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Image Coutesy Hao Lang, VITAL 2007 The essence of performance, International Chinese Live Art festival, Chinese Arts Centre, Image by James Champion

Tuesday 20 November 2007
Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester
Part of Vital 07: The Essence of Performance International Chinese Live Art Festival

The gallery is darkened and a small performance space in the corner is marked by a semi-circle of chairs set at a respectful distance from a large mirror on the floor. Attractive reflections of light are cast on the walls, suggesting conventional theatre footlights. It is in this rather glamorous setting that Hao Lang performs as a super-kitsch figure in tight-fitting striped top and flower-studded bathing cap, his cheeks reddened with make-up so he is easily recognisable as the rosy ideal of countless garish propaganda posters and simultaneously recalling the camp of Busby Berkeley musicals.

The strident voice of an exercise instructor fills the space with motivational Mandarin, accompanied by rousing music to which Hao Lang starts his demanding routine. He stands directly on top of the mirror. And it is not reinforced or protected with a special coating to withstand the full force of his stamping, marching workout. It breaks with his first step. And he keeps on breaking it, until it is nothing but a slippery mess of vicious shards on which he persists with his routine.

The shattering, splintering sound contrasts horribly with the inspirational, perky music. It is chaotic, rude, uncontrolled noise laid over the relentlessly rhythmic and demanding exercise instructions. It is deeply unsettling and we have to watch with growing horror as Hao Lang slips and pitches forwards several times, coming close to terrible injury. There are many grimacing faces in the crowd. This is not an affectionate re-enactment of a happy childhood activity; the savagery of the breaking glass combined with the relentlessness of the exercise routine suggests punishment, humiliation, genuine endangerment and no fondness for the enforced physical workouts all schoolchildren in China have to endure. The mix of imagery and sound is nightmarish as all references are accessible and recognisable but unsettling when assembled in this way; the familiar seems unfamiliar and is made deeply sinister.

We see Hao Lang get breathless through physical exertion, we see flashes of fear in his flushed face as he stumbles and lurches frighteningly close to the splintered glass, we sit or stand horribly close to the shattered mess and try to inch away when the circle of shards begins to widen and threatens to exit the performance space in flying daggers towards us. However, we can't escape and we're trapped like Hao Lang in this menacing exercise, bound by an oppressive, invisible obligation to complete the task no matter what danger it puts us in. When it ends, we applaud with relief and can finally take pleasure in all those missed sessions at the gym: Hao Lang has proven that exercise really can be bad for you.

Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

Becky IpVital 07 – The Essence of Performance
Chinese Arts Centre
Manchester
20 and 21 November

China. Chinese. Chinese Live Art. Chinese Artists. Where to begin when critiquing the work at Vital, the Manchester based International Chinese Live Art Festival? There are many pitfalls to avoid amid the current art-world lust for everything Chinese; problems of economy, of identity – for me as well as for the artists and the ‘Chinese’ work they may or may not produce. There is also the gap between China and everywhere else that is religion, language and art. Such gaps are factors in disseminating art work from any number of countries but with regards to Contemporary Chinese Live Art, moreover to Vital, it is a specific break that is breached via a Chinese Live Art Historical canon that is only now being written. The fundamental risk in contextualising Vital, then, is allowing these very challenges to prevent important critical things being said about contemporary live work in, from, or about, China today.

Happily, it is indicative of the festival's global outlook, both in terms of China and Chinese art, that not all the work in Vital was about China or being Chinese. What each performance did have in common, however, was a distinctly pared down look and feel. This was performance stripped right down to its live essentials. No stage, no technology, no theatre and not many theatrics. Not even nudity to distract from the matter at hand: the ‘essence of performance’ that is the body in space and time and the bond between the audience and the artist. In keeping with this remit the artists in Vital worked with only the most basic, minimal props, creating work that was deceptively simple and poignant to expose what is at stake in the live. And many artists cut straight to the subject of their audience and the affective element in Live Art without deviation.

Such raw elements of the live were clearly at stake in the work of Brendan Fan (UK) and Marcus Young (US). Both artists were listed as ‘intervening’ throughout the Vital programme and used the audience as site and location for work that subverted our desire to capture the very essence of live performance; to have, to hold, to be there or document it. Fan removed the distraction of the actual work itself to get to the core of that life force; the audience and their relation to the work. His interventions were de-materialised to the extent that the performance itself is un-witnessed or potentially not even carried out in the first place. By documenting absent performances in gallery wall texts ‘Artist Secretly Watched the Visitors to His Exhibition, 2007’ and giving out postcards saying things like ‘During your visit to Vital 07 an artist may secretly involve you in a performance without your knowledge’ the real location of Fan’s work remains outside the frame of the actual action, instead it lives in the audience’s imagination or somewhere out in the essence, or ether, of performance.

