Now Not Moving

Image credit: Prompt number 823 by Barbara Campbell Story written by Tim Etchells Performed by Barbara Campbell 21st September 2007 at sunset, GMT

1001 Nights Cast Discussion with Barbara Campbell, Adrian Heathfield, Sarah Jane Bailes, Tony White and Lara Pawson at The Live Art Development Agency Office, London, 21st September 2007

It’s not generally considered safe to meet up with strangers you’ve met through the internet, as Adrian Heathfield reminded us at the start of the 1001 Nights Cast Writers’ meeting in London on 21st September. But here we all were, thirty individuals brought together through Barbara Campbell’s online project, which involves collaborators from all round the world.

The discussions went some way to teasing out the community fostered by Campbell’s project, which emanates from a structured base, through Campbell and its contributors, to those who read and view the project online. Each morning for 1001 days, Campbell selects a ‘prompt’ from that morning’s newspaper coverage of the Middle East. She sends the prompt – normally a few words long – to a writer who has one day in which to write a story. At sunset, Campbell performs the writer’s story on a live video stream broadcast on http://www.1001.net.au.

1001 Nights Cast amounts to a complex and reflective network of creative production that circles round a series of oppositions, some of which were identified by Sara Jane Bailes, who has written for 1001 Nights Cast on nights 692 and 795: truth and fiction; freedom and restraint; east and west; reading and performance; one and many.

Adrian Heathfield (nights 688, 806) also spoke in terms of productive oppositions. The act of writing that the project fosters is both enabled by new media (the internet), and reminiscent of an old one – letter writing. Bringing these things together, 1001 Nights Cast draws attention to the act of sharing between people and traditions. ‘I really appreciated that reminder,’ Heathfield said, ‘that storytelling and narrative are about survival, that at its core narrative has a virtual movement between one to another and that this movement is restorative, that it is full of life force.’

From a writer’s point of view, however, the experience of contributing to 1001 Nights Cast can be isolated. Campbell acts as a kind of two-way valve for the writers’ creativity – she directs our concentration through the prompt and the deadline, then she receives our work and gives us a voice by performing our texts. Coming together at the Live Art Development Agency’s Office, then, the writers gave substance to the virtual social community we had helped to form. It was a meeting between people with a stake in the project – as writers, all of us had participated in the growth and shape of 1001 Nights Cast – and it was an opportunity to share our approaches to the challenge of writing for it. But the meeting also focussed around the locus of communication we had in common: the pivotal role of Barbara Campbell herself.

As well as the point of entry and exit for each writer’s work, Campbell is also of course the author of the project, the teller of stories, and the one to whom stories are told. She is both the ‘she’ of the frame story that gives a reason for 1001 Nights Cast – a woman who travels the world in order to find redemption from grief through the narratives of strangers – and the writer of the frame story itself. But while Campbell could be said to embody the project – she is perhaps the only person to have read each source, each prompt, each story – she is bound by her own rules to incorporate ideas from outside.

Perhaps as a result, she learned early on to exercise some control over this process. Rather than rely on unsolicited submissions from writers through the site, she, ‘quickly came up with the “booking system”’. As well as guaranteeing a story every day, this allows Campbell to choose the prompt with the contributor in mind. As Narelle Jubelin (Madrid webcast host) put it, ‘You have a consciousness of the prompt suited to the writer.’ But Campbell still accepts stories that are submitted online, and the prompts act as open invitations into the layers of the project.

It is, then, both Campbell herself – as author, story teller, reader, listener – as well as the prompts that link the structural oppositions of 1001 Nights Cast, building bridges that are formal as well as thematic. Lara Pawson, a journalist, (nights 729, 784) said that the prompt functions like a quote in a news story. Just like the restraints that Campbell sets, journalists have to work with ‘a short, almost nonsensical quote, a tight deadline.’ But, unlike journalism, 1001 Nights Cast has no ‘aspirations to objective truth.’ Tony White (nights 701, 758, 815) compared the prompts to stage lights. Instead of anchoring the story to a central fact, they cast a new light on their surroundings; like, ‘changing the gel on a light above a stage … to flood the stage instantly with a particular colour.’

As a result, said Pawson, ‘you can explore real ideas and real problems and real issues.’ And it’s this tension between truth and fiction that lies at the heart of the project. In contrast to the blanket-nature of rolling news coverage, the fictional written accounts often feel personal, revelatory and ‘true’. Campbell described them as the ‘punctum’ in the Barthesian sense, meaning something that emotionally or physically pricks or bruises us, as opposed to the banal or ‘studium’ experience of the news. (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26)

It is of course the firm structure of 1001 Nights Cast that enables this freedom of movement and gives rise to the effect of punctum. The structure is what brings the writers together into a project that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is the restorative nature of storytelling that Heathfield identified, and it highlights both the stories that are being told and the act of telling. ‘Perhaps, the process is not for us to expose further the horrors that we all have sometimes witnessed’, Branislava Kuburovic (nights 728, 788) said, ‘… but actually that this weaving of these completely different stories is what it’s about.’

