me having my hair cut

Haircuts by Children’ by Darren O’Donnell
03 November 11am– 4pm
2 in 1 Hair Salon
12 B Pell Street, Chinatown, New York

Produced with children studying at MS131, Dr. Sun Yat-sen Middle School in Chinatown by Art In General for PERFORMA07

Hair is not as external, shallow or simple as it may seem. Since before the dawn of Western civilisation hair and hair cuts have played a vital role in our cultural, social and religious beliefs and impacted upon our sense of our innermost selves: In the Bible Samson lost his strength when his hair was cut. For a Sikh long (uncut) and turbaned hair is a symbol of faith. In addition, Women’s hair has historically been covered up in the practise of Orthodox Judaism and Islam. Hair also plays a vital role in the identification of African tribal peoples. The long and short of it is, whether it’s shaving your head, having too much body hair, being concerned about going bald or getting a drastic new cut, hair is rooted to our contemporary psyche. All this makes having your hair cut, especially by non expert young children, extremely fitting material for a performance.

So the stakes are high in Haircuts by Children and the risks involved are many, for both performer and participant: the child ‘stylist’ or performer risks giving someone an unwanted or bad - in academy terms - haircut. The ‘customer’ or audience member has to make themselves and their hair open to a hair cut in the name of art and to potentially sporting a truly avant-garde style. The economic and cultural factors are equally tangible; whatever the result, the haircut is - literally - live art and it’s free, this means you can’t get a refund or complain. The politico-economic factors in the work are also clear; 2 in 1 is a hair salon in Chinatown, the kids are all of Chinese heritage mostly with English as a second language. The implications of being white, whilst being pampered by a group of clearly underage Chinese people in a run-down part of town, their home, perhaps doesn’t bear worth thinking about. But in this way, Haircuts By Children is yet another example of how live performance uncovers, and puts pressure on, important aspects of contemporary life that could so easily otherwise remain hidden beneath the surface; of the body, of the city of New York, and of the current (booming) Chinese / Anglo-American market economy.

Politics aside, my own hair cut was a personal disaster for me. To cut a long story short, I went from shoulder length curly hair to a severe, short, and very uneven bob in only 30 minutes. They were an extremely tense 30 minutes in which I saw larger and larger chunks of my hair falling past my shoulders while my hairdresser accidentally cut her finger, laughed a lot and waved her scissors dangerously near my eyes. Meanwhile, other 10 year olds stood by and stared, saying in hushed Chinese tones what I hoped - but doubted - were nice comments about my beautiful, stylish hair cut.

The focus of O’Donnell’s work isn’t to traumatise people or give bad hair cuts (the kids have all undergone basic training). His point is that children should be trusted with the important things in life and not sidelined. Moreover, a child’s opinion, their vision, should not be put down as simply childlike. Perhaps then, my hair came out bad not because of my child stylist’s inexperience or young age, but because I appeared nervous or was too demanding and therefore wasn’t trusting enough of her aesthetic vision for my hair. Whatever the result, she and I entered into Haircuts by Children as equals, both parties open and willing not only to acknowledge, but actively participate in, or risk, failure. This is a rare and difficult thing to undertake, however old you are, and it is testament to O’Donnell’s skill that both the participating children and adults took the transgression of these social and personal boundaries in the slightly manic, dangerous, yet underlying serious spirit of the work.

If you see me at any of the remaining Performa events come and say 'hello', I’ll be the one with a turban, hijab or large head-band on.

By Rachel Lois Clapham

A Hair Massacre

Darren O’Donnell and Art In General are offering the public free haircuts by children next Saturday November 10, 2007. (See Performa website for location details)

Me and DaveNovember 1st 3-6pm.
Artist Dave McKenzie
‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building Plaza.

On Thursday 1st November from 3-6pm a black man in a leather jacket sits on a bench in Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building Plaza, Harlem. It doesn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary. It’s not. And that’s the beauty of Dave McKenzie’s performance. Amid the other highly choreographed or larger staged events of Performa 07; with its celebrities, fashion designers, famous curators and artists- most of whom I don’t know- it is intriguing and radical to be invited to simply go and ‘find’ someone sitting on a bench at a certain time as a piece of art.

The works’ radicality comes in part from its unpredictability. ‘I’ll be there (2007)’ is Dave’s open invitation to be ‘found’, but it is not listed as happening anywhere but the Performa programme. This makes it a relatively secret rendezvous in which neither you nor the artist know who will turn up to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building Plaza, or what will happen. It’s also a public, and hence relatively unsupervised, event. Such instability enacts one of the fundamental underpinnings of performance; that it has the ability to be un-tethered, and perhaps not to be trusted. ‘I’ll be there (2007)’ also returns at base to one of the paradoxes of live work; it is simultaneously structured and timetabled yet represents a wholly chance encounter in which neither you nor the artist have full control; you can choose not to go, Dave can choose not to be there. There is also the possibility that the normal nature and look of the piece may lead you to not find, not recognise, or worse still misrecognise, Dave. Either way, the performance of ‘I’ll be there (2007)’ still happens, the work is still completed.

‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ could be overtly and radically political; deliberately performing a black face (his own) in a historically predominant black part of New York (Harlem) in a plaza named after a black civil rights hero (Adam Clayton Powell Jr) that is now best known as a site for contemporary political protests and street-side vendors selling gospel psalms and black activist memorabilia. It could also be of fundamental importance to ‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ that nearly all the Performa visitors who actually do find Dave are white. These are undoubtedly important elements to the work but ‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ feels much less banal or soap-box than that. Instead the work operates on a more open-ended, fragile and quiet level that is clearly indebted to Allan Kaprow’s politics of the performance of the everyday and the subversive, quiet, often un-witnessed performances of Adrian Piper and does the vital job of refreshing these narratives for the 21st Century.

In the end I did find Dave. He was there, as he said he would be, sitting on a bench in the plaza. We had a pleasant chat together then went our separate ways. In our technologised, wireless everything, age ‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ indulges us in a desire for a bygone era when spontaneous, low-key yet intimate one to one social encounters were commonplace. It also allows for the fantasy of meeting a dark, handsome stranger at a pre-arranged time and place and so putting your trust, and fate, entirely in a printed paper advert.

Dave McKenzie’s ‘I’ll Be There (2007) is part of ‘All Together Now’, a series of four performances in PERFORMA 07 that look at the artist’s past and current performances and interventions. Curated by Romi Crawford. Presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem. Courtesy PERFORMA and Studio Museum.

Dave McKenzie will be performing ‘Babel’ (2000-2006) on the 14th November and Private Dancer (2007) on the 18th November as part of PERFORMA 07. See programme for more details.

Rachel Lois Clapham

.Francesco Vezzoli, Right You Are (If You Think You Are), 2007. Photo copyright Paula Court. Courtesy of PERFORMA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Gagosian Gallery.

Francesco Vezzoli Cosi E (Si Vi Pare) / Right You Are (If You Think You Are) at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, October 27th.

If you have to stand in a queue, make sure it’s an interesting one. The queue that snaked around the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum on Saturday night may have been long and dispiriting, but it was also one peppered with celebrities from the worlds of art and showbiz. Programmed to begin at 10pm, Franco Vezzoli’s one-night only adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s play ‘Right You Are (If You Think You Are)’ did not start till nearly 11. The waiting crowd had to content themselves by watching stars appear and disappear into the museum behind a flash of bulbs.

Pirandello’s 1917 play is a parable about truth. It revolves around the mysterious Signora Ponza whose presence is only described through her relationships with others. Drawing together an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman and Peter Saarsgaard, Vezzoli’s adaptation courted this fragility of truth in relation to the nature of celebrity. In doing so he choreographed the audience as much as he directed the actors and – although I may not have appreciated it at the time – that long queue was a fitting introduction to the themes of his piece.

Inside the museum, the A-List actors sat facing each other at the centre of the rotunda. Some were cast in roles that deliberately contrasted with their appearance or gender – Natalie Portman, for instance, as the straight talking (male) Laudisi, and the adolescent Marcus Carl Franklin as the Mayor – and they were all reading from a script, so that even when the play was at its most dynamic we were reminded that it was a constructed fiction. This had the paradoxical effect of emphasising the historical specificity of Pirandello’s text (it’s setting in early twentieth-century Italy) in order to free the implications of the play. By never allowing the audience to suspend disbelief, in other words, Vezzoli grounded the existential arguments of the play in real experience.

The A-List credentials of the cast also shed an intriguing light on the distinctions between truth, lies and the possibility of knowledge. By using such well known faces – and in particular, the status and renown of Cate Blanchett as Signora Ponza – Vezzoli exploited our own willing complicity in the cult of celebrity. Signora Ponza’s denouement (or anti-denouement, as she does little to clarify the story) could just as well have been a description of Blanchett’s activities on the publicity run for her latest film. In that situation, too, she is a construct of other people's imaginations.

And yet my view of events was heavily coloured by where I was seated. Famous and important people (of a range that included Mary-Kate Olsen, Lou Reed and Cindy Sherman) were seated around the actors on the ground floor, while others vied for their place along the museum’s ramps. My seat was in a separate screening room, which showed pictures from cameras trained on each of the actors’ faces as well as on members of the audience. Signora Ponza/ Cate Blanchett, wearing a veiled costume designed by John Galliano, was perched on an elaborate stool in front of the screen.

Just like the gossiping villagers who cast judgment on Signora Ponza’s identity in Pirandello’s play, then, I was afforded the apparent luxury of being able to see without being judged myself - there were no cameras trained on my seat. I watched the fidgeting and shuffling of high-status audience members, and I saw the watchful expressions of the actors between lines. The frustration I felt in the queue was long behind me, as I revelled in the privilege of the belief that I had a perfect view. In fact, it was the feeling of exclusion in the queue – forced to wait while others were led into the museum –that made this sense of inclusion and knowledge so richly felt.

The programme quotes Pirandello’s desire to stimulate audience members as opposed to please them, and the shuffling discomfort of the queue certainly did nothing to please anyone. But there was no loud rebellion, no chorus of booing like in the early performances by Pirandello’s Futurist contemporaries. In the end, were we all sated by the tantalising glimpse of celebrity? Flattered and cosseted in my prize seat, I certainly was.

Cosi E (Se Vi Pare) / Right You Are (If You Think You Are) was a PERFORMA Commission. Produced by Gagosian Gallery, New York. Co-produced by PERFORMA in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Mary Paterson
Performa Writing Live Fellow

See more reviews by Mary and Rachel Lois on http://07.performa-arts.org/performa_live.php