7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, Toronto, Oct. 21-31, 2010

Final words (DB)

2010-11-16T11:03:00.003-05:00

In his incomparable Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argued, at length and with vast erudition, that the idea of play is at the origins of our idea of thinking. What he meant by “thinking” was not a purely private, introspective process, something done by solitary individuals in their studies or monk’s cells, but rather an experimental process by which we attempt to find some meaningful correspondence between the stream of subjectivity and the stream of reality so-called. Public events in which the social order is temporarily suspended, like carnivale or Halloween, are part of that process. The idea that play might provide not just a relief from the tedium of daily life, but the possibility of radically reformulating how we see the world as well as how we act in it, attracted Situationists like Guy Debord to Huizinga’s writings. Performance art is also a mode of thinking in this sense: an open-ended experiment in how we see ourselves and the world, suspended at the cusp between our subjective and our public selves. For this reason it is appropriate that the final two days of this year’s 7a*11d festival took place on the weekend of Halloween, performers and attendees alike decked out in skin-tight glittery cat suits, devil horns, rabbit ears, white zombie makeup and the like. It is worthwhile dwelling on what the idea of “experiments in thinking” might really mean. In most of our life, “thinking” implies reasoning something through based on beliefs that we already have, or could easily acquire based on beliefs that we have: we decide that we should get a different cell phone service because another company offers the same thing for less, or that we should go back to school and get a degree as a computer technician because being a freelance writer or a performance artist offers a future of destitution and isolation, or that we should drop everything and follow our new lover to Kamchatka because we value love and freedom and volcanic landscapes over stability and predictability. Or whatever. Experiments in thinking, by contrast, suggest that we are not moving forward based on what we know, but rather opening ourselves to reshaping the way we think.

Sylvie Tourangeau and Claudia Wittmann’s performance in the penumbral back room of The Toronto Free Gallery Friday afternoon was intensely insular: as an audience, we watched their bodies move, their breaths emerge from their bodies, as though watching a kind of corporeal consciousness ravel back toward its origins. Tourangeau’s solo performance Saturday night, on the other hand, was outwardly directed toward the audience, making the audience literally and figuratively part of the process. Early in the performance, Tourangeau unfurled black, red, and white streamers out into the audience from a glass bowl, asking audience members to hold them taut and aloft so that they served as vector lines linking the audience with the liminal space of the performance. Then she invited selected audience members to come on stage and sit with her, shoulders back, intensely concentrated on the act of sitting. Tourangeau’s piece not only created symbolic physical links between the performance and the audience, but also served as a kind of meditation on the relationship between performing and simply existing in space. Irish artist Teresa Dillon’s piece, by contrast, was both improvisatory, in the moment, and trace-like. Having invited men over fifty to collaborate with her on a work that combined visuals and music, Dillon and her small entourage had created the performance earlier that morning. Lights dimmed, patterns pulsed on the screen on the back wall. Andrew Paterson appeared with an electric guitar and began playing a low, repetitive refrain, the other men following with microphones singing ditties reaffirming their desires and life. Dillon meanwhile literally hissed into the microphone, her voice seeming to come from a megaphone in some old revolution. In the end, Dillon’s piece had a slow, beautiful violence to it that got under one’s skin and is ultimately difficult to describe.

Certain modes of performance, I noted in an earlier blog, combine the procedural with the symbolic, the two modes closely intertwined, and the magical piece by Quebec artist Étienne Boulanger falls into that category. Standing in front of a sinister scaffold with a chair set to one side, Boulanger announced that the work that was to follow was “inspired by a nonsense conversation, a dead-end conversation.” He handed glasses of water out to the audience, then sat down in the chair and tilted back until, finally, he crashed backwards. He got back up and set up a kind of teeter-totter, placing a bowl filled with sugar at one end. He looped a rope with a bag at one end through the scaffold and up through the ceiling, holding it tautly aloft. Then, sitting down again, he leaned back, and as he fell backwards again, the scaffold lurched forward, striking the balance and spraying the sugar into the air. The piece’s mechanism had an immaculate and beautiful pointlessness to it, a dangerous trick whose end result was air full of sugar. Pancho López – whose appearance had been delayed by several days due to visa problems coming from Mexico – arrived late and truculent. He pasted the word “Visa” letter by letter to the front of his shirt. Mexican music playing and replaying in the background, he proceeded to open a case of Champagne, shooting each cork into the audience, smirking, as he filled up a huge bunch bowl with Champagne, and occasionally taking a swig. When he was finished, he sank the letters into the Champagne. Then, suddenly, he grabbed a baseball bat, shattering the bowl, sending a sea of champagne cascading onto the floor.

Julian Higuerey Nuñez’s piece, the conditions of surrender, provided an appropriate coda to the festival. Nuñez had been following the festival all along, sweeping up the spaces after the performances. He took the physical traces of the festival, mixed it into what proved to be a translucent, water-based ink, and wrote on a temporary wall in the gallery: (1) I will go last (on the final performing night), (2) I will sweep (or vacuum) the floors at the end, (3) I will use the collected dust to make a water based ink, (4) I will write, using the ink, the conditions of surrender, (5) this is not to be referred to as performing. Nuñez’s piece was at once self-referential, humble, ruminative, and strangely beautiful.

In Roddy Hunter’s lecture earlier in the week , “Notes Toward ‘The Eternal Network’ in the Era of Globalization,” he suggested that we may want to give up the term “Performance Art” in favor of “Action Art”; in part because performance art seems to encompass such a vast array of activities and practices, many of which bear little resemblance to “performance” as the term is usually understood, that it is no longer illuminating. I would agree with him as far as such terminological issues go—and there was, of course, a great deal more to his lecture than that—but I also think that some of the most interesting work pushes the boundaries between art and life, art and the world, so hard, that almost no term is appropriate, except perhaps “art.” When Michael Fernandes wandered around Bloor street, or sat in front of an audience laconically reading a peculiar and obscure book about the life of faeries, one was hard pressed to discern the difference between his simply engaging in those activities and presenting a work of art, and indeed the vanishing difference seemed to rest in the activities of trying to make that distinction. And when Tehching Hsieh completed his final, thirteen-year performance, he announced that the work had consisted entirely in living. As this year’s festival amply demonstrated, art in this context is meant to insert itself into the interior of what it means to live here and now.

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-31T01:25:00.001-04:00

Saturday, October 30, 2010 - Union Station 10 AM - 6 PM

he asked me what i was doing here. i replied, "working." i then contextualized this by saying i was doing research, embodied research, researching what it was to be a stationary presence within a place of transit. he accepted my explanation saying if there was anything i needed, they were always here.

Carlos Monroy, St. Lawrence Market, Saturday October 30, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-30T16:14:00.004-04:00

I approach the St. Lawrence Street Market from Union Station. It is slightly chilly on this second to last day of the festival. I am looking for the CMG Performance Art Services booth, which has been described to me as an organization by and for artists, figure-headed by Columbian artist Carlos Monroy, that promises to make performance art more economically accessible while giving performance artists a regular source of income. I am intrigued…

First I see the banner, large, blue on white: Make Art Work For You. As I arrive, I see Monroy deep in conversation with a passer-by. I listen in while looking over the booth wares: a corporate video advertizing the company and a service catalogue complete with mission statement and corporate logo. As I peruse the catalogue, looking over work – work that I can presumably purchase, though it is still opaque to me exactly how such a purchase might operate – I hear Monroy extolling the value of performance art and art more generally for the good of the demos. A family of four visiting from India nod in agreement, particularly the father, who launches into a story about the appalling public support for the arts in his hometown and the difficult fate of his brother, a sculptor. While Monroy encourages the whole family to join his service, I turn back to the catalogue and video.

In both, the work for sale is separated into four categories: Temporary and Ritualistic; Public Spaces; Minimalistic and Formalstic; Identity Issues Related; Institutional Critique. I am leafing through a performance art library ready to be bought and sold for my aesthetic pleasure. Looking for something to brighten up your corporate retreat this year? Purchase some performance art, all tied up in a lovely corporate bow. It seems difficult not to read the stall as a send-up, especially when watching the corporate video playing on loop at one end of the performance booth. Over and over again the video intones: We are artists thinking about how to help other artists be creatively and economically successful without sacrificing the real soul of what makes performance art.…We are contemporary, vibrant, aggressive and ownable…. We offer a truly here and now experience….We are confident, dynamic, versatile … instead of trafficking in the buying and selling of objects we focus on the context in which the action is happening…

CMG Performance Art Services is sold as a brand identity. However, while not completely convincing as a business pitch, it works as satire. As I lean in, I could be listening to an articulate and vibrant aunt trying to sell me a pitch from a pyramid kit she ordered over the internet in order to get her home-business off the ground. It has both that kind of zeal and fragility. Monroy begins (I paraphrase): Performance artists normally sell pictures and videos of performance work as documentation. This is their only long term access to an artistic commodity circuit. We at Performance Art Services insist that liveness is lost with these practices. Instead, we propose selling the performance itself, as a propositional co-authored construct! While it might look like what is being sold is the script of the performance, we assert that it is instead the soul of liveness that we traffic in. We do this by insisting that each iteration is a new one, a collaboration between the original author of the piece and a local performer. We don’t re-produce, we don’t re-do, we engage in a co-authorship, co-writing practice.

Furthermore, Monroy continues, CMG Performance Art Services is, like many contemporary businesses, committed to public outreach and education. In categorizing the product into “five styles of performance” the public is invited to think about an anatomy of performance art. To recognize genre distinctions within a notoriously difficult to understand artistic form. Bringing performance art into the streets and homes and corporate corners of the world – In Monroy’s words, bringing it to the “real public,” that is, to people who don’t already know how to think about performance art – CMG Performance Art Services argues that by co-opting the well-known Multi-Level Marketing business model made famous by housewives flocking dishware and makeup all performance artists can make a living wage.

With Joseph Beuys’s famous dictum “everyone is an artist” as the ground of his project, he asks each passerby to join the flock, believe in the cause, and network – for a small fee – in the name of performance.

Berenicci Hershorn, XSPACE, Saturday October 30, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-30T15:47:00.011-04:00

As I head down the stairs to XSPACE’s basement area, XBASE, I hear a faint digital soundtrack that manages to entice me and make me uneasy all at once. It is high pitched and rhythmic, like the clicking and beeping of some alien Pigmy music. At the far end of the basement Berenicci Hershorn stands in a clear plastic enclosure, bright spotlight behind her. The plastic gives the performance a danger-zone feeling. Her smock has a large black decal at the chest, and for the life of me I can’t help thinking that it looks like the headdress of a HAZMAT suit. Whatever is going on behind the plastic is meant to invoke toxicity. Or messiness. Or something dangerous. To my left, as I stand before the plastic enclosure, is a huge mountain of ice piled inside of a large chalk circle. It glistens under a white spotlight like a mound of oversized diamonds. In the center of the space is an old tin kettle, boiling on a plinth and lit by a tiny red LED. It also stands inside of a large chalk circle. We are privy to a ceremony of some sort, but whether it will end in mercy or malice I am not sure.

Hershorn’s action is repetitive. For the duration of the evening she stands behind a long kitchen table wearing a white smock. Methodically, she removes a piece of newspaper from a pile, folds it in preparation, and places it in the center of the table. She then pours a dollop of a red viscous material (paint?) from a tin watering can into the center of the newspaper and gently folds it into a little packet. Each folded newspaper is a feat of Origami. Gently she ties the packet with a piece of twine and places it at the top of the table. In between each action Hershorn cleans the space. The pile of red liquid packets accumulate as the performance moves from its first into its second into its third into its fourth hour, some seeping through, some retaining their integrity. Fold. Pour. Tie. Place. Clean. These are the five actions that Hershorn repeats and repeats. The steam from the kettle, meanwhile, permeates the space with a faint something – I can’t quite tell what. The smell is soothing, in stark contrast to the sound and the site of Hershorn herself, who I find determinately unsettling as I inhabit her symbolic universe in its fastidious and unremitting continuity.

Over the course of this five-hour performance, Hershorn invites us to experience something between the production of bio-weapons of mass destruction and a Voodoo high-priestess' ritual. As her smock becomes smeared with blood-redness, the enormous pile of ice (I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it is 40 or 50 bags worth) begins running a river of water towards the front of the space. I watch the water in two forms, the ice on the floor and the steam from the kettle, transforming and moving through space. I watch Hershorn making her little tied packets of blood-not-blood, ready to post or send or scatter to whichever corners they are destined for. I watch all of these things to the sound of the electronic alien Pygmies, and leave the space for the final time, as I began: vaguely unnerved.

Roddy Hunter, Through Michael Fernandes, Toronto Free Gallery, Friday October 29, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-30T12:52:00.012-04:00

My day starts, again, by going to the Toronto Free Gallery at noon to meet with Michael Fernandes and witness his ongoing Doing Things With Strangers. For four days of the festival, loosely between the hours of noon and five, we have all been put on alert: Michael Fernandes is performing in and around the Toronto Free Gallery. Because of this, we have all watched his actions – sitting in on the afternoon Performance Art Daily talks, wandering the streets interacting with business owners, asking an artist where she is from and what kind of work she does, sitting in a cafe over coffee - with attention. All these things have both been constituted as performance and as a question: is he performing? Up until today – so for the first two and a half days of the performance – this has been maintained actively as a question, with Fernandes offering only his enigmatic look or wry smile when asked when/where are you performing?

Today starts much the same: I arrive at the gallery and notice him sitting, ready for this afternoon’s Performance Art Daily, a talk by UK artist, critic, organizer and teacher Roddy Hunter. Despite myself I, too, want to go up and ask Fernandes if he's performing this afternoon. Though that question seems increasingly antithetical to what he's doing, as someone tasked with writing about the piece a part of me wants to know for certain: is this it or not? Am I supposed to be writing about what's happening now or not? Sitting down for Hunter's talk - Notes Towards the Eternal Network in an Era of Globalization - I find myself listening through the lens of Fernandes’s Doing Things With Strangers.

Hunter starts us off with an autobiographical sampler of his performances over the last 20 years. We are treated to an onslaught of works – 30 or 40 – each represented by a single image and brief description. What is central here is not so much the work or its genesis but instead the geographical location of each work, detailing a chronogeography of art actions: Hungary. Kazakhstan. Japan. Berlin. Transylvania. Toronto. Serbia. Poland. Taking off just his left shoe and sock he navigates these art actions for us, bringing our attention to the interrelationship between forms of visibility (art actions) and forms of capitalism - the circulation of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital as constitutive of contemporary networks including those of the performance art festival.

Hunter’s central terms for this analysis come from sociologist Henri Lefebvre, particularly his distinction between “the global” and “the mondial.” While the global - and, by extension, globalization - refers to a totality, to an effect, the mondial and mondialisation refer to a making practice, to a making and remaking of worldwide space. The mondial - multiple, fractured, process-driven - gives rise to the possibility of parallel worlding practices. It is in this context that Hunter wants to question performance art… What world are we building when we organize, dis-organise and re-organize international performance art festivals and traffic in the circulation of international performing bodies and the dissemination of local cultural (performance) discourses? In other words, how do we as performance artists inhabit capital? Is it possible, he asks, that artists in the performance art network, traveling everywhere, themselves articulate a form of aesthetic neo-colonialism? In this context, Doing Things With Strangers becomes the fear that the stranger will become obsolete. That instead of trafficking in difference, the performance art festival circuit will work only to increase sameness. While concerned with what he dubs a kind of neo-liberal colonialism, the network - a figure of possibility for Hunter, riffing on George Brecht and Robert Filiou - is nonetheless what can be mobilized to replace the outdated concept of the historical avant-garde in thinking about these practices. While the historical avant-garde is a category dependent on a rejected mainstream, the network, like the mondial, becomes a figure for living in the same world, but living in it differently - in effect replacing a binary with a rhizomatic figure. Hunter's talk, experienced in the context of Fernandes and Doing Things With Strangers, recalls for me the term altermondialisation, not just as an umbrella term for activists advocating alternate forms of globalization, but also as it is mobilized by feminist theorists and philosophers like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Beatriz Preciado. Altermondialisation takes seriously the ethics and the aesthetics of worlding practices so dear to both Hunter and Fernandes – to Fernandes through Hunter, Hunter through Fernandes, each in different idioms, different densities and textures of practice.

After the talk I mill around, following Michael Fernandes in his "other-worldalisation," at a a distance, feeling like a performance art stalker. On duty but not wanting to interfere, I watch him go up to one person – a stranger? – and strike up a conversation. I watch him bum a cigarette from another. After a while I stand next to him and, when there is a lull in the conversation, I break down and gently ask the question I have been enjoying not knowing the answer to: whether he is performing this afternoon. He gives me a look. People keep coming up to me and asking whether I am performing. They say “where have you been? I have been looking for you performing and haven’t been able to find you.” You know what I tell them? You don’t need to look for me, I am here! I am right here! This is it! I nod and step back to observe again. The performance has shifted from an enigmatic question, is this performance?, to a forceful assertion, this is performance!

I am left with the question, what kinds of other-worlding are being practiced here? What multiple, fractured, process-driven, making and remakings of worldwide space? What parallel worlding practices? A Dick Higgins quotation from Hunter's talk is haunting me: “[C]offee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music.” Doing Things With Strangers, however, is not about a (perhaps not so) simple engagement with what the lens of performance can offer to the practice of daily life, but more emphatically about the role that performance can play in creating new lines across social difference. After a half an hour or so, I see Fernandes leave and I let him go, unencumbered by my nosiness, off into a world of strangers.

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-30T10:47:00.000-04:00

Friday, October 29, 2010 - Union Station 9 AM - 5 PM

if you come to see me but cannot find me, does this mean you missed my performance? this is not my question. if you come to see me but cannot locate me, my question is, "what does this produce?"

Pancho Lopez, Anger, XSpace, Friday October 29, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-29T16:14:00.003-04:00

Some music plays, a lovely smooth Latin something. There is a pedestal with a fishbowl on it and a small table with what looks like 24 bottles of champagne. Pancho Lopez is introduced by festival co-organizer Tanya Mars. She informs us that Lopez, who had been scheduled to perform last week but was denied access to the country, was finally granted a visa and would tonight be performing a piece called “anger.” With that introduction done, Lopez slowly lays out 8 pieces of paper, each bearing the word “VISA” in large font and all caps. When each sheet is in place - forming a barrier between him and the audience - he puts on an apron, takes out four vinyl letters, V, I, S, A, and glues them to it.

Lopez pops a bottle to the music. The cork hits an audience member. He pours a small glass and hands it to another audience member. He pours a few more, with flourish, until the first bottle is empty. The next bottle he allows to pop safely, anti-climatically (all of us prepared, with ducked heads), and pours the whole bottle into the fishbowl. He repeats the process with the next bottle, and the next, sometimes shaking the bottle to the music. A dance of champagne, music, and foam. At one point the “S” on his apron begins to come up. He opens a glue stick and re-sticks the letter. He then takes out some chapstick and puts it on his lips – a visual rhyme. But mostly his action is repetitive: Pop. Pour. Pop. Pour. The only variation lies in his little dance with the bottle and the varying level of threat that he plays with as he pops each cork into or just above the audience's heads. The performance is also punctuated by audience commentary: someone with a glass tries to signal for more champagne, another complains as a cork hits her, another finds a cork and throws it back at Lopez. Lopez plays with our expectations, while filling slowly, bottle by bottle, the large round fishbowl to the brim.

While pouring the bottles Lopez gets more and more attentive to cleanliness, asking for a mop and wiping up any spills. As he does this we can see his image, inverted in the fishbowl, glowing golden with champagne. At bottle twenty-two the bowl is almost full, and I start to wonder how this will end: will he pass out more champagne to us, the audience? Will the bowl overflow? I am struck by the excess, waste and luxury that I'm witnessing. As the last bottle is shaken, popped and poured, we watch, breath held. It almost fits, sloshing just slightly over the brim. Bowl filled, Lopez rips the letters from his chest – V… I… S… A – and places them in the bowl one by one. They float on top. He takes one sip from the bowl, steps back, grabs a red baseball bat and hits the bowl with all his might.

It shatters.

Champagne splashes and runs across the gallery floor, its rich odor filling the air as the audience scrambles back a little, and the gallery staff come in to prepare for the next performance.

Michael Fernandes, XSpace, Friday October 29, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-29T15:42:00.007-04:00

Fernandes sits quietly in the space. An amplifier buzzing and a microphone in front of him. He pauses, a book in his hands, and looks at us. Putting on his glasses he opens a book and slowly, gently, begins to read. Between the human point of view and that of a fairy or a member of the angelic kingdom… One of the main differences is that we live in a world of form and they in a world of life. The words fill the space and we wonder, a bit, what it going on. The book he is reading from is called The Real Book of Fairies by Dora Van Gelder. He continues to read quietly slowly, sitting hunched. A bottle of water at his side, his signature blue bag behind him. To the fairy the tree is a living breathing personality which is expressing itself in the form we see…Most of our world is composed of inanimate things that seem to be dead. Not only are we surrounded by rocks and animals… Ours is a world of objects. But a fairy never experiences anything of this character. He reads to us. We move from a description of the world of fairies – one that is radical ecological in nature – to a description of the fairy itself as a creature with porous boundaries, living in a continuum with the natural world. We are in an impromptu bedtime story session. We are forced to just listen – an odd proposition in such a visual context. At a certain, seemingly arbitrary, point, after thirty or so minutes of reading, he stops. It goes on. He says to us. And then, picking up his things to go, almost as an afterthought he says: It is not political.

He leaves. We clap.

Irma Optimist, Performance Connection, XSpace, Friday October 29, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-29T14:01:00.019-04:00

A woman enters the space. Somber, dressed in black. Holds a ball of red ribbon between her cupped hands and bows her head. A moment of solemnity. She then ties a clothesline with the ribbon across the gallery space, a lustrous red line.

This is Irma Optimist, grande dame of Finnish performance art. She is all dressed in black. Black heels, black tights. Black blazer and turtle neck. Stark white hair. She holds up a compact piece of paper, the size of a small boulder, crumpled and roughly painted black. After presenting it to the audience, much as a magician might show his hat for all to see that there is nothing in it, she slowly unfurls it making gentle crumply sounds, revealing a white plane that emerges from within the three dimensional black dot. Continuing to work with the sound of the paper – rustling and crinkling – she eventually works it until it is totally open. Not quite flat, she shows it to us as a drawing. A flag – all white with one black dot. She clothes-pins it to the red ribbon. Another ball is presented and unfurled. She repeats the action. This time the dot is a little lower, our attention brought to the variation of small differences. Repeat again. The unfurled sheets of paper are beautiful, all crumples and shine in the gallery light. She repeats the action seven more times, ten in all, each time presenting the ball and treating us to a soundscape of crumple as we witness the movement of one material – paper – between two states. The pages hang like ink stained laundry. Black on white on white almost completely covering the ribbon's line of red, which now exists only at the edge.

With this action Optimist, a trained mathematician, offers us an experience of points in transformation from three to two dimensions. A point, I am told by my authoritative online sources, is not a thing but a place. The point of the point is that it is a total abstraction. It has no length, no width, no breadth: it has no dimension. As if to emphasize this, all ten pages hung, she approaches with scissors and cuts out the black dots, each cut marked by its own crinkly sound in the quiet gallery space. Dropping the centers one by one to the floor, we are presented with ten hanging voids. Then Optimist hides the scissors in her skirt and pulls each sheet down with a firm tug that sends the clothespins flying. When she is done she places them, one by one, around her neck – a 17^th century ruffle grown to comic proportions.

The clarity of each image Optimist offers is striking, the subtlety of detail and the time allotted to each action in perfect balance. The last sheet in place, she bends at the waist while over a loudspeaker she repeats a single word. I can’t quite make it out. Something like “oit” is repeated at regular intervals with increasing echo. I decide that is it, in fact, Optimist saying point: point point point point. As the word resonates and echos, the separate sounds syncopate and then come together. Once distinct, the repetitions merge in progressively closer and closer articulations until they overlap, become one, and stop. While I am certain that this sounding is in some way conceptually tied to the black dots, I am not sure exactly how. I don't need to know, however. I am transfixed by the poetry of the gestures. She rises, takes off the sheets one by one, lays them on top of each other on the floor, and bows.

[all photos by Henry Chan]

Henry Adam Svec, Songs Just For You, XSpace, Friday October 29, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-29T13:51:00.003-04:00

In the center of the gallery is a podium lit by a single spotlight. To the left is an open guitar case, guitar inside. Henry Adam Svec comes in and stands behind the podium, dressed in what I would call graduate student garb. Clearing his throat, he begins to lecture us.

The title of my presentation is “Songs Just For You.” Svec offers us a philosophical treatise on authenticity. He distinguishes authenticity from sincerity. He tells us that the authentic includes first and foremost debates about authenticity. He tells us many things about authenticity – assertions, arguments, propositions. Authenticity is always already commodified, Svec tells us. A little jocular. Off the cuff. Be aware of yourself recognizing authenticity, he says, and proceeds to offer a set of humorous binaries. Which one is authentic and which is not? Micky Mouse. Water. We laugh. He proceeds to categorize different types of authenticity, giving the example of being a waiter in an authentic way, in a way that is not just about the job but that is in some way both full and truthful. He talks about being a waiter in a way that reminds me of the 70s feminist performance group The Waitresses (co-founded by Jerri Allyn and Anne Gauldin in 1977) who constituted their waitressing as performance to transform their relation to their daily practice. Is it a lecture? Is it funny? Is it a performance send-up? Is it an implicit critique of authenticity in the context of performance art and its liveness?

I will show you authenticity, Svec says. How does one show authenticity? What is the form proper to authenticity? Like a lecture authenticity is pure content. He then turns to the guitar. Now I will sing songs. In what way will they be authentic? He gives us what seems like a Marxist proposition on unalienated labour, something that is in excess of the commodity form. In that spirit he tells us not only that has he refused his artist fee, but that he is not even who he says he is, and that this performance will never appear on his CV. Furthermore, he says, garnering a laugh, I'm not even enjoying myself!

