Guest Review - Chris Roberts: Tino Sehgal's "Kiss" MCA Chicago

Tino Sehgal – Kiss – Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
October 7 – December 30, 2007


The German artist Tino Sehgal intervenes the fourth floor exhibit, Collection Highlights at the MCA, with an aggressive performance art piece titled Kiss, creating an atmosphere of both lust and awkwardness. Taking its cue from conceptual art and twisting it with art historical references, Sehgal choreographs two dancers to assume slow moving kisses that require adequate stamina from the participants and tolerance from the museums visitors. Onlookers are bewildered as to what is taking place, questioning the couple’s morality as to their public displays of affection, and the appropriateness of the quarters. This creates a great tension between the performers and that of the spectators, which mirrors the performer’s actions between them.

Kiss succeeds in its eagerness to engage an unsuspecting audience, whose onlookers stumble on the performance like an accident, and continue to gawk in amazement as they pass by, trying not to look, but compelled to continue. With no formal announcement that the piece is taking place, Kiss sends out no message, yet leaves one questioning its own preconceived notions of what is a proper display of affection.

Review by Chris Roberts

Redo of Allan Kaprow’s "18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing)" @ PERFORMA 07, Deitch Studios, NYC

I caught the 8pm performance of Allan Kaprow’s “18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing)” at Deitch Studios in Long Island City last night. This redo of Kaprow’s seminal work was directed by André Lepecki and presented as a part of the PERFORMA07 Biennial of New Visual Art Performance.

According to the PERFORMA website:

18 Happenings in 6 Parts was first performed in the Fall of 1959, at the Reuben Gallery in New York City. After a few performances, it was never shown again. Today, it is considered one of the major turning points in the history of performance and visual arts. In 2006, a few weeks before his death, Kaprow authorized a re-doing of the piece based on the dozens of original pages of music and movement scores, notes, drawings, writings, and drafts he had created in the summer and fall of 1959. The re-doing was presented on the occasion of a major exhibition of Kaprow's work at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in the Fall of 2006.

I was excited to go see an attempt to resurrect a bit of performance art history. I have always felt a bit befuddled by the photos of this event and wasn’t too concerned about possible misrepresentation of the original. The program makes pains to clarify that this is not an attempt to display a relic of the past but more to find fresh inspiration from the idea and notes. This redo’s follows the series of redo of seminal performance works as reconceived by Marina Abramovich at the last PERFORMA biennial in 2006.

I get the sense there is a desire in both the performance historians and the remaining living artists of that era to claim their historic stake in the art history books with these redo’s. There also seems to be some audience education going on here. And of course it brings up the issue of liveness and documentation and their relationship for continued discussion.

I am fond of the redo idea. The redo’s shouldn’t be confused with the original nor do I believe a work like I saw last night really stands very profoundly on its own without the knowledge of its historical precedent. I believe there is something special to the liveness of a performance and documentation doesn’t capture it, it just creates something else. Getting to spend sometime with this living history is how performance is perhaps best retained.

Anyway, the walk to Dietch Studios last night allowed us to enjoy a magnificent nighttime view of the Manhattan cityscape. Once we found the space we were handed a page of program notes and instructions which told us where to sit and when. The staff made great pains to make sure cell phones were off and to be clear about the requirement to remain in the performance space for the duration of the performance. I liked that clarity and after entering, hearing the door close behind us and feeling shut in and committed to the event.

I was assigned room one for the first two sections, room two for sections three and four and then put back in room one for the last two sections. There were three rooms total and I decided to go where they asked me. Some folks sat were they liked, I don’t think it changed much.

There were three rooms along a hallway that had been created by wooden frames covered with see-through plastic sheeting. There were old fashion light bulbs lining the top edges of the walls that provided some illumination. It was a mostly a bright space. There were a few additional decorative elements and props used during the show.

The performances were mostly simple movements, choppy text blurbs, sound cacophonies and actions. They played games, showed some slides of some sort, and stood stiffly.

