.
Image credits: Daria Martin, Harpstrings & Lava, 2007.
Film production still.
Photograph Thierry Bal.
Courtesy of PERFORMA and Maureen Paley, London.

Daria Martin, Harpstrings and Lava at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. Screening Room, New York, Nov 4th 2007. (Also showing Nov 19th, 2007)

The title of Harpstrings and Lava, the new film by the American artist Daria Martin, is taken from a nightmare that a friend of Martin's had as a child. The nightmarish element is the conjunction of two seemingly impossible things – the thick, molten heat of lava and the cool, clear strings of a harp. The film, a PERFORMA Commission co-commissioned by S.M.A.K and Outset, also builds to an encounter between two conflicting ideas – this time, embodied in characters. There is the driven activity of a musician, played by the experimental musician Zeena Parkins, and the exploratory, animal-like behaviour of a woman in a woodland set, played by the performer Nina Fog.

Parkins wears a Japanese Kimono and carries out a series of unexplained rituals – banging chalks together, whipping the sleeves of her dress – before sitting down to play the harp. She is surrounded by formal architecture and when she starts to play music, it's in a never-ending courtyard. The courtyard's walls and archways glimpse more walls and archways, receding into an infinity of man-made space.

In contrast, Fog's world is consumed in nature and discovery. She wakes up, confused, under a tree, and scrambles round for food. Her dextrous fingers fumble through leaves and dirt, while Parkins' dextrous fingers take command of the harp. The camera slides between each character by way of a long, twisted branch; it is dead when it leads to or from Parkins, but comes to life as it gets closer to Fog.

Harpstrings and Lava is itself a contrast to the other two Daria Martin films shown at this screening, Birds (2001) and In the Palace (2000). In these earlier works, the camera travels around performers striking poses, or getting prepared to strike a pose. These films draw on modernist aesthetics – relishing the shapes, forms and colours of objects; attending to the acts and tools of representation and performance themselves, rather than to mimesis (the drive to imitate).

They draw attention to the camera's participation in performance and the actors, as Daria Martin said in her introductory speech to this screening, are used like mannequins or marionettes, rather than individuals with their own agency.

In Harpstrings and Lava, however, the characters sometimes lead the camera. While in her earlier films, Martin uses the camera to explore a set that is complicit in and produced entirely for its gaze, in Harpstrings and Lava the camera seems to have stumbled upon a world that resonates beyond its horizons. Here it is the agency of the camera and the performance of film as a medium that are rendered passive. Dripping with meaning beyond the viewers' control, Harpstrings and Lava really does feel like a nightmare. It ends just as the two irreconcilable characters meet. The lights go up in the auditorium, and we wake without resolution.

by Mary Paterson

Ei Arakawa in BYOF Bring Your Own FlowersBYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) by Ei Arakawa and Amy Sillman
Japan Society Lobby
Friday November 02 at 8pm

Ikebana is the ancient Japanese art of flower arranging, or Kad? (the ‘way of flowers’), the traditional practise of which involves great skill and accomplished craftsmanship after many years of being tutored in the correct Ikebana school. In Japan, Ikebana is also revered and loaded with cultural, artistic and religious (Buddhist) significance and continues to be a popular contemporary art form. It is wise, then, that for Ei Arakawa’s performance of BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) a large disclaimer "Warning: This is Not a Traditional Ikebana Workshop" was printed in the programme booklet. Traditional, harmonious, reverent and highly crafted, this performance installation was definitely not.

Instead, the audience for BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) were packed into the downstairs Japan Society lobby; tightly squeezed around a large make-shift installation that included paintings on canvas, polystyrene screens, data projectors -some rigged up, some strewn on the floor- sewing machines and unopened boxes of canned Blue Ribbon beer. We stayed like this, tense, shuffling and expectant whilst nothing happened, for some time until a Japanese man in tight leggings and a baggy tee shirt entered. He runs between the polystyrene screens, fumbles with the data projector, moves chairs around. The audience start to smile knowingly. Some of us start to take photos. The man senses our - misplaced - attention and, with some difficulty, holds up a metal table attached to a small microphone. Through the table-microphone he shouts: “This is not the performance. The performance hasn’t started. We are not ready yet!” The man has an altogether worried look on his face. Does he think this performance is all going horribly wrong as we, the audience, do? Perhaps it is because we think it is going horribly wrong that we carry on smiling even more and taking photos. Looking exasperated at this the man then lurches forward at the happy snapping audience: "No photos please, this is not the performance!"