Svec begins to sing. He stops. I am not drawing your attention to the songs themselves, he says, I am not sure if the songs are authentic, I am bringing your attention to the singing of them. He sings a lonely song called “Don’t.” One line from the song stays with me – although he did tell me not to pay attention to the content: If you think this is just a game I am playing, if you don’t think I mean every word I am saying. The words might as well be a commentary by Svec, as I for one have oscillated between taking him seriously and taking the whole thing as a sly critique.

Svec sings another song, in a beautiful lanky voice, just so you won't be tempted to think that the first one meant something special, he says. Finished, he thanks us for listening and invites us to come and find him with questions.

[all photos by Henry Chan]

Francis O'Shaughnessy & Sara Létourneau, I have nothing to say about my day, XSpace, Friday October 29, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-29T13:25:00.006-04:00

We are arranged in the space. Francis O'Shaughnessy tells us where we can sit – there, no further, that is good - and pauses. Sara Létourneau enters with two china teacups, complete with saucers. O'Shaughnessy
takes a pair of scissors and cuts a slit in his shirt. Something is bundled under the fabric, at the bicep. Létourneau puts her knees in the two tea cups – which have a clear liquid in them that I later learn is bleach – and stands, looking at us. She takes bread out of her bra and eats it. He takes bread out of the cut in his sleeve and eats it. They stand. She looks at the audience and he paces, both eating. Stand. Pace. Eat. Look at the audience, impassive. Repeat. It seems almost like a force-feeding, the way they keep on eating the dry bread without swallowing. Their mouths full. She starts to twirl her hair. Standing. Staring. Chewing. He takes out the scissors again and cuts the lock of hair that she has meanwhile twisted and held out. He puts the hair down his pants. This seems to break the monotony of the chewing. Each takes a tea cup and removes it from the saucer, placing it closer to the audience. Then they lean over the saucers, in concert, and open their mouths, dropping the bread balls they've been chewing onto the saucers with a plop. The bread action over, they move the plates to the side. An off-kilter invocation of domestic ennui.

To continue their portrait of dystopic gender relations and family life, Létourneau takes out a spool of red thread and a needle while O'Shaughnessy cleans the floor of breadcrumbs with a paper towel. He then walks slowly across with the cups, filled to the brim with bleach, doing his best not to spill, and places them to the side. Taking out a length of grey yarn, he ties each end to each of the teacup handles. Létourneau meanwhile has threaded five needles to the same thread. He cleans some more with the paper towel while she pins the needles to the wall in the shape of a house. A plaintive drawing against the gallery wall. O'Shaughnessy then undoes his zipper and gropes inside his pants, looking for something. Finally, he pulls out a flower. A daisy. The audience giggles. He does some improvised calisthenics - jumping jacks and push-ups. Bread crumbs are flying from his sleeve, littering the floor he has just cleaned. She stands inside the red-thread house and looks at him. Coyly she takes off her tights. Shoes. He drinks a sip of beer from an audience member. She puts on a pleated skirt. He takes off his T-shirt and puts on a long-sleeved one. Létourneau moves to the center of the space, bringing the thread with her, and O'Shaughnessy lets himself get caught in it. Then, grabbing a large garbage bag from the corner, he kneels behind her. He puts his head up her skirt and she sings How Long Has This Been Going On while he works at doing something up her skirt. Létourneau, the red spool of thread still in her hands, proceeds to wrap a thin line around her waist. As she sings she continues, round and round, the thin red line getting thicker and thicker. I could cry salty tears / Where have I been all these years / A little while, tell me now / How long has this been going on? With her tiny a capella voice and her French Canadian accent, she sings. All the while he continues to work under the skirt. There were chills, up and down my spine / Yes, there're thrills I can't define / Listen sweet, while I repeat / How long has this been going on? He comes out of the skirt, sighs as if exhausted, and removes the bag. Breaking the thread, she throws the spool away.

At this point O'Shaughnessy places a cutout icon of a woman on the floor of the gallery. Turning, he proceeds to Létourneau, who is standing against the wall, in "customs search" position. Again he crawls under her skirt, pierces something, and some white powdery substance comes rushing down, causing many audience members to leave as she jumps and whatever it is – something at least somewhat toxic judging by the audience reaction – billows out into the space. Done, Létourneau stops, stares at the audience, takes off her skirt, and reveals two cans of Comet strapped to her thighs. O'Shaughnessy then takes off his shoes, walks across the space, puts away the woman icon cutout, and grabs the grey yarn holding the cups filled with bleach. Létourneau lies down in front of O'Shaughnessy and, with the yarn across his waist, he walks forward, dragging the cups that are now dripping bleach, while she rolls in front of him in slow motion. When they reach the end of the space they stand together and bow.

[all photos by Henry Chan]

Wednesday, October 27th (d2d), Thursday, October 28th (evening) and Fiday, October 29th (day) 2010 (DB)

2010-10-29T10:50:00.000-04:00

Photo of Chuyia Chia (above) by Henry Chan
Photo of Maurice Blok (below) by Henry Chan

In the early 1980s, Tehching Hsieh conducted his legendary one-year performances, in which he performed a specific symbolic action, or fulfilled a stricture, for the duration of one year. In one, for instance, he punched a time clock every hour on the hour for a year, carefully documenting the instances in which he failed to do so; in another, he did not enter into any building or shelter for one year. Hsieh’s durational performances are among the greatest, most sublime, and most wholly enigmatic works of performance art, and the ones in which the relationship between art and life is most uncompromisingly examined; they also raise pointed questions about what a work of art is and what a performance is. Does performance need to involve actions of some kind, as I suggested in a previous blog, or can it involve a lack of action, a negative action? Can it be just a state of being, a kind of mode of existence, rather than an action? Does it have to be something available to the public, or can it be purely private? Can it be something that can only be seen in its documentation?

Photos by Henry Chan

Curated by Johanna Householder, the Direct to Documentation features works that can either only be seen through their documentation, or works that were viewed as more interesting in their documentation than as works to be reproduced live in Toronto. Finnish artist Annette Arlander’s “Year of the Rat” is in the tradition of Hsieh’s year-old performances. For one year, Arlander went every day to the shore in the Bay of Finland and filled and emptied a jug of the water. In the five minute version, one sees the passing of the year in fast forward: the tides moving in to cover her feet or sliding out, snow covering the rocky shore then melting, the light steely or more generously glowing. For “The T Project,” American artists Sarah Banasiak and Alexia Mellor rode the subways during the course of the so-called work day from 9 to 5, one of them typing memos on an old fashioned typewriter. Much of the amusement of the video rests in observing the reactions of the other people. Rachelle Beaudoin’s “Eyelash Extensions” is a prime example of a private performance that’s just slightly off-kilter from ordinary life. In it, we find Beaudoin using tweezers to glue lengths of her hair to the tips of her eyelashes, with predictably goofy results. Myk Henry’s “Time Out,” on the other hand, is a purely public performance, one that of course could never take place in a gallery at all. For “Time Out,” Henry stops a street car in the middle of rush hour in Geneva by tripping and spilling a whole shopping bag full of pasta. He picks up his groceries as slowly as possible, literally crawling under the streetcar to get every last piece. In the meantime, the streetcar driver and it passengers are becoming increasingly agitated at being made late. Myk steadfastly remains in front of the streetcar, occasionally crawling back under it to look for more lost groceries, arguing with the driver, with the jeering passengers, with angry people in the massive traffic jam he has caused, with outraged passersby. He does this for approximately three minutes (this performances clocks in at exactly 3:01) then desists, letting the relentless flow of city traffic resume. Myk’s piece sharply underscores the inflated and accelerated speed of urban time. It is remarkable how much disruption Myk’s performance at least looks like it caused—and it only took three minutes. Was anyone actually going anywhere that was all that important?

One of the finest pieces in the Direct to Documentation screening was the beautiful and enigmatic “How to Feed a Piano,” a kind of tribute to Fluxus composer Lamonte Young’s “Compositions 1960s” by Canadian artists Candice Hopkins and David Khang. It opens with a grand piano set atop a wooden platform, Khang shoveling hay into the piano while Hopkins plays, the notes muted, skittish, and erratic. Eventually Khang himself crawls into the piano, presumably manipulating its strings. Later the lower part of the platform on which the piano is set is opened to reveal a full-grown work horse. Khang is off to the side, privately meditating. He is then covered with blue paint, attached to the horse like a plow, and dragged over the floor, creating long, swishing blue streaks, in a clear allusion to Yves Klein’s body painting performances of the 1960s. (Unlike Hopkins’ and Khang’s, Klein’s performances were intensely ironical fashion statements—there was a small orchestra playing, the performers were beautiful young women, the blue, of course, perfect Klein blue). Swedish performers Elin Lungren and Petter Pettersson’s “Turkey’s Nest” involved the artists wearing a big wolf’s head and a bear’s head respectively. While Lungren, decked out in a summer dress and high heels (wolf’s are fashionable and sexy, after all), dances to imaginary music, while Pettersson laboriously moves bread rolls from one huge pile to another. Sophia New’s uncanny “When no-one was looking I snuck back stage” is close to being abstract. A jump rope with blue, then red, then white light projected onto it loops against a black background, its whooping sounds loud, the jumper invisible. Occasionally the rope falters, as though becoming entangled in someone’s feet; occasionally the silhouette of the person jumping rope flashes onto the rope as though from a distance.

Tehching Hsieh’s epic performances raised the question of what counts as a performance and pushed the relationship between art and existence to its limit. This year’s Eminence Gris Michael Fernandes’ series of performances outside of the Toronto Free Gallery in and around Lansdowne and Bloor raised similar questions, but in a more intimate, one might even say lyrical mode. Unlike in the Karen Spencer episode reported on in the previous blog, this time I actually knew what Fernandes looks like when I showed up at Bloor and Lansdowne yesterday afternoon—lanky, and with a long, sinuous face and long grey hair, bald at the top. I saw him cross Bloor and head up the street carrying a blue bag. I figured he would be back, so I brought a cup of coffee and settling in at the street corner and waited. A pair of African men bantered with each other in French outside of their barbershop. A crack addict in an oversized sweatshirt sped furiously back and forth in front of me. Women pushed huge strollers along the sidewalk. Occasionally someone stumbled out of one of the cafés where one can drink cheap beer and stare at ancient television sets all day. Eventually, I grew bored and walked up the street and found Fernandes nursing a cup of coffee in a bakery. Not wanting to disturb him, I retreated to the bus stop to wait and see what happened. School was out and mobs of high school age kids spilled up out of the subway, the boys in their cheap baggy jeans and knock off sneakers shouting slogans at each other and smacking each other's backs, the girls elaborately made up as though exiting the velvet rope of a nightclub staring at their cell phones with withering contempt. One girl kept shouting over and over into her phone, “I am not a slut, I am not a slut, I am not a slut, bitch, I am not a slut…” Eventually Fernandes left the bakery and crossed the street, and I thought, now something is going to happen! He entered a convenience store; I continued to wait. At some point a young OCAD student, apparently directed to me by a representative of 7a*11d, approached me (I was standing in the shelter at the top of the subway stairs) and asked, “Do you know where Michael Fernandes’ performance is?,” and I said “He’s over in that convenience store, maybe he’s doing something there!” So we walked over to the convenience store, and, inevitably, he had disappeared. Later, it struck me that virtually anything he did might have counted as the performance: sitting in the coffee shop, crossing the street, going into a convenience store, disappearing. And of course my looking for him might have been part of the performance too.

I am not sure Fernandes ever actually “did” or “performed” everything, and the more I searched for a performance or an action, the less I really understood what such things are.

Thursday evening at Xpace featured five powerful examples of performance art, all of them symbolically potent, and all of them exploiting the visceral immediacy of being present to something live and which will, in my view, always give live performance qualities unavailable in documentation. (Even live absence can be weirdly visceral: in Chris Burden’s piece of the late 1970s when he holed himself up in a construction with monitors attached to his hard, his presence was electric).

Photos of Chuyia Chia by Henry Chan

For her performance, Chuyia Chia appeared dressed in white, a larger rectangle of paper hanging from the ceiling at the end of the stage, a metal bowl, a blender, a knife, a bottle of oil, and a Styrofoam box on the floor. She ceremoniously washed her hands, put on a pair of gloves and a plastic butcher’s cap. From the Styrofoam box she took a whole fish, long and blue finned, and, caressing it lovingly, she cradled it like a baby, carrying it around and presenting it to the audience. She then placed it below the hanging sheet of paper and packed its sides with ice. She then took the bottle of oil and squirted it at the paper, creating a stained, bleeding drawing that itself resembled an ornamental fish. Next, Chia set to gutting the large fish, first placing its viscera into the blender, then chunks of the fish, grinding it bones and all into a puree. Using her hands, she shoveled the puree into the metal bowl, carrying handfuls of the ground fish around for the audience to smell. As anyone who has spent any time in fish markets or the docks in fishing villages, fish have a peculiarly potent and to some sickening smell, and this is smell is released with even greater intensity when it is ground up, but it is also fascinating: it is a smell that makes one think of the deep, liquefied, unformed, raw inside of living things. Some in the audience covered their noses; others looked like they were about to gag; others inhaled with gusto. Chia then began hurling handfuls of the fish at the paper, creating an explosive, reeking painting of fish and oil that the audience was invited to join in. Chia’s performance clearly quoted similar performances using animal blood by the Vienna Actionists, but Chia’s performance was not about violence or the expiation of history; it seemed, rather, to involve an affirmation of the unmediated substances of the world, and the way they can be compromised.

Photos of Maurice Blok by Henry Chan

Dutch artist Maurice Blok’s performance, on the other hand, was an intricate unbalancing act, a kind of symbolist Buster Keaton routine. On the floor were boards, chairs, a carton of cream, glasses, a bowl, a pitcher, a trash bag full of bouquets of flowers. He began dipping his socked feet in a bowl of water, then taking his socks off and drying his feet. He swallowed cream and dribbled the cream out in a remarkably accurate circle, then placed chairs at the two ends of the circle. Placing a board across the two chairs, he clambering up onto the rickety construction, which looked like it might collapse at any moment, and attempted to pour cream into a glass set below, with little success. He tore open a cardboard box and wore it as a kind of dress; he free fell sideways, thudding onto the ground; he shook flower petals into the audience. In the performance's final passages, he set a board and blocks of wood up as a kind of teeter-totter with flowers at one end, and sat in a chair at the opposite end. He then tilted back in the chair until he fell, vaulting the flowers up into the air. Blok’s performance was about the delicate relationship between balance and imbalance, between rising and falling, and the cheap, ragged bouquets gave it a kind of clownish exuberance and lyricism.

Photos of Agnes Negregard by Henry Chan:

Norwegian artist Agnes Nedregard’s performance, on the other hand, was all intensity. A board hanging on a rope from the ceiling and a board with two holes on the ground, she began by placing a mouthpiece in her mouth that held it open grotesquely, her tongue poking out. A metronome ticked to one side. She blew a whistle. She took her rubber boots off and prowled past the audience in stockings full of dirt and rocks, scowling. She then took her jacket off, revealing an old shirt ripped loose down the front between her breasts. Using needle and thread, she then began sewing the flaps of the shirt to the sides of her breasts and chest. She approached individual audience members, staring at them intensely, then pierced the needle through her skin, pulling the thread tight. She blew the whistle again. The metronome continued to tick. She fit her legs through the holes in the board on the ground., and set herself on the one hanging from the ceiling, gazing, again, with a blank intensity at the audience. Then she suddenly leaped off the board, and it snapped back up toward the ceiling, swinging. The performance ended with her putting her jacket and boots back on and stopping the metronome, whose ticking by then permeated the room. Nedregard’s performance might seem to be about the denial of the body, and of women’s bodies in particular, but it struck me as too physically intimate and present for that; it seemed to me more about the fragility and instability of the body as it exists in time, where time, through the metronome, has become an active, physical, literal part of the performance.

Photos of Chen Jin by Henry Chan

Chinese artist Chen Jin’s performance begins with a standard map of the world—the kind one might find on the wall of a child’s room—spread out on the ground. On his hands and knees, Jin began kissing the countries, the continents, Asia, Africa, North America, Antarctica. Carrying a box of big, carpenter’s nails, he climbed up to the top of a ladder and began tossing the nails onto the map, some of the nails settling on the map, others scattering out onto the concrete floor. Once the box was empty, he climbed back down, spread the nails more or less evenly, democratically, over the surface of the map and fit a sheet of glass over it. On top of the sheet of glass he poured milk, the milk flowing out over the edges of the glass, pooling on the floor. At that point he broke open a packet of cherry tomatoes and began arranging them on the top of the milk-covered glass. Shuttling back and forth to check spelling and the shape of letters (Jin’s English is shaky), he gradually arranged them into the shape of a red, somewhat goofy “Peace.” Standing back, Jin looked pleased. With a rubber ball that itself looked like a globe and which glittered and flashed, he bounced the ball and strolled, not gaily, now uneasily, around his construction. And then, without warning, he hurled the ball against the glass, shattering, opening up a kind of wound of milk-spattered nails clotted over the map, the tomatoes rolling everywhere. Jin’s piece is a layered construction, of love, good will, violence, and naivete, reminding us perhaps how fragile and fractal and unpredictable the way we shape the world ultimately is.

Our everyday relationship to time and the world is skittish, fragmented, hurried. The great appeal of monasticism for many, whether it is Buddhist or Christian, is that it both radically simplifies the objects of consciousness and dramatically slows consciousness of time. Performance artists who work with durational pieces are, in a way, the monks of the art world. Tehching Hsieh being perhaps the most rigorous among them. Martine Viale’s durational piece in the basement of Xpace consisted largely of her filling small plastic packets with a a few drops of sky-blue ink and arranging them in a gradually expanding rectangle on the concrete floor. The color itself is strangely beautiful, small, gelatinous. Her face tattooed with lines the same color of blue, Vial went about the task of arranging the packets with a slow, silent, fatalistic precision, as though she were embodying a kind of cosmic necessity. By the second night of her performance, she had expanded her operations, setting up a table for dripping the blue into the little packets. Behind her were curious charts marking the emotional trajectory of her performance.

Photos of Sylvie Tourangeau (left) and Claudia Wittmann (right) by Henry Chan

Sylvie Tourangeau and Claudia Wittmann’s performance in the rough backroom at The Toronto Free Gallery was not a durational piece per se (though it could have been), but it shared some crucial characteristics with durational works. Pieces like those of, say, Maurice Blok and Chuyia Chia, and Chin Jen, for instance, rely in part on the symbolic resonance of the objects their performances involve as well as on the sequence of actions. The these are hardly narrative works, they are pieces that need to have an ending—we, as viewers or critics, would have a strong sense if they went on too long, or if they ended too early and seemed incomplete. Viale’s piece is so reduced in its elements and iterations that it has no real ending other than an arbitrary physical one; I could easily imagine her going on for days or even weeks, filling up the entire basement with packets of blue, moving on to the basements of neighboring buildings. Tourangeau and Wittmann’s performance is one without a natural ending for a different reason: it was driven by relational process activated between the performers themselves as well as the space they were performing in that need not have ever wholly exhausted itself. Sometimes they were on the ground, twisting in parallel contraposition, moaning, birthing being given birth; other times they tilted against each other in delicate balance; still other times they seemed to have been dropped into a kind of primordial dream space. Normally we think of consciousness as somehow inside of bodies, directing them like the captains of ships, to use Descartes’ famous metaphor from The Meditation; here they became a kind of corporal consciousness, continuously shifting in relation to one another.

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-28T23:56:00.000-04:00

Thursday, October 28, 2010 - Union Station 9 AM - 5 PM

the impusle is to share, but i withhold. certain things can be destroyed through their transmission, so today i withhold from sharing and fold into that place of protection my already articulated and re-membered recollection.

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-28T23:50:00.004-04:00

Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - Union Station 9 AM - 5 PM

when in the great hall turn west and look up at the arched window between the interior and exterior panes of glass. you may see a ghost-like silhouette of a person walking from one side to the other.

Karen Spencer: Sittin’, Union Station, Thursday October 28, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-28T13:45:00.011-04:00

It is three thousand seven hundred and twenty-three minutes into Karen Spencer’s Sittin’ performance at Union Station. It is cold, and I am not the only one here. I recognize a festival-goer sitting with her. Together they gaze gently into the distance, in roughly the same direction, as if waiting for something or someone.

I know from having talked to Spencer earlier that her experience of the site has changed. One of the “Red Caps”, sitting in front of us, named Dan, introduced himself to her the other day, asking how she was doing and if she needed anything. Only in Canada, I think to myself, having recently moved back from the US. The drama I was waiting for finally arrived and it came in the form of a gentle query. No request to move on. No harsh what are you doing here and where is your ticket? Feeling somehow included in the formal social life of the station, no longer waiting for someone to notice and say something – perhaps to send her packing – Spencer is visibly more relaxed. Or at least it seems this way to me.

Spencer comes up and offers me her seat: it’s the best seat in the house, she says. I put aside my computer and just sit. At first I notice visual rhymes: two green bags, two yellow ones. But quickly, this time, possibly because of the set-up by Spencer, I find myself feeling more deeply rooted in the space. I'm reminded of a wonderful short story by Ursula K Le Guin called "The Direction of the Road". It is told from the perspective of an oak tree watching the world walk, gallop and drive by. Similarly, here, I feel like a node in the center of a world that is spinning at different speeds.

Today I am tired. Doing this bloging with a new baby at the breast has wrung me out -- its own form of durational performance. Even at a slight distance from the vents that blow just behind the row of chairs, I am chilled to the bone. I can feel it around my neck and creeping into my jaw. Nonetheless, sitting here with Spencer relaxes me. I let the rest of the world drift away and concentrate on the production of space. On inhabiting a thoroughfare. On experiencing architecture. On the subtleties of the intervention: sitting. A seemingly passive act rendered so very active in intensity.

Three thousand seven hundred and fifty seven minutes into the performance, I leave, refreshed.

Michael Fernandes: Doing Things with Strangers, Toronto Free Gallery, Wednesday October 27, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-27T23:08:00.007-04:00

I'm meeting Michael Fernandes at noon at the Toronto Free Gallery. Today is the first of four days that Fernandes will be performing, from 12-5, locations TBA. As I walk along Bloor, I see him seated on a chain across the entrance to a car dealership. He stares into the street. There is something alluring about this image: solitary, lanky, long grey hair flowing. Tempted to approach, I walk on instead, giving him his space in case he is preparing for the performance. At 12:05, he's not at the gallery yet, so I decide that maybe what I saw wasn't actually preparation but was the performance itself. I walk back to the car dealership. Almost there, I see him walking towards me accompanied by a woman, a film-maker he introduces as Barbara Sternberg, an old friend. Fernandes offers me some peanuts in the shell and we walk back to the Toronto Free Gallery together. On the way, Fernandes asks me if I know where he can find an Angelic Harp. The three of us discuss Angelic Harps for a while. Then Fernandes offers us each a fig and suggests that we go see the artist's talk by the TouVA Collective. We agree. But first, he says, let’s stop for tea.

We go into a little teashop and Fernandes treats. While we're drinking he initiates a conversation about performance, value, scale and detail. We discuss the performance that happened last night and the talk yesterday afternoon. We then turn to the question of performance art and life: how do you see, represent, and disseminate work that has no iconic imagery? Work that is embedded in the everyday? The possibility suddenly occurs to me that, with no announcement, I am in the performance. That we have been performing - all three of us - the whole time. We finish tea. Walk over to the gallery. Listen to the talk. Gather together afterwards and reflect on the ways that it echoed the themes of our discussion over tea. We smile at each other. And so on. Each ritual constitutes a performance moment. Or does it?

Fernandes announces that he is going to Union Station to sit with Karen Spencer, and off he goes. Perhaps this is the next part of his performance for today, the next act. Perhaps these are all moments of performance, instances of Doing Things With Strangers - an echo of JL Austin’s Doing Things With Words that I can’t but reflect on after TouVa Collective's invocation of Austin yesterday. Subtle interventions into everyday life, each instantiating performance through an encounter with strangers – in this case, Barbara Sternberg and me. Or maybe I'm overthinking it and there was no performance at all today. As I follow Fernandes out of the gallery and prepare for the next part of my day, two festival goers come up and ask: have you seen Michael Fernandes? Is he performing? Has he started yet? Of course, I don’t know what to say.

Wednesday, October 27th 2010 (DB)

2010-10-27T17:17:00.055-04:00

7a#11d Blog 2

Photos of Joakim Stampe by Henry Chan

Photo from Bojana Videkanic's performance, by Henry Chan:

Most performance artists insist that what they do is distinct from what is disparagingly termed “mere spectacle.” I take this to mean something like this: performance is not reducible to the images it might result in, which can be remarkably beautiful or grotesque, but rather consists in the ineluctable series of acts that unfold in time. This may seem obvious, or tautological, but it’s important to keep in mind right now since the work of some of the most influential performance artists, like Marina Abramovic, is largely experienced through finely staged and crafted documentation, and is now conceived in a way that performances can be restaged like theatre events, sometimes decades after the original performance. Yet it is the specific, vanishing singularity of actions in time that gives performance art its distinctiveness, and is also the place where the boundary between art and life begins to blur.

The Fluxus artists famously insisted that no real distinction should be made between art and life—art is life, and life is art. This, of course, raises the broader philosophical question of what constitutes “life” and “art” in this context. These questions were given special importance for me this morning when I headed off in search of Karen Elaine Spencer’s performance in Union Station, which was scheduled to take place between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM. I purposely did not investigate in advance the nature of the performance but rather went there cold, hoping to encounter it accidentally like any other passerby on his way to catch a train to Montreal or Winnipeg. This proved considerably more difficult than I had expected. Lurking in front of the station, I found myself focusing in on a short, compact woman somewhere in her thirties dressed in tight jeans and a windbreaker, her straight blond tamped down by a toque. She looked upset, agitated, standing beside a suitcase packed to the point of bursting. Occasionally she stamped her feet as though about to launch into a tantrum, muttered to herself, and walked out in a semi-circle around the plaza in front the station. She did this repeatedly with such precision it struck me that it was part of a routine, and I was convinced that she was Karen Elaine Spencer and that this was the scheduled performance, or at least part of it. At some point she pulled an iPhone out of her pocket, stared at its screen, and began to cry, and I started to feel uneasy about the fact that I had been standing there watching her and even taking notes for a long time—after all, she might not be Karen Elaine Spencer! Then a woman I gradually realized was probably her mother arrived and she started yelling, in French, about how she had too much luggage with her, how she had to get rid of some things, and her mother told her that she had to calm down or else she would miss her train. By then I fully understood that this could not be Karen Elaine Spencer, and that I was not watching a work of performance art, but still I followed them into the station and to the line for the train to Quebec City. She was not Karen Elaine Spencer, was not a performance artist, was simply a woman on her way back home to some sad event, like a funeral. But then maybe she was Karen Elaine Spencer, maybe the performance consisted of posing as someone going to Quebec City under tragic circumstances. Or not. And so forth.

