future imagination - Future of Imagination

Transcription

of
FUTURE
IMAGINATION
International Performance Art Event, Singapore, 2008
www.foi.sg
Future of
Imagination
5
Future of Imagination 5
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Contents
Prognosis: Comparative Indicators for Future Actions
Lee Wen
4
Time and Again: Present-ing the Future in the Public of Performance Art
Adele Tan
8
Resonant Relationships:
The One-to-One performance
Lynn Lu
14
Document & Performance or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Lens
Bruce Quek
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Artists’ Biographies
Adina Bar-On (Israel)
Angie Seah (Singapore)
Cai Qing (Germany/China) Cheng Guang Feng (China)
Chia Chu Yia (Singapore/Malaysia)
Dariusz Fodczuk (Poland)
Duan Ying Mei (Germany/China)
Fabien Montmartin (France)
Gwendoline Robin (Belgium)
Helmut Lemke (Germany/UK)
Jason Lim (Singapore)
Kai Lam (Singapore)
Lee Wen (Singapore)
Lynn Lu (Singapore)
Melati Suryodarmo (Germany/Indonesia)
Mongkol Plienbangchang (Thailand)
Myriam Laplante (Canada/Italy)
Ronaldo Ruiz (The Philippines)
Sabrina Koh (Singapore)
Yuenjie Maru (Hong Kong)
Zai Kuning (Singapore)
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35
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Forum Speakers
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Cover photo: ‘Past Now Present’, Kenny McBride,
Future of Imagination 4, 72-13, theatreWorks, Singapore
Photo by Urich Lau
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Essays
3
Prognosis: Comparative Indicators
for Future Actions
Lee Wen
4
In August 2001, I participated in the 2nd Open Art Festival in Sichuan, China organised by Chen
Jin, Shu Yang and Zhu Ming.1 This was my first visit to the Chinese mainland. On arrival we were
told that the venue would have to be changed from the Beijing suburbs (as was originally planned) to
undisclosed venues in Chengdu, Sichuan, because the organisers feared that the police might have
caught wind of the event and was preparing to shut it down. We took a 36-hour train journey to
Chengdu and sought out a rustic unused brick factory near Pengshan, a small town outside Chengdu.
We also performed on an island in the midstream of a river facing the Giant Buddha monument in
Leshan and eventually ended in Chengdu on the last day.
The situation in China had changed tremendously over the years and by the time I returned again in
2004 (and later in 2006), performance festivals were becoming more openly held in Beijing. This
October I participated in the ‘UP-ON First International Live Art Festival’ in Chengdu. I had helped
organise and curate the foreign artists while Chengdu-based artists, Zhou Bin, Liu Cheng Yin and Yan
Cheng were the artist-organisers curating the artists from China.2 UP-ON in Chengdu was followed
up by two smaller events in Chongqing and Xi-An as the foreign artists split into two groups to go to
the two different cities.3 The events were reported favourably in the local newspapers as well as on
broadcast television. What a contrast from my first encounter in 2001 when we practically felt like
fugitive artists on the run from the authorities and the law. At the same time, the audiences have grown
to include not only artists and friends but also dedicated students and an enthusiastic public.
Chia Chu Yia, Sleeping with the ignorance, UP-ON First International Live Art Festival, Chengdu, China, 2008
5
Huang Ling, “KVCIO 症 / The Illness of KVCIO”, 2008’Vital-Chongqing International Live Art Festival, 2008
Despite various organisational problems and frictions one cannot but feel positive about contributions
which helped bring about transformations in society via artistic processes. However, at the end of the
performances and discussions with the audiences, some prevailing and recurrent questions gnawingly
remain concerning the reception and continuation of performance art or even contemporary art
practices in reality. If we comparatively examine the situation in China with Singapore some telltale
signs show up glaringly the characteristics of how our society functions and perhaps also point
towards future actions for facilitating desired changes and development.
Authorities in both countries responded to performance art with severe censure at the outset but
this was later followed by acceptance. Since 1991, the National Arts Council has funded the
development of the arts and culture in Singapore. The controversial performances in 1994 by Josef
Ng and Shannon Tham, during an event co-organised by The Artists’ Village, alternative art group
and 5th Passage, an artists-run space, however, resulted in a 10-year funding ban on performance art
and sanctions on exhibitions for Ng and Tham.4 In the same year, Zhu Ming and Ma Liuming were
arrested and imprisoned after police interrupted a performance event at the East Village, an informal
artists’ colony in Beijing.5
6
Josef Ng relocated to Bangkok and is now a respected curator of a major art gallery in Bangkok,
while Shannon Tham is an art director with a successful career in advertising and design. Zhu
Ming and Ma Liuming who once underwent distressing arraignment for performance art have now
gained fame and are today sought after in the international art market.6 After facing censure from
the authorities or even legal action, artists in China could still re-establish themselves as artists,
albeit of the money-spinning entrepreneurial kind, whereas Ng and Tham have had to give up their
artistic ambitions and find new directions elsewhere.
Contemporary art has gained increased media attention with international biennales set up in
Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing; more new art magazines have been initiated and writing
on art has acquired sophistication and depth in China. Even after the second edition of our
international biennale, Singapore’s media are still looking for verification as if the claim of cultural
and art renaissance pertains only to the ages of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Any new art
magazine that is able to last for more than three issues or exist past half a year can therefore pat
themselves on their back for trying.
Performance art in China was chastised in the past on the grounds of obscenity and nudity.
Although still frowned upon by the more conservative sections of society, there is enough tolerance
and sophistication today for nudity to be accepted as art rather than as an indecent or morally
offensive act. Such performances found their way into newspaper and television reports although
one hastens to detect the proclivity for prospective sensationalism.
The greater ease of use and proliferation of mobile phone cameras, cheaper video and digital
cameras has become an irritating and distracting feature during every performance art event. Stern
announcements and signs to restrict the use of mobile phones or requests to switch them to silent
mode or prohibiting their use often end in failure. At a most tense moment, an excited photographer
will be closing in on a view, obscuring that of others; someone’s phone will ring, breaking the
concentration of both the artist and the audience. Despite the newfound embrace of performance,
there is now a need for more sensitivity and self-discipline amongst the audience.
Art students in China till today are not taught performance art in schools – although they are
allowed to perform, they will not be assessed for those works done – but performance art has begun
to be introduced into the Singapore schools’ curriculum. That said, young artists in Singapore
schools have strongly tended towards reproducing Western models or methods seen in art books
and magazines without much regard for our own local contemporary history and performance
artists. Young students in China are getting increasingly interested in performance art but the
education system there responds not to the demands of the students but has accommodated more
the inclinations of a rigid hierarchy.
One of the two festival venues in Chengdu had to be changed just three days before the festival
began. The management of the intended venue abruptly decided for us to be part of another
Festival of Flowers beginning more than a week later than originally planned despite having been
agreed upon the terms of the sponsorship months before. Zhou Bin and his co-organisers were
fortunate to able to find an alternative venue and sponsor but they had to re-print all posters and
re-send invitations. In Singapore, venues have to be booked months if not a year ahead. Our strict
7
2) Duan Ying Mei, “忧郁”----段英梅2015 年重庆现代艺术中心 / “Melancholy “ - Duan Yingmei, 2015 Chongqing Contemporary Art
Center, 2008’Vital-Chongqing International Live Art Festival, 2008 Photo: Lee Wen
licensing requirements for public performances simply make this an impossible-to-imagine worstcase scenario.
“Performance” has become a key word in not only the study of art but also a wide variety of activities
ranging from religious rituals, trading markets, to the Olympics, and performance as a field has been
described as an anti-disciplinary discipline resisting conclusions.7 The negotiating, organising and
enacting of live performance art programmes could also be seen as a larger collective performance.
Based on the comparative observations of these experiences above, one can discern distinct
differences and characteristics between the state of affairs in Singapore and China or elsewhere.
And in order to rationally consider what needs to be changed or even have the confidence in our own
capacity to make these transformations depends on our disposition to either yield to the status quo or
renew and fortify our commitment towards a higher life ideal.
8
(Endnotes)
2nd Open Art Festival, Pengshan, Leshan and Chengdu, Sichuan, 8 to 17 August 2001:
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~ee1s-ari/sichuan.html
1
Zhou Bin and I started discussions more than a year ago when I was on a site research visit for my own project in June 2007.
Zhou Bin and Liu Chengyin had just initiated UP-ON Live Art Space in an old factory building dedicated to performance art practice.
Unfortunately the building was demolished 5 months after.
http://www.up-onspace.com/
2
2008’Vital-Chongqing International Live Art Festival organised by Yan Yan, 501 Contemporary Art Centre and 2008 Xian International
Live Art Festival organised by Xiang Xishi, Fang Yan Contemporary Art Space, 16 to 17 October.
