PRISCILLA PITTS
I never saw any of Peter Roche and Linda Buis's performances and I suspect the same is true of many, perhaps most, of those who will visit In Relation. I know of some of those works but that, of course, is not the same as being physically present. Those of their performances that involved a live audience were aimed at a small, select number, sometimes by invitation only or promoted in a very targeted and limited way. On at least one occasion—Night Piece (1980/2006)—only one other person (Wystan Curnow) was present; and Museum Piece (1980/1993) was conducted without an audience. Both may have been incidentally witnessed by passers-by but of the works detailed in the exhibition guide to In Relation only Street Piece (1980) was performed in daylight in a very public place (Auckland's Queen Street where the pair separately and repeatedly crisscrossed the busy road).
The question of ‘audience’ is central both to Roche and Buis's performances and to how those works are presented and experienced in retrospect. The two artists took their relationship to their audiences very seriously. In a report on their performance at the Manawatu Art Gallery in 1982 they wrote: There's a whole thing about tolerance within a social structure, about audience, about power and manipulation, and about pushing that too far or not far enough…. Naively, perhaps, they had not realised While deliberately creating a level of tension, they claimed to be ‘careful not to take the thing too far … We do not want [them to] feel they are being used.'
