Ensemble

Though his experiments in dismantling the conventions of performance had already begun in the 1970s, Roelandt began the series he described as ‘post performance projects’ in 1980. He developed the series as a reaction to the bourgeois institutionalisation of performance, and thus the imposition of certain conditions and expectations—foremost among which were the presence of the artist and the dedicated time and space of the live moment. He created Post Performance Project 1 (1980), in which machines take over, in collaboration with Paul Geladi. Recordings made of a phone conversation and answering machine ‘talk’ to each other, with the artist sitting listening to his own voice. Dismantling the component parts of performance, these post performance works, which also diverged into public space, shifted the emphasis to an investigation into the processes and reception of art, and into individual and social behaviour.