3
Ray Langenbach, “Looking Back at Brother Cane: Performance Art and State Performance”, 1995 Space, Spaces and Spacing, The
Substation Conference1995.The Substation Singapore 1996. P.132-147
Ray Langenbach, Performing the Singapore State 1988 – 1995, PhD thesis, Center for Cultural Research, University of Sydney. August
2003, Ch.7, p. 207-239
http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/uploads/approved/adt-NUWS20041027.174118/public/08Chapter7.pdf
4
5
Thomas J Berghuis, Performance Art in China, Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2006
Detractors have even questioned the integrity of recent works by Chinese artists including performance artists who now employ
capitalist production means to meet the frenzied demands of the booming art market.
Zhu Qi, ‘Experimenting with Art Capitalism in China’, trans Modi , Art Map, December 2007, issue 7, Beijing, China, pp 16-36; Zhu
Qi, ‘Art Capitalism in China (Part I & II)’,
http://www.artzinechina.com/display.php?a=602
http://www.artzinechina.com/display_vol_aid603_en.html
6
7
Marvin A Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, New York and London, 199, pp 188-9
9
Time and Again: Present-ing
the Future in the Public of Performance Art
Adele Tan
They always say that time changes things,
but you actually have to change them yourself.
-- The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)
10
I have been thinking about time. This should come as no real surprise given that this event
is titled “Future of Imagination” (FOI) and the term “time-based art” is repeated no less than
three times in the first two paragraphs of the FOI press statement for 2008. Time is a formal,
ontological element in any performance or theatrical event and as such looks almost too selfevident and easily taken for granted. Yet should the “time-basedness” of performance practice
hold more promise than an emphatic rhetorical gesture?
Here, I want to take the term more seriously than when it was summarily dispensed as a
neutered description, to allow me to ponder how performance works to make us think about
time politically and philosophically. As much as the culture industry is now built on identity and
memory, we have not got to the task of asking what time and history has got to do with this,
and how power, violence and capital are embroiled within the thinking and working through
of time-based art.
To prescribe an event title such as “Future of Imagination” immediately puts into play the past,
present and future. These categories are however not locked in a rigid linear progression but
are to be set about with a dialectical disposition, embodied succinctly in the French artist
Orlan’s arched motto “Remember the Future”.1 This emphasis on the dimension of the future is
a hopeful gambit that poses to us the imperative of transformation in time. This turn of the gaze
and imagination toward the future is a typical modernist and avant-gardist standpoint, a belief
in a succession of technological and theoretical triumphs. Or in a postmodern twist, the future
beckons the deferral of closures, the welcoming embrace of the yet-to-come and the yet-to-be.
FOI could technically also be an infinite series of events, coming one after another, year after
year, until of course it runs up against the limits of state funding and forbearance.
Yet abutting this futural logic is another question: “If not now, when?”2 Could our ability to
act be sundered by the habitual postponement of change, thereby making us peremptorily
rush to the conclusion that “the future is now”? Or to phrase this counter-question more
generously, in what ways are directives toward the future aids to helping us grapple with
the now? Contemporary life has been perceived as condensed into a perpetual, ever-lasting
present, an all-at-once, and it is now the present that proves intractable to comprehension but
amenable to consumption. Can performance be one of the many instruments to dialecticize
and deconstruct the mythic meanings of the present and find out what constitutes it? I say this
because performance art is unusually well-placed due to its constitutive ties to ephemerality
(an elusive ever-shifting present) and to the mediated document, and hence is a connective
tissue between ways of being and seeing.3
To be sure, discursive strategies in art and performance studies have capitalized and
elaborated upon the paradoxes of time and the futural flux. Chief among such disquisition
is the psychoanalytic conception of time, Sigmund Freud’s nachträglichkeit or what we now
translate as “afterwardness” or deferred action. This implies a complex reciprocal relationship
between an earlier significant event and its later reactivation (seen as a repeat or re-enactment
of the original event), causing a reinvestment with renewed meaning and psychic efficacy. This
means that there is a vital gap between the immediate experience and receptive understanding.
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And not only is there a movement from the past to the future, but also in the retroactivity, a
movement from the future toward the past. The former is deterministic whereby a past governs
the present, whilst the latter is hermeneutic where the past is read from the vantage point of
the present but for which the past is never wholly factual or fully decipherable.4 Therefore in
performance, its forcefulness derives from working through a distance and temporal delay that
enables a spatio-temporal significance to be grasped as representation at one remove from
the actual event. The foregrounding of duration in performance, especially when linked in with
materially lived experiences, consecrates a dialogical encounter with and witnessing of shared
and anticipated histories or fantasies.
It may well be true that performance art runs its integrity through the horizon of oppositional
resistances it mounts against other steadfastly crude modes of socio-historical perception. But as
“indeterminacy” has perforce been poached to become part of the rubric of capitalist spectacle,
we are compelled to now examine how our time-based art slips quietly into a discomfiting
partnership with a globalised imaginary that has eviscerated real conflict and contagion, a
“present” made compliant to media images of reality. In a highly prescient essay, Fredric Jameson
had already called us out as an era that imbibes this “nostalgia for the present”, whereby our
perception of our present is as a literal past of a constructed, determinately fantasized future.5
We have been therefore living an historical timeline fully created by period film set in Hollywood
or the dull hygienised network television. The future challenge for time-based art is thus to
resuscitate a proper contemporaneous frame for historical inquiry without history being reduced
to a cultural style. Art as a performative testimony then serves to mend that disconnect between
events and experiences.
The case for critically engaging with the “now” has been made incumbent upon us as citizens of
an emerging world order that is fashioned by “atavism” and “new-fangledness”, all shoehorned
into a nightmarish eternal present.6 The best and excoriating summation of our current particular
consumer temporality is given by the group of critics who call themselves RETORT in their
provocative volume Afflicted Powers:
Modernity, particularly in its consumer society manifestation, is less and
less able to offer its subjects ways to live in the present, and to have
the flow of time be accepted and inhabited as it happens. And this is
precisely because it stakes everything on celebrating – perpetuating – the
here and now. Lately it has built an extraordinary apparatus to enable
individuals to image, archive, digitalize, objectify, and take ownership
of the passing moment. The here and now is not endurable, it seems
(or at least, not fully real), unless it is told or shown, immediately and
continuously, to others – or to oneself. The cellphone, the digital replay,
instant messaging, “real time” connectivity, the video loop. Far be it from
us – image-lovers to a fault – to say that giving an experience visual form
means not living it. It depends on what the imaging is for. But there is a
kind of visualization, we all know in our bones (and common parlance is
often scathing on the subject), that is essentially a mechanism of defense
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– a way of deliberately alienating the moment, and putting the non-lived,
the non-significant, at a distance. …
Consumer culture is many faceted. For example, the gadgetry of instant
objectification is nowadays accompanied by a wider realm of commodity
appearance – in advertising, design, the whole staging of commodity life
in commercials and info-tainment—more and more oriented to the past.
Once upon a time what commodities promised was the future, above all.
Now a whole (dominant) class of them exists to invent a history, a lost
time of togetherness and stability, that everyone claims to remember but
no one quite had.7
All this should not be lost on the participants and viewers at FOI, for it is but a short step to go
from a “future of imagination” to a “future of an illusion”, as was forewarned by RETORT. Their
comments are all the more pertinent for FOI because the time-based art it stages is dependent
on the portable, pseudo-memory devices that are our digital cameras and videos, a barrage of
these almost guaranteed at any performance event. Will it be increasingly true that a recording
of an event will no longer be an aide-memoire but an unlooked-at, invisible document that allows
us to disavow and displace a present actuality from consciousness?8
***********
It has been said that one can never step into the same river twice and as FOI gets into its fifth
year, it has returned to a place which briefly hosted it in 2004 – the Sculpture Square. This
cannot be the same place as it was before, and indeed its management has shifted hands to be
now overseen by the people running our veritable Arts House. But I want to take this return to
Sculpture Square as an opportunity to think and reiterate the conjunction of place, public and
the time of performance.
By placing performance art within the arena of the Sculpture Square, not only is performance
brought back into contiguity with the plastic arts, (think Joseph Beuys’s “social sculpture” and
Gilbert and George’s The Singing Sculpture), it also gives us the occasion to yoke performance
to and against “Public Art”, most often seen as sculptural installations in plazas and squares and
as tokenistic surpluses for the accrual of value to public spaces.9 But what if the performances at
FOI aspire to a different condition of ‘Public Art’, that is with a new envisioning of the “public”,
a kind that seeks to mobilize the public in both conscious knowledge and unconscious desires?