Although this was the performance; BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) had already begun and Ei Arakawa’s performance persona was already in full force. With only a faintly ironic hound-dog expression, a baggy tee and a pair of leggings this likeable whirlwind of Japanese mischievousness already had us in the palm of his hand. We liked him, at least I did. And it didn’t matter that I was tired, crushed and not just a bit confused about what was actually happening.

Amid Ei Arakawa’s genuine protestations that his performance was not a performance, Japan Society staff, bored looking audience members and other ‘helpers’ of undefined status idly tinkered with the installation’s equipment, moved boxes and draped material over polystyrene screens. 20 minutes later and I think I can say with confidence that the performance had definitely started (again). The artist and his helpers collected the all important flowers that the audience had brought, then proceeded to besmirch and swat them mercilessly across floor, table, chairs, data projector and beer cans. Chaos still reigned 10 minutes on, some confused audience members left, and Ei Arakawa gave out cans of "little bit chilled" - read : warm - beer and performed a disorganised slide lecture about famous artists throughout history whose life and work had been indebted to the consumption of alcohol (Van Gogh, Kandinsky, some others I couldn’t hear). At some point in the middle of all this Ei Arakawa took US $150 from the audience and the American painter (Amy Sillman) was interviewed by a journalist for the Brooklyn Rail. It is unclear whether the money was ever given back (I very much doubt it) and if the interviewee really was the renowned Amy Sillman, or a younger stand in? It is in the punk spirit of BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) that all these questions - and many more - remain unanswered.

In a neat circle of self reflexivity the process for BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) - including the waiting, the nothing happening, the false starts and the non performance performances - is the work itself. BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) is at once the bare, shambolic, manic and sketchy bones of how a performance comes to be, or sometimes doesn’t quite happen, whilst being the final finished version of itself. In this way, Ei Arawkawa and co skilfully perform creative chaos while enacting the grey, shifting and difficult area of live work that reveals the different levels of Performance itself (Ei Arawkawa performing himself performing, or rather, not performing). Breaking down traditional and suspect notions of artistic skill, craftsmanship and cultural relevance for our contemporary times, BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) was high class Japanese theatrics with no Theatre in sight: sheer adulterated joy.

Rachel Lois Clapham

TM Sisters
Image: The TM Sisters, 'Things Will End Before They Start', Digital Video Performance in Uncertain States of America, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006. Photo copyright Declan O’Neil.

TM Sisters 'Things Will End Before They Start' at Artists Space, New York
7pm November 02
Curated by Benjamin Weill and Silvia Karman Cubina
Presented by Artists Space in collaboration with Moore Space (Miami).

Two women in matching retro dresses fly through the air. They soar through a pale blue sky, arms straight out in front of them, their gaze fixed intently elsewhere: somewhere out in the ether. Together they float smoothly across pink clouds, white stars and pass awkwardly through abstract geometric shapes andworm-holes in outer space. Then, all of a sudden, God reaches out from the heavens, grasps both girls with two large hands and gently plonks them down on stage in front of us.

This is the colourful world of the TM Sisters in Things Will End Before They Start, a performance presented as part of PERFORMA 07 in which the distinctly bored looking art duo physically interact on stage with animated digital landscapes. The work involves the sisters running (in realtime) through digital streets, doing gawky dance moves with virtual characters in on-screen discos, pretending to fly through simulated clouds and physically encounter a cartoon pair of God’s hands, all to the rhythm of 1980’s sounding pop music.

The TM sisters are bound together by their artistic collaboration, but also by blood (they really are sisters). The sisters also share a religious upbringing in Miami where they were home-schooled under the watchful eye of their father, a church pastor. This spiritual element fits in with the naive graphics, cheesy choreography and retro-cool aesthetic of the sister’s performance, in which spoof and sincerity are enacted in equal measures. However, this distinctly in vogue art-world mix of silliness, ennui, irony and contemporary retro that the sisters employ makes picking out what is spoof and what is sincerity in Things Will End Before They Start a very messy affair.

In that case, perhaps we should not pick at Things Will End Before They Start; not analyse the conceptual, faintly apocalyptic, title or the professed seriousness of Gods’ influence in the work, and so not look underneath the skirts of the TM sisters to see what is at stake behind their poptastic veneer. Perhaps then, it is too cynical, amid the undoubtedly fun, deliberately low-fi and lightweight tone of the work, to wonder how firmly the TM sisters have their tongue lodged in their cheeks, and if so, who exactly - them or us - their joke is aimed at? Then again, perhaps all this is of the utmost importance. What I do know is that it remains to be seen if Things Will End Before They Start is critical enough to bring on the creative, transformative or religious apocalypse its title anticipates.

Rachel Lois Clapham