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Image credit: Carlos Amorales, Spider Web Stage (negative), 2006-2007. Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York/Paris.

This interview was held in New York, 15 November 2007 between Rachel Lois Clapham, a UK writer with Writing From Live Art and Carlos Amorales, an artist based in Mexico.

Carlos Amorales’ Spider Galaxy is a 400-piece sculpture resembling a spider’s web that is the site for an ongoing performance by a lone dancer, accompanied by a subsonic sound composition by Julien Lede transmitted through the sculpture itself. Spider Galaxy adds to Amorales’ oeuvre of ritualistic performance projects and animations, including Amorales vs. Amorales, which involved professional wrestlers and was exhibited at the Tate Modern in London and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, amongst other venues.

Rachel Lois Clapham (RLC): Can you tell me what happened in your studio with regards to Spider Galaxy?

Carlos Amorales (CA): In my practice I build structures for other people to work in, like the record label I set up ‘Nuevos Ricos’, then I invite other people such as bands, artists and graphic designers, to be involved in that structure. It’s the same in my studio. I collaborate with three of four people at any one time. Various people do graphic design, draw, research software or write. Together we build an archive of digital images which I use in different ways. Working in this way means I can create the conditions for something to happen within the limits of my own practise. Spider Galaxy really illustrates that way of working, that collaborative process that happens in my studio. I literally constructed a stage and asked a dancer (Galia Eibenschutz), musician (Julien Lede) and choreographer (Eri Eibenschutz) to develop their work on it.

RLC: What currently binds all these different ways of working?

CA: Thematically, it is Fantasy - whether it is inherited fantasy, myth or the cliché of Fantasy - how it operates; how we rationalise it or don’t. Essentially I want to unpick how we relate to the cliché of Fantasy in its own specific language. That is why the digital archive is very important. It contains all these different pictorial elements, tools to make a fantasy story. My other main concern is analysing the process of doing artistic work. That’s why I work across many different formats and within various institutions - both within the art-world (in galleries and museums) and outside it (in Wrestling or the music industry). I like to test the ways in which I can work within those different environments and how the specific audiences’ interact. I do see all these things as part of my practice but at the same time, with the record label Nuevos Ricos, it’s not like I’m declaring it ‘art’.

RLC: What is the significance of the dancers’ costume in Spider Galaxy?

CA: The bird shape for the costume comes from my archive. It is the combination of an image of a bird mixed with the pattern of a spider web and the grid-like structure of a Samurai Warriors’ armour. I wanted to abstract the costume, to make it more open as an image, and if I had used a spider as reference point it would be too obvious.

RLC: Why have Spider Galaxy in the atrium at 590 Madison? - was it the fact that there are trees and real birds inside that space?

CA: The birds flying inside the space was a pure coincidence. The most important thing was to find a mixture of public and private space. I wanted Spider Galaxy to occupy a space that wasn’t specialised like a Theatre or a gallery, but that wasn’t directly on the street. The key element of public space is to creating a spectacle that is not overly theatrical; where the work is not so much about creating a show for people to turn up, be seated and laugh at. Having Spider Galaxy in the atrium public plaza area meant that some people travelled directly to see it and the passing public might enjoy it, but then again they might not look at or even notice it. I like that mix. It also means that people can stumble upon the work without meaning to.

RLC: What is the significance of the sound in Spider Galaxy?

CA: For many years the musician Julien Lede and I have been collaborating, he is a part of Nuevos Ricos. The sound he made for Spider Galaxy was quite simple, with really low bass and really high pitched sound at opposite ends of the sound spectrum. There was no rhythm in the sound so that the dancer could move independently, according to her own natural or bodily logic, that way her moves might look stranger. The sound was also designed to match the physicality of the space; the spider web has a built-in seated space for the audience as well as the dancer. This highlights the audience’s physical interaction with the work, it brings them in. The vibration the audience feels moving through them heightens the fact that they are implicated in the work. The bass moving through the stage is also an analogy of the movements that a spider uses to track food on its web.

RLC: I looked away when the dancer was coming onto the stage. When I looked back all I saw was an inhuman looking bird form perched on the side of the stage; it was very still, moving only when it was breathing. It looked really unfamiliar and was quite a disturbing moment. The thing that came to mind was the Uncanny. In what way does this aspect of primal fear operate in your work?

CA: I think you were really lucky. The fact that you looked away and suddenly something had appeared like that is an important moment in the piece for me. I’m jealous of that experience because I know the story from the beginning, but that’s a moment I really like: when you don’t know if the dancer is an object or a human or what is about to happen. For me, Spider Galaxy has a lot of tension and the idea was to really slow that moment of anticipation and unfamiliarity down, to prolong it so the audience would have to wait a long time to realise what it was, before Galia starts dancing. That’s another way in which Spider Galaxy plays with the audience’s expectations of being ‘entertained’.

