liveart - column2

Look what you could have won

wfla — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:12:08 +0000

Image credit: Susannah Hewlett, 'It's Not You'. Courtesy the artist.

Susannah Hewlett
It’s Not You
Arnolfini, Bristol 17/02/08

Time was, a man knew where he stood, especially on national television. Your role was plain, your moment defined. No one was under any illusions how it would play out. If you were Joe or Jane public, the man-in-the-street, the girl-next-door, and you found yourself on TV… well, you’d be famous for approximately ten to fifteen minutes and within that time there were rules that everyone knew, and you’d either win or lose.

Game shows, most likely, that’s where it would happen. Talk shows were home to the properly famous; but it was game shows for the random punter, hoisted up by the scruff of the neck and plonked beneath the studio lights, left there for just about the right length of time to memorise items on a conveyer belt, or to guess how much the toaster was worth. The star of the show? The smiling host, of course, and don’t forget it. Closely followed by YOU. And if not actually you, then a person could always imagine themselves up there. Naming that tune. Whatsing that line. Here was the original arena for everyday fame, tea-time fame, hello mum fame, innocent and fun; and when you left the studio the cameras didn’t up sticks and follow after. They didn’t miraculously multiply with every hastening step down the high street. They didn’t park outside your house at night and call your name.

Times change, though, innit? Back in the day, you’d be playing for cars, holidays, fridge freezers and cold hard cash – it used to be about the money, dammit. Now it’s all about the spotlight… and the money is just assumed to follow on.

Susannah Hewlett takes this notable shift in popular culture as a springboard for her live art work It’s Not You, riffing on themes from the cheesier, fluffier era of TV light entertainment when primetime was about the permanent grin rather than the permanent fear of dismissal. In the concourses and stairwells of Arnolfini, a troupe of consummate performers silently act out random moments from an invisible game show, all sequins and high heels, blue suits and orange skins. They drift from space to space, taking the unheard applause and glitzy bonhomie with them, appearing amongst families dining in the café bar, bursting unannounced into the bookshop. Gallery-goers emerge from an exhibition to be confronted by an immaculately coiffed hostess presenting a pillar to them as if it were a sun lounger or a microwave, her face frozen in a wide rictus grin, disconcertingly dead-eyed. Meanwhile, in the building’s elevator: the lift doors open and a gentleman of Dale Winton hue stands blocking your exit, statue-still, arms flung wide in the familiar pose that proclaims “Hey, you guys! The fun we’re going to have right here!” and he doesn’t move. You wonder whether to get out of the lift or not.

Over two days these showbiz throwbacks traverse the building, ‘presenting’ anything that moves to unheard oohs and aahs, and also an awful lot that doesn’t… signs, books, leaflets, doorways, baby buggies, tables, walls, and, in one bizarre instance, a gentleman’s crotch. Lipsticked ladies recline on the reception desk as erstwhile Arnolfini staff attempt to ignore them. Depending on where and how precisely you stumble across these glamorous weirdos, their static poses provoke very different reactions, despite a basic uniformity of content: the two suited hosts side by side on a balcony, proffering a “Step into the light!” hand to the punters below sparks up images of Gilbert and George, living sculptures; a hostess in a ridiculous wig, leaning over to grin mindlessly at the doorjamb to Arnolfini’s archive room, appears remarkably like a woman mid-collapse, on the cusp of insanity; another hostess gesturing towards thin air in the dead centre of the bar area. Amidst diners and scrapping kids, she seems to me like an alien, freshly descended from the stars and making a heroic but fundamentally misinformed attempt to blend in.

The repetition and brain-dead glee of it all is, of course, funny. It’s sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, in fact. But there’s also something else present. Maybe because we know these particular clichés to be dead or dying, maybe because we know what eventually became of them in the overall evolution of the game show, there is a tangible sense of unease to the whole exercise, sometimes even an undercurrent of menace. A sense that the professed inclusivity of these gestures is, and always was, bullshit… leading you up a blind alley… preparing you for an era when bad-mouthing and ramped-up false drama openly form the backbone of primetime TV, when a racist insult or a full-blown public breakdown fill more airtime and column inches than a Brucie Bonus ever could. In It’s Not You, we’re looking at ghosts. Echoes from an era when you were met with a smile and a twirl, when the audience were rooting for you, when everyone was said to have done “very well,” even if they had fucked up royally.

At least, that’s what I carry away with me when, their work done, the performers pull off their wigs and stilettos, washing away the blusher and tan. I’m sure the broad strokes of a work based upon such familiar popular territory will mean many things to many people, and wonder whether Susannah Hewlett is concerned that any particular message or concern is communicated. It seems that, refreshingly, she’s happy for the experience simply to be engaging and funny. “I really believe that if it’s funny, it doesn’t mean the work isn’t conceptually strong,” she says. “You know when people say, ‘I like to add a bit of humour into my work?’ I’m not ‘adding’ anything! It’s just there. That’s what I’m interested in.”