Young also took control of, or sidestepped, concerns of material form, documentation and dissemination of his performances by personally delivering a daily whisper to unsuspecting audience members. I received my first daily whisper in the middle of Rosa Mei’s performance. Young tapped me on the shoulder and leaned in to say ‘I appear’, then much later on ‘You hear something, you doubt something’. This is Young’s way of staying as close as possible to the essence or performative life force of acts of speech. His are acts that are particularly affective and transformative in that they literally ‘do’ what they say as they say it; Marcus does appear from nowhere and you hear something, then have feelings of doubt, all in the very moment of the whispered utterance.

By reducing the content of the work to very minimal or no action, Fan and Young stuck close to performing the basic, affective, elements of performance. This aspect was something that intervened in not only the audience’s body, behaviour and thoughts in Vital but reached across other art works in the programme in interesting ways. Jenevieve Chang (UK) embodied sound by moving solely in response to noise from the audience, who duly offered coughs, mobile phone ringtones and shouted the artist’s name. When Young interrupted the middle of the performance with a private whisper in Chang’s ear what the audience saw was a neat visualisation of Young’s secret whisper transmitted into Chang’s performing body. This was the perfect chance-meeting of two works concerned with the live manifestation of percept and affect.

Also concentrating on these basic affective elements of performance, artists such as Jason Lim (Singapore), Becky Ip (Canada), Lushan Liu (UK) and Zhou Bin (China) cut through complex issues of Chinese Thought, Language, translation and history, enacting the live as pure and simple whilst simultaneously performing it as complex and mediated. With the lights turned out Liu interacted with a submerged projection of family photographs; water covered images of proud Chinese parents and grandparents in traditional Chinese clothes were distorted by ripples and waves. This was clearly Liu uncovering, whilst being drowned by, her Chinese history. In an equally fragile yet powerful durational (6 hour) performance Ip continually stencilled the words ‘The date does not fall the country’ on a wet Manchester pavement outside the Chinese Arts Centre. The phrase was translated through a translation website from the 1937 infamous English quote ‘The sun never sets on the British empire’. The resulting opacity of ‘the date does not fall the country’ highlighted the gaps inherent in translation and illustrated language itself as impure, containing a devious character and agenda all its own. Bin took a similar deceptively simple approach to language and its politics by slowly skewing and stuttering the words ‘I am not a terrorist’ until he quite literally vomited the sentence; red lumps of sick analogous to words at first spurted, then later dribbled, from the artist’s slack jaws. Bin’s performance harnessed the tangible affect or ‘essence’ of the performance work at Vital by initiating an immediate performative chain reaction of retching around the studio. Lim also utilised this same invisible energy in a much more aesthetically pleasing way to perform taut, strong yet paradoxically delicate and breakable bonds between his body, glass and stretched sellotape in between the trees of the Arts Centre courtyard.

Despite the remit of the festival to expose the bare bones of performance by doing away with decoration, theatre, artifice or props, the natural force and stark agency that coursed through the veins of the work at Vital is not simply due to curatorial wisdom; there are too many overt and underlying metaphysical, visual and formal factors that bind the disparate works together. Whether it is history, performativity, luck or energy the work of Fan, Young, Chang and Lim is compelling evidence that such ‘essences’ of performance are far from academic , non- material and ephemeral. The agency of this work is raw, visceral and exists on a very distinct frequency. Could this elemental aspect of performance be quintessentially Chinese? Only time, writing and documentation, will tell.

Rachel Lois Clapham

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Image coutesy of Jenevieve Chang, VITAL 2007 The essence of performance, International Chinese Live Art festival, Chinese Arts Centre, Image by James Champion

21 November 2007
Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester
Part of Vital 07: The Essence of Performance International Chinese Live Art Festival

This likeable and amusing performance is to be enjoyed with caution. For all her levity, Chang is playing dangerously with several stereotypes of Chinese femininity and though she encourages participation from the audience, this too has to be approached with caution.

