liveart - column1

We Need to Talk About Live Art

wfla — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 11:11:34 +0000

Sparking Debate. Stimulating Conversation. Supporting Artists. Taking Live Art Seriously.

'We Need to Talk about Live Art' is a daily flash publication, by Writing From Live Art writers Tim Atack, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt, that was printed daily and distributed at the Tramway Arts Centre, Glasgow during the National Review of Live Art(NRLA) 6- 10 February 2008.

We Need to Talk about Live Art responded to the work seen at NRLA. We were not affiliated with the National Review of Live Art. The project was conceived of to start conversations with NRLA artists, audiences and readers and support the work shown. Comments cards were also made available for audience responses and feedback during the course of the festival, which were then integrated with the daily NRLA publication.

The writing is enclosed in its original flash publishing format and the PDF's represent the quick turnaround of the writing, complete with the occasional typo. You can download the PDF's from the links below. A selection of this writing is also published in print and online in RealTime Magazine 84 April-May 08,2008.

'We Need to Talk About Live Art was a writer-led initiative with support from Live Art UK, the national network of Live Art promoters.

If you have any comments or queries about the writing please make a comment here on the Writing from Live Art website, thankyou. Thanks to everyone who made NRLA 08 and We Need to Talk About Live Art an enjoyable experience.

'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Sunday, 10 February 2008[1]

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'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Friday, 8 February 2008[1]

'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Thursday, 7 February 2008[1]

'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Wednesday, 6 Feb 2008[1]

Those songs, those bloody, bloody songs

wfla — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:59:05 +0000

Image: Uninvited Guests, 'Love Letters'. Courtesy the artists

Uninvited Guests
Love Letters
Tramway, Glasgow, 09/02/08

This first one is dedicated to Uninvited Guests. It’s been a long hard road, and I ought to confess it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. Your systematic use of mediated or found text. The considered performance style you had, with its strange amplifications, intensities pitching like a boat in a storm. My unreasonable suspicion of anything that laid out its stall so simply and openly in the way that you did. Offline was the first time we met, remember? Happy days. Your show about love on the internet, a lover’s stroll which ambled along to a soundtrack of schmaltz played by the cheapest general MIDI sounds you could find. And I couldn’t ‘get in’. I couldn’t engage. It wasn’t going to happen on the first date. But I spent longer with you – literally, in the durational version of that same project, and I was happier. It seemed more human, more vulnerable, and that made me think that maybe there could be something between us: if I let my guard down, and if you did the same.

So here we are then, many shows, many years later, and it’s the second time I’ve seen Love Letters. The first time was funny, beautiful… the second time, magical. Such a simple idea: trap a whole bunch of people in a room full of other people’s song dedications, with all the images, memories, stories, hopes, dreams and regrets that come spilling from the music. Because unlike dedications of the type heard daily from the radio station of your choice, these cannot be switched off – you can’t be doing the washing up, you can’t answer the phone. The audience form part of the process, witness to each announcement, be it a shout out to a friend or a eulogy for the dear departed.

So here we are then, and it’s about music, and about how the most saccharine piece of crap translates into the most evocative of symphonies for someone. So here we are, and it’s about standing up for the song you believe in, not being ashamed by it or what it says. So here we are, and Richard Dufty has begun shouting at the top of his lungs as Kate Bush’s The Hounds Of Love thumps from the speakers, shouting about missing you so much, and missing you so much, missing you so much, his voice rasping and cracking under the strain. The audience member next to me is suddenly in floods of tears, uncontrollable, patting her clothes for a handkerchief she can’t find. I know it’s the first time she’s seen this show, so I know it’s not just me. I know it’s not just because I’ve grown up with you, Uninvited Guests, just because I’ve become accustomed to your wily ways. Because along the way I’m sure we’ve both changed.

So this is a thankyou. And as for the song I’d like to dedicate to you? Well, I thought it appropriate that it should be a cover version. And probably my favourite cover version in the world is “Women of the World” by Jim O’Rourke, from Ivor Cutler’s original. It’s deceptively simple, repetitive… but it gets there, and it gets to you. In the end.

Women of the world, take over
Cos if you don’t the world will come to an end
And it won’t take long

This next one is dedicated to the audience. Go, team. Some of you I didn’t get to see around much; but as we were sat at two long tables, wedding / seminar / board meeting style, a good half of you I was able to watch intermittently throughout the show. The mottled burnt orange wall behind you, glitterball reflections twinkling in your green / blue / black eyes: god, you guys were beautiful. I’d particularly like to mention the good-looking bloke with the cheeky smile with whom, a few minutes into the show, I was asked to lock eyes for the length of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face as sung by Johnny Cash. Sorry, mate: I’ve seen the show before. I knew it was coming. I was well prepared. You seemed a little more fazed.

