: Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. This list-based approach breaks down the private and the social. Behind the lists, the viewer generally does not see personal stories, but rather a social phenomenon. The list becomes a visual embodiment of a large-scale and significant event in which the individuality of a person is pushed into the background, in this case, by the horrific fact of police abuse of power against African Americans, which resulted in the deaths of these people. Tattooing involves breaking the integrity of the skin. This practice of cutting through artistic material dates back to the works of Lucio Fontana, who made deliberate openings in canvases, thereby revealing hidden space. Cutting the body is rarely used in performative practices. Among the classic examples, we can recall the works of Gina Pane, who, through methods of pain and bodily trauma, created an image of experiencing a special state of purification through the prism of bodily suffering in the name of another. Among contemporary examples, we can mention the artist Andrey Kuzkin, who in his 2013 performance ‘The Main Question’ cut the letters ‘what is this?’ into his body with a scalpel, in which the ambiguity of the question is multiplied by the traumatic method of cutting the artist’s body. In Ivan Lupi’s performance, the method of tattooing fills the incisions on the body with black paint, thereby sealing them and marking these wounds with names from the list of Black Americans killed by police. Thus, the hidden space, violently exposed, remains visible as a symbol of unforgotten history.

Furthermore, the performance “Before and After George” did not involve the presence of an audience at the moment the tattoos were applied. It is not the viewer who is important here, but the participant in the performance is the tattoo artist who responded to the artist’s request. This is how a community of people is formed, connected by a common sacrifice. The theme of sacrifice is the leitmotif of this performance. Ivan Lupi sacrifices the skin, a material that is not infinite, meaning that this kind of sacrifice has its limits. Meanwhile, the tattoo artists’ method of sacrifice has no potential limits. It is important to note that Ivan Lupi does not decide what the future name will look like; the sketch is created by the tattoo artist. This approach draws attention to such a shameful practice in human history as the “bodily” of slavery. By entrusting the artist’s body to the tattoo artist, Ivan Lupi visualises the term coined by Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, “bodily epistemology”, which is defined as “a strategy of representation in which the body of the contemporary author-protagonist is used to capture the traumatic slave past [3]”. Any work of art concerning African Americans cannot fail to touch on the subject of slavery, as Ron Eyerman pointed out: “It is important to remember that the term “African American” is not a natural category, but a historically formed collective identity that first and foremost requires articulation [4]”.  Overcoming this “bodily” of slavery occurs through the unique design of each name applied, which restores individuality to faceless list names.

It is worth noting the special organisation of time in the performance ‘Before and After George’. Using the terminology proposed by performance theorist Richard Schechner, time in performative practices is divided into three types: Event time, Set time, and Symbolic time [5]. Speaking of Event time, that is, the time during which all stages of the process must be completed, Ivan Lupi’s performance has no predetermined end point and is potentially limited by the size of the material – the artist’s skin. The Set time in this performance is the events in which the performative gestural act takes place. At the same time, events such as private meetings with tattoo artists are a series of essentially identical actions in which the performance is realised. These heterogeneous in time but identical events create a kind of ornament made up of repeating parts of the performance. And, like an ornament, Ivan Lupi’s performance is an open-ended system of events with their potential quantitative growth. The artist’s invitation of tattoo artists to an art institution, such as the performance in Christchurch, is the creation of an unpredictable event that disrupts the repetitive pattern of the ornament. In this event, the artist does not know how many tattoo artists will respond to his invitation, or whether they will respond at all. Similarly, the audience’s participation in such an event brings a different quality to the performance of the gestural act, which further associates this performance with a ritual action. The event is remarkable for its location, the presence of the audience, and the absence of a predetermined script, creating a counterpoint that further emphasises the beauty of the rhythm of the main pattern of the performance, events that take place without the participation of the audience and outside of an art institution. All events of the performative gestural act are always documented with photographs. The photographic documentation and the artist’s body with tattooed names visualise Symbolic time. The artist uses time compression to create a visualised imprint of a shameful social phenomenon in the form of tattoos on the skin and a photographic process of applying these tattoos. These physical results of a long-term event, presented as a single event, give the work the properties of a manifestation, a concentrated representation of a large-scale event.

The bodily and reference to the most acute political issues, the alienation of the body and its division into object and subject, the experience of the painful method of tattooing — all this combined in one act forms a very strong artistic image of an unhealed trauma, expressed through faceless lists of people who have become mere lines in statistics, finding their new individual form on the body of artist Ivan Lupi, they become part of the image of the collective identity of African Americans. 

[1] Goldberg R. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Thames Hudson, 2011.
[2] Eyerman R. Cultural trauma and collective memory. In: Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. Cambridge University Press; 2001:1-22.

[3] Woolfork L. Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

[4] Eyerman R. Cultural trauma and collective memory. In: Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. Cambridge University Press; 2001:1-22.

[5] Schechner R. Performance Theory. Routledge, 2003.