Paul Couillard is a Canadian performance artist, curator, and scholar with a PhD from York University’s Communications and Culture program. He has created well over 300 performance works in 26 countries, often with his husband and collaborator, Ed Johnson. Couillard was the Performance Art Curator for FADO Performance Art Centre from 1993 until 2007, and is a founding co-curator of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, ongoing since 1997. Paul’s key areas of creative research include site-responsiveness, durational performance, understanding the concept of presence from the perspective of a thinking body, the role of gesture in the transmission and conservation of performance art practices, and addressing trauma through explorations of our bodies as shared vessels of sensation, experience, knowledge and spirit. He is the editor of the monograph book series Canadian Performance Art Legends, and has been a lecturer at McMaster University and the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the recipient of the 2022 Joan Yvonne Lowndes Award for curatorial writing.
artist : Paul Couillard
title : Sitting with the Mountain （30-days durational performance, 8 hours per day on site）
date : April 6 – May 5, 2007
venue : York University at offthemapgallery, Toronto, Canada
project : MFA Thesis Exhibition
Photos: Miklos Legrady
Some words written at the time to describe this work: “Sitting with the mountain” April 6 – May 5, 2007
We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains. — Li Po
Each day I will spend 8 hours at the gallery “performing”, developing thresholds or situations that speak to experiences of loss and grief. I am on a hunt for images that open up possibilities for moving through and alleviating trauma. The work will evolve daily, with accumulating and dissipating evidence of my daily gestures. My interest lies in the idea of relieving trauma, not reliving it. How can we begin to address trauma without replicating it? What can alleviate the suffering associated with loss? How do we come to terms with the death of those we love? What can grief teach us?
Performance art has been my primary medium for more than 20 years. To “live” images through my own body, and through time, is intrinsic to the way I understand, create and learn from the art-making process. For me, an idea cannot be fully understood until it is linked to a physical and temporal understanding: a “body knowledge”. My performances often deal with personal and social traumas, which are evoked through inquiries that appear to test bodily limitations. While there is a large history of performance works that put the artist’s body in peril, my intentions are never to expose myself to harm. I engage in situations that may be psychologically or physically challenging, but that can be safely withstood or borne by my body (which is most decidedly NOT superhuman or obsessively trained). The hallmarks of my process often include the following:
- i) finding a way to do the task I have set with the body I have at the time of the performance;
- ii) learning through doing, using duration and endurance as tools (while I always begin with a prescribed set of actions, I often choose to abandon them during the performance when an unanticipated solution or resolution presents itself through the act of doing, and through the process of being forced to confront my own areas of doubt, uncertainty and not-knowing in front of an audience)
iii) engaging in repetitive, ritualistic, or slow-moving actions that demand a constant engagement with questions of attunement and awareness of myself and my surroundings; and
- iv) responsiveness to site or circumstances (the nature of the gallery space – the unfinished walls and floor, the fact that it is unheated, the access to natural light, the architectural features – will provide raw material that will guide how I construct daily situations). — Paul Couillard
artist : Paul Couillard
title : Noir (26-hour performance)
date : 11 September 2001
venue : Gallery 101, Ottawa, Canada
project : Blast” curated by François Dion
Noir was originally conceived as a performance based on images from the film noir genre and my concerns with technology. in advance of the performance, I wrote:
“Recording devices are communication tools. They allow us to tell stories, transmit information and seemingly capture aspects of time and space. They have irrevocably and radically altered our environments, ever (and forever) changing the way we see and hear. I use these tools all of the time; the world I have could not be had without them. At the same time, they wreak havoc on my attention, and have a depressing, disappointing effect. They are often distracting, intrusive, inhibiting and isolating — leaving me with the sense of a life not fully inhabited. I am disturbed by this tension, so I am setting to work on it. NOIR will function as a playhouse laboratory space where I can engage with others (an audience) to find ways around this basic contradiction of technology. Perhaps together we can find a way to illuminate the darkness.” Then, after I had arrived in Ottawa, as I was preparing to head to the gallery to begin setting up the work, 9/11 happened. I turned away from the television set, not wanting to have the image of the twin towers on fire emblazoned on my retinas (they had not yet fallen). I decided not to follow this new story in real time. Instead, I went to the empty gallery space, having lost faith in my performance art plan, in which I had planned to stage a series of images of death. I abandoned my original outline (that performance was never staged) and started from a new place, asking myself what of performance art I might still have faith in given the weighty events unfolding around me. This is a document of what I did instead.
