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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Mary Paterson

http://www.greenenaftaligallery.com/

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

.Francesco Vezzoli, Right You Are (If You Think You Are), 2007. Photo copyright Paula Court. Courtesy of PERFORMA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Gagosian Gallery.

Francesco Vezzoli Cosi E (Si Vi Pare) / Right You Are (If You Think You Are) at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, October 27th.

If you have to stand in a queue, make sure it’s an interesting one. The queue that snaked around the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum on Saturday night may have been long and dispiriting, but it was also one peppered with celebrities from the worlds of art and showbiz. Programmed to begin at 10pm, Franco Vezzoli’s one-night only adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s play ‘Right You Are (If You Think You Are)’ did not start till nearly 11. The waiting crowd had to content themselves by watching stars appear and disappear into the museum behind a flash of bulbs.

Pirandello’s 1917 play is a parable about truth. It revolves around the mysterious Signora Ponza whose presence is only described through her relationships with others. Drawing together an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman and Peter Saarsgaard, Vezzoli’s adaptation courted this fragility of truth in relation to the nature of celebrity. In doing so he choreographed the audience as much as he directed the actors and – although I may not have appreciated it at the time – that long queue was a fitting introduction to the themes of his piece.

Inside the museum, the A-List actors sat facing each other at the centre of the rotunda. Some were cast in roles that deliberately contrasted with their appearance or gender – Natalie Portman, for instance, as the straight talking (male) Laudisi, and the adolescent Marcus Carl Franklin as the Mayor – and they were all reading from a script, so that even when the play was at its most dynamic we were reminded that it was a constructed fiction. This had the paradoxical effect of emphasising the historical specificity of Pirandello’s text (it’s setting in early twentieth-century Italy) in order to free the implications of the play. By never allowing the audience to suspend disbelief, in other words, Vezzoli grounded the existential arguments of the play in real experience.

The A-List credentials of the cast also shed an intriguing light on the distinctions between truth, lies and the possibility of knowledge. By using such well known faces – and in particular, the status and renown of Cate Blanchett as Signora Ponza – Vezzoli exploited our own willing complicity in the cult of celebrity. Signora Ponza’s denouement (or anti-denouement, as she does little to clarify the story) could just as well have been a description of Blanchett’s activities on the publicity run for her latest film. In that situation, too, she is a construct of other people's imaginations.

And yet my view of events was heavily coloured by where I was seated. Famous and important people (of a range that included Mary-Kate Olsen, Lou Reed and Cindy Sherman) were seated around the actors on the ground floor, while others vied for their place along the museum’s ramps. My seat was in a separate screening room, which showed pictures from cameras trained on each of the actors’ faces as well as on members of the audience. Signora Ponza/ Cate Blanchett, wearing a veiled costume designed by John Galliano, was perched on an elaborate stool in front of the screen.

Just like the gossiping villagers who cast judgment on Signora Ponza’s identity in Pirandello’s play, then, I was afforded the apparent luxury of being able to see without being judged myself - there were no cameras trained on my seat. I watched the fidgeting and shuffling of high-status audience members, and I saw the watchful expressions of the actors between lines. The frustration I felt in the queue was long behind me, as I revelled in the privilege of the belief that I had a perfect view. In fact, it was the feeling of exclusion in the queue – forced to wait while others were led into the museum –that made this sense of inclusion and knowledge so richly felt.

The programme quotes Pirandello’s desire to stimulate audience members as opposed to please them, and the shuffling discomfort of the queue certainly did nothing to please anyone. But there was no loud rebellion, no chorus of booing like in the early performances by Pirandello’s Futurist contemporaries. In the end, were we all sated by the tantalising glimpse of celebrity? Flattered and cosseted in my prize seat, I certainly was.

Cosi E (Se Vi Pare) / Right You Are (If You Think You Are) was a PERFORMA Commission. Produced by Gagosian Gallery, New York. Co-produced by PERFORMA in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Mary Paterson
Performa Writing Live Fellow

See more reviews by Mary and Rachel Lois on http://07.performa-arts.org/performa_live.php

Image Courtesy of Christer Lundahl
Explode and (Anything) – an Itinerary
Participatory performance by artists: Lundahl & Seitl
Saturday 6 October 2007
Battersea Arts Centre, London

