Marc Arthur News

Rockwell Kent, Flame, 1928

Paul Klee, Fire at Full Moon, 1933

Malcolm Browne, 1963.  Photograph of Thich Quang Duc’s Self Immolation.

François Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451, 1966

Judy Chicago, Atmospheres, 1967

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 5, 1974

Ana Mendieta, Silueta en Fuego, 1975

Mariko Mori, Burning desire, 1997

Stephanie Sinclai, Self-Immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help, 2005

Paul Chan, an artist known for his video and animation works, put the lexicon of theater to work in 2007 when he teamed up with Creative Time and The Classical Theater of Harlem to mount a production of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in New Orleans.  When it first opened in 1953, Beckett’s seminal play famously provoked public fights due to its lack of plot and dramatic action.  The play has since become so ingrained in contemporary culture and psyche that it now receives countless productions, many of which are site specific.  In his latest piece, Chan re-activated Beckett’s controversial text as a language to speak about waiting and the loss of narrative in post Katrina New Orleans.

Beckett’s absurd and severe play was constructed in two outdoor locations that were significantly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina: a decimated street in the Lower Ninth Ward and an abandoned house in the Gentilly neighborhood were the stage.  Free to the public, the play began with a sermon from the local Reverend, pre-show gumbo and a marching band that lead the audience to their seats.  On opening night crowds of eight hundred tailgated, waiting eagerly to get bleacher seats.  Still, this was the harshly minimal Godot that we all know and Gavin Kroeber, the shows producer from Creative Time, notes that “every night there were people who left”[Kroeber, 147] —but also describes a lingering potency that the play left in the city.

In a video trailer for the project on Creative Time’s website, Chan explains his goal for the project: “…that it becomes aesthetically interesting but locally sustainable”.  As an artist, Chan is not solely interested in commercial success.  In addition to shows at Greene Naftali, The Hammer and inclusion in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Chan works widely as an activist having been involved with the Chicago based anti-war group Voices.  Countless arts organizations were involved in workshops and meetings leading up to the Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.  Chan taught classes at local schools and a shadow fund was set up where contributions, that matched the shows production cost, were made to local charitable organizations.

The concept of repurposing Waiting for Godot in spaces of political upheaval is not a new one; inmates at the San Quintin prison have performed the play and Susan Sontag famously staged it in Sarajevo in 1993.  Revisiting the text in the site-specific context of New Orleans brought to light a struggle many New Orleans residents were all too familiar with—waiting.  Robert Lynn Green, who lives in the Lower Ninth Ward, pointed out, “Basically everybody knows about waiting, whether you are waiting for FEMA to call you, whether you’re waiting for The Road Home to call you, when you’re waiting for the Red Cross to call you for an appointment that’s three months down the line, everybody knows about waiting.”[Creative Time]

There is no finale, no grand crescendo in a post-Katrina landscape ravaged by innumerable disasters.  In her essay Political Beckett? Terry Eagleton describes Waiting for Godot as “Post-Auschwitz,” noting that “one pointless narrative cranks itself laboriously off the ground only to be aborted for another, equally futile tale.”[Eagleton, 69]  Beckett is no stranger to similar iniquities.  Waiting for Godot reflects his engagement with the resistance in World War II torn France where he spent months as a refugee.  James Knowlson writes, “Many of the features of his later prose and plays arise directly from his experience of radical uncertainty, disorientation, exile, hunger and need.”[Knowlson, 416] Beckett’s bleak and empty play makes visible the absurdity and beauty of hope.  The deep sense of immediacy in Waiting for Godot is perhaps owed to its universality.  The ambiguity of the text offered the New Orleans audience a chance to put themselves in the place of actors and consider their struggle in a new light.

If New Orleans was Chan’s set, then the crowds were speaking the performer’s dialog.  What made Beckett’s play originally so controversial is also what makes Chan’s project an apt and well-crafted gesture in the marriage of art and politics.  What better medium to engage in social activism than one that exhibits identity, perception, and the live body over time—a form that acts out rather than merely documents life.  Beckett does not offer a solution, Vladimir and Estragon never find Godot, and the audience is left to contemplate their struggle of waiting.  Chan did not produce his piece in New Orleans to convey a message or to reach a solution, but to encourage reflection and provide support through grass roots fundraising and the sale of artworks related to the piece.