The most sensory impact came from the smells…there was a section when a performer lit and extinguished a number of matches and then sprayed some kind of bathroom cleaning foam on the section of plastic which put a sulfur and cleaner smell in the air. Later fresh squeezed orange juice aromas mixed with the smell of paint as one performer juiced and drank juice and two others painted a canvas.

I surprised how much the style and presence of the performers stood out in the piece. In general the performance was hyper-rational, calculated and stiff, for instance the performers moved around the space with artificially straight walks and only turned sharp 90-degree turns, and so the human qualities of the piece stood out. I wondered how this piece would have changed if instead of stylish young New Yorkers, a cast of country folk from Kentucky or a suburban family from Seattle had played out the actions.

The bell that marked the sections was the loudest and most disturbing thing.

I wondered if anyone who came had seen the original Happenings. I looked for old people in the crowd.

The events unfolded and there was a full 15-minute break twice between sections that created a lot of time for chatting.

I also was aware of being in a room with some of the piece but not the entire piece. I could hear and see bits of what went on elsewhere but the architecture isolated me.

In a section when text was read to me I found myself listening not so much for myself but for the performer’s sake like you might listen to a friend who is trying to get something off there chest. I found that shift interesting, though I don’t know what triggered it.

I find myself listing these fragments of my experience and leaving a bit of detail out, as that was my experience, partial. I left with a sense of ok-ness at the end, feeling satisfied and good but in no way moved. Perhaps the piece was too rational for that. I had some nice social interactions during the breaks with my friends and people I met there, which was defiantly a part of the experience.

I have no idea how you could have captured this performance in a photo.

First impression of PERFORMA07 in NYC.

Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci performance at the Clocktower Gallery was my first PERFORMA07 event. I thought I would toss out some first impressions because in my mind I am as curious on the quality and viability of PERFORMA as a sustainable organization as much as the performances it presents.

Here is a description of the PERFORMA biennial in their own words:

Two years ago, PERFORMA established a new biennial for New York City. With its vast array of new performance by visual artists from around the world, it served to contextualize such cutting edge material and at the same time to build an exciting community of artists and audiences, and a strong basis for educational initiatives as well. The biennial underlined the important influence of artists performance in the history of twentieth century art, and its ongoing significance in the early years of the 21st.

What is at stake to my mind his whether contemporary performance can find and hold more of place with the an audience in the United States, whether it can invigorate and inform the performance artists in the U.S. and maybe bring more of an international performance dialogue stateside. There is certainly a much more supportive atmosphere for performance on both the governmental and audience level overseas. And it is certainly difficult for a performance festival to survive in the United State. This biennial, with the star-power, money and whatnot behind it is the best top down chance for an advance I imagine right now.

I think it is important not to just compare PERFORMA’s offering to what is just going on in New York. It is LA, Chicago, and so on were the trickle down influence of a successful PERORMA will have the most important influence. I saw the first PERFORMA in 2005 influence programming at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago which followed the redo’s of the first biennial with a symposium in Chicago on the concept of the redo.

Anyhoo…

There was this sales pitch that I heard repeated by staff and volunteers: that PERFORMA07 was giving us access into a number of building that we otherwise no be able to enter. I didn’t buy the pitch last night as the as the building seemed unremarkable and made me feel like PERFORMA must be struggling for acceptance based on its core product. The morning’s rooftop performance by Christian Jankowski is in his studio and seems more relevant to that train of thought but I wonder if it is really representative of the whole festival, last nights Marie Cool seemed more like marginalization and the product of a tight budget as it was in a space that PS1 now seems to use for internal programs.

I was unable to attend more than one thing yesterday because events are spaced a good deal apart in the city. This format is feels like a product of economics of putting on this festival more than a conceptual decision. Maybe there would need to be more contextual writing paired with the festival to convince me on this point.

The volunteers and staff were unprepared to house manage the Marie Cool performance but generally friendly and happy to have an audience there.

