NAKED ATTIC

‘Stockroom; The Planet in Orgasm, or, Freedom from the Known' a lecture by Zach Rockhill

2011-03-10T16:16:00.022-05:00

What follows is the transcript of a lecture I gave in February 2011 at Grand Arts in Kansas City as part of the Imaginative Reinvention of Education Symposium:

In 2009 I was invited by the curator Chiara Vechiarelli, in conjunction with the arts organization at Ca’ Zenobio in Venice to reinvent an Allan Kaprow happening as part of one of their scheduled peripheral events to the Venice Biennale.

Allan Kaprow, 'Stockroom' 1967

The invitation to revisit Kaprow’s work in Venice had been preceded by my doing a large scale re-invention of Kaprow’s ‘FLUIDS’ from 1967 at the invitation of the Performa ’07 biennial.

There is a core paradox in revisiting Kaprow’s work. Kaprow’s impulse towards art was founded on making singular works of art that insisted on their ephemeral natures, “something never before done, by a method never before used, whose outcome is unforeseen." I proposed to Ca’ Zenobio to revisit Kaprow’s earliest environmental happening, ‘Stockroom’, from 1961. Their 16^th century palazzo seemed the perfect place to envision a spirited and messy American event.

Kaprow issued these instructions for the piece:

“Basically, the work is to be conceived organically rather than geometrically, though one should not interpret these words in any absolute way. The “feel” of it should be one of artlessness or stylelessness, therefore. This of course requires of the composer the utmost in responsibility and devotion to his job. While flexibility is intended within certain limits, license is to be discouraged.”

At around the same time, following a thread of interest that evolved in my studio practice out of watching Tarkovsky films, I found myself reading Stanislav Lem’s novel ‘Solaris’ (which Tarkovsky had made into a film of the same name). ‘Solaris’ was published in 1961, the same year that Kaprow mounted ‘Stockroom’. On the surface this is a benign and perhaps totally unremarkable coincidence - but as I read and then re-read Solaris it dawned on me that there was a relationship between the two art works.

I’d been sensitized to the possibility of a relationship born of coincidence by an arrest at LaGuardia Airport in New York around this time. A young man named Scott McGann was caught on the jetway with a ‘bomb’ - that turned out to be a time machine.

His arrest perfectly mirrored Chris Marker’s sci-fi film ‘La Jetee’ – the time machine, the search for his mother, Orly/LaGuardia airports looking the same - and it left me thinking that confluences of art works across time and space might be more the norm than the exception. At the time I became obsessed with finding collapsed boundaries between art and life, geography, and time. Why couldn’t these events be tied to one another, and to myself? Scott McGann hadn’t woken up from his catatonic state following his arrest at LaGuardia and had been interred at Bellevue – unreachable. We'll never know if he'd seen Marker's film.

In spite of the derision being heaped on him by the press I couldn’t help wondering if perhaps his device hadn’t worked, if his body wasn't just a place holder, a buoy to mark his travels. What if each one of us, Lem, Kaprow and myself were the intersections of a triangle –in some other dimension - forming this new work?

'La Jetee/Daily News Swap' 2009, Zach Rockhill

“Solaris” is set on a space station orbiting the planet Solaris in the far future. The cosmonauts on the station are the last of several generations of scientists who’ve been trying to establish contact with the intelligent and sentient being that is the planet Solaris. Solaris’s one vast ocean creates enormous architectural and sculptural ‘mimoids’, ‘symmetriads’– sculptural forms - for no apparent reason.

“On gala days (for the scientist as well as for the mimoid, an unforgettable spectacle develops as the mimoid goes into hyperproduction and performs wild flights of fancy. It plays variations on the theme of a given object and embroiders ‘formal extensions’ that amuse it for hours on end, to the delight of the non-figurative artist and to the despair of the scientist, who is at a loss to grasp any common theme in the performance. The mimoid can produce ‘primitive’ simplifications, but is just as likely to indulge in ‘baroque’ deviation, paroxysms of extravagant brilliance. Old mimoids tend to manufacture extremely comic forms. Looking at the photographs, I have never been moved to laughter; the riddle they set is too disquieting to be funny.”

The cosmonauts, in an effort to make Solaris in its architectural and sculptural exuberance communicate with them, (which it hadn’t done during the hundreds of years of their research) deliberately irradiate a swath of the ocean with microwave radiation. Following this, Solaris begins to reproduce inside the space station people from the cosmonauts’ past, dead people. The protagonist of the story, Kelvin, has his dead wife Rheya appear on the station in perfect health.

Film still from Tarkovsky's 'Solaris' showing Kelvin and Rheya

My first impression of ‘Solaris’ was that every sculpture student should be made to read it for its fantastic anology to the artistic process – an autistic ocean that makes sculpture, motivated by unknown forces. But then it dawned on me that, in reinventing the historic work of Kaprow, I was bringing back to the living something that was singular and now dead. What Solaris, the sentient and autistic ocean, did to Kelvin’s wife, I was now doing to ‘Stockroom’, circa 1961.

'Symetriade/FLUIDS 2007'

The novel, after the appearance of Kelvin’s dead wife Rheya on the space station, is a meditation on desire, grief and death. In the end, the cosmonauts can’t determine what the motive on the part of the Ocean is in sending the dead back to them, in much the same way that I couldn’t totally clarify my motives behind revisiting Kaprow. From ‘Solaris’:

"Unable to plumb Solaris's motive for the re-visitations, Kelvin becomes aware that despite his scientific and rational effort to understand his predicament, he loves the re-visitation as he loved the original: "You may have been sent to torment me, or to make my life happier, or as an instrument ignorant of its function, used like a microscope with me on the slide. Possibly you are here as a token of friendship, or a subtle punishment, or even as a joke. It could be all of those at once, or - which is more probably - something else completely."

I loved the work, it was a torment and made my life happier, I wasn’t sure what the motive on the part of the institutions that wanted this work were (though I continued to act on that imperative to revisit it), and there was friendship, as well as difficulty and punishment, in the work. Having set this analogy in motion I began to wonder - in a paranoid jag – if I also wasn’t an instrument ignorant of its function.

Film Still from Steven Soderbergh's 2002 version of 'Solaris'

The poles of this problem: history and the past on the one hand, the present tense and expanded field of possibility on the other, Lem and Kaprow, closely model a dilemma that I face as a teacher (of art). The problem was loosely addressed in the performance workshop that I did then with a group of students from the Academia in Venice.

