Oh, the days when slapping a video behind a dance or music piece made it a ‘multimedia performance.’ The novelty rapidly waned, and our expectations for multimedia are higher now—as they should be. Still, it’s a treat to be newly amazed by the possibilities of video in live performance. The dance/performance installation Takes (presented by Philadelphia-based Nichole Canuso Dance Company at 3LD Art and Technology Center this past weekend as part of the APAP blitz) integrated live video and projections with a subtle, yet knock-your-socks-off level of inventiveness.
The credit for the concept of Takes goes to Nichole Canuso and multimedia director Lars Jan, a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow who has produced a slew of intriguing performance/installation projects. Performed by choreographer Canuso and Dito Van Reigersberg within the confines of a box created by white gauze-like walls, Takes is a series of snippets about a relationship gone sour.The substance and the magic of this piece lies in live projections of the performers onto the transparent walls of the box: the action inside the box is recorded simultaneously by multiple cameras and superimposed on the walls/screens, creating different perspectives and layers of each moment that add up to more than the individual parts. Combining all this with an evocative sound score and skillful lighting, Takes casts a net of intimacy that is impossible not to fall into.
Nonetheless, the choreography, while no doubt crafted with an eye towards the projections, is largely unremarkable in terms of its movement vocabulary. Structurally, the piece follows the predictable arc of an angst-ridden love story, with some fragments reading more strongly than others, and a few trite moments along the way (ironic that a paper letter takes center stage in an era of electronic communication).
The close-ups and level of detail captured by the cameras mean that gestures come across particularly powerfully, and these are the moments that stuck in my mind: his fingers playfully marching up her knee in the beginning, and later, his fists striking the air in frustration. The solo sections are the least engaging, perhaps because they rely more heavily on movement alone, as opposed to the interactions between Canuso and Van Reigersberg. The performers’ commitment to the work salvages some of these shortcomings, but can’t rescue them entirely.
The suggestive possibilities of the projections and rich quality of the images is nothing less than mesmerizing, but as I watched the video loop roll across the screens at the end, I realized that I was rather satisfied with these pre-recorded projections of movement. Am I just a junkie for beautiful footage? I’d like to think not—Takes is missing something in the link between video, choreography, and performance, and this time, the gap isn’t on the multimedia side.
Heather Lang and Eleanor Bauer. Photo by Ian Douglas
A whole lot of real exists in The Heather Lang Show By Eleanor Bauer And Vice Versa Trash Is Fierce Episode 2: Destiny’s Realness, and that’s a good thing. Smart, vital and spontaneous, Eleanor Bauer and Heather Lang host an insightful infomercial unpacking “realness”, which the audience experiences both live and on a television screen. The dynamic characters work in the business of connecting people to one’s “spirit product” in a direct and endearing style.
Wearing recycled materials (Lang, in a stiff dress of magazine pages and Bauer, wrapped in flowing layers of plastic bags), the two pontificate on the couch and riff about inner-light, the evils of capitalism and repurposing trash to make somethingness out of nothingness. After showcasing each product in the style of a roadshow, audience members call the 800 number for the spirit product, which is then lovingly presented to the caller by Lang or Bauer.
While the talk show format makes watching the full performance on screen possible, Trash Is Fierce should be seen in a room full of people, it’s live-ness crucial. Bauer cracks her character just once on Thursday, slumping into the couch. She cups her mouth laughing, the moment fresh for a show about realness and unifying in its honesty. In the end, Bauer and Lang remind their viewers to be awake in the world by literally holding up a compact mirror. They also remind everyone that “Trash Is Fierce!” which the audience repeats with gusto. If we are lucky they’ll bring us another episode.
Michael Hart’s photography exhibition, Unreal, with text by Ryan Tracy packs years of life and art moments into a mosaic of roughly 200 images. During the opening Thursday in the Abrons Arts Center, several of Hart’s subjects present at the show informally identified their images pointing and telling anecdotes. The subjects recalled Hart’s captured moment, at times clarifying whether the shot was real or staged. Those live conversations illuminated Tracy’s text, “In the end, the body is what we have and what we use to make “the world” and with which we remember it. Real or staged. Live or performed.” The subjects made clear that those moments were both – lived and performed.
Eight short pieces compose Daniel Linehan’s Zombie Aporia performed by Linehan, Thibault Lac and Salka Ardal Rosengren in the Abrons Arts Center Experimental Theater Friday. During the first section, the performers rhythmically repeat the phrase “The music is the background for the dance” although for Linehan, the music is truly created by the dance. The trio generates a soundtrack of music with the body through sustained monotone vocalizations, repeated words and percussive footsteps resulting from the given movement. For one song, Lac applies pressure with his hands to Rosengren’s throat and stomach to manipulate the force of her throaty tune. The execution provides a physical image of that which is heard. The exacting, often mechanical sequences cast a distance between the audience and the performers. This distance extends even in the moments during which the three get physically close to the audience, stiffly moving through the crowd to create formations dictated by a computer screen.