The PERFORMA07 program/calendar is awfully difficult, vague and confusing. I am finding different prices listed for shows from different sources, unclear show times/lengths, and rather bland descriptions. There website is also difficult to navigate and if you download a PFD of the schedule you find they have reduced it to a one page size which make all the information too small to read if you print it.

The Performance Studies international conference is paralleling PERFORMA this year which it great but I can’t afford it. There are some great free talks on the schedule though. I would hope for a bit more public conversation to digest the content of the festivals.

I am curious if their attempts to create late-night hotspots at different bars will work and actually become interesting locations for discussion. Usually these types get together things seem too be to artificial or subject to vagaries of location and trend to succeed. I suppose it depends if the artists, smart folks and so on actually get interested in participating. I suppose if Rose Lee shows up and holds court and raises some questions it might get interesting. As someone visiting the city and generally an outside on whatever scene exists around PERFORMA I don’t particularly feel I could just show up and get much out of it.

The NYTimes has a blog covering PERFORMA07. So far I have enjoyed Claudia La Rocco breezy commentary though it is brief. The NYTimes seems to be making an effort to do write-ups on the shows.

I hear mixed things about PERFORMA for others. Lots of people I tell about the shows have no idea the biennial is going on.

So to wrap up the biennial seems like it has decent content and a generally friendly atmosphere but their organizational stuff seems like a mess and I hope they are able to get it together and hang in there.

Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci @ PERFORMA 07, Clocktower Gallery, NYC

Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci presented “Untitled (Prayers) – 1996-2007” at the Clocktower Building in Manhattan last night as a part of the PERFORMA07 Biennial of New Visual Art Performance.

This two-hour performance consisted of minimalist gestures using common objects (like tape, a pencil, or a CD in a CD sleeve) presented in progression by Marie Cool in a white walled space. That is to say the performance was a display of lovely physical/mental presence, elegant conceptual gestures, and gentle audience communion.

The audience was encouraged to stay in the center of the room on a grey, carpeted platform while the gestures were performed along the walls. The audience had to shift positions continuously to keep the actions in view.

When Marie Cool took a moment to stand still and reset between gestures it would subtly indicate a space for her next activity and allow the audience time to shift. At first the audience was a packed, hungry mass but as the performance went on and the gestures began to recycle, the crowd thinned, the New York Times photographer left and the audience spent more time quietly sitting and musing rather than just watching.

Marie Cool, a “French choreographer”, brought a quiet, mindful and trained physical presence to the gestures of the performance. Her presence sold many of the gestures and maintained the overall atmosphere of serious matter-of-factness. She was a slight, middle-aged woman that stood shorter than most of the audience.

Fabio Balducci, an “Italian Artist”, stepped in at the end of the piece to declare it finished but his role beyond that was unclear. I assume he help devise the gestures, provided an outside eye and helped decide which of the seventy-action their collaboration has produced would be presented on this evening.

In retrospect, the title is a good one. “Untitled”…perhaps non-rational, unnamed, unpossessed certainly indicated the orientation of a spiritual practice as one of feeling more than knowing as displayed in the work. The bracketed “(Prayers)” could suggest a concession that despite the best intentions we still know the names, or perhaps there is a boundary between the named and the unnamed and that is the space this performance dwells. The clue that this is the product of more than a decade of work “1996-2007” foreshadows a set of values that cherishes the integrity and depth that emerges from persistent effort.

The Clocktower Gallery was one of the original spaces of PS1, or so I was told by a volunteer at the show, and has been closed to the public since 9/11. The floor we were on seemed to house a number of internal PS1 programs including the wps1.org online radio station. I mention this because the space was more or less indifferent to the performance in my mind. The room we were in was white, neither pristine nor grungy, and big enough to receive the 40 or so people that were there. It was a reasonably neutral space perhaps available on the cheap to the organizers.