What is the nature of this dilemma for a teacher and how does my odd pairing of Solaris and Kaprow model it? Everything that we agree is art has its genesis in other art, and knowledge in previous knowledge. There is always a precedent, a starting point and a model for what it is. Everyone comes to the endeavor with some idea of what it is and how it functions. The category of art as we understand it – with its constantly shifting tide lines of location, materiality, activity, performativity, dead and undead genres – can only be described by saying ‘the category of art’, -as absurd as that sounds. The planet Solaris can only send back to Kelvin something that he already knows and something that is dead. The mind can only project outwards what it already knows and it looks to repeat itself. Or, as Lem says later in Solaris, through Kelvin’s fellow cosmonaut Gibrarian, regarding contact with extra-terrestrials;

“We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.”

And yet, what I, as a teacher, want for my students, is not repetition of other models or a mirror of the past. I want for them to make work in a boundaryless field of possibility, in a constant present tense of limitless horizons and enormous energy. I want them activated by what Joseph Beuys called ‘field character’ and I call endless orgiastic play, rigorous pleasure, ‘the planet in orgasm’ as Lem described Solaris – an enormous intelligent will to live. Call it what you like. Every student comes to art with, hidden on their person, the recognition that our lives should be constituted of something greater than this, a utopian impulse, a dream of possible lives - rich, deep, oceanic lives.

This brings me to the question of my role as a teacher, my position during that performance workshop in 2009, and one of the purposes of this symposium.

If on the one hand we’ve all arrived at the space station of - in my case art, but enter here whatever your endeavor in life is; architecture, engineering, cooking - and we are circling the planet earth looking to communicate with a vast intelligent being, that Lem describes as:

‘a monstrous entity endowed with reason, a proto-plasmic ocean-brain enveloping the entire planet and idling away its time in extravagant theoretical cognition about the nature of the universe.’

If we’re trying to communicate and all it sends back to us are the dead, and the teachers themselves speak in the language of the dead, but we believe there is a new form emerging of vast potentiality, how do we teach to it? How do we nurture – to borrow George Kubler’s term - “prime objects” over replications? What is our role as a teacher in this landscape? How do we open the door to the ‘something else completely’ of Kelvin’s description above?

In 2009 I described the project to the students in Venice; that there was a confluence between Kaprow, now gone but having insisted throughout his life on an artistic endeavor of constant innovation, and Lem’s learning to love through the ambivalent gesture of occupying dead forms. I told them about 1961 and about ‘Solaris’ and ‘Stockroom’ appearing on opposite sides of the earth with opposing impulses. I told them that I thought that the earth had asked me to come to Venice to build an elaborate mimoid/installation with them in the hope that we could occupy the present tense together.

They laughed. Being Italian, I realized, they were comfortable with the transubstantiation of the dead. I think this is where the imperative of the teacher in relationship to the student might be the most prescient – because what we were aiming for in that workshop was transubstantiation, transformation, and we were doing it with the hovering danger of committing necrophilia.

What do I mean by this? Every model, every idea of what art is or could be, that a student comes to making art with is at once the vehicle for their liberation - it has taught them that there is an expanded field for them to occupy - and their master, having set the terms of engagement in a vocabulary not their own. In the analogy of Solaris, as a studio art teacher – and I’m sure that the studio art teachers in the room can relate to this – the dead are all the ghosts in a student’s practice. They are the family of artists that a student self-identifies with. The ghosts are the earliest exposure and impression on the student, or on any artist, of the possibility of what a life in art might mean. Most importantly, the ghosts are also what we - as teachers - tell them art is.

Film Still from Tarkovsky's 'Solaris', Kelvin is having to tear Rheya's dress open because Solaris,

reproduced what he cannot remember about his dead wife - the buttons.

They appear and like Rheya, they look similar to things we’ve loved (or the student has), or have been told to love. If you try to undress them though, like Kelvin, you find that Solaris has mimicked only what was in Kelvin’s mind. They have no buttons on their dresses and no laces on their shoes – Kelvin having been unable to recall those details of his dead wife. The student, divided from the original creative act by their own partial knowledge of their attraction leaves equivalent vacancies. Kelvin asks Rheya where she came from – just now – and she can’t answer, Solaris having no memory to project into a past. They’re not fully formed. They are discordant, misshapen, and incomplete. If you mishandle them they are incredibly strong and resilient.

It is at this point at which many teachers of art diverge; with the majority saying simply ‘art cannot be taught’. What they mean is, beyond the etiquette lessons of materiality, the dead cannot rise, there is no transubstantiation. It occurs to me here, as I’m arguing for raising the dead, that my first impulse is decidedly un-messiah like: I think it’s imperative to put one’s hand down the back of Rheya’s dress to check for buttons; to acknowledge that language, whether spoken, written or transmitted through images or objects, is the currency of our exchange, and must, alongside the effort to generate prime forms, be self-aware of its previously inhabited meanings.

The question after that is how to negotiate the space between, on the one hand, the attraction to Rheya, the form, the language (whatever it is) and on the other, the complicated matrix that is our lived experience, between – as flat footed as it may sound – between form and content. The challenge is how to bring them into contact with one another and have the full and unarticulated spectrum of our lives fill the vacancies of the form we chose – ideally to exceed that form and synthesize into something never before done, something else completely.

It would take a second and third symposium to address the methods that good teachers use to negotiate this endeavor. As we’re about to go do a movement workshop with the dancer Leralee Whittle that loosely explores the pedagogic model I’ve described above, I think its important to mention that I see teachers as guides who set structures for unknown outcomes. In the analogy I’ve used, lets imagine that the ‘Rheya’ that has appeared amongst us is our own body, our relationship to it half formed, partial, loving and ambivalent. The only witness in the room is yourself, and Rheya.

Zach Rockhill

February 2011

Imaginative Reinvention of Education Symposium

Grand Arts, Kansas City

2009-11-20T16:43:00.009-05:00

TALK SHOW, Omer Fast, Abrons Art Center. November 11, 2009.

Two middle age men stepped onto the stage; they both looked familiar to me.

“So how did you get into this mess?” one man asked.

The other man proceeded to answer this question. He spoke about life in the 60’s, how teaching led him to political activism, and how Kennedy and Martin Luther King's deaths turned him toward violent measures. He reminisced about falling in love and burst into protest songs twice. The man spoke passionately, nervously and yet seemed a bit rehearsed. He ended his story by describing the accidental explosion at 11th street that killed his girlfriend and collaborator “Diane.”