(M)imosa/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M) on Friday in the Abrons Arts Center Underground Theater employ a raw and layered approach to reveal the possible identities of (M)imosa. Story upon story, song upon song Cecilia Bengolea, Francois Chaignaud, Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Trajal Harrell unravel the identity of (M)imosa. The spectacle swinging from glow-in-the-dark club moments, to Stravinsky, to a crowd-pleasing rendition of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights successfully disorients and then settles as Harrell discusses authenticity through a story about the situations in which one should bring the real fancy handbag out, versus the times when the fake is the better choice. Echoing the sentiment he also suggests that in terms of realness, there is a time to be vulnerable and a time to keep one’s real to oneself.
“Why do so many people care about the way other people dress?” Madison Moore had already broached this question on Thought Catalog. Now he stood at one end of the long interior gallery inside New Haven’s Artspace, and fired it at the 45 or so folks arranged in folding chairs facing him and the screen behind him, as the opening salvo of a two-day event. “Why do we care about what people wear?” The silver sheet blazed with the logo of The Urban Catwalk: A Fashion + Street Culture Symposium.
Impressarios Madison Moore (l) and Alex Tudela on Orange St. in New Haven, outside the Artspace gallery. photo by Katya Moorman
At Moore’s elbow stood Alex Tudela, his partner in climb, who has written about men’s style, pop culture and nightlife for T: The New York Times Style Magazine blog, Splice Today, and the online magazines Fiasco and F/Homme. The two share a vision of “fashion <as> a daily performance of identity.”
Moore’s query resonated throughout the two days of activities that the pair had prepared, the preceding NYC launch party, and the organizers’ hopes for an NYC encore. As Yale Performance Studies scholar Moore and his posse would frame it, this would be fashion in the act of performance.
“Street fashion tells a personal narrative about one’s dreams, fantasies, fears and struggles,” the hommes have written. “From Marie Antoinette to Lady Gaga, and from Napoleon Bonaparte to Prince, fashion <has been> used as an instrument of rebellion and commentary on social norms.”
The greatest gift of The Urban Catwalk, over its two day maiden voyage in the City of Elms and Amistad, may have been its ability to both incorporate and transcend the tension endemic to petit-urban/academic communities such as Nerd Haven, and to reach in a way under the clothes to the social skin, the flesh, the human heart, that lends quickness to this quotidian performance. Book-ended and interwoven with formal performance events, the symposium cum festival knit together shining threads of thought and street sass into a savvy though not quite tactile text-tile.
Devotion to my most demanding mistress, NYC’s annual Dance Parade, limited my attendance to Urban Catwalk’s launch party and opening day, but that exposure provided enough intriguing dalliance to make me wish for a subsequent rendezvous.
It didn’t hurt that the first flirtations featured the award winning underground band Moon Hooch, and the self-described “style activist” Michaela Angela Davis. Davis’ “sugar free conversation,” with the two hosts, who perched on a couch at her knee, set the stage for the series of scholarly presentations that would follow, by invoking the notion of street fashion as set by those who eschew “negotiating the gaze of others.”
A desultory three-way, the conversation ranged over a wide range of reference points, most occurring “before this age,” Davis interjected, “of everyone gazing.”
“The discarded become the most free,” she posited in assessing the roots and role modeling of street style, “because they don’t have to satisfy your judgment.”
Within this frame then, the scholarly presentations, each accompanied by projected illustrative slides, took on a performative quality. Under such titles as “Fashion as Resistance: the Subversive Power of Dress,” and “Perform or Else 1: Designing the Self,” panels consisting of three thinkers each, from disparate academic disciplines, would work it at the podium with the assistance of a moderator.
Watch out for the red(s)! Even in pastel blue and jeans, Philip Warkander stands out amidst the black & blue & gray & brown typical of the sober stylings of Stockholm.
Philip Warkander, a Doctoral candidate who’d traveled from Stockholm University, charmingly epitomized the general demeanor of the power point poses in the Q & A after his explication of “Queer Styles in Contemporary Stockholm.” Attempting to illuminate the shocking power of even a flash of color in the Swedish capital, he got a laugh with the self-effacing use of his own sober black and gray ensemble as exhibit “A” of what the typical contemporary Stockholm street style color palette almost wholly consists of.
Indeed, “performance,” figured in the titles of the vogues vivendi of Francesca Granata, Visual Culture; Costume Studies, New York University, (“Fashion and Performance: The work of Bernhard Willhelm from Commedia dell’Arte to Low-Horror,”) and Lauren Downing a Masters Student in Fashion Studies, at Parsons (“Performing Vintage: The Cultivation and Dissemination of Identity at the Brooklyn Flea.”) As Davis had averred in describing the street fashion revolution, “No one wore their diamonds during the day. No one. Noooo one! And no one wore denim at night.” Cheek by jewel, now, there’s a spectacle!
