After Kaprow: The silent room; and, Book of journeys

After Kaprow represents a continuation and extension of Rosemary Butcher’s overall aesthetic trajectory, which emphasises the situation of bodies and their intensive, intrinsic movement qualities in site-specific contexts. The piece continues to interrogate Rosemary’s recent enthusiasm for the practice and research that are involved in the recreation, reinterpretation and recontextualisation of movement that reached an important milestone in the account of Alan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 parts, performed at the Hayward Gallery in 2010. Kaprow’s Happenings and Rosemary’s subsequent reinterpretation of them provided the basis for the concept that was to become After Kaprow, yet the resulting work has departed considerably from any direct reference point. What remains is the extension of performative context via a dialogue with architectural form, and the possibilities afforded by a juxtaposition of performance with film and the idiomatic potential of the filmic.
After Kaprow comprises of two individual but strongly related works – The Silent Room and Book of Journeys. Conceptually, the pieces look at the notion of women inhabiting interiors and how these rooms are witness to their activities over time. The performers represent women who have lived out their lives amongst the changing premise of the ‘room’, and enacts the repetitive, ritualistic and habitual movements that occupy spaces. The solace and stillness of the performer references the painted figures of Vilhelm Hammershøi, the Dutch artist famed for his poetic, muted tableaux of women in domestic settings. Rosemary Butcher takes these women and places them within time, reinventing their actions but maintaining the slight tension and distance present in the original paintings. Both elements of After Kaprow stem from this central notion, stripped down to a still mediation on time in The Silent Room, and given life and trajectories in the painterly Book of Journeys.