As I set my face into something that I hoped was approaching the approachable (as opposed to what I fear it was; a pervy smirk) everyone around us was doing the same, gazing into the eyes of the person opposite. Some found it easier than others. Little bursts of laughter interrupted Johnny Cash to my left and right, like birds sounding off in a dark forest.

Our hosts knew what they were doing. The rules of engagement were laid out clearly: we, fair audience, were fair game. Later on, we’d be asked to scramble around the perimeter of the space after one of the performers in a playground kiss-chase (which some of us did suddenly, and unexpectedly.) We’d be asked to stand as if the dedication were ours, even when it wasn’t, representing a stranger’s memories. We’d be told “If this song means something to you, feel free to stand up at any time.” It was “Heroes” by David Bowie, and I jumped to my feet as if prompted by a pistol shot. Yep, that was me. We were plied with alcohol and party poppers; we were asked to throw flowers onto two lovers as they rolled about between the tables; we were asked to slow-dance at the end of the show. But mostly, we were asked to listen.

I wonder which dedication struck you the hardest? For me, it was Lady In Red. What a song! Chris de Burgh’s whiny, sexless vocals. The dying robotic twitch of its drum machine. The dull mush of its faux-string synthesisers, the useless twunk of its rubber-band guitar. All in all, an appalling piece of simpering bullshit, almost apocalyptic in its awfulness: but it was dedicated to someone’s Grandmother, and the accompanying homily ended with the words “Every day without her in the world is the less for her absence,” and suddenly… how could I have hated this song so much? How could I when somehow, somewhere, it channelled a sentiment like that? And what’s more, I knew the way the show had been compiled: this was a dedication by one of my fellow viewers, present, somewhere, in the room. Sorry, whoever you are. Are we still friends?

Presenting these pop vagaries requires no small amount of subtlety. Theatrical tricks can’t get in the way. The performances by Jess Hoffmann and Richard Dufty were remarkable in this respect; for the much of the opening five minutes of the show, they simply sat behind their apple macs, at opposite heads of the table, mixing love songs at each other in a sort of DJ tennis, saying absolutely nothing and letting the music tell its many tales. Their faces were quietly mischievous, flirting, each track a chat-up line. “Yeah!” shouted Dufty as the guitar solo in I Believe In A Thing Called Love kicked in. He ramped up the volume. Hoffmann looked at him with the quiet tolerance of a lover, a patience many years in the making. Later, the songs shifted, a romance gone awry. Love Will Tear Us Apart. Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.

So, comrade audience, our own story… well, it’s done. It was a one-night stand, I see that, in retrospect. And as for my dedication? In the spirit of songs which may mean one thing to you and another to me, I’m going to chose a track by that most marmite of vocalists, the love-her-or-hate-her Björk. And a remix, to boot: the Plaid mix of All Is Full Of Love, new chords snaking about Björk’s original melody, messing with its DNA.

You’ll have to trust it
Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Maybe not from the direction
You are staring at

Bit of a curveball, this last one. But bear with me.
This is to the man who I first remember speaking of those sweet, meaningless songs, wafting up the stairway. The bittersweet melody lilting from the scratchy gramophone. This is to the man who gave those cadence-like memories their own, unique dramatic shape. To the man I think of as I leave Love Letters, as I recall the line from The Singing Detective, spoken by his character Phillip Marlowe: “Those songs. Those bloody, bloody songs.”

I’d like to dedicate Eyes by Alex Glasgow to Dennis Potter. Eyes, a piece of music I discovered when morosely leafing through my departed grandfather’s record collection. “Take whatever you want,” my Grandma had said, in her usual brusque Yorkshire way. “I’m not likely to listen to any of it.”
And Alex Glasgow’s strange warbling voice over a bed of keening strings lifted my spirit, and made me twice as sad, all at once. A bit like Love Letters, truth be told: it spoke of the persistence of memory, and of the fading light… both of how terrible and beautiful it can be.

Eyes look kindly on me
Eyes of thine look kindly on me
Thine eyes
Mine eyes
Tell me no lies and look kindly on me

Written by Tim Atack

Book Review. Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle

wfla — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:29:16 +0000

Image courtesy of Afterall Books.

Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle by Catherine Wood, Published by Afterall Books, Central Saint Martins College, October 2007

The Mind is a Muscle is the latest in the One Work publication series by Afterall Books. Each book in the series is an in-depth look, by one author, at a single artwork that has shaped the landscape of contemporary art as we know it today. For Catherine Wood, Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance at Tate Modern, Yvonne Rainer’s performance of ‘The Mind is a Muscle’ at the Anderson Theatre, New York on 11, 14 and 15 April 1968, is one such work.

The Mind is a Muscle is a multipart performance for 7 dancers who perform a routine of pared-down, ordinary or ‘everyday’ gestures on stage; the work also includes choreographed periods of silence, film and text. Fittingly for a whole book dedicated to one 95 minute performance, Wood’s analysis of The Mind is Muscle is detailed, specific and thorough. Importantly, Wood focuses on one particular performance of The Mind is a Muscle - 11, 14, and 15 April 1968- deliberately setting it apart from the many other instances of the same work. In this, Wood sets the specific socio-political, art historical and physical scene for the April 1968 version of The Mind is a Muscle - a scene set in the context of a 1960’s affluent America, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights protests and an exploding art scene but also inextricably linked to Rainer’s mental state, her health, her friends at the Judson Church and her own (stable) financial situation. In setting this specific scene in all its minutiae, Wood provides a close focus for her reader whilst giving weight to the idea that each performance, both of The Mind is a Muscle and of performance in general, has its own unique temporality; that even if repeated, performance is never the same twice.

For the main part Wood uses choreography scripts, documentary photographs, prop lists and evocative descriptions as well as a myriad of theoreticians, including Plato, Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Nicolas Bourriaud, Emile Durkheim and David Graeber, to explore the groundbreaking achievements of The Mind is a Muscle with regards to notions of ‘work’, minimalism, audience, and gestural image making. The result is advanced and interesting enough for those already familiar with Ranier’s work but also accessible enough to provide an in-depth introduction to those who need it. However, it is the new model of art that Wood proposes in The Mind is a Muscle, particularly its relation to audience, that is the most intriguing aspect of the book. Wood encourages us to ‘picture The Mind is a Muscle as a live event...a ritual configuration of bodies, positions and actions within the multiplicity of bodies, positions and actions found among the 18 million inhabitants of New York City at that time.’ Our continuing, embodied and live relation to The Mind is a Muscle, both to the book and the performance itself, is important for Wood because she posits that the real innovation and impact of The Mind is a Muscle is located in the works’ specific living, dynamic and relational tension between materiality and idea. For Wood, The Mind is a Muscle is the first artwork to perform the ephemeral as fact, and to conceive of the event as transmitting culture and knowledge, an event in which meaning is generated collectively.

The underlying critical problem with Wood’s One Work treatise on The Mind is a Muscle (1968), is that it adds to the growing library of ‘works that have made the difference’ in the One Work series such as Bas Jan Aders’ In Search of the Miraculous (1975), Marc Camille Chaimowiczs’ Celebration? Realife (1972) and Joan Jonas’s I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) (1976). With her contribution Wood further solidifies the presumption – clearly evident in the One Work series- that Europe and the US in the 1960’s and 70’s is the pivotal moment for contemporary performance related practice, moreover for contemporary art. Although such canonisation is inevitable with any publication that focuses on one work, it should be recognised that 1960’s Europe and the US is hotly contested as the birthplace of visual art performance. Wood’s recourse to this all-too-familiar 1960’s US moment is a missed opportunity - for Wood, for contemporary art, for the One Work Series - to correct this mid twentieth century euro-American art historical bias and forsakes the importance of more recent, 21st Century, performance related work. More emphasis on how The Mind is a Muscle influences today’s’ contemporary art, i.e. the art of the current century , along with more practical art examples, would have gone someway to setting the record straight.

Despite the predictability of Wood’s choice of One Work, The Mind is a Muscle has plenty to offer. Picking just one contemporary art work that has significantly shaped culture, and writing a wholly focussed and impassioned book-length treatise on it, is a rare and beautiful thing to see in print and as such represents an exciting prospect for any contemporary art enthusiast. The excitement isn’t just in learning more about the author through their choice of artwork or reading about the far reaching social, political and artistic consequences of that work. More than anything else, the One Work series begs an intriguing question ‘Can you think of one contemporary art work that has transformed the way we look at the world, and if so, what is that One Work?’

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

Joe Moran ‘My Father’s Grace’

wfla — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:22:58 +0000

Image: Joe Moran's My Father's Grace, courtesy of Dance Art.