A cobra turban allowed Parisian women to express resistance amidst the privations of the Nazi occupation. Let them eat snake! Photo courtesy of April Calahan
A panel that strutted its stuff in exceptional style featured independent researcher April Calahan (“Sleeping Cobras: French Street Fashion During the German Occupation, 1939-1944”), Jessica Metcalfe, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico, who flew in from Santa Fe, (“Our Existence is our Resistance: 21st Century Native American Streetwear”), and Xiyin Tang, J.D. Candidate at Yale Law (“Against Beauty: In Praise of Street Style’s Dedication to Un-Pretty Dressing.”) As moderated by Christina Moon, a post doc at Parsons, this group resonated with the political overtones of Davis’ discussion.
Picking up the gauntlet thrown down by the Parisiennes of Calahan’s description, the plucky Tang pulled no punches in her extremely well argued brief assaying fear and loathing in style pages:
“Here’s one thing I want to get out of the way before we begin,” she began. “Style—real style—is never vain. It isn’t superficial, frivolous, materialistic, or any of the other jabs people love to lodge in its path…”
After using the film version of The Devil Wears Prada as a pop cultural reference point, Tang does a quick two-step double take: ” I want to begin with the simple idea of clothing and what it is or isn’t to people. Perhaps what’s most ironic to me about the complaint that being interested in what you put on your body is shallow and silly is the fact that those who are interested in what they put on their body (and that’s everyone, but more on that later) <seem> interested in everything but the actual clothes. The idea of style as performance is one that’s been kicked around quite a bit lately, but let me hash out my version of it.”
Projecting a point, counterpoint pondering of the stylizations of Paris Hilton and Mark Zuckerberg, Tang references none other than hagiographic art critic Clement Greenberg’s famous essay “Modernist Painting” to question his assertion, “‘that what painting had been doing since the time of the Renaissance was to create an illusion of the real.’ His is a gross over-exaggeration, nonetheless, I find this appropriate when applied to clothing. For are we not using these garments to project an entire illusion of what we care about, what kind of men or women we’d be game to sleep with, what our income brackets are? The real shallowness of clothing, then, is the fact that it is supposed to go too deep, to represent too much, to be too intricately tied to notions of money, market, and power. Because of this baggage, style as a medium has yet to free itself from its semiological fetters, and thus, by definition, cannot be ideological, but only practical.”
In riposte, Tang holds up “street style blogs and the real men and women who helm them. “These” are finally taking fashion to its own endgame, just like Greenberg’s favored artists: the Abstract Expressionists, did with painting. Bloggers like Bryanboy, SusieBubble,Julia Frakes, Jane Aldridge, and Tavi Gevinson, as well as street style stars like Anna Dello Russo and Catherine Baba, are taking clothing on clothing’s terms….. Their personas and projections, like Greenberg’s favored AbEx paintings, are flattened.
Global Heroes (mostly heroines): from l to r: Bryanboy, SusieBubble, Julia Frakes, Jane Aldridge, & Tavi Gevinson. slide courtesy of Xiyin Tang
“Are any of these street style stars pretty, either? Certainly not in the conventional way. And they certainly don’t dress the part. And that’s about as deep as it gets. In other words, we have finally hit true shallowness. The illusion is gone because these men and women are not using clothing to create any illusion but the illusion of dress itself. As Greenberg had written, it is using ‘the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.’ ”
After a consideration of this flatness as “a self-reflexive mode, forever turning inwards on itself to subvert and rebel,” she offers up her plea:
“Wouldn’t it be nice to think for one second that the whole of fashion—and style—itself was somehow outside the ugly realities of marketing gurus, patriarchal societies, the sex-craved MTV generation, and American consumerism? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just get past the idea that we need to show more leg, flash more cleavage, avoid looking gay unless you are gay, tuck in that tummy with Spanx and control top hosiery, dress your age, look your profession? Wouldn’t it be nice if we just stopped being afraid of what we looked like and just wore clothing for what clothing is—lurid, crazy, beautiful, ridiculous?”
She follows with a discursive meditation of the gaudiness of Gavinson then Gaga before “acknowledging that this plea for absolute shallowness comes with plenty of precedents—not only from Greenberg in art, but also, for example, from the architect Alejandro Zaera Polo, who, in writing on the progressive power of building facades, also imbues absolute surfaceness—what he terms building “envelopes”—with a kind of violence between what he calls the private inside and the public outside. He writes of envelopes, ‘It is a boundary which does not merely register the pressure of the interior, but resists it, transforming its energy into something else.’ And if you, as the passive viewer in this active spectacle of real style decide … that you all of a sudden feel rather undone in your khaki pants and button-down shirt, then I say that street style has done its job. Because the point is not to be comfortable, to placate the viewer with stock notions of the Beautiful, to give the viewer a free pass at avoiding examining his own personal conditions. It is taking what has too long been deemed, at worst, a necessary evil of life … or, at best, banal prettiness, and elevating it to aesthetic shock, … <and thus> life itself—by displacing the everyday with something exceptional. As the art historian Ekaterina Degot wrote, in talking about Moscow Conceptualism, ‘By allowing its user to experience alienation, the work allows for reflexivity, the necessary starting point for independent thought and critique. Without this device, there is just life, and no art.’ ”
Meat - Kermit. It's hard to get under her skin when you go gaga over what she puts over on it. slide courtesy of Xiyin Tang
If I had one overwhelming regret at my inability to stick around for the Catwalk’s closing “real people fashion show,” in which Moore created “social sculptures” by asking the “model” participants to prance rather than parade atop square wooden gallery pedestals, it would have to involve missing the opportunity to perhaps see this jeune juriste boogie on a box.