Could the Sculpture Square be akin to Jurgen Habermas’s albeit idealist conception of a public
sphere where “private people come together as a public”10, to freely and reasonably associate,
think and discuss in order to keep in check the domination of state powers and mass media?9
If FOI has a vested interest in time and the future, it is in the public that it has placed its hopes
for time’s amplification and expatiation. FOI is a temporal imagination that requires us the
Singaporean public to be recovered as “adult”people, with with developed political, intellectual
and ethical agency, with an expanded time sense to be cognizant of historical specificities as
13
well as consequences of our decision-making. That said, the lack of consciousness of time and
our surrender to its micromanagement has led to weakened citizenship. The modus operandi of
governance here has in ways removed the meaningful distinctions to be made between country,
government and political party, assisted in no small way by the rise of media technologies that
collapse truth into news live-feeds and melodramatic spectacles.
Hence, I will argue that to consider the performance art that FOI presents as public art is
to see the sympathies in argument that both realms bring to the table. Both are immersed in
the techniques of visibility, to the extent of revealing to all what had hitherto been invisible,
expunged or repressed. My evocation of a public art is far from the static monumental “turd
on the plaza” ilk, or the showpiece of democracy for cozy community and consensus building.
Performance as public art will be a sort of gash or gaping wound moving through time and
space, to critically and accurately register, describe and interpret the forgotten, out-of-sight
violence (symbolic or actual).11 It will behove us to resituate our lives within controversy, conflict
and contradiction, but also with openings toward provisional resolutions and healing. Between
the soma, the mental and the psychic is not a pacified sphere of disinterested deliberation
but a space where our placement in time is replete with contentious decisions. This is perhaps
what motivates the slew of historical reconstructions as performances, from Jeremy Deller’s
Battle of Orgreave that references the 1984 UK miners’ strike, to the street theatre of Iraq
Veterans Against the War (IVAW) that stages in various American cities a simulation of the sniper
fire and mass arrests typifying the Iraqi occupation in the midst of an unsuspecting public. 12
And there is a self-reflexivity in the awareness of the media components that make such
verisimilitude achievable, paying heed to WJT Mitchell’s caution that “our interpretation of
the present is always in danger of replicating previous narratives with their nostalgia for a lost
authenticity understood as responsible representation”.13 That FOI is billed as an international
event is also one way of indicating that our sense of time is braided with other historical
narratives and occurrences, and that the political strife in Israel, Thailand, Burma and China is
closer to home than we deem them to be. But our interest in their issues should not blind us to
our own a historicity going on in our backyards.
And so, what faith might FOI then engender amongst a public that has at times lost faith in
itself? With the attenuation of attention spans, FOI in its fifth edition runs into the frustration
of being given short shrift, the novelty of its inauguration to mark the end of performance
art funding embargo being all but spent. Perhaps faith is restored because of FOI’s continual
capacious ambition to address and involve the public and then to invigorate it with sheer
bloody-mindedness against those who expect to be given an easy ride. Let it be said, therefore,
that the future of the public begins with upending the now.
14
(Endnotes)
In an interview, Orlan has opined: “You have to project yourself into the future. We have to keep our distances with the here and
now. Our prejudices and our decisions are linked to the past. Most young people need to get younger. They are repeating what their
parents thought when they were 30 or 40; they are already old, not only because they absorbed their parents’ experience, but also
because of the way they’ve been educated. In the future, our way of thinking will be different.” However, what I want to get across is
that despite an orientation toward the to-come, much more critical engagement with the here and now is needed than the convenient
sidestepping or distanciation of the issue.
1
If Not Now, When? is the title of a novel woven around Jewish partisans and resistance fighters in World War II by the Italian author
and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi. It was first published in 1982 under the title Se non ora, quando?
2
3
See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance, Routledge, New York and London, 1993
This understanding of nachträglichkeit has been mined by Hal Foster in his argument in The Return of the Real that the traumatic effect
of avant-garde activity is only fully registered in subsequent workings out through the neo-avant-garde activities of the late 1950s and
60s. See also Peggy Phelan, ‘Introduction’, in Phelan and Jill Lane, eds, The Ends of Performance, New York University Press, New
York and London, 1998
4
5
Fredric Jameson, ‘Nostalgia for the Present’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 1989, vol 88, no 2, pp 517-537
See Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of Spectacle, trans Malcolm Imrie, London, 1998 [1988], as he distils the political
consequences of such inhabiting of time.
6
7
RETORT (Iain Boal, TJ Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, Verso,
London and New York, 2005, pp 181-2
8
Ibid, p 183
I am here playing on the semantics of “Sculpture Square” even though it is apparent that it is not by conventional definition a square
(its main building being a former Methodist chapel) and does not restrict itself to the display of sculptural work.
9
10
Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation in the Public Sphere, trans Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989, p 27
My thinking on this is indebted to Rosalyn Deutsche’s Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998 and WJT
Mitchell’s Picture Theory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1994, in particular Section V, on pictures and the public
sphere.
11
12
See <http://ivaw.org/>
13
Mitchell, op cit, p 423
15
Resonant Relationships:
The One-to-One Performance
Lynn Lu
16
At the Sensitive Skin Festival in Nottingham in 2005, Juliet Ellis invited one person at a time into a
private space for an audience-of-one performance entitled Silent Sermon. Each participant was asked
to “think of a moment when you wanted to cry and didn’t”, and then was invited to join her in a oneminute grating of an onion. With humour, generosity, and gentle irony, Ellis offered – with the help of a
raw onion – to share empathically in an unspoken memory and the release of a repressed trauma.1
Performances designed for an audience of one grew out of the legacy of 1960s and 70s performance
art in which artists extracted their audiences from invisible spectatorship and into active collaboration.
Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) and Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 (1974), in particular, relied crucially
upon the physical, psychological and mental engagement of their audiences for the making of their
work.2 By granting power and freedom to their spectators to do as they wished, the artists radically
redefined the concept of audience participation. Building upon this genre of performance art, artists
of this generation such as Juliet Ellis, Kira O’Reilly, and Random Scream, have upped the interactivity
to a most intimate level: One on one.
Ellis asks for no narrative, nor does she offer one; we do not need the details of anyone’s private
sob stories to know vividly from our own experiences the ache and isolation of wanting to cry and
not being able to. Based on what we know of psychological distress through our own experiences,
we involuntarily identify with others who appear to occupy the same position as we had or still do.
Roland Barthes intuited what neurologists of our time would discover: Our minds mirror another’s in a
situation we are personally familiar with. He writes of Werther (Goethe, 1774):
Werther identifies himself with every lost lover: he is the madman who loved Charlotte
and goes out picking flowers in midwinter; he is the young footman in love with a widow,
who has just killed his rival – indeed, Werther wants to intercede for this youth, whom
he cannot rescue from the law: “Nothing can save you, poor wretch! Indeed, I see that
nothing can save us.”3 [Italics mine]
Barthes reflects that “identification...is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place
I have”. He adds wryly that it is because of this homology – or empathetic resonance – that the love
story sells.4 [Italics mine]
Empathy is defined as a “feeling-into”5 or having objective knowledge of another person’s internal
state.6 Not to be confused with sympathy, which is an altruistic concern for another’s well-being
combined with a desire to alleviate their suffering, empathy is a primitive and pre-reflexive capacity
to connect with others psychologically. Gaining access into another’s inner life depends on our innate
ability to be aware of the feelings of others through observing their situation and other perceptible
indications such as body language. If we recognize the other’s condition as one familiar to us, we
unconsciously slip right into their skin.
Resonance refers to the “intensification and enrichment of sound by sympathetic vibration”.7 As
with musical instruments, resonant relationships also occur between humans who inhabit a shared
state. Barthes compares friendship to “a space with total sonority”, where “the friend – the perfect
interlocutor – constructs around us the greatest possible resonance”.8
In the privacy of a space for two, eyes stinging from the fumes of cut raw onions, each pulls up a poignant
memory, and knows, in that moment that they share the same position. By mutually acknowledging “I
know, I’ve been there too”, Silent Sermon constructs a sonorous space in which empathic understanding
17
reverberates between the artist and participant. Misery does love company, although here it is not
taking mean-spirited pleasure in the suffering of others. Rather, it is an unsentimental recognition that
our various trials and tribulations are not unique to us even if they seem to be. This is the human
condition. (The kind of realization worth celebrating by tearfully grating a raw onion, then extracting
the juice for a fortifying and nutritious tonic – we need it.)
***
Where Ellis sought, through an intimate one-to-one encounter, to articulate an unspoken shared
experience with a gesture, I attempted to draw words from a silent social ritual in my performance
piece a(t)tribute. This was a durational work first enacted at the 9th International Art Action Festival:
Interakcje, in Piotrkow Trybunalski in 2007. Designed for one participant at a time, a(t)tribute was
made for a context in which most of the audience would be strangers or acquaintances I did not know
well. I waited for visitors in a small room, which was empty save for two chairs, two blank notebooks,
and pens for writing. Entering the room, the visitor was invited to sit and was given written directions:
Please write a description of who / what you think I am. What do you imagine my
likes, dislikes, work, temperament, temper, concerns, friends, family, desires, interests,
beliefs, strengths and weaknesses, etc., are? And I will do the same for you.