This was when I realized that the person speaking was Bill Ayers from Weather Underground, and as in most of his interviews about the Underground, he made it clear that while Diane's death changed his entire approach, it also made him more determined to be an activist for the peace movement.

Applause.

Ayers exited the stage, and Lili Taylor took his seat. She asked the man on stage, whom I later found out was actor Tom Noonan, “So how did you get into this mess?” The game of telephone began.

And it was broken right the way. The actor had left out most of the idiosyncratic details in Ayers' narrative. His lifelong ideological struggle quickly evaporated into a tall tale about how loving a young woman led him to violent and regretful political actions. This left very little for Lili to work with. She basically had to start from a fairly generic love story and spin it out into a performance removed from historical context. Despite all, she did manage to captivate the audience with the tone and emotion of her performance.

Four more performers took turns. While I never thought a work by Omer Fast would make me laugh out loud, I was grateful that comedian Dave Hill took charge of the few rather grim narratives and injected some comic relief. By the time we got to the last performer, Rosie Perez, Diane had become a dangerously beautiful queer activist killed in an anti-Iraq-war protest because the protesters were making bombs to one-up each other in a competition for attention.

It was hard to watch Bill Ayers’ story deteriorating into farce with him sitting in the front row. But what did we expect? The performance was meant to be a kind of high-end theatrical experiment. And yet I couldn’t help but compare it to Fast’s other video works, particularly Godville (2005.) My dissatisfaction with the theater piece led me to explore how different performative structures produce and alter meaning, and how the role of forgetting plays out in the artist’s work.

In Talk Show, forgetting is a part of the act, a form of omission based on improvisation and the pressure of telling a story in real time. When something is left out by a player early in the chain, every subsequent player has to construct the narrative without that information.

In Godville, forgetting is the subject matter. The impression of a hole in the narrative is created through repeating and layering multiple interpretations, using jump cuts to compress time. The more we see, the less we feel we know about the actual narrative. In contrast, in the theater version where time is linear, the dissonance comes from the fact that we know more than the performer.

I guess the act of forgetting is much messier in real life. Rather than a kind of metaphorical erosion that we tend to theorize and recreate, forgetting things can be abrupt and arbitrary as a game of telephone.

And how about Bill Ayers? I wonder how many times he has told his story at this point in his life, and how many edits he has gone through in order to present a version of a remembrance that might just be too significant to be broken apart.

-- Annie Shaw

2009-11-15T12:33:00.005-05:00

William Kentridge, ‘I AM NOT ME, THE HORSE IS NOT MINE’

Part lit. 102 ‘Russian Authors’, part manifesto, part mission statement, part midnight rambling, part literary history of the fragmented self, part didactic lecture, part comedy routine, part fragments of other parts. . .

. . . it begins as a lecture. Kentridge is on stage describing for us his research into Nicolai Gogol’s short story ‘The Nose’ for an upcoming opera ‘The Nose’ by Shostakovich. He’s an enthusiastic college professor, energized by the profundity of his subject: the fragmented self in the western cannon. He reads aloud from the text, pince-nez on, pince-nez off, on and off, off and on, the artist’s handsome prodigious nose. That nose! Then, of course, Gogol’s nose in the story is gone, off on a career of its own and we follow it, and as we do, Kentridge appears on the stage in the projection behind him. He’s in the Kentridge uniform, his own Chaplin bowler/Beuys vest: white shirt and black pants. The doubled self is pathetic, shuffles on stage, shoulders slumped, trying to hide, a bum, a clown; he’s channeling Kentridge’s failure, the possibility that nothing will align, no point of meaning arrive. He listens, bored, as Kentridge delves deeper into the history of the fragmented self: from Gogol, to Cervantes to Tristam Shandy, self divided against self, stories within stories.

Kentridge lectures on our capacity to make bits of paper into form. The projection becomes hands forming a horse of torn paper: it’s the horse in Cervantes, the horse in the title that appears. It starts with 10 pieces of paper for the horse, then 6 then 3: the limit of our capacity to hold it is reached. Overextended, it becomes paper again. The papers fall off the page and the pathetic double dodges them. He gathers Kentridge’s dropped papers and hurls them in the air, collects them in reverse order. Later he falls asleep on a chair and then he sneaks away silently.

We proceed through a series of fragment and vignettes as Kentridge circles for meaning within the larger project of forming the Opera. He’s kept awake at night in bed (he appears in the projection with his wife sleeping soundly beside him at 4 am) trying to make meaning out of the bits and pieces he’s presented with. He’s searching for parallels with Gogol’s story: ‘Trotsky is the Nose separated from the party . . . no no’ he says, followed by, ‘The Nose is Persephone in the Labyrinth. . .’ and then cruelly berates himself for forgetting his Greek myths. The sleeplessness devolves into a chaos of images, the Nose is diving into a pool over and over again, the Nose appears in a processional, the processional runs mad, flags torn apart, its hands and then puppets and people, Russian avant-garde posters and text.

Towards the end, Stalin’s tribunal meets and a man is on trial: Kentridge reads the text from his ladder while his doppelganger falls asleep behind him: it’s a desperate plea to be allowed to die of his illness, that his crimes against the party don’t warrant the punishment, he’s too weak to speak, and at the end of each short sentence/plea to the tribunal Kentridge reads: ‘in brackets, general laughter in the room.’ Twin telephone cables hum in a gale; it’s the self outside, a tribunal against the self, a utopian impulse that mocks human frailty. The bum sneaks off stage.

This storm of cross-pollinating fecundity is married to Kentridge’s ghost and oldest bugaboo – Felix and Soho – self divided from self. The real Kentridge (we presume) on stage is desperately searching for a whole to draw all these figures into. In its best moments we don’t need the 10 fragments, 6 will make the metaphor hum and even when there are only 3 and the bum/clown is right and the center can’t hold, when the horse disappears – even then, we are left holding the impulse, the desire to see a whole. That alone is worth the price of admission.

2009-11-13T14:13:00.008-05:00

Twelve days into Performa 09 and nothing much stands out to write about. However, I have seen some great local, experimental, less-expensive performances in the same twelve days. It is possible that my attraction to one over the other is structural. All the Performa events seem very safe and produced for easy consumption.