Her aesthetic, humanistic and political concerns, however, found ample echo in the work of Metcalfe and Gregory Mitchell. Mitchell, a Doctoral candidate in Performance Studies, at Northwestern, passed out tee shirts to accompany “Puta Ontológica: Catwalks, Battles, and the Girls of Daspu.”
“Daspu” abbreviates “das putas” (“from the whores”) but also plays on the name of the de luxe São Paulo, Brazil, fashion house Daslu, famous for, among other things, a helicopter shuttle of its well-heeled clients to its salon, allowing them to overfly the favelas and socio-economic fallacies of the capital of carnal-vale.
Gabriela Silva Leite, a retired prostitute, who holds a degree in sociology, conjured Daspu as an outgrowth of Davida – Prostituição, Direitos Civis, Saúde (Prostitution, Civil Rights, Health) an NGO at the center of The Brazilian Prostitutes Network in support of the nation’s sex workers. In 2005, on the heels of Brazil’s rejection of $40 million in U.S. anti-AIDS funding over the Bush administration’s insistence upon an explicit anti-prostitution pledge, Leite and Davida developed the idea of a fashion line to simultaneously raise money and AIDS awareness.
Ironically blasted into the public eye by the backfire of Daslu’s threat to sue over the similarity in sound to their brand name and the subsequent scandal of the fashion house’s tax evasion scheme, Daspu and its slyly sloganed tee-shirts found its streetwalker/models pictured the next year in Brazilian Vogue. By mixing in interns and supporters among its sex worker models, and by taking its runways to the streets, Daspu has been able to blur the boundaries and highlight the hypocrisy surrounding sex, style and social mores that have crossed, as the video shows, into the commercial sphere.
Metcalfe’s talk reinforced the ubiquity and primacy of the tee shirt as the drag of choice in political fashion by focusing on its adoption as a “survivance” strategy among the youthful designers of “clothing of resistance,” made in Native America. If the bluntness of a motto such as “Fuck Columbus … and the ship he came in on,” signals a separateness of outlook when emblazoned across the wearer’s chest, a Daspu design that offers “Lost women are the most sought after” seeks to foster familiarity, acknowledgement and a disarmingly chuckled, “Well, duh!”
If Tang’s understated socio-political critique finds itself fleshed out in the presentation of these crusades, her power point meets its soul sister in that of Rizvana Bradley, proto-PhD lurking in the Literature Program of Duke. Bradley’s “Fashion Freaks: Postmodernism’s Unpredictable Subjects,” echoes many of the essentials of Tang’s examen, albeit in more assertively feminist fashion. Its most intriguing contribution comes in relation to its consideration of the politics of desire.
Jean Charles de Castelbajac, Fall/Winter 2009 image courtesy of Rizvana Bradley
“Contemporary cultural criticism extends the conventional beliefs of modernism, and its traditional aesthetics, by constructing fashion <in Peter Wollen’s phrase> as ‘the other art,’ ” she states. “Fashion is the art that, in its proximity to the body, comes to be understood as supplemental and purely decorative. But fashion is now marked by its increasing ambivalence, as Elizabeth Wilson writes: ‘when we dress we wear inscribed upon our bodies the obscure relationship of art, personal psychology and the social order.’”
Bradley references the feminist critic Pamela Church Gibson, among others, in developing a dialectic delineating “a theory of desire that runs counter to the views of feminist theorists who take their cues from feminist film studies’ discussion of gendered practices of looking, specifically the idea that the female subject who is viewed, is always objectified and actively solicits, secures and satisfies the male gaze…. Fashion foregrounds a practice of same-sex looking, in which women dress to please other women, rather than for the purpose of attracting men. (Those familiar with the blog Man Repeller are fond of Leandra Medine’sdevious practice of taking a desirable piece of clothing and intentionally accessorizing it with something that will repulse members of the opposite sex, but will ultimately please her female readership….) If however, the desire behind fashion and the experience of fashion is not primarily sexual in nature, then what kind of object is fashion now within culture?
“If we look at the increasingly peculiar and unpredictable ways in which fashion is employed within postmodern culture, we confront the possibility that fashion has mutated into something <that> now compels us to reconsider the representational terms and images that define cultural categories and social systems of classification <and> has become political. Today fashion challenges conventional ideas about social norms, as well as the limits of desire, pleasure, and bodily signification.”
Bradley employs a reading of kitsch as an operation of the idea of “the formless,” as described by art historians Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, to argue that “the inherent gesture of fashion is an aesthetically subversive one….. The formless fissures the modernist oppositions of formalism/iconology and form/content. In art it is a performative operation that happens in the slippage between the form/content of the work, and ultimately points us toward the materiality of the work….