Scrutinizing one another, the participant and I formulated a candid description of who or what we
imagined the other person to be, based on what we saw and sensed. Our trappings are the result of
fairly conscious decisions, and certainly give away a good amount of information about who and what
we are. A young girl’s ferocious haircut, complicated outfit, and impractical shoes speak for her as
cogently as a middle-aged man’s ruddy complexion, strong hands, faded overalls and crucifix do for
him. Our physical features and apparel reflect our tastes, lifestyle, and affiliation to particular ethnic
and social groups.
Figure 1. Lynn Lu, a(t)tribute, 2007,
“9th International Art Action Festival: Interakcje”; Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland.
Duration: 8 hours. © Lynn Lu
18
In any face-to-face meeting, however, we actually disclose far more than we are perhaps aware of, or
mean to. If our external costume moderately makes evident who or what we are, our body language
reveals rather more intimate information about our internal life, or how we are.
Our body speaks with other bodies and, for the most part, without our awareness and/or permission.
In fact, so eloquent is our nonlinguistic behavior that it often indiscreetly and indiscriminately divulges
our private feelings, even against our wills. As Sigmund Freud observed in 1905:
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can
keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out
of him at every pore.9
And of his own involuntary non-verbal disclosures, Barthes – with some regret – wrote:
...I can do everything with my language, but not with my body. What I hide by my
language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my
voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize “that something is wrong with me”.
I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language
is a very civilized adult...10
As soon as a visitor entered the room – even before we sat down to consciously study each other – our
bodies began a wordless conversation. The way we greeted each other and negotiated the space
between us as we settled into our chairs began to tell us some basic things about the other person.
Then, sitting knee-to-knee, our bodies continued chattering and revealing our psychological state even
as we kept our lips silent. The way we maintained eye contact (or not), fidgeted in our seats (or not),
coolly assessed the other from head to toe (or not), responded to the other’s body language (or not),
etc. gave away vital information regarding our inner condition.
Figure 2.
Lynn Lu, a(t)tribute, 2007,
“9th International Art Action
Festival: Interakcje”; Piotrkow
Trybunalski, Poland.
19
In order to function in society, we rely on our ability to read such external indicators as physical
appearance and body language with a certain degree of accuracy. Having said that, what we
observe about another is of course not purely objective: It is also coloured by our own subjective
interpretations and subsequent projections based on the associations they evoke. As a result, each
person‘s reading and description of the other person perhaps disclosed as much about the “reader”
as the “read”. Some of what we attribute to the other necessarily stems from our own minds.
At the end of the day, all the descriptions written by the (unnamed) participants, as well as the ones
by me, were put up on the walls of the room. The written descriptions focused on themes as varied as
the interests of the writers: love life, taste in movies, family, sports, social life, food, fashion, pets, sex,
art, and spirituality, among others. Visitors could read them in their entirety and try to match them up
with their own unarticulated mental renderings of people they know.
Figure 3. Lynn Lu, a(t)tribute, 2007,
“9th International Art Action Festival: Interakcje”; Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland.
20
It is an important part of our everyday survival skills that, in any encounter between strangers, we are
able to automatically and almost instantaneously size each other up. When in physical proximity to
each other, our means of communication with, and perception of, the other extends far beyond the
reaches of the linguistic and into the realm of body language.
Although we routinely and intuitively engage in a mutual reading of the other, our appraisals are
rarely consciously expressed, even to ourselves. a(t)tribute was an effort to verbalize that which
habitually remains tacit when people first meet.
***
The artist and participant face one another in a private space. Having no prior knowledge of the
other, they silently suss each other out. The sensory exchanges between the two strangers are of
unprecedented intensity and immediacy.
In our everyday interactions with each other, it is the affective and cognitive processes of empathy
that allow us to contact with another person psychologically. The affective processes refer to our mind
mirroring another’s mind when we watch them experiencing something we are personally acquainted
with. Using technology such as fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), neurologists have
found that when a ballerina watches another ballerina dance, for instance, the neural activity in
the watcher’s brain is identical to when she herself is dancing.11 Involuntarily and unconsciously,
our minds echo each other. In the case of Silent Sermon, a double reflection occurs. The artist and
participant watch each other as they jointly recall a painful memory, grate onions, and shed tears. The
cognitive processes of empathy refer to our ability to – for the most part, unconsciously – be aware
of and identify the feelings of others by their body language and subtle psycho-physiological signals
such as pupil dilation.
Although this reciprocal and interactive “feeling-into” certainly does happen in group situations,
it is most evident and potent in intimate one-to-one meetings. And when the two people happen
to be strangers, mutual “person-reading” plays a most vital role in helping us figure out whom we
are dealing with. Studies have shown that in any encounter up to ninety-three percent of what we
communicate to each other remains wordless,12 as the series of mutual, relational, and complex
exchanges takes place at a speed beyond our ability in speech.13 Nevertheless, the cognitive and
affective processes of empathy allow us to pick up on implicit meanings, and to make contact with
each other mentally as well as emotionally.
By inviting the conscious articulation of that which usually remains unspoken and unconscious,
a(t)tribute brings awareness to our continuous yet unacknowledged psychological discourses with
each other. Set in an intimate environment conducive to a focused reciprocal reading of each other’s
tacit signals, these dialogues are an investigation of communication that takes place between the
gaps of verbalization. The work exposes our sense of separateness from the other as two individuals
scrutinize each other. At the same time, our act of giving voice to a shared silent ritual binds us
intimately. A familiar and ordinary human activity is re-contextualized into an immersive interaction, to
allow for new meanings and understanding to emerge from what Vivian Sobchack calls the collective
embodied foundation of our subjective consciousness.14 Similarly, Silent Sermon draws from our
21
collective experience of subjective distress in order to ask, quite simply, “Do you feel this way too?”
The audience is personally invested in the performance as it pertains to their private narrative.
In the one-to-one performance, the spectator is no longer part of the “invisible mass”, but the same
individual proactive agent she is in her daily life. She joins the artist – on equal terms, as collaborator
and discoverer – in an intense psychological conversation, from which an understanding emerges that
is not only conceptual, but also perceptual and affective.
Perhaps, more than anything, the one-to-one format makes for resonant relationships between the
artist and audience at an unparalleled level of intimacy. Through their reliance upon the cognitive
and affective processes of empathy to involve us intellectually, emotionally, and even physiologically,
the one-to-one performance has the exceptional ability to engage us deeply, remind us of our inherent
interconnectedness with others, potentially nurturing our relation to each other.
22
(Endnotes)
See Rachel Zerihan, ‘Intimate Inter-actions: Returning to the Body in One to One Performance’,
<http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol06/rachelzerihan/zerihan.pdf>, accessed on 26 December 2006.
1
2
Cut Piece premiered in Kyoto in 1964 and Ono invited the audience to cut away her clothing as she knelt calmly onstage. The
performance exerted great influence on subsequent generations of performance artists like Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, Gina
Pane, Barbara Smith, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden. In Rhythm 0, Marina Abramovic stood by a table laid out with objects including
a gun, a bullet, an axe, a whip, and knives, which spectators could use on her passive body as they liked. She was “cut and stripped,
and when a loaded gun was pressed to her head, a fight broke out – between those who were pushing the boundaries of witnessed
violence and those who had instinctively grouped around Abramovic to protect her – bringing the performance to an abrupt end.”
Cited in Thomas McEvilley,The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism, McPherson
and Company, New York, 2005, p 274
3
Cited in Roland Barthes. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans Richard Howard, Jonathan Cape, London, 1979, p 129
4
Ibid , italics mine
Theodore Lipps, ‘Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung und Organempfindung’, Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, 1903, no 1, pp 465519, cited in Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York,1972.
5
Heinz Kohut, ‘Selected problems in self psychological theory’ [1980], in P.H. Ornstein, ed, The Search for the Self. Selected writings
of Heinz Kohut: 1978-1982, vol. 4, International Universities Press, New York, 1991, pp 489-524
6
7
Encyclopedia Britannica, 2003.
8
Barthes, op cit, p 167.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905), Collected Papers, Vol. 3, Basic Books, New York,1959,
p 94
9
Barthes, op cit, p 41. Our inner state makes itself known to others not only through the inflection of our voice, the flush of our cheek,
and the speed/depth of our breath, but also through the most liminal of affective responses: pupil dilation. In folk psychology of at
least two cultures, it is widely known that pupil enlargement indicates a person’s positive interest in something. See Eckhard H Hess,
‘Pupillary Behavior in Communication’, in Aaron W. Siegman, Stanley Feldstein, eds, Nonverbal Behavior and Communication,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, New Jersey, 1978; and John Shlien, ‘Empathy in Psychotherapy: A vital mechanism? Yes.