I later learned Karen Elaine Spencer was sick and the performance that day had been cancelled.

Photos of Bojana Videkanic by Henry Chan

Despite the close relationship between art and life, and life and art, with most works of performance art it is fairly obvious that one is encountering a work of art, even if it involves activities that are in some form close to life. Sarajevo-born Canadian artist Bojana Videkanic’s performance, for instance, opened with her decked out in a sleeveless T-shirt and men’s underwear squat on a rectangle of cloth in front of a plastic bowl full of dough, bags of flour and bottles of vegetable oil. Fitted with a microphone, her breathing was loud, raspy, and furtive. First she kneaded a large lump of dough into a loaf shape, and then, setting it down on the cloth, she used a long, wooden rod to begin the process of spreading the dough out into a thin layer. Wetting the dough with oil, she slid her hands underneath it and pressed her fingers with caressing and fluttering movements. Stretched like that over her fingertips, the dough looked like human skin, quivering to the touch. When the dough had been stretched to its limit, Videkanic stood up, smeared messy red lines of paint down either side of her face and body, and began singing a song in Serbo-Croatian, a traditional song that is associated with Bosnia. Eventually she stretched out on the dough, and, singing plaintively and out of tune, she pulled the dough completely over her with just her bare feet sticking out. She looked as though she was wrapped in a shroud. The piece was quietly heartbreaking, evocative as it was Videkanic’s family and history (her family left in 1995), and of a world that was permanently destroyed by the war.

photo of Bojana Videkanic by Henry Chan

Photos of Joakim Stampe by Henry Chan

While Swedish artist Joakim Stampe was organizing an idiosyncratic array of props on the floor—a record player, books, a power drill, a can of beer—he commented, “I am going to show you some images I have never seen before.” He rubbed the record player over his body; he put a black bag on his head; he picked up a book whose back was a sculpture of a human face. He put a single on the recorder player, a folk song from the 1950s about an old revolutionary who had lost everything except his socialist ideals—the song was played over and over, to great comic effect, throughout the performance. At one point he put on a glove, wore the book with the face on its cover as a kind of sleeve, and began to touch and probe the audiences, begging for coins; at another point he drilled holes through the book and lay on his back with the book on his face, smoking a cigarette through one of the holes.

Photo of Joakim Stampe by Henry Chan

Although some of the things Stampe used in the performance seemed to have personal significance—the song was one his father, an artist and black listed socoalist, liked to play—his performance was less about specific symbols than about discovered new images, new relationships, and new responses.

Photo of Jolanta Lapiak by Henry Chan

Photo of (from left to right) Jolanta Lapiak, Jess Dobkin and Maurice Blok by Henry Chan

Photo of Paul Couillard, Jeffrey Byrd and Jolanta Lapiak by Henry Chan

Photos by Henry Chan

Canadian Jolanta Lapiak’s “De-hearingization,” on the other hand, takes a wholly differenct approach to performance than that of Videkanic and Stampe. Rather than focusing on the actions of one or more performers, her piece consisted of orchestrating participatry experiencescentered around destabilizing our hearing-centric concepts of language and communication. Accompanied by several other deaf performers, Lapiak had audience members’ mouths taped shut and ears plugged, then they were herded into small groups where they were taught rudimentary sign language without relying on hearing. At the end of the performance, everyone gathered in a circle around a paper chain made from torn out pages from a dictionary and broke the links in the chain. Like sight, hearing is a fundamental communicative sense, and relating to the world without it inevitably involves shifts in focus and priorities. Lapiak’s performance gestures toward recreating an aspect of this experience for those whose hearing is intact with the aim of making the point that language and communication are not in and of themselves dependent upon a particular organization of the senses.

Photo by Henry Chan

Performance art can be a somewhat heavy affair, trafficking as it often does in big ideas and issues—personal and national identity, the depredations of history and contemporary consumer culture, the unstable contents of the unconscious, the nature of language and art. So it is always a relief, especially in the context of a festival, when there is an occasion to laugh. Bogota, Columbia based artist Carlos Monroy opened his “CMG Performance Art Services” with a Power Point presentation. “Confident, dynamic, versatile, independent,” Monroy said of his company, which artists were invited to invest in.

Photos of Carlos Monroy by Henry Chan

“Contemporary, aggressive, ownable….” Monroy’s hilariously disconnected corporate language serves to underscore a feature of performance art many of its practitioners take pride it—that it does not trade objects that can become commodities, that, Marina Abramovic aside, it does not depend upon the same star system that dominates most contemporary art. Then, halfway through his presentation, sultry Latin music came on, and Monroy, dancing to the new vibe, moved into the audience and began to strip. Jacket, tie, shoes, socks, shirt, pants, all of it came off as Monroy pumped and swayed his way through the small, seated crowd; by the time he resumed his more corporate personae, all he had on was a big white jock strap. “CMG Art Services,” he said, “Let art work for you!” So much of the art world today is bound up in celebrity artists (Abramovic was profiled in the Home and Garden section of the New York Times showing off her multi-million dollar country home!), dealers, collectors, institutions and name curators, and against this background Monroy’s performance was refreshingly naïve and bumbling. He doesn’t really know how to use Power Point very well; and the corporate marketing language is clearly alien to him.

Monday, October 25th 2010 (DB)

2010-10-27T16:58:00.003-04:00

Photos of Jamie McMurry (above) by Henry Chan

Photo of Robin Brass (below) by Henry Chan

7a*11d Blog # 1

Performance art, as it is currently understood, owes a great deal to the spectacle of ritual, which might be roughly defined as a set of disciplined, symbolic acts that activate meaning within, and to some extent define, a sacred space. One thinks of the role of the Catholic mass in performances from early Tadeuz Kantor events to Diamanda Galas’ gothic rock operas, or the banquet table in Marina Abramovic’s earlier work. The allure of the idea of ritual or ceremony in performance is easy enough to understand, because it offers a model of how complex meanings can be enacted, literally and physically in time, without the trimmings of traditional theatricality. But the use of allusions to ritual and ceremony can also be dangerous: it can imbue a work with a false sense of solemnity, an aura of deeper meanings where none necessarily exist.

Photo of Robin Brass by Henry Chan

Two of the works offered thus far at this years 7a*11d are good examples of how a sense of ritual can be used in performance without degenerating into pomposity. In Canadian artist Robin Brass’ “Mi ima Enkosit,” a phrase in the Nahkawe language used to indicate the end of a story, images of young falcons are projected onto the wall. The birds are soft, delicate, quivering, and beautiful. One does not see them flying, but rather they seem to be suspended on the threshold of flight; they exist in a state of pure possibility. Brass approaches the projected image, and, wearing a fringed robe, arms outstretched wing-like, makes a slow, circular movement over it, leaving behind a thick oval of blood-red paint. The image is striking and evocatively ambiguous. On the one hand, the oval blood shape might appear a symbol of doom, as though the performance itself were an elegy to these birds and everything they represent —freedom, flight, open skies, future. But there more I reflected on it, the more it struck me that Brass is making a very different kind of gesture. Brass is interested in intersecting possibilities, trajectories not yet taken, stories not yet told: the red oval does not shut those stories down as they endlessly multiply, but acknowledges and consecrates them. Red is not always the color of death and endings after all; it’s also the color of earthly life.

Photos of Jürgen Fritz and Gabe Gaudet by Henry Chan

For his “Ringing a Bell in Dialog,” German artist Jürgen Fritz works with Gabe Gaudet, a native drummer and singer who drums and chants while Fritz rings a bell with long, sweeping movements of his arm. The central action of the performance is the repetitive movement of Fritz’s arm, which is both simple and dramatic. The musical sequences follow their own course autonomously, and carry with them their own significations. The bell, for instance, cannot but suggest imminent arrival—of trains, of the hour, of dinner—and the vehemence with which Fritz rings it makes it at times ominous and even frenzied. The chant, by contrast, has a slow, circular inevitability; it sounds as though it has always been there and will always be there. The sonic dialog they create together is one that surges forward in phases. For periods the sharp ringing of the bell seems to recede into the embracing textures of the chant and drum beat; at other periods, the drum beat and chanting drifts behind the more urgent ring of the bell, as though we are hearing it from an increasing distance. Fritz’s soundscape ends up creating a shifting and ephemeral spatial environment in which the competing claims of the sounds intertwine. As with the stories Brass refers to, this isn’t the kind of dynamic that lends itself to definitive resolution; it’s a performance bounded only by the physical endurance of the performers themselves.

Brass and Fritz’s performances take place within a broadly allusive ceremonial context within which they can be read and experienced. Japanese artist Kaori Haba’s work, by contrast, is domestic and intensely personal. According to Haba, she sets out in her recent performances to create an essay articulating her observations and perceptions using objects rather than words. The ordinary objects Haba uses in her performances—sand, bread, apples, neck ties, a rope—seem to be supercharged with meaning and emotion, as though they had been lifted directly from the unconscious. According to British psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein, much of our relationship to the world is mediated by the ways in which we introject objects and parts of objects into our interior world; in Haba’s performance world, those charged, thrumming, ambivalent objects have been spilled out onto the floor.

Photos of Kaori Haba by Henry Chan

Haba’s performance style is literal, compulsive, and determined; all of her gestures are at once arbitrary, obsessive, and imbued with a kind of inner necessity. She affixes neckties to the oval of blood Bass made on the wall. She lifts a bag of sand, stabs it open with a trowl, and spreads the sand out on the floor. She eats an apple. She struggles with a long coil of rope. She sweeps and sweeps and sweeps in great circular motions. Now agitated, now calm, now restless and searching, the world circumscribed by Haba’s “Women in Peace and War” remains relatively contained and balanced compared with the world acted out by Los Angeles based artist Jamie McMurry in his spectacularly unhinged “Ranchero.”

Photos of Jamie McMurry by Henry Chan

“Women in Peace and War” is in a way fussy, precise. Like the work of fellow LA performance artist Paul McCarthy, McMurry’s sensibility is epically messy. “Ranchero” opens with McMurry standing beside a music stand taking a swig of Canadian Club, which he then dribbles from his mouth onto a saucer and proceeds across the space for an encounter with a picture of a Chevrolet Ranchero that is taped to the wall, an image that seems to have a scary, demonic significance for the artist. McMurry’s approach to performance, like that of McCarthy, is intensely physical, expiatory, and raw. He stands at length with his foot in a bucket of ice then attempts to pour the dirty, melted water down his throat. Eventually he fills his shirt with ice, cutting it open and letting the ice spill out onto the floor. The performance becomes increasingly obsessive and even harrowing. He attempts to guzzle whole buckets of paint, physically gagging as the paint spills over his face and naked torso. He attempts to drink an amalgam of paint and pebbles from the model of a house, and then, on verge of puking, demolishes the house with a bat. At one point he has a kind of shamanic skull rattle taped to his arm as he faces off with the Ranchero with cryptic gestures.

McMurry also asked the audience to participate in the performance, or at least provide additional materials. He photographed a member of the audience and then asked her to take a picture of his ass; he arranged the two developed Polaroids in cheap frames on a kind of alter. He sampled hair from select members of the audience, mixed it with water in a jar, and drank it down. Half naked and soaked through with paint, he pinned a metal to his bare chest, began shearing off his own hair, and recited rock lyrics in a slow, deliberate, deadpan voice: “Cali-for-niay knows how to par-tay…” After another spasm of destruction with a baseball bat, he led the audience out onto the street. Those who had participated earlier got in a mini-van that McMurry immediately doused with more buckets of paint, and then he proceeded to run down the street, waiving his baseball bat above his head, as though he were leading a riot.

The night of the performance was cold and rainy, and McMurry didn’t get far before he was pulled over by a patrol car. The police apparently pointed out to him that, when face with a half-naked, club-wielding man running down the middle of the street in cold rain, someone who looked outwardly insane or at least on drugs, they would be within their rights to simply shoot him. Fortunately that didn’t happen, and McMurry thereafter limited himself to the sidewalk as he wended his way on side streets to a local twenty-four-hour car wash, where a stretch limo and an astonished chauffeur awaited him. Californians know how to par-tay, and a few of those willing to weather the cold rain were treated with a ride in the stretch limo. Those in the mini-van were given loot bags assembled by McMurry’s wife back in California. The performance ended with McMurry getting a proper haircut.

If Brass and Fritz’s performances are anchored by open-ended and public symbols, those of Haba and McMurry are fueled by materializing the dynamics of very private worlds, and they are successful to the extent that they resist becoming wholly insular. In the end it is hard to say what forces McMurry is struggling with over the course of “Ranchero,” what the Ranchero ultimately represents, why he needs to tie a lamp to rubber tubing, stretch it to its limit, and unleash it against the wall, what exactly he is trying to internalize when he tips buckets of paint into his gaping mouth, what exactly he is destroying when he rips apart a wooden model house, why he needs to festoon himself with lengths of red and white tissue paper. McMurry’s performance was carried by the immediacy of the struggle itself, and the perverse ironies that arise along the way. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that we don’t really know the meaning of most of went on during a performance that lasted well over an hour. After all, most of our struggles are ultimately against forces we cannot identify much less understand.

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-27T00:20:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - Union Station 9 AM - 5 PM

this morning one of the 'red caps' walked over to where i was sitting, stuck out his hand, and said, "hi, i'm dan." i took his hand, smiled, and said, "hi, i'm karen."

The TouVA Collective (Sylvie Tourangeau, Victoria Stanton, and Anne Bérubé): The 7th Sense, Toronto Free Gallery, Tuesday October 26, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-26T17:40:00.022-04:00

The space has chairs on two walls. In the center lies a bolt of red and yellow mottled cloth, three bottles of juice-like liquid (yellow, orange and red), three wine glasses, an orange, apple and banana stacked on three sheets of tissue paper (again, red, orange and yellow), and a long spiral of some kind of children’s candy encased in a tube of plastic. There are three books – Perform, Action, and a French edition of JL Austin’s How To Do Things With Words – three sheets of drawing paper, and two markers. A performance art still life.

As the audience mills around, the performers begin almost imperceptibly. I don’t even realize the performance has begun until a hush falls over the room - until enough people having stopped talking and begun paying attention to the performers (Anne Bérubé and Victoria Stanton) writing on two sheets of poster board (orange and yellow) against one of the walls where the audience is seated. Bérubé dictates the following list to Stanton:

One: Guest List, Two: Snakes and Ladders, Three: A Tribute To Françoise Sullivan, Four: Pogo-Sushi, Five: Katerine et les Trios Grâces, Six: Joan Jonas – My Shitake is your St Tropez, Seven: Beach Party!, Eight: Hey You!, Nine: Répéter au Besoin, Ten: I don’t know anything about you, Eleven: James Bond, Twelve: (number twelve is left blank), Thirteen: Blue Screen.

Bérubé and Stanton move to the opposite side of the space, the side we're facing. By now all attention is on them. They put up two more pieces of poster board, Stanton directing Bérubé as to the straightness of the panels before dictating the list (the same list) of items. Bérubé has a thick French Canadian accent while Stanton is clearly English Canadian. The juxtaposition of accents places us immediately within a particular politics, whether willed or no – a politics of utterance. Same list, performed twice, heard differently. Meanwhile, Tourangeau sets up the juice and glasses on a small pedestal at the opposite side of the space and and asks the audience if someone will help her carry the bolt cloth. Someone does. Tourangeau gathers the fruit and tissue paper, sets them up at this side of the space, and asks another audience member whether the banana is best perched on the apple or on the orange. The audience member indicates the orange. She asks another audience member what a pile of masking tape rolls look like. Stairs, perhaps? The audience member suggests that they look like a cake. A cake! Ah! responds Tourangeau and then, after asking how the markers should be arranged in relation to the masking tape cake, she places them inside like a vase and walks to the center of the space.

What is clear at this point is that we are witnessing actions or sequences that are loosely scripted. Attentive to the interior coherence of each action and its sequence as it unfolds, step by step, The TouVA Collective is, in some way, following the dictated list. What is unclear, and is only to become more and more unclear, is what the exact relation between the actions and the listed items is. Instead, we are brought firmly and unrepentantly into their private coded and experimental world. At one point in this world Victoria Stanton enters the space with a platter-like rectangle covered in a mix of glitter and little alphabet-shaped letters. As she slowly, ceremoniously, tilts the platter to let the alphabet glitter whoosh (quite beautifully) to the floor, the following imperative is revealed, written in glue: extract it. I don’t know exactly what I am meant to extract – perhaps meaning from among these absurdist actions and utterances? – but I will accept that order, now, as I reflect on my experience of the performance.

Extract #1: Together Tourangeau, Stanton and Bérubé take a deep breath. They unfurl the bolt of cloth and cover the length of the space. At one end of the space Tourangeau lies across the cloth, width-wise, while Bérubé and Stanton stare at each other through the cardboard tube the cloth was wrapped around. One is leading and the other following, but it's unclear who is who. Like a mediated mirror game we follow their dance. The action completed, they cross to Tourangeau and roll her from one end of the space to the other. As she rolls, her hands stick out of the cloth over head, at first limp as if dead and then gently dropping first one, then another, then another penny onto the floor at uneven intervals. With the first penny I'm unsure – maybe an audience member dropped something? By the second penny it is clearly Tourangeau. Progressively it becomes clear that with her hands she is directing the actions of Bérubé and Stanton. They roll her this way and that and eventually unroll her completely. Bérubé and Stanton take her place and lie across the newly laid out cloth. Tourangeau brings the cloth up over them as if to tuck them in. She then places herself between them, holding a push-up position as long as she can. She pauses over the cloth as if to do something, but doesn’t and wanders offstage with a look both gleeful and naughty.

Extract #2: Bérubé, Stanton and Tourangeau enter the space, each with a marker and a piece of white poster board. In concert they tape the poster board to the floor, step to the left, and lie face down with their right hands holding marker to paper. They begin, one by one, seemingly in response to each other, to tap, squiggle, and otherwise make sounds with their (capped) markers. Somehow having signaled each other they each, then, remove the tops of their markers one handed and begin to write. The audience slowly -- once the ice has been broken -- stand up and crowd around to read the messages. Scrawled, drawing-like, and blind (each of their heads is turned away from the paper), the writing is mostly illegible. They finish the action by rolling back and forth until piled together.

Extract #3: Standing in the center of the space, Tourangeau, Stanton and Bérubé each hold a book. One is called Action, another Performance. These flank a French edition of JL Austin’s How To Do Things With Words. The women begin a round-robin call and response riffing on Austin’s central example of the performative utterance: the “I do” uttered in a marriage ceremony. Do you take this commitment? I do. Do you take this seriously? I do. Do you take this lightly? I do. The women play with the I do in a context famously considered by Austin to be unfelicitous: the performance space. Bérubé and Tourangeau leave the space. Stanton, left in the space, pours herself a yellow glass, raises her glass to us and stands still. We wait. She doesn’t drink but returns the full glass to the table and leaves the space.

Extract #4: The three performers have left. There is a pause. The audience looks at each other. (What happened? Is it over?). The wait becomes uncomfortable. Just as it is about to become too too uncomfortable, Stanton comes back with some yellow folded clothes. She changes shirt. Pants. Socks. Then Tourangeau and Bérubé come back too, having changed into red and orange respectively offstage.

Extract #5: Bérubé gets into an argument with either Tourangeau or Stanton – it is unclear which. She puts on a hat and purse and leaves the space. Half of the audience can see her outside and laugh. Those of us on this side of the space have no idea what is going on. Stanton joins Bérubé outside. Tourangeau drops the banana and leaves. Bérubé and Stanton re-enter, Bérubé hands an audience member a cigarette that she lit while outside, and they both follow Tourangeau out of the space. We wait, trained to expect long pauses, for them to return, but they don’t. An audience member tells us that it's over. We pause, unbelieving.

No, really: it’s over.

The performance ends as it began, with uncertainty. The 7^th Sense operates much like life – it begins before you really know it is happening, is heavily structured for much of the middle, and the end takes us by surprise.

[all photos by Henry Chan]

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-25T02:09:00.001-04:00

Sunday, October 24, 2010 - Union Station 10 AM - 5 PM

every morning i take myself to a place of transit. here i sit, mostly; but i also stand up, walk around, go to the washroom, eat and drink. i do not read or write, text or call, photograph or videotape. nor do i capture sound. at the end of the day i walk back to my hotel and write my sentences for paul to upload onto this site.

Karen Elaine Spencer: Sittin’, Union Station, Sunday October 24, 2010 / Day Four (NL)

2010-10-24T18:50:00.002-04:00

We are less than halfway through Spencer’s ten-day performance action: sitting for eight hours a day on a set of benches near the Front street entrance of Toronto’s Union Station. I approach the performance site half expecting not to see her. Expecting that at this point she might foil expectations, change the rules of the piece and sit somewhere else. But no, she is still there. And this makes sense, as one of the things that Spencer is curious about is how long she can “loiter” in one site before someone – anyone – asks her what she is doing there.

I approach her, ask how her day has been - it's now four, the workday is almost done - and about yesterday. It was great! she says. A couple people came to see me after reading the blog and sat there watching me for an hour before introducing themselves. I had no idea I was being watched. I sit down with Karen again and think about this. I look around. Could I mistake anyone for a surreptitious observer? There’s one young man, maybe twenty years old, texting and glancing up now and then. He could easily be an art school student. I look off into space, sitting, and imagine him watching me. A wedding party enters. A woman with a limp passes by. A Muslim woman struggles by with a baby carriage and too many suitcases. Someone catches my eye and then looks over at Karen. Is he here for the performance? No, his eyes move on and land on his travel partner and they move off.

If day one, for me, was about sight, and day two was about sound, today what I notice most is the cold. These seats are directly in front of some vents and after only twenty minutes I am chilled to the bone. The other thing I notice is a kind of anxiety linked to boredom, both actual and prospective. I am not actually bored, but the moment I stop and just sit, contemplating eight hours a day every day, I begin to feel the oh god what have I gotten myself into and how and I going to do this that I often feel at some point near the beginning of my own durational pieces. It's a sensation linked to moving towards the unknown in an experience. It's a sensation linked to any act of experimentation: the parameters are set up and the phenomenological journey embarked upon, in all its unexpectable complexity.

Spencer spends most of the time I'm there alternating between sitting and standing next to the chairs. While the performance is called Sittin’, today it is more about loitering than sitting. Sitting as synonymous for occupying space. I loiter, in solidarity, and wonder how long it will take for someone to say something to her – whether a question: what are you doing here everyday? Or a command: stop sitting here every day. I also wonder at my desire for exactly that – for some drama. I remember Spencer talking to me a bit about her inability to just drift off and relax during her days because of the site she has chosen: directly in front of the “Red Caps” – people who function, as far as I can tell, as a mix between security officers and porters. Sitting in front of them keeps her always alert to her role as public performer, as interloper, as potential problem. I think about this as I loiter in front of the Red Caps, trying to ignore them and dissolve into my surroundings, go back into the visual or sonic detail of the site. I listen to the echo of the hall, to a couple arguing in a corner. I wonder how long it would take me to exhaust my surroundings and what, exactly, exhaustion might mean in this context? Would I just keep peeling layers away from the space like an onion? Only if I wasn't chilled to the bone. Maybe someone reading this will bring Spencer a windbreaker...

[Image by Henry Chan, from a different day]

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-24T02:08:00.000-04:00

Saturday, October 23, 2010 - Union Station 9 AM - 5 PM.

union station was part of the great nation building unity project, i.e. capitalism. now the station is part of the transportation system, this never-ending movement of bodies and goods, i.e. capitalism. i just wanna know, when do we get to stop?

Brian Connolly: Market Stall Performance, Kensington Market, Saturday October 23, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-23T18:24:00.001-04:00

Moon For Sale! Buy Now! Brian Connolly, of Northern Ireland, calls out to the passers-by in the streets of Toronto’s Kensington Market on a Saturday afternoon. Have you a favorite centimeter? You can own it today! Limited Edition: 1 of 100! I approach and survey his wares: A Star Map Umbrella, Second Hand Teeth, Virtual Reality Goggles. Leaves for Sale. Own A Country Today! First Come First Serve! I am taken by the humour and simplicity of his offerings, and by their steampunk aesthetic. Like a postmodern snake doctor intervening in a normative consumer landscape, Connolly offers useless, evocative, conceptual products that delight or mystify, depending on one’s perspective. I am particularly drawn to the beach ball Earth, covered in band-aids, that Connolly invites passers-by to puncture with darts. Each country is assigned a number of points and, with good enough aim, you can attack a country and win money all at the same time (three darts for a dollar, three dollars if you win). I am also intrigued by the Virtual Reality Goggles, wire spectacles re-tooled with mirrors. To experience them Connolly has me sit down in a wooden chair and hold a copy of the astronomical volume of Diderot and d'Alembert’s eighteenth century L’Encyclopedie. Through one eye I can see the sky, while, through the other the pages of the L’Encyclopedie are turned sequentially by the artist. A personal tour through the heavens. Over time the two are superimposed: ancient diagrams over blinding white cloud cover.