Firstly, in celebration of the 100-year anniversary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism,’ Performa has integrated the theme of futurism into its programming. The first publication of this text in 1909 (Boccioni’s application of the manifesto to the visual arts came in 1910) is highly problematic in a contemporary space. It is about recklessness without accountability to a community or society, and blatantly misogynistic. There are only eleven points in the document; and Points 9 and 10 state: “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.” and “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” The 1909 manifesto stands revered and celebrated by Performa by renewing its content to a contemporary place without a critical or problematized platform.

Next, Performa is self-defined as a biennial dedicated to performance. However, the Performa Commissions program originates new performances by inviting artists, “many of whom have not worked ‘live’ before” to create work especially for the Performa biennial. This is a decision to promote already-deemed-acceptable artists to be shown yet again, versus taking risks and allowing un-tested emerging artists a larger platform that they rarely have access to. Also, the hand-selected commissioned artists work closely with the Performa production team from conceptualization to presentation. This, I suspect, is my reason for thinking that everything feels safe or tamed, like it has been tested for an uncritical (and paying) audience.

On the other hand, I went to the (non-Performa event) AUNTS Roadshow where I encountered a refreshing destabilizing experience as a viewer. The performances were non-hierarchical and happening everywhere in the space at once. Admission is a barter system, or a contribution to the free boutique/free bar, where everyone shops and drinks for free. It was a chain curation where the performers could do as many performances as they wanted, as long as they negotiated it with other performers in that evening. And, plenty of the works trusted my thinking ability as an spectator and I am still chewing on some in my head.

Granted, I haven’t yet seen many Performa events, I did see some of the Futurist Film programming at the Anthology film Archive and the works were lovely and easy to watch. They confirmed a traditional societal structure and did not make me have many questions as a spectator. Admission: $9

The Tacita Dean piece did not feel challenging either. The feature length film of Merce Cunningham’s dancers rehearsing in a gorgeous warehouse was a profoundly beautiful quotation to the end of his life, but not much else. I am always skeptical of beautiful film subjects (dancers, the warehouse, the Bay and sunlight) fueling a narrative. Watching in-shape bodies perform entertaining gestures is endlessly beautiful. The lack of musical soundtrack was the strongest aspect of the work. The juxtaposition of images of Merce Cunningham with the sounds of dancing feet was moving. Admission $10

Another performance I went to within the last twelve days was Will Rawls’ “Planet Eaters” at the Dance Theatre Workshop. This was not a Performa event, but an exciting model of risk and community. The event was part of the Studio Series; and Rawls used the evening to get feedback from the audience of about 40 people. He shared four movement sequences with us and asked us questions in between. At the end, we all sat in a circle and talked through some of our answers and thought. It was engaging critical dialogue and I appreciated the work that was being asked of me as spectator. Donation: $3

The Performa biennial claims to “build an exciting community of artists and audiences” however, a trusting, critical performance arts community already exists! Talented, questioning, hard-working performance artists are vibrant in this city and challenging the structures of how performance is shared. Performa feels regressive to me because it is pre-ordained and a modern construct for art tourism, based solely on art as entertainment. I was in conflict about writing a blog about Performa, because I did not want to contribute to the bloated attention that the festival is already receiving. Despite my hesitations and disappointments, I will continue to seek and share my observations for the last ten days.

-- Lindsay L Benedict

2009-11-04T17:22:00.002-05:00

Hello Readers!

Stay tuned for reviews on Performa 09.

Hobza/Rockhill Performative Lectures

2008-05-26T16:05:00.001-04:00

Please join us for a pair of artist lectures on Friday, May 30th, 7pm
at Fivemyles Gallery in Brooklyn.

Artists Klara Hobza and Zach Rockhill will be presenting new
performative lectures.

Hobza's "Nay, I'll Have A Starling" induces the epic return of the
European Starling to its motherland. Hobza will defend her grand
quest, sharing documentation material from her personal experiences
during the project, as well as borrowed sources from her research.
Hobza invites you to discuss the related topics of art, science,
politics, and other fields of humankind's passionate involvement.

Zach Rockhill's "Mysterious case/Adventures in. . . ." is an ongoing
project that places two coincidental narratives about adventures of
dislocation on the North American continent alongside one another, and
presumes their contemporaneous import.

Fivemyles gallery is located at 558 St. Johns Place between Classon
and Franklin in Crown Heights Brooklyn. Directions by SUBWAY: 2,3,4,or
5 train to Franklin Ave. Walk 2 blocks against traffic on Franklin to
St. Johns Place. Turn left, walk half block to Fivemyles. Located on
the web at fivemyles.org.

Klara Hobza and Zach Rockhill are both recipients of the New York
Foundation for the Arts' (NYFA's) 2007 Artist Fellowship. This
presentation is co-sponsored by the artists and by Audience Exchange,
a NYFA public program.

Mullican Under Hypnosis, a conversation

2008-04-14T20:00:00.001-04:00

KH: As an introduction, I’d like to give a brief description of the stage from my memory. I interpreted this design as the frame for a lose script or a choreography, performed under hypnosis. Before Matt Mullican entered the stage, I remember seeing a backdrop of large scale paper covering the back wall, a simple desk and a chair. On the desk, we found supplies for brewing fresh coffee, a newspaper, and paint supplies. A blanked had been thrown over the chair. There might have been some more items and pillows on the floor.

Matt Mullican came in, holding on tightly to a bundled up blanket and a sketch book. As the performance unfolded, I was able to make out a rough script. I interpret this script as: A day in an artist’s life: Artist just got up, makes coffee, reads the news, makes art, reflects on what he created, and goes to sleep. Then, he left the stage.

ZR:
We've all seen Mathew Mullican's Hypnosis piece or a version of it so just a few thoughts immediately: the opening conceit is that the performance is done under hypnosis, this information is in both the gallery print and is widely known, yet my first impression of him as a performer was not of a man under hypnosis - which is immediately interesting for a number of reasons, the first of which is that I don't have any idea what hypnosis looks like! Yet, because of the format, I'm suddenly in a position where every action/sound/behavior is thrown into question: is it or isn't it really hypnosis? As someone watching this it is both interesting and a distraction - because what he's doing is very compelling to watch.

KH:
That's interesting. It might be safe to say that most spectators from the art audience don't know what hypnosis looks like, either. I certainly don't. From this angle, the piece turns the mirror onto the audience, and their assumption of “the subconscious” and “artist as creator”.

Let's take the process of art creation: Indeed, right in front of me I saw take shape of what I heard before, myths of the artist genius as a creator: The angry man turned child when playfully executing his work, followed by existential crisis. If I saw this as a theater play, I would walk out not having learned anything.