I would say a notion of the uncanny: attraction and at the same time repulsion, is very important to my work and is built into the aesthetics. Beauty can have this dual element, it can be attractive yet really scare people. Aztec art is beautiful but it has that same air of strangeness, I think because we know so little about it, yet the images are quite commonplace. It’s important to me not to make anything nightmarish or gothic though, that would be reduce the work to the level of gimmick. Instead what I want is to try to work with the spaces I can’t grab. I try to find something in beauty. The Uncanny is perhaps not a psychological narrative in my work, rather it is built into its material form. It is a way to perceive the graphic forms I use.

RLC: How do you think of Spider Galaxy when there is no dancer?

CA: I displayed the spider web stage itself, with no dancers, as an installation ‘Spider Web Negative’ in Milton Keynes Gallery in 2006. So the work does have an important function in the atrium space without the dancer. There are deliberately no signs to say you cannot touch or climb on the spider web when there is no-one there, whether they are staff, dancer or audience; it is a stage ready for anyone who wants to interact with it. Sometimes people do step on it or play with it, which is important. In that sense the installation, the empty spiders’ web, has an element of performance waiting to happen. It’s also an invitation to perform, which can be quite alienating or frightening because you’re not sure how you are implicated, or what you might be expected to do. With this invitation to perform Spider Galaxy is passive yet equally quite aggressive.

RLC: Perhaps for the people who stand on the empty spider web stage their uncertainty is ‘When is the spider going to come and eat me’?

CA: Or ‘Am I the spider?’...

RLC: Spider Galaxy is a Performa Commission. Performa Commissions usually represent a shift of some kind in an artist’s practise with regard to working live. You have worked live before, why do you feel you were commissioned by Performa?

CA: I stopped doing live performance after the wrestling and Devil Dance projects about 5 years ago so Spider Galaxy does represent a shift for me, quite a big one, as it is my first live work since I quit performance. It was a big step for me to come away from that kind of work but I wanted to change something in my practise at that point. Spider Galaxy is very different from what I have done before. I really wanted to depart from previous work, which was much more entertaining and ‘popular’, the audience knew exactly how to react to it. Of course, there are similarities in Spider Galaxy; the idea of the stage remains the same as in the wrestling or Devil Dance. But other aspects are totally in another direction. Spider Galaxy is against the idea of entertaining. It is slow, more demanding of its audience and not so immediately translatable. The design of the work, a certain graphic Bauhaus feel, is also more developed. It’s that deliberate shift of direction and the fact that the previous performances were made in my late twenties, whereas Spider Galaxy comes at a time when I am in my late 30’s, which makes this work feel more mature.

RLC: If Spider Galaxy represents a change in your relationship to live performance, does this mean you will begin to make live work again?

CA: I don’t know. Performance is such a burden. When you make studio work you are in a private space. The moment you exhibit or show someone the work is of course public, but when you finish it, it stays finished and static. In my current exhibition ‘Black Cloud’ at Yvonne Lambert Gallery - I installed the work, then I left it and only return every now and again to check on it or fix the odd bit. I can release myself away from the work. The problem with performance is you carry it everywhere in your daily life, and it’s so intense. Even though I no longer perform in my work myself – I am only directing or behind the scenes in Spider Galaxy - the tension is still huge. I don’t think I could cope with making it regularly as the main outlet of my expression.

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Image: Long March 'Avant Garde' 2007, Courtesy: Long March

Long March projects for Performa 2007 included; Nov 7-10: Long March- Xu Zhen, In Just a Blink of an Eye (2007), Nov 10 - Qiu Zhijie, The Thunderstorm Is Slowly Approaching (2007), Nov 11: Long March- Avant-Garde (2007), Nov 14: Long March- Zhao Gang, Harlem School of New Social Realism (initiated by Gang Zhao, organized by Long March Project) (2007).

The Long March, also called ‘The Great March of the Red Army,’ 1934-1936 was a defining moment in Chinese history when soldiers and members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) including intellectuals and artists made a radically political move into the Chinese countryside; marching 8000 miles from Jiangxi to Sichuan via Guizhou over some of the country’s most remote and harshest terrain, in protest against the hierarchy of Chinese aristocratic rule and Literate society. Although the military project of the Long March failed, by engaging with, and harnessing the power of, the country’s rural majority and setting a new revolutionary agenda, The Long March heralded the onset of Modern Communist China and paved the way for Mao Zedongs’ influential twenty seven year reign as leader of The People’s Republic of China.