As I exit the lo-fi augmented reality of the goggles and step back for a moment, it occurs to me that the wares fall, loosely, into three categories: material elements or detritus, representative abstractions or mapping and measuring devices, and practices or experiences. The detritus – Leaves for Sale! Buy One Get One Free! Just 50 Cents Each! Super Seasonal Offer! and Second Hand Teeth! (Just 50 Cents Each) Buy One Get One Free! – evokes consumer society but presents us with natural items – things that are shed in the course of a life cycle. While the teeth appear to be adult teeth, and so they are not truly a sheddable part of the human, individual and incomplete they read more as a dentist’s detritus than as violent trophies of colonization. The leaves, on the other hand, are a totally disposable part of a tree – at least for deciduous trees. The dried leaves covering both the table and the ground are a molting. A gift for the earth. I can’t help but to think of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where (at some point in the series) leaves themselves are declared the currency. You can have as much as you can gather, bathe in, sleep on. The representative abstractions - the mapping and measuring devices - include pieces of the moon, countries, and favorite centimeters from a ruler. Each of these is organized around a map: buying a piece of moon involves buying a circle of a map of the moon. Buying a country involves buying a country-sized piece of a map of the world. Buying a centimeter involves buying a centimeter-sized piece of an old wooden ruler. Both ruler and map represent, and measure. In inviting us to “buy” a piece of moon or a centimeter, Connolly asks us to collapse the space between the representation and the represented, offering for sale not the actual product of labour – the map / ruler – but the thing it iconically signifies, that it lays claim to. While the Star Map Umbrella, the Who’s Next dart game and the Virtual Reality Goggles all rely on similar mapping and measuring practices, those practices are brought into the here and now of the performance. Each requires that artist and participant perform actions in time, actions that may themselves serve as advertisements: throwing darts at an inflatable globe, flipping pages while staring into a makeshift device, punching holes out of an umbrella in the form of constellations...others stop and wonder at Connolly's offerings.

All day every day, in this society, we traffic in an abstraction: "money". It seems to me that Brian Connolly’s Market Stall Performance is as much about money itself as any of the things sold. The absurdity of these commodities simply underscores the absurdity of every transaction, in which we exchange small pieces of paper and metal for objects useful and useless, in which we make claims, declare our rights to own and use our worlds.

[all images by Henry Chan except the last one. last image by Natalie S. Loveless]

Jeffery Byrd: Symphony (1, 538 Beautiful Notes), Toronto Free Gallery, Saturday October 23, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-23T14:41:00.015-04:00

I am walking to Toronto Free Gallery to see the beginning of an eight-hour performance by US artist Jeffery Byrd. It's 12:30 PM and he is thirty minutes in. As I approach the gallery I first notice a rainbow of pastel Post-Its in the top third of one of the windows, each bearing a single word. As I read them -- serene / serenity / mist / golden / cadence / gleam / spacious / pure / ellipse -- I see a man through the window's glare, dressed in a suit and tie, glasses, and dress shoes. His movements are regular, repetitive. He bends over a small stool, picks up a Sharpie, writes one word on each of the differently coloured pads of Stickies and sticks them to the window for us to see. He places them in order, one after the other, a perfect grid of alternating colours. As I follow the words along I notice that German words are interspersed with the English. Asymptote / plethora / leiben / tanzen / caprice / evanescence / weissbier/ milch. What are these words? A response to what he sees out the window? A response to some theme he is working with, one that remains obscure? I step inside and see three pink post-its on the wall by where Byrd is performing:

Walking back outside I let my eyes pass over the words. They crash into each other in a semiotic cacophony: Fantastic Banana Lollipop. Destiny Pumpkin Bubble. Peekaboo Delicacy. Paradox Giggle. Hilarious Moment Extravaganza. Sophisticated Renaissance. Serendipity Twinkle.

. . .

Six hours later I come back to see how the performance is progressing. By now instead of six rows of Post-Its across one window, there are seventy-seven across four. He is on the last window and has shifted from horizontal to vertical rows, presumably to keep his body visible to the street for as long as possible. There are now words in more than just English and German. I recognize French, Latin and Greek, but there are at least half a dozen other languages. Armed with the knowledge that the performance is called Symphony (1,538 Beautiful Notes) and that it is dedicated to gay youth who have killed themselves, I wonder about this turn to the beautiful word.

The performance is built around a simple gesture. One that is formally beautiful, as the rainbow of pastel spreads and grows across the space. But are the words themselves beautiful? If they are, why are they? Their phonetic resonance? Or do they point to beautiful things – the words’ referents? And, in any case, where did he find this list of words (I find out later that the words come from a variety of sources including the artist's personal choice and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Northern Iowa) and why 1,538? Did he test to see that this was the precise number that would fit across the windows? Or does this number have some hidden significance?

I lean back and return to the piece's formal elegance. Its visual rhythm. I am torn between taking the piece at face value, its simple function as a gift or perhaps a retrospective plea, and following a more complex train of thought. I try to take seriously Byrd’s proposition: They surely could have used some beautiful words. Words. Word. A word. The concept "word." A signifier. An index. For me, the piece brings together the representational split embedded in all signification with the agony of feeling that there is no place in a heteronormative order for representations of self experienced by gay youth. If we come to know the world through words, then having some beautiful ones on hand can be a powerful thing. I think about the words that I understand as defining me. The words that people have used to describe me at certain moments that, somehow – either through vulnerability or synchronicity – stuck and stay as those words that represent what makes me me.

I am brought out of this reverie by a small alarm that rings to signify the end of Byrd's day. The gallery is empty -- while people have come and gone throughout the day, and spent substantial time with the performance, everyone is now at the Mercer Union Gallery across the street watching the beginning of another performance. His work done, Byrd packs up and goes, leaving me alone surrounded by words. I pick one of my favorites and take it with me:

[all images by Henry Chan except the second and last one. second and last image by Natalie S. Loveless]

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-23T02:32:00.003-04:00

Friday, October 22, 2010 - Union Station 9 AM - 5 PM.

at the top of the stairs leading to the main mall of union station there is a sign. the sign says: "see something suspicious? say something! call union station security..."

Performance as Encounter: Toronto Free Gallery, Friday October 22, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-22T19:03:00.024-04:00

We are gathered outside, forbidden access. The storefront windows are dressed with pastel balloons. All four performers - Adriana Disman, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Helene Lefebvre, and Johnson Ngo - work together offering a ritualistic opening between performer, glass, and audience. At one point they all stand, hands and lips pressed to the glass. A bizarre performance art fish tank. Passers-by stop and join the crowd, unsure of what they are seeing. Time passes. They remain, manikin-like in the window. Gathering attention.

As we file in and take our places against the side walls of the gallery the performers move, slowly, mesmerizingly, to their starting places. In the far corner, Granados takes off his shoes and socks and faces the wall. He mashes his tongue against the wall, hard, until saliva is running down, leaving trails. Ngo kneels before a mound of rice and a clear glass bowl of water. Palms on knees. Waiting. He remains seated, impassive, until finally he reaches his hands into the bowl of water and slowly, oh so slowly, starts to rub them together. Then he plunges them into the pile of rice. Lifting his hands, he lets the rice pour out, slowly, leaving them gently coated in grains. Lefebvre and Disman remain up front, in the window, facing out into the street, staring at the passers-by with their faces, tongues, and lips smashed against the glass. A teenage woman stares at them, and seems delighted.

My attention descends, expanding into the details. I start hearing the muffled comments of folks outside, the grains of rice squeeking in Ngo’s fists as he throttles the handfuls before gently letting the grains fall back into the pile. Gently, hands facing in, hands facing out. Trying to let as many grains as possible fall before washing… there is something beautiful to the hands caked in rice and the sound of each grain falling. I notice that he is moving his gaze from person to person in the audience, keeping eye contact with each one for the length of his action. I look back to Lefebvre and Disman and see one passerby mirroring Lefebvre’s hands and another with his face mashed up against Disman’s. They stand and encounter each other, cheek to cheek through the glass.

My attention moves back to Granados, now maybe two feet closer to me. He has made his way very slowly across the wall with his tongue, leaving wet spots and saliva drips behind. A gesture drawing, white on white and perfectly ephemeral. His saliva glistens on the wall, its thickness providing texture, slowing the drip. I can’t help but think of the dirt he is gathering, of what these walls have seen. If performance is encounter, then this encounter is with duration, abjection, and the subtlety of detail. Tongue in and out. Tip to the wall then smashed into it. All the while saliva dripping like clear ink.

At one point either Lefebvre or Disman pop one of the balloons they have been sitting among and we all jump. Disman laughs loudly, forced. Fake. A sign for us more than a sign of mirth - surely designed to make us uncomfortable. Lefebvre and Disman, our attention on them now, lean back, each picks up a lipstick and, mirroring the other, applies a bright red shade. They smile – a grotesque clownlike gesture – and press their faces against the glass again. Meanwhile, Ngo’s action has slowly shifted. He is now sitting partially in the rice. He rinses his hands and digs them back into the grains of rice. He then starts to work the rice with his knees like a slow and partial snow angel. If performance is encounter, then this encounter is with monotony, and perseverance.

Well into the second hour of the performance I notice people getting in close to the performers: observing the detail of Granados’ tongue against the wall, the detail of Ngo’s hands dancing with the grains of sand. One person moves in to Ngo, hand out held in a request to join in with the rice action. I notice that people are also becoming more brazen with Lefebvre and Disman. One man is kissing Disman through the glass while another is pressed body to body with Lefebvre.

I go out for a moment to see what it looks like from outside. I am taken aback by the intensity of the solicitous gazes Lefebvre and Disman are offering the passers-by. Disman catches a young man’s eye, calls him up with a smile and frantically licks the face he presses against the glass. The outdoor audience laughs together. Disman sits back hardly visible through the fog of smeared lipstick. Lefebvre has an extended dance going with one of the conference organizers, hands up and down, side to side. Passersby keep stopping to ask what is going on. Some go inside. Following one back in I see that Granados has finished his tongue action, having taken something like 90 minutes to travel the length of the gallery. Now he is standing in a hunched contrapposto, staring into the middle of the room, the horizon line of his saliva almost completely evaporated, but still glistening a bit in the light of the gallery as it disappears to nothingness. He walks slowly across the gallery and returns to where he began, putting his socks and boots back on and leaving the space. Lefebvre and Disman move to standing. They make their way down and slowly leave the space following Granados. All eyes turn to Ngo and we listen again to grains falling, tapping against the floor, against his pants, against each other. With nothing else to look at all eyes are trained on his hands, twisting, loosening rice grains. Watching them drop one by one. No longer clear, the water in his bowl is white with rice flour. Ngo washes his hands one last time and ends as he began, with hands to knees in meditation pose.

Two hours have passed as we have observed the four artists at work. Together, these have been the results of a five-day workshop called Performance as Encounter, facilitated by Norwegian performance artist and educator Agnes Nedregard. Over the course of this durational action-based performance we have had ample time to contemplate the idea of performance as encounter. Performance as encounter with space, apparent in Granados’s tongue action, performance as encounter with audience, illustrated by the glass-mediated mirror games of Lefebvre and Disman, and performance as encounter with material or object, as we observed in Ngo’s gentle rice action. If performance is encounter, then this encounter has been with intimacy and distance, detail and time, boredom and beauty.

[all images by Henry Chan]

Karen Elaine Spencer: Sittin’, Union Station, Friday October 22, 2010 / Day Two (NL)

2010-10-22T13:25:00.006-04:00

This time I approach from the other side and spot Spencer, sitting, eyes closed, hoodie partially hiding her from the world. She is sitting in the same set of chairs as yesterday. I skirt around silently to take a seat a little way down from her and watch. She opens her eyes, sips a drink through a straw, and looks off into the distance. Today she has no backpack, just a little paper bag tucked up beside her.

She notices me and smiles. I approach and ask how today has been. Busy, she says. Lots of foot traffic. The guards have begun to notice her but no one has yet talked to her or asked her to move along. She tells me that today has been more internal than yesterday – instead of watching so much she has been listening. She suggests that I close my eyes and just listen. I do. A deep hum. Low bass. A drone. A slightly higher rumble with a slight whine. Someone is talking on a phone loudly at my right. It irritates me to no end, wanting to just drift into the ambient sound. But I am learning a lot about his wife. His job as an insurance agent. His son Michael. Eventually I manage to tune him out and move back to the hum. The rumble of the trains. The little buzz of suitcase wheels. The clop of footsteps. All the sounds are predictable but somehow it is just delicious to sit here for a bit, listening. It is like listening to the world through a railway-station shaped conch shell.

I open my eyes to a little child running around. I see a wall of workers in front of me. I look at them intently and wait to see if they will notice me, return the look. They don’t. I glance at all the elements that attracted me yesterday – the architecture, the signage, the advertisements. I stare at the marble floor and, after a while it is transformed into a lovely detailed drawing – each crack a gesture speaking to time, weight, stress, history. The stone walls, too, emerge as paintings with delicately rendered all over patterning. I take a deep breath, glance back over at Spencer, and return to the sounds of the space. Beautiful. Dramatic. Symphonic. Today I experience sitting with Karen Spencer as a gift of music. With gratitude I return to her and leave her to the hardness of the seat, the expressiveness of the space, and the onslaught of passing people.

[Image by Henry Chan, from a different day]

Karen Elaine Spencer - sittin'

2010-10-22T00:57:00.002-04:00

Thursday, October 21, 2010 - Union Station 9 AM - 5 PM.

upon entering union station from front street you will see a row of red seats. these seats are for the 'red caps', and they won't like it if you sit there.

Helge Meyer: Pneumatic Vision: Cut, Mercer Union, Thursday October 21, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-21T21:53:00.005-04:00

Seven white pillows lie in a semi-circle, and a knife on each one. On the floor in the middle of the semi-circle, filled with black ink, is an aquarium. A red glove floats on top. Another aquarium is suspended from the ceiling upside-down, a little off center. Walking in a circle around the space holding a red velvet bag, Meyer pulls out a square tile with the number 37 on it and puts it on the floor. Taking a few more steps, he puts another number on the floor, then a few more steps and another, and so on. Although the sequence of numbers he is pulling out is random, their placement is neither random nor at even intervals, but organized, perhaps, by the stochastic distribution of audience members on the floor around him. Then he starts organizing the numbers in groups. Rows of four numbers. Then a line of three. He finishes this number action by placing a final line of numbers on the floor alongside the ink-filled aquarium, then folding the red bag and putting it aside.

Suddenly Meyer pulls a belt tightly around his neck – I didn’t even realize it was there – and, turning red from the strain, starts to pull pieces of paper out of his jacket. The papers fall at even intervals around the circle, floating down: superbia, avaritia, luxuria, invidia, gula, ira, acedia. The seven deadly sins, and a pillow for each one - but which pillow is which sin, I cannot see. With all the sins in place, he removes the belt from his neck, hangs it on the suspended aquarium, takes off his jacket, and guts the first pillow diagonally from corner to corner. He then folds the back of it together and pushes the insides out. Like entrails, feathers erupt. Reaching into the ink-filled aquarium, Meyer takes out the glove, puts it on his right hand and raises it over his head in salute, black dripping down the arm of his dress shirt. After a pause he takes it off and puts it on the gutted feathers.

He proceeds to the next pillow, takes off his right shoe, and guts this one too – insides out in one fell swoop. From the aquarium he removes a set of clothespins attached to cardboard. Clipping three to each eyebrow and two on his lips, he places one on the pillow. The ritual is established: move to a pillow, remove a piece of clothing, stab the pillow, do something with an aquarium item and leave it on the pillow - or in its remains. Next pillow. The right sock this time. This one is gutted in a fetishistic ritual, a Seppuku of three strokes in a zig-zag across its surface. He gently shakes the feathers from the pillow and pulls a harmonica from the aquarium. After playing through clothespinned lips - slowly, painfully - he leaves the harmonica on the pillow. Left shoe. The fourth pillow dies with gentle slices. Out of the ink comes a ball of yarn. Slowly dripping, he holds the string over the next pillow creating a gentle gesture drawing, taking his left sock off and gutting the fifth pillow in the shape of a heart. And again to the aquarium. Out comes a scalpel. Cutting open the pocket of his shirt, he reveals a “7” taped to the skin over his heart. He shows this to the audience. Off come his pants, and the sixth pillow is cut in the shape of a cross. It is firmly shaken until everything comes out. Meyer stands now with feathers stuck to his half-naked body. From the aquarium he removes a deck of cards, scattering them over the remains of the sixth pillow. There is only one pillow left.

Wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony. While each action clearly represents a sin, which sin fits which action is unclear. Is lust the pillow cut in the shape of a heart? Greed the deck of cards, envy the ball of yarn? Faced with the invitation to interpret a performance that hovers somewhere between enactment and exorcism, I find myself going along with its affect instead, with its ritualistic rhythm, its simple intensity.

Continuing the ritual Meyer removes his briefs, revealing a number on his ass and another on his genitals. A single stab to the center of the final pillow and he turns back to the aquarium. Out comes a small roll of red electrical tape, with which he writes a backward Z on the floor with three six-inch lengths. All the pillows now gutted, he dunks his head in the aquarium, holding it there for as long as he can. He emerges from the ink with a grunt and then stands and places his head inside of the suspended aquarium, ink pouring down his face and body. From inside, he counts from one to seven in German, repeatedly and at top of lungs, his cry amplified by the bowl. Ink spitting against the glass, he gets more and more heated until a crescendo is reached and he stops, steps out from under the aquarium, and offers a little bow.

[all images by Henry Chan]

Stein Henningsen: Untitled, Mercer Union, Thursday October 21, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-21T20:00:00.003-04:00

I enter the back room at Mercer Union, and in the dim light see Norway’s Stein Henningsen lying on the floor, weighted down by a four-hundred-pound block of ice. It is strapped to his back. He lies forehead to ground and hands tucked in underneath, presumably to help support his shoulders and neck, allowing him to breathe. I am confronted with the juxtaposition of Henningsen's body and the block, reaching perfectly from knees to shoulders.

He is wearing a blue shirt, black pants, and dress shoes. I can see right through the ice to his back, where his shirt is drenched by the melting block. Water creeps across the floor, like blood. I imagine what the ice will look like when he is done. Whether it will have an imprint of his back. And then I start to meditate on the beauty of the block of ice. So massive. So clear. Glistening in the dim light. Through it I can see people walk in to the space and pause at this sight – there was no announcement of the performance. It is unexpected. The audience in the main gallery space doesn’t know that Henningsen is performing. I hear someone ask how long he has been there. Presumably through the whole previous performance another person answers. Word spreads and the audience grows.

Someone comes to tighten the straps holding the ice to his back, and the performance is officially announced. The crowd moves in and Henningsen slowly begins to move. First hands out. Then head up, slightly. Nose hovers over the floor. The strain of the block is evident. His feet and knees quiver and it is clear that he is trying to traverse the floor but doesn’t know quite how to do it. Eventually he develops a kind of push and slither motion and slowly worms towards the main performance space. Slowly, painfully, he grunts his way inch by inch. His legs look almost broken from the weight of the block, his toes at an odd angle scraping against the floor. Like a slug leaving behind slime he begins to make a trail between the spaces, each slide accented by a long groan. I am behind him, watching the progress. I see his arms come out at an angle and have the impression of some impossible insect with a crystalline, unliftable shell.

I move into the other room. Brightly lit, the larger room is empty except for a single knife that lies in the middle of the floor. The effort that Henningsen is exerting to get to the knife is intense. By now he is soaked fully through, from knees to shoulders. He reaches the knife, grabs it and struggles to flip onto his side. The block thuds to the ground and, obvious relieved, he lies panting for a moment. Henningsen then begins to flail against the straps and it seems that he is trying to maneuver his weight to flip over, onto his back. His effort as he strains and strains again to try and flip is real. No mere theatrics. It is like watching a beetle stuck on its back, struggling for its life. Eventually it becomes clear that he simply cannot flip the block of ice. Stuck on his side, he takes the knife to cut himself loose, knife moving in at odd angles, precariously close to penetrating flesh. Eventually, through what must be exhaustion and extreme cold, he cuts first the hip strap, then the waist strap, finally the chest. Panting on the floor, at one end of the watery action painting he has created, he is free.

Dislodging the ice from the straps, Henningsen caresses it and pushes it towards the back wall. He takes a wide stance over the ice and it becomes clear that he is trying to lift it, to tilt it and make it stand up. It seems like an impossible task – 400 pounds of slippery wetness. He manages it in a he-man-performance-of-strength. Then, block upright, pushes it to the middle of the room. We can see it now, transformed by the cracks and ripples from the straps. A beautiful testimony. A landscape.

To complete his action Henningsen picks up the knife and fetches a bucket. Running his right hand across the ice he pulls a bottle of water out of the bucket with his left. Keeping one hand on the ice, he slowly pours the bottle out into the bucket. I can hear it crashing in the bucket and can't help but feel - as if in my bones, or in my blood - the contrast between the flowing water, the ease of it, and the bulky difficulty of water in its frozen, crystalline state.

[all images by Henry Chan]

Jocelyn & Natalyn Tremblay: Pre-Ovum #8: Cyborg Single, Mercer Union, Thursday October 21, 2010 (NL)

2010-10-21T19:49:00.002-04:00

Prelude: Identical twins enter from opposite sides of the space, meet in the middle with a ritualistic gesture, and begin the performance. Moving to separate video cameras that offer a live feed against the back wall, they each kneel and place a single hand before the camera. With the detailed view of the projection offering the enlarged palms of each performer, we are brought to mind of the individuality of a hand – the location of a fingerprint, the standard marker of individuality. Like that mirror game where two people stand in front of each other with neither in the lead or following but each trying to synch with the other, the hands play together. In this enlarged and distorted mirror-game the player’s gazes and presences are displaced and mediated by the camera-and-live-feed relay. I watch as two hands slowly move in concert. Two halves, a composite whole. And as I fall into the mesmerizing dance of these hands, a set of images flashes across them in rhythmic punctuation. It reminds me of a subliminal advertising campaign. Each image flashes just long enough to register but not long enough to read. The images are childhood pictures of the twins interspersed with iconic gender and gender-bending images: the queer in all shapes and sizes.

Act One: Identically dressed, the Tremblay sisters come together in the center of the space, perfect androgynous mirrors. They begin by hugging, closely. It is almost uncomfortable to watch. A little too intimate. Their hugging transforms into a mid-air game of twister. A game of trust. Leaning against each other, bending with each other’s weight, leaning as far as possible in one direction, then the next. Pushing balance to its limits – they offer us something between an incestuous embrace and the give and take of contact improv. At some point they seem like a single two-headed beast. Their movement turns into a kind of capoeira, and from there into a rough and tumble on the floor – brothers at play. Greek boys preparing for the Olympics. We are being asked to pay close attention to their writhing bodies, and the uncanniness of their twinness, as they fold into each other. Their wrestling becomes more heated. Their breathing becomes audible. The strain palpable. For a moment they come apart and each take a deep breath only to return, pushing forehead to forehead, then hand to hand – pushing with all their might as if into and away from each other at the same time. This is the final gesture of their first action.

Act Two: The performance now shifts to video and we are treated to a funny biographical interview starring each sister performing in character. They offer faux serious and funny reflections on themselves as artists. A kind of art-speak babble pastiche swiftly cutting from one liner to one liner that brings our attention squarely to the pedagogical theme of their piece: queer bodies, queer knowledge production. If we thought, in the first act, that the theme would be latent we are now disabused of that notion. When the video ends the sisters don Groucho Marx style glasses and glittery silver hats and face the audience. They begin with another story, this time the story of the earthworm. The earthworm is a detritus, they tell us, excreting nutrient rich dirt. They give us a potted biological expose of this critter in the form of talking points and questions: Did you know that the earthworm is asexual? That to mate it simply sidles up to another earthworm, exchanges DNA, and then both can procreate? Did you know that if you cut an earthworm into pieces it doesn’t die? Does it, then, become two earthworms or is each part a clone of the other? As they talk to us images of (what I think are) worms under a microscope dance behind them.

Act Three: And then, with a smile, they switch gears again to finish with a bit of anecdotal theorizing. They offer a manifesto, a sermon denouncing not only heteronormativity but normativities of all kinds. This theoretically-informed manifesto is grounded in their biography, which they share – growing up in Southwestern Ontario, their emerging queer identities in the context of a small French farming community. They speak of the fetishization of their twinness and discuss the inescapable pull of sameness and difference that coloured their lives – the push to find small differences to distinguish one from the other: the pretty one / the ugly one, the smart one / the stupid one, etc. They cite feminist philosopher Judith Butler and her early work on gender performativity as the basis not only of their own work but of the world that they want to incite with it. Ending on this pedagogical note, the performance ties together their concern with the queer, with sameness and difference, with normativities of all kinds in a manifesto against gender norms that ends with a statistic: the rate of suicide among queer youth in Canada. One in Five.

Finale: Retreating from the oppressiveness of the statistical and back into the poetic, in a final gesture the sisters create a Bobby McFerrin-like soundscape together as they walk back to the cameras where they began and present their faces, this time moving them so close into the lenses that, in the projection, the two halves become one. Almost. An oversized projection of an uncanny one-not-one face stares at us while the two performers harmonize their voices and end on a single note, leaving us to contemplate their unique blend of satirical lecturing, anecdotal theorizing, and performance intervention. Above all, to contemplate their poetic, evocative, interdisciplinary plea for a more heterogeneous world, at the level of gender performance and sexuality, yes, but even more so at the level of thought.

[all images by Henry Chan]

Karen Elaine Spencer: Thursday October 21, 2010 / Day One (NL)

2010-10-21T13:29:00.004-04:00

It is 2pm and I am wandering through Union Station to find Karen Elaine Spencer, who is performing a durational piece called Sittin'. Over the course of the festival she will sit from nine to five each day in the same spot at Toronto’s Union Station. I wonder about the choice to sit, for a full day, in the same place. If it were me, where would I sit? What kind of place? A designated seat? A corner of a stairwell? In the middle of a throughway? It takes me a while to find her – she is literally in the last place I look, and I find her right before being ready to give up.

Spencer is sitting, nondescript, in a corner, five chairs in front of the Front Street entrance. She sits in her hoodie and drab old sweater staring into space. As I approach she greets me and I ask how the day has been. No one has bothered her yet. She has taken food and pee breaks, always returning to the same seat. I ask if I can observe for a little while, and step back to decide where to sit. Sitting in front of her and watching seems, somehow, wrong. Though designated performance, this action doesn’t want attention. Her body posture invites the eye to move on: arms gently crossed over bag, slightly slumped, and eyes staring into the distance, first left, then right, as if waiting. I am reminded of Faith Wilding’s poem and performance “Waiting” and decide to sit with her for a while, to try and get inside the performance for a bit.