But here, the hypnosis seems to guarantee authenticity. And I find myself admiring Matt Mullican for his courage and taking a genuine risk to expose his basic emotions to a quite possibly cynical audience.

AC:
It is certainly a risk to lay bare for an audience one's inner dialogues and processes, as it appears the hypnosis does. From an artistic standpoint, though, I would also argue that it releases one from a certain amount of responsibility at the same time. The performance itself is the artwork, with the drawing/painting created serving more as a record of the performance, thus what one would normally term the "art-making process" is the actual artwork. However, this actual artwork is being performed by a person with, ostensibly, no conscious control of his actions thus the normal questions of skill associated with artwork dissolve. The process is set, thus the performer's only responsibility is in applying himself to the process and allowing events to occur as they will. One cannot argue that he is a better or worse performer, because he really is no longer a "performer." He is really more of a personality or psyche, and one can argue that he is a more or less interesting psyche, perhaps, but not that he has developed a greater skill in his art.

In a sense, the only true control that he seems to have over his situation, perhaps, lies in his decision to actually undergo hypnosis and his choices regarding the arrangement of the space (the placement, as well as choice of objects). And it is never really revealed to the audience whether he personally chose how the space was set up, so the amount of control he has in this whole process is rather ambiguous. The more I consider the performance, I realize I can describe it, and explain what was interesting or uninteresing as an experience, but the performer himself evades any normal critiques because of the question of control.

ZR
I think it’s safe to presume that he was in control of the set up – it would make for a fascinating performance if he weren’t – and I think that’s the point where this revolving door of control/non-control hits it’s limit. For whatever reason, he made a series of choices before hand, he put out the coffee, the paint, the pillows, and decided these were the things he was going to have an experience with.

KH:
Historically, we can find many examples of artists choosing to lose intellectual control during the creation of their work. This loss of control was usually compensated by a conscious editing process that followed. Only after that editing process, the work was exposed to a larger audience.
There often was a smaller, possibly exclusive circle of people witnessing the process of creation. This audience could be observers, as during the happenings of Viennese Actionism. The audience could also be a small group of collaborators, even people who simultaneously are creating, as in experiments of the Surrealists.
Still, the accepted terms seem to be create-edit-show. (Of course, these don’t need to be linear.) To me, it’s during the editing process that the work is being crafted into academic value. That is, intellectual justification for the piece as a valuable contribution to a contemporary dialog.
Now, what do we do with a piece that’s clearly part of the academic art context, but withdraws from editing? We disregard it because it doesn’t play by the rules. But is that really what happens in Mullican’s Hypnosis pieces? I doubt it. He certainly minimizes the editing during the performance itself, though, as we mentioned in the very beginning, we can’t tell for sure how conscious he really is under hypnosis. He has at least thirty years of experience with performing under hypnosis, enough to tighten up the frame for each piece beforehand, and possibly during the live event. Mullican’s Hypnosis performances, whether the artist is fully aware of it or not, offer a very interesting contribution to questioning the usual rules of art making. I believe that at large, they throw out a product that lends itself for rich theoretical discussion.
ZR:
I think what’s interesting about this thing about being in or out of control under hypnosis is that it proposes that the field of our conscious experience is a limiting factor – that the total bandwidth of possibilities is, on a day to day basis, reduced – and that through hypnosis Mullican is drawing on the total range. Those were the criterion for my criticisms of the ‘truth’ of his hypnosis: is he self-conscious (where that term means vain, concerned about his appearance)? Is he concerned about what the painting looks like? Does he ham for the audience when they laugh? Almost invariably the answer was no. He was inside the experience, the range was opened

AS
First, I should preface this by saying that I did not see the Whitney performance. The one I experienced was titled "The Corner's Corner" at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions now 8 years ago, though it was exceptionally memorable. Assisting for this show was my first work experience after college. For the project, Matt underwent hypnosis in a miniature version of the house in Malibu where he grew up. My role was to help in drawing up its floor plan and building the structure in the gallery. I was sent to measure this house, literally corner to corner. During this process, I met not only Matt, but also his mother Lucia, who was then mourning the passing of her husband, modernist luminary Lee Mullican. Their house had an aura of authenticity, lived in and genuine, a distant relative of the modernist aesthetic common in our households today.

The floor plan was then scaled down, abstracted and constructed to fit into the gallery space. A little mouse maze just for Matt, its walls were only 3 to 4 feet high, painted in bold colors often associated with his installations. There, for one evening, he underwent hypnosis, and performed in front of an invited audience of sixty, consisting of family members and friends of the artist, his gallery Grant Selwyn, and LACE.

This element of intimacy struck me then, and I am reminded of it now, in comparison to the scale of a Whitney event. Then, I questioned the notion of a targeted audience, especially in terms of institutional ethics. At that time, LACE was a 22 year old non-profit, with the mission of bringing art to the greater LA community. Although documentation was exhibited during the eight-week show, it only confirmed that the performance did not translate, the public was put at a further remove from the actual event.

Now, in retrospect, I've become more empathetic towards the problem of a specified audience. The thematic backdrop for the performance was Matt’s childhood. Perhaps he needed the construct of an intimate audience, the way he chose hypnosis as the medium, to perform an experience that was impossible to authenticate by the general public in the first place. Matt would grunt, throw up food, or run around the structure smelling corners like his childhood dog. It was difficult for an outsider to watch, and I could only imagine how traumatic it might be for his family to witness this process. However, once we put aside judgment, what we really saw was a full-grown man attempting to grasp onto some part of his past, remembered or invented.

Going through our correspondence, we seem to identify our role in this performance as that of witnesses rather than as audience. Different than a rehearsed play or “conscious” act, hypnotism as vernacular performance is often associated with certain form of spectatorship, successful only when the audience confirmed the performer was genuinely under hypnosis. The more we have been distant from normality -- Matt acting out regular actions under an altered transgressive state -- the more we seem to desire certain proof of authenticity, some identification of control and intentional limits, to connect ourselves to the performer, and justify “this happened.” Is it at all possible for the context of art to provide another set of ethics for us (the audience) and Matt (the performer) to engage with each other?

Suddenly, I think about the circularity of his Whitney performance: Matt performing a day of the artist in front of an audience, many of whom are artists, in a biennial putting focus to art that employs populist vernacular to intervene with reality. Each of us, Annie, Klara, Nina and Zach, has our own personal version of what a day of an artist might look like. This is not unlike performing childhood in front of old friends and family members. What’s the point of watching something we all can closely identify at the first place? We can consider hypnosis as simply the medium, a kind of theater that allows an altered representation of experiences we all believe we know so intimately.