Joe Moran ‘My Father’s Grace’
Wilkinson Gallery
London 8th / 9th January 2008

My Father’s Grace was devised and performed by Joe Moran and represented the finale of Dance Art, a short season of dance co-produced by Intimate Contenders and Falling Wide in London gallery spaces from October 07 – January 08. The piece consisted of Moran himself dancing a 40 minute solo in the empty ground floor gallery of Wilkinson Gallery to an audience of approximately 30 people.

As a performance My Father’s Grace was stark in its gestures and appearance. Moran wore basic, casual red training clothes, used no props and only the basic gallery lighting. He also kept all dance moves down to only the most necessary. The soundscape for the work was also minimal, including separate sections of electronic pulses, natural sounds and one light folksy tune. Despite this starkness Moran’s choreography was varied throughout; long periods of lying deathly still were combined with primeval style writhings on the floor interspersed with flowing movements that ended abruptly with strangely closed, strangulated gestures. His was indeed a skilled, knowledgeable body performing highly emotional, personal feelings of death, mourning, mental anguish and joy. However, how Moran’s movements related to the audience, or to the visual art context of Wilkinson Gallery, is not clear.

Dance Art’s aim is to explore dance’s interface with the visual arts, to celebrate the porosity of dance as a genre, and so it is a shame that My Father’s Grace did not grey the boundaries of visual art and dance or utilise the context of Wilkinson Gallery more overtly. This lack of address is also unfortunate on a critical level. With no specific narrative or formal elements tying the work to the gallery context it is easy to believe that the presence of My Father’s Grace amongst the bare walls of Wilkinson Gallery is convenient or circumstantial; it presents dance as something simply akin to a curatorial and financial 'gallery filler' in between periods of exhibition de-installation or commercial shows.

The lack of acknowledgement of the visual art context is also unfortunate because Moran’s approach to mark making as physical gesture, including his stated desire to show ‘instinctive meanings inherent in the moving body’ in order to explore ‘natural intimacies between performer and audience’ suffers when seen within a contemporary visual art perspective. In contrast to contemporary dance or interdisciplinary works that thrive in occupying the shared territory of dance and visual arts - by choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roi and artists Pablo Bronstein and Kelly Nipper- Moran’s insistence upon meaning as embodied, and therefore primal (original, basic and simple), together with its unmediated translation to the audience, comes across as problematic and indebted to a removed and purist twentieth century narrative of formal modernism; of autonomy, abstraction, material meaning and form. With this approach My Father’s Grace enacts Moran’s body-in-performance as a modernist art object; as inherently meaningful - and intellectually and economically ‘valuable’ - in and by its formal materiality. Moran’s performance then - contrary to his desire to explore ‘natural intimacies’ between dancer and audience- highlights the interaction between audience and performer as heavily mediated, unnatural and hierarchical, by setting itself up as an art object that is distant, removed and insistent upon its autonomy. In this sense Moran’s performance compounds the (mistaken) belief that the body, its gestures, skill and abstraction can only be worshipped from afar, or translated by experts.

Despite these underlying critical failures there were moments of joy in My Father’s Grace. By alternately turning the gallery lights off and on in the first section Moran created a pitch black ‘off stage’ facility that enabled an ‘invisible dance,’ in which the sounds of Moran’s bare feet brushing the gallery floor were the only evidence as to his movements. Although I think it unlikely that this basic light show was a deliberate witty reference to Martin Creed’s famed conceptual Work No. 227 ‘The Lights Going On and Off’ (2000) it was none-the-less effective in highlighting the performativity of unseen or invisible dance movements. This invisibility, combined with the long moments of lying down in stillness, neatly challenged the expectations of an audience who had paid £12 each to see Moran’s choreography.

Another highlight of the evening was ‘In Land’ (2006) a video shown alongside My Father’s Grace in the Wilkinson Gallery lobby. It depicted two people linked together whilst rolling slowly and laboriously over a grassy landscape. Despite the necessarily removed or surface interaction implied by the video monitor, the sheer materiality of the two bodies and the physical exertion involved in rolling over the grassy mounds was clearly at stake in this work and beautifully at odds with the effortless nature of the depicted pastoral scene. In contrast to My Father’s Grace, In Land used the natural landscape in which it was filmed to enact recognisable mark making and meaning in physical gesture. And so on the night it was with In Land - a work that celebrated the embedded, unskilled, less-seen and unglamorous aspects of physical performance; the lumpen physicality and weight of the body and the strenuous effects of gravity upon it that are vital in order to make movement, be it dance movement or not - that Moran proved dance can speak a distinctly twenty first century visual arts language.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