I suggest that whilst audiences often can’t help grinning back at Hewlett’s performers in their showbiz tableaux, there’s still something sinister at work. She nods. “Something funny, becoming nauseating. That’s the TV I like, as well… Chris Morris, for instance, stuff that might make you feel a bit sick. All these things in popular culture, I’m completely drawn to them: the familiarity, but the frustration of it. Say I really fancy a bit of Saturday night telly, that’s all I want, but it sickens you, and you’re shouting at the TV, you can’t bear it, but it’s comforting. I genuinely enjoy the darkness of that.”

It certainly seems as though Hewlett has put some serious research into the generic techniques of light entertainment, both ancient and modern: the title It’s Not You is inspired by the long, drawn-out moments preceding an eviction or dismissal in more recent game shows, the slow-motion fall of the guillotine. Hewlett has been watching lots of Dancing on Ice or Big Brother and counting these critical pauses. “It’s normally 12 seconds,” she says. “So, Strictly Come Dancing: the couple will be shown in the spotlight and their names are announced, ‘JULIE AND MICHAEL…’” [pauses for 12 seconds] “‘IT’S NOT YOU.’ And the spotlight goes out.”

I suggest these moments sometimes resemble a form of torture, citing the example of brother / sister duo Same Difference on the last series of The X Factor: during the cavernous, doom-laden pauses leading up to the voting off, contestant Sarah Smith looked as though she was being electrocuted, spasms of fear racking her body, mouth clenched shut but twitching uncontrollably. It was a moment she had to endure every week, for almost two months. “They [the TV producers] know exactly what they’re doing,” says Hewlett. “Building the tension… the lighting, the sound, the slightly too-high chair…”

There are also undercurrents of torture to another element of It’s Not You, in which Arnolfini’s auditorium is filled with the solemn tick-tock of a musical ‘countdown’ which never ends, and a single black swivel chair is spotlit in the dead centre of the space. Areas of the seating rake are randomly, briefly, illuminated. It turns a vague mock-up of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire studio into something redolent of the horrendous techniques used to ‘break’ prisoners in Guantanamo bay; incessant noise, isolation, a big empty room with unpredictable shifting lights. Here, though, the volume of the music is pretty moderate and I wonder about the effect it would have were it pumped out at the decibel level of a basement nightclub: Overpowering. Unavoidable. Painful.

Other aspects to the work one might stumble across include a busker outside Arnolfini’s main entrance, rattling through theme songs like Snookering You Tonight; a cheesy jingle schmoozing from the tannoy which announces the venue’s current programme à la Leslie Crowther; and a series of images which use actors to depict varying states of pre-dismissal nerves, spliced into the display units behind Arnolfini’s reception desk and run as screensavers in its archive room.

But, to be honest, it’s the production line of showbiz poses that grabs and holds my attention. Within these simple, superficial actions alone there’s enough to contemplate, enough to surprise. This might be because not only do the performers have an ‘on’ state, they have an ‘off’ as well, a neutral smiles-gone shoulders-down blankness in between the grandstanding. As they journey from place to place the men squeak their teeth, pat back their hair; the women check their heels or adjust their cleavages. The backstage mode before the roar of the crowd begins is, of course, another cliché in itself… watch pretty much any film from the last 20 years which features a game show host character, and you’ll see him behaving like a bastard in the wings before blossoming into the life and soul of the party once the camera settles on him – sure, we know that. In It’s Not You, though, that on-camera moment comes suddenly, unexpectedly, almost violently. One hostess switches her grin on and it’s like being hit by a bus. A host clicks his fingers and suddenly an entire roomful of glammed-up ghosts is beaming directly at you. Equally, the Arnolfini foyer can be populated by performers switching in and out of la-la-land at random, bored in the foreground, happy to see you in the distance. And it goes on, and on, and on, inexorably… like watching a player piano at work, each passing dot in the service of something mechanical, something bigger, something that probably isn’t equipped to explain itself: your entertainment. Your escape. Your fun.

Glamour model and author Katie Price, AKA Jordan, visits Cribbs Causeway mall in North Bristol. She’s signing copies of her new book, Andy Warhol-style. A conveyor belt of star-struck norms wends its way around the shopping complex, and regional news programme Points West is there to ask of them: why do they love Jordan so? “She doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her,” says one kid. “Yeah,” enthuses another, “She don’t care.” It’s a recurring theme amongst the assembled teenagers. In their eyes, Jordan is a celebrity because she doesn’t give a monkey’s.

I’m not, to put it bluntly, sure that they’re entirely correct in their assessment. But it’s fascinating that amidst a modern entertainment culture obsessed with dramatising acts of public approval, Jordan’s fans rate her apathy so highly. Maybe they’re just in teenage denial, fighting against what they know to be true: that of course celebrities care what other people think, that no-one wants to be voted off first, that raw popularity is now considered the biggest prize of them all. It’s much more likely that what their heroes hope for more than anything else is that constant round of applause, following them everywhere they go.

Written by Tim Atack

‘Too close for comfort?’

wfla — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:28:16 +0000

Image Credit: 'Office Party Xmas 2007', Featuring Amanda Hadingue with audience members. Photo by Steff Langley

Office Party Xmas 2007
Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez
12 – 29 December 2007
The Pit, Barbican

See http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?id=6068&pg=766 for details.