It starts innocently enough with Chang standing mute in the performance space, exuding an openness and friendliness that puts the audience at ease. Notices granting permission for mobile phones to be left on and freedom to cough, sneeze and shuffle anticipate a very different sort of performance.

As the audience settles and the room grows quiet, it becomes clear that Chang is listening very carefully and as the sound of traffic creeps into the quiet room, her body begins to react to it, very gently. Eventually, the audience grows bolder and begins to provide incidental sounds such as coughing, sneezing, jingling loose change in order to trigger more movement in Chang. We become complicit in her performance and the artists present, either briefed on Chang's performance or more willing to be explicit than the non-artists in the crowd, start to provide deliberate noises, singing, calling her name, jangling keys. More people join in and there is an extraordinary change in atmosphere when we collectively realise that without us providing the noises normally frowned upon in performance work, there would be no performance work at all in this case. Chang is our puppet and we can, we must, make her dance.

Chang's responses are humorous and spontaneous, changing in scale according to the sound provided. She is a confident and skilled performer and is able to inject wit and character into her movement but it is the constant reverting to coyness and coquettishness which is troubling. We are in control of Chang and Chang is willingly submissive, responding to whatever she hears with charm and openness. Apart from the initial notes granting permission for distractions, she does not do anything further to invite noises from the audience and can only wait for something to make a sound when the room goes quiet.

This is the level of her submission and it is impossible to escape the stereotype of the obedient Chinese / Thai bride so coveted by Western men for their assumed docility and responsive attentiveness at the sacrifice of their own comfort. The fulfilment of the performance is dependent on a complex contract made between the audience and Chang: between me and Chang, the contract is even more complex. As a British-born Chinese woman myself, I found the performance deeply discomforting, as if I had caught sight of myself smiling while subject to the whims of a braying crowd. The audience gleefully perpetuate the obedient Chinese woman stereotype by producing more sounds, literally making Chang dance at our command; the repugnance of this is smothered somewhat by the humour and wit of the situation but is something I will carry with me in my memory of this experience.

Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

British artist Richard DeDomenici interviewed by Tim Atack and Rachel Lois Clapham on the 26th September 2007

.: Did Priya Pathak Ever Get Her Wallet Back? August 06

Rachel Lois Clapham: Oh. Sorry, I’m just eating .….

Tim Atack: Ok then. Ill start: Richard, What led you to start making art?

Richard DeDomenici: My father was an artist. And my grandfather was an artist….

TA ….Are we to trust that answer?

RD Yes. I have always been a creative person. I was considered ‘the artist’ at school: I was the one that could draw. In 1989 I won the London Marathon poster competition. Obviously a huge boost to my artistic career. It pretty much set me on my way.

TA What was your winning design?

RD It was an image of the marathon runners passing through the modern buildings of Docklands at South Quay Plaza, the building that the IRA blew up in 1996. It’s not there anymore. I was on BBC Newsroom South East, SIX times! It was like ‘Today Richard goes to the printers’, ‘Today Richard hands over a cheque’. I was on TV so many times! In retrospect, I fear that Micheal Wale, the TV presenter, had an inappropriate interest in me…..

RD …..Later on I went to university in Cardiff to do art because they said you didn’t have to specialise in any department, you could move around the school. It was a lie. You had to specialise after the first term. I chose the Time-Based department after seeing a performance by Kira O’Reilly- she was graduating when I started at Cardiff- I had no means of interpreting what I was seeing in that work. My only reaction was to laugh at Kira’s performance but it stayed in my mind. Now I understand that laughter is a reasonable reaction to work when you don’t now how to interpret it, laughter is often the first response and that’s why people often laugh at me when they see me on the street. But I stayed and did time-based art for 3 years because it was so interesting.

RLC Do you think laughter is a good critical reaction – a useful one – in relation to your work….?

TA ….Do you encourage being laughed at?

RD If you can make a stranger laugh, then they’re much more likely to engage with the underlying meaning of the work. It’s a way of breaking down our natural defences. In my lectures I am funny. The lectures started off in 2003 when I was asked to talk about my work at Brunel University. I had just failed massively on a project attempting to turn coal into diamonds. It was my biggest commission at the time: £2000. I had never worked with such a budget. It had all gone terribly wrong and that informed my decision to call the lecture ‘Embracing Failure’. Needless to say everyone thought my tales of fiasco were both amusing yet encouraging, and so ‘Embracing Failure’ became a big success. So, yes, my lectures are supposed to be entertaining, although clearly they are not entertaining when compared to proper comedy, as I learnt at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year. That was a mistake; sitting down, reading a script, the comedy critics didn’t like it at all. I recognise that I am not a comedian, but I also recognise that in relation to other artists my work can be seen as funny.

