Ei Arakawa at the Japan Society

Friday, November 2nd

Having heard much high praise for Arakawa’s performances, I eagerly anticipated the Ei Arakawa performance BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowers) at the Japan Society. Billed as a “Live performance of painting-actions (not action-painting). Lives of paintings in and out. True paintings will dance and move in many ways,” with the added note that it would include “two real paintings of Amy Sillman,” I was uncertain what to expect. However, knowing that, as the Performa website puts it, Arakawa’s performances often “teeter on the brink of random chaos,” I was prepared to take each development with some patience and vigilance.


The performance started slowly, with no defined beginning. If one entered, as I did, at the listed starting time, one was told that the performers were still preparing and the performance would be delayed by ten to fifteen minutes. I found myself a place to stand as more audience members shuffled into the lobby where the performance space had been set up. There was little area to fit around the demarcated stage, and as audience members squeezed around each other, Arakawa came out. He began adjusting various stands and objects, asking viewers to stop taking pictures as the performance had not yet begun, then he tried to move audience members more evenly around the space, eventually offering seats placed within the stage area to the audience as well. The lights dimmed as other performers came out, adjusted screens and stands, and began collecting the flowers audience members had been instructed to bring. No directed lighting appeared, but at some point music, with a driving beat, thankfully started up, giving me something to latch onto and pull me into the performance in spite of its sluggish beginning.


In the half-light of this stage, performers made their way around screens and tables as they began smearing and crushing, or perhaps “painting” the collected flowers against a variety of surfaces throughout the performance space, from Styrofoam screens to fabric drapes. Running around breathless, Arakawa gathered the last of the flowers, looking almost like some sort of marathon runner, pacing himself for the rest of the performance. The performance crew then broke out into a cleaning session, using vacuums to suck up the petals and other remains of the vegetal violence. Several performers began removing drapes of translucent fabric, while others attacked the drapes with pruning shears. A Sewing machine appeared, and a portion of the removed drapes were stitched together, then re-hung. Meanwhile, from my vantage point, the sounds of simple construction – drilling screws into wood – were just audible from the opposite side of the stage.

As the din of sewing machine and vacuum died out, Arakawa launched into a PowerPoint presentation of the alcoholic tendencies of various painters (and critics) from modern art history, accompanied by sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon straight from the case. The lecture ground to a close as construction continued behind the power-point projection screen. Arakawa grabbed a stack of cereal boxes with what appeared to be prints of a Sillman painting pasted to their surfaces. These cereal boxes, Arakawa explained, were to be sold the first bidder at each named price. He would modify – read destroy – each successive box more, thereby increasing its worth and thus its price. Prices started at $20 and ran in $5 increments to $50. Although certain audience members volunteered to purchase under the impression that nothing was serious, Arakawa refused to hand the boxes over without an actual monetary exchange. Still, the boxes were auctioned off as quickly as legitimate bids occurred.




















The action then moved to a construction phase in which the main focus of activity seemed to be the construction of frames to display actual Amy Sillman paintings next to a large printed reproduction. As this construction appeared to draw to a close, the director of the Japan Society came out to introduce “Amy Sillman and Phong Bui, from the Brooklyn Rail” for a “conversation.” As it turned out, this “conversation” was clearly a restaging, with the two reading from a printed interview, and the actual identities of the performers were suspect as well.


















I tried for a few minutes to actually follow the conversation, but I found myself constantly distracted by the construction continuing around the two speakers, as well as their own movements. The pre-fabricated conversation picked up speed and, compounded by the interviewer’s casual consumption of various snack–foods, began to take on a Chaplin-esqe tone. The content of the interview became totally obscured by the performance: it became more about the rhythms of the actions, the cadence of the words and movements.









