Kent Beeson is a Classic and an Absolutely New Thing (2001)

Image: Video, 12 mins Collaboration with Hugo Glendinning Performed by Kent Beeson. Courtesy Sketch

Tim Etchells
100 People and 3 People
Video installation
The Gallery at Sketch, London
15 September – 3 November 2007

In addition to his work as Artistic Director of performance company Forced Entertainment, now in its twenty-third year, Tim Etchells has begun to exhibit visual and gallery-based work over the past few years and will have a novel (The Broken World) published next year. His recent exhibition at the Gallery at Sketch, consisting of four video pieces projected in series, explores ‘the relationship between language and image’ – but also, unsurprisingly, the performative quality of video and the theatrical encounter it conjures.

Three of the works consist of monologues to the camera in which the speaker describes an imagined future for him or herself. In Kent Beeson is a Classic and an Absolutely New Thing (2001, 12 min), the title character describes for himself a celebrity lifestyle in which he is fantastically rich and powerful. In So Small (2003, 10 min), Katie Ewald describes her own funeral and the wide range of significance her death will have. And in Erasure (2003, 12 min), Nicholas Cooke imagines himself moving though the world with complete anonymity, leaving no trace or memory of his passage.

The length of these monologues means that each video is able to explore the interior richness and contradictions of each fantasy. Beeson’s is torn between an ambition toward a common idea of the ‘good’ person, one who is polite, chivalrous, and generous, and that of a powerful person, one who can change people’s hair colour, who can buy a hotel whose service he doesn’t like and fire everyone, who can have people killed. In Ewald’s monologue, the indulgencies of her imagined death fantasy get carried away into indulgencies of thought and language itself, becoming more and more grand in the conceptual and figurative range they encompass: she predicts that ‘”How could this girl be missed?” will be one of the great unanswered questions, like “Where is the North Pole?” and “Did Shakespeare write all of his plays?”’ And in Erasure, Cooke’s dream of invisibility draws on both the appealing fantasies of being unseen (leaving no footprints, going unnoticed by CCTV cameras) and the banal realities of insignificance (wearing clothes from the same department store as everyone else, having a face that people instantly forget).

Though they borrow the form of the confessional video, these three monologues vary in their delivery in ways which expose their performed nature. Ewald’s is the most naturalistic, and, watching it, it’s possible to believe that these words and thoughts are her own – that she is in fact imagining this funeral in the moment of being videoed. Like Ewald’s, Cooke’s performance is a single take and has a naturalistic quality; but in comparison with Ewald’s his delivery is noticeably regular, proceeding with the measured cadence of written text. Beeson’s performance is comically botched, as from the get-go he misspeaks his text, goes back and repeats himself, and berates himself every time he gets it wrong. As Beeson grows increasingly frustrated, there’s an implied connection between his inability to get his lines right and whatever forces are keeping that fantasy out of his reach.

In this way, what’s going on in all three pieces is less a revelation than an aspiration, less a stripping away to get at the core of these characters and more a layering of textuality and language. That which had appeared to be an invitation to an intimate disclosure turns out to be a process of accumulation and assumption, and the more is revealed, the more is assumed. A kind of theatricality is in operation, in which the harder these performances work to get to the truth of their characters, the more theatrical they become.

By contrast, 100 People (2007, 20 min) has no actors in it, only a series of short textual descriptions of individuals and groups of people. Many of the descriptions focus on minute details, as if these tell you everything you need to know about this person: ‘The fifth person is out of breath and wearing a big brown jumper and blue tracksuit trousers that evidently weren’t really purchased for jogging’; or, later, simply ‘Big nose.’ These funny, pathetic, and cruel synopses invite the viewer to sit back and imagine this parade of characters, conjured here for the viewer’s benefit.