I didn’t get a huge iconographic read from the piece. There was defiantly opposing forces at play in most of the gestures. One contrasted of the rubbing of the performer’s feet in some fresh branched and the drawing a straight line in pencil, kind of a nature vs. the mind kind of thing. There was also a moment when she was surrounded in a plastic bubble that was somewhat embryonic. But in the end I didn’t come away with much of this kind of content.

Good performance is novel, inclusive, relevant, and present. The strength of this piece lied with the presence and integrity of the performance. The novelty was located more with the surprises of particular gestures than with any overarching concept or form that I could identify. The gentleness of the piece was inviting and the audience placement was inclusive in a sufficiently satisfying way. Whether this piece especially relevant is a question that I am the most ambivalent about as I write.

There were a number of clever gestures performed using simple objects of neutral and translucent qualities. I felt directed by the actions towards subtle points of contact, barriers and sensations. The repetition of these gestures eventually deadened the novelty and seemed to either drive the audience away or turn the remaining viewers into a calmer, more internal space. It sort of purified the crowd of gawkers and left a bunch of viewers who were willing to do the work of being patient with the artist.

A few of my favorites gestures…

*An almost stage-magic sort of trick was performed several time where she held a length of floss/thread (which was invisible to us in the audience) vertically, lit one end near the floor and lowered the other end at the same rate the fire burned to create the illusion of a flame that just hovered above the ground.

*A length of transparent tape was stretched tautly across the room at a height which made the artist had to reach up for contact. The artist would traverse this part of the room by running her fingers along the sticky side of the tape, the adhesive caused her fingers to stutter as they were dragged across the tape creating a particular sound and making me very aware of the point of contact and the tackiness of the surface.

*A row of folded paper was laid across one side of the floor with half the paper standing up. As she walked by, the papers would gently flutter in the wake of the air she displaced.

*She applied some mild adhesive or bit of moisture to the palms of her hands, enough to allow some rice (or something, I couldn’t see it) to adhere to he palms. She held her arms out to her sides, palms down, and used gentle hand movements free the bits. They fell onto two sheets of paper laid on the floor. It made a sound like rain; she was raining out of her palms.

When I think about the relevance of a piece of performance, I think of how well it speaks to some issue or is installed (whether physically, emotionally, conceptually or spiritually) within some contextual framework. I took this piece within the context of the festival more than the space it was presented within (though the shape of the room was used well, particularly the space the objects were given and how the audience was placed, moved and massaged). This festival, being basically themeless beyond the common medium, becomes more of a showcase of work and this piece a representative offering of a certain mindfulness tract within performance that has lingered since the early days of performance art.

This kind of display of presence is a timeless experience though and still central to the kinds of work produced in many dance and theater communities so I liked seeing it placed in this context of “visual art performance”. The minimalist conceptualism of this piece seemed a like a thread from the Seventies, which I still get excited about but I wonder how relevant it is to most folks now-a-days.

In the context of a “prayer” theme, I could see a need in people to find relief from the tensions of our time but it seem like a cyclical rather than striking issue.

I also should mention while considering the context of the piece that the folks managing the room were a bit of an annoyance at times, they were unclear and inconsistent in communicating the boundaries they were enforcing in the space…originally telling people to stay in the center and then when that obviously wasn’t working retreating to randomly telling people not to go to the certain areas near the objects and walls. Certainly they want to protect the delicate and often nearly invisible objects in the room but it seems like the circumstances put them into a position were they became insensitive to the growing dynamic between the audience and the artist.

The person I attended the show with was a part of a moment when the crowd naturally parted to create an aisle for the artist to walk across the room but this placed several people in a spot that caused them to be awkwardly shooed.

It is also perhaps a mistake to not to tell the staff to dress in a way that supports the presentation of the performance. Loud, clunky boots are not so appropriate on the feet of support staff if they are going to be moving around a space that is supposed to be quiet while they carry out their duties.

Managing a quiet and flowing piece like this isn’t easy, but, by being inconsistent and unprepared, the management were not able to support this particular performance by matching the integrity of preparation. This is important.