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Eagleton, Terry.  Political Beckett.  New Left Review 40 July 2006.  P. 69

Knowlson, James.  Damned to Fame.  P. 416

Kroeber, Gavin. Producing Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A field guide. Edited by Paul Chan. Creative Time 2010. Chapter 4.  P147.

Creative Time.  Video trailer for project. Creative Time website: http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/welcome.html

In case you missed the latest Not For Sale panel on Performance Art and the Museum, there is another great one happening next week at Cuny regarding intersections between performance art and the performing arts.

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Gavin Kroeber (Creative Time) leads a panel featuring artists Sharon Hayes and Alix Pearlstein, the Radiohole ensemble, and curator Nancy Spector, exploring the porous lines of affinity and bias that connect and separate performance art and the performing arts. To what degree are the burgeoning opportunities enjoyed by performance in the visual arts sphere the result of intentional disciplinary distinction, and to what degree is the institutionalization of performance art moving the form towards the mechanisms of the performing arts (casting, rehearsal, repetition, and dramaturgy)? Must cutting-edge theatre and dance artists cross over into visual performance art to find adequate spaces and sympathetic audiences, or can the American performing arts adapt to accommodate performance more broadly construed? Eschewing naïve scenarios of disciplinary rapprochement and nostalgic discussions of 20th century performance movements, this panel will bring artists and curators that are employing techniques across shifting disciplinary lines into lively dialogue, discussing how flexible practices benefit artistic inquiry, challenge institutional approaches and develop spaces for social rapport between often segregated art worlds.

Info here: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/events/s10/intersection-art-performance.html

Perhaps owed to their unpolished technique or the universality of their themes, there is a timelessness to William Kentridge’s work.  Whether adapted from Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play “Ubu Roy” or narrating Kentridge’s own fictional character Soho Eckstein, the themes and struggles portrayed in his work are individual metaphors for something much greater.  Born in Johannesburg in 1955, Kentidge not only lived through the apartheid era but was exposed to many of its ills through his parents, both of whom were lawyers working in and for the anti-apartheid movement.  Coupled with his undergraduate studies in Politics and African Studies, there is a clear political bent to much of his work.  To that end, the aggressive gestures that he uses to build image and his mostly monochromatic palette allude to the civil unrest and segregation that permeated every aspect of his culture.

In a world and artistic landscape that seems to constantly be reinventing itself aesthetically, there is both a steadiness and classicism to Kentridge’s work that his critics label as uninspired.  Having studied miming and theater in Paris in the 1980′s his drawings show a consciousness towards staging and stylistically, an interest in the silhouette.  Like a mime, whether working in film on paper, Kentridge relies heavily on gesture to compensate for a lack of verbal communication.  This energy carries over to his animations and to his live performance, I recently saw his epic opera “The Nose” at The Met, which through a staccatoed stringing together of stills capture much of the raw impetuous movement of his drawings.  It was so rewarding to see performance that is based so heavily in the concrete foundation of drawing.  Kentridge is having a moment in New York right now that is not to miss.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/964

http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/news/features/detail.aspx?id=11434

At first glance, this exhibition is an overwhelming array of TV monitors, wall texts and lengthy news clippings.  As the daunting task of consuming 100 years of performance art weighed down on me, I was reminded that performance has transcended time not through physical art objects but via a diversity of documentation.  To uncover the unifying theme or linear history in this colossal drafting of the genealogy of performance art, viewers must first betray the content of the exhibition all together and dedicate themselves to interpreting the formal mechanisms of documentation.