However, during this conversation, the construction around the paintings continued. Screens that had obscured views across the space were taken down; drapes were again repositioned. Flowers were brought out again, and, again, they were smeared on fabric and various screens, but then they were stuck through Styrofoam, actually becoming part of the construction. As walls were taken down and reused in this new construction, the arena opened up from its original compartmentalization into one centralized stage with the paintings at the focal point. As the conversation between “Sillman” and “Bui” came to a close, the director of the Japan Society came out and announced that this was the end of the performance. The actions of the performers never stopped, however. As the director made the statement, the performers smoothly transitioned into a dismantling set pieces, collecting equipment, and generally cleaning the remains of the performance, again obscuring the distinction between performance and set strike.



Throughout the piece, there was a tension between action and performance. As good little audience members, our attention kept wandering to the “performances”: the lecture, the auction, the conversation. Arakawa skillfully kept these performances just interesting enough to catch our attention, but then frustrated us by making them difficult to see and hear, and strangely lacking in satisfying content. They were like footnotes, asides to a text on painting, but couldn’t form a full narrative in and of themselves. The lack of focused lighting allowed the viewers’ attention to wander, separating the storyline, fracturing the performance and making each viewer’s experience unique depending on their location, their attention. The melding of the performance space with the audience space, compounded by the movements of viewers following performers to different sections of the stage, effectively dissolved the edges of the performance, keeping us guessing about what was staged and what was spontaneous.



Upon reflection, all of this served to highlight the in-between moments: the shifts from space to space, from action to action. The constant construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction form the storyline. Like all good Japanese artists, Arakawa is aware of the ma, the space around an object, image, or in this case, performance. However, unlike many other artists who simply use this space to frame their subject, Arakawa has chosen to take this space as the content of his work. A challenging stance, he has done a remarkable job of foregrounding the moments we usually dismiss, while drawing a parallel to the creative process. He shows us how creativity never appears where or when we expect it, but rather shows up during those transitional moments that we so often disregard or forget. For that, I admire his work.



Having said this, I must add, however, that despite having enjoyed the performance, I had an impression of something lacking as I left. Even now, as I reflect on the work, I feel as though I needed more substance to the work. Perhaps it is an unavoidable side effect of taking the in-between as the subject in a work. Perhaps it is my own personal flaw that I cannot take this performance as complete in its current form. I hesitate to say that it is due to its subtlety, for I much prefer subtlety to dramatics in artwork, but it is possible that in this context in which an already understated subject has been chosen, it would be best to have some slight highlighting of these in-between moments. Nothing too dramatic, but some well-placed lighting or some slightly tighter choreography between music and action (although one wants to avoid a truly staged feeling in these might possibly lend the piece an entirely too conclusive air). It is difficult to say whether such changes would aid or hamper the performance as this is ultimately a challenging subject to take on, and Arakawa handles it quite deftly. Visually stimulating, conceptually intriguing, no one can doubt the skill or sincerity of his artistic endeavor, but for all its proficiency, I was still left wanting more.

‘I AM NOT ALLAN KAPROW (but I could be confused for him at a distance.)’

Or,
‘Why reinvent the wheel?’ an argument in favor of doing it again
Or,
‘A Few Thoughts on my ‘FLUIDS’ (Allan Kaprow, 1967) reinvention for the Performa>07 biennial at Cooper Union.’



By way of introduction I was approached by the Performa>07 biennial and asked if I was interested in doing an Allan Kaprow piece in conjunction with a number of other Kaprow related events they were sponsoring (18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Push and Pull). After some research and reflection I proposed doing ‘FLUIDS’ with a group of Cooper Union students.