But something else is going on. It seems as if the subject of 100 People isn’t actually this series of imaginary people, but the viewer him or herself. The texts increasingly refer to the moment of encounter, with some of the imagined persons arriving late or resenting their place in the order. This moment of encounter might at first be taken to be a past event, something which the author experienced or imagined. But increasingly it seems as if this encounter is the one happening here and now, in the darkened cinema. And so, finally, the 100th person is ‘you’, sitting in the dark, watching words on a screen.

With its written printed text on a black screen, 100 People seems similar to the printed page, but the way in which the viewer is folded into the work is enabled by the particularities of video in a darkened room. Printed text has a permanence – it sits out there, waiting, untroubled by the passage of time. It also has a multiplicity – there might be many simultaneous readers in different locations. But 100 People does not have a reader, but a performer, and it’s me – conjured out of thin air and placed here in a strange room for the benefit of the piece (and not the other way around). I played my part by showing up and sitting in the dark – otherwise the words would have played to an empty room. What makes this a performance is that it needs me, not just to complete it, but for it actually to exist.

Written by Theron Schmidt

www.timetchells.com
www.sketch.uk.com

Adam Pendleton, The Revival New York (Hans Peter Feldman), 2007

Adam Pendleton
The Revival
Stephan Weiss Studio
New York
Nov 1.

The lights go low. Conversations peter out. A single, clear, female voice resonates around Stephan Weiss studio. She is singing a Duke Ellington song and her lone voice – disembodied and unaccompanied – fills the hall and demands the audience’s attention.

Adam Pendleton’s The Revival, a PERFORMA Commission for this year’s biennial, trades on the power of language through meanings and sounds. Pendleton harnesses the energy of gospel, jazz and pop music along with the style of Southern-style religious services to deliver a compelling sermon to his congregation.

The performance is loosely circular. Pendleton’s speech starts and ends with what sounds like a political statement of defiance – a list of things that ‘we broke’, and things that ‘we freed’. In between he ranges from the publicly polemic ( a tirade against the US administration’s attitude to drugs for HIV/ Aids) to the touchingly private (‘my lover often sits on me to get me to eat’). And there are also ‘testimonials’ from the poet Jena Osman and the artist Liam Gillick, who join Pendleton from the audience like parishioners sharing their experience in church.

But who is Pendleton preaching to? The church set-up makes the audience feel part of a congregation, but the ‘we’ Pendleton speaks about is never explained. When he talks about gay politics is he addressing us as comrades or enemies? He says, ‘I prefer gay people, I think we’re better than everyone else’, and it raises a laugh. Are we laughing with him, as he redirects the bigotry of homophobia through a a parody of self-rightousness? Or is he laughing at us, trying to shake the liberal conceit of siding with the oppressed?

What, in fact, is Pendleton’s sermon about? Despite the emotive form, the driving music and the charismatic persona, Pendleton’s language never gets to a ‘message’. He repeats phrases and reroutes them, changes round the order of words and switches tone in the midst of an argument. In the end, no argument can emerge. Osman’s and Gillick’s testimonials, meanwhile (the former, about the objectivist poet Charles Raznikoff; the latter, a persuasive speech by a car manufacturer to potential employees) are far from personal. Examples of very different kinds of speaking, they rupture the smoothness of Pendleton’s delivery and draw attention to it. The ‘message’ here is rhetoric as practice, to an emotive jazz and gospel score.

The Revival plays with the functions of language and text. Without specifying who he is preaching to, what he is preaching about, or even his own point of origin, Pendleton charts a dynamic journey through language and sound that leaves the audience uplifted and asking for more. The gospel singer’s voice finishes the performance just how it began, singing about a new day which, ‘brings hope, they say’.

The last part is important. This nameless ‘they’ is the authority of language that The Revival draws on. Mesmerising without being meaningful, The Revival wallows in the investments made in language – its purpose that comes from the people that use it, its authority from the fact of being used. Pendleton weaves together different modes of address to deliver a virtuoso demonstration of language’s power.

Mary Paterson

Christian Jankowski Rooftop Routine (2007).