“Today we increasingly find kitsch at work in fashion, and it is through kitsch that we are able to link fashion to the subversive aesthetics of the formless.”
slide courtesy of Rizvana Bradley
By extending examples drawn from the work of such artists as Andy Warhol and Lucio Fontana Bradley wends her way into the territory of Gaga, Anna Della Russo, Kanye West, as well as Tavi, Lynn Yaeger, Anna Piaggi, Daphne Guinness, and others. “We recognize an eccentric femininity configured around excess, with a difference in each case. These personalities compel us to ask, ‘Who has been represented as excessive, and who has had the power to represent or describe someone else as excessive?’”
“When the French painter and sculptor Jean Debuffetwrote the following, he may never have anticipated a pop star like Lady Gaga: ‘In the name of what-except perhaps the coefficient of rarity-does man deck himself out in necklaces of pearls and not of spider webs, in fox furs and not in fox innards? In the name of what, I want to know? Don’t dirt, trash, and filth, which are man’s companions during his whole lifetime, deserve to be dearer to him and shouldn’t he pay them the compliment of making a monument to their beauty?’”
Such questions!
Like Moore’s opening query, this one, at the end of a long day, hung in the air like a fat pitch waiting on the eyes and hands of a slugger. That splendid splinter or yankee clipper might well have emerged on the second day, when talk of “Living Out Loud: Style in Public Communities,” and “Framing the Self” (Perform or Else II) would give way to a roundtable inquiry: “Why Does Street Style Matter?” featuring Guy Trebay, Chioma Nnadi and Jimmy Webb (of Trash & Vaudeville) — heavy hitters all.
Then after a final panel on contemporary street cool, Barnard French professor Caroline Weber would conclude the conference with the keynote “Street Scenes: Paris Fashion Then and Now,” and close the circle begun with Calahan’s confab commencement. For now, Moore and Tudela along with their pith crew — Kimberly Julien and Sean Mihlo — would repair to the Gant clothing outlet at New Haven’s Broadway Triangle for the second night of their three game home and away series of music/fashion/dancing events. The Elm City’s own Fake Babies, pitching for the home team this Friday evening, found themselves hard pressed to match the momentum that Moon Hooch built up in their sets at the previous night at the launch party held at Don Hill’s on the edge of Tribeca.
Costumed, as Hooch had been, by the, born in New Haven, Swiss purveyor of mostly preppy looking All American styles, the Babies, i fear, demonstrated all too clearly the difference between bred in the street and bound for the studio style. Where Moon Hooch, a 3 piece sax and trap drums combo that Moore first encountered in the subway, knew how to build each set to a steady climax that under other circumstances might have had the audience emptying its collective pockets once it stopped dancing, the Fake Babies habit of extensive tuning breaks between numbers proved a buzz kill. The event, entitled “WORK!” didn’t quite.
Still I have to pass the organizers props for trying. Their outreach to local businesses, which in this case included a caterer, shows a degree of thought and street savvy that may see their ambitious plans for a published book and an NYC sequel to the event, perhaps as early as Fall Fashion Week, come to fruition. When prompted about other plans, Moore responded, “Alex and myself are committed to exploring new forums for academic expression. The Urban Catwalk was about having brainy conversations in a fun, engaging way, conversations that are open to all whether they <pursue> Ph.D.s or not. We’re really trying to build a brand around the idea of conferences and intellectual gatherings as sort of like parties; the way promoters throw parties, we want to throw conferences. We’re also currently in the early planning stages for a new scholarly journal for all the really cool, blacklisted ideas that don’t get aired out in academia. We imagine it as something that scholars working in this area would contribute to, but also journalists and pop culture writers at large.”
I can tell you that 2 weeks after the event, the questions that the Urban Catwalk proposed and provoked as it paraded, preened and pranced its way towards Moore’s “social sculptures,” the last minute inspired motif for the event’s culminating “Street Style Fashion Show” Saturday night, continue to linger and lick at my mind, even as i consider people in Libya wearing fake or empty firearms as a signification of their tribal loyalties and deepest dreams and desires. or marvel at the Alexander McQueen retrospective at the Met Museum.
Feel free to return here for video of that final fashion fling, once videographer Aymar Jean Christian has a chance to get it to us.
Ryoji Ikeda, one of the world’s leading electronic composers and installation artists, will transform Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot drill hall into a dynamic digital and sonic environment, flooding the senses with projected and synchronized light and sound. Visitors to the Armory will be subsumed by a flickering landscape of binary code, black-and-white color, and digital sound—an artistic experience choreographed and composed by Ikeda from a seemingly infinite stream of raw scientific data. the transfinite marks the first time that American audiences will be able to experience the work of this multimedia artist at such a large and immersive scale. In conjunction with the installation, there will be an Artist Talkwith Ryoji Ikeda on Saturday, May 21 at 2PM. I hope that you will consider developing listing coverage of this vibrant experiential installation.
I’m not even going to both explaining why I’m posting this; if you don’t know, read this and be pissed. Then watch this video interview with Wojnarowicz below, and see how depressingly not far we’ve come in this country, despite all the progress.