Cheesy music? Check. Party nibbles? Check. Social awkwardness? Bucket loads. Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez’s Office Party Xmas 2007 at the Barbican Pit Theatre had all the necessary ingredients for an excruciating night of organised ‘fun’. The artists transformed the theatre into a hellish grey function room complete with bar, dance-floor and plenty of tinsel; and a collection of business stereotypes – a talentless and boorish American CEO, a bossy head of Marketing, a raunchy female secretary – led the roaming crowd through a night of inappropriate drinking, casual sexism, and barely disguised animosity.

The audience members were integrated seamlessly into all of this. Before we entered the party, we were each given a name badge linking us to a department. Now I was Mary from Domestic Support, and everyone knew it. The badges meant we could participate in group activities, but more importantly they meant we were forced into social groupings with people we didn’t know and didn’t trust entirely. It felt just like work.

This social aspect of Office Party Xmas 2007 worked flawlessly. Somewhere between the peanuts on the bar and the Christmas tree by the dance floor, real social dynamics began to take shape. Some of my fellow members of Domestic Support were riled because they didn’t get an Executive badge; personally, I felt some bitterness towards the ‘Creatives’. People I had assumed were actors – a man who wore a bra and manhandled other men on stage, a competition winner who eagerly snogged the heads of department as his prize – were actually audience members whose tasteless behaviour was entirely spontaneous. And the badges meant that we could all address each other by name – not with permission, but with that sinister over-friendliness that only exists between colleagues or strangers.

It was, then, a perfect replica of the self-conscious awkwardness, unpleasant décor and unimaginative music of an office bash somewhere in a business park underneath a motorway flyover. But Office Party was also a platform for some independent acts. Tina C (aka Christopher Green) gave a rousing performance, belting out a couple of songs in-between pearls of her Southern-belle wisdom, and there was a surreal and hypnotic interlude when Robyn Simpson broke down a wall to melt into a dream-like dance sequence.

These independent acts worked best when they segwayed smoothly from the premise of the rest of the evening – that the orchestrated cheer of an Office Party belies the frustration people feel in their jobs. The dance sequence erupted perfectly, for example, from a realistic spat between Robyn from Accounts and the compere of a Christmas-pudding-eating contest. But, with the exception of Tina C, they were less successful as stand-alone performances. When the dancers ‘Two-Ché’ performed their po-faced routine to ‘Lady in Red’, undressing each other to reveal red pubic hair, it was so absurdly inappropriate it reminded us that we were not at a party, but a pastiche of one.

And this is the problem at the core of Office Party Xmas 2007. It worked well as an explication of the ways people package identity – both the meaningless epithets we load on other people (‘Mary from Domestic Support’ isn’t a great conversation-opener), and the lengths we might go to escape our own labels, once encouraged to let our hair down. But the attention it paid to the mundane was also a little smug, and misguided. Catering to the lowest common denominator – as is the burden of office do’s everywhere – Office Party also flattered the knowingess of its audience. Fake disclaimers gave warnings about the subjectivity of ‘fun’, and the cartoonish ridiculousness of the CEO gave us all an intellectual escape route – enough room to sneer. But who were we laughing at? The downfall of the office do is not its lack of taste, but the fact that no-one wants to be there in the first place. These touches felt heavy handed and threatened to break the evening’s suspension of disbelief.

Office Party was most affecting when it avoided the conspicuous nod to irony. A sing-along at the end was both a searing critique of business-psycho-babble and a convincing exercise in togetherness. Here, encouraged to take our roles seriously, the audience saw the desperation of a work community in a different light. But perhaps the show’s reminders of pastiche served another purpose. Midway through the evening a friend confided, ‘I can tell this is a realistic office party – I’m thinking of leaving early.’ But by the end he was setting the dance floor alight and wishing the DJ would play ‘Agadoo’. Could it be that – shockingly – Office Party Xmas 2007 reveals that deep down, we all secretly like that kind of thing? Swap the drunken conversation with your boss, in fact, for the excuse of irony, and we might even pay £15 to do it.

Mary Paterson

‘Bloods on the Catwalk’

wfla — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:12:17 +0000

The New Barbarians Fall Collection 2007
La Pocha Nostra
Arnolfini, Bristol
10/11/07

The last time I got a severe case of the shivers during a live art show was thanks to Goat Island’s ‘When will the September roses bloom / last night was only a comedy’. In it, whilst the bland, treacly tones of James Taylor oozed from the PA, Litó Walkey stood still on one leg for a good seven or eight minutes. One song ended, another one began (as if the sound op had dozed off, leaving the whole CD playing unintentionally) and Walkey simply stood centre stage, one leg raised, in a crepuscular half-light.

I’m no particular fan of James Taylor (or indeed of standing on one leg for any length of time) but after about three minutes into ‘When will the September roses bloom....’ I suddenly realised I was shaking. At first I thought it was in sympathy with the performer, or maybe even because of the cold, but I quickly discounted these theories and yet still couldn’t stop myself wobbling… and that wasn’t particularly good news as I was behind a camcorder at the time, filming the performance. Despite everything, despite the formality of Goat Island’s house style, despite the fact that the immediacy of the event was being filtered through a viewfinder before it hit me, I was being consumed by something unnameable and shaking like a leaf.