Therapist’s conceit? All too often. By itself enough? No’, in Arthur C. Bohart & Leslie S. Greenberg, eds, Empathy Reconsidered: New
Directions in Psychotherapy, American Psychological Association, Washington DC and London, 1997
10
Richard Restak, The Naked Brain: How the emerging neurosociety is changing how we live, work and love, Harmony Books,New
York, 2006, p 63.
11
Albert Mehrabian, a professor of psychology at UCLA and a pioneer in nonlinguistic communication research, has showed that
in any face-to-face communication, we derive only seven percent of the meaning from spoken words. Voice tone accounts for thirtyeight percent, while body language is responsible for conveying fifty-five percent of the message. See Albert Mehrabian, Nonverbal
Communication, Aldine-Atherton, Chicago, 1972
12
13
Shlien, op cit, p 77
Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles
& London, 2004, p 2
14
23
Document & Performance or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Lens
Bruce Quek
24
The first performance I ever photographed would probably be Kai Lam’s Prop-Agenda Blab: Green
Fingers on Furious Electric Zit No. 031, at Studio 19, on 28 February 2006. At the time, however,
I was not so much concerned with creating a documentary record of the performance as with
locating unusual situations from which I could extract images of interest — an excursion into portrait
photography, paired with the secondary function of it as a kind of personal record of places I had
seen.
Eventually, I took a greater interest in documentation proper, acquiring a concern for the accuracy
of reportage; a sense of the necessity for a faithful document to preserve that which was ephemeral
through a thorough record of the overall performance, to be achieved through a photojournalistic
or naturalistic approach. Taking this approach, though, led to a number of turning points, incidents
which raised serious questions about the perspective I had adopted.
One of these would have been my attempt to document a performance by Throwing Stones (a group
comprising Australian artists Alicia Jones, Rebecca Cunningham and Richelle Spence) during the
2007 instalment of the performance art festival, Fetter Field. There had been three performances,
each by a different artist, occurring simultaneously at different points in a large, open air courtyard.
Selectiveness on the part of the documenter became inescapable as I jogged from one performance
to another, assessing the urgency and/or necessity of taking a photograph at that specific moment,
relative to the urgency of taking one at either one of the other two performances within the next thirty
seconds or so.
It became apparent that regardless of any logistical difficulties, the documenter would inevitably
exercise a certain amount of discretion over the creation of a so-called “documentary record”, a
conflict of intention placing documentary material at the beginning of a trajectory different from that
of the performance. Furthermore, this record would inescapably point to its own incompleteness, each
frame implying a multitude of others not taken, to the extent that it seemed increasingly untenable as
such to think of it as a record.
Other recent performances by artists such as (but not limited to) Tang Da Wu, Jeremy Hiah, Muhammad
Lugas Syllabus and Juliana Yasin served to highlight the problematic validity of the “documentary
trace” and simultaneously casting doubt on the primacy of photography and videography as
documentary media, insofar as their performances incorporated relational and interactive elements,
which operate in fields inaccessible to visual or aural media – the result being that the media artefact
of the performance would occupy a tangential or even wholly disconnected trajectory. This gives rise
to the question: what actions could be constituted as documentary, giving rise to documents? Would a
pervasive yet unrecorded oral history surrounding a performance qualify as a document, a derivative
performance as documentary?
If there were details, situations and nuances not recordable in the medium of choice, were we to take
refuge in the magical translation of these variables into the terms dictated by the specific medium;
a transubstantiation of, say, a moment in the performance decisive in emotive terms rendered in the
document as a decisive image? Such alchemy would seem to suggest the creation of something new,
not the representation of something that had existed.
25
As these difficulties mounted, threatening the validity of a documentary practice, it occurred to me that
such a practice implied a privileged division, in which performance art held pride of place as some
ephemeral communion or authentic experience, whereas documentation was only supplemental, the
secondary residue or trace of a transitory performance, which held or was derived from (however
infinitesimally) a value of truth, or the possibility of such.
In opposition to this privileged division, the art historian Amelia Jones has argued that “there is
no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product”, characterising the
relationships offered by the live experience and documentary experience of performance art as
“equally intersubjective”, comprising different elements, each mutually supplementary to the other. The
performance’s presence is confirmed in retrospect by the existence of its documentation, facilitating
its inclusion in the broader narratives of art history and practice, whilst the document, anchored in its
representation of the significant yet ephemeral performance, thus derives its legitimacy.
But here, though the question of privilege has been resolved through the establishment of the mutual
supplementarity of the separate terms, thus levelling their respective privileges, this interdependence
would seem itself dependent on an increase of the terms’ specificity, in their irrevocable differences. It
is a situation uncomfortably reminiscent of segregationist notions of ‘separate but equal’ divisions in
society; an apparent resolution of apparent antagonisms in a hallucinatory armistice.
What if we were to dispense with this separation, to sidestep the truce by rendering it irrelevant?
The writer and critic Philip Auslander has suggested that these recordings of performance art
are “no longer documents of ephemeral performances, but often constitute virtual performances
in themselves” – I would go a little further to suggest that all these supposed documents, in their
circulation, preservation and distribution, in being referenced for the further generation of cultural
products, constitute a multiplicity of performances on a tremendous scale; informational, contextual
performances, a stochastic succession of narrative permutation and recombination.
This would be most similar, perhaps, to a model of contagion; performative spores or narrative viruses,
capable of anything from gradual genetic drift to instantaneous speciation, occurring every time a
spore was accessed, every time it was referenced or cited in the generation of some configuration
of information or action – an infinitely malleable lifecycle, since these viral configurations could be
referenced the very next day, or lie dormant for centuries.
What this exploration leaves out, however, is a treatment of the act of documentation, in the context of
its immediate situation, of the performance ostensibly documented. In photographic terms, we would
have to consider what, exactly, happens at the moment the shutter blinks, as well as the role and
significance of the photographer’s movement through the space defined by the performance. There
is a reciprocity between these variables of the photographer’s movement and posture in relation to
the photograph, to the extent that the photograph is as much a record of the photographer as it is of
his supposed subject.
The father of modern photojournalism, the late Henri Cartier-Bresson, put forward the notion of the
decisive moment – “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of
26
an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression”.
Coupled, however, with an almost ritualised, monastic discipline, as well as eerily predatory qualities
– velvet hand and hawk’s eye - which he deems necessary for such recognition, it seems possible that
there is another transaction that takes place here, either consubstantial with this capture of reality, or
masked by it.
Michel Tournier’s fictional Abel Tiffauges initially adopts this velvet hand and hawk’s eye, an invisible
hunter operating covertly with a telephoto lens, rapacious in his accumulation of images; an ogrish
voracity lending a more sinister aspect to Cartier-Bresson’s perspective on the photographer’s vocation.
However, Tiffauges soon loses his taste for such a sterile method, adopting a confrontational strategy
of photography, seeking a union in suffering between the photographer and the photographed,
between “the person who knows he is being photographed and by the person who knows he is
known to be committing a predatory act, to be hi-jacking an image”. He likens this to surgery without
anaesthesia, whereby anaesthesia would reduce surgery to the level of “dissecting corpses”. Perhaps
the photographer is a vivisectionist.
The photographer, I would assert, is no neutral agency or incidental cog in the process of image
creation. Along with other documenters, with their multitude of tools and methods, he is an active agent
– potentially complicit, possibly belligerent. To assume otherwise, to efface the act of documentation
by the documenter entails a certain amount of risk, like deciding a cracked wall isn’t by painting
over it.
Relevant to this is an incident during FOI4 in 2007 where one of the artists, Ferial Affif, asked me
to perform the role of a photographer during her performance; to be specifically, the crass, brash
photographer who would push people out of the way and use flash photography at inappropriate
moments, one element in a performance of confrontation and disruption.
Thus, in performing this role, the resultant images and documents were of secondary importance,
almost entirely incidental; the important thing was being a photographer, photographing an event,
to the extent that the only thing which could have distinguished my role from that of the “actual”
photographers who sought to document the performance would have been the artist’s intentionality,
accessible only in retrospect or through prior communication with the artist.
If the act of documentation could be performed, indistinguishable from an “actual” documentation,
does each position then suffer a loss of stability, each becoming interchangeable with the other? The
position, posture, actions and movements of a documenter within the performance space change
according to a cryptic collusion with those of the performer, to be modulated or filtered according to
various drives, conditions and objectives. It could be likened to a mirror or a shadow of sorts, but such
things beg the question: who is it that is reflected and whose shadow is cast?
Is it entirely unreasonable to suggest that performers completely immersed in a wholly mediatized,
mediated world for decades would, unconsciously or otherwise, anticipate in every action, posture
and movement their own representation, reducing the actual act of recording to a mere formality,
an acting out? Perhaps, complementary to Auslander’s assertion, the physical performance itself is
27
already irredeemably virtualised, mediated in advance – the physical presence of recording media
being only a disguise which would allow us to believe otherwise.