I went to the exhibition’s opening as part of an audience myself: semi-tipsy revelers, louder and more boisterous than the usual gallery crowd, loosened up by lobby drinks and the leaking sounds of Mental 99. As a result, the feeling of the exhibition was less of the usual quiet reverence you get in a gallery. It felt more like being at a giant party, where the urge is to stick your head in a room, say “cool!” and move on.
Much of the space in the gallery is divided into little screening rooms, the projections and seating spaces adjusted to each experience. As an audience member you’re appropriately framed for each performance. For Stefan Constantinescu’s film, Troleibuzul 92 (2009) you’re sitting in plastic bus seats. The circle of TVs for Venerations (Applause 3) invite an enveloping kind of self-congratulation. On their screens run an endless cycle of clips: studio audiences clapping and cheering one another, and you’re invited to circle them endlessly.
Ironically, the installation with the most comfortable seats made me the most uncomfortable: Isola Bella (2007-2008), a collage of clips by artist Danica Dakić. In it, we watch members of an Eastern European mental institution performing and witnessing their lives on a stylized stage, wearing cartoonish half-masks and accompanied by eerie piano. There’s a blurb on the wall outside that references utopias, the social systems, color. But it’s hard to keep the current state of social services in mind while watching a man with cartoon eyes describe his horrific childhood.
Since performance artists shattered the fourth wall, social media has come of age—along with YouTube, reality TV, web cams, status updates, you get the picture. In this normalized over-exposure, it seems odd to ever feel like a voyeur, inappropriately peering into other people’s lives. But that’s exactly the feeling that Yoshua Okon’s pieces provoke. He’s given a partial retrospective along with the Audience exhibition, largely because his work provocatively involves human non-performer performances.
The piece Canned Laughter (2009)– literally a series of laughing cans–is pretty funny, until you see the film of the “workers” hired to make them laugh. It’s a comment on the conditions of factories in Mexico as well as the manufacturing of culture– think the recent Banksy opening sequence for the Simpsons– but in this case, the beleaguered workers depicted aren’t drawings, but actual people.
In Rusos Blancos (White Russians) (2008), Okon rehearsed a series of arguments, speeches and performances with a family who live out in the American desert. He set up four cameras in their living room, the shots overlapping, with spectators in each frame. The pieces title refers to the type of drink the visitors received from their hosts before witnessing a spectacle that blurred the boundaries between reality and performance. Was the dog pissing on the carpet rehearsed? Does playing out backwater stereotypes disperse or just confirm them? Or are we just being made fun of for watching at all?
The poster image for Audience as Subject is the piece Turn On, by Adrian Paci, where unemployed workers of his native Albania are filmed along steps next to generators holding giant light bulbs. The power of the engines and the softness of the light romance the faces and pasts of the workers. It’s one of the few pieces where the “audience” is treated elegantly and respectfully, giving rise to the feeling that reverence is its own kind of sideshow.
Perhaps the pieces in Audience as Subject are so unsettling because participation has become such a rampant aspect of modern culture. We’re no longer content to passively witness: we must comment, link, share, tweet, “like” or dislike. The subject of many of these works volunteered to be framed and ordered by an artist. A security guard approached Okon personally and asked to be featured in a piece. The result is HausMeister (2008). We watch a film of the guard as he crawls on all fours through a man-sized mousehole, meeping and blurping at us. The piece’s introduction will tell you it’s about territory and power, but what comes across is the guard’s incredible willingness and faith in the artist.
Three days after the exhibition opened, the San Francisco Giants won the World Series. YBCA’s hometown erupted in orange and black. Giants Champion gear went on sale before the game had even finished, along with giant Brian Wilson Beards, spinning orange scarves and F*CK YEAH shirts. Strangers hi-fived one another on the streets and woo-hooed the sky. While Audience as Subject presents people as framed by a select few artists, it also begs the question: how else do we agree to be framed?
1.Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?
Two years ago I came to New York City, from Chicago, for graduate school at NYU where I had won a full Master’s fellowship. I got my ID, and I kept looking at it and thinking, “This has to be a scam; this has to be a joke.” I couldn’t believe I was going to get to go to graduate school for free.
So, I thought I would test out the ID. I went to the library to swipe it, and was certain that it would be rejected.
The library is not open to the public. They have glass doors that slide open once you swipe your card, similar to subway turnstiles. I swiped my card and sure enough–they opened up and I walked through. To me it was a symbolic action–it seemed possible that I could connect all of these seemingly disparate parts of my life through my Master’s studies. Being accepted into the program showed me that somebody else thought that they might be connected in interesting ways as well. To give you an idea, I have a BFA in Photography, a BA in English Lit, I have worked in communications, I volunteered in South America and developed a photography program for young women, I have worked on an online community magazine in Chicago–somehow they all came together in a Master’s in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?
Recently, the Brooklyn Public Library had a free talk on Gabriel Orozco’s work after which free tickets were handed out to go see his show at the MoMA. So my boyfriend and I did both. While I’m not too excited to hear other people talk about Orozco’s work, it was really cool to hear him talk about his work in the free audio tour.
He impressed me with the way that he lives his life: he doesn’t believe in the isolation of the studio; he walks around, and he interacts with people and objects. One of his pieces we saw at the MoMa was a sculpture made by patching together different inner tubes from tires. It looked like a huge rock. My boyfriend and I really liked it, because it was this mundane object that he turned into something fascinating. The piece was enhanced by Orozco’s story of how it was made. I feel that, lately, Orozco has had an impact on me, and how I think about being creative on a daily basis.
3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?
I can’t stay up all night as easily as in the past, and I wish I could. Because when you have been awake all night, when most other people are sleeping, there’s a different kind of consciousness that I don’t think you can access in the day. 4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.
RIght now I don’t have a regular schedule, so I’ll tell you about a day a year ago, and then I’ll tell you about a recent day:
A year ago there was this day in which I actually did, for once, stay out dancing all night. I was in Cusco, Peru, with a group of friends. We had met a group of Peruvians, and they took us out dancing. It was a lot of fun.
After staying up all night, my friend (who was in visiting from New York) and I took a bus to a small town outside of Cusco named Pisac. We met up with an indigenous family and stayed with them for the rest of the evening and the next morning. I practiced my Quechua with them, the kids and I took short videos of their guinea pigs, and they shared their family photos with me. That was a great day.
Recently, I went to an arts fair in Philadelphia. One vendor hollowed out old books and made secret compartments in them. It was a brilliant idea, and I thought that my brother and his wife would love one. So I went to the Strand, and I got a book from 1929 for a dollar. I already have hollowed it out, and am working on the secret compartment. It’s not the only thing I’ve been doing with my time, but it’s exemplary my work style. I try to do things that are interesting to me, or things that I feel are important. And I’ve been very lucky that so far, it’s worked out. The bills get paid.
5.Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?
Sometimes, within limitations, you can actually become more creative. One time my sister sat me down with a blank sheet of paper and she said, “If you had a magic wand and you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?” I made a list. Then we tried to figure out how I could achieve each item. It was an interesting exercise. We decided that in order for my wishes to be fulfilled the first step would be to obtain what we called an “enabling job” for a limited amount of time. After that, I would have the means to pursue other items on the list. Luckily, I can do more than one thing at the same time. But there’s always a balancing act between what you’re completely passionate about and things that need to get done. It’s more complicated than an either/or situation.
1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?
I grew up in Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand. I studied art at Silpakorn University, the first fine art university there. My major was printmaking both in B.F.A and M.F.A. In my past work, I explored how the principal qualities of printmaking can cross media from what is typically two dimensional, to three dimensional forms of art, such as sculpture and installation. Starting in 1996, my concern was with how material can have physical and metaphoric meaning in art. My interest soon turned from printed media to installation art, in which space is one of the most important characteristics. From here, I began to explore the field of new media art, which has further pushed my investigation of describing space through both the process of time and through the experiences of people via participation and interactivity.
After finishing my MFA in printmaking in 2000, I decided to return to school to study for a Masters in Digital Media, but it took me ten years before I came to study in the Digital+Media department at Rhode Island School of Design. Before then, I considered myself a self-taught media artist or practical researcher. I started to work in the field of art and technology in 2001 and learned from the direct experiences of participating in art and technology exhibitions abroad. I worked in new media art before I was aware of what it meant, theoretically, and realized that new media art is a new language that would broaden my art. It is because of my interest in art and technology that brings me from my homeland to another land. First, I travel with my work for installation of exhibitions and stay in residency programs abroad. Then, I came to study in the US follow my interest.
2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?
The two works that help me understand cross-cultural experience are Sip My Ocean, 1996 by Pipilotti Rist, and Turbulent, 1998, by Shirin Neshat. Both of these two artworks are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, installed in the different spaces of the museum. The exhibition room in which the two videos are projected creates an interpretative space between two cultures where the audience brings their own interpretation of that contrast. Rist’s video installation uses the wall surface at the corner of the room to represent the mirroring moving images. The effect of this technique provides the three dimensional space under the quality of illusive dimension of video projection. The video shows the colorful life living under the sea, such as shimmering coral, fish, and jellyfish. Rist, who was born in Switzerland, also uses her own body in the swimming suit to represent her work as one of the moving elements under the water. The work combines the visual images with song, which she created her own version of Chris Isaak’s pop song: Wicked Game, in a tone both unpleasant and enjoyable. Sip My Ocean interprets the quality of dream and the sense of place through effects of video production.
While Rist’s work recaptures the cheerful attitude and the dream-like effect to the public, Neshat’s Turbulent represents another position of a woman on the other side of the world. Neshat’s black and white video installation has two large-scale projections on the two opposite sites of the wall. On one wall, a male singer, who turns his back to the audience, delivers a love song to a group of men. He feels comfortable from the position of what he chooses to take. On the opposite wall, a woman in a black chador stands silently on the stage while the male is singing. There is no audience on her side, and she faces an empty auditorium. But, after the male singer finishes his song, the woman sings her song in a sensual way. This impassioned wordless sound from the hidden female singer shows the limitation of expression of women in the social context. Both contradictory behaviors show the cultural privilege of the men to the women under religious and cultural context. The women have no choice to take, but the society has imposed it to her. The woman’s performance is outlawed and exists only as a dream.