I mention this because it happened again during La Pocha Nostra’s The New Barbarians Fall Collection 2007, in a similarly unquantifiable way. Rajni Shah had been parading spider-like up and down the fashion show runway for some time, naked but for a black choker, with an animal snarl and dark arterial blood smeared across her face. Slowly, quietly, Sarah Jane Norman – similarly unclothed except for various thin black trusses dissecting her body and a rubber mask of what looked like Condoleezza Rice over her head – made her presence known at the opposite end of the catwalk. I can’t even remember what was playing on the soundtrack at the time because by then the entire experience had battered me into a helpless submission. 90 minutes of noise, fury and fashion, culminating in La Pocha Nostra and their associate artists making me vibrate with the heartbeat regularity of a quartz crystal… and by means that couldn’t have been more different from Goat Island’s.

Days later, details of New Barbarians are still repeating upon me like snatches of a half remembered dream, sneaking up, unexpected and often unwelcome, triggered by some innocuous element of my daily life. BAM! There’s Alex Bradley, hauling himself the length of the catwalk by means of the connecting spars of two lighting clamps, the metal props attached to his wrists, instruments of torture, clunking painfully into the wood of the runway. BAM! Roza Ilgen, her form entirely covered in human hair, short-arsed, sporting breasts and a beard like some long lost evolutionary byroad: Captain Caveman, Morlock, Bigfoot, arms splayed out, a perverse Christ, the audience cheering her enthusiastically. WHOOSH! The sound of a mad Mexican woman jabbering away down a telephone line, unintelligible, distorted, insane. BOOM! BANG! Guillermo Goméz-Peña suddenly breaking into a native American chant, all the while pouting ridiculously like Derek Zoolander. GO!

Presented in the mode of a fashion show, New Barbarians keeps all the rituals, bluster and bombast of such events intact. The audience have been told to “dress for the catwalk” and most have obliged. There’s a foyer preview, free drinks, a rat pack of photographers (all uniformly name-badged “PAPARAZZI SCUM”) and once we are led inside the auditorium there’s VIP seating at the runway’s edge, a hammering soundtrack, plus Folake Shoga’s disjointed and deliberately mashed-up films projected onto a screen above the throng – cutting rapidly and queasily between ethno-geographic documentaries, rehearsal footage, adverts, military recruitment films and middle east news stories. There’s the obligatory show manager hustling models to and from the stage with a constant air of unflappable yet pissed-off efficiency. Goméz-Peña, founder member of La Pocha Nostra, holds court on a platform opposite the runway, freezing the noisy proceedings regularly in order to deliver verbose treatises in a patchwork of languages, physically inhabiting a space somewhere between a Hopi tribal chief and Klaus Lagerfeld. His consort is a snappily-suited female announcer who gives voice to the catwalk at random, speaking over the soundtrack in measured sing-song tones, offering performers for sale, encouraging the audience towards acts of rebellion or cultural vandalism. It is relentless, and total. It also has that single most important clash of textures prevalent in the world of fashion: the constant, repeated intertwining of the profound and the utterly meaningless, holding the event together like warp and weft. There’s the all-pervading sense that what we’re witnessing is the creators throwing a huge amount of stuff at the wall, and seeing what sticks. It’s exuberant, funny, unapologetic… and occasionally feels as if it’s in danger of collapsing under its own weight.

La Pocha Nostra have spent much of the last fifteen years conjuring up and making flesh this world of border and hybrid cultures, building a creative lab where cultural phenomena undergo a type of rapid, barely controlled fission. The forms (it doesn’t feel right to call them ‘outfits,’ somehow) on the runway tonight are the gene-spliced bastard children of the communications satellite and the nightclub, bearing the family traits of hip-hop, sado-masochism, youTube and airport terminals, cheap handguns, DVD boxsets, protest marches and internet porn, speaking cross-Phillipino-Icelandic with a Brazillian / lowland Scottish accent, listening to klezmer-grindcore on their iPods and spending their holidays on the fucking moon.

As they tour the world, Goméz-Peña and a crew of three or four permanent cohorts ‘collect’ associates, throwing further spices into their melting pot. The diverse bodies are all artists, all complicit, all having made themselves beautiful in their own eyes, no doubt via some mediation on the part of their hosts. As a result of this diversity it’s unsurprising that many fascinating socio-political concerns are manifest in each model parading back and forth before us: power play appears to be a fundamental building block of their interactions; gender is not so much bent as blended, a thick chromosomal soup; and the models borrow ‘clothes’ from every religion and religious impetus that crawls beneath the sun. BAM! Harminder Singh Judge, gas-masked and with the multiple arms of a Hindu deity, strapped to a crucifix CRACK, THWACK a Nike swoosh on a stiletto-heeled terrorist’s hijab BANG! Jiva Parthipan performing an exuberant, grinning Kath kali dance with a handgun stuffed into his crotch.