If we accept that the documenter is part of the performance, or at least in collusion, would the
documenter, no longer naïve, have to re-evaluate his practice in some way? Even the fact of persisting
in a “conventional” practice of documentation, situated in a new context of performative dialogue,
could acquire a newfound significance, a heightened sense of itself. A field of possibilities unfold
from this germinal point, varying degrees of integration, collaboration, conflict and dialogue between
“documenter” and “performer”, further differentiated and nuanced by the application of any number
of strategies and perspectives – as far flung, perhaps, as a deliberate effort by both parties to achieve
a specific effect in the performance to be enacted by the document itself, or secret rituals from which
all forms of recording devices would be prohibited; adversarial strategies of photography, or the
enactment of its disappearance through its diffusion into dozens of hidden surveillance cameras.
In closing, if you observe the reaction of a given audience to the commencement of a performance,
more often than not they reach for their point-and-shoot digital cameras or camera-equipped cellphones
in an almost instinctive reaction. They are amorphous, performance-tropic mycelium, sprouting
sporocarps of lenses in response to the stimuli of a work of performance art. Short of a radical secrecy
or occlusion, a direct engagement with such ubiquitous media would seem advisable.
Additionally, much as the author J.G. Ballard predicted that only intelligent machines could one day
appreciate space flight in terms of motion sculpture, or “immense geometric symphonies”, perhaps
only semantic web-crawling or data-mining software agents could fully appreciate the rhizomal
traceries and traversals of these semi-aleatory, almost atemporal informational performances.
Conversely, perhaps there are performative-documentary strategies to be articulated which could yet
allow us to direct and appreciate such performances, spanning communities, continents, decades
and disciplines.
Bibliography
1)
Philip Auslander, ‘Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture’, TDR, vol. 33, no. 2 (Summer, 1989), pp. 119-136
2)
James Graham Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, Harper Perennial, London, 2006
3)
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1952
4)
Amelia Jones, ‘“Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’, Art Journal, vol. 56, no. 4
(Winter, 1997), pp. 11-18
5)
Michel Tournier, The Ogre, Penguin Classics, London, 2000
28
Artists’
Biographies
29
Adina Bar-On
(Israel)
Adina Bar-On, Sentenced for Life, USA, 2008, performance still. Photo: Natalie Loveless
Adina Bar-On’s work discourses on conflicts of identity and conflicting identifications. Her work as
a performance artist creates moments of emotion and states of behaviour that her audience might
share in empathy or criticism. Adina has been an active performer since 1973, when she was a
third year student at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Over the years,
she has presented her work in Israel`s major art museums and galleries and performed insistently at
social and political events, making it her business to emphasise her socio-political stance.
In recent years, she has been travelling abroad, 5 months of the year, to present her own performance
work and conduct workshops on visual communication in countries such as Canada, USA, Hong
Kong, Japan, Germany, N. Ireland, Thailand, Poland, Russia and France. In 2001, Adina was
awarded a major prize for her contribution to Israeli art by the American Israel Cultural Foundation.
A biographical book, Adina Bar-On, Performance Artist, has also been published.
30
Angie Seah (Singapore)
www.angiesimplicity.com
Born in 1979, Angie Seah is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Singapore. Since 1997, she has
been making drawings, performance art, installations and clay sculptures. Art making is a tool for
Angie to understand the social environment and respond to everyday human conditions in the context of her personal situations. Cutting through the white noise of daily lives, the depths of mind, the
unconscious, she attempts to connect with the basic emotions that make her human. In 2000, she
was awarded an education bursary from the National Arts Council and graduated with a BA from
the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology where she majored in painting. She was also a recipient of a 3-month culture/language scholarship to Berlin awarded by the Goethe Institut in 2005.
Angie has since travelled and participated in several performance art festivals in Singapore and
internationally in Poland, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Romania, Germany, Italy, Korea and
Japan. She has also exhibited her works in Southeast Asia and completed artist residencies in
Switzerland, Romania and Indonesia.
Angie Seah, Fool on the hill, Switzerland, 2008, performance still. Photo: Angie Seah
31
Cai Qing
(Germany/China)
www.caiqingart.com
Cai Qing, Worship New York, one day durational performance, 2007. © Cai Qing
Cai Qing (Qing Sonnenberg) has been living and working as an independent artist in Europe
and New York City since 1989. In September 2007 he relocated his family to Singapore after
accepting a teaching post at the Nanyang Technological University. As a contemporary artist,
he uses performance, installation, video and pictures to reveal his feelings and explain his ideas.
The concept in most of his art is the “observer” and the “observed”, focusing on people of various
backgrounds in different societies. He enjoys the interaction with different people and his works find
inspiration in many of their real life stories.
With advances in technology, his way of communicating with people has also shifted from the real
world to cyberspace. Some of these the projects utilised internet chats as platforms to establish
connections without identity. Cai Qing has also curated several important art shows with the same
degree of novelty. In 1998 he has co-curated China’s first contemporary art exhibition in a private
space, “Trace of Existence”, and recently, in 2008, he curated “Construction before Destruction”,
the last performance show in Sifo Art Village, Henan province, before its modernisation by local
officials.
32
Cheng Guang Feng
(China)
Cheng Guang Feng was born in
Shenyang, China, in 1982. He has
continually been exploring socio-political
issues, but for this exhibition, Guang
Feng will be tapping into his personal
feelings to surface aspects of selfdiscovery since his move to Singapore
to continue his art education. He will be
exhibiting his recent paintings, sculpture
and video works, most of them the result
of his practice during the last year. He is
also a member of The Artists Village in
Singapore.
Cheng Guang Feng, Silent Examination 2, Beijing China, 2007,
performance still. © Cheng Guang Feng
33
Chia Chu Yia
(Singapore/Malaysia)
Chia Chu Yia (with Tang Dawu), Untitled, 2007, performance still. Photo: Dan Yeo
Chia Chuyia obtained her diploma at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, and her BA from
Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia. Her major was painting but to satisfy her innate
curiosity, she has always explored other media from time to time. Her paintings and installation
art have earned her awards and residencies overseas but has recently turned her focus towards
performance art
Her work is concerned with the structuring of identities in relation to the changes in different
environments, building on our sense of direction and placement. She uses her body and mirrors as
a metaphor in her search for the reflexivity in self-structure. She has collaborated with Tang Dawu
and participated in the performance festivals Fetter Field and Maju Jaya in 2007. Her works have
been exhibited locally and in other countries such as Malaysia, China, Peru, Australia, USA, and
Indonesia.
34
Dariusz Fodzcuk, The Shoeblack (a two-day diptych performance), Poland, 2004, performance still. Photo: Marcin Bobrowicz
Dariusz Fodczuk
(Poland)
Dariusz Fodczuk’s early performances were based on simple symmetrical compositions that gave
audiences an impression of a meditative trance. He was glad to discover that repeated actions were
able to neutralize the dynamic of a singular movement and progress into monotonous repetition.
His recent actions focus on audience participation and interaction, and actions made through
the processes of repetition and appropriation. Dariusz is interested in inventing structures that
encourage audiences to participate. Constantly engaging the audience and using their energy and
attitude to make powerful actions, he motivates audiences into doing things which then becomes a
performative and collective act. Despite his leaving a strong impression through his performances,
Dariusz however has refused to reveal the ‘true’ message of his art but instead leads us to the issues
arising from the fundamental assumptions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in our society.
35
Duan Ying Mei
(Germany/China)
Born in 1969 in China, Duan Ying Mei has worked in performance, installation and video and is
now based in Braunschweig, Germany. Yingmei was part of the Chinese avant-garde who in the
1990s formed the artist colony, East Village, in Beijing. In 1995, she participated in the by now
iconic performance To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain.
She left China for Germany in 1998 to further pursue her studies in art and in 2006 finished
her postgraduate studies with Marina Abramovic, Birgit Hein and Christoph Schlingensief at
the Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste Braunschweig. Yingmei’s performances, installations and
videos deal with aspects of daily life: memories, fears, longings and dreams. Since 1993 she
has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, festivals and workshops, e.g.
Braziers International Artists Workshop in England 2003, 1st Performance festival in Salzau 2005,
etc. She has also taken part in the IPG (Independent Performance Group) exhibitions curated by
Marina Abramovic at the PAC Milan (2003), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (2005), and the
Venice Biennale (2007).
Duan Ying Mei, In Between, performance still, Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste Braunschweig, Germany, 2004.
Photo: Chengwu Luo
36
Fabien Montmartin
(France)
Born on 4 April 1974 in France, Fabien Montmartin attained his BA in fine art in 1994 and after
He had studied in different fine art schools in Europe and graduated with a Master Degree in
Marseille in 2003. Since 2001, Fabien has practiced a new style of poetry language called Slam.