Miming the same collective structure, revolutionary spirit and educational remit of the 1934 Long March, The Long March Collective, founded in 2002 by curator Lu Jie, explores a distinctly Chinese notion of Avant-Garde arts practice; one that does not have to look outside China to articulate an idea of revolution or artistic change and goes beyond the oft quoted 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre as starting point for politically motivated contemporary art in China. The collective itself has 20 staff, over 300 Long Marchers and its activity includes International Biennials and Triennials, as well as a 20 step curatorial programme and Ghizou-based ‘curatorial summit’ camps. The Long March collective is also geographically embedded at the site of the original Long March; every year a group of Long Marchers – including both international and Chinese artists, curators and theorists - take to the countryside, walking together as a communal piece of live art from Jiangxi to Sichuan whilst marching in the physical and historical footsteps of their Red Army comrades. Along the route Long Marchers work with rural communities to collect research, create exhibitions, host workshops and keep the Long March spirit of avant-garde revolution and notion of ‘art for the people’ alive.

The Long March Collective might use the rhetoric and strategy of a manifesto’d military political party but they don’t want simply to become the latest Red Army faction to make the Long March across China. Rather, they want to use the revolutionary impact of the Long March as case study to explore the validity of contemporary art in relation to the public whilst interrogating the possibility of a contemporary art practise in China that is autonomous from Chinese state rule. With this, the Long March collective have its sights set firmly on the future of art whilst literally maintaining a foot-hold in China’s political past.

It is on this openly interrogative note that the Long March collective contributed to the PERFORMA 07 programme, playing host to a variety of live works. Long Marcher and international conceptual artist Xu Zhen exhibited In Just a Blink of an Eye at the James Cohen Gallery. It was a deceptively simple show in which Zhen made an ephemeral, live and – paradoxically – monumental sculpture out of the suspended bodies of two real-life Chinese migrant workers. The precarious free-fall position in which the two were suspended was an effective metaphor not only for the liminal status and uncertain future of the two Chinese migrants, but of the status and future of China itself.

Artist Qui Zhijie took a more militant approach in order to convey his message. His frenetic The Thunderstorm is Slowly Approaching was a Chinese Dragon Dance performance with traditional music and two important contemporary twists; the troop, including Zhijie, the dancers, musicians and the dragon itself all wore Chinese camouflage combats from head to foot, and the dragon chased, not a pearl, but a camouflaged fighter plane. The troop whipped up a crowd of followers in Columbus Park, danced through the streets of Chinatown and later stormed New York’s Asian Art Fair. By overtly re-asserting Chinese (military) identity in the polished and rather non-descript ‘Asian’ art fair Zhijie’s message was clear; the Chinese are coming.

Lu Jie, Qiu Zhijie and German artist Long Marcher Ingo Gunthe were slightly less fervent but no less openly subversive when they hosted Avant-Garde; a Long March workshop at the China Institute that introduced the Long March collective, explained its social remit and openly grappled with some important questions of how and why to go beyond ideology to initiate an Avant-Garde art movement in China. We were also given a glimpse into a certain Chinese mindset by Gunthe and Zhijie, who explained that the traditional Chinese notion of time is non-dialectic due to a lack of Greek philosophical and Hegelian influence, therefore historical progression and going -or looking- backwards are inextricably bound together in a way necessarily and radically different from Western philosophical thinking. This theory was then put into practice with a 100-strong line of workshop participants who completed a three hour backwards march from the China Institute down a busy 5th Avenue, through the Lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, ending at Times Square. By facing backwards whilst moving forwards the 100 ‘Backward Long Marchers’ performed the complex Chinese contemporary relationship to history that Gunthe and Zhijie had articulated. Moreover, by physically embodying this specific sort of Chinese backwardness Avant-Garde made it easier to conceive of the Long March Collective’s relationship to the historical Long March and to understand exactly how they (and now us) were attempting to create a new future past for Chinese contemporary art.

History was also at stake in the final Long March project ‘The Harlem School of New Social Realism.’ The school was initiated by artist and some-time Long Marcher Zhao Gang and took the form of an amplified open-air group discussion between various artists, theorists and critics of African and Chinese descent in Harlem’s Adam Powell Clayton Junior Plaza; a location at the heart of Black America named after the first African American Congressman that has played host to many political protests over the years. The question as to why African Americans should be involved in the Long March were- to my ears at least- left un-asked. However, heated debate about what form Harlem’s New School of Social Realism should take floated over the cold afternoon to the mixed interest of locals; some of whom were obviously more concerned with where their next hot meal was coming from.

The lack of understanding, or interest, displayed by certain members of the Harlem public is exactly what is at stake in The Long March’s Harlem School of New Social Realism; ie why is contemporary art not valid to these people, and if it isn't then how can it - or should it - it serve them better? This was the genuine spirit of enquiry demonstrated in all the PERFORMA Long March projects and it is a reminder that its work isn’t just for art’s sake; it anticipates real, public and social results. Combined, the work of the Long March Collective is also living proof that the Chinese are not only coming; they have of course already arrived. And with them comes the clear message that contemporary performance, be it from China or not, is still an important critical mediator for the political.

Rachel Lois Clapham

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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