The crossbreed cyber-sexual rebellion of New Barbarians might sound disconcerting, but it’s not what gave me the shakes. It wasn’t even the implication that somewhere beneath the fashion show there was a bubbling bloodbath of righteous violence. What I was watching, after all, was a distillation of a million things, people and places that already exist, active, actual, accessible either physically or technologically, far from alien or inhuman in any conceivable way. The danger wasn’t in the shapes, nodes and ideas.

I certainly wasn’t shaking with indignation, as I loved the damn thing: feeling oddly, happily at home. I’ve heard since the show that some people actually found New Barbarians offensive, but it’s completely inconceivable to me why. I can’t understand how anyone could be offended by such a vivid celebration of the possibilities of human synthesis. Sure, there was plenty of perverted religious imagery; much nudity (some of it in the areas euphemistically and uselessly described as ‘graphic’); and little, if any, explanation of what you were seeing and why it was there – only a sly announcement before the catwalk burst to life that the audience shouldn’t take all they saw “entirely seriously.”

But still, what’s offensive about that? La Pocha Nostra’s magpie tendencies are wonderfully indiscriminate, irreverent in equal measure towards male, female, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, left, right, rich, poor. Basically, if you’re human, you’re fair game. To me, being offended by New Barbarians is about as logical as being offended by Rio De Janeiro, Singapore or Los Angeles – all of them by no means short of culture clashes, bastardized religions, ridiculously beautiful people and plenty of senseless violence.

And maybe that explains why I was shaking. It was like an overdose. Perhaps if you can picture the entirety of Singapore, Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, London, New York, Paris, Milan… imagine every last inch of them crammed into a hypodermic and injected forcibly straight into the base of your spinal column. An instant download of more dirt, glitz and mixed messages than you could possibly handle.

Tim Atack

www.pochanostra.com
www.arnolfini.org.uk

‘How to unwind a wren’

wfla — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 11:50:11 +0000

Dawn Chorus
Marcus Coates
Arnolfini, Bristol
10/07/2007

Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus is a curious mix of an event in which an audience of musicians, new music lovers, live art and experimental film enthusiasts - plus a sizeable gaggle of ornithologists - gather to witness an attempt at recreating the chirps and warbles of the Northumbrian countryside using human vocal talents.

Bioacoustic expert Geoff Sample (and was ever a sound recordist so magnificently named?) knows his birds. He knows whether you’re listening to a robin, or a blackbird doing an impersonation of a robin. He knows the difference between any given number of avian songs, even identifying vocal tics that distinguish one specific chiffchaff from another. Apparently birds have regional dialect: “It’s like the difference between Sunderland where they’ll say makkem and takkem, and Newcastle, where it’s maek ‘em and taek ‘em,” he burbles, happily.

Sample is collaborator, principle aide and - by the looks of things - something of a guru to Marcus Coates, the originator of Dawn Chorus and an artist concerned for many years with the natural world and its array of alien sensory experiences. His work juxtaposes human characteristics against the behaviours and traits of other species, a notable example being the film Out Of Season which plonks a lone Chelsea supporter in the midst of a leafy bucolic landscape, belting out terrace chants in an incongruous display of bravado that is, at the same time, completely in keeping with the territorial aspects of the birdsong chittering about him.

Coates’ ongoing fascination with the dynamics and resonances of birdsong has led to him and Sample recording 576 hours of the stuff, hiding microphones in trees, under bushes and between rocks in Bamburgh, Northumberland so as to accurately isolate the many voices that mass in the hours around dawn. And subsequently, this evening at Arnolfini - part performance lecture, part conversation, part film screening – has at its heart a fascinating musical exercise in which a small choir of homo sapiens is assembled to perform a ‘live’ dawn chorus; reciting selected recordings from Coates and Sample’s archive which have been pitched down to the human vocal scale. A video made of their performance is then sped up digitally to mimic the incredible dexterities of bird voice.

In presentation as well as content it’s a fascinating example of the merging of science and art as well as the two disciplines’ occasional clash of principle. Coates often draws complex metaphors from the raw facts of the natural world whilst Sample advises caution to anyone appropriating tricky concepts of neuroscience and animal behaviour for creative ends; such as idly speculating upon why, exactly, birds bother to sing in the first place. He reveals that in one species ovaries only form in the female if they are subjected to song from their male counterparts. “So the song has an actual biological purpose?” asks Coates, and with a tiny grimace Samples’ face says: “Contentious.”

The actual choral performance itself is the highlight. After a short laptop-based demonstration of how birdsong - when undercranked by a factor of about 16 – can become whalesong or the sound of children in a playground, several vocalists take to the stage and, listening carefully to playback through individual headphones, croon out the slowed-down tones of greenfinches, goldfinches, wrens and swallows. The differences in avian identities when placed in a very human context are remarkably apparent: some birds are minimalist, repetitive, their ranges falling within a set scale. The opposite extreme is represented by species such as the Blackcup (performed as part of Coates’ film installation by singer-songwriter Rasha Shaheen) its grandstanding tune a dazzling marathon of microtones resonant of the New Complexity, an avant garde cadenza amongst the trees. Meanwhile, the machine gun chirps of the Wren - performed by Meena Reetoraz-Yeomans - if transposed to the human metabolism would require diaphragm muscles with the speed and impact of a pneumatic drill. Ben Owen, making like a Swallow, has perhaps the widest demand in tonal range, requiring him to squeeze out some gutteral croaks redolent of a hungover Tom Waits one second before sighing gently in the upper registers like Stina Nordenstam the next.

