Kent Beeson is a Classic and an Absolutely New Thing (2001)

Image: Video, 12 mins Collaboration with Hugo Glendinning Performed by Kent Beeson. Courtesy Sketch

Tim Etchells
100 People and 3 People
Video installation
The Gallery at Sketch, London
15 September – 3 November 2007

In addition to his work as Artistic Director of performance company Forced Entertainment, now in its twenty-third year, Tim Etchells has begun to exhibit visual and gallery-based work over the past few years and will have a novel (The Broken World) published next year. His recent exhibition at the Gallery at Sketch, consisting of four video pieces projected in series, explores ‘the relationship between language and image’ – but also, unsurprisingly, the performative quality of video and the theatrical encounter it conjures.

Three of the works consist of monologues to the camera in which the speaker describes an imagined future for him or herself. In Kent Beeson is a Classic and an Absolutely New Thing (2001, 12 min), the title character describes for himself a celebrity lifestyle in which he is fantastically rich and powerful. In So Small (2003, 10 min), Katie Ewald describes her own funeral and the wide range of significance her death will have. And in Erasure (2003, 12 min), Nicholas Cooke imagines himself moving though the world with complete anonymity, leaving no trace or memory of his passage.

The length of these monologues means that each video is able to explore the interior richness and contradictions of each fantasy. Beeson’s is torn between an ambition toward a common idea of the ‘good’ person, one who is polite, chivalrous, and generous, and that of a powerful person, one who can change people’s hair colour, who can buy a hotel whose service he doesn’t like and fire everyone, who can have people killed. In Ewald’s monologue, the indulgencies of her imagined death fantasy get carried away into indulgencies of thought and language itself, becoming more and more grand in the conceptual and figurative range they encompass: she predicts that ‘”How could this girl be missed?” will be one of the great unanswered questions, like “Where is the North Pole?” and “Did Shakespeare write all of his plays?”’ And in Erasure, Cooke’s dream of invisibility draws on both the appealing fantasies of being unseen (leaving no footprints, going unnoticed by CCTV cameras) and the banal realities of insignificance (wearing clothes from the same department store as everyone else, having a face that people instantly forget).

Though they borrow the form of the confessional video, these three monologues vary in their delivery in ways which expose their performed nature. Ewald’s is the most naturalistic, and, watching it, it’s possible to believe that these words and thoughts are her own – that she is in fact imagining this funeral in the moment of being videoed. Like Ewald’s, Cooke’s performance is a single take and has a naturalistic quality; but in comparison with Ewald’s his delivery is noticeably regular, proceeding with the measured cadence of written text. Beeson’s performance is comically botched, as from the get-go he misspeaks his text, goes back and repeats himself, and berates himself every time he gets it wrong. As Beeson grows increasingly frustrated, there’s an implied connection between his inability to get his lines right and whatever forces are keeping that fantasy out of his reach.

In this way, what’s going on in all three pieces is less a revelation than an aspiration, less a stripping away to get at the core of these characters and more a layering of textuality and language. That which had appeared to be an invitation to an intimate disclosure turns out to be a process of accumulation and assumption, and the more is revealed, the more is assumed. A kind of theatricality is in operation, in which the harder these performances work to get to the truth of their characters, the more theatrical they become.

By contrast, 100 People (2007, 20 min) has no actors in it, only a series of short textual descriptions of individuals and groups of people. Many of the descriptions focus on minute details, as if these tell you everything you need to know about this person: ‘The fifth person is out of breath and wearing a big brown jumper and blue tracksuit trousers that evidently weren’t really purchased for jogging’; or, later, simply ‘Big nose.’ These funny, pathetic, and cruel synopses invite the viewer to sit back and imagine this parade of characters, conjured here for the viewer’s benefit.

But something else is going on. It seems as if the subject of 100 People isn’t actually this series of imaginary people, but the viewer him or herself. The texts increasingly refer to the moment of encounter, with some of the imagined persons arriving late or resenting their place in the order. This moment of encounter might at first be taken to be a past event, something which the author experienced or imagined. But increasingly it seems as if this encounter is the one happening here and now, in the darkened cinema. And so, finally, the 100th person is ‘you’, sitting in the dark, watching words on a screen.

With its written printed text on a black screen, 100 People seems similar to the printed page, but the way in which the viewer is folded into the work is enabled by the particularities of video in a darkened room. Printed text has a permanence – it sits out there, waiting, untroubled by the passage of time. It also has a multiplicity – there might be many simultaneous readers in different locations. But 100 People does not have a reader, but a performer, and it’s me – conjured out of thin air and placed here in a strange room for the benefit of the piece (and not the other way around). I played my part by showing up and sitting in the dark – otherwise the words would have played to an empty room. What makes this a performance is that it needs me, not just to complete it, but for it actually to exist.

Written by Theron Schmidt

www.timetchells.com
www.sketch.uk.com

Adam Pendleton, The Revival New York (Hans Peter Feldman), 2007

Adam Pendleton
The Revival
Stephan Weiss Studio
New York
Nov 1.

The lights go low. Conversations peter out. A single, clear, female voice resonates around Stephan Weiss studio. She is singing a Duke Ellington song and her lone voice – disembodied and unaccompanied – fills the hall and demands the audience’s attention.

Adam Pendleton’s The Revival, a PERFORMA Commission for this year’s biennial, trades on the power of language through meanings and sounds. Pendleton harnesses the energy of gospel, jazz and pop music along with the style of Southern-style religious services to deliver a compelling sermon to his congregation.