Christian Jankowski Rooftop Routine , the artists residence on Division Street, 10am Nov 03 2007
Presented By PERFORMA

It’s 10am on November 3rd and a small, tired looking crowd stand on the rooftop of Ming Tower on Division Street, Chinatown. We have been invited here, to the roof of the artist Christian Jankowski’s apartment, to witness Rooftop Routine an early morning collaborative performance that is part of PERFOMA 07.

Just across from us on an adjacent rooftop is a Chinese woman stood amid bits of junk, walls of graffiti, discarded chairs and cans. She is dressed in red and is hula-hooping for all her worth rocking slightly back and forth, with both arms in the air, her palms toward her. Back on our roof thirty seconds later someone excitedly points in another direction just west of the original hula-hooper; another hula-hooper has been spotted doing the same routine. Then another. All in all the Chinese woman sets off a hula-hooping chain reaction that involves about 20 people and stretches in a three block radius around us.

Combined, the gyrating, sports-clad hula-hoopers are beautifully at odds with the grey New York morning, with its loud and busy rush hour streets, looming Uptown skyline and litter strewn Chinatown rooftops. The shared, simple arm gestures of the hula-hoopers, which change variously from waving arms up and down and turning palms inside and out, move out sequentially from the Chinese
woman, travelling beyond any one individual hula-hooper’s body or sightline. This autonomy of movement gives the routine itself a visceral and contagious quality or choreography that moves through, but is independent of, the bodies of the hula-hoopers. Spreading like a happy rash over the rooftops, each change in the hula-hoop workout create links, making tangible the physical and conceptual bonds that bind us here together; this project, these buildings, these bodies.

The basis for Rooftop Routine was Jankowski looking out of his apartment window to discover his neighbour, Suat Ling Chua, doing her daily 40 minute hula-hoop workout on the roof of her apartment opposite. It is outside the frame of this project that spying on what your neighbour gets up to as part of her personal fitness regime might be a dubious starting point for a performance. Also not in the picture is why Suat Ling Chua was hula-hooping on her roof in the first place and whether or not hula-hooping is actually a sport, it is also unclear what Suat Ling Chua’s actual level of input or personal investment in the project is (aside from being the lead hula-hooper). All this is of interest, but what really matters is that the artist eventually found, and initiated contact with, Suat Ling Chua and the rest, as they say, is history.

The coming together of the community of Chinatown and New York’s contemporary art world is not something new or unique. Chinatown, one of the remaining parts of New York to retain its (Chinese) inhabitants and distinct (Chinese) flavour, is also home to many New York artists - including Jankowski - who live or keep art studios in the area. In recent history, this mix of low rent, available space, immigrant communities and artists has inevitably signalled areas in danger of impending corporate development or gentrification. Whether or not this is the immediate future for Ming Tower such local geographic and economic concerns seem important to Rooftop Routine. Seen in this political light, Jankowski’s deceptively simple human chain of hula-hoopers is the perfect cover for a performative restoration of neighbourhood links that highlight the area’s distinct blend of community, architecture and art that might just keep the developers at bay for a while longer.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

me having my hair cut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Rachel Lois Clapham

A Hair Massacre

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

PS1‘Stapelung (Stack)’ 2007
A Five Channel Video Sculpture by John Bock
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre
28 October – 19 November 2007
Thursday thru Monday, 12 – 6pm
FREE with museum admission

Best known for his 1990’s spontaneous performance lectures, German born visual artist John Bock works with a wide range of different media, including sculpture, theatre, film and performance, and everything he touches takes on a dirty, low-fi, absurdly comedic feel that is distinctly Bockian.