The work and effort of mindfulness that is presented gives us, as audience, support staff, institution, press, etc., the chance to meet the performance with are own integrity and effort, which is a rare opportunity. Certainly some people will choose to leave, and that is a relevant choice because it is the freedom to choose to stay or go that give the choice its power. What is disappointing is to fail take advantage of the chance to match the effort and integrity of a performance like this by not striving to be as prepared as possible.

I think the length of the piece is the last thing that I should mention. The choice to recycle a small set of gestures throughout the two hours seems significant, when the program clearly indicates that they have plenty of material to fill the time with novel stuff if they preferred. As I mentioned above, this repetition scraped the novelty off the gestures, thinned the crowd, and took the spectacle out of the piece by the second hour.

My guess is this points to the moment as you experienced it, both entertaining and not, both pleasant and not. This is typical of meditative practices of many sorts that you could compare to the evening’s effort.

Despite the bad reputation of ugly, annoying performance art that goes too long, it is the length of this piece in this case that transformed the experience and made it less a spectacle and more like a reveal of the experience of life. A subtle magic trick and one that is perhaps a point of relevancy that makes this piece endlessly appropriate.

Erik

Wooster Group “Hamlet” @ the Public Theater, NYC

It has been several years since I last witnessed a Wooster Group performance, “Poor Theater” at the Performance Garage, which was a show that exploded my being with joy. So I approached last night’s “Hamlet” at New York’s Public Theater a bit of wary of expecting too much. And I did enjoy this take on “Hamlet” but without the ecstasy, it is probably good to have “Poor Theater” out of my system.

I should say first that the Wooster Group is not simply presenting the Bard’s script of “Hamlet” but taking its primary source material from a film version of a 1964 Broadway production of “Hamlet”, starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud. According to the program notes the film was shot from a live performance using 17 camera angles, was edited into a film and then shown for two days in 2000 movie theaters in the US in an attempt to bring theater to the masses. An additional technical note in the program offers a clue into the production, and apparent starting point for their development process…the film was digitally reedited to take the lines of verse “which were spoken freely in the 1964 production” and put them back into iambic pentameter.

This edited version of the film is presented upstage throughout the performance and introduces a choppy, slipping rhythm to the Wooster Group’s production that the actors mimic via a number of onstage reference monitors. The video image is also overlaid with many textural filters that imitate VCR artifacts, give it additional coloration to scenes and reference the medium and language of editing…even as literally as to throw up sections of video that read “unrendered”.

The key point to this production and a distinctive quality of the Wooster Group in general is this attempt have the live performance to mirror the video source material with affected human slippage mixed in for good measure. The actors twitch and rewind as they cross the stage and deliver their lines and even the set is mobile, scooting on wheels to match changing perspectives as the video cuts to a different camera angle. The actors are caught in a web of competing and live demands on their activities as they present the text of the play while also staying close to the video version that is pacing them.

Video cameras on stage also capture the actor’s gestures and remix them into the video strata of the presentation, mostly featuring them on two smaller screens near the wings. It is this video stratum where this performance metaphysically descends and to which characters of the play transcend in death.

Now here is my macro read of things: Wooster Group seems concerned with this cultural moment as defined by experience immersed within electronic media. I imagine a Wooster Group conception of the history of storytelling which progresses from an oral tradition – to a script-based tradition – to one that includes process based/physical research – to now a tradition of performance which is based in electronic media and a mixture of what has come before. If my fancy has any truth to it then Wooster Group choice of doing Hamlet is an interesting one.

By presenting these performances that are sourced in a script, a rehearsal process, and a video record like this archival “Hamlet” the first thing that is in constant flux is the authenticity of the play because the truth is not simply one of these sources but the attempt to juggle all of them. The moments that where the most enthralling in “Poor Theater”, which used a similar conceptual approach to media, were when an actor dynamically found a meaningful place among the various truths sourced in the play.