Over 15 minutes a specific arrangement unfolds, with great care taken to reproduce the precise interactions of particular species. It turns out that the authentic dawn chorus has what amounts to a loose score, with certain birds making way for others, duetting, waiting their turn in a semi-improvisatory arrangement. The final result is compressed into less than a minute of footage, so fast we get to see it three times, with the performers taking on some physical tics and mannerisms weirdly evocative of their feathered avatars. It’s oddly affecting, disconcerting and extremely funny, all in one high-speed flash.

Tim Atack

Marcus Coates is an artist and filmmaker exhibiting nationally and internationally. An extract from Dawn Chorus can be seen at http://arts.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,1997689,00.html

Geoff Sample: http://www.wildsong.co.uk/

Pablo Bronstein 'Plaza Minuet'

wfla — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:56:14 +0000

Image Credit: Pablo Bronstein, Balletto Neoclassico, 2007. Dancers from Teatro Nuovo, Torino. Courtesy Galleria Franco Noero

Pablo Bronstein 'Plaza Minuet'
Plaza Minuet was performed in four parts in New York on November 7

Part 1, 2 – 2.30pm Winter Gardens, World Financial Center
Part 2, 3 – 3.30pm 80 Pine Street
Part 3, 4 - 4.30pm One New York Plaza
Part 4, 5 - 5.30pm 60 Wall Street

Apart from the turquoise-leotard wearing dancers who perform in them, each of the spaces chosen by Pablo Bronstein for his Plaza Minuet have one thing in common. These grand halls in New York’s wealthy financial district are all ‘privately owned public spaces’: areas designated for public use and maintained by private companies. When Bronstein’s dancers bound into each venue, mark a cross on the floor and move in slow unison between Ballet positions, they are simply exercising their public right to be there. So what makes them look so strange?

Firstly, the dancers’ costumes deliberately jar with their surroundings. Their bright, figure-hugging leotards clash with the décor and the dark suits worn by those who work nearby. Secondly, the dancers’ movements look out of place. These splendid lobbies, with their marble pillars, palm trees and ambient lighting, are used as spaces to walk through, not perform in. Even the vast atrium of 60 Wall Street (owned by Deutsche Bank), in which people play chess on tables and chairs at the sides of the hall, functions mainly as a thoroughfare on the way to the subway.

These public spaces have been carefully designed by their private owners with particular uses in mind. But by marking out their own area in the middle of each venue, as well as marking themselves as visually different, the dancers in Plaza Minuet ignore both the architectural imperatives of the buildings’ design and the social implications of other people’s willingness to abide by them. In 60 Wall Street, for example, the trees and pillars are not just grand but they also compel people forward, narrowing pathways and suggesting direction. The dancers cut across these pathways and the commuters using them, to disrupt the flow of movement.

Put simply, the dancers don’t behave like you’re supposed to – they don’t behave in the way these spaces expect. As well as looking strange, this misbehaviour exposes the rules the rest of us follow. But it’s more than mere resistance to authority that makes the Plaza Minuet dancers stand out – it’s competition to it. The artist, Pablo Bronstein, and a choreographer, Hilary Nanney, instruct the dancers when to change position, and they correct individuals when they make a mistake. In this way, the dancers in Plaza Minuet do not simply disobey the silent rules of their architectural surroundings, but they submit to an alternative authority – the bodily discipline of Ballet, as embodied by Bronstein and Nanney.

Brought together physically, the authority of Ballet and the authority of the architecture of public space expose the ideological implications of each other. The comparison between the two is illuminating, because both types of authority compete on the same terms. Both Ballet and the architecture of public space adopt a strong visual code (turquoise leotards/ marble pillars); both expect silent complicity from their subjects (no rewards for success, only punishment –for example, looking strange – for failure); and both seek to incorporate individuals into a compliant group (with no reward, conformity must be an end in itself.) It’s also illuminating because these terms normally remain hidden – naturalisation, in fact, is another tactic the two types of authority share. While the beautiful illusion of Ballet is maintained by its disavowal of physical hardship, the awesome spell of Wall Street’s architecture is preserved by the myth of the easy accumulation of wealth.

In this way, Plaza Minuet enacts a competition between the authority of Ballet and the authority of the architecture of public space, and makes them both visible in the process. But, just as the ‘lie’ of capitalism is not weakened, according to Marx, by its exposure, this explication of institutional authority is far from critical of its subject. Opening up the machinations of Ballet and of the architecture of public space, Plaza Minuet questions the institutions’ claims to natural authority; but it also suggests that authority itself is inescapable – the only way to notice one set of rules is to succumb to the other.