In front of us are three advertisements. I wonder how much time she has spent staring at them. I find myself fixating on the people passing by. How they walk. The middle aged man slumped at an unnatural angle under a duffel bag; the aging couple shuffling towards the coffee shack. The workers. The crinkle of a donut bag being crumpled and thrown away. Everything is suddenly worthy of attention as I contemplate the task of sitting here from nine to five. Nine to five: a full day’s work. The temporality of industrialized labour. The train-station as site. My back begins to hurt and my eyes move to the roof. The architecture. The signage with departure times and destinations. I expect that all of this has, over the course of the day, moved towards a kind of local, inhabited knowledge for Spencer. I wonder about the patterns, temporal rhythms, and textures of existence she must be experiencing as time stretches and slows over the duration of the performance.

For me, it’s only been 46 minutes and 12 seconds. For her, it will be 480 today, 4,800 over the course of the festival.

I leave her sitting.

[Image by Henry Chan, from a different day]

Festival updates, opening day

2010-10-21T09:37:00.004-04:00

Throughout the festival, check the 7a*11d site (www.7a-11d.ca) for updates. Today's news releases include new info regarding the collaborative performances by Sylive Tourangeau and the offsite location for Karen Elaine Spencer.

Sylvie Tourangeau

In response to her proposal to collaborate with local artists as her residency project for this year's 7a*11d festival, Éminence grise Sylvie Tourangeau has selected Simon Rayniuk and Claudia Wittmann.

In 2006, Sylvie Tourangeau began a collaboration cycle with different performance artists based on shared dialogue, where the performative attitude forms an integral part of the principles of co-creation. For 7a*11d, Tourangeau proposed to develop performative actions in collaboration with two performance artists from Toronto with whom she has never previously worked, knowing that she is not fluent in their language.

The results of these collaborations, which began through email communication and have continued through intensive face-to-face interaction since Tourangeau's arrival in Toronto on October 17, will be presented in separate events on October 22 (working with Simon Rabyniuk) and October 29 (working with Claudia Wittmann). Check the website schedule for details.

Simon Rabyniuk is a Toronto-based artist who occasionally sub-contracts himself to Department of Unusual Certainties. He predominately creates context specific projects exploring urban form as both process and object. His work takes a variety of forms including walking projects, participatory events, performance for video, and sculpture. He has presented work across Canada including as part of the Harbourfront Centre's Hatch Emerging Performance Series, at Ryerson University's Modernity Unbound Symposium, and as part of Broken City Labs' Storefront Residency for Social Innovation.

Claudia Wittmann has been performing since 2003. Her work explores identity through visiting body memories, transformations and intimate moments with witnesses/audiences. It is based on her butoh training with SU-EN and on her work with artist Paul Couillard who has acted as her source coach since 2006.

Karen Elaine Spencer

As her performance project for 7a*11d, Karen Elaine Spencer has chosen to spend eight hours a day in a single location throughout the festival - not quite a squatter, but a sitter, inflecting her presence as observer and (un)observed. After spending a day walking the streets of Toronto, Spencer has chosen her point of arrival, Union Station, as the location for this inhabitation. At the end of each day she will post her reflection on the day's experience on the 7a*11d website, distilled to a single sentence.

8th International Festival- 7a*11d 2010!!

2010-09-17T17:07:00.017-04:00

7a*11 International Festival of Performance Art

Thursday October 21 – Sunday October 31, 2010

7a*11d is pleased to announce the 8th biannual International Festival of Performance Art to Toronto audiences from October 21 – 31, 2010. Presented in association with our festival and gallery partners, daily and evening performance art events take place at Mercer Union, XPACE Cultural Centre, Toronto Free Gallery, The Tranzac Club and various outdoor public sites around the city.

The 2010 7a*11d festival promises a unique and wide-ranging mix of progressive and provocative new performance works by over 30 of the global performance art community’s most exciting and innovative contemporary performance artists.

Established in 1997, 7a*11d is Toronto’s only international festival of performance art. For the 2008 festival, we have assembled a roster of emerging and established artists from China, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, Sweden, UK and the USA, plus Toronto artists and national icons from across Canada. The festival hosts performance art events, panel discussions, video/performance screenings and workshops in 11 jam-packed days. In addition this year we are pleased to be working with Toronto Free Gallery to present Performance Art Daily, a noon-hour artist talk show series featuring many of the festival’s visiting artists in conversation with local artists.

Full schedule available on-line on October 1
Festival catalogue available October 4
Festival Hotline: 416-822-3219

www.7a-11.ca

Day 11: Observations on The Panel and Rules of Engagement (AJP)

2008-11-07T11:02:00.006-05:00

Andrew James Paterson

On the 2008 7a*11d festival’s final afternoon, a panel was held with the title of Terms of Engagement: Presence and the Performative. The panellists were Helsinki-based artist Annette Arlander, Paul Coulllard, and Johanna Householder. Tanya Mars was scheduled to participate in the panel live from Paris, but technology did not cooperate. Norbert Klassen also performed an “intervention” during the panel or, rather, he entertained the audience with a brief performance parallel to but not contravening the panel. (What exactly is an intervention? Does it usurp, or complement? Is it confrontational, or agreeable?)

This blog posting is predominantly my response to themes of and from the panel, rather than a summation of the panel itself. It is from my own perspective as an audience member for practically the entire 2008 7a*11d festival, a frequent audience member at other performance (or performative) events and/or exhibitions, and my own experience as an occasional performance artist. It is also a revisiting of many of the individual performances and actions hosted by this biannual festival.

The bi-annual 7a*11d Festival received many applications which, in the collective’s opinion, could be considered “performative”, but not particularly performance. “Performative” has often been a usefully vague term - it can refer to many different instances of art and/or presentation. Formation of an image can be considered performative, whether or not bodies are physically present in the process. Presentations that contain elements of other disciplines - projected film, painting, whatever- in addition to bodily presence can also be called “performative”. The term also has become a cousin of what is broadly categorized as “relational art”- art concerned with creating “social space” or engaging with a if not the community.

Relational or social or (even) community art practices have become rather commonplace in Toronto’s non-profit and even public (maybe even private) galleries. There are of course major variances within this very broad category of image-making and/or performance. There are exhibitions and performances that are as much about the social space created by the audience that is tuning in and out of the exhibition or performance, rather than that audience remaining locked into a passive relationship with what or who is on the wall or on a proscenium. There are events where an image itself is modified by its contact with an audience or participatory viewers - performances that require an active rather than passive audience. And there are relational art events that really aren’t about much more than tea and chat with a visiting artist, whose name is on the wall or the marquee and who doesn’t really do much beside encourage his or her audience to drink tea and chat.

The 7a*11 Performance Festival received numerous proposals for varying degrees of relational, social space, or community arts claiming to be performances, and decided that such work was already none too difficult to find and therefore 7a*11d did not need to programme any more of it. This decision is based on different sense of engagement with the work 7a*11d has chosen to programme - different engagements both from the performers or artists and also from the audiences. Although 7a*11d this year did programme pieces that were more of a static/sculptural nature than of body-generated actions and demonstrations, those sculptural pieces still involved the artists' own bodies either pushing or being pushed to their limits. There was one piece - Don Simmons’ Picked you out of my Pocket and Death was the Door Prize - in which the titular performer was in fact the director and/or sound mixer. But this performance also utilized three daredevil cyclists who most certainly did place their bodies at risk.

This body was the connective throughout the festival. This was a performance festival for a performance audience - one willing to make commitments parallel to those of the performers. These commitments were of time, stamina, intensity, and much more.

I have over the years witnessed performances also witnessed by audience members rooted in other disciplines - theatre, conceptual art, film/video, music, whatever. I once had a conversation with a theatre-artist about a particular performance that was in fact rather theatrical, but static - a tableau I believe. The performance was not in a theatre or gallery - it was in a specific but public location. The theatre artist wished that the performance artists had acknowledged the audience more. I thought that was a really daft criticism, since the performers had in fact made their tableau highly visible at a distance calculated to heighten their visibility to not only an attending audience but also to pedestrians and other members of “the public”. Surely those artists were honouring the appropriate rules of engagement? During the 2008 7a*11d festival, the overwhelming majority of artists engaged with their audience(s) in that they defined space, established their intentions, and maintained attention via their bodies and/or gestures.

Time, or investment in time, is central to so much performance art for both the performers and their audiences. Time is, if not an exact synonym, surely a cousin of duration. Some of the 7a*11d performances (John G. Boehme, Angelika Fojtuch, others) utilized either the entire gallery space or the entire audience and thus created quite social spaces. One could watch in admiration or amusement as Fojtuch and her bandaged/bondaged captive (or husband) slowly moved through the crowd throughout the gallery. One could chat and gossip with neighbours as Boehme one-by-one carried the entire audience on his shoulders in Belonging Networks: a social utilities performance. It became clear that such was Boehme’s intention, although not final intention. By contrast, other performances engaged by means of performer focus and intensity. Small gestures, if amplified, can become big gestures - when the performer(s) make visual, sculptural, emotional, and other forms of contact or connection or engagement.

I did feel occasionally as an audience member that I was unable to engage with a few of the performances to the degree that I would have liked to. seen unseen, by Natasha Bailey and Danielle Williams, was presented in the Xpace window concurrently or parallel to Sini Haapalinna’s Kaleidoscopopspectacal (live Cinematic Trans Flux), which I found worthy of complete attention. However, the endless sound of the door to the street creaking as people went in and outside to take in the window performance prevented a complete engagement with the indoor performance. On the final performance evening, I would have liked the option of alternating between Annette Arlander’s Wind Swept- variation upstairs and Marilyn Arsem’s rather Gothic durational/installation in the basement. Both of these visually effective pieces placed the performers' bodies in relation to a projected landscape and a rather cinematic environment respectively. But I didn’t feel that I had the option of moving back and forth without creating commotion and disturbing the calmness crucial to Arlander’s presentation.

In conversation with another audience member, it was suggested that Warren Arcan’s Nosferanook was too short or abrupt. I completely disagree. Arcan made wonderful use of the opportunities provided by such a classically mouldy basement. He entered as an Owl - in a fantastic costume that he had designed in tandem with his Creative Residency. He made it clear to where in the space he was heading to, and then completed his intention by chopping at the wall (a perfectly durable wall). It took a while for it to become apparent that there wasn’t another act as part of Arcan’s act - that he was going to continue chopping until the final audience member moved elsewhere or clued in. Nosferanook was a relatively brief performance, and highly effective in its brevity. It was an equation, a metaphor, a pair of symbolic gestures. Owls are wise but they lack olfactory facilities, so they persist in knocking at walls that will not fall down and reveal their hidden treasures. Arcan, like any good creative resident, engaged with his contract, his environment, and his brain, and arrived at a clear and effective performance.

It is probably self-revealing that I spent as much time regarding the beautiful oscillating images of Nicola Frangione’s Voice in Movement as I did watching the performer. Admittedly, I myself am more committed to making media-art than I am to live performance, but it was also the novelty of having something to focus on beside the performer’s body and its by-products that I found refreshing. Another festival participant and observer thought that the gorgeous black and white images detracted from Frangione’s performance, and the performer’s body language was certainly intricate enough to warrant sole focus or engagement.

On Friday October 24th, I ate a roti at a wonderful little restaurant near the Toronto Free Gallery on Bloor near Lansdowne. Across the street from Vena’s Roti, the venerable Toronto artist-run gallery Mercer Union has just opened its new space. I decided that, since I was in the neighbourhood, I had time for a quick visit to an art opening - intending to return later and spend some time with the art. I of course recognized many artists and colleagues from the visual art “community", and explained that I was in and out quickly because I was working as a blogger for 7a*11d. That was of some interest, but at that moment Mercer Union and its audience seemed like another world. My contract with performance art seemed to involve a different mode of commitment - not only temporal but physical. So I headed over to Xpace, and engaged with my own engagement. This was an engagement involving commitment, stamina, and duration, and also alertness. Such was the nature of the contract.

Photo of panel participants and Norbert Klassen by Henry Chan

Day 11: Panel as Performance (EW)

2008-11-06T18:43:00.006-05:00

Sunday November 2, 2008

The final day of the festival was wrapped up with a panel discussing terms of engagement: how does one create performance art, and what is the difference between performance art and performative gestures?

The panelists consisted of a series of performers-and-professors: moderator Johanna Householder, Helsinki artist Annette Arlander, festival-organizer Paul Couillard, and Governor General Award-winner Tanya Mars. Unfortunately, Tanya's Skype connection was buggy and we were unable to receive her input into the panel.

The discussion began with broaching terms of engagement: not only what terms we can (and should) use to describe engagement, but also on what terms engagement becomes necessary in the performative world. Annette was invited to provide the opening contexts for the audience, in which she brought up a key facet of defining performance art (versus the performative gesture): in performance art, the distinction between community art (art made for others, with the intention of being seen by others) with body/individual art (art made as a process for the performer) is often blurred. For while an audience is not intrinsically necessary for performance art to be created, or for it to possess meaning (the theatre was presented as an example of this need), neither is performance art an exercise for the artist alone, where the audience can be coincidental (or non-existant) with little ill-effect (visual art galleries, for example).

To add to this idea, Annette introduced us to the three cornerstones of spectacle: liminality, contingency, ephemerality. These three qualities of performance are ones we can use to describe liveness and how liveness factors into the blurred-boundary that performance art creates. Strategies of harnessing this include: engaging with the site in specific ways that derive their meaning from the environment itself, the encouragement of audience members as active participants, interactivity, generative technology (technology that is flexible and not static -- capable of facilitating creation and improvisation), performing open-ended tasks that do not close off potential resolutions, and incorporating accidental audiences, or audience members who do not know that a performance is going on. The idea of audiences as participants raised some questions that we should ask of any performance when trying to understand its liveness: how much of the performance is created in front of an audience, how much with the audience, and how much by the audience?

Annette then emphasized two conflicting halves of performance, and art in general (taken from a Finnish documentary filmmaker whose name I didn't catch): the problem of encountering reality and the strategizing of representation. How much of a performance is real ("live") and how much is a representation of reality? (For example, wearing ice skates and a jersey in order to play hockey is a much different idea than wearing ice skates and a jersey in order to presenting oneself as a hockey player to an observing audience.) This dualism plays out most clearly in the cinematic idea of verisimilitude, that tangles itself up when something that is staged seems to be more realistic than something that is real. (Take, for example, laughtrack artists who rarely use a live audience's laughter unmodified, as television audiences feel, ironically, that the unmodified laughter is fake.)

This split between mediated and unmediated is particularly salient when discussing the use of documentation, as evidenced by our d2d screening night.
Divisions hover around the use of documentation (archival versus intentional) and the liveness of the art audience within the video -- if they, too, are part of the performance, then what marks the audience watching the audience watching the performance?

We were then told an anecdote about how performance artists don't go see video work and how video artists don't go see performance work -- a fact that, Householder points out, is tied to how performance art demands a commitment of time from its audience, as well as a commitment, period. The level of engagement required to watch a piece of performance art is vastly different than that required to walk through an art gallery, to watch a movie or even to watch a play.

Paul went on to speak about the types of performances that they chose to keep out of this year's festival. Stressing that performativity does not equal performance, he brought up two examples of performative gestures that he felt were not performance art: Austin's performative utterance and Butler's performative identity. Austin's theory posits that an act of language that changes reality is actually a performance -- the words "I do" change one's status from single to married; a jury's announcement of "guilty" changes a person into a criminal. And Butler states the daily existence of people, in our myriad of social groups and social identities, is performance. The representation of self through things like clothing, possessions, hobbies, etc -- especially in relation to identity politics -- becomes a daily performance that relies on being seen to be valuable. Both of these kinds of performative acts lack what Paul described as 'presence': the essential interaction, the shared element between audience and performer, that he deemed necessary for the festival.

And here, the panel negotiated a key point: If these gestures aren't performance art, then what is? Paul responded with "that which makes form." Like Alan Kaprow's happenings that were no longer a representation of time and space, but rather played with time and space, Paul explained how he as a performance artist is no longer satisfied with being a representation. He described his growing discomfort with creating performances where he is the image/representation and the audience is merely watching, even if they are engaged. He mentioned how the wall of doing something alone, of being the image separate from the audience, is at least negated when doing a performance with someone else. At least then if the audience isn't actively involved, he is at least performing with intention, to and for someone who is right there in the moment with him.

Throughout this portion of the panel, Norbert Klassen performed the final performance of the festival. With slow deliberate movements he sat in a chair and balanced a series of things on his head. Odd, everyday and bizarre things ranging from a red (devil) plastic duck, to an orange pumpkin, a jade vase, and a white candelabra with white candles which he, of course, lit. Each item had a very strong sense of colour, and his facial expression was perfectly calm as he carefully lifted each item up and down.

Paul went on to create a distinction between performance art and theatre that I understood as the hallmark of the performances in this year's festival. He described the actor's craft as one asking the audience to "look at me" -- look at my choices, my characterization, look at my skill, look at how well I am being someone else. To this he contrasted the craft of the performance artist, which possesses a shyness, an embarrassment -- look not at me, but at what I am doing, look at my actions and the materials around me, look at how my actions are affecting my environment. The performance artist is doing an act for what is created rather than doing it specifically for an audience (which will be brought up again later, regarding performances with no audiences). In this sense, performance art is concerned with what is rather than with representing what is, and the materials become the source of the piece in comparison to the actor being the source of the piece.

A question from the audience challenged Paul: things like the happenings, and Jerzy Grotowski's theatre laboratories were challenging the idea of mere representation. The example was used of not being Medea as a character, but finding the Medea within the self.

Annette pushed the conversation into a different direction. The focus on presence and live interaction moves towards demarcating theatre in opposition to performance art. What if we were not to start with the idea of presence? If presence is common to both theatre and performance art, what defines performance art? Paul defined this difference by stating that performance art's role is to question whatever needs to be questioned at the time. It incorporates into its very structure change, flux and virtuousity.

Annette responded with an interesting question. In performance art it is often the artist who is performing, but what happens when we bring up the possiblity of "outsourcing authenticity"? Returning, again, to the theatre-versus-performance art division as a source of definition, Annette emphasized how theatre maintains a large division of labour between creator, performer and audience, whereas those boundaries are not as prevalent in performance art. (Which, as a theatre practitioner working in devised theatre, I feel compelled to say is a little bit of an old-fashioned point of view. But that's a spiel for another day.)

At this point the panel invited Marilyn Arsem for insight into her conceptual piece performed in the XBASE on Saturday night, and how she would feel if another were to perform her piece on her behalf. She responded that she views the performer's body as a tool for the audience, to stimulate a continued source of engagement with the site. Recalling Paul's discussion about the materials versus the act, Marilyn's point of view creates the actor as a material of the site. As such, using "hired help" would not feel the same, since when a performer recreates another's ideas, they can only portray those intentions they have been told about. As well, outside performers can feel as if they do not have permission to be as improvisational or relational as a piece would require if it is someone else's piece.

Annette presented the other half of the equation -- to think of performance as something not necessarily for an audience is liberating, a fact to which Johanna soundly agreed. A performance without an audience is free to examine and present an action for a reason other than how it affects someone else. Performing then presents an action with a direct meaning that cannot be misinterpretted. Returning to Paul's earlier sentiments of what types of performance he wanted in the festival, Annette emphasized the difference between artwork and festival artwork. After all, in a public festival meant to draw audiences, why go to the trouble of setting up a performance that the artist doesn't allow anyone to see?

The nature of festival art became even broader as Paul reminded us that art cannot be made for a single community alone, even if that is the intention of the artist. (Here Johanna challenged his use of the term "communities"; they settled on "audiences".) Even festival art, created with the intention to reach the audiences that attend the festival (ie other artists, press, art supporters), possesses the potential to invoke simultaneous communities. Paul presented the Chaw Ei Thein's piece which resonated with the Burmese community, drawing in a crowd that wouldn't normally experience this type of festival.

Somewhere in all this discussion, a conclusion was created. The final question that must be asked, I suppose, is whether this very panel constitutes as performance, especially in potentiality, since we missed Tanya Mars Skyping in (with the promise of a Marie Antoinette wig).

~Elaine

Creative Resident Profile: Gustavo Alvarez "Musgus" (AJP)

2008-11-05T14:33:00.003-05:00

Photos of Gustavo Alvarez by Henry Chan.

Andrew James Paterson

Mexico City born (and now Chihuahua-based) artist Gustavo Alvarez (also known by his alter-ego Musgus) was also a Creative Resident for the 2008 7a*11d Festival. In conjunction with his residency, Gustavo presented a series of four public realm performances and one gallery performance - on the festival’s final night which was also the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Alvarez began performing in 2000, and immediately began creating performances in urban areas - in the streets, on public transit, and more. Alvarez states that he prefers performing in the more public realm - that he is stimulated by contact with individuals and groups outside art institutions and the museums. He does enjoy interacting with people in social spaces that can exist inside galleries and even museums, but he prefers encountering unexpected spectators or ‘accidental audiences’. This is also an extension of the artist’s history of teaching workshops in performance art to people generally outside artistic “communities” - blind people, people dealing with mental hospitals and/or mental health issues, people living with HIV/AIDS, and others. Alvarez prefers the unexpected and the provocative - his is not a form of public art that is all about subtle immersion in the everyday or the public realm. His is a not a what’s wrong with this picture aesthetic. Alvarez or Musgus likes to shatter false silences, and conversely he likes to stop not only traffic but also mindless chattering and its exchanges.

“Musgus” is the performer’s alter ego. I asked Gustavo about the name, and he enigmatically suggested I should think of “moss” and also “juice”. Moss is somewhat synonymous with lichen, which tend to grow on rocks and other natural surfaces. Lichen are not bacteria - they are not unhealthy and are therefore life forces. Moss may popularly be considered to be baggage - the word may refer to things unnecessary (and to aging). Moss is also not unlike memory -it comes and goes and it also grows. It is akin to memory in that it is difficult if not impossible for humans or animals to banish or eliminate. Moss is a survivor, and juice is energy. ”Musgus”- Gustavo Alvarez wears that name and logo on his signature yellow jump or boiler suit.

In August 2008, Gustavo Alvarez concluded a series of workshops in there mountain range of Chihuahua with the indigenous Tarahumana. These workshops took place over a two-year period. During his Creative Residency at 7a*11d, Alvarez decided to undertake a series of performances based on the Tarahumana concept of Chabochi. Chabochi references the mestizo - a different thing or The Other.

Gustavo plays with the double-edged or two-sidedness of Chabochi. Chabochi can be presented as being both romantic with its otherness, its perceived threats to normality and to order. But Chabochi is also a derogatory label for an outsider, a foreigner, a virus. Who is Chabochi?

In tandem with his Toronto residency, Gustavo Alvarez “Musgus” presented four performances or actions in “public spaces” and one culminating presentation at Xpace.
The first public performance made use of bus shelters and newspaper boxes and gateways into parks, before moving onto the street and even the centre of a major intersection. This first public performance was called Chabochi Memories, and its trajectory involved the artist decorating bus shelters and newspaper boxes and sidewalks and street themselves with paraphernalia referring to memory - photographs and souvenirs and toys. Musgus would stop at ideal locations and create small altars or shrines. He would break silence by asking where are the memories. Pedestrians were curious but hardly threatened or alarmed. Queen West - even the sections without an abundance of art galleries - is a neighbourhood in which sidewalk and graffiti artists are not exactly unusual. Considering Musgus’ obvious costume, his masks and personae accessories, this was clearly a performance - the performer made no effort to blend into the crowd as that is not his methodology. It wasn’t until Gustavo moved his shrines or assemblages onto the street that situations began to tense. First he usurped a street corner at which there was a bus top, and then he concluded Chabochi Memories by occupying the centre of the street car tracks at Queen and Bathurst, a busy and often volatile intersection. A young couple wondered what the man on the street car tracks was doing. I explained that it was performance art, and I was personally grateful for the one careful street car driver who slowed down and observed that Gustavo knew perfectly well what he was doing.

The second and third public performances - Chabochi in a Dangerous World and Chabochi for the Dead - both took place on the property of the Toronto transit Commission. The first of these two cations was on a Queen West streetcar. Weering a green Mexican wrestling hat, and carrying a supply of bells and paraphernalia, Musgus led a 7a*11d contingent onto the street car and handed out bells. He ran up and down the street car and bellowed out lightning words such as Terrorist, Poverty, Bad Government, Corruption. These aberrations exist, and what do passengers think about that? He repeated his actions and proclamations. Passengers were beginning to become confused. A man accompanying a small child was upset that the performance had upset that child. Musgus changed his tone, not particularly in response to anxious passengers. He stated that there is exists hope, and then led the 7a*11d contingent off of the bus.

The Chabochi for the Dead performance was enacted primarily in the Museum subway station, with its kitsch totems and decorations - its “public art” proclaiming that we are indeed approaching the one and only Museum. This performance was much more elongated ritual than the streetcar action. Musgus ate from a loaf of bread characterized by a pink glacial face image-pattern. He ate like a dog, holding the food with his hands and eating with his mouth from both left and right. . He wore his signature yellow boiler-suit with no head gear today.

In the Museum station, he placed the by now well-eaten head of bread onto the floor, knelt as if praying before it, and continued eating. Crumbs were by now accumulating in considerable quantity. The artist began hanging black and orange plastic shields with shaped holes (some faces) around one of the station’s altars or museum-referent poles. The black and orange shields or flags appeared to have been purchased in some cheap Halloween-supplies store. Halloween or Sam Hain - Days of the Dead. The artist reached into his supplies-bag and retrieved first one small clay head sculpture, and then another. He placed the two heads on a black blanket, and retrieved twelve candles, which he spread about in the shape of a corpus. He scattered crumbs in order to provide flesh. He addressed the air and thus the commuters:

“For my dead. For your dead. For our dead”.

