A Prelude
That, a fair is about selling and buying and sellers and
buyers is not a mystery. That fairs have
also turned into a point of convergence for fun, socializing, exploring and
eye-warming window shopping however may create a sense that there may be another motive behind it. Yet I believe , that the purpose and guiding
principles remains deeply ingrained in the buying-selling, even if they may
create a feel of being otherwise. I write
this not with any sense of judgment but
rather a reminder to myself (and to other similarly naive beings) who tend to
get lost and carried away by the scale and grandness of things, which quite
often is designed to do that by triggering awe and sway people off their feet
into believing in the necessity of whatever that is.
Art Basel is certainly a grand fair in the art world with a mix
of everything, for almost everyone who has
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| The Signboards |
anything to do with arts. This year (2014) the fair has a new
exhibition, ‘14 Rooms’, curated by two
well known curators Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The ‘14
Rooms’ (an evolution from the 11 Rooms at Manchester International
Festival in 2011) featured at Art Basel for the first time as a grand new
entity that seem to rest on the rise and the commercialization potential of
performance arts.
A room each is assigned to fourteen artists from the art
world that seemed confined to North America, South America and Europe, but for
one artist from China. Prominent, shiny signboards placed all around
Art Basel venues yelled out the star cast: Marina Abramovic, Allora &
Calzadilla, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Damien Hirst, Joan Jonas,
Laura Lima, Bruce Nauman, Otobong Nkanga, Roman Ondak, Yoko Ono, Tino Sehgal,
Santiago Sierra, Xu Zhen. Beside these,
there were two more – John Baldessari and Jordan Wolfson.
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| The press and invitees at the 14 Rooms preview |
A rectangular structure, constructed in the middle of a huge
exhibition hall at the Messeplatz, had seven cubical rooms on either side and a
large space in between for visitors to wander around and ponder. The wall, infront of the entrance to 14
Rooms, within the larger confine of exhibition hall, displays the archive of an
idea proposed by John Baldessari in 1970 - to exhibit a cadaver as an art
work. Alongside are the emails written in
2010 - an attempt to realize the proposal for the 11 Rooms at Manchester
International Festival. The emails were
a back and forth communication between multiple agencies to explore the
ethical, medical and legal possibilities of the venture. With this unrealized proposal on death as a
prelude, one enters the 14 Rooms hall.
The mirrored doors, that one pulls open to enter each of the 14 rooms, reflect
our own image as we approach this world of performances in rooms.
The Performances / Works
If art is about raising questions, beside selling and
buying, 14 Rooms does that in multiple ways.
There are questions that the works trigger and questions that 14 Rooms
raise as a concept itself. What is a
performance? What is it’s origin? What is the ‘medium’ of a performance - the
body or any and everything else except for the body? If the medium is the body, then whose body -
the artist’s, who conceptualized it or another person’s, who ‘copies’ the
act? Can a ‘copy’ of performance provide
the same meaning?
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| Outside Marina's room |
Marina Abramovic performed ‘Luminosity’ in 1979, where she
sat on a bicycle seat jutting out from a wall at a height, legs outstretched
and spread apart, feet supported by two planks on the wall below while her
outstretched arms move up and down sideways, like a bird flying in slow
motion. A beam of projected white light
creates a rectangular frame around her making it look like a painting plastered
to, yet jutting out from, the wall. The
audience has to look upwards as she positioned herself about five feet or so
above the ground level. 14 Rooms,
replicates it exactly except that the artist herself is not present. Instead three performers do it in rotation. Bruce Nauman’s ‘Floor-Wall Positions, a set
of 28 body positions where the artist remains in touch with both the wall and the floor simultaneously, was performed
by him 1968. Joan Joanas did her ‘Mirror
Check’, in which she examines her naked body through a small mirror, in
1970s. In 2014, a set of hired performers
enact these pieces at 14 Rooms.