This “Hamlet” is conceptually interesting to me as it is a weighty play that is known for its struggle around themes of death and being while also containing a notoriously complex and challenging lead role.

Hamlet as a character is neatly reimagined here as not just a psychologically conflicted prince who must struggle with revenging his father’s murder but a character portrayed by an actor attempting to juggle the various media of his environment, while delivering his role and so on.

Also there is the layer of “Hamlet” the play, which is burdened by it significance in the theatrical cannon and the many previous productions not unlike we think of the Mona Lisa today not just as a painting but as a mass produced icon. And like Andy Warhol’s and others commentary on the Mona Lisa, “Hamlet” the play is taken on as whole here also immersed in the tension of a variety of representations and interpretations.

Then there is thematics of death and being which have a unique life in this production as the supernatural world of the undead is all within the media. Hamlets father appears to us by via video. When a character dies they reappear in the video, displaced and disembodied. After the final bloody deaths of the climax the whole production ends in dissolution of static. Throughout the play we are also haunted by the specters of the Broadway production which contain and restrain the actions on the stage, not unlike Hamlet must struggle with the his own history, a death defines not just ones own life but the lives of ones loved ones.

This is all fun but clear to me early on in the evening. As I looked for more I didn’t really find it. My friend suggested that usually Wooster Group uses more varied source material so there just isn’t as much to play off of in this show, which I thought was a feasible comment. If you read the NYTimes review I think you’ll find Ben Brantley got a lot more involved with the source play and the visual effects that were applied to the video, which I found fun, relevant to the pacing of the show but ornamental in themselves.

There are also occasional digressions into other film “Hamlets” including the Kenneth Branagh and a version featuring Bill Murray as Polonius. I also might mention here that this was the first time that I have seen an actor evoke a Mel Gibson-ish delivery…Scott Shepherd was very thorough in his research and includes many Hamlets in his delivery.

I felt that the place where I felt the most let down was in the delivery of the language. The exception being Ari Fliakos’ Claudius is powerfully delivered both physically and vocally, Kate Valk’s Gertrude was rich but her Ophelia was vocally strangely thin and detached, Scott Shepard’s Hamlet was physically sharp but vocally seemed to be smothered at times by the media. To this relationship of the media audio on stage: I think the audio was intended to magnify and be mixed with the live actors so there was some sense of emotional power resonating from the past, but it was a mixed bag. There were certainly times when it was like the performance had a whole voice and there were time it was indistinct or some little audio gag was thrown in that seemed irrelevant.

Unfortunately, beyond the three mentioned above, the rest of the cast didn’t speak in a way that really brought the language alive to me and often stood there dead on their feet. I don’t know what Casey Spooner was doing there or why they inserted his disconnected little vocal interludes. If this were mainstream media I would think that some marketing person was trying to appeal to the younger crowd but since this is “…America’s foremost experimental theater company” I won’t push the Jar-Jar Binks comparisons and chalk it up them sticking to some devising process or another.

Odds and ends: I haven’t seen or read “Hamlet” is sometime so I suspect there might be some more intricate textual stuff that I may have missed. I also wasn’t always clear why they glossed over some scenes. I missed the gravedigger scene and felt like the play took a really rough tack on Polonius for some odd reason. The harsh audio used to return from intermission was cocky and fun. The nurse and Polonius’s walker choreography was some of my favorite stage business, as was how Hamlet removes Polonious’ dead body.

So to wrap up, I came away from “Hamlet” with broader interpretive responses having to do with what I suspect is the Wooster Groups relationship to their performance medium and our cultural times more so than say more personal or insights into the characters or personal emotional resonance. Certainly the Wooster Group’s reconsideration of the Shakespearian staple is full of fun physicality and similarly smart in how it uses the play as a whole to comment on performance but it rarely touched me, it didn’t live up to the vocal demands of the play, nor was I able to pick up on additional commentary on the apparent themes of the play within the actual interplay of the characters. It left me with none of the musty Shakespearian aftertaste that comes from a straight production.

e