His first performances were about making short live-poetry in public spaces (the square, shop,
bar and hall). During one of the performances he presented in a festival, Fabien discovered that
words could also be silent, i.e., the language of things, objects and movements, which speak for
themselves.
He asks: “How to manage time and space in the composition of a piece of poetry, a land where
usual things disappear only to re-compose?”
Fabien Montmartin, Fishermen without fishook, Poland, 2007, performance still. © Fabien Montmartin
37
Gwendoline Robin, Self-portrait, Brussels, 2007, performance still, Photo: S. Noël
Gwendoline Robin
(Belgium)
www.gwendolinerobin.be
Fire, explosions and her body are the main media used by the trans-disciplinary performer
Gwendoline Robin. Her street fire actions, movement performances and burning mobile tools are
usually site or occasion-specific. Focusing on the body as her working material – as an instrument
used to measure space, time, intimacy, resistance and fear – Gwendoline draws her inspiration
from performances of the 1970s. As to exactly how and where in the Short Story performance this
diligent pyromaniac will set off some unconventional fireworks – a clothes-hanger, maybe a tube,
or out of her fingers – let this remain a surprise! Rather than relating her projects to the spectacular
tradition of fire art, she introduces the elements of conceptualism. Thus, in accepting an invitation
for a presentation of her poetry, she responds with a performance in which she explodes her book
into a thousand pieces. Even during her studies – and in particular when she was studying in
Valencia, a city with long tradition of bonfires and fireworks – she dedicated herself to performing
flaming social sculptures in public spaces.
Gwendoline studied urban and rural space at the Brussels’ La Cambre – École Nationale Supérieure
des Arts Visuels. She has participated in various festivals and performed at several venues, including
the De Singel, Factor 44 arts centres in Antwerp, as well as the CCNOA and the Maïs Festival in
Brussels.
38
Helmut Lemke
(Germany/UK)
www.sound-art.de
Sound, the audible, the inaudible and the imaginable, is the basis of Helmut Lemke’s work. Born in 1953
in northwest Germany, he has presented for over 30 years process-based results of his investigations
into site-specific sound, frequently collaborating internationally with musicians, visual artists, poets,
dancers, scientists, performers and filmmakers. He has held concerts and performances and exhibited his
installations all over Europe, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore. His other activities include
organising and managing projects, symposiums and festivals.
Since 1995 he has taught at art academies and universities in Germany, France, England, Finland and
Thailand. He was Research Fellow in Interactive Arts (Media Events) at Manchester Metropolitan University
(1997) and AHRC-Fellow at the University of Salford where he researched the mutual dependency of sites
and sounds. During his research he visited Iceland, Lapland, Greenland, Switzerland and the North of
Scotland. Helmut now lives in Todmorden/Lancashire, England.
Helmut Lemke, Sulaminen, Helsinki, Finland, 2003, performance still. © Helmut Lemke
39
Jason Lim
(Singapore)
Jason Lim, Duet, durational performance, France, 2008 performance still. Photo: Sylvette Babin
Jason Lim’s practice traverses ceramics, sculpture and performance art and is regarded as a
maverick in the ceramics field. He has radically shifted assumptions about ceramics as a discipline,
pushing its potential as a medium in installation and performance art. Jason’s performances often
play on the boundaries of risky precarious situations, teasing the audiences with a cheeky use of
materials and spaces. He has participated in various international performance festivals and took up
residency programmes in Japan, The Netherlands, Australia and U.S.A. In 2006, he was awarded
the Freeman Fellowship artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Vermont, U.S.A. He was
involved in initiating UTOPIA, an alternative art gallery in 1996 and was co-Artistic Director of Future
of Imagination 2 in 2004. In 2005, he organized StopOver, a Singapore/Japan performance art
meeting in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. He was one of four artists in the Singapore Pavilion for
the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. In the same year, he represented Singapore at the 4th World
Ceramics Biennale in Korea and was awarded the Juror’s Prize.
40
Kai Lam
(Singapore)
www.geocities.com/op_out74
Kai Lam is based in Singapore and has proved to be an active innovator in his artistic involvements since
his studies in sculpture at the Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts in 1995. In 2001, he was awarded a study
grant from the Lee Foundation and an education bursary from the National Arts Council to complete his
Bachelor of Arts (Sculpture) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Versatile and prolific, Kai has
used his skills in drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed-media installation and performance to collaborate in
theatre productions and the organisation of art events since 1999.
As President of the alternative art group, The Artists Village, he had helped to initiate “Artists Investigating
Monuments” (2000), a presentation of installations and performances at various public sites. This was
later presented again at the Singapore Art Museum (2004), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
and House of World Culture, Berlin, (2005). In 2003, as co-organiser of Future Of Imagination, an
annual international performance art festival in Singapore, he displayed initiative in the hosting of events
that involve other local constituents as well as the international arts community. Since 1999, Kai has
travelled to different countries in Asia and Europe to present his art projects. Art-making to Kai Lam is a
tool towards a better understanding of the environment in which he lives and is an exploration of life and
social human conditions. His artworks are created as social commentary and are a creative response to
the urban pluralistic society.
Kai Lam, Variation #2:
Sex, Rock n’ Roll Without the Drugs,
2008 performance still.
Photo: Lee Wen
41
Lee Wen, Almost Untitled: Stagger Lee # 3, 2008, performance still. Photo: Kai Lam
Lee Wen
(Singapore)
www.artsingapore.org/leewen/
Lee Wen’s performances and installations often expose and question the ideologies and value
systems of individuals as well as social structures. His work attempts to combine Southeast Asian
contexts with international currents in contemporary art. His early practice was associated with The
Artists Village, an alternative art group in Singapore and later forged a more individuated artistic
career. Lee Wen’s work has been presented at the Busan Biennale (2004), the 3rd Asia Pacific
Triennial in Brisbane (1999), the Sexta Bienal de La Habana, (1997), the Kwang Ju Biennial
(1995), the 4th Asian Art Show, Fukuoka (1994) Sea Art Festival, Busan Biennale (S.Korea, 2004),
and the National Review of Live Art (Scotland, 2004 & 2005). In 2003, Lee initiated, with the
support of The Artists Village, “Future of Imagination”, an international performance art event that
includes forum, documentation and presentation of performance art in Singapore. Since 1999,
Lee has also worked with Black Market International, an innovative, groundbreaking, utopian
performance art collective comprising artists from various countries and cultural backgrounds.
Lee Wen was awarded Singapore’s Cultural Medallion in 2005.
42
Lynn Lu
(Singapore)
www.lynnlu.info/
Lynn Lu is an installation/performance
artist from Singapore. She received her
BFA from Carnegie Mellon University,
and MFA from the San Francisco Art
Institute. She is currently a Ph.D candidate
at Musashino Art University in Tokyo,
on a scholarship from the Japanese
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lynn has
received numerous grants, awards
and commissions from the Singapore
National Arts Council, Lee Foundation,
Ucross Foundation, and Carnegie Mellon
University. Since 1997, Lynn has exhibited
and performed extensively in Singapore,
Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines,
Indonesia, Australia, the United States,
Argentina, UK, France, Switzerland,
Germany, Austria, Estonia, Denmark,
Poland, Belarus, and Canada.
Lynn Lu, An idealized moment when everything
is simple and secure, GFAL, Tokyo; 2008,
performance still. Photo: Koike Hirohisa
43
Melati Suryodarmo
(Germany/Indonesia)
www.melatisuryodarmo.com
Melati Suryodarmo, Memorabilia, Indonesia, 2008 Photo: Rama Surya ©melatisuryodarmo2008
Melati Suryodarmo´s performances are concerned with cultural, social and political aspects which she
articulates psychologically and physically through her body. Her performances speak about identity, energy,
politics and relationships between the body and the environments surrounding it. The arrangements of
her performances are simple but each maintains an edgy closeness to the audience. In her performances,
she uses specific objects which concretises her conceptual thoughts but at the same time bring the public
into the daily facts of life. Melati’s performance works have tended to be long durational events with the
exception of a few short, punchy ones like Exergie-butter dance. As a spin-off, she has also transformed
some of her performances by presenting them through photography and digital video.
Melati was born in 1969 in Surakarta, Indonesia but has been living and working since 1994 in
Braunschweig, Germany. She earned her degree in International Relations and Political Sciences in
Bandung, Indonesia before beginning her study at the Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste Braunschweig
with Anzu Furukawa (Butoh and choreography), Mara Mattuschka (time-based art) and Marina Abramovic
(performance art and Raum Konzept). She is graduated with an MFA in Performance Art in 2002.