The performance is loosely circular. Pendleton’s speech starts and ends with what sounds like a political statement of defiance – a list of things that ‘we broke’, and things that ‘we freed’. In between he ranges from the publicly polemic ( a tirade against the US administration’s attitude to drugs for HIV/ Aids) to the touchingly private (‘my lover often sits on me to get me to eat’). And there are also ‘testimonials’ from the poet Jena Osman and the artist Liam Gillick, who join Pendleton from the audience like parishioners sharing their experience in church.

But who is Pendleton preaching to? The church set-up makes the audience feel part of a congregation, but the ‘we’ Pendleton speaks about is never explained. When he talks about gay politics is he addressing us as comrades or enemies? He says, ‘I prefer gay people, I think we’re better than everyone else’, and it raises a laugh. Are we laughing with him, as he redirects the bigotry of homophobia through a a parody of self-rightousness? Or is he laughing at us, trying to shake the liberal conceit of siding with the oppressed?

What, in fact, is Pendleton’s sermon about? Despite the emotive form, the driving music and the charismatic persona, Pendleton’s language never gets to a ‘message’. He repeats phrases and reroutes them, changes round the order of words and switches tone in the midst of an argument. In the end, no argument can emerge. Osman’s and Gillick’s testimonials, meanwhile (the former, about the objectivist poet Charles Raznikoff; the latter, a persuasive speech by a car manufacturer to potential employees) are far from personal. Examples of very different kinds of speaking, they rupture the smoothness of Pendleton’s delivery and draw attention to it. The ‘message’ here is rhetoric as practice, to an emotive jazz and gospel score.

The Revival plays with the functions of language and text. Without specifying who he is preaching to, what he is preaching about, or even his own point of origin, Pendleton charts a dynamic journey through language and sound that leaves the audience uplifted and asking for more. The gospel singer’s voice finishes the performance just how it began, singing about a new day which, ‘brings hope, they say’.

The last part is important. This nameless ‘they’ is the authority of language that The Revival draws on. Mesmerising without being meaningful, The Revival wallows in the investments made in language – its purpose that comes from the people that use it, its authority from the fact of being used. Pendleton weaves together different modes of address to deliver a virtuoso demonstration of language’s power.

Mary Paterson

Christian Jankowski Rooftop Routine (2007).

Christian Jankowski Rooftop Routine , the artists residence on Division Street, 10am Nov 03 2007
Presented By PERFORMA

It’s 10am on November 3rd and a small, tired looking crowd stand on the rooftop of Ming Tower on Division Street, Chinatown. We have been invited here, to the roof of the artist Christian Jankowski’s apartment, to witness Rooftop Routine an early morning collaborative performance that is part of PERFOMA 07.

Just across from us on an adjacent rooftop is a Chinese woman stood amid bits of junk, walls of graffiti, discarded chairs and cans. She is dressed in red and is hula-hooping for all her worth rocking slightly back and forth, with both arms in the air, her palms toward her. Back on our roof thirty seconds later someone excitedly points in another direction just west of the original hula-hooper; another hula-hooper has been spotted doing the same routine. Then another. All in all the Chinese woman sets off a hula-hooping chain reaction that involves about 20 people and stretches in a three block radius around us.

Combined, the gyrating, sports-clad hula-hoopers are beautifully at odds with the grey New York morning, with its loud and busy rush hour streets, looming Uptown skyline and litter strewn Chinatown rooftops. The shared, simple arm gestures of the hula-hoopers, which change variously from waving arms up and down and turning palms inside and out, move out sequentially from the Chinese
woman, travelling beyond any one individual hula-hooper’s body or sightline. This autonomy of movement gives the routine itself a visceral and contagious quality or choreography that moves through, but is independent of, the bodies of the hula-hoopers. Spreading like a happy rash over the rooftops, each change in the hula-hoop workout create links, making tangible the physical and conceptual bonds that bind us here together; this project, these buildings, these bodies.

The basis for Rooftop Routine was Jankowski looking out of his apartment window to discover his neighbour, Suat Ling Chua, doing her daily 40 minute hula-hoop workout on the roof of her apartment opposite. It is outside the frame of this project that spying on what your neighbour gets up to as part of her personal fitness regime might be a dubious starting point for a performance. Also not in the picture is why Suat Ling Chua was hula-hooping on her roof in the first place and whether or not hula-hooping is actually a sport, it is also unclear what Suat Ling Chua’s actual level of input or personal investment in the project is (aside from being the lead hula-hooper). All this is of interest, but what really matters is that the artist eventually found, and initiated contact with, Suat Ling Chua and the rest, as they say, is history.

The coming together of the community of Chinatown and New York’s contemporary art world is not something new or unique. Chinatown, one of the remaining parts of New York to retain its (Chinese) inhabitants and distinct (Chinese) flavour, is also home to many New York artists - including Jankowski - who live or keep art studios in the area. In recent history, this mix of low rent, available space, immigrant communities and artists has inevitably signalled areas in danger of impending corporate development or gentrification. Whether or not this is the immediate future for Ming Tower such local geographic and economic concerns seem important to Rooftop Routine. Seen in this political light, Jankowski’s deceptively simple human chain of hula-hoopers is the perfect cover for a performative restoration of neighbourhood links that highlight the area’s distinct blend of community, architecture and art that might just keep the developers at bay for a while longer.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham