Tag Archives: performance art

noos from noo york

Martha Rosler, Carey Young at the Whitechapel Gallery

On Thursday night (Nov 20th 2003)– Martha Rosler presented a remake of her “Semiotics in the Kitchen” video from 1975. It’s the video in which she pretends to be a cooking show presenter, and goes through an a to z of kitchen implements, waving them to the camera, and sometimes brandishing them threateningly. She’s trapped inside the tv, inside the kitchen, inside the structure of language (that’s how she talks about the piece herself).

The idea of re-enacting, live, a performance originally made for video was a bit odd, and I think she dealt with it as best she could – by creating a kind of “audition” situation where a couple of dozen young women (who had been recruited from the local art scene) queued up to take a role in the kitchen, going through the alphabet of implements. There were 3 “kitchen sets” where this process was going on simultaneously, meaning that the huge crowd that had assembled at the whitechapel had a higher chance of “getting close” to the performance. It was pretty messy and unruly, but not a bad way to bring a certain intimacy (most of the other pieces this week have used the "auditorium" set-up, which was fine for their work, but Rosler’s needed that closeness between audience and performer). It felt a bit like being in a shopping mall, looking at a (very odd) product demonstration, rather than watching a tv show (although the action was transferred live to tv monitors within the room). Some of the performance participants hammed it up, others were deadpan, I think they all got a kick out of taking part. Rosler acted as a kind of director for the piece, even giving instructions sometimes as it was in progress.

"Semiotics in the Kitchen" came after Carey Young’s “Optimum Performance”, which took the ambiguous meaning of the word “performance” (meaning either “a piece of performance art”, or “a level of achievement within the business world”, similar to “effectiveness” or “efficiency”) and transformed the gallery into a motivational business seminar. She hired an actor to present the piece, which he did very well indeed, in front of a set consisting of grey felt-lined panels and indoor plant. The speech itself was all about how we can all "achieve better performance by having regular reviews". It was very funny, and cleverly written and crafted.

However, I would not make any claims for the effect of the work beyond being a (in-)joke or stunt…unfortunately, that’s just what Young did in the discussion panel session at the end of the night, jargonistically telling us what the piece was “about” (“soft architecture” “soft business”, (whatever that means) and “creating a space of ambiguity”) and so on. She told us that she had worked in the business world for some years, and that she felt it was important for artists to develop the ability to speak corporate language and operate within a business environment. She even mentioned that art was being considered as a diplomatic tool for international trade deals, and that it could therefore be a powerfully subversive element in world politics.

Young's argument was utterly unconvincing, especially after the Morris lecture from the previous night, which had hammered home the way that large artworks have constantly been used as an unconscious tool of capitalist imperialism. Young was also disappointing for her lack of commitment to any "actual" real life politics – she said that she had used the business sphere as “research” for making artworks. Contrast this with Rosler, whose work and life deals with labor and gender in a direct and concrete way, and, as Rosler said, maybe there was a “generation gap” issue going on between the two artists. Young came across as a caricature of the late 80s artist-entrepreneur (Koons et al), whereas Rosler presented as a throwback to a forgotten generation of outdated and somewhat unfashionable politics (unionism and labour conditions etc). The final question from the audience was “besides being two women, why are you both presenting work on the same night?” – Rosler, who had been holding back up til then, leaned into the microphone and droned “actually, I had been wondering that myself.”

Inventory at the Whitechapel Gallery

Atlas Group and Mark Dion at the Whitechapel Gallery

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Saturday night (Nov 22, 2003) was dominated by Walid Raad's tour-de-force powerpoint presentation about the activities of The Atlas Group. The Group’s archive deals with "the situation" in Lebanon, especially since the civil war in the mid 1970s. It is a fictional archive, (sometimes a fiction based on true documents and events), which attempts to make sense (and even poetry) of the constantly unstable political climate within Lebanon. It does so by utilising the minutiae of everyday life, and this is important for both the archive’s intrinsic content, and its apparent authenticity.

By concentrating on vast quantities of very minor information (such as the make, model, and colour of every car used for a bombing in Lebanon between 1975 and 1989) we are swept into a world enormously different from our own (in terms of daily personal danger) and yet incredibly similar and banal at the same time (ordinary cars, in colours we might choose ourselves). In this, The Atlas Group consistenly proves that it is in masterly control of the craft of its fiction – the overwhelming quantity of detail which makes us swoon, and forget the fact that it might actually be all just made up.

Raad extends this performance craft even to the point of planting questions in the audience, for which he has answers ready-prepared. In response to one of the questions, “can you give us some background information about the situation in Lebanon?” Raad sighs, and opens up the directory of his computer (visible to the audience on a data projector), revealing countless filenames for documents on the history of Lebanon decade by decade for the last five hundred years. By this strategy, he can reveal the breadth of the answer to that question, without actually needing to answer it directly.

For as he said, “when you talk for too long, people will try to make you shut up. But when you are asked a question, you have permission to talk for a long time”.* As both me and a friend commented at the same time, he is one clever cookie.

*…however, it should be noted, that this information about questions and answers was volunteered by Raad, and not given in response to any particular question. (Perhaps he wants to hammer home just how clever he really is, and why not, we all got a kick out of it anyway).

Mark Dion, prior to Raad’s presentation, showed old-fashioned slides, and gave an entertaining A-Z of extinct animals, and biological nightmares of our times. In moments, it was very informative (especially in relation to biological facts), yet, as my friend Tom pointed out, the tone of the lecture was "more catastrophic than critical", and therefore not very useful for instigating concrete change to the problems it described. However, the scope of the lecture was modest, and I don’t believe it set out to achieve more than it did – therefore it was nowhere near as irritating as the Carey Young performance (and the claims made on its behalf) earlier in the week.

Andrea Fraser at the Whitechapel Gallery / Art Quiz Night

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On 18 Nov, I went with my friend Lilly to an “art quiz-night-” in a pub near East London's famous Whitechapel Gallery. This was a really interesting event, and made me think about the kind of social structures Bourriaurd writes about in Relational Aesthetics. Here we were in a kind of low key performative atmosphere, engaged with the esoteric minutiae of the history of art, drinking beer in a pub. It was hilarious. I think it would work well in Sydney's Hollywood Hotel with the Briefcase Gallery. Questions ranged from “what is the title of the Duchamp readymade of a snow shovel?” to a “name that monochrome” test based on a handout of black and white photocopied images, to “what was renaissance artist Donatello’s full name”. It was hilarious and infuriatingly difficult at the same time, since it showed how little “detail” we know to precision about art historical “facts”. I thought of my friends Elaine and Angel’s "slide recognition tests" they had to do at the National Art School in Sydney. Rote learning is really out of style now…

………..

At the pub, I also met Andrea Fraser, who had done a performance at the Whitechapel Gallery earlier that night. I really liked her piece, which was called "Official Welcome", in which she created a fictional opening speech for a museum or gallery. Fraser is a good actor, taking on several different roles during the performance, alternating between gallerist/director and artist on show, navigating the clichés of that (usually incredibly tedious) ritual. Yet her “speech” was not tedious at all, she weaved close enough to the art world figures we know and love/hate, without ever making explicit parody of any one person. I thought I detected Vito Acconci’s stuttering New York drawl in one of her characterisations (in fact, later in the pub she said it had been a combination of Shirin Neshat and Cy Twombly). And I could have sworn it was Tracey Emin she was lampooning in her faux-impersonation of an artist being honoured for her gritty, truth-telling work, having been through rapes, abortions, suicide attempts. And surely in there was a joke about Vanessa Beecroft and her designer-underwear-supermodels performances. But none of it was clear-cut. My guesses about the sources for her succession of “take-offs” could be totally off the mark – it could be that in five years time, the exact same performance would seem to ape a completely different set of artists/gallerists. Perhaps the "types" stay the same, but are occupied by different real people. At the pub I suggested she should come to Sydney with her piece, I would love to see it at the MCA, where Liz Anne MacGregor is routinely drowned out by the loud conversation of alcohol-guzzling guests not at all interested in hearing her say yet again, “the work can be understood on many levels.” I mentioned this MacGregor classic to Fraser, she said it was a good one and maybe she would try work it into her next piece.

Fraser’s previous work has included similar “institutional critique”, including pretending to be a museum guide, and focusing visitors’ attention on “peripheral areas such as the museum’s canteen rather than its collection” and “incorporating references to class, sexual and cultural difference that are generally elided by official histories”. (Quotes from Whitechapel catalogue spiel about Fraser). In another piece, she visited the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, borrowed the official audio tour guide, and proceeded to respond to its “lyrical and sensual” descriptions of the building by rubbing her body up against “the curvaceous walls”, all documented by a hidden camera. In an earlier work, she pretended to be a museum director – (from the Whitechapel catalogue) – “taking the podium unannounced during the opening of the triennial art event in San Diego, inSITE, Fraser surprised the crowd with an oration that went well beyond the limits of accepted protocol, weaving references to the NAFTA trade agreement into the exhibitions rhetoric about supporting cross cultural activity. The real inSITE director was then required to take to the stage and, rather awkwardly, deliver the real speech in a very similar vein.”