3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?
In art and technology, only the specific skill, knowledge, and aesthetic of technology or art are not enough because it is a combination of both of these forms. It is a combination of technique, materials, and functions, through both the process of time and through the experiences of people via participation and interactivity. As I am from visual art background, I wish I should learn more about both general and specific skill and concept in technology in order to further push my investigation of describing space in my artworks. Also, (new) media art is time and budget consuming. I hope to get better in managing my time.
4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.
I work as an artist and I have some other works to support my art career. I do not have a routine day. In the past, my schedule is normally depended on the project or the work I do in that time. Also, I just finished my second MFA in Digital Media. I am on the transformative time of where to go and work, so everyday I spend a lot of time planning and researching of what to do next.
5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?
When I have a chance to choose, I usually choose to spend time for my art more than other works. The reason I spend a lot of my budget and time on my art is because I want to go further on my art direction. Artist life is quite hard. Although I am working in other types of work for living, I still think about my art project all the time. When I spend a lot of time mainly on my art projects, sometimes it is better to do other works for living together with making art, as it is good to look at the art (of what you think by yourself) from other different perspectives.
BAC Gallery seeks proposals from emerging and mid-career independent curators for its 2011 spring and fall exhibitions. This is an open curatorial call; however, preference will be given to Brooklyn-based curators. There is no application fee. All proposals must be for group exhibitions of 3 or more artists, comprised of members of Brooklyn Arts Council’s Artist Registry. All Brooklyn artists are eligible to join the Registry, which is free.
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY
The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Off the Wall, a two-part exhibition that brings together thirty performative actions by artists, in works made from 1946 to the present, and seven iconic works by Trisha Brown.
Part I: Thirty Performative Actions
On view from July 1 – September 19, Off the Wall: Thirty Performative Actions, focuses on actions using the body in live performance, in front of the camera, or in relation to a photograph or a drawing. Each action displaces the site of the artwork from an object to the body, acting in relation to, or directly onto, the physical space of the gallery. The wall and floor are often the stage for these actions: walking on the wall, slamming a door, gathering sawdust up from the studio floor, slapping hands against the wall, walking on a painting, striding and crawling, writing or drawing on the wall and the floor, or performing a striptease. The actions include re-performances of iconic early works by John Baldessari (I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, (1971) and Yoko Ono (Painting to be Stepped On, (1961), realized by Nate Lowman), as well as recent works by young artists including Dara Friedman and Trisha Donnelly, and David Hammons’ video installation Phat Feet, in which the sidewalk of the Bowery in downtown New York City becomes the stage.
Also included are works by Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Jonathan Borofsky, John Coplans, David Hammons, Joan Jonas, Paul McCarthy, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, David Salle, Lucas Samaras, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. The use of the performative action by women to challenge male definitions of the body can be seen in works by Jenny Holzer, Dara Birnbaum, Martha Rosler, Hannah Wilke, Francesca Woodman, Carrie Mae Weems and Carolee Schneemann. The unprecedented crossover between dance and performance that occurred in the 1970s can also be seen in works by Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Maya Deren, Simone Forti, and Nauman.
The exhibition includes a number of works that reveal the underlying theatricality of the performative action, and the ways in which artists stage the self in images that question conventions of identity, gender, and perceptions of the body. In the work of artists including Laurie Simmons, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Tony Oursler and Sonic Youth, Francesca Woodman, Jimmy DeSana, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Jack Pierson, Lyle Ashton Harris and Robert Mapplethorpe, the camera replaces the white cube of the gallery as the stage upon which action occurs.
Part 1 is curated by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.
Part 2: Seven Works by Trisha Brown Part 2 features the Trisha Brown Dance Company, on the occasion of the company’s fortieth anniversary. Six dance works and a sound installation made in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be presented. The dance works will be performed daily from September 30 through October 3, 2010, in the Second Floor Galleries, the Sculpture Court, and outside the Whitney Museum of American Art on East 75th Street. Trisha Brown’s history with the Whitney began when the now-acclaimed choreographer first brought her work uptown, to the Whitney’s Breuer building, after having debuted much of her work in downtown Manhattan, in Soho and at the Judson Church, among other places. Some of Brown’s most important early works including Walking on the Wall (1970), Leaning Duets II (1971), Falling Duet I(1968), Falling Duet II (1971), and Skymap (1969), were performed at the Whitney on March 30 and 31, 1971, as part of an evening titled “Another Fearless Dance Concert.” They are all re-presented in this exhibition. When asked recently about her relationship to the Whitney, Brown commented, “The Whitney? I was born there!”
Part 2 is curated by Limor Tomer, the Whitney’s Adjunct Curator of Performing Arts.
Image Credit:
Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990), Marker Cones, 1982. Silver dye bleach print. Courtesy the Jimmy DeSana Trust
