Mullican Under Hypnosis, a conversation

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

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

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

Friday, November 2nd

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


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


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

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




















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


















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









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



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



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



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

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

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



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

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


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


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


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

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

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

Then it melted.

David Medalla: "FOUR ACES - A participatory performance"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medalla reminds the audience that all is about utter meaninglessness.

We hear music, English and French ballads about love.

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

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

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

They all lie down are told to sleep and dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

naked attic from a fan

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