Here is an excerpt from an article written for the Centretown News entitled “Performance art ‘Blasts’ into Centretown” by Kristen Vernon, published September 28, 2001:
Paul Couillard, who also performed in Blast, says, “The object (of performance art) is to create a situation that involves interaction with people. It’s not entertainment, but a way to get people to think.” Couillard laid on the floor of the gallery in a yoga position known as the corpse. His feet were flexed, his palms faced upward and his fingers touched the ground. He was naked and molasses trickled out of his mouth. Visitors listened to a tape-recorded message and then recorded a personal question into another tape recorder. Visitors then went and looked into Couillard’s eyes. He didn’t want to know anyone’s question, but he gave each person an action to perform or contemplate. After the performance, Couillard noticed people talking about how the action he suggested related to their question. “That people were thinking about things in a different way, that made the piece a success,” says Couillard. To prepare for his performance, Couillard says he spent 24 hours in the gallery — without sleep or food — practicing the position he would take during the performance as a way “to get into a place beyond ego consciousness.” Couillard says he had 11 jars filled with water, which he drank from and then urinated in. Couillard says his art binds human beings and says he wants to create other kinds of connections, like compassion. “We live in a capitalist culture, and many interactions start with money. This is not a recipe for lasting success. I’m looking for other ways to connect us as humans,” he says.
artist :Paul Couillard
title : Weight of the Dead (2-day outdoor performance )
date : On Saturday, March 5, 2005
venue : Bonington Gallery, Nottingham UK
project : “Sensitive Skin” curated by Stella Couloutbanis
From the advance description of the performance:
On Saturday, March 5, 2005, I will carve some words into a block of ice placed on the Nottingham Castle grounds.
The next day, I will carry what remains of the ice block to the Trent River, following a route down Castle Road and along the Nottingham canal. I plan to place the block into the river, where I imagine that it will float down to the North Sea and then on toward Latvia (the home of my partner’s late father’s ancestors), melting as it does so into the stuff of tears.
While I do these actions, this is some of what I will be remembering:
“By then Sam was unconscious, but I thought there were some things he should be told, so I thanked him for taking me into his family, telling him how much this had meant to me, and more importantly to his son. I told Sam how everyone was saying what a good man he was. I told him that he was a good father and a good husband, and that he was loved and that he’d had a good life and led a good life, and how proud his family was of him. I told him that even though I knew he felt badly that he was “putting us all through this”, that actually he was giving us time to say goodbye, giving his family the time they needed to understand that it was his time to leave. I told him that it was ok if he couldn’t hold on any longer, that everyone would be ok and that we would all look after each other, that he’d raised a beautiful son and daughter who would do alright. I told him I loved him, and that his son and his daughter and his wife loved him. And I assured him that he was still close to home, because I knew that the hospital gave him the feeling that he was far away in a strange city. I told him what was true. I told him what I thought every man should have a chance to hear. I held his hand for quite a while, and stroked his forehead a bit, and when the end came it was very quiet — he didn’t wake up and he didn’t seem agitated — he just started to breath differently, and then the breaths came quite far apart, so that just when I thought he had stopped altogether, he would take another little inhale, and then there weren’t any more, and I saw the body start to change as the energy kind of exhaled out of him.” Paul Couillard March 2005
artist :Paul Couillard
title : Trace Elements ( a 24hours durational performance )
date : 21~22 December, 1999
venue :
project : FADO’s “Time Time Time” series