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’.

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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