In fact, it’s this interest in rules as a principle – rather than what they stand for – that finally marks the dancers in Plaza Minuet as strange. Even though Ballet is exposed as a form of bodily control, the dancers choose to conform to its strictures. This choice to comply goes against the pervasive individualism of twenty-first century Euro-American culture. Indeed, it goes against the capitalistic individualism on which Wall Street’s wealth is built, at the same time as it questions the veracity of that myth by exposing the architectural authority that supports it. In this way, Plaza Minuet uses a dance derived from Renaissance-era court practise to reach behind our understanding of the individual, and question the sovereignty of the twenty-first century subject.

Mary Paterson

Interview between He Yun Chang and Rachel Lois Clapham

wfla — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:35:43 +0000

Image credit: He Yunchang, ' Mahjong, 2007'. Photographer Paula Court. Courtesy: Courtesy of the artist and PERFORMA.

Interview between Performa Writing Live Fellow, Rachel Lois Clapham and artist He Yun Chang, dated 14 November 2007.

Beijing-based artist He Yun Chang is arguably the leading performance artist presently working in China. Over the last eleven years, he has created a series of unique and discrete solo performances in which he has placed exceptional physical demands upon himself both in terms of his strength and endurance. For PERFORMA07, He Yun Chang devised a unique version of Mahjong, based on the ancient but popular Chinese game, but using over 100 mahjong ‘tiles’ made from large cement bricks. The artist played this game in New York's Washington
Square Park for four hours with various audience members.

Rachel Lois Clapham (RLC) How did Mahjong 2007 come about?

He Yun Chang (HYC) I thought of the idea 2-3 years ago but my gallery, Chambers Fine Art, set it up with Performa for 2007. People usually play Mahjong recreationally but I wanted to subvert it, turn it into something else and make it physically oppressive. My version of the game is quite cruel, that's what the heavy bricks are about. Also I like the idea of playing it for a long time in the hot sun or in middle of winter, like here in New York. Someone told me that Korean soldiers are made to play a similar model of the game, with very large bricks as part of their torture in prison but that's not necessarily the most important thing in Mahjong 2007. What's important is playing the game with the audience, rather than the game itself. Previous performances have been dangerous, solitary or censored, whereas in Mahjong it was important that I was able to have the audience in the space with me in, and interact with them. My relationship with the audience in Mahjong is also quite friendly - unlike the wrestling game I played in 'One and One Hundred, 2001' where the relationship with the audience was definitely tense, antagonistic. People really wanted to hurt me and to win! In Mahjong the process of playing, the time we spend playing it, is much more important than winning the game.

RLC Why do Mahjong in Washington Square?

HYC Because it's a public space; some people go ice skating, some people eat a meal there, I chose to play my version of Mahjong. It could have been anywhere public really. I was ideally looking for somewhere a bit warmer!

RLC You wanted to be warmer. You also ended the performance 45 minutes early (at 6.15). Does this mean perseverance or physical endurance are less important to you in Mahjong than in other previous works?

HYC Physical endurance is still a factor, its' just that there were logistical problems with Mahjong. I ended the work early because it was cold and raining but more so because several of the people could not play the game properly, which really affected the piece. The police also came part way through Mahjong and made me put my clothes on, which also interrupted the performance. The nakedness was important. I have always performed naked so I was naked whilst playing Mahjong- for continuity- but I also think nudity makes the performance more pure, with less distractions. Being exposed to the elements when naked was also a way of increasing the magnitude of what was happening in Mahjong, it made the game a starker contrast to the wet and the cold.

RLC Do you consider Mahjong a success, even though you were interrupted by the police and stopped early because it was cold and raining?

HYC Yes. It is a success because I completed the performance. I carried it out. It is out of my control whether the police stop the work; they have guns and I don't! Carrying out my work in the face of those elements does have a connected interaction with those chance elements. But they are also forces that are out of my control and so not central to the work's success.

RLC Is Mahjong a new side to your work, a softer side, in which you testing your physical and mental limits is less important?

HYC It's true that I often pitch my body and my individual will in contrast to external forces ( harsh weather, strong water, poured concrete) or chance elements, like being interrupted by the police, that is important in my work. But in some pieces I vary the concept and lessen that element. Often, like in Mahjong, the process itself is as important as fighting against those forces, whether they are outside (natural, instigated by others ) or from within myself (my own endurance against my own body or will). In that way, the process and act of completion, following through with the act of performance, expressing it physically with the audience is key, in spite of any logistical, natural or chance factors that may stop or hinder the work in some way.

RLC How would you feel if a someone walked through the park, saw the game, and didn't realise Mahjong 2007 was a performance or something original?

HYC I wouldn't mind at all, that would be wonderful! My work is very ordinary looking. I always use the simplest materials in order to create the largest imaginary space. Even with simple, everyday gestures and materials you can make work of a great magnitude and get the essence of something important. Also, it wouldn't matter to me if some people thought what I was doing wasn't art, or was pointless. In my 9 month tour of the UK in 2006, 'Touring Great Britain with Rock,' I often had only two or three people watching me and sometimes in China I don't have any audience at all, so I don't necessarily think about who will witness or understand the work. My feeling is that if some people pass by Mahjong and don't understand what they see, give them 100 days and they can have a think about it.

RLC Is it true that your work gets more interrupted here in the US, than in China?

