The Egyptian legend of Isis and Osiris, a Norman Mailer novel, archetypal American automobiles, Harry Houdini and a giant salt deposit below Detroit are just a few of the concepts that inspire Ancient Evenings, Matthew Barney’s latest opus created in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler.  Barney’s formal interests seem to be edging closer to live performance then ever before.  Rather than creating performances exclusively for the camera, as he did in The Cremaster Cycle, in Ancient Evenings a small audience of critics, collectors and art world aficionados were invited to witness three extravagantly constructed site-specific acts, during which sculptures were forged and opulence reigned.  KHU (2010), for example, a seven hour long act that involved a detective plot, a chorus of opera singers and a women with prosthetic legs fornicating with live snakes, took spectators on a tour of derelict Detroit and onto a barge where they watched five giant silos release molten lead that formed into the sculpture DJED which is currently on view at Gladstone gallery.

The notion that this event could be entombed in the sculptures themselves haunts the gallery like a strange aftershock. Heavy metals like iron, lead, bronze, and copper litter the gallery floor in the transient shapes they were cast in.  Han Solo could be hibernating in any of these – a Chrysler’s underside made entirely of lead and graphite, a block of plastic in the midst of an alchemical change to zinc, or a heaping mound of rusty bronze topped with a perfectly polished Was (Egyptian power scepter).  In addition to this, twelve cryptic drawings that could have been torn from a William Blake sketchbook hang on the walls in red frames and provide insight into Barney’s mise-en-scène.  These conceptual concerns are by no means strange to the second half of the twentieth century, or Barney’s other work for that matter.  Artists have long pioneered methods of capturing the precious live act – whether it be Yves Klein’s Le Saut dans le Vide, Piero Manzoni’s Magic Base or any performance artist who has documented their work in video, film, or photography.  Barney makes live performance implicit to his sculptures by creating such a specific and grandiose setting to craft them.  The sculptures, though they are packed full of mythology both modern and ancient, left me wanting to know more about where they came from.  Not even the comprehensive brochure/playbill that accompanies the exhibition can compensate for what it might have been like to be at one of these performances.  I hope for this reason that the forthcoming acts to be performed in New York City will be accessible to a larger audience.

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

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.

—————————————————————————————————–

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

—–

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

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

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 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