Mary Paterson (nights 583, 689, 777, 826; DIY workshop nights 760, 762)

A Blank Canvas
Pablo Bronstein
'Ballet Park Avenue' at a private Park Avenue residence, New York.
7.30pm Saturday November 16 2007
Presented by PERFORMA and Curated by Catherine Wood

Last night I was one of the three people to be invited to a private patron's Park Avenue apartment to witness Pablo Bronstein's Ballet Park Avenue. We entered through the austere marble lobby, were escorted up in the residents private lift and met by two maids in matching black and white uniforms who lead us through a labyrinth of oak panelled rooms, past full sized Canaletto's, original Vermeer's and Louis 14th furniture. The space for the performance of Ballet Park Avenue was marked out by blue tape on the carpet of the large banquet room. After a while, 12 Ballet dancers in lurid green unitards entered the room and stood poised in the taped box beneath the central chandelier waiting for instructions from Bronstein.

You will need to imagine what happened next as Ballet Park Avenue did not actually happen. It never existed as a performance. Or rather, the event as described in the PERFORMA 07 programme never existed. In short, there was no ballet performance in the Park Avenue apartment of a wealthy New York patron. This may come as a shock to you if you were amongst the many who called the PERFORMA offices-whether cajoling, name dropping or shouting-demanding access to this 'exclusive' event only to be told that Ballet Park Avenue was for a select few and that the identity of the attendees themselves was a secret. Yet despite this revelation, your being set up or feeling excluded from Ballet Park Avenue is not in vain.

Ballet Park Avenue is at once a total 'non-event' and a carefully curated performance piece that represents a continuation of Bronstein's conceptual concerns. In the artists' earlier PERFORMA presentation, Plaza Minuet (7 Nov 2007), a series of unitarded ballet dancers performed in four public lobby spaces of Downtown Manhattan. It was a piece in which dancers were manipulated into, and then held in, strenuous poses by the artist as if they were paint on a canvas - roughly, with disregard for any signs of the dancer's physical strain or human emotions - in order to perform, and skew, the coded behaviours and social control inherent in both Ballet and public architectural spaces.

Bronstein's interest in Ballet stems from its roots in the Fifteenth Century Italian aristocratic practise of 'Sprezzatura' (the art of making the difficult look easy or concealing artifice), the legacy of which can be seen in the development of the genre through the Baroque period to the Classical Ballet we know today. The performative of Plaza Minuet was to enact, and skew, the specific politics of Manhattan based privately owned public space. Ballet Park Avenue, on the other hand, is concerned with the performance of exclusive, private space and, as John Cage's infamous musical composition of silence in 4.33' (1952), testifies; a dematerialised or non-event is certainly no less visceral or message laden than a real one. In fact, the elements of control, concealment of artifice and class that Ballet Park Avenue manifests are paradoxically more poignant, tangible and live because the work is fictional; how better to put focussed pressure on the social codes, individual insecurities and privilege regarding access to a private performance than creating an exclusive event that does not exist? Where better to perform the ultimate in interiority than in the privacy our own imaginations?

The non-event or non happening 'happening' that is Ballet Park Avenue does fit into a lineage of historical Conceptual Art but has more in common with other overtly de-materialised Twenty First Century pieces in the PERFORMA 07 Biennial programme, including Tris Vonna Michell's story telling and The Swiss Institute Spoken Word exhibition. The way in which Ballet Park Avenue differs fundamentally from these works is in the duplicity and antagonism the work both openly trades -and depends- on in pretending the event is happening. Such a cynical approach to audience doesn't fit comfortably into the PERFORMA remit to bring new live work to a more mainstream and accessible visual art world stage. But it isn't simply cynicism on Bronstein's part. The fact that Ballet Park Avenue may be difficult to swallow due to the artist's manipulation of our expectation, ego and desire is a central aspect to Bronstein's articulation of the private.

Rachel Lois Clapham

Project Team 'Mahjong 2007' at Washington Square Park

He Yun Chang
'Mahjong,2007'
Washington Square
09 Nov 4-7pm
Presented by Chambers Fine Art for PERFORMA07.

I went to Judson Church on Washington South yesterday to meet He Yun Chang whilst he prepared for his performance of Mahjong, 2007. Mahjong is a traditional Chinese game that He Yun Chang will perform with various audience members in nearby Washington Square Park on the 9th November. The performance of Mahjong itself has nothing to do with the church, but the tiles that He Yun Chang will use for the game are large bricks, 100’s of them, and they are all to be hand painted by the artist himself, so Judson Church kindly agreed to give Performa space in their basement for the brick storage and painting.

That the tiles for He Yun Chang’s unique version of Mahjong are big, heavy bricks and that each one is to be painstakingly hand-painted should come as no surprise to those who know He Yun Chang’s work. Previous projects have tested the limits of the artists’ physical and mental endurance against insurmountable odds. Such odds have included the artist trying to move a Chinese mountain with string in Moving a Mountain, 1999, being suspended over a river whilst trying to cut water with a knife in Dialogue With Water, 1999 and more recently Touring Great Britain With Rock, 2006 in which He Yun Chang walked 2000 UK miles in 9 months whilst carrying a large rock.

Although He Yun Chang doesn’t succeed in physically moving mountains or dividing rivers, the artist’s persistence does prevail in incredibly moving ways that reference human struggle and the triumph of the individual over both internal, natural and external political forces.

Mahjong,2007 will be the latest in a long line of powerful, poignant and quintessentially Chinese performances by China’s leading contemporary performance artist. Put simply, it is not to be missed.

Rachel Lois Clapham