AC:
Again, we are back to the mirror. I think at this point it is useful to consider the brief statement about Mullican's performance found in the event listings for the Whitney Biennial:

"Since the late 1970s, Mullican has used hypnosis to explore the experience of the subjective. For this rare performance, Mullican acts under hypnosis as “that person,” treating his psyche as a found object and distancing the ego from the creative self.”

If the ego, or the self-aware part of one's mind is disengaged, as is stated to be part of the intention of this performance, we would expect a certain freedom from social constraint as the performer, theoretically, is no longer in touch with external reality - the place from which many social constraints are imposed. Certainly such release from constraint was visible in Mullican's outbursts of emotion, externalization of what sounded like internal dialogue, and on-going noise-making. Certainly all of these actions could be influenced by Mullican's own natural personality quirks, but we have no means of gauging this within the context of the performance because he has not allowed us to know the conditions under which he was hypnotized, nor were we allowed to view his transformation into the character we see in the performance space. As I understand from a former assistant of Mullican's, at least in one early performance, this transformation was visible, with Mullican changing into the personality of a child as he crossed a taped-off line demarcating the performance space. His choice not to reveal any clues as to the degree of the change he has undergone for this performance obscures the degree to which he is in control, returning us to the question of editing.

I do not intend to say that there is no editing, and no self-control within Mullican's performance. Even within the performance, a certain self-awareness is still present: the hypnotically-induced distancing of ego from creative self did not translate into freedom from self-doubt, as one of the more dramatic conflicts arose from the gap between expectation and reality, both with the missing Wall Street Journal from his stack of newspapers to the results of his composition on the back wall of the performance space. However, the exact degree to which he can exert any form of conscious control is impossible for the audience to even guess at, short of drawing on any previous knowledge of the man or his artwork. While this question of control in and of itself is not so important, it seems to me that recognizing its ambiguity is a key to understanding how we relate to the performance. As Annie pointed out, we have a desire to ascertain the authenticity of the experience (and I would add the exact degree of the authenticity), but the structure of the performance is such that it becomes an impossibility to come to any definitive conclusions on this question, forcing us to place it aside. We either accept that the performance is totally hypnotically induced, or disregard it as a farce.

If we accept the performance as authentic, this puts the decisions of how to perform this day-in-the-life-of-an-artist on a pre-conscious level, excising the involvement of the ego (as in self-image/pride). Although the experiences he draws upon, unconsciously, to perform this day are still uniquely his, because of the apparent lack of involvement of any self-important element, we can accept the veracity of his portrayal more readily. We identify the elements we are familiar with, and are less prone to questioning the elements that are foreign to us. After all, he did not choose them in order to portray himself as the stereotypical creative individual, but rather simply because it was something he unconsciously recognized as a common experience from his life.

All of this may seem a bit of a stretch in purely logical terms as, for the sake of illustrating the underlying mechanism, I have perhaps overstated the degree to which we are influenced by the structure of the performance. However, the main point I am trying to reach is that by placing the decision-making process on this pre-conscious level, he is able to establish a connection to the audience that would be more difficult and tenuous were he to make the same decisions from a conscious level. At this point I would draw a connection to one of the other main lines of inquiry in Mullican's general practice. Much as his pictographs are able to address people in a pre-verbal format, communicating in terms that may be difficult or simply different on the level of speech, his performances address and connect to us on a pre-conscious level. The parallel is not perfect, as we are in a different state of consciousness than he is and thus will necessarily comprehend the performance on a different level of consciousness, but I think it is an important aspect of the work that helps, for me, to illuminate a possible motive for Mullican presenting, as Annie put it, "something we all can closely identify at the first place."

Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis

2008-03-27T12:19:00.003-04:00

Last Tuesday, Mar 25, Matt Mullican performed at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Below please find a short video of his performance.

A discussion between witnesses of this event is going to follow.

SOAPBOX EVENT by Pia Lindman

2008-03-25T00:19:00.004-04:00

A Participatory Performance

Reinventing Forms of Free Speech

Location:
Federal Hall National Memorial
26 Wall Street, New York City

Date: April 5, 2008
Time: 2:00–5:00 PM

SOAPBOX (n): a post upon which people stand and give their opinions on a topic, sometimes in quite emphatic terms.

Soapbox Event is a participatory performance created by Pia Lindman. Participants are given one soapbox each, which entitles them to one minute of free speech. They may form coalitions and stack their boxes together to obtain greater spatial presence and talk time. The spokesperson of a coalition may speak for as many minutes as there are stacked boxes. As the event evolves, boxes begin to express changing rhetorical configurations in sculptural forms.

In Soapbox Event, Lindman pares down the structure of democracy to the elemental forms of free speech: human bodies, live voices, and space. This performance investigates the construction and breakdown of collective structures, and how they influence individual expression in democratic decision-making. The event highlights the relationship of embodied speech to the bare life of an individual, in the context of increasingly mediated communication.

The site — formerly New York City Hall and Customs House, currently Federal Hall National Memorial — epitomizes freedom of speech in America. In this place, newspaperman John Peter Zenger was tried for seditious libel against the Royal Governor; with his 1735 acquittal winning a major victory for the free press in America; George Washington delivered his inaugural presidential speech from the balcony in 1790; and Yayoi Kusama held her Naked Event on the steps in 1969. We are pleased to present Soapbox Event amid this splendid tradition of speech acts.

Pia Lindman has performed and exhibited internationally since 1994, including at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Modern Art, Sculpture Center, and Performa 2005, all in New York; at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Galeria de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City; Keio University, Tokyo; and Beaconsfield, London. In 2008–2009 Lindman will be artist in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin; currently, she is a lecturer at Yale University School of Art. Her work is in the collections of MoMA and the Queens Museum of Art. She is represented by Luxe Gallery, New York City.

Soapbox Event is curated by Sandra Skurvida and has been made possible, in part, by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with the generous support of the September 11th Fund.

Please see soapboxevent.blogspot.com for more information, or contact Sandra Skurvida: skurvida@earthlink.net or (917) 250-7251.

Ei Arakawa at the Japan Society

2007-11-19T21:05:00.000-05:00

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.)’

2007-11-17T13:43:00.000-05:00

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"

2007-11-14T16:51:00.003-05:00

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

2007-11-12T20:02:00.000-05:00

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

Karl Holmqvist at the Swiss Institute

2007-11-04T10:28:00.001-05:00

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

2007-11-03T23:54:00.000-04:00

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.