After deciding to do ‘FLUIDS’ and setting in motion the various agencies required to realize it, the Kaprow estate contacted us with the language we were to use: it was to be a ‘reinvention’. Once invented, twice . . .. ‘reinvented’? With its emphasis on an initial historical moment it deepened an already vexing question about doing a performance/happening/event that has already occurred – where on the spectrum of participation and authorship does a ‘reinvention’ lie? If I tried to imagine the line of authorship with, on the one hand, the most traditional form of copying – the easel painters in the Metropolitan of Art or a cover band - with their concern for making an exact replica and on the other end of that line the appropriation or ‘revisitation’ artist (how to describe Marina Abramovic’s ‘7 easy pieces’?) – where an original piece is made subservient to a new set of artistic demands – I wondered where would ‘FLUIDS’ lie. Worried that both Performa>07 and the Kaprow estate wanted a replica of the piece, and knowing that I would never be able to provide it, I was reminded of what Steve Martin said about translation: that it was like a bad marriage. First it’s about contrived fidelity, then it’s about concealed transgressions, finally – it’s about survival.


While I was parsing this dilemma, I attended a panel discussion with Stephanie Rosenthal, Irving Sandler and the artist Paul McCarthy on Kaprow’s work. The issue of this new practice of revisiting Kaprow’s work came up as Stephanie Rosenthal had just curated a major show of his work at the Haus der Kunst in Munich - and had ‘reinvented’ a number of his events/happenings. The conversation revolved in part around his last instructions (he passed away last year) regarding doing his happenings anew. His instructions were: ‘look at the documentation, reinvent the piece’. This was, in essence what I had done anyway – poured over Jeff Kelly’s book ‘Childs play’ with its black and white photos and first hand accounts – and invented the piece.


While those directives give license to a performer in the same way a score would, they also raise the danger that the original documentation becomes too fixed a point of reference. I had project managed Performa>07’s presentation of ’18 Happening in 6 Parts’, where a stage designer had been hired to rebuild the original 1959 loft space the event had happened in– from the original photos (1,000 square feet of mdf had a variable flooring pattern ripped into it on a table saw to replicate the original floors in the documentation). It’s a short step from there to making costumes from the 50’s and 60’s and rehearsing period accents. The result would be a contrived fidelity – a forced verisimilitude. It would be equivalent to a word-to-word computer translation that literalizes and flattens the language, losing syntax and meaning along the way.


In the end it was the students and the internal logic of the piece that brought it to life. Unlike a theatrical event where parts are memorized, or a FLUXUS score where a chart is given for a series of actions, FLUIDS is a task, like a bucket brigade or barn raising. We had 24,000lbs of ice and were going to build a rectangular enclosure. There was no script or directions, no manual for the right or wrong way to do it (beyond its size of 30 feet long x 10 feet wide x 8 feet tall), and the possibility of it failing or being hopelessly compromised – as with any task- was present.

The students took to it with enthusiasm, a crowd gathered to watch, passers-by asked what it was and strangers explained, contingent meanings flowed towards it (a crane was erected across the street, the workers came to admire our work as we had admired theirs), men in the park jeered the students, Allan Kaprow’s widow stopped by as did my girlfriend and daughter, the students all ate pizza together - and, in the middle of this activity I knew that the intelligence of the piece could only arise out of doing it, and that reinvention was, after all, the appropriate term–we were the first, doing it again.

By early afternoon we were on the outside of a space that we could no longer see inside of. When the students laid the last row of ice blocks at 8’, they closed in an empty space. While we knew there was ‘nothing’ there, as it were, (and I had seen that ‘nothing’ dozens of times in the documentation from 1967) it was a nothing that invited contemplation. It occurred to me that that interior space, unseeable and inexplicable, perfectly mirrored the ‘nothing’ that went into it’s making. Both were at once the purpose of the piece and perfectly invisible. In response to a question about when the ‘performance’ would start I overheard one of my students say, ‘this is it.’ You couldn’t really see it, but we were doing it.

Then it melted.

David Medalla: "FOUR ACES - A participatory performance"

David Medalla at the Swiss Institute, 11/06/07

As we come into the art space, we see fabrics on the floor of one part of the space, defining what is to become the stage. Visitors are invited to take a seat on chairs facing this stage, and also on the margins of the stage itself. Next to this carpet of fabrics, we see a group of young men, all wearing nothing but white t-shirts and white briefs.