Many of the passengers coming and going the busy station were at least pausing, either fascinated or disturbed. One young couple asked me if the man was okay. I assured this couple that the performer was quite okay. Musgus regarded his altar - his remains of bodies - with respectful silence, and then packed up his utensils and led his acolytes onto the southbound train. The altar or installation remained, but it obviously would not remain for long. Passengers would hopefully help themselves to souvenirs or mementoes, rather than doing public space a favour and tossing the art into the waste containers.

On the following afternoon, Musgus had intended to perform his fourth outdoor action - titled Chabochi vs. the Global Market. His intended location was Dundas Square, which is an awkward “public” space hopelessly compromised and cluttered by corporate logos and non-stop advertising. Gustavo intended to make use of Dundas Square’s fountain, but alas the fountain was not running. Was this simply because the last day of October was the last day of the fountain, or were authorities worried about Halloween pranksters? Whatever. City Hall Square offered a possible alternative site, but also no fountain. There was a fountain in the privately-owned Eaton Centre, but the illegality of an action involving such a fountain would have averted an action intended to take place over a longer duration. So the fourth action was postponed until the next afternoon, and relocated to the street outside the Toronto Free Gallery on Bloor near Lansdowne.
Prior to the performance’s announcement, Gustavo Alvarez Lugo has already made a petit installation on the sidewalk, with a small object-holder of sorts, two toy bubble-blowers, and a small but ominous snake figure. The performance artist was wearing his trademark MUSGUS yellow boiler-suit, but today he was favouring a blue wrestling hat. After checking his sidewalk set-up, Gustavo began running on the sidewalk, jumping over his installation. He did this back and forth for a while, eventually for shorter distances until he stopped. Pedestrians walked around the performance and the sidewalk installation. Many stopped and watched. He shouted out SHOKWAME HAS COME. Shokwame is an evil man, a witch, a questionable magician.

He retrieved a black string and wrapped it around an audience member’s lower left leg. He found other semi-consenting observers at four corners from each other and tied them all to his central installation. The Shokwame has come. He caresses his blue wrestling-helmet, then removes it and begins to cut it open along the seams. He now has a mask with eyes, nose, and mouth. He adds it to the street-sculpture. Now he lies down, blows a few tentative bubbles, again announces that The Shokwame has come, and then concludes the performance. A young bystander/observer asked if he can have the mask. Gustavo declines the request, but informs the boy that he has other masks. This is November 1st, the Mexican day of the Dead.

This fourth performance - Chabochi vs. Shokwame - was much lighter in tone than its predecessors. Perhaps it was the time and the neighbourhood? Bloor and Lansdowne is a changing neighbourhood, host to various communities and now becoming a zone with at least a couple of high-profile art galleries. And the artist’s fifth and final performance during the 7a*11d festival was inside a gallery - at Xpace on the final evening. During the changeover from the evening’s previous performance/installation, Gustavo had assembled one of his trademark altar- installations on the floor. He entered banging a drum on its side with a mallet-stick, and he wore a facial mask on the back of his head. He moves toward audience members while banging the drum. Then he walked up to the west gallery wall furthest from the street and writes CHABOCHI on that wall.

Gustavo lit the contents of a cup which was part of his little shrine or altar, and used paper to increase the burning. He picked up the cup and transported it over to the wall under his writing, allowed the fire to burn itself out, and then asked the audience “Who is Chabochi?” He wanted a volunteer - he wanted someone else to declare themselves an other or an outsider. He procured willing participants from the audience. Those who admitted or declared themselves CHABOCHI were handed plastic flag-papers similar to the ones Gustavo had used in his Museum Subway Station installation, and instructed to tape them to the gallery wall and write their names on the wall at the top of the papers. When all the volunteers had done so, Gustavo then inverted the dynamics - the balance of his equation. He asserted that there is no Chabochi, that there should be no more Chabochis, and that there was one world. Then he said thank you, and the performance and the performances of the 2008 7a*11d festival were now history. The Day of the Dead had been observed, and now the Day of the Dead had drawn to its conclusion.

Gustavo Alvarez Musgus has indeed cut a swatch throughout parts of Toronto. It might well have been interesting for him to have undertaken a public action in a part of the city where performance art is not relatively recognizable; a neighbourhood in which his simultaneous celebration and parody of cult-leaders and their followers might well have prompted even more confusion if not hostility. But he is a very effective public performer, one who skilfully plays with boundaries between what is private and what is public - tensions between what should remain private and what is perfectly appropriate to vent in a public realm. Throughout the 7a*11d festival, Musgus succeeded in creating what Hakim Bey refers to as Temporary Autonomous Zones, in which conventional rules of exchange and etiquette are at least problematized if not completely abolished.

Creative Resident Profile: Robin Poitras (AJP)

2008-11-04T10:29:00.003-05:00

Andrew James Paterson

Regina-based artist Robin Poitras is another of the 2008 Festival’s Seven Creative Residents, who have been invited to develop and create performance works and/or actions specific to either of the 7a*11d’s two host galleries or to the public spaces of Toronto. Poitras’ body of work encompasses dance, theatre, and visual art. These labels or categorizations become blurry and arguably redundant, as it all culminates in performance.

Poitras’ work or practice has been characterized by ritual and processions, by specific focus on materials that the artist feels have multi-faceted histories, reverberations, and associations. She is fascinated by mythologies and by dreams; and she has an ability to create powerful single images that can permit multiple suggestions and/or interpretations.
Light, colour, movement, rhythm, and also cinematography are key elements of her considerable body of work and ongoing practice. Poitras combines a dancer’s discipline with a visual artist’s belief in the power and beauty of images.

In 1986 Poitras founded New Dance Horizons, of which she continues to be the Artistic Director. Being both a dancer/choreographer/performer herself and also a director, she has fruitfully collaborated with a wide range of visual artists, choreographers, musicians, actors, and other artists. In 2000, Robin Poitras organized a three-day dance festival called Stream of Dance, which showcased a blend of styles and disciplines including ballet and powwow dancing. Robin Poitras has never been one to shy away from blending different disciplines and also different audiences.

Poitras is not a subscriber to Western beliefs in superiority of mind over body. She subjects her body to endurance tests of her physical limitations. She transcends the physical body while simultaneously moulding it, or sculpting it. She is a believer in thinking as a bodily act and not as a detached egghead ivory tower form of gamesmanship. She is unafraid to explore terrain dismissed by many women (as well as men) as being essentialist or biologically-determinist, although she is too open to chance in order to be pinned down by such labels.

A significant multidisciplinary and community-based work by Robin Poutras is The Pelican Project. This processional performance is heavily influenced by Japanese culture - it is based on a series of five Dragon Procession performances designed for children. These performances take place annually at festivals such as Lanterns on the Lake in Regina. It consistently involves workshops for its participants and collaborators, from which have evolved performances utilizing pelican “prosthetics” such as beaks and wooden shoes, and pleated paper costumes as well as paper lanterns. A march or procession occurs at Wascana Park, and the wooden feet create strong memorable rhythms. Sound generated by movement is a commonplace of Poitras’ works.

The Pelican Project was echoed by an outdoor performance that Poitras presented on a lovely pre-Halloween afternoon in downtown Toronto’s financial district. Poitras formed a trio with two other female artists - Brenda Cleniuk and Leanne Lloyd (both from Regina). Dressed in identical black outfits and wearing comfortable red shoes, they held umbrellas over their heads in unusually sunny weather and fastened belts hosting bells around each leg. The three-piece orchestra would sit in wooden stools in different site-specific arrangements and shake their bodies enough so that the bells would ring harmoniously. The ringing was particularly sonorous at the performance’s first location - in front of the Design Exchange which had originally been the stock exchange. The ringing commenced at noon - high noon. Ringing bells of course carry many associations -meeting time, feeding time, mess time as it is called in the military. The stock market’s daily opening is announced by ringing bells, as is its daily closing. The stock market has of course been oscillating quite wildly in recent times - the stock market has been downright Fluxist.

The closer the performers could sit to each other, the more harmonious the bells. In front of the Design Exchange they were in one of my favourite keys - that of “D”, and their movements were almost perfectly synchronized. When the performers moved across the street to a deserted fountain area, they had to sit further apart and intensity was lost. But they could sense this and so they picked up the slack, enough to attract the attention of a Security Guard who requested that they relocate. So they moved up another level, and then walked through them lobby of a large CIBC bank. Were they disturbing the peace? (On an earlier day this week, another 7a*11d artist - Sakiko Yamaoka - did lead a sleep-in in various banks including this one.) No, but people did stare. Perhaps the three women belonged to some religious cult? Or were they nuns of a sort? They were silent, except for their ringing. Poitras and her co-performers had undertaken a vow of verbal silence in the heart of the financial district, a district in which constant chatter is a given. Many denizens of that district stopped what they were doing for a moment and pondered the three identically-dressed women.

In 2000, Poitras commenced a body of work titled Invisible Ceremonies, works combining performance, dance, spoken word, and ritual. Many of these works, such as Ursa Major, attempt to forge connections between conscious and unconscious by deploying recognizable shapes and outlines Or perhaps preconscious is a better word here - animistic, instinctual, and elemental. Poitras at least flirts with occult elements. Poitras
“plays with symbols and the fairytale as part of a multi-pull deck of historical, social, scientific, and poetic thoughts and images…to trace some of the origins and mythological inheritance that perceives the way women are viewed”. (from the artist’s notebook, 2003. Quoted in Brenda Cleniuk, Robin Poitras, pub. Caught in the Act; an anthology of performance art by Canadian women, eds. Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, YYZ Books, 2004, page 372)

Poitras uses a stage or playing area as an installation space, a space for gathering and arranging materials and referencing art, science, and nature. She does not see these fields as separate disciplines but rather as being complexly interconnected or co-dependent. Poitras has particularly referenced non-white Western cultures (particularly Japanese and First Nations), and their various public rituals. Materials and fertility are at the foundation of many if not most of Poitras’ works, often in relation to site-specific locations and to landscape. An important work is Memez Ovum, drawing on stories and mythologies about Prairie winters and source ideas such as frozen embryos, the moon, Snow White. And cryogenics. The hyper-rationalist worlds of science are never a violation of nature but an organic or bodily extension. Thinking and deducting and experimenting are all body acts. Memez Ovum also drew on the works of visual artists who have made significant amounts of work examining the colour white, not as a default base or non-colour but as a vividly expressive and idiosyncratic colour, with as many shades and sub-shades as the primary and secondary colours. White of course is the colour of snow, and Poitras in her notes describes Memex Ovum as “an ode to winter picnics.” It is dedicated to her mother, who initiated her daughter into winter picnics and transmitted a love of snow and fairytales and natural magic.

The belief that crucial life-materials come from the body rather than being simply ingested into or superimposed onto the body is central to the performance that Robin Poitras presented at Xpace Gallery for 7a*11d on October 30th, 2008. Her material of choice was honey. When I asked the artist why honey, she regarded me patiently and informed me that she collected bees as a child. Bees may seem to be a seasonal nuisance, as far as most people are concerned. However, bees make honey and bees are endangered. Honey is a first (if not the first) food, a major source of fertility, and a timeless remedy for illnesses and immune systems. A body devoid of honey is a body in trouble.

. The 7a*11d festival catalogue lists Poitras as presenting untitled: a work that draws on past works. This title referred to the flexibility granted to the Seven Creative Residents by the festival - a trust that they are capable of arriving at something substantial during their residency, a presentation(s) based on their interactions with both the performance site and their reactions to their working environments. But this performance was so much more than that.

As the audience re-entered the gallery from the epical preceding performance, Poitras was on a ladder applying a paint-roller to a white wall. What was on the roller was not paint but honey. Sweet and very sticky honey. She was painting the letter “X”. In the centre of the gallery she had a bucket and a pair of stilts. Very simple - minimal and particular materials and/or supports.

She first rubbed skin against the X she had painted onto the wall, making sure that the honey was appropriately sticky. Then she climbed down from the ladder, sat in the middle of the floor, raised the bucket and poured honey all over herself. The honey ran down her entire body and formed a major puddle on the floor. The honey not only dripped from but soaked right into her skin. She remained still and never looked at the X that she had “painted” on the wall to her left. She slowly rose and mounted the stilts. She moved backwards through the puddle of honey and very slowly but steadily around the playing area she had defined, maintaining the necessarily perfect balance. She stopped in the centre by the puddle of honey and slowly climbed down from the stilts. She lay the stilts down, and walked slowly toward the wall to her right. Robin Poitras pressed a hand against this wall, and held it there. Then she withdrew the hand, revealing one very clear fingerprint. Then she exited. Her timing was perfect, as was her concentration. This was not a performance that could have lasted forever and ever, with an arbitrary point of conclusion. This was a performance that moved from point to point, or station to station. There was no dead space in Poitras’ performance, no unfocused moments in which she made decisions concerning what to do next. These directions were in her head and in her entire body. This was a performance that a purpose to accomplish and that purpose was accomplished.

Creative Resident Profile: Glenn Lewis (EW)

2008-11-03T17:43:00.004-05:00

Glenn Lewis: An Assembly of Artifacts
November 1 2008

After the audience is finished processing the events of Chaw Ei Thein's performance in the Toronto Free Gallery, we turn our attention to the other half of the room which is dominated by a large structure made out of lattice work and wood. A giant square base morphs into an octagonal second layer, which (once the performance has started) will be dominated at its top by a skeletal dome.

Glenn Lewis, renowned both as an artist in a variety of forms and as an environmentalist, has weathered many artistic movements over his many years in the performance art world, though he muses that he does not belong to a specific group or movement any more. While he does not perform very often any more, having concentrated his efforts on his gardens where he breeds lilies, he tells me that the structure he has created recalls themes in his life involving to shapes, circles and knots working in on himself. This theme encompasses performances ranging from his very first to the hexagonal house he has built in British Columbia.

Having started his artistic endeavours in visual art and ceramics, he cites his interest in performance stemming from a workshop led by Deborah Hay that he attended while part of the intermedia movement: a movement concerned with crossing established boundaries by combining different media, forms and sources of inspiration (dream, movement, material) to create poetic combinations in art. At this workshop, he created his first performance in which he opened up an umbrella full of flour and raked the flour into swirls and shapes (in a fashion similar to Japanese rock gardens) in time to a radio playing in his pocket.

In the performance we see today, Lewis, clad in his green jumpsuit and orange hat, begins by constructing a tower in the centre of the structure out of various found objects (including an old stereo system, a CD rack and an impromptu bird cage), at the top of which sits a purple and yellow stuffed bird. From the top of the cage sprouts eight grey foam tubes, which Lewis balances on nails to create the domed ceiling of the sanctuary. A CD of Abyssinian music plays in the background as the two videos of the walking/sweeping portion of this performance are displayed side by side on the wall, and we watch the dual Lewises as they progress along the sidewalks of Toronto.

In my interview with Lewis about his piece, I mentioned that I felt that he went out of his way to create an atmosphere of help and positivity in these walks, emphasized by his jumpsuit reading 'HOPE engineering' and his random acts of kindness. I was curious if he felt that his art stemmed from a desire to create positive social relations. His answer was yes, but not necessarily in a conscious way; in fact, no more deliberately than his every day life. About the potential for performance art, and art in general, to change society for the better, he would like to think this is possible, but added that it's probably not a good idea for artists to be in any sort of political power. He does hope, again in an offhand kind of way, that his performance would provide the audience with an awareness of the sheer mass of the commodity life we lead and all the garbage we produce on a daily basis. But, he emphasized, that preaching is not at all the intention of the piece -- the piece is more like a collage, incorporating aspects of the street with aspects of the festival's ideals of art and performance.

And indeed, as he strews bags of garbage around the structure, his performance is much more light-hearted and fun-loving than my questions about social change. He almost revels in the garbage as he shuffles in circles inside the structure, clearing a path. It is the vision of the sanctuary in Evelyn Waugh's short story that he wants to recreate, especially its unexpected nature, the masses of junk and the feeling of timelessness, of motion stopped. The structure does set a striking image with the homeliness of the lattice walls combined with the black metal of the central tower and the piles of trash. We aren't quite sure how to processes this combination of images, as is evidenced in some audiences members' reluctance to join Lewis inside the structure for his circle dance (although this is probably also people's reluctance to get their shoes dirty). But, after gathering up those brave audience members he can, they dance together with him around the central tower, kicking up the garbage as they go first in one direction and then the other.

Overall, Lewis stated earlier to me that if anything, he wanted to give the audience an experience, something that they wouldn't normally do -- like walking through a very odd sand. A sand constructed at the crossroads of daily life and history, between discarding and reclaiming. He wanted to make a hidden experience, and I believe that the most important hidden part of this experience is how celebratory of life it is, despite the potential to read the piece as a criticism of modern society. Lewis is not someone who disparages or destroys, but someone who supports people and life through his art.

~Elaine

Day 10: Saturday November 1 (AJP)

2008-11-03T10:15:00.009-05:00

Photo of Chaw Ei Thein by Henry Chan (Above).
Photo of garbage from Glenn Lewis' Performance (Below) by Henry Chan.

Andrew James Paterson

I begin the longest day of the 7a*11d Performance Art Festival - the Day of the Dead - out at the Toronto Free Gallery on Bloor just east of Lansdowne. I enter the Free Gallery for the fist time since last Tuesday, and Chaw Ei Thein’s mural on the west wall has nearly tripled in both scale and detail. She has left a space slightly past the mural’s centre - a space for what I wonder as I watch the artist print out a text at the top of the mural:

“In this dark and closed space = suffering = getting my body = my body + spirit + possibilities for…..reality? = freedom from Fear = Performance artist = …+…=…+…=…+…= Quiet River”.

An audience begins to fill the gallery. This audience is a mixture of 7a*11d staff and guests and people from the neighbourhood, many of whom are of Burmese origin. The audience is directed to the back room of the gallery, where eight lit candles surround a black cardboard box. People cease chattering among themselves in this back room -the box bears more than a slight resemblance to a coffin or perhaps to something gothic. There is an atmosphere of reverence as well as one of dread. At first I think there might be a light source inside the box, but then I realize that the illusion is courtesy of the lit candles.

The audience is still for an extended duration (except for those flashing and documenting etcetera), and so is the box. Then the performer inside the box begins to push leaflets of paper through holes in the south side of the box. This is primarily visible to spectators on that side of the box, and this process goes on for several minutes at least. Chaw now shifts to the east side of the box, and soon audience members begin to pick up the papers and read or look at them. I wonder about the etiquette of this curiosity, yet this section of the performance could be read as referring to methods of smuggling information out of a totalitarian state, or any state without free press and with maximum security/surveillance. After several minutes of this process Chaw began to pish her way through and out of the box and onto the floor. Festival organizers moved the lit candles away as she crawled out of the box and onto the floor, completely covered in a black cloth garment which made vision at best minimal.

Chaw Ei Thein crawled through the front gallery space toward her mural on the west wall. At the foot of the mural, there were several small paint bottles. Chaw dipped her right hand (covered by the cloth or cloak) into the black paint and wrote the letter B in roughly the centre of the white space on her canvas. She found spaces for the letters U, R, M, and A; and then for the words WHAT and NEXT. After she finished this action, some people thought it was the conclusion of the performance and tentatively began clapping. I don’t think this was out of fatigue or certainly nor boredom; it was acknowledgment of ma major achievement. But there was more to Chaw Ei Thein’s performance. She inched her way out from underneath the black garment, slowly donned a Burmese dress and a red scarf, and then indicated the end of her performance. She received richly deserved applause.

The afternoon’s performance was by Vancouver-based Glenn Lewis, another of the Creative Residents. Two projected documentations of Lewis wearing his green worker’s suit and picking up debris from Toronto’s streets and sidewalks played on the east wall of the main gallery. Lewis set himself up in his Abyssinian gazebo, with its wooden lattice, and began assembling a sculptural object composed of objects he had found, kept, and prioritized. A generic crate served as a base or foundation, a CD and radio set was then placed diagonally on top of the base, a strange-looking ladder came next, and then a birdcage at the top of some eight stringy arms (but with some weird toy with a big open mouth in the cage). An octopus of course came to mind - or some weird monster with tentacles. Lewis then proceeded to scatter five clear bags full of debris in each corner and then in the centre of the gazebo.

Photos of Glenn Lewis by Henry Chan:

After clearing a circular pathway, Lewis danced a Ring around the Rosie and then found audience members to join in the celebration. He had seven inside the gazebo going round and round and round. Then he exited with his followers, and invited anyone who wished to do a round to enter the gazebo and do one. There were no gamers, so the performance came to its natural conclusion. Ring around the Leaning Tower of Octopus?

Photo of Glenn Lewis by Henry Chan:

Shortly after Lewis’s conclusion, it was time to go outside or in front of the gallery. Gustavo Alvarez Lugo has already made a petit installation on the sidewalk, with a small object-holder of sorts, two toy bubble-blowers, and a small but ominous snake figure. The performance artist was wearing his trademark MUSGUS yellow boiler-suit, but today he was favouring a blue wrestling hat. After checking his sidewalk set-up, Gustavo began running on the sidewalk, jumping over his installation. He did this back and forth for a while, eventually for shorter distances until he stopped. Pedestrians walked around the performance and the sidewalk installation. Many stopped and watched. He shouted out SHOKWAME HAS COME. Shokwame is an evil man, a witch, a questionable magician.

He retrieved a black string and wrapped it around an audience member’s lower left leg. He found other semi-consenting observers at four corners from each other and tied them all to his central installation. The Shokwame has come. He caresses his blue wrestling-helmet, then removes it and begins to cut it open along the seams. He now has a mask with eyes, nose, and mouth. He adds it to the street-sculpture. Now he lies down, blows a few tentative bubbles, again announces that The Shokwame has come, and then concludes the performance. A young bystander/observer asked if he can have the mask. Gustavo declines the request, but informs the boy that he has other masks. This is November 2nd, the Mexican day of the Dead.

In the evening, I enter XPACE and observe Sakiko Yamaoka arranging eating and drinking utensils on a long table. She has rows of plastic glasses, Styrofoam cups, cheap wine or juice glasses, and coffee mugs. She is pouring coffee grains into the coffee cups and red wine into the juice glasses. More red wine, I remark to myself. She also poured water into the Styrofoam cups.

Photo of Marilyn Arsem by Henry Chan:

A durational performance by Boston-based Marilyn Arsem is in progress downstairs in the dungeon. I eagerly walk downstairs and am impressed by a simple but effective tableau. Overgrown flowers spill over a red clay vase while a woman lies very still on the floor, with long brown hair flowing well on top of her head. A four-note musical motif repeats itself - it is the sound of Chinese wind-chimes and it appears to be activated by a heater. The chimes seem to be singing Are You Sleeping. Water very slowly is dripping from the pipes in the ceiling - this is also no accident. I think Gothic, Day of the Dead, and Murder Mystery installations. I plan to return at the first intermission.

In the introduction to Sakiko Yamaoka’s performance, Paul Couillard refers to this artist’s previous site-specific performances during the festival, Wind From Sky. Sakiko not only co-ordinated sleep-ins in financial institutions, she “impersonated” a plant in three variety or convenience stores (I regret missing these performances, but my colleague Elaine Wong did witness at least some of them.) The artist held up a statement:

Human beings are alive
Plants are alive
Therefore human beings are plants

Despite wondering how perhaps animals fitted into this equation, I was intrigued by the nonsensically rational premise. I found a strategic viewing position as Sakiko began to move her dessert-sized plates into positions behind the glasses and cups and then press down on the plates. This pressure had the effect of moving the entire arrangement forward, until the plastic glasses began to fall onto the floor. It was quite fascinating to watch Sakiko’s nobody positions as she arranged the plates into the most effective positions at the back of the table, while more and more plastic glasses were falling and water was beginning to drip from the Styrofoam cups. Soon Styrofoam cups began to fall to the ground. The first landed vertically, but that was only the first. I thought at first she might continue this process until all of the plastic glasses and Styrofoam cups were off the table, but it became apparent that the entire table has to be cleared. Then, since the initial juice glasses did not break upon landing, I thought her pressure might be so delicate as to avoid breakage. I thought that might be one of her intentions. But the falling glasses and the subsequent coffee cups began shattering ans shattering, and the water puddle on the flor was joined by wine and coffee beans.

Photos of Sakiko Yamaoka by Henry Chan.

As she approached the final clearance of the table, Sakiko had to lean further and further across that table to push the contents off. I did think of a plant that might be sprawling out of control, or might be dying and losing its shape and its elegance. But this impression was countered by the performer’s need to clear that table, and to press harder in order to do so.

When the table was finally cleared, this was not the end of f the performance but rather the end of an initial movement. Next, Sakiko used her body to push the empty table up through the gallery toward the front door, but stopping in front of the admissions desk After wiping the table clean with paper leaflets, she stood up on the table, with a plastic bag from which she retrieved plastic bags, folded neatly and signed Sakiko Y. 2008. She handed them out to willing members of the audience, who were instructed to shake them and make noise. Sakika conducted the audience like an orchestra, or perhaps she was playing around with the dynamics of crowd control. Or perhaps this was now the wind from the sky - the shaking sounds from the bags invoked wind and sometimes rain. The audience surrendered to her elements and obeyed her gentle commands - softer, louder, fortissimo, up, down, etcetera, Finally there was a denouement, and the performance was finished.

Photo of Sakiko Yamaoka by Henry Chan:

This was a superbly involving performance. It contained ritual, destruction, reconstruction, and rejuvenation. It may indeed have been analogous to a plant (or animal?) shedding leaves, shedding excess, changing habitats and seasons, and regenerating. Whether or not it can be read allegorically, it was a pleasure to observe, even though I resisted my own temptation to shake.

Since a break was announced, I almost ran downstairs to see where Marilyn Arsem’s performance had evolved to. It was a beautifully calm environment compared to the jostling for positions during Sakiko’s performance, and Marilyn had moves along the string or wire slanted across the east/west axis of the downstairs space. The string attached to the plant has become more visible, and I and others wondered whether she was activating the strings or the strings were pulling her. Her hair was not stretched out as much from her head now, but she was in a static (and seemingly unconscious) position. The chimes continued to ask the performer if she was asleep.