RLC When do you think you have been most ‘at risk’ because of your work?

RD Definitely ‘Unattended Baggage’ in Helsinki in 2005. I put myself in a suitcase and left it outside Helsinki railway station.

TA I am surprised you even did that after 9/11

RD Well. It was after 9/11 but before 7/7. Finland had a relaxed attitude to security back then so I thought it would be a good place to test the work out. They had no War on Terror. It wasn’t politically expedient for them to have a War on Terror. The Helsinki event happened about two months before 7/7. The plan was to do ‘Unattended Baggage’ in London and New York. I didn’t end up doing it in London or New York, not on the grounds of taste, but because I thought I would be, well, killed!

RLC So you thought it would be the police that would intervene- the authorities- rather than civilians?

RD I worried about the police and civilians. I was in a wheelie suitcase. It’s not like one of those polycarbonate cases. I was really vulnerable. Skaters or anyone could have jumped on me. Anyone could have wheeled me away, packed me into a bus. Also, in terms of doing it in London, the police had just shot Jean Charles de Menezes in the head, you know? I was in no rush to do such a performance in London. I didn’t think me in a suitcase on the tube or in a railway station would be appreciated by the over-zealous Metropolitan Police Force. But I was encouraged to do it in London. People wanted me to do it. Make of that what you will!

(Laughs)

RD The performance in Helsinki was very discretely documented. It probably works better as a film than if you were there at the time. I try not to set things up so that they only work on film but it always ruins a piece of street art if there is some bloke standing next to you or the art with a big camera so there was a camera in a paper bag. The difference with ‘Cable-Tie’ where I had a bag on my head in Chicago was that I wouldn’t have done it if there hadn’t been two people following me with cameras and we were linked up with radio microphones for safety; to stop me being bundled into a van or jumped on. So sometimes the documentation is crucial to the performance.

RLC In the Chicago piece (Cable-Tie, 2004) there was a lot of reaction from the public. They saw you walking with a bag on your head and your hands tied behind your back as controversial. How did you prepare for that, and what is the worst reaction you’ve had to one of your performances?

RD With the Chicago performance, I prepared for the worst and hoped for the best. I had already talked to a lawyer. I thought either no-one would care me walking on the street with a bag on my head or I would get shot and bundled into the back of a van. Luckily it was midway between the two. The fact that I was white, from England, and well spoken helped. You can get away with a lot more if you are from England in America. An interesting point someone made in a review was that the subtext to that performance is what would have happened had he been Black or sounded less English?

RD ….I was really worried about being arrested in Chicago. I really didn’t want to get arrested in America. I definitely don’t go out of my way to get arrested. I only ever got arrested once and I managed to talk my way out of it. (‘Break-In’, 2000) It is quite easy to get arrested if you want. But I like to make stuff - do work- that is in the grey area between legal and illegal.

TA You stick to ‘low-grade civil disobedience’. ….

RD Yes. I’m not interested in getting a criminal record as it will limit my ability to be an artist; limit my right to roam. My more activist friends like to get arrested, but that’s not what I’m about. If someone sees what I’m doing and calls the police, then the police come along and say ‘yes that’s fine, that’s within the boundaries of what’s acceptable’, than that’s perfect for me, like the ‘The Big Flyposter Draw’ (October 2004).

TA A lot of your work seems to be about failure or is destined to fail?

RD Yeah. Once I had done the ‘Embracing Failure’ lecture I came to the realisation that if your not scared of failure then it allows you to take lots of risks. Then that became one of my maxims. I don’t go out of my way to fail but if it happens……

TA Do you have your on personal measure of success for a work?

RD. It varies from work to work. But if I don’t get beaten up or arrested, then that’s good. Artistically, it’s harder but I tend to know when a piece has worked.

RLC In terms of funding, do you have to report back to the Arts Council about your various failures?

RD I try not to apply for Arts Council funding. Once, the Arts Council wrote to me and asked me to apply for a grant - which apparently is really weird - so I did. At the time I thought the whole thing must have been a terrible misprint. It was for a ‘Visual Art Talent Plan’ for the East of England because I was living in Watford which is the East of England. Did you know that?