David Medalla starts his performance with a monologue addressing the audience:

His choice of young men is not only aesthetic, but based on a painting by Piera della Francesca, which is displayed at the National Gallery in London. He points out that the Renaissance was a period when the human body was free of censorship, and that a marker of repressive societies is the repression of the human body and human needs. He also talks of other paintings he saw at the National Gallery in London that represent people playing cards, and that in this performance, cards play the role of assigning arbitrary meanings.

From this art historical set up, Medalla moves into a personal story.

When he lived in New York in the nineties, he lived in a place too far out in Queens and didn’t have a ‘Green Card.’ He decided to live as a homeless person in Thompson Park and do performances for a living.

For example, he put a branch on his head, similar to the one right here.

He also had a moneybag in his hand. When people came to ask what he was doing, he answered “it’s a wishin

g tree. When you put money into the bag, make a wish and it will come true.” When they asked if he could guarantee that their wish would come true, he said “no, I can’t.” Nevertheless, they gave him money, and so he continued with this performance, even repeating it in other cities.

Later, as an invited artist on a DAAD stipend in Europe, a woman walked up to him. “Do you remember me? Because, I remember you!” “No, I’m sorry, I don’t. I do this very often.” It turns out that this woman had put 300 dollars into Medalla’s moneybag. “Of course! I wanted to

thank you!” The woman continues to tell her story. When she saw him in Thompson Park, she made th

three wishes: to divorce her husband, to get a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and to live happily. All the wishes came true. She took Medalla out to dinner and gave him an envelope to be opened later. She had given him another three thousand dollars.

On this note, the young men start giving out envelopes to the audience, for everyone to make a wish and donate money.

Every individual man is asked to introduce himself, talk a bit about their lives, what they are doing, and how they came to perform here.

Most of them turned out to be artists or performers themselves, coming to the performance through art organizations, though some were curators or actors. Medalla seems not to have met them before.

The men give out sticky notes, and everyone in the audience is asked to write a noun on them.

Next, Medalla explains the playing cards, to be drawn later: Hearts stand for a verb, Spades for an adjective, Clubs for adverbs, and the Joker for anything.

Medalla reminds the audience that all is about utter meaninglessness.

We hear music, English and French ballads about love.

Throughout the whole performance, Medalla gives precise instructions for each step, calmly and persistently. Although nothing appears to be practiced, the performers do a very experienced job in following the given steps.

One after one, each young man takes off his shirt, then holds up a color copy of the detail of the Renaissance painting. Half-naked, they sit down in a circle and Medalla starts dancing in the middle. He looks mischievous, obviously enjoying himself. Then they all dance, culminating in throwing their t-shirts up in the air.

Medalla explains the four suits of cards, representing now the four directions. With their shirts and photocopies, the young men form a cross and a circle. Then they all point north, south, east and west. As they were first instructed to point, a funny slip occurred: many of them pointed in conflicting directions.

They all lie down are told to sleep and dream.

He asks the audience to close their eyes and dream. However, hardly anyone even pretends to. He also addresses the audience with other speeches, but the music is too loud for me to understand what he’s saying. Then Medalla wakes up the young men. He says, “I was going to offer you rice cakes, but I forgot them in Brooklyn.” Instead, they receive rubber balls to play with, and they do so joyfully.

I’m impressed by Medalla’s balancing of his script and with the improvisation. He seems very masterful at creating an atmosphere of calm, focus, and playfulness.

After playtime with the balls, the young men are told to represent the four seasons with body language. They repeat this task twice. As they arrive in winter for the second time, they get close together to hug and keep each other warm.

The erotic atmosphere increases with the next game: forming a circle with one young man standing in the middle, the others are supposed to form a star, using a twine. As they start experimenting, several get caught up in twine, rather bondage-style. The star formation has come out of control erotically.