Tony Conrad “Window Enactment”

2007-11-03T07:36:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, Oct. 30^th, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

“A special live performance Tony Conrad, known for his pioneering work in music and underground cinema.” So, at least, it says in the program. Well, the performance wasn’t anything special, nor pioneering. In fact, the work seemed like an undergraduate course assignment on Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” as seen from the backwaters of washed-out postmodern film theory.

Since barely anything happened, here’s a summary of the first few scenes:

Scene 1: We see nothing but a white drywall with a projection of a half-opened window.

Just in case we don’t get that it indeed is a ‘projection,’ we have to stare at it for about 10 minutes. Gradually, another window within the set appears, right behind the projected one—of course.

Scene 2: A door in the drywall opens a crack, and we see a very bright light shining through this door. Again, we wait, finally this door shuts.

Scene 3: We sit in darkness. At last, an additional window opens in the back of the set.

Yes, it is about windows, thank you for reminding us again. And, yes, even the title tells us that.

We see what looks like 3 young students, walking around inside of the set, pretending to be looking for something. Through loudspeakers, we hear the sound of squirting Windex across the imaginary floor and corners. Immediately, it’s obvious we are looking at people with no training in acting nor any careful instruction. Their movements hold no tension, are utterly self aware, and of course don’t look at all like the intended representational imitation of ‘regular people’ walking.

Then we have to listen to female heavy breathing coming out of the speakers.

To top all embarrassment, the chick gets naked. Well, at least we have something to look at. To keep things un-sexist, the boy gets naked too. Though he doesn’t have to wind around, caressing lightbulbs and cables, like she does. She wears a headset. Oh, so the heavy breathing might be hers. “Or is it just an illusion? Is life an illusion? Are we merely voyeurs?” Give me a break!

We go on seeing more young people, as well as an old man, getting naked, pseudo-modern dance, more projections, and even a Hitchcock-ish sound score. Well, here’s when I almost threw up: implying that the audience must be a crowd of utter idiots who still didn’t get the “Rear Window” reference, not only once, but twice, do we have to look at the actors staring at us through the window with binoculars! The second time was especially painful, because they just wouldn’t stop. Moreover, when people giggled in the audience, one of the actors couldn’t help but fall out of what pathetic little was left of her role, and giggled back.

All was accompanied by constant camera clicking. Why is it that the worst performances are the best documented?

I’ve endured for nearly an hour. I get up to leave.

The event is well visited, mostly by people in their twenties. The gallery reeks like the L-train, but only during its section from Chelsea to Williamsburg, maybe Bushwick if you want to be generous. Hipsters—and I mean hipsters, not artists—and other wannabes scan my outfit and pick at their faux-hawks. The Midtown view through the gallery windows is spectacular. We are being served homemade punch, water, and neatly arranged mini donut balls. I grab another one of those and flee.

Was this performance an underage, pretentious, busy-bee version of Performa’s disastrous opening event? (See a couple of posts below on Francesco Vezzoli’s “Cosi E (Se Vi Pare)/Right You Are If You Think You Are.”) It certainly was shallow, pseudo-intellectual, predictable, didactic, and painfully boring. In the case of the opening event, at least, the concern with topics such as the aura of fame/cult was acted out up by hired, experienced professionals. The night at Greene Naftali Gallery was held at the cost of naive, enthusiastic youngsters who didn’t get any credit whatsoever.

I can’t help but understanding the motivation for hosting this event as staying fresh (meat), though what I saw was as moldy as certain influential somebody's midlife crisis. I feel embarrassed for the poor amateur actors who had to be exposed to this scenester vampirism. I’m angry at Tony Conrad and the host for wasting people’s time and insulting their intelligence, but most of all for exploiting these poor kids for their underground capital.

Michael Portnoy at the Swiss Institute

2007-11-02T21:14:00.000-04:00

Melissa Brown and I show up right on time for M.P.'s performance at the Swiss Institute.

Melissa has seen him perform before - after her band played in Miami.

She said she thinks he might have jumped up on stage without anyone's permission.

But tonight he seems to have gone through the right channels.

We run into Sam Gordon - he has seen M.P. perform before too.

"Be careful in the front row," says Sam. "We might get food on us."

But there doesn't seem to be anything on stage that will stain my pants.

The mission tonight is to crank call people from ArtReview's annual list of the 100 most powerful people in contemporary art,

and keep them on hold.

"Think of all the art that will be piling up while we waste their time." says M.P.

Sometimes the performance is pure slapstick.

And I forget myself in the audience.

But laughing out loud while we are on the phone with _____'s next door neighbor,

we are suddenly all implicated in the prank.

"Richard Prince #26. What a dick. I don't want to call him." says M.P.

He makes up dirty jokes instead,

He has his assistant bang them out on his ass.

Sometimes I am mad at him for the way he speaks to her,

although I know,I know... its all part of the act.

And he treats his other friends just as poorly.

He tries to get some high rolling officials from Waste Management on the phone,

but they prove to be more elusive than those in the art world.

He calls 311, impersonating Larry Gagosian, and tries to get a special waste pickup from 555 West 24th.

"Don't pay too much attention to what I say," says M.P. "it's all about the hold music, it's about expanding the way people approach hold music."

But its hard not to pay attention to the double entendre

and the uncomfortable poetic lapses,

and in the end they have expanded everything just enough.

He sings along karaoki style to Billy Joel's 'Always a Woman'.

"Isn't art and trash 'always a woman'" says M.P.

I see what he means when he points out the words :
Oh--she takes care of herself
She can wait if she wants
She's ahead of her time
Oh--and she never gives out
And she never gives in
She just changes her mind

She is frequently kind
And she's suddenly cruel
She can do as she pleases
She's nobody's fool
And she can't be convicted
She's earned her degree
And the most she will do
Is throw shadows at you
But she's always a woman to me

PS I asked Sam Gordon to tell me a little about Michael Portnoy. Here is what he writes:
Portnoy, or soy bomb as he is known to a larger public (google that if you don't know) is one of a kind, they broke the mold after making him. Infamous for numerous private salons and public freakouts, he threw his mic at one of Performa's patrons at their recent benefit, which got his act shut down. He's been adopted by the Swiss Institute, or maybe more like foster care, in Basel he served hors d'oeuvres though glory holes at their booth. When protest and action seem all quickly and totally commodified, his situations, which include spoken world, singing, and often screaming have an urgency with perhaps an agency that may not stop the tide of waste and taste, but will keep you laughing while they skin us alive.

