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

TM Sisters
Image: The TM Sisters, 'Things Will End Before They Start', Digital Video Performance in Uncertain States of America, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006. Photo copyright Declan O’Neil.

TM Sisters 'Things Will End Before They Start' at Artists Space, New York
7pm November 02
Curated by Benjamin Weill and Silvia Karman Cubina
Presented by Artists Space in collaboration with Moore Space (Miami).

Two women in matching retro dresses fly through the air. They soar through a pale blue sky, arms straight out in front of them, their gaze fixed intently elsewhere: somewhere out in the ether. Together they float smoothly across pink clouds, white stars and pass awkwardly through abstract geometric shapes andworm-holes in outer space. Then, all of a sudden, God reaches out from the heavens, grasps both girls with two large hands and gently plonks them down on stage in front of us.

This is the colourful world of the TM Sisters in Things Will End Before They Start, a performance presented as part of PERFORMA 07 in which the distinctly bored looking art duo physically interact on stage with animated digital landscapes. The work involves the sisters running (in realtime) through digital streets, doing gawky dance moves with virtual characters in on-screen discos, pretending to fly through simulated clouds and physically encounter a cartoon pair of God’s hands, all to the rhythm of 1980’s sounding pop music.

The TM sisters are bound together by their artistic collaboration, but also by blood (they really are sisters). The sisters also share a religious upbringing in Miami where they were home-schooled under the watchful eye of their father, a church pastor. This spiritual element fits in with the naive graphics, cheesy choreography and retro-cool aesthetic of the sister’s performance, in which spoof and sincerity are enacted in equal measures. However, this distinctly in vogue art-world mix of silliness, ennui, irony and contemporary retro that the sisters employ makes picking out what is spoof and what is sincerity in Things Will End Before They Start a very messy affair.

In that case, perhaps we should not pick at Things Will End Before They Start; not analyse the conceptual, faintly apocalyptic, title or the professed seriousness of Gods’ influence in the work, and so not look underneath the skirts of the TM sisters to see what is at stake behind their poptastic veneer. Perhaps then, it is too cynical, amid the undoubtedly fun, deliberately low-fi and lightweight tone of the work, to wonder how firmly the TM sisters have their tongue lodged in their cheeks, and if so, who exactly - them or us - their joke is aimed at? Then again, perhaps all this is of the utmost importance. What I do know is that it remains to be seen if Things Will End Before They Start is critical enough to bring on the creative, transformative or religious apocalypse its title anticipates.

Rachel Lois Clapham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Paterson