My Father’s Grace (2007) was devised and performed by Joe Moran. Technical Manager: Rachel Shipp, Visual Projection taken from the work of Alexander Sokurov. Soundscape and music by Chris Watson and Sufjan Stevens

In Land (2006) was directed by Joe Moran, filmed by Jane Barnwell and Robert Napoletani, danced by Florence Peak and Kirstie Richardson and edited by Ultan Molloy.

http://www.fallingwide.com/
http://www.intimatecontenders.com/

‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’

wfla — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:03:13 +0000

Don’t Leave Me This Way
Franko B
Arnolfini, Bristol
14/12/2007

You will, of course, be very familiar with sleepdogs, even though you might not know their name (unsurprising, given that I just made it up.) Sleepdogs are the whorls of colour and light that you see on the inside of your eyelids as you slumber. They’re the residual retinal images that, later in the night, will flower into full-grown dreams.

Franko B’s Don’t Leave Me This Way begins by presenting the artist as a sleepdog. His voluptuous, naked form sits unmoving in the darkness, illuminated so subtly and with such a barely perceptible inconstancy that you could easily consider his presence a trick of the mind. Kamal Ackarie’s mercurial lighting design only gradually filters in the details of Franko’s many tattoos, the dome of his head, his width and girth. For quite some time the artist’s face - and any expression he may be wearing - are never fully revealed.

It’s not as if there’s any great mystery as to how Franko B appears amongst us: before the show, the audience has filed into the Arnolfini auditorium and has parked itself on raked seating, chatting, before a raised plinth upon which a nondescript chair is positioned. It’s pretty obvious that once the houselights dim and we’re plunged into near-total darkness, Franko has ascended to his seat and is waiting, whilst the hammering, stuttering squalls of a post-industrial electronic soundtrack bounces threateningly from speaker to speaker around us. The noise is disjointed, mechanical, repetitive but random, like a gargantuan malfunctioning robot repeatedly and unsuccessfully bolting itself together. For me, the tangible unease comes not from the sheer volume of this noise, or the optical trickery alone, but the fact that it seems to play with our location – there’s an unspoken danger to theatrical spaces, so much buzzing and barely controlled electricity, so many suspended lights, the threat of sudden heat, shock and collapse all around… and the brutal, unforgiving soundtrack seems to emphasise the raw power around you, generating a palpable techno-claustrophobia. Combine this with the sensation that Franko B’s presence feels a bit like a mental glitch, a naughtiness of the cortex, and you’re tempted to blink repeatedly, in a vain attempt to re-set your surroundings to something a bit more comfortable.

Then lightning strikes.

Unheralded and intense, a massive burst of white light floods the audience, and is gone. My eyes water instantly. Another burst, then a dual burst, and finally, a wash of overpowering light holds over us for about 10 seconds. Franko B is lit completely and profoundly, but you can only look at him by adopting one of several strategies – squinting, angling your head oddly, or raising a hand to your eyes. With my neck bent as though I’m an incredibly tall man in a very low-ceilinged room, I try to look at Franko. Tears are streaming down my face. From what I can tell, he seems to be smiling. But then we’re plunged into darkness one last time, and there’s another morphing, sleepdog-pass of dark blue light over the artist’s familiar figure before the houselights rise to reveal an empty chair.

Franko B is perhaps best known for the blood-based practice that has dominated his live work for the past 15 years. In I Miss You, for instance, he falteringly paraded the length of a long, thin, strip of canvas whilst bleeding constantly from wounds in his arms. Many audience members have testified to the sensation that through simple actions like these – which ostensibly seem lonely, artful, maybe even shocking – Franko has “taken them by the hand” and guided them through the difficulties and differences of his practice with the gentle touch of a friend or lover. Despite his shift in practice away from bloodletting performances (you can imagine anyone getting tired of having to sign contracts which stipulate you guarantee to “bleed as part of the performance,” and “from both arms”, otherwise your fee is forfeit) Franko B’s work is still wonderfully, beautifully unapologetic about its brash sentimentalities: it’s about Franko, it’s about you, it’s about letting go, it’s about loving, dying, needing, wanting. The pop song titles say as much.