Body Art on a Binge (Pre-thoughts on PERFORMA 07)

2007-11-01T01:32:00.000-04:00

PERFORMA 07 is the latest of the biennials or international fairs to become part of the steady diet of art on a binge. Taking its moniker from Documenta perhaps, PERFORMA is different in that it’s tightly focused (or at least in jest) on performance art. As scholastic as this may sound, it could prove to be strictly insular and in being so, lose the ambition of the medium itself. For example, there is no strictly painting or sculpture biennial anymore and if there was: How many of us would really care? And if we did – could we find artistic integrity in its overall production, direction and relationship to the reality of contemporary art as an interdisciplinary function?

One can only guess that the idea for such a biennial could have spawned from the lack of full acceptance or integration of performance art in the mainstream contemporary gallery and museum scene. But then again, it was never supposed to be mainstream. As valid as the cause may be, to then charge more than a handful for entrance fees makes it more problematic to truly enjoy the “art” in performance. It puts us in a context of musicals, theater and dance recitals. Are visitors and audience members to judge the artistic worth of a work (that by its very nature is non-commercial) to the amount of money they paid to get in? And if it is treated like a rock show – Do the artists get half the door? I hope so...

In a time where contemporary art is so expensive to buy (in order to enjoy it for more than a few minutes), it’s comforting to know that you can at least visit a gallery without paying an entrance fee. The PERFORMA model seems to be working the other way. And I think that it has some of the artists participating in it thinking in the same way - two to three night performances of the same piece with a matinee for good measure.

I am curious to see if there will be any DIY and guerrilla performance artists taking claim of their medium and staging off-the-cuff works that combat the PERFORMA establishment in the next few weeks. This could be really exciting. If you are (even if you don’t know it yet), please let us know!

The next post will find performances that break the mold of the biennial host. Stay tuned.

Francesco Vezzoli at the Guggenheim

2007-10-28T16:23:00.000-04:00

Francesco Vezzoli at the Guggenheim.

In his first live performance, Francesco Vezzoli, the young Italian video artist whose work has revolved around an interest in celebrity, restaged Luigi Pirandello’s 1917 play ‘Right You Are (If You Think You Are). The play is an investigation and dissection of the character Signora Ponza, played by Cate Blanchett, by a group of provincial Italians. Signora Ponza is absent throughout the play, created for us through the multiple vantage points of the other characters – a character with no presence, defined only by the attention devoted to it.

Set on a black stage in the center of the Guggenheim’s main rotunda, the performance and its proceedings exceeded what I anticipated. It came complete with stars being ushered from black SUV’s past anticipatory crowds, an hour and a half wait, closed guest lists and color-coded tickets. The museum generously provided opera glasses to view the stars (Including Natalie Portman and David Strathairn) to those of us not lucky enough to be seated on the rotunda floor.

The actors, who were seated and in costume, read their lines from stands set before them. The acoustics were bad higher up and the text hard to understand. With the exception of seeing Natalie Portman in a mustache (playing the part of Laudisi) there was little to hold one's visual interest. The crowd, already on its feet for almost two hours to get in and still standing, thinned quickly.

The hook for remaining was the anticipated appearance of Cate Blanchett in a costume designed by John Galliano. Let in on the grand finale by a nearby Guggenheim employee ('she’ll take the elevator to the fifth floor and then walk the ramp down past the people while the strobe lights go off') and tired myself, I left after the second act.

It is always interesting to see what is revealed by an artist shifting medium. What is notable in Vezzoli moving from his earlier video that used socially popular types (‘Caligula’, which mimics a film trailer, and ‘Marlene Redux: a True Hollywood Story!’ an expose on his own death) to performance is that, where those media types allude comically to other experiences – a film about a film that was never made and a film about a life that was never lived - this performance made no allusions, it simply was. There was no imagined deferral, no shared laughter at the possibility or impossibility of it, no self-deprecation, and no medium to humorously buoy us above the exclusivity of the fame that was its true content.

It is troubling to note in relation to Vezzoli's preoccupation with fame and exclusion (and perhaps it’s the gleaming black stage and David Straithairn’s leather pants that brought it to mind) that amongst Pirandello’s many achievements he is remembered for having given Mussolini his Noble Prize in Literature to melt down for the war effort.

John Bock's 'Stapelung' at P.S. 1

2007-10-28T13:52:00.000-04:00

Performance as video as performance as sculpture

2007-10-28T12:43:00.000-04:00

John Bock “Stapelung” (Stack)

2007, P.S.1, New York

“Stapelung,” meaning ‘stack,’ is indeed a stack of videos, running on monitors sitting on shelving units. It shows 5 video films, each arranged as a loop of a different performance.

All the films combine performance footage that has been shot exclusively for the camera, and documentation footage of public performance and public sculpture. The piece, seen as film and as sculpture, takes performance as a starting point, as well as its backbone, and is loaded to the breaking point with cinematic elements.

The nature of John Bock’s performance originates in visual art, particularly in sculpture, and its dependence on the relation with the scale of the human body. The artist invents extensions for his physical limits, including the brain, both in logical and in associative thinking. All props are fabricated as sculptures, and after the performance and/or film has been shot, remain on display as sculpture within a visual-art context. In this aspect, the film becomes a documentation of kinetic art.

To review this John Bock piece in a descriptive manner is bound to fail due to the time limitation given to me as a visitor at an exhibition. In the content of the sculpture/performance/video, ‘stacking’ continues endlessly within each element. All visual elements appear colorful and compelling, as do the masses of associative chains in Bock’s monologues.

Bock’s characteristic use of an overwhelming mass of material comes combined with his gimmick of pseudo child-play elements within the performances. These seem to let him get away with ignorance of any of the individual topics that he uses in his writing. This is disturbing, especially when it comes to ignorance of racial politics. The same applies to the props’ visual solutions. However, Bock’s stylistic method of primary directness throws the viewer back to their own naivety—indeed, a good immunization against criticism.

Another good trick for ‘waterproofing’ art is coming to a full circle within an original associative chain. And for this one, I would like to give him full credit. “The world is the stage is the wood is the world.” (John Bock)

First review!

2007-10-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

The first NAKED ATTIC review will be posted Sunday, October 28th, 2007.
It will be on John Bock's "Stapelung", which will take place at P.S.1, Long Island City, New York.