Explode and (Anything) – An Itinerary is one of ten special commissions by Battersea Arts Centre to be part of the sprawling installation performance of Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death. The massive Edgar Allen Poe experience fills every room in the Old Town Hall building, without skimping on detail; lighting, sound and decoration covers every inch. In the rich, atmospheric, Gothic, completely immersive environment, it is hard to believe the experience can be any more extraordinary. And then a figure in a white robe beckons you into a quiet room …

Lundahl & Seitl are very suitable artists to be embedded within Punchdrunk’s epic production. Their work creates eerie sensations of disembodiment through their uniquely designed whole-body experience, an unusually effective paradox. Explode... is uncanny, uncomfortable and provokes disorientation and dislocation of all the senses. While Punchdrunk holds up a guttering Victorian candle flame to three hours worth of terror and mystery, Lundahl and Seitl go one step further and plunge those who dare visit them into utter darkness for fifteen spine-tingling minutes.

The white-robed Lundahl & Seitl performers led us three apprehensive but excited participants into the white room. We took off our shoes, put on white robes and full-face canvas masks. We became sexless, faceless and identical; apart from our heights we were almost interchangeable. Wireless headphones blocked out noise and we stood waiting until a voice crackled in our ears. Take two steps forward. A simple enough instruction that required huge mental effort to execute when all certainty about our surroundings had been removed. The voice said it was watching me and I was to take its hand. A hand grasped mine and pulled me forward. For the next few moments, I moved around the unseen space, alternately repelled by and longing for the safety of this anonymous hand. I was beginning to relinquish all responsibility for myself, a euphoric sensation that was discomforting and enjoyable at the same time.

Explode… certainly knows how to push participants out of comfort zones and into something new and extraordinary. Through direct manipulation of the senses, participants are drawn into a world of strange, destabilising sensations: whose hand is holding mine? Who is speaking to me? Where am I? Am I safe? What is happening? In writing, it seems like the last thing any sane person would want to undergo but in practice it is an exercise of the lesser used senses and how certainties can reassemble themselves into multiple possibilities.

In Explode... Lundahl & Seitl have taken the single, definite set of environmental circumstances and replaced them with multiple imagined ones. With no way of comprehending what is in the immediate environment, every configuration was possible and the boundaries, the hard edges and certainties of space were removed. As I walked and moved with the voice gently instructing me, I imagined every possible sort of space and knew that all of them existed at the same time, somehow. The experience was an unsettling mixture of giddy liberation and dread.

The second part of the performance started when part of our masks were removed and we saw the room through a thin layer of gauze. It was a shock to have all my imagined settings collapse into this singular reality: a white room, small, with the other two audience members standing motionless. The voice told me to walk around the room, so I did. The other figures did too. We could have been reflections in a series of mirrors. I couldn't tell who had held my hand. It was eerie and bizarre. And then it got even stranger.

The voice said it was signalling to me as one of the other figures began to raise its arms. I was asked to raise my right arm. The other figures turned to look at me. It was my turn to be the embodiment of the voice. If we could all be one white-robed figure, we could also all be the voice. The multiple, simultaneous possibilities of what was real and possible crowded my mind – and then any remaining grip I had on a sense of who I was, what I was doing, where I was and how it all came to be was completely shattered.

We three white-robed figures sat in a circle facing each other, still anonymous, still interchangeable due to the gauze over our faces. The voice said it was standing behind me and wanted me to see myself as it saw me. Stand up and take two steps back, I was instructed, so I did. The lights flashed off. The lights flashed on again. Where I had been sitting, there was a figure in a white robe in exactly the same position. It was a performer being me – it was me. I was staring at the back of my own head. I was utterly gobsmacked. The other two figures remained motionless. Then the lights flashed off again, I was led back to the circle and guided into sitting down. When the lights came on again, my mouth was still open in amazement.

Explode... is an experiment for the senses and a challenge to the conceived ideas of self. Every moment in the white robe and mask with the disembodied, anonymous voice removes yet another certainty of space, of reality, of who you are, where you start and where you end. I left feeling free and light, as if I had been liberated from something that had weighed me down for so long, I was no longer aware of it until it was gone. In other hands, the blindfolds, the robes, the headphones and the constant physical touch could feel invasive and aggressive, with the challenges of such an experience occluding any emotional or mental engagement. With Lundahl & Seitl leading the way, being uncertain has never felt safer and Explode... is a thought-provoking, gentle and kindly journey into the unknown, innovative, original and utterly irresistible.

Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

http://lundahl-seitl.com/

http://www.bac.org.uk