When I spoke to Fraser in the pub, I realised that I had misinterpreted the framework of her performance pieces. I had assumed, through reading the text in the Whitechapel Gallery catalogue, that her “interventions” were unauthorised, mischievous (but ultimately harmless) actions. No, she told me, the catalogue was slightly misleading, and the works were presented in collaboration with the venues concerned. My friends Lilly and Will had suspected as much – they said they had seen the hidden video documentation of the Guggenheim piece, and they thought that it was “too high quality” and “the angles were too good” for it to have been a "real" guerrilla action within the museum.

So the “institutional critique” she makes is carried out with the permission of the very venues she lampoons. Why shouldn’t I have expected that? Naturally, museums must be clamouring for her to grace them with a work, hungry, self-centred attention-seekers that they are (the museums, that is). As one of her collector-characters said in her “Official Welcome” speech, “we mainly collect art about sex and excrement. We’ve always loved her work”. Is Fraser any more than the art-world’s stand up comic? Could it be possible that her work has the potential to transform the institutions which smile politely and lap up the attention, as she sends them up? Perhaps that’s not important, or maybe it’s too much to ask anyway. With “Official Welcome” she is telling it like it T-I-S, exposing the spurious prestige-swapping relationship between artists and the gallerists and museum staff who “(re)present” them. I had a hearty laugh, and that’s rare enough in art these days.

Robert Morris lecture at Whitechapel Gallery

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Morris gave a lecture entitled [something like]

Notes From a Chomskian Couch – The Imperialist Unconscious

(on 19 Nov 2003)

Morris spoke on contemporary "image making". Specifically, his point was about how (what he calls) the "mega image" ( or "megig") is complicit with the American project of cultural imperialism. According to Morris, this was the case with large abstract painting through the 60s, and in earthworks, and through to large "multi-screen-video-installations" (or "muscrvit") today.

Very few (famous) artists escaped Morris' web of "the imperialist unconscious" he slammed the big video men – Bill Viola, Doug Aitken, etc, the big painting men – Pollock, Barnett Newman, etc. His exceptions included Jasper Johns – he maintained that Johns always maintained a resistance to American imperialism, (and what's more, Johns' paintings were small) – and Ad Rheinhardt also, who, apparently, "was at every peace rally, every anti Vietnam march". (How does going to marches change the nature of his work though, I wondered, since it still looks like monochrome painting?)

Morris presented the text of his lecture in the form of a psychoanalytic encounter between himself (the patient) and Naum Chomsky (the analyst). "Chomsky's" role, however seemed rather minor, and his comments and interjections were only punctuations within Morris’ tirade. They helped, certainly, with maintaining the attention span of the audience, since otherwise the talk may have seemed somewhat monotonous.

[By the way, Morris’ said that his performance pieces from the 1960s were originally conceived as “dances”, in a La Mont Young vein – where the ordinary movements and actions of everyday life might be regarded with the same level of interest as “expressive” movements usually associated with the work of trained dancers. This is the context of his piece "21.3", where he lip-synchs a lecture by Erwin Panofsky called "Studies in Iconology"…apparently, all the minor movements (a cough, a sip of water, shuffling papers) were "choreographed" in advance, and noted on the "performance script". I felt that the Whitechapel presentation of "21.3" was a bit unconvincing in its realisation, as a video recreated by somebody else (an actor re-enacted "21.3" for video in the early 1990s). I wonder why he did that, rather than videotaping himself doing it.]

At the end of the lecture, Morris stated that he would take 10 questions. He then proceeded to re-enact a performance by John Cage from the late 1940s or early 1950s (?) – at the end of a lecture on chance, Cage took questions from the audience, answering them with pre-scripted texts pulled at random from a hat. In Morris’ case, the audience played along marvellously, their questions moving quickly from the serious ("you mentioned you were going to present some exceptions to the project of imperialist unconscious as embodied by image-art, but I must have missed it, can you tell us what those examples might be?") to the absurd ("what will you have for breakfast tomorrow?", "did anyone ever tell you you look like Sigmund freud?", "how many questions are left?")

This humourous end to an otherwise pessimistic lecture lent a certain lightness, (what relief!) since, within the lecture itself, Morris had not left much room for examples of artwork that could escape the net of the "imperial unconscious" (or "impunc").

Bilateral

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