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

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

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