Let’s Get Together, Yeah Yeah Yeah: Clifford Owens at Cornerhouse

'This is an opportunity to take part in a completely improvised and unpredictable environment, where the level of individual engagement can be small or great. The event is likely to test boundaries and levels of risk, so please bear this in mind. Please note, not everyone photographed will end up in the exhibition.'

This was the call-out to participate, posted on the Cornerhouse website in 2013 – and the 'improvised and unpredictable environment' that the potential audience was invited into was convened by ‘ringleader and provocateur’ Clifford Owens, an artist based in New York and whose exhibition, Better the Rebel You Know, opens at Cornerhouse, Manchester, on 10 May.

Amazingly, this is Clifford Owens' first ever exhibition in the UK (in fact, in Europe), which could explain why Owens’ work is not necessarily on many people’s radars. With a background in photography, Owens has been working on the US performance circuit for many years and has shown at multiple Performas. It was not, however, until his major 2011 exhibition, Clifford Owens: Anthology, at MoMA PS1 in New York, that his work really began to gain worldwide visibility. Cornerhouse’s exhibition brings together work from the PS1 show, and has commissioned a new iteration of the Anthology project and a newly commissioned version of his photography project Photographs with an Audience. The exhibition is curated by London-based Daniella Rose King, and stands to be one of the most interesting things coming up in the Northwest’s – if not the UK’s – 2014 arts calendar.

Held in October last year, Photographs with an Audience hosted around 20-30 people at Cornerhouse over two evenings for an experience in performance, provocation and image-making. Owens started the evenings socially, with beer, wine and conversation, slowly revealing snippets of information about himself (experiences of family alcoholism, drug use or relationships with partners) before turning the tables on his audience and asking them questions – "Who here has had an alcoholic parent?", or "Who has taken cocaine?"

Those that volunteer this information are then asked to be photographed as a group, and an image is made of this both connected and disparate group before the conversation moves on. Owens’ questions alternate between the light and the provocative, but all demonstrate his own interests – that of how groups or, sometimes, temporal communities are formed, how we perform our own truths or identities and categorise ourselves or are categorised by others.

“The situation can be quite tense,” says King. “It’s quite powerful and can be tricky to know what you think about the performance or where you situate it, but the ideas are really at the heart of Clifford’s practice. He talks about how performance is a kind of gift economy, it’s always an exchange and the performer is so totally at the whim of the audience – they change everything: the atmosphere of the room and even the actual performance itself and what it turns out to be. I’ve been to a lot of performances where it feels like the audience is peripheral, they don’t really need to be there. This is very different. The audience can ask questions and take control of the situation entirely if they wish.”

Audience reactions can be incredibly mixed. You only have to search online for Owens' work to know what an emotionally charged response participants can have. One thing is clear: people want to talk about it, and during the event they can be very forward about delving into elements of their personality and history, which contributes to a sense of laid-bare, stark truth. “It’s surprising how generous and revealing people are about their character,” says King. “You’re always performing yourself in a way. There were moments in this performance where you thought, 'What exactly am I doing here?' But some moments are very tender and you can see this immortalised in the photographs.”

Although Photographs with an Audience is sure to garner the most press attention – its local participants and provocative nature make for a great story – it is the ever-evolving Anthology that is arguably the more interesting and complex project. Anthology was first presented in Owens' PS1 exhibition and consists of a series of performative suggestions, or ‘scores’, that he approaches a range of artists to write for him; he incorporates them and makes a certain number of live performance works, exhibiting both original score and documentation of the event.

“The beauty of Anthology is that many of the artists he approached don’t work with performance," says King. "It wasn’t about a literal kind of performance survey or anything; it was just about bringing in people that are part of a community that he’s a part of – the black artists’ community in the States – and engaging in conversations that would spark other questions and conversations. The work deals with questions about how few examples of black performance art there are to be found in the mainstream – questions about the canon, what gets left out, what gets included and why.”

The original PS1 show included the scores of 26 artists, including Coco Fusco, Senga Nengudi, Benjamin Patterson and Glenn Ligon (with David Hammonds). It was Kara Walker’s score, however, that caused the most controversy. Her instruction for Owens – ‘French kiss an audience member. Force them against the wall and demand Sex. The audience/viewer should be an adult. If they are willing to participate in the forced sex act abruptly turn the tables and assume the role of victim. Seek the help of others. Describe your ordeal. Repeat’ – has been much discussed in the press, and sometimes it is not necessarily grasped that it is Walker’s instruction and not, when performed by Owens, a predatory threatening act of Owens’ design.

In a collaborative effort between Owens and King, 20 new scores, by UK-based artists, have been added to Anthology, and the focus of inclusion has shifted slightly. “We decided to expand the notion of black to a political black and allow for ideas of immigration, marginalisations and identity politics,” says King. A slight departure for Owens, this broadening out of Anthology allows for new and interesting voices to be added to the mix – including David Blandy, who is fully aware of his (some might say) problematic position of being a white UK artist contributing to a project that, at its core, is about the representation of black performance artists within the art canon. Identity, race and the post-colonial position have always, however, been part of Blandy’s work and it would be a loss to the project to not include him.

“I think his work really justifies inclusion, in terms of how he works with identity, and I think it speaks to questions we are facing today of post-identity – which is the question of who does identity belong to?" says King. Blandy’s score consists of an instruction paragraph and long-list of dance names in chronological order, taking in everything from tap to voguing, Crip Walk to breakdancing. “I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to formalise an idea I’ve had floating around for a while,” says Blandy. “The score is called A Brief History of African American Dance. It was the result of several different thought processes coming together, thinking about the cultural history of African American dance, how it contains the history of the crossing, slavery, underground movements. But also about the appropriation of those forms by the white culture industry, from tap dancing to twerking; then there's the cultural value of these artistic forms, never appreciated as 'high art' in the way avant garde dance has been. I was thinking of a form of 'answer piece' to Tino Sehgal's Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century.”

Owens occupies a curious position within his work. He is at the centre of a constellation. Bringing so many different people and ideas into the mix, the world of his work seems a lot larger than himself – a factor that only strengthens the power of what he has to say, as he is both an agent and a conduit. Although the exhibition will run at Cornerhouse until 17 August, its most powerful and exciting element – Owens’ live performance of the scores – will occur over the opening days. This will be a unique opportunity to witness Owens in action and in quite an intimate setting. Now that Owens has made his first forays outside of the USA, we suspect he will be hungry for more – new audiences, new collaborations and new creative potential.