You can smell the men’s sweat throughout the Swiss Institute. Using the previously distributed post its, the young men start reciting and making up short poems, and so does the audience. That’s when Medalla starts sticking the sticky-note nouns from earlier onto their backs.

While the poetry recital is spinning out of control, Medalla begins wrapping golden fabric around the waists of “his boys.” This fabric mirrors the golden flag in the background which announces the details of the performance. He proceeds to explain more to the audience, but the simultaneous poetry recital makes it too loud to understand anything. (see video below)

We are coming to the last part. Medalla reads out four postcards which he has written to friends during his brief NYC stay. The first three of them strike me as rather professional, announcing and describing future events mostly. Only the last postcard describes personally what he has been doing in New York. It’s a pragmatic description of preparations for the performance we just saw, along with impressions of the New York Marathon. Medalla thanks his friend for helping him move his books out of his London flat in Hackney.

The performance ends with Medalla thanking everybody and the young men collecting the envelopes. The cash inside is for them to keep.

Overall, the audience seemed amused, and they clapped cheerfully. Only a few left during the performance.

Personally, I can’t say if I liked the piece or not. It simply ‘was.’ And since I’m a fan of work that ‘is’ rather than being ‘about,’ I went home in a good mood after a night well spent at another successful event in the “Spoken Word Exhibition” series.

Later, I had a chance to chat a bit with the performers, and I invited them to contribute to this blog. So, if you read this, boys, let us know! What were your impressions? How did you feel on the stage?

naked attic from a fan

>>> dear naked attic authors, look what i found for you in nyc ... a naked attic! ahoj! klarinka

Karl Holmqvist at the Swiss Institute

Spoken Word Exhibition at the Swiss Institute

November 1^st, 2007, 6 pm: Karl Holmqvist

Curated by Mathieu Copeland, the Swiss Institute currently presents an unusual live exhibition. Instead of showing visual art, the institute’s staff reproduces spoken art given to them by visual artists.

The visitors are invited to walk up to any staff member, and pick one of the 15 artist names on the list. Included are: Vito Acconci, Robert Barry, James Lee Byars, Nick Currie (aka Momus), Douglas Coupland, Karl Holmquist, David Medalla, Gustav Metzger, Maurizio Nannucci, Yoko Ono, Mai-Thu Perret, Emilio Prini, Tomas Vanek, Lawrence Weiner, and Ian Wilson. Then, the staff member will briefly consult a piece of paper with directions previously given by the artist, and read out the designated text to the visitor.

There is also one black box room with an audio installation called “A series of spoken word retrospectives, Gustav Metzger/69 minutes, David Medalla/70 minutes”.

In addition, each night, one artist performs live from 6:00 to 6:30 pm.

I went to see Karl Holmqvist, and it was a real pleasure. After Tony Conrad’s torture two nights earlier (see review below), Holmqvist’s performance at the Swiss Institute was soothing and encouraging indeed.

The general atmosphere at the institute was pleasant, calm, unpretentious, and welcoming.

The presentation’s setup was simple—a small table, a chair, and a microphone, placed toward the middle of the space. On the table, the curator set up a folded brochure. This was the artist’s issue, of a new Berlin based publication called“FACEHUG.” Peeking at it, one could recognize blocks of text arranged in abstract patterns of rows and columns.

Without any spectacle or introduction, Karl Holmqvist took the microphone, and started reading from this folder, using it as if a score. Very soon, the audience found themselves immersed in an aura of meditation, and sensuality. Holmqvist’s narration started out by using fragments of David Bowie’s ballad “Five Years”: “Pushing through the market square, … So many mothers sighing, …”

His reading technique was impressively perfectionized: It created an organic blend of spoken words, repetition, and fragmentation of sentences. Holmqvist performed these words in an unusual breathing technique, sometimes as if inspired by a record that’s been bent or cracked, sometimes reminiscent of vocalists such as Bjork.