RLC No, I didn’t

RD. It took me two years to write my application. It wasn’t an enjoyable process. And I still only have half of the money because I haven’t finished my ‘activity report form’ so I still haven’t got half of the money. Also, I think it’s good to try and be self-sufficient as an artist. I was saying about 10 years ago that if London get the Olympic all the Arts Council money will disappear, and people seemed surprised but of course it’s happened. I try to go to different funding sources, get various commissions. So, the failure doesn’t come up much because I don’t work directly with the Arts Council.

TA Did anyone walking through your work on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile pay the ‘Pedestrian Congestion Charge’ (August 2005)?

RD No, because if anyone really did pay money to me that would definitely be illegal. The idea was it would be automatically deducted form their mobile phones. That’s what the leaflets explained to them.

.: Pedestrian Congestion Charging 09 August 2005

TA Did anyone turn round and question it?

RD We did the performance for a week. On the second day there was a man that came back and said ‘I only had a £1.60 on my phone. I ran out of credit and I had to make a really important call yesterday!’ He was totally convinced that not only was the charge genuine but that I had money deducted from his mobile phone. It was really good. Some people said he was stupid but, you know…. he was obviously just easily suggestible! His name is Andrew Tovey. I have met the guy since, he rides one of those bike taxi - human transporter - things. He came to one of my ‘Priya Pathak’ lectures with his mates. I think it’s good that people are so….. errr, malleable. Poor Andrew.

RD I was really hoping that the police would shut down Pedestrian Congestion Charging immediately so I wouldn’t have to do it everyday for a week. I wanted maximum publicity for minimum effort. I’m all for delegating responsibility. There is a certain element of laziness to my work, which I try to embrace. But the Scottish police didn’t stop it.

.: Pedestrian Congestion Charging 09 August 2005

RLC Regarding ‘low-grade civil disobedience,’ is there anything currently so low grade or covert that no-one apart from yourself knows about it, if so, can you reveal it to us now?

RD No, because that would ruin it wouldn’t it?

RLC No.

RD All details will be revealed at a later date. Seriously though, it only takes a very small action to make a big effect. Like re-arranging someone’s knives and forks in their cutlery tray. Something small like that can cause massive discord and have a ripple effect. It’s like Jaws. I consider myself like Jaws. You know where the shark systematically searches for the weak parts of the boat. That’s how I consider what I do, but with less blood.

TA Systematically searches for the weak parts of the boat. That’s good.

RD ….but with less violence, I don’t believe in violence……. I’m the shark, and the boat is…society! (Laughs)

RLC Have you ever hi-jacked a civil disobedience or claimed a public disorder incident was your own doing even though you didn’t do it? (Aside from the National Review of Live Art 2006 fire alarm incident)

RD Yes. NRLA 2006 was where that started. I have reached a level of notoriety where people often blame me for stuff. I get blamed for all sorts of things and, again, I’m lazy so ill claim it, if it’s good. I’m not going to spend time trying to force people to believe that I didn’t do something.

RLC Can you say what classifies as ‘good’ in terms of claiming anyone else’s disruption or accident?

RD No, but I often see other people’s work and consider it plagiarism even though I haven’t thought of that idea yet. ‘Proto-Plagiarism’. I still consider it mine. That happens a lot to me. It’s really annoying.

RLC So it’s a future plagiarism: you haven’t thought of the idea yet but you would have done eventually, had the time been available to you: Nice.

RD Yes, I’m always getting ripped off for an idea I haven’t thought of yet. As an artist, sadly, there’s not much you can do about it. Except write a lecture about it - ‘Plagiarism’ will be out next summer.

TA For ages you have described yourself as a ‘one-man subversive think-tank’. Can you say a bit about that?

RD Yeah. I’m going to change that….. If you want to help me write a new artistic statement id be happy to hear from you because I’m sick to death of ‘one-man subversive think-tank’.

......................................................................

Richard DeDomenici is an artist based within the M25. He has recently disavowed his artistic statement of six years, which described him, amongst other things, as 'a one-man subversive think-tank'. He is currently without portfolio, scouting around for a new ideology. If you think you can help, please visit http://www.dedomenici.co.uk and click on 'Statement'.

Tim Atack is a musician and writer with Writing From Live Art, he is based in Bristol.

Rachel Lois Clapham is a curator and a writer with Writing From Live Art. She is london based and currently editor of www.writingfromliveart.co.uk

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

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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