44
Mongkol Plienbangchang
(Thailand)
Mongkol Plienbangchang is a painter, poet and performance artist from Thailand. He started making
performances since 1995. Mongkol is part of ASIATOPIA’s organizing committee and has always
been involved in art and social movement groups. His performances are usually very intense, mostly
dealing with the political issues of Thailand. He has published two books of his drawings and poems
Inner & Outer and The Man Number Zero. He recently travelled to Indonesia to participate in the
2nd Jatiwangi Arts Festival 2008 at Jatiwangi Art Factory, West Java and also PERFURBANCE #4,
an international performance art festival that took place at ‘Krinjing village in Java, Indonesia. He
also was in a short residency performance event at Rosid Studio in Bandung, Indonesia.
Mongkol
Plienbangchang,
Crashing Horizon, Poland,
2007, performance still.
Photo: Nopawan Sirivejkul
45
Myriam Laplante
(Canada/Italy)
www.myriamlaplante.net/
Myriam Laplante, Disaster (with tea), performance still. Photo Roberto Vaccai
Myriam Laplante is a Canadian artist living in Italy and started performing while she was a student
at Ottawa University in the early seventies. She had concentrated on painting, installations and
photography and started performing again in 1991 while continuing her “gallery” work. Her
early performances were essentially self-portraits. By putting herself in the skin of circus side-shows
(bearded lady, dancing monkey), a crying ghost or a mutant mermaid, she deals with alienation
and the difficulty of communicating, the refusal to adapt to society and the cynicism of the dominant
sects. She re-stages the internal tension between desire and memory, power and submission. Her
more recent installation and performance works are cynical replies triggered by the absurdities of
contemporary society and power-dealing politics on every level. Her work is in the public collections
of the Galleria Nazionale d’arte moderna (Rome) and the Museo di Arte Contemporanea (Rome),
the Musée du Québec (Québec) and the National Museum of Photography (Ottawa).
46
Ronaldo Ruiz
(The Philippines)
www.ronaldoruiz.multiply.com
Ronaldo Ruiz studied fine arts at the University of the East, Philippines. He was recognised
by the Cultural Center of the Philippines as one of its thirteen artist awardees of 2003 for his
significant contribution to the dynamic expansion of Filipino contemporary art. He was also named
Distinguished Alumnus (2007) and Achiever (2006) by the University of the East. A two-time winner
of the Philip Morris Philippines Art Awards in 2000 and 1997, Ronaldo was also an artist-inresidence at Artspace, Sydney Australia in 1999 and has presented his artworks in 17 one-man
exhibitions, often incorporating painting, installation and performance into his shows. He has also
participated in group exhibitions and action art events in the Philippines and abroad, including
Australia, Canada, China, Dubai, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, Kingdom of Bahrain, Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, Macao, Myanmar, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Yugoslavia, amongst
others. Ronaldo is also artistic director of Tupada Action and Media Art (TAMA).
Ronaldo Ruiz, Camouflage Project, Biri Island, The Philippines, performance still. Photo: Ma. Paulette Tan-Rui
47
Sabrina Koh
(Singapore)
Sabrina Koh is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer. Graduating with a Diploma in Interior Design
from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 2002, she crossed over to pursue a BA (Hons) Fine Art with
Contemporary Writing. On this programme, Sabrina consistently outshined her peers in her critical
exploration of issues relating body and sexuality, through writing, performance and installation
art. She emerged the top scorer in the final assessment, eventually attaining 2nd Class Upper
Honours.
Sabrina Koh, People are always afraid of the unknown, not realizing that progress and creativity in society can only come from
breaking boundaries, Singapore, 2006 Photo: Genevieve Chua.
48
Yuenjie Maru
(Hong Kong)
Yuenjie Maru is based in Hong Kong and began working with installation art in 1995. From then
on, he has been exploring various different art media such as writing, theatre, dance, happenings
and performance. He has been very actively involved in art workshops and is a jammer in contact
improvisation and environmental improvisation dance. He started his solo performance work in
1999 and now calls them “MARULIVEART”. His works revolve around love, the human condition,
social issues, environment and so on. He has performed in Mainland China, Macau, Taiwan,
Korea, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and UK.
Yuenjie Maru, So far, so close, performance still. © Yuenjie Maru
49
Zai Kuning
(Singapore)
http://www.onisstudio.blogspot.com
As an artist, Zai Kuning deliberately complicates convenient categorization, employing a wide range of
practices from video to poetry to theatre, dance, performance art, music and installation art. In 1996,
during his residency with The Substation, he formed Metabolic Theatre Laboratory (MTL), a dance theatre
group led by Zai as director, performer and trainer. Its main objective is to search for a physical language
and movement deeply rooted in Southeast Asian rituals. Among MTL’s most memorable productions are
Prodigal Songs, Remnant 2000, Bluemonkish and No Alibi which toured Hong Kong and Korea in 2000.
MTL was disbanded in 2001.
Zai has spent the last few years researching the lives of the orang laut (sea gypsies) in the Riau Archipelago
which began under the auspices of a Theatreworks residency project in 2000. In 2003, he completed
his short film entitled RIAU which was widely screened at many international film festivals like Rotterdam
Film Festival and Busan Film Festival. RIAU is now in the permanent collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art
Museum. Zai also initiated Onistudio in 2003, a small flexible space (opposite The Substation and is
supported by a Chinese karaoke bar) for performances, talks, exhibitions and dialogues. The Onistudio
motto is to “think small” and lasted about 8 months. However, Zai has recently revived Onistudio as an
events organizer, focusing mainly on sound art, musical experimentation and punk culture.
Zai Kuning, A Bowl of Rice, Singapore, 2008, installation view. Photo: Vivien Lee
50
Forum Speakers
51
FUTURE OF IMAGINATION 5: FORUM DISCUSSION
The forum on 15 November 2008 will mark the close of FOI 5 by bringing together six respondents who
will be sharing their critical observations of the scheduled performances and opening up the debate on
the practice of performance art. Selected video recordings of the performances during the three-day event
will be made available for viewing before the start of the forum. We welcome all to participate in the
discussion either at the forum or online at www.foi.sg
Panel of Discussants:
Adele Tan
(FOI forum facilitator and moderator)
is a writer and critic. She is completing her doctoral
dissertation at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London
and is Assistant Editor at the London-based journal
Third Text. Her interests include discourses on the
body, psychoanalysis and feminist practices. She
has published widely in international journals and
magazines on performance and contemporary art.
Bruce Quek
is a young practicing artist, making largely conceptual
works concerned with the distribution, contexts and
relations of information. He also collaborates with
Woon Tien Wei on Danger Museum’s cultural podcast,
The Wire, takes photographs and writes occasionally.
Jeremy Chu
is a Singapore-based visual artist and cultural worker. His
recent interactive installations and collaborative projects
in Boston, USA and Manchester, UK, examine the
framework of cultural space production, representation
and hybridism of form in contemporary landscape
urbanism. His research interests include vernacular
architecture, cultural theory, sociology, philosophy and
Chinese relational history in Nanyang.
52
Lim Qinyi
is Assistant Curator at the NUS Museum. She graduated
with honours in art history from University of Queensland
and is currently pursuing her masters in Southeast Asian
studies. She has worked on exhibitions such as “Telah
Terbit (Out Now)” and “Bound for Glory: Wong Hoy
Cheong”.
Dr Susie Lingham
is currently Senior Lecturer and Course Leader of the
Contemporary Art Degree Programmes (BA & MA) at
Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. She has
recently completed her DPhil (PhD) in Literature, Religion
and Philosophy at the University of Sussex, U.K. Her
interdisciplinary work – text, image, performance and
sound – synthesizes ideas and research across various
fields relating to the nature of mind.
Wang Zineng
is based in Singapore and researches on modern and
contemporary art in Southeast Asia.
53
Programme
Day 1 - Live performances
12th November 2008 - 7p.m onwards
Day 2 -13th November 2008
Workshop with Zai Kuning - 2.00 to 4.00pm
(Registration required)
For registration please contact Annabelle,
annabelle@substation.org
Live performances
Day 3 - Live performances
Day 4 - Video Screening/Forum Discussion
15th November 2008
Video Screening - 11a.m to 2p.m
Forum Discussion - 2.30p.m onwards
Venue:
Sculpture Square 155, Middle Road. Singapore 188977
54
Notes
55
International Performance Art Event, Singapore, 2008
ISBN: 978-981-08-1956-9
Credits
Festival Artistic Directors:
Jason Lim and Lee Wen
Forum Facilitator/ Moderator
and Catalogue Editor:
Adele Tan
Publicity:
Annabelle Aw
Website Design:
Sharon Tan
Catalogue and Flyer Design: Ken Yeo
Logistics/ Technical:
Angie Seah
Official photographer:
Urich Lau
Official Videographer:
Ghazi Alqudcy
Funded By:
Supporters:
ISRAEL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
DIVISION FOR CULTURAL & SCIENTIFIC RELATIONS
56

future imagination - Future of Imagination

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