Most Hollywood movies would kill to be able to tap into the hopes and fears of its audience with the simplest of abstract images, but somehow Franko B manages to do just that. So Don’t Leave Me This Way will be about many things to many people… but for me it was about dying. It was Franko holding your hand as you fade, fighting inside but doomed, sinking into oblivion, into the mystery. How did it achieve that? I don’t know for sure. No, let me re-phrase that: I quite simply haven’t a clue. Read the first few paragraphs above, it’s all there. That’s what Franko B did, moment by moment, as best I can describe it. Where precisely the circuit connected, and how the hell the light went on? That’s another matter.

Tim Atack

www.dontleavemethisway.net
www.franko-b.com
www.arnolfini.org.uk

CLAIRE 'Flagrante Delicto'

wfla — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:08:16 +0000

National Review of Live Art
Tramway, Glasgow
9 February 2007

For Flagrante Delicto the artist Claire refuses to use her surname and by this employs a deliberate strategy of anonymity. Claire’s anonymity is re-enforced in various texts accompanying the performance- in booklets, business cards and programme information - so much so that it becomes an important point for me: Why am I being deliberately led as reader, as audience member, to read this anonymity as significant in this artist’s practice? I am confused, firstly by the first name which belies the desired anonymity; 'Claire' is a western Judo-Christian woman’s name. And secondly, because denial of Claire’s surname is evidently strategic on her part; Claire feels the holding back of her surname is important to the content of her performance. As a result of this, I imagine what Claire’s surname could be, and in what way it would be distracting from Flagrante Delicto? Moreover, I wonder about what reasons –political, criminal, protective, familial - there might be for concealing a surname?

Once inside the darkened performance space my first glance of Flagrante Delicto confirms that Claire is white and, from the outside at least, she is a natural or biological woman. The work itself consists of Claire, dressed in black with black leather fingerless gloves and shaved head, moving in between four wooden doors and slamming each one firmly behind her. Isolating the action of a door slamming from its everyday context - be it the result of an angry domestic argument or a rushed exit – and repeating it in the pared down performance style reminiscent of Alan Kapprow’s 1960’s Happenings, highlights the ritual aspect of such ordinary gestures and in doing so makes them strange. In addition, each slam of the doors is a violent and irregular interruption that is impossible for the audience to anticipate or prepare for.

But, as a member of the audience my thoughts - however broken by the disturbing slamming sounds -are brought back to how ‘queering’ the action of a slamming door might be significant in relation to Claire’s desire for anonymity, or significant to the work as a whole? Flagrante Delicto brings together Claire’s attempt at anonymity - including her written statements and the attempt to strip down her (female) identity via her shaved head and sturdy all black clothing. The work also highlights the slamming of doors as ritualistic, loaded and performative of sonic and bodily violence. In addition, meaning is also lent to the piece via the translation of the Latin phrase ‘In Flagrante Delicto ‘ (while [the crime] is blazing); also a common English euphemism for being ‘caught in the act’ of a (flagrant) sexual encounter.

These distinct elements of identity, anonymity and violence are visually combined, and so clearly at stake, in Flagrante Delicto . However, the interpretation of sexual (mis)adventure is only immediately available to audience members with an understanding of the Latin phrase and the English euphemism that it relates to. Moreover, far from banal, the visual signifiers that signpost meaning in Flagrante Delicto act in defiance of Claire’s attempt at anonymity. Instead, the visual clues are brimming with specific, culturally loaded and potentially misleading information; Claire’s shaven headed look, masculine clothes and black leather fingerless gloves remind me of an overtly LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender ) 1980’s ‘scene’ look. A clear link can also be made from the leather gloves, the physical strain of slamming the doors and the violence of the slam itself (which is oddly reminiscent of a loud whip-crack) to sexual violence and Sadomasochism.

The sum of what these disparate parts combine into wasn’t enough for me to establish meaning upon my visit to Flagrante Delicto , nor were the individual elements tempting enough for me to want to stay for the works entire two hour duration. What Flagrante Delicto does add up to is a Live Art performance in the making, one that needs more careful choreography with regards to content and scripting of accompanying text material in order to be better pieced together and so stand up to critical scrutiny. To this end, re-considering the visual elements of the performance, re-drafting an accessible artists’ statement and having a translation of the phrase ‘In Flagrante Delicto ‘ available in the performance space, or clearly printed in the written material, would have been a real bonus.

Rachel Lois clapham

The Long March (China) 2007

wfla — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:29:45 +0000

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

Hao Lang

wfla — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:03:07 +0000

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

Jenevieve Chang

wfla — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:15:19 +0000

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

1001 Nights Cast Discussion

wfla — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:58:22 +0000

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)