By now Helsinki-based artist Annette Arlander was set up and ready to begin. Arlander had linked two plinths vertically and placed an old birch nest of tululenpesa onto the plinths. Tuulenpesa are an assemblage of assorted elements - witches brooms, messy conglomerates of branches, all caused by a fungus named Taphnana. Such an assemblage is known as a wind nest, witch was the title of Arlander’s performance. Tuulenpesa often grow in birch trees, and Arlander had kept a large wind nest from a birch tree that had been damaged by a storm on the Harakiia Island in Helsinki, where the artist has a studio. An image of the island’s landscape was projected on to a screen - a shadowy figure was seen against a tree stump from a tree that had also been damaged by this storm.

Photo (Above) of Annette Arlander (Helsinki) by Henry Chan.
Photo (Below) of audience participant in Arlander's performance by Henry Chan.

Arlander’s practice has for some time concentrated on what she calls landscape performance. Not only does an audience see video documentation and found objects idiosyncratic to particular locations with particular natural forces; the artist evokes her own and others’ bodily present in these specific environments and intends to share that presence. Arlander announced that she would be using a musical landscape/composition titled Enter The Unexpected, by Adita. Then she placed the wind nest assemblage onto her back, handed out headphones to some but not all audience members, and positioned herself in a meditative lookout position in relation to her projection. The headphones were branching out from her body, and some audience members who had chosen to attach them into their ears found themselves being drawn closer to the performer. I chose to remain stationary when I was offered headphones by another audience member, and then I came to realize that I would be missing a key component of the landscape or performance if I did not wear phones. So I did, and I heard the artist’s voice reciting an original poem “Wind nest…place of refuge…” The poem was only a minute’s length, it was meant to be experienced only for that duration and certainly not throughout the entire performance and/or installation. As Arlander remained relatively static in her contemplative position, I became aware of the live wind sounds that were elemental to the artist’s sound scape (in addition to the trance-like music). In comparison to many of the add-a-part improvisational performances of the festival and also many of those performances concerned with pushing bodies to extremities, Arlander’s performance was slow, contemplative, and about listening as much as seeing. It involved and also invoked the so-called lower senses - smell, and touch. Wind Nest nicely counterbalanced Marilyn Arsem’s slowly unravelling spatial performance that was occurring concurrently in the downstairs space.

Photos of Gustavo Alvarez "Musgus" Lugo by Henry Chan:

The final performer of both the evening and the festival was none other than Gustavo Alvarez "Musgus" Lugo himself. This time performing inside a gallery space rather than on the street or in a public location, Gustavo had assembled one of his trademark altar- installations on the floor. He entered banging a drum on its side with a mallet-stick, and he wore a facial mask on the back of his head. He moves toward audience members while banging the drum. Then he walks up to the west gallery wall furthest from the street and writes CHABOCHI on that wall.

The word CHABOCHI loosely translates as outsider, or foreigner, or person outside of polite or acceptable society (suspect-immigrants, suspected terrorists, persons with AIDS, lepers, etcetera). “Chabochi is a concept that the Tarahumanas (indigenous to the region of Chihuahua) use to determine the mestizo, the one that is not like them, who is not of them, the one that is different.” (7a*11d catalogue, 2008, p.37)

Photos of Gustavo Alvarez "Musgus" Lugo by Henry Chan:

Gustavo lights the contents of a cup which is part of his little shrine or altar, and uses paper to increase the burning. He picks up the cup and transports it over to the wall under his writing, lets the fire extinguish, and asks the audience “Who is Chabochi?” He wants a volunteer - he wants someone else to declare themselves other or outside. He procures willing participants from the audience - Istvan Kantor, Annette Arlander, others. (I let my guard down and volunteered.). Those who admitted or declared themselves CHABOCHI were handed plastic flag-papers similar to the ones Gustavo had used in his Museum Subway Station installation, and instructed to tape them to the gallery wall and write their names on the wall at the top of the papers. When all the volunteers had done so, Gustavo then inverted the dynamics - the balance of his equation. He asserted that there is no Chabochi, that there should be no more Chabochis, and that there was one world. Then he said thank you, and the performance and the performances of the 2008 7a*11d festival were now history. The Day of the Dead had been observed, and now the Day of the Dead had drawn to its conclusion.

Photo by Henry Chan:

Chaw Ei Thein's Final Performance of "Quiet River" (EW)

2008-11-02T11:02:00.006-05:00

Photos of Chaw Ei Thein by Henry Chan.

November 1 2008

As the crowd emerged into the Free Gallery, we saw creative resident Chaw Ei Thein's finished mural. In addition to what I have already described in previous posts, the artist had now addressed the other half of the canvas, incorporating an embryo surrounded by bloody handprints, purple people linking arms to creating a line across the mural and a blue woman, being encroached upon by a demon, with a dove emerging from her mouth. A mural of bold contrast and fantastical colours, Chaw Ei's work presented themes of imploring hands and silent eyes.

On paper above the mural was written "Quiet River = In this dark + closed space = suffering - getting my body = my body + spirit + possibilities for ...... = reality ? = freedom from fear = being Performance Artist = .... + ...... + ..... = ... + ......... + ......... = Quiet River"

Eventually we were led into the back room of the gallery, in the centre of which sat a large cardboard box, painted black, with eight candles in a circle around it. The audience gathered tightly into the space and the stillness was overwhelming -- the shuffling of bodies was stifling in the room. After a very long moment, we heard scratchings, shufflings from inside the box: the sound of crumpling paper and shifting cardboard. A hole began to emerge in the side of the box, and soon another hole on another side. From this second hole, crumpled paper was pushed through -- scads of it, onto the floor. After a few individuals came up to take some paper and read what was written on it, one of the members of the Toronto Burma community took it upon himself to bring handfuls around the room. A feeding frenzy (or rather a reading frenzy) began as everyone in the room was flattening out the papers -- photocopies of news articles regarding the actions of the military junta in Burma, and the ineffectual international outrage -- and still the papers kept coming out of the box.

But soon the papers stilled, and more ripping could be heard. The box was being torn apart from the inside; the hole on the side was getting bigger and bigger, and black cloth was pushing out. After several attempts, Chaw Ei emerged, encased entirely in a long black bodybag. She writhed and wriggled free of the box and groped her way out of the room, clutching at audience members' ankles and banging walls in her desperate attempt to escape. She emerged into the main gallery, still reaching blindly, until she was able to find her mural and the paints set up in front of the blank space left in the centre of the canvas.

Photos of Chaw Ei Thein by Henry Chan.

The emotion was overwhelming as we watched the artist, still trapped in her bodybag, open the paints and use her cloth-covered hands to smear letters across the mural spelling "BURMA what next?" After this Chaw Ei was finally able to shed her mobile prison -- but even still, she exchanged her salmon tank top and black pants for the traditional (and often culturally enforced) clothing of Burmese women. With tears still fresh on her cheeks, she handed out articles to the audience about the brain drain in Burma, the trend in young people who are able to get their educations abroad and never return to help their old country. Quiet River is an ordeal from which Chaw Ei has been able to emerge, but even still the images and emotions are haunting.

~Elaine

Robin Poitras: Of bells and whistles (EW)

2008-11-01T18:54:00.008-04:00

Photo (Above) of Sini Haapalinna by Henry Chan.
Photo (Below) of Don Simmons and cyclists by Henry Chan.

October 31 2008

Robin Poitras began the day's performances with a presentation of 'Sometimes Three' alongside Brenda Cleniuk and Leanne Lloyd. They collected in front of the Design Exchange, a single serious line of black accented in brass and red leather. The premise of the piece was simple: the three artists sat on wooden benches, with black umbrellas open and horses' bells draped across their legs, using the motion of their bodies to sound the bells. The response it evoked was much more complex.

The image that I saw in their performance was of three Apollonian priestesses/Oracles intertwined with the three witches of Macbeth. Heralding out a coming prophecy, and deliberately linked to the fluctuating stock exchange, the sober act continued in the back courtyards of the financial district. The trio made tighter and tighter circles as they continued to perform -- something big was coming, and we should all be prepared.

In any case, the visual impact of the piece complemented the aural chords, as the sets of bells mingle and chimed. Each performer shook at her own pace, creating her own pattern of notes; they were connected but individual, inseparable but independent. Mimicking the bells of the stock exchange, the bells of the performance sped up and slowed down, alternately marking out strict tempos and rushing through jumbles of notes.

At the end of the performance, the artists gathered their materials, stool under one arm and bells and umbrella hung carefully on the other, hand outstretched as if waiting for a sign. They walked slowly through the same CIBC that had Sakiko Yamaoka so worried the other day, and brought their performance full circle to the street.

Jason Lim set the Hallowe'en tone for the evening as he performed a durational work just outside XPACE. Standing with a trio of glasses under each foot, he drew black thread from a large spool and draped it loosely on his hand, his arms moving back and forth as if he were an automated anti-spinning machine. As he progressed, pausing occasionally to check its size and watch it flutter in the wind, the variation in the lengths of thread took on the appearance of a wig of human hair. Which was exactly Lim's intention as in the finale of his performance he donned the wig (shot through with threads of red) and carefully kicked out the glasses from beneath his feet until he could balance no longer.

The evening's indoor performances began with Don Simmons' 'Picked you out of my pocket and death was the door prize', a bit of a spectacle for the gallery. (Forgive me for not having the proper vocabulary to describe this piece!) Three stunt bikers rode into the studio space slowly, dressed in hooded whites and black dirt masks, while Simmons stood at his audio booth and freehanded the audio layer of the performance.

Photo of cyclist participating in Don Simmon's performance by Henry Chan.

Street ambience, howling wind and effects like smashing glass and honking horns layered themselves as the bikers lined up and performed stunts one at a time. Every so often all three would ride up toward the edge of the audience, as if to leap over them, but pulled back at the last moment. I wasn't sure if the audio was reacting to the cyclists or vice versa, but as the riders progressed through their stunts the layers of the audio got thicker and harsher until all audio and light dropped. A projection came up on the back wall, describing the process of leaving ghost bikes: bicycles painted white and left at accident sites as homages, as eulogies, to mark the passage of fallen cyclists around the world. The written text explained the vulnerability of a cyclist in a process of introspection, and the contrast between action and stillness, between audio and silence, marked the moment all the more sharply.

Photo of Natasha Bailey and Danielle Williams by Henry Chan.

From the window of the gallery came a durational installation from Natasha Bailey & Danielle Williams. The floor of the window nook was littered with electronic correspondence and on the back wall hung a painter's jumpsuit, latex gloves, a pair of white socks, and a paintbrush. On a stool sat a bucket of flour paste.

Photo of Natasha Bailey and Danielle Williams by Henry Chan.

Into this 'seen unseen' scene, the two artists emerged clad only in strategically placed scraps of papier-mache. Taking their places on the raised floor, their hands clasped and their bodies pressed against the glass, the duo struck an image in the window. Mahan Javadi entered the picture, dressed a bit like an exterminator without the gas mask, and slowly began to entomb the artists against the glass with their own words. At first the pair free to talk but as the layer of paper moves further up their bodies, they are stifled into stillness, eyes closed and almost mummified.

This shared experience, similar to Angelika Fojtuch's last night, read as a comment on human relationships, on what they can weather and how easily they can be buried. We are reminded again that relationships are an endurance. The artists are on a search "for honest communication" (as per their self-description in the catalogue), and yet even this live action is mediated by the history of all the text and words that have transpired between them. In the end, though, Bailey and Williams were able to tear free of their confines and revel in the reality of their interaction, knowing that they have weathered at least this much together.

Photo of Sini Haapalinna by Henry Chan.

The technical phantasmagoria of Sini Haapalinna bore an apt name in 'KALEIDOSCOPOPSPECTACAL Live Cinematic Trans Flux', as the gallery became a playground of light, sound and video effects that I must admit are right up my alley. Using an audio effects unit, a series of contact microphones, a light box and a live video feed with programming (delays, inversions, etc), Haapalinna created a series of abstract sound and image vignettes that warped the frame of commonplace objects (bowls of water, plastic toys) into an epic document of the crumbling of life's structures.

As the visual and aural images distorted and layered atop each other, each sound and image invoked another series of sounds and image -- nothing was simply what it was, but was a metaphor, an allusion to other worlds. Clinking bowls became a procession of monks' chimes. Piling bubbles became a mountain of fish eggs while the sprinkles used to break them appeared as a spreading bacterial invasion. Bird calls were reverberated into a haunted forest, and empty bullet casings became bombs as the land of the dinosaurs was bombed to smithereens by army men.

Photos of Sini Haapalinna by Henry Chan.

Time slowed and swirled in the projected image as photographic slides were placed on the lightbox and the camera pressed right up against them to create a composite cityscape in which the statue of liberty decomposed slowly on the screen into the ghostly image of the LED lights strapped to Haapalinna's body as she whirled before the camera. And time reversed on itself as she used a laser pointer to create the look of burnt celluloid in a supremely digital medium.

The final performance of the night was BBB Johannes Deimling's 'No rose without a thorn'. Unceremoniously, he blindfolded himself with his sweater -- and the blindfold continued as he took off each article of his clothing and wrapped it around his head. He even included his shoes, using four pieces of twine to hold the mass together.

Photo (Above) of BBB Johannes Deimling by Henry Chan.
Photo (Below) of BBB Johannes Deimling handing napkin to Sini Haapalinna by Henry Chan.

Then he began scratching himself furiously, raising red lines and drawing blood from his skin before finally wiping himself down with a small napkin. Blind and bloody, he folded the napkin into a haphazard flower and proffered it to the closest audience member, though it took three tries before Haapalinna stood to accept the blossom. Deimling had become his own thorn, commenting on the often self-destructive nature of love and how the idea of blind self-sacrifice, while romantic enough, I suppose, in novels, becomes out of place in reality where awkward silence usually reigns.

~Elaine

Day 9: Friday October 31 (AJP)

2008-11-01T13:27:00.004-04:00

Photo (Above) of BBB Johannes Deimling by Henry Chan.
Photo (Below) of Natasha Bailey and Danielle Williams by Henry Chan.

Andrew James Paterson

At twelve noon sharp, Robin Poitras presented an outdoor performance on a lovely pre-Halloween afternoon in downtown Toronto’s financial district. Poitras formed a trio with two other female artists - Brenda Cleniuk and Leanne Lloyd (both from Regina). Dressed in identical black outfits and wearing comfortable red shoes, they held umbrellas over their heads in unusually sunny weather and fastened belts hosting bells around each leg. The three-piece orchestra would sit in wooden stools in different site-specific arrangements and shake their bodies enough so that the bells would ring harmoniously. The ringing was particularly sonorous at the performance’s first location - in front of the Design Exchange (which had originally been the stock exchange). The ringing commenced at noon - high noon. Ringing bells of course carry many associations -meeting time, feeding time, mess time as it is called in the military. The stock market’s daily opening is announced by ringing bells, as is its daily closing. The stock market has of course been oscillating quite wildly in recent times - the stock market has been downright Fluxist.

The closer the performers could sit to each other, the more harmonious the bells. In front of the Design Exchange they were in one of my favourite keys - that of “D”, and the performers’ movements synchronized wonderfully. When the performers moved across the street to a deserted fountain area, they had to sit further apart from each other and some of the intensity was lost. But they could sense this so they picked up the slack, enough to attract the attention of a Security Guard who requested that they relocate. He had been dispatched to remove them from the property, but a compromise was achieved. Therefore, Poitras and her collaborators moved up to another level, and then they walked through them lobby of a large CIBC bank. Would they disturb that peace? (On an earlier day this week, another 7a*11d artist - Sakiko Yamaoka - did conduct or lead a sleep-in in various banks including this one.) No, but people did stare. Perhaps the three women belonged to some religious cult? Or maybe a band? The three performers were definitely on their way to somewhere - they walked with intention.

Photo of Natasha Bailey and Danielle Williams by Henry Chan.

In the evening it was time for another series of performances at Xpace. Prior to the indoor (and window) performances, there was a nicely intimate piece by Jason Lim outside the gallery. I missed the beginning, but when I arrived Jason was un-spooling (despooling?) a roll of industrial strength black string. He was standing on six glasses. Opposite Jason, Norbert Klassen was unspooling a red spool, not standing on six or any number of glasses. This continued for a while, and I looked at the papers and props set up in the gallery window in anticipation of a scheduled performance by Natasha Bailey and Danielle Williams, titled seen unseen. When I turned around to see Jason Lim’s performance, Norbert had excused himself and Jason’s black string was inter-threaded with red string. As I so often do with relatively informal durational performances, I walked elsewhere while intending to return later. When I returned, Jason was now wearing the mass of black string as a shaggy, almost Rastafarian wig over his eyes and he has a string with leaves dangling onto the ground from his upper body. His balance gradually became precarious and he eventually lost his footing from two of his foundation glasses. Thus the performance had to conclude.

Photo of Natasha Bailey and Danielle Williams by Henry Chan.

After watching Natasha Bailey and Danielle Williams mouthing something sweetly inaudible to each other in the window while wearing sparse scraps of paper taped with some Plaster Paris-like and gooey substance to their bodies, a performance by Toronto-based Don Simmons was announced. A man whom I recognized as Simmons stood behind a laptop on a plinth and a sound collage began. Simmons was wearing a white athletic suit with a hood and a black cloth over his mouth. Three bicyclists entered fron the street door, identically dressed with Simmons and with each other. The cyclists rode toward the audience together, and then in competition with each other. They took turns at oneupmanship, riding like skateboard kids, riding like motorcyclists with their wheelies and whatnots.

Photos of Don Simmons and cyclists by Henry Chan:

Simmons’ sound collage was richly detailed. He combined motor and crowd noises, and an interesting dislocation or distance developed between the pre-recorded crowd reactions and those of the audience, who were somewhat amused but impressed with the riders’ agility. But the riders came closer and closer to wiping out, and then the lights went down. So did the sound - completely down and off. A text was projected - a rather lengthy text acknowledging the ongoing bicycle fatalities on Toronto’s and other streets and spoken from the perspective of somebody committed to the group Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists, or ARC. The text indicates that the speaker dutifully attends memorials for fallen cyclists, even though he does not know any of the dead. Whatever, he still feels a need to be there. The contrast between the live and dangerous and the elegiac in Simmons’ performance was considerable, and it was the prime intention of this performance. There was an effective contrast between what was live and vulnerable, and what it was like to be sitting in a movie theatre and taking in plot and/or information with the lights down and everything confined to the screen. Simmons’ performance was titled Picked you out of my pocket and death was the door prize. The door prize is an award given to motorists who violate a cardinal road rule and fail to look before opening their vehicle doors.

Photos of Sini Haapalinna by Henry Chan:

The next performance was by Helsinki-based Sini Haapalinna, who crouched on the floor in front of a surface containing various objects and also in front of a small video-camera. There was a screen on the wall behind her. She began placing objects in the camera’s field and playing with them, creating moving pictures. She also would make sounds with various objects and play the sounds against the pictures. Sini was highly skilled at layering images. She performed an extended secton with a simple water bowl that she could multiply and alter the textures of by playing with the camera but also water itself - skimming it and even splashing it a little. She blew bubbles into the water bowl and achieved a wonderful lava-like texture. She used filters or screens, she moved like a slow dancer in front of the screen with LEDs after setting enough images and sound in motion. She added parts on top of added parts. Much of her performance -Kaleidoscopopspectacal - consisted of layering parts (both sight and sound) in top of already added sounds and then finding another object to explore - to see how it might generate images and sounds. The effects were often striking, but the performance did go on for too long.

Photos of BBB Johannes Deimling by Henry Chan.

The final performance was by Berlin-based BBB Johannes Deimling, in collaboration with FADO Performance Art Centre of Toronto. This untitled performance was very effective due to its relative simplicity. After announcing that only members of 7a*11d could document his performance, Deimling stood centre playing area and began systematically removing his garments. He would blindfold himself with his clothes, wrapping them around his head like a bath towel or a turban or some bizarre head gear (bizarre because it was comprised of very ordinary or everyday clothing.) He took off his shoes, he added his socks to the head contraption, and he even added the shoes after taking off his underwear (and wrapping it around his head. His body was naked, but he was also wearing a seriously cumbersome head-dress.

Then he began scrubbing his body, like a person showering but with nails. The scrubbing or cleaning accelerated into scratching. He scratched harder and harder and drew what looked like welts as well as bleeding. When he had scratched to satisfaction or his limit, he used a tissue to stop the bleeding and to wash off his body, to soften or restore it. Then he placed the tissue on his left little finger and struck two poses. Then he handed the tissue to the nearest audience member, who happened to be Sini Haapalinna. The performance and the evening were now complete and concluded.

This evening of course being Halloween, there were occasional confusion about who was a performer and who wasn’t during the changeovers or intermissions. This was fun - it was amusing. But no trick and treating pour moi. I had to get home and get to work, and then get to sleep.

Creative Resident Profile: Norbert Klassen (AJP)

2008-10-31T13:32:00.010-04:00

Andrew James Paterson

Norbert Klassen has presented two performances at the 2008 7a*11d Festival (on Friday October 24th and also the following evening - the Saturday night). Both were distinguished by performance presence, deceptively informal but very precise pacing or timing, and a wonderfully perverse humour. Klassen was born in Duisburg, Germany in 1941, and has been living in Switzerland since 1964.

In the late nineteen-sixties, Klassen and a collective of performing and writing associates formed STOP F.T. (Studio am Montag),which only presented performances on Mondays since Monday is traditionally a “down” night in the theatre world and also so that collective members could work elsewhere on other nights in other capacities. The group would meet, discuss, and workshop; and scripts and/or performance directions would collectively emerge. The performances tended to range between twelve and twenty-four hours - they were partially scripted and partially improvised. Audiences were not expected to sit for the duration of the play - they were encouraged to stay for a while, leave, return, etcetera. Norbert Klassen describes these original plays as having a “dream narrative” - something may or may not actually be occurring. What is “real” and what is strictly in both the performers’ and audience’s imagination? He also refers to them as a “landscapes of human figures”. Sets and costumes were undertaken by all of the players, or at least as many of the players who made the commitment. Already Klassen and his colleagues in STOP F.T. were moving toward performance art, or at least in a performative direction.

Since 1979, Klassen has presented performances for performance art audiences, while still working as an actor and director in the theatre. In 1985 hr became involved in the Black Market International Performance Group. It seems that there are many version of the Black Market story or narrative, so Klassen stresses that he is presenting his version. He credits the founding of Black Market in 1985 to Boris Nieslony, who sought out performers and individuals whom he felt capable of working for considerable duration without script or preparations. Initially there were between six and eight performers (all male, which was not an intention). Later there were a dozen performers, both male and female.

The name Black Market of course suggests underground economies, illicit exchanges, and clandestine espionage activies and so on. Klassen describes the term Black Market as not being restricted to any economic realm. It is anarchic - people all meeting to work together and simultaneously respecting individual space(s). People trusting and letting go of egos for a collective good without some authority figure barking out commands or orders. Black Market is a space or mindset where people find partners and do so without rules. Video-documentations of Black Market performances have revealed parallel performances taking place within the same physical framework. Recorded from two different angles, one might think they were watching two different but parallel performances.

Norbert Klassen has great respect for audiences - in their ability to be selective, to retain visual and other information, and to form their own conclusions. He sees his performances (as well as his theatrical works) as being dialogues with audiences. For Klassen, an audience is never a mere convenience. Audiences are to be played with, to be allowed to help shape a performance. He is not a performer who is publicly withdrawing into some extremely private interior or trauma.

The vocabularies of art world and its exchange systems is a recurring trope in many of Klassen’s performances. It certainly was a key component of his first Xpace performance on the 24th of October. The materials and/or results of his performance were neatly packed into clear plastic boxes and ten sold to the highest bidders. But Klassen inverts and twists art auctioning and at markets. He invokes the Warhol maxim Art is What Sells (I also think of General Idea’s cunningly facetious “if it doesn’t sell, then it’s not art) only to reverse the buyer consumer roles. He offers to buy the multiple art works back, after having burnt the paper money. Norbert Klassen has presented this performance widely and internationally, this performance in which he uses acupuncture needles to mark his face, writes ART with blood into his upper left arm, stops the bleeding, and then sells his traces. Audiences overwhelmingly prefer to retain the art object rather than recover their cash investment.

Norbert Klassen does indeed have a rather casual, even facetious, attitude to money and materiality. He lives modestly and travels lightly, preferring not to accumulate too many inflexible possessions (although he is a voracious reader). Norbert Klassen as a solo performer and a member of Black Market International are highly respected on an international performance circuit. Exchanges between performer and audiences, and between citizen and citizen, are more important to him that material rewards or trophy souvenirs. Norbert Klassen will be up to something during the 7a*11d festival’s final day panel. I cannot predict what he will be doing, but I am quite fascinated by the possibilities.

Day 8: Thursday October 30 (EW)

2008-10-31T13:32:00.009-04:00

We return again to XPACE, and there is something new in the gallery window to replace Alejandra Herrera's installation. It is a blue ceramic bowl and a pair of brown leather shoes, but they aren't for use tonight, so I will have to wait to find out what they are for.

When is a rock like an orange?
When Essi Kausalainen performs 'Untitled (Toronto)', a piece constructed of actions and rituals that became images. The colour orange dominated the performance but not Kausalainen herself, who was noticeably apart from her orange objects (rod, chair, ribbon, orange) in her blue jeans and white shirt. She created several stunning images, such as when she was crawling around the chair, carrying the rock on her back, bearing the weight of the world, as it were. A similar attempt with the orange resulted in disaster as it fell from her back, sending her sprawling. Another beautiful image came when, after taping one end of the ribbon to the pole and the other end to the rock, she rolled up the ribbon before kneeling with the pole upright, allowing the coiled ribbon to unfurl in slowly a widening spiral around her body as the force of gravity on the rock causes it to orbit its pole.

