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.