Linked associatively, Holmqvist repeated certain words or sentence fragments, using surprising ways of speeding them up and slowing them down, letting them fall, to then pick them up again. Mentally, one then could pull these links together in a musical but also visual manner.

From my first impression, most of the experimentation happened within an unusual, “bent” way of stressing and stretching syllables of a word, but I’d have to hear the piece more often to sure.

Visually, the artist’s presence, both in physical and facial expression, reminded me of a musician’s solo presentation, rather than a visual artist’s performance or a writer’s reading.

When it came to the content of the text, Holmqvist’s vocal color and experimental intonation of the sentence and word fragments brought in the perfect equalization between emotion and perfectionist technique. The writing drew a large cycle of emotionally and politically existential topics: alienation, pain, escaping the past, losing everything, private property, homelessness, media frenzy, celebrity obsession, dreams, love and loneliness, mission in life, sex, birth, and death.

However, Holmqvist’s reading/singing technique carefully walked the line and succeeded in avoiding banalization or kitsch. Rather, it touched directly on that certain state of the human condition that artists strive for throughout their whole lives.

The reading concluded with the ending lines of Bowie’s “Five Years.”

Much like David Bowie’s voice and ballads, this performance left us in a mood of tenderness and compassion.

Karl Holmqvist is the first artist of the publication called “FACEHUG,” #1/2007, and can be ordered for 13 Euros (ISBN 978-91-633-1375-2).

The Spoken Word Exhibition runs November 1^st to 7^th, 2007, 12 pm to 12 am. In addition to the staff’s live vocalizations on demand during the day, each night there is a live spoken word performance by an individual artist at 6 pm.

Cesare Pietroiusti, James Morrison, Pete Drungle, and Cyrus Amundson in Queens

Tonight I went to a performance at the Texas Firehouse in Queens.

I had never been there before.

The show was called "If I See You Around Here Again, I'm Going to Call the Cops. No, Really... "

James Morrison was performing a piece called 'In Memory of'

Tied up on stage - he silkscreened these cards and then dropped them to the floor.

I spoke with him for a minute through his cage.

Unrelated to James' performance, someone was playing the song Heroin by the Velvet Underground.

That song always reminds me of sitting in my room in high school. I couldn't wait to move to New York and go to weird parties. I can picture exactly what I thought it would be like...

Later on I went to the Sculpture Center to see Cesare Pietroiusti's video. Projected against a vaulted wall in the basement, the video was shot in 2006 during the eviction of the Angela Mai squat in Rome.

Cesare went into the basement and tried to break through a coridoor wall.

"Are you looking for something?" asks a voice off camera. "No," he answers.

"But are you searching?" the same man asks.

"Perhaps in order to know what is on the other side." says Cesare.

It's weird because earlier today, I was at the site of another mass eviction. 1717 Troutman in Queens.

My friend Cyrus Amundson was being evicted from his home along with hundreds of other people.

This was the final hour before they were locked out of the building forever.

Cyrus made an installation in his studio with some of his paintings that he could not move or store.

I couldn't take a picture of the scene we witnessed as we were leaving. A march of kids and parents, taking the last of what they could carry down a jammed staircase and out into the street a line of rental trucks.

Upstairs from Cesare's piece,

Pete Drungle was performing 'Continuous 24-Hour Solo Piano Improvisation (Daylight Savings Mode)"

It was almost midnight and I was the only other person in the room.

Pete seemed unaffected by fatigue.

In a way it reminded me of James and Cyrus and Cesare. Bound to perform under the conditions of the modern age...

When I got home, my roommates were watching 'A Clockwork Orange" and I arrived just as Alex was being kicked out of his house.

His ex friends had all turned cop.

And they beat the crap out of him in the woods. 'my god' I thought. 'is this what we are coming to?'

But remember, that in the very end of the movie, Alex returns to the site of his most hideous crime,

and ends up getting everything he wants.