For PERFORMA 07 Bock has installed a video sculpture, ‘Stapelung (Stack)’ 2007, at PS1 Contemporary Art Centre. ‘Stapelung (Stack)’ 2007 is a 5 channel video sculpture; a 5 screen video work that is also a 9 foot high steel rack supporting a messy combination of monitors, electrical wire, tape, plugs and 5 sets of audio headphones. Each monitor perched on the rack or ‘stack’ screens a different Bock film. On the top shelf is ‘Meechhouse’. Below that ‘Foetusgott in Memme’, then ‘NogoJones Dandy’ on top of ‘Wuhl um die Klumpen’ all 2002. On the bottom shelf is the 2004 ‘Sechser Tragerl Sushi Aschai Periskop Guatscht Schwanerl- Wie kann man das Gobu Ten Udong massig Bekleben.

Stapelung (Stack)’ 2007 is an important inclusion within the PERFORMA 07 biennial; it manifests Bock’s trademark combination of performance, sculptural construction and film whilst highlighting the artist’s concerns with narrative, staging and props. If the German titles don’t make sense to you don’t be alarmed, it’s all part of the absurdity. To view Stapelung (Stack) 2007 is to be touched by a distinctly European tradition of artistic madness that comes directly down from Surrealism, Dada, Chaplin, Boyce, Beckett and Brecht. If you get there before November 19th step inside PSI, into Bocks mind, and be immersed into his world.

written by Rachel Lois Clapham

‘Stapelung (Stack)’ 2007 is co-presented by PS1 Contemporary Art Centre (a Museum of Modern Art affiliate) and PERFORMA , with support from Anton Kern Gallery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Lois Clapham

Candid CameraTony Conrad - ‘Window Enactment’
Greene Naftali Gallery,
New York
30 October 2007

There are some moments in life when I look round for the candid camera. One was in a visual culture lecture, when the lecturer played a recording of the sound of buttons being pressed. One was in a packed train at Waterloo Station, when commuters pressed tight to each other for over an hour, even though the train wasn’t moving and the doors were open.

And one was last night. A darkened gallery in Chelsea, New York. A stud wall with a window set up in the corner. Melodramatic music, on what sounded like vinyl, being played while performers acted and reacted to each other behind the flimsy viewing pane.

What characterises all these almost-candid-camera-moments is the pious attentiveness of the people caught up in them - including me. As I sat cross-legged on the floor of Greene Naftali Gallery, earnestly watching Tony Conrad’s ‘Window Enactment’ amidst the hushed silence of other art-goers, I wondered if someone was going to jump up and pop our collective bubble of concentration. What, after all, were we looking at?

There were some repeated motifs in Conrad’s work. The ominous sounding music that played while performers marched back and forth in front of the window happened on and off with what – in this context – could be said to be regularity. One female performer teased a half-realised, flirtatious character from her whispered words into a mobile phone. And there were pleasingly circular references to the voyeurism of the piece, as performers looked out of the window and into the audience through night-vision goggles.

But were these improvised scenes enough to warrant a room-full of silent veneration? Watching Conrad’s piece felt like spying on the not-quite hidden antics of your neighbours – an illicit pleasure borne out of the knowledge that it’s something you shouldn’t do. Except that here the voyeurism was directed, so all we watched was a series of never-fulfilled relations between people we didn’t know. The naughtiness of that kind of anonymous voyeurism – where the subject is a stranger – was taken away, but its emptiness was left in. It is profoundly dissatisfying to concentrate on some not very interesting strangers half-finish some not very interesting things.

Perhaps this lack of interest is my own fault. Perhaps my own thoughts should have ballooned inside the templates offered by Conrad and his fellow performers, until I constructed the kinds of narratives I pin onto the office workers I can see from my bedroom window. But those office workers seem so interesting because I watch them at a tangent to my life. Here, as the revered object of this art-crowd’s attention, Conrad’s performers were neither absorbing enough to occupy our thoughts, nor playful enough to encourage flights of the imagination. I left after an hour and a half, realising on my way out that the gallery had quietly begun to empty behind me. Perhaps the others had noticed a candid camera somewhere, trained on our pious and eager faces; waiting for someone to point out that the Emperor had no clothes on.

By Mary Paterson

http://www.greenenaftaligallery.com/

http://07.performa-arts.org/artists.php