HYC I have never actually been 'caught' doing a performance in China, but have been arrested in the US a few times. My work is under the radar of the authorities in China because of the locations and spaces I perform in; often in private enclosed gallery spaces or outside in the remote countryside. But there are big differences too: my performance work is not so easy to do in China because nudity is not allowed, that's why I waited to do Mahjong here in New York. Chinese audiences don't have the general level of understanding about art, or the same generosity or openness to understand or interact with different things as art. For instance, a lot of people in China still don't consider what I do art. On the other hand, there is more financial support and artistic, institutional, frameworks outside China for artists doing performance. That doesn't mean performance doesn't happen in China. There are spaces in which you can perform, and perform nude, but for big projects like 'Touring Great Britain with Rock' 2006, it is much more conceivable outside China.

RLC Pitching your individual will or mental limits against that of your own physical body- do you see that separation of those two elements, a separation of self, as political in your work?

HYC For most people intellect and body operate in tandem, but sometimes the intellect is superior. Under normal conditions we are used to what the body and intellect can do together, but under extreme situations sometimes the body takes over to do amazing things as well. I feel that China is a very complex society, one in which it is important to use your body and your intellect so you can stop and face its reality. Highlighting the body in this way, as separate, is also important because, historically, Chinese people have not endowed the physical body with value, rather they have valued the spirit of the Chinese people, as a collective. Contemporary China is much more individual in its thinking, so it's a pull between the two. By putting pressure on an idea about myself (my intellect) and my own body I can make it into something much larger.

RLC Do you foresee a time when political, body-based or nude performances will be shown alongside other contemporary visual art forms in china?

HYC Not in the short term, no.

RLC What has been the most lasting effect of your performance work to date-mentally, physically or emotionally?

HYC It is my health that has suffered the most because my body has been in danger so many times. In Buffalo 2005, as part of the exhibition 'The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art,' I did a performance where I stood in the Niagara waterfall and the police came, they were worried and took me straight to hospital. The doctor told me my kidneys had failed because my body was so cold from being submerged in the freezing water. In general I am also getting increasingly grumpy and short tempered. Despite all this I think the most valuable contribution I can make is to use my body to express ideas and give other people imagination. That is more important than my health. I have also derived much pleasure and enjoyment from my performances over the years.

RLC What project are you planning next?

HYC I'm planning to do something for 2008 in China that involves my mother and will be three months long. It's going to be great. I can't do it in the UK or the US as the insurance costs will be too high. I can't say anymore about it, all will be revealed in due course.

RLC Is there anything you want to ask me?

HYC Can you make Performa happen earlier in the year next time, so it's not so cold? October and November are too cold in New York.

RLC I'll do my best?!

Interview: Carlos Amorales and Rachel Lois Clapham

wfla — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:38:51 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CA: Or ‘Am I the spider?’...

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

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

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

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

‘A Chinese Frequency’

wfla — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:33:09 +0000

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

An Interview with Richard DeDomenici

wfla — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:09:37 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

TA ….Are we to trust that answer?

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

TA What was your winning design?

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

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

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

TA ….Do you encourage being laughed at?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laughs)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC No, I didn’t

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

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

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

.: Pedestrian Congestion Charging 09 August 2005

TA Did anyone turn round and question it?

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

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

.: Pedestrian Congestion Charging 09 August 2005

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

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

RLC No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preview: Mahjong 2007 by He Yun Chang

wfla — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:11:37 +0000

Project Team 'Mahjong 2007' at Washington Square Park

He Yun Chang
'Mahjong,2007'
Washington Square
09 Nov 4-7pm
Presented by Chambers Fine Art for PERFORMA07.

I went to Judson Church on Washington South yesterday to meet He Yun Chang whilst he prepared for his performance of Mahjong, 2007. Mahjong is a traditional Chinese game that He Yun Chang will perform with various audience members in nearby Washington Square Park on the 9th November. The performance of Mahjong itself has nothing to do with the church, but the tiles that He Yun Chang will use for the game are large bricks, 100’s of them, and they are all to be hand painted by the artist himself, so Judson Church kindly agreed to give Performa space in their basement for the brick storage and painting.

That the tiles for He Yun Chang’s unique version of Mahjong are big, heavy bricks and that each one is to be painstakingly hand-painted should come as no surprise to those who know He Yun Chang’s work. Previous projects have tested the limits of the artists’ physical and mental endurance against insurmountable odds. Such odds have included the artist trying to move a Chinese mountain with string in Moving a Mountain, 1999, being suspended over a river whilst trying to cut water with a knife in Dialogue With Water, 1999 and more recently Touring Great Britain With Rock, 2006 in which He Yun Chang walked 2000 UK miles in 9 months whilst carrying a large rock.

Although He Yun Chang doesn’t succeed in physically moving mountains or dividing rivers, the artist’s persistence does prevail in incredibly moving ways that reference human struggle and the triumph of the individual over both internal, natural and external political forces.

Mahjong,2007 will be the latest in a long line of powerful, poignant and quintessentially Chinese performances by China’s leading contemporary performance artist. Put simply, it is not to be missed.

Rachel Lois Clapham