For a moment she sat with the rock on her head, biting into an orange -- it seemed as if she was making an homage to Norbert Klassen's work on Sunday the 25th. But instead she peeled the orange into a single long spiraling strip, and the visual similarities ended. Once freed, the newly naked orange and the rock were able to change skins, to assume the other's persona: the rock was nestled into the peel that was reassembled into orange shape, while the orange flesh was wrapped in the ribbon. The matter of the two objects became interchangeable; organic life and stable rock were the same. And yet, when Kausalainen repeated her ritual of action with her new rock and orange, everything was different, yet oddly the same.

She tells me that the piece was inspired by recent scientific discovery that the first light after the big bang was orange. She asked herself "What do we do with this piece of information that doesn't seem to make have any concrete sense?" And then she drew a connection with performance art: gestures and images that don't seem to make any sense, any impact on daily life until we stop to realize that it is part of the process that re-imagines the universal and whittles it down to the everyday.

The next performance of the night was Nenad Bogdanovic, who reversed the idea of gesture-as-image into image-as-gesture. Using a canvas suspended at its four corners by four volunteers, he began by painting the word 'NICER" in bright colours, and then systematically destroyed the image in a series of actions that could have been sponsored by dentists around the world.

At first he ate an apple, then vigorously brushed his teeth, spitting out the water and foam onto the first letter of his painting, N. He repeated this cycle with each subsequent letter, eating a granola bar, then a banana, then drinking a bottle of Coke and finally smoking a cigarette -- normal actions undercut by absurdity as he continued to brush his teeth. The canvas became a receptacle for the various tastes and textures in his mouth, while the image displayed and maintained the motion that Bogdanoivic imposed onto it: streaks implied the direction and force of his spitting, and the water pooled in the centre of the canvas, swirling colour together.

Finally, to add to the controlled chaos of the image, he lay on the canvas and performed a series of push-ups in the sodden expanse of paint and water, further rendering the painting abstract and unrecognizable. The artist's intention behind the piece seemed to be twofold: a statement on how performance and art permeated even the most mundane aspects of his life, but also a willingness to sacrifice the sanctioned in a search for the meaning of art.

Angelika Fojtuch was perhaps pre-empting Hallowe'en as she began her piece quietly in the small space at the side of the room, positioning herself and her unwitting assistant (whose name we later discover is Thom) in front of a table. Starting at the feet, she slowly wrapped the two of them together, and soon they were forced to hobble over to the front of the room in order to have more space. Thom was left holding the bag of bandages up for Fojtuch's seemingly disembodied arms as they continue to wrap bandages around the two of them until they formed a hybrid between the michelin man and an ancient Egyptian mummy. For the latter half of the wrapping phase, the artist was going entirely by feel as she had wrapped her head in the bandages and, in any case, couldn't move her body enough to see around her assistant.

The precarious balance of human relationships and co-dependency were inescapable connections for her audience, but it was interesting to note that Fojtuch was doing all the wrapping, continuing to perform this action alone even when it would have been easier for Tom to lend a hand. And this was mirrored in the unwrapping, where Fojtuch waited patiently for Thom to cut through and unwind all the bandages, including those he couldn't see, before she released her hold on him. Draw from this observation what you will about about human relationships, and who was in control (if either of them) in the process.

The final performance of the night was a test of strength and will for Éminence Grise Robin Poitras, who performed using honey as a medium. Her first act was to paint a giant X on the wall with the honey, and climb a ladder to embed the honey into her skin. After this, she moved her focus to the centre of the floor where a bucket full of honey and a pair of small ladders lay. She plunged herself into the bucket, letting it spill over and around her, a glorious basking in a substance that took upon the qualities of solidified light.

Like a prehistoric woman emerging from an ageless preservation in amber, Poitras stood in the honey and took up the ladders which she used as a combination of stilts and crutches. Holding her balance steady of a supreme effort of control, the performance became a ritual as she began to move painstakingly around the room, following the course of a spiral in an observance that marked the passage of time, steps of growth and the movement of the sun. Time seemed to have stopped as we watched her progress as, with each quarter circle, she stepped up onto a higher rung of the ladder. The honey slowly spread in pools from her body, embracing the floor and bringing it into the performance as if showing the effort the ground was displaying to hold her up. The scent of the honey, while not overpowering, definitely imbued the room as Poitras came full circle to the X and paid a silent, motionless obeisance before stepping down and time resumed again.

~Elaine

Day 8: Thursday October 30 (AJP)

2008-10-31T13:28:00.004-04:00

Photo of Gustavo Alvarez by Henry Chan:

After enjoying a delightful tea with the performance artist Norbert Klassen, we trudged off to the subway entrance at Queen and University by the big shiny new opera house. I had hopped that Gustavo Alvarez was intending to perform one of his public actions in relation to the opera house, but it was into the subway that Gustavo and his portable audience entered.

Gustavo (Chabochi) retrieved a loaf of bread, with flamboyant pink icing forming facial images on top of the bread. He lay the bread/head down and began eating it - holding the loaf with his hands but not picking it up with his hands and then eating it. He ate like an animal - a dog perhaps or maybe a belly-dancer. He wore his signature yellow boiler-suit with no head gear today. After taking bites out of the loaf from both sides (and letting at least one train pass the platform) he got on the train and the performance-paparazzi followed.

Photo of Gustavo Alvarez by Henry Chan.

Suddenly Chabochi got off the subway train at the next station north - St. Patrick - and, as his followers followed him, he got on the next car before they/we could get on the next car. But he had informed Johanna Householder that his destination was the Museum station, with its hello we are now approaching the museum kitsch subway decorations - its “public art”. In this station, he placed the by now well-eaten head of bread onto the floor, knelt as if praying before it, and then resumed eating. Crumbs were by now accumulating in considerable quantity.

The artist began hanging black and orange plastic shields with shaped holes (some faces) around one of the station’s altars or museum-referent poles. The black and orange shields or flags appeared to have been purchased in some cheap Halloween-supplies store. Halloween or Sam Hain - Days of the Dead. The artist reached into his supplies-bag and retrieved first one small clay head sculpture, and then another. He placed the two heads on a black blanket, and retrieved twelve candles, which he spread about in the shape of a corpus. He scattered crumbs in order to provice flesh. He addressed the air and thus the commuters:

“For my dead. For your dead. For our dead”.

Commuters were stopping and wondering what was going on. Most stared for a bit and then moved on. One couple asked me if the man was all right and should they call 911. I informed this couple that calling 911 would not be a good idea, and I used the words “performance art”. They seemed okay with that.

Photo of Gustavo Alvarez by Henry Chan:

Gustavo Alvarez MusGus finished his meal and inspected his installation. He left it on the platform. Of course the 7a*11d contingent was documenting the performance evidence, but so was one stranger. Yes, the wonderful convenience of digital cameras and other modern technologies. Photographs preserve traces of events, and they also document the dead. Gustavo Alvarez will be performing at Xpace on November first, the day after Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead.

The evening’s programme at Xpace involved duration, options of continuing, formation of images, and a lot more. Serbian artist Nenad Bogdanovic presented Seventh situation for a nicer painting. A canvas was suspended on four support strings stretched across the gallery, each corner held by an artist-participant. Bogdanovic retrieved his squeezable paint-tubes one by one and made a word painting. N in black, I in green, C in red, E in yellow, and R in black. NICER. Then he ate an apple and then appeared to brush his teeth with something mysterious. Whatever the toothpaste was, it permitted him to spit out a fluid onto the canvas, adding drips and another layer of paint and smudges and artistic whatevers. Bogdanovic repeated this process with different foods, liquids, and stimulants (a chocolate bar, a banana, an entire bottle of Coca-Cola, and a cigarette, and more). He was able to spit out different colours. Actually quite impressive.

I thought he was going to keep spitting out paint/fluid until the word NICER had become completely abstracted. I did think of the infamous provocateur Jubal Brown, who once declared that Mondrian could benefit from another colour and thus vomited blue food colour onto a Mondrian canvas at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I also found myself remembering the Australian movie Man of Flowers, in which a “painter” snorts copious cocaine, spray-paints a multitude of colours on a canvas, rolls his girlfriend’s dog over the wet canvas, and then declared the finished work a masterpiece. Sure enough, after guaranteeing that the canvas was dripping and overflowing enough, Bogdanovic pressed his boy against the work-in-progress and revelled in the paint. He converted dripping paint into actually rather restrained smudges. He made a painting, and then took his art-work away with him. Off to the market, perhaps? Or at least to a dealer? I did wonder whether or not the artist would attempt to sell his latest painting.

There were no performances in the dungeon or basement this particular evening, but there was a short projected film by performance artist Robin Poitras. The black and white film was titled XO Skeleton, and it was appropriately titled. The dancer/performer wore black leotards visible underneath a white garment designed to accentuate the artist’s bone structure - designed to accentuate her stretches and contractions and contortions. And Poitras is a very good dancer who can twist her body into many different shapes - she is nothing if not elastic. Poitras performed a very different piece at the end of the evening’s programme, but that piece also involved stretching and contacting and serious concentration.

Gdansk-based artist Angelika Fojtuch’s untitled performance began quite out of the blue. I had been chatting with friends when suddenly I noticed 7a*11d committee members documenting something happening on the floor, against a table containing empty beer bottles and food trays. Angelika Fojtuch was wrapping audience-member Thom Sevalrud’s feet around her feet, with shards of white gauze or bandage. (One of my favourite typing mistakes already enters into play here - bandage/bondage). She kept wrapping and wrapping, and Thom was stoic and good-humoured. Up the legs, around the waists, around the chests, and the upper torsos, and the heads. She wrapped bandages around Thom’s neck and blindfolded herself. The two walked slowly - very slowly. They stopped against a wall, where more and more wrapping continued and continued. Audience members began to applaud and still Angelika kept wrapping. Well, why wouldn’t she? Until death do us part and all the rest of the ceremony, it’s known as commitment and also consent. I did think of Linda Montano’s and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance (1983-84), in which the pair was bound together by an eight foot rope for a year on condition that they never touch. Well…Angelika and Thom were literally bounded and gagged to one another. They were, I believe, married. But eventually it became time (an arbitrary time) for Thom to be permitted to cut the bandages (the umbilical cord?) and then take the active role in de-blindfolding Angelika. The pair was introduced to each other, which was nice considering they were now free to get divorced.

Robin Poitras, the evening’s final performer, has also been one of the Seven Creative Residents who were being encouraged to develop and then present performance pieces in response to their working and living environments. The festival catalogue lists Poitras as presenting untitled: a work that draws on past works. Well, yes, that is true. But this performance was so much more than that.

As the audience re-entered the gallery, Poitras was on a ladder with a roller against a white wall. What was on the roller was honey. Sweet and very sticky honey. She was painting the letter “X”. In the centre of the gallery she had a bucket and a pair of stilts. Very simple - minimal and particular materials and/or supports.

She came down from the ladder, sat in the middle of the floor, raised the bucket and poured homey all over herself. It ran down her entire body and formed a major puddle on the floor. She remained still and never looked at the X that she had “painted” on the wall to her left. She slowly rose and mounted the stilts. She moved backwards through the puddle of honey and very slowly but steadily around the playing area she had defined, maintaining the necessarily perfect balance. She stopped in the centre by the puddle of honey and slowly climbed down from the stilts. She lay the stilts down, and walked slowly toward the wall to her right. Robin Poitras pressed a hand against this wall, and held it there. Then she withdrew the hand, revealing one very clear fingerprint. Then she exited. Her timing was perfect, as was her concentration. This was not a performance that could have lasted forever and ever. This was a performance that moved from here to here to here to there, and did not waste a second doing so. It had something to do, and it did it.

Creative Resident Profile: Chaw Ei Thein (EW)

2008-10-31T13:18:00.002-04:00

Chaw Ei Thein: From the Outside

Her mural, Quiet River, has developed a lot of depth since the last time I have seen it. The faces bordering the image all have eyes and noses (and, pointedly, no mouths). They have ears on their outstretched hands, reaching to listen in on the events happening in the centre of the mural. The line of monks has become a crowd, and scenes of riot police have emerged. Any blank space is being filled in with beckoning, imploring handprints and eyes peering from the blackness.

For Chaw Ei the political has always been a part of her work, for when one's daily life is a struggle for freedom, themes of politics and of activism become inseparable from art. In her performance she holds a positive tone despite the harsh images depicted on the canvas, hoping that she is able to influence change in Toronto, if not in Burma. Her goal is to create discourse and discussion amongst her audience, to give them insight into the lives of the Burmese people while at the same time learning about local disputes with freedom.

Her current position outside the struggle is one that she hopes to use to good effect, noting that when inside a situation as oppressive as Burma's, where even basic life is constrained, it is often difficult to see a way out. When solutions have been tried and failed, it is difficult to move on. From the outside, she feels she is able to gain perspective by seeking out others' points of view, and able to learn from others' dealings with human rights issues and lost freedoms. From here, she can contact her audience directly, she can create physical connections, she can speak, she can inform.

Access to her audience is a crucial point of her art. As such, the work that she can do from the outside is important. Chaw Ei explains that before 1988, no one really knew about the situation in Burma. It was only after a series of campaigns that international awareness slowly grew, although even now, it is still largely an issue not given wide regard. But here in Toronto, she can spread the news to locals, to all the people affected by the festival and all the people in the community that have come to speak with her. Her perspective right now is that even if she can't find a solution, then at least she can share her her experience with the people; she can show them what it is to fear, and what it is to have freedom.

When I asked her how this piece would be different if it took place in Burma, she responded quickly: it would be impossible. She would be arrested and perhaps kept in prison indefinitely. If she had been secretive, showing the work only to friends and family, any media reports (including this innocuous blog post) would make her unsafe. In May 2005, Chaw Ei, co-performer Htein Lin and three others in their group were arrested for a public performance in a Yangon market, selling daily necessities and paintings at cheap prices, a performance that critiqued the government's unreasonable inflation. Even working outside of Burma, she felt for quite some time that she was not free to create, as the weight of censorship and caution followed her like a shadow. Until very recently she was concerned about her safety upon her return to Burma if she was making these critical, political performances internationally. She never met with media, and she felt herself not expressing as much as she could. But now, she has made a choice: she must do something. She is no longer concerned with censoring herself.

Whatever repercussions she may face in the future, she is willing to face. She does wish to go home, of course. But for the time being, while she still has recourse to create and work in the outside world, she will. When the day comes that her papers and passports expire, she will return to Burma. For Chaw Ei, although optimistic about her abilities to spread her words and performances, is under no delusions of the strength of her impact from the outside. She can see both sides of the equation, for although perspectives and audiences can be reached from the outside, one cannot always affect those left inside. Revolution, she feels, must come from inside, where once can truly touch and affect those directly underneath the shadow of the military junta. The difficulty, there, comes not from desire or intention, but from inability to create.

She and many others are living in this situation. Even if she travels to different countries, there is no escaping it. She has received many visitors from the Burmese community in Toronto, and for of them, the events that have happened in the past still affect them as if it were yesterday. This art, these works, spring from the physical experience that she cannot forget. Although hopeful, this quiet river is not a peaceful river. A river once bustling with promise that is now forced to keep silent. But the river carries along its banks ideals and dreams of hope.

~Elaine

Housekeeping by Lezli Rubin-Kunda (EW)

2008-10-30T18:31:00.004-04:00

October 30 2008

On Harbord Street just west of Spadina, there is a small gallery that is housing another portion of the festival: a screening of some of Lezli Rubin-Kunda's recent video works. The screening contains three separate videos, of which two (Down to Earth and A Walk with Mask, Streamers and Sardine Cans) are documentations of live performances, while the third (Housekeeping) is collection of video poems musing on the theme of Rubin-Kunda's relationship to her home.

Housekeeping is a series of celebrations of and challenges to the ideas of home, security and inhabitance, in which the mundane meets the sublime in touchingly poetic vignettes that are sculpted from the very fabric of Rubin-Kunda's house.

A very short piece entitled 'reminder' depicts the artist leaning over from the roof of her house, laying out post-it notes onto the outer wall. And while the artist's commentary is about the constant, incessant presence of everyday life and its million and one things to do, she is able to transform the wall of her house into a mosaic of yellow paper against whitewash.

'a backyard pilgrimage' is another short that turns the mundane into the marvelous as Rubin-Kunda traverses the damp earth and foliage of her backyard, able only to walk on grapefruits she has scattered across the ground. Playing on notions of children's games and the need for protection from the outside world, she tries to maintain her precarious balance while at the same time sacrificing the citrus to her steps.

Perhaps the most bittersweet of the vignettes, 'a happy homemaker counts her blessings' shows Rubin-Kunda writing on a wall with her fingers and mud from the yard. She writes all those things in life that she loves. Her family, her home, the way the moonlight shines into her bathroom, eating breakfast on the patio, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette on the roof: the complexly simple things that make life wonderful. Yet after this positive recounting, the artists washes down the wall, and the words blur and fade, leaving only their memory behind. And yet life and happiness, while transient, are both able to linger despite the things that tries to erode them.

Tomorrow is the last day that Lezli Rubin-Kunda's work will be on display at The Fleishman Gallery at WonderWorks, so do stop by if you have the time. The screening is accompanied by still photographs and print collections of the artist's work.

~Elaine

Creative Resident Profile: Sylvette Babin (EW)

2008-10-30T11:18:00.004-04:00

Sylvette Babin: the Art of Sound, and the Sound of Art

In a previous statement about her art, Sylvette Babin described herself as un être hybride, a hybrid being without a fixed discipline. Eight years later, the idea of hybridity, of being able to combine and draw from different media is still a positive facet of her art. She has created and choreographed art from a variety of different perspectives -- writing, video, performance, installation, visual art, and more -- and though at this point in her artistic career she finds herself leaning more towards performance, she states that the connections between different media are crucial, and not always able to be separated. Nor is it necessarily a valuable thing to be able to separate them, for she is adamant that she be able to use the medium(s) she feels is necessary to create her message. While in general she would love to be able to draw more heavily upon video and site-specific performance, unfortunately the time is not always available to her.

One theme she has found that crosses the borders of different media is the idea of art as an exploration of space and movement. Even within her canvas as a visual artist, she felt that the work's engagement came from its composition and the movement of the brushes, while installation and sculpture functioned as tableaux of motion, crystallized within space.

This theme of space-play is also tied to her ideas of sound-play, wherein she manipulates sound and its creation, changing the physical manifestations of sound. Despite having lost the use of one ear, Babin possesses an intuitiveness with sound. For instance, one of her first video installations was a series of three looped videos on fifteen monitors, in which she focused on the combined experience of sound and image together, creating overlapping layers of sound. A visitor to the installation commented on the polyphonic nature of the installation, which surprised and pleased Babin, whose world is purely monophonic. She states emphatically, however, that she creates sound, and not music. She listens to the sound of objects, hearing the notes within them; she plays with the natural capabilities of all objects to create sound.

This physicality of sound is one of the many things about it that appeals to Babin, for while image and text must always be processed through the mind to be understood, she is intrigued by how sound is interpreted first and foremost by the body and felt as a genuinely physical experience. The link between body and sound is a concept that she has explored in the 'Breath series' of performances around the world. Starting in a children's wading pool with a harmonica and a stove pipe-turned-amplifier, she ran around the wading pool, letting her breath flow naturally through the harmonica. By just letting her breath go, without trying to control it to produce specific tones, Babin tied the sound of the breath directly to its production by the body and to the visual image of her motion, linking the three into a single action. In Poland she performed piece along the same vein. Lying with forty pounds of grease stacked in cubes around her face, her only means of interaction with and awareness of the audience beyond the wall of fat was a single breathing tube attached again to a harmonica. In Italy this was performed with giant pile of tomatoes, in Germany with soil, and in France with ice. The sound of her breath filtered through the harmonica created a complex web of sound based on the speed and depth of her breathing.

Each of these performances, as well as her performance last week in the festival, is accompanied by a strong visual aspect that she feels is complimentary to the aural exploration of her work. In each case she feels that the audio would not work on its own but builds off the context of the situation to give it meaning, since the sound is created by action within the performance. However, she is unworried that the striking visuals of her performances will distract from the aural aspects, because the sound is often the first point of contact with the audience, as well as the most enduring. Babin feels that sound, in the context of her performances, should be organic/acoustic, for the act of creating of sound with the body is just as much a part of the performance as is the manipulation of it.

"The body is always there in performance. The body is the source of motion, the source of intention. Everywhere there is creation there is the body to create it." -- Sylvette Babin

~Elaine

Day 7: Wednesday October 29 (AJP)

2008-10-30T10:37:00.007-04:00

Andrew James Paterson

I had been tipped off the Chihuahua-based performance artist Gustavo Alvarez (Musgus) had been planning a performance action starting at the bus stop by the Old City Hall at three o’clock. I get there early and nobody’s there. I think of checking out the City hall Library and checking my email for location and/or schedule changes, Then Gustavo shows up.

He is wearing his Made in Mexico yellow windbreaker and a head/helmet of sorts. It is a hat worn in wrestling and the colours are spectacular. An almost emerald green with bright yellow outlining the head functions - the eyes, nose, and mouth. Seeing, smelling, and talking/tasting. And other 7a*11d folks show up, and it becomes apparent that Gustavo’s performance will be taking pace on the street car. TTC tokens to the rescue.

Eight 7a*11d people get on the bus and move roughly to the centre of the street car. It’s quiet at first, and then Gustavo begins distributing the bells he carries in a bag. People check out the bells. Some of them begin ringing the bells. You can ring my bell oh yeah ring my bell. A chorus of ringing is taking place - nothing to stop traffic or the bus. But perhaps these bells have to do with the prematurely cold weather. Perhaps Gustavo is one of Santa’s elves?

Er, no. I don’t think so. Gustavo begins addressing the riders, quite angrily. “Exists Terrorism, Exists Poverty. Exists Money, Exists Bad Government. What do you think about that?” The TTC is a method of transportation lying somewhere between public and private. It is open to and thus dependent upon the public, yet it is a system which individuals agree to utilize on condition that they can ride that system and maintain relative privacy. The TTC, like public transit throughout the world, is intended to be neutral, and now the radical subjective has raised its voice. Except that the radical subjective is not alien to many of the transit riders. Terrorism, poverty, financial straitjackets, and corrupt governments are hardly alien to many if not most of the people on the bus. Except…they deal with these omnipresent conundrums in their own spaces in their own times.

Gustavo switches tone from negative to positive and cries out that somehow there exists hope. He stresses the suggestion that there is still hope, even though there is terrorism, poverty, material straitjackets and exchange systems, corrupt governments, etcetera. It is becoming too much for some passengers. A man accompanying a child informs Gustavo that he had crossed a line - that he has upset the child. The child is crying but not screaming and bawling - this is not an emergency situation. I have been on the Queen West street car before and heard domestic arguments via cell phone leakage as well as monologues that invade the relative privacy of the passengers. I have witnessed the police being called in to intervene and preserve silence on the public transit system. This doe not happen today. But perhaps it could have happened if Gustavo had travelled for a few more stops and continued to violate the uneasy silence that characterizes public transit. The contrast between celebratory (the ringing bells) and the accusative (the performer’s angry litany) was startling and potentially upsetting. Gustavo Alvarez de facto created what Hakim Bey has called a Temporary Autonomous Zone, or a DMZ. Outside of the law, outside of the state, and alive with its own highly visible and disputable contradictions.

Wednesday evening’s programme was not a series of live performances at XPACE; it was a relaxed evening of direct-to-disc performance documentations in the social space of the Gladstone Hotel’s Melody Lounge, in tandem with the Gladstone’s weekly “Granny Boots” series. In two sections, broken up by Ulysses Castanello’s DJing, the audience was treated to not only performance documentation excerpts but some events or actions staged for various cameras. Some works shown were by single artists and might have fit in with the 2008 7a*11d live programming, some were site-specific, some veered towards pranksterism and/or sight gags. Concurrent with the video-viewing, there was an “intervention” by performer Leanne Lloyd (who will be performing in tandem with Robin Poitras Friday afternoon outside the Design Exchange). The performer moved slowly throughout the bar dressed in an interestingly stitched original costume, eyeing the audience and other bar-customers. She was a Super Sexy CEO. She (and the festival) used the word “intervention” for her performance, which had been promoted not only within 7a*11d events but also on Canada’s Akimbo arts-promotional services.

Leanne Lloyd described her presence as an intervention. Gustavo Alvarez MusGus describes his public performances as actions. Are these synonyms? Are they cousins? I have heard “intervention” used to describe spontaneous or at least quasi-spontaneous interruptions of other events. Lloyd did not interrupt the screening, she didn’t particularly distract people from the ongoing programme, she blended into the evening’s ambience (which is not at all a bad thing to do). Her intervention was not confrontational - Alvarez’s public actions are confrontational, in the way that they can jolt an uneasy civility taken for granted in public space(s). When MusGus asks where have the memories gone and scatters memorabilia on streets and in parks, he is transgressing unofficial but entrenched divisions between what is private and what is public. Is he not making an intervention? He is certainly disrupting and problematizing daily routines and complacencies.

Photo by Henry Chan.

At the top of The D2d video programme, 7a*11d steering-committee member and performance professor Johanna Householder observed that most of the performances witnessed so far during the 2008 festival are exactly that - performances. Not “relational art”, or “spoken word”, or sight gags. Not “performative art”. This has, at least so far, been a festival of performance art. Bodies have been the fulcrum, even when the works are also rooted in sculpture or sound or even language. There have been works characterized by the formation of images (Norbert Klassen, Francis Arguin, Jason Lim… others), but the formation of images has not been the prime focus of these performances and thus they are arguably performances and not performative artworks. On the festival’s last Sunday afternoon, there will be a panel titled Terms of Engagement: Presence and the Performative. Panellists will include, in addition to Ms. Householder, Paul Couillard of 7a*11d (and up to recently of FADO), Helsinki’s Annette Arlander, and Grande Dame Tanya Mars (electronically possible from Paris, Francs). This should be a well-attended and well-debated afternoon event.

Gustavo Alvarez will be performing another action in public space on Thursday afternoon. The meeting place is outside The Opera House. Opera had traditionally been associated with well-dressed and well-heeled theatrical excess - those who dislike opera consider it ridiculous, and what exactly is wrong with being ridiculous? There is, come to think of it, something quite operatic about Gustavo Alvarez/MusGus.