The first piece of the exhibition, Le Ballet Mechanique (1924) is a futurist film by Fernand Léger put to a score by George Antheil.  The film emphasizes repetition through close-ups and dizzying angles of gears, machines, amusement park rides and illustrations of futurist style figures being cut up.  Antheil’s score adds to the nauseating and chaotic tempo with tam-tams, sirens, propellers and 7 player pianos.  Reading wall texts I learned that most of the artists exhibited in the room all worked collaboratively at different points in their careers, and also that Antheil’s accompanying soundtrack would later stand on its own in a performance whereby musician’s interactions with the instruments became the ballet itself.  To render any piece in this room as a complete piece I drew lines between all of the works – Futurist manifestos, a film by Oscar Schelmmer, and fashion designs by tktkt etc. – to create a constellation of different aesthetic, collaborative and ideological elements that could position me better in the live moment of the Futurists.

As artists working in performance during 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s tackled the quickly evolving technologies of film and video, the camera lens was employed for a variety of purposes revealing evolving practices in performance.  The raw black and white street documentation of Valie Export’s Tap and Touch Cinema (1969) is a straightforward and unbiased document of her live performance.  We understand the importance of the video theater, the nudity and the artist’s relationship to the public. While in a work like Joan Jonas’s Glass Puzzle (1973), the artist performs for the camera, as if moving her body was a personal show for the viewer alone.  Much of the performance art from this period deals with the body, and is often categorized in terms of shocking political elements (A group of teenagers were huddled around Gunter Brus’s Transfusion (1965) ooing and awing at the blood and gore).   It is when we look back at the documentation and consider the negotiations between camera, performer and audience that we clearly see the varied practices of artists, and understand how they were laying the groundwork for a new generation of artists who would take the relationship between the camera and performer to a new level of complexity.

We are now in an era when artists like Tino Sehgal or Andrea Frasure have made these issues of documentation central to their practice.  As artists adapt, the formal challenges of representing performance become more complex, techniques have exploded to include all fields of art practice.  In the final rooms that span the past 20 years, I found that reviews and exhibition announcements offered the most valuable information just by their descriptive nature alone.  Video and photographs only felt adequate for artists like Mathew Barney who consider documentation the end all product of the performance.  Surely a photograph cannot help me to understand the scope and politics of Felix González-Torres’s “Untitled” candy piece (a work that involves the gallery visitor taking a piece of candy from a large pile with them as the leave).  Fortunately this artwork is physically present, and fortunately there are also live performances programmed into the exhibition.  On the day I went, a crowd had gathered to see the experimental music band Shattered Patterns perform.  They swamped the galleries with ambient noise and bizarre moans attesting to the fact that there really is nothing more valuable than witnessing a performance live.

Simply reading a wall text, looking at a photograph or watching a video doesn’t enact the live experience of a performance.  But, it does present evidence for solving the mystery of the live act.  During a panel discussion on documentation and performance, art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg remarked that,  “We’re looking at a medium that needs a new approach in terms of history: yes it is documentation; no, I very often wasn’t there, but most of the time, very few other people were there either”[1].  If there is to be a new approach to understanding performance art through history, we must first become literate in the language of documentation.  This exhibition is the perfect place to start.

[1] Goldberg, RoseLee.  Everywhere and All at Once: An Anthology of Writings on Performa 07.  JRP Ringier, 2009.

The latest incarnation of The Key took place as part of the MIX festival.  Performers were Gage Boone, Stephen Boyer and I.  All images courtesy Ava Hassinger.

Recently Peter Cramer, Jack Waters and I were invited to collaborate and present new work at FRISE in Hamburg.  In addition to the exhibition, we did a performance and screened new videos.  Here are some images of various elements from the project titled “Triple Threat”.

“Undetectable In Berlin”
2009, 28 minutes, video. U.S. Premiere
Culled from the actions of an artists’ residency in Berlin. A sub-theme for the Berlin occupation was “Undetectable”: an infection whose presence is assumed, but whose physical detection is untraceable by scientific means.
Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.

“The Education of Abou Ben Adhem”
2009, 16.5 minutes, video. Made in collaboration with Marc Arthur. World premiere
Showing ways in which cultures clash by positioning the impressionistic figure of an imaginary Islamic nationalist torn between his love of erotic poetry and the need to defend his heritage against the very Western influences that are his material resources for said defense.

http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/schedule/search/film/?id=9371