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| Diaspore - Otobang Nkanga |
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| Performer lies suspended in Xu Zhen's Room |
Ed Atkin’s ‘No One is More Work Than Me’ had a graphically
generated talking head displayed on a flat screen, continuously trying to
‘sell’ his presence while a masked performer sits next to the screen trying to
engage, interact and at times disengage with it. Otobang Nkanga’s ‘Diaspore’, a progression
from her earlier work, had upto three performers (all of African origin) on a
floor designed to look like a topographical map, holding a potted ‘queen of the
night’ plant on their head or shoulders while singing or talking to it with
numerous references to uprooting, longing and resilience among others. Roman Ondak’s ‘Swap’ began with a performer
bringing a single item into the room to engage the audience in a swap. The process of swapping continues till the
last day leading to multiple swaps and interactions that occur during the
process. ‘In the blink of an eye’ by Xu
Zhen features a performer fixed in an almost impossible posture with the entire
body bent backwards from the knee as if suspended against gravity. All these pieces - seven of them - use the
‘body as a medium’ and some were even performed earlier by the artist
him/herself. Yet at 14 Rooms the artist remained
absent from 3.5 meters high, 5*5 meter rooms, designed by the celebrated
architects Herzog and De Meuron.
The
question that emerges therefore is ‘who’ is engaging the audience and with ‘what’? Is performance about a connect between the
artist, through his / her body, with the audience (as suggested during the infant
days of this still young child to segregate it from the other more defined
performance acts)? Or is it about
creating a ‘concept and storyline’ (as in advertising or film world) and have
others perform it, even when the work could be performed by the artist? Is this the influence of the theatre or the
film industry where one creates products, as also in the more established
and establishment-oriented visual arts? With Marina particularly, this approach becomes
somewhat ironical in view of her earlier work ‘The artist is present’ and even
more so when one reads here recent interview (published on May 12, 2014 in the
Guardian), where she re-asserts, “The medium is the body”.
The ‘Body and Performance Art’ connect has been a given since
performance began to emerge in the West as a ‘new’ and ‘different’ art form in
the art arena. 14 Rooms is certainly
about ‘bodies’ but not of the artists whose works are featured and whose names
shine prominently on all ads and displays.
The confusion continues in the catalogue that instructs, pre-warns and
informs one what to expect. The foreword
by Sam Keller (Director Fondation Beyeler), Marc Spiegler (Director Art Basel)
and Georges Delnon (Director Theatre Basel) ends with a note of thanks to the
visitors for “transforming the instructions of the fourteen artists into a
milestone moment in the history of performance art.” The very next write up, ‘Curators in
Conversation’ (with a reference to the 13 Rooms at Sydney in 2013) mentions, “It’s not called 13
Performances because it is not thirteen performances. It’s not called 13 Artists because that would
be irritating. It’s not called 13
Sculptures because that could be misunderstood.
Instead it’s called 13 Rooms”.
The curators further elaborate on their intent of creating an exhibition
that is replicable and can be reproduced later by any other curator and set of
performers. They bring in an analogy to
music notations that allow classical music pieces to be reproduced and
re-performed. Thus their conscious decision
of having “always a human being or more than one person, but not the artist
him- or herself.”
That should lay to rest the expectation of the artist being
present at the 14 Rooms even if they are still alive and kicking. The curators’ vision also makes sense of the other
set of rooms, some of whom have no performers at all and some with more than
one.
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| Large queues recurred outside this room |
Yoko Ono’s ‘Touch’ was a pitch dark room where one could see
nothing. Visitors often ‘touched’
another person accidentally or felt the walls.
She succeeds in taking away the visual sense and force the visitor to shift
to other senses, in her quest of addressing the question of touch as a taboo in
the society. Gonzalez
Dominique-Foerster’s room with an instruction etched on the mirrored door
‘enter one by one .wait’ triggered much curiosity and expectation of an
encounter with the unknown. No wonder
there were huge queues at this door.
Inside, the room had a carpet and a small mirror hanging on the wall
where you see yourself as you turn around to face it. With nothing more there, one tries to exit
the room only to realize that it can not be opened from inside. The visitor must seek another person’s
intervention to unlock the door from outside and escape their own presence,
unsure of who performed what.
Damien Hirst had look alike twins performing similarly
choreographed actions under two dot paintings of his. At the first look both paintings appear
similar, just like the twins. A closer
inspection reveals different colored dots and sequences in each, just like the
twins exhibited differences every once in a while. Allora and Calzadilla’s Revolving Door is
designed to involve about 10 performers
at any given time, moving like a revolving door in pre-choreographed
sequences. The audience could enter and
interact with the various patterns of the door, some which allowed the visitor
to pass through while the ‘barricade’ piece forced anyone in the way to move
along. Laura Lima’s ‘Man=flesh /
Woman=flesh’ required a person with physical disability to lie inside a very
low roofed structure. The audience had
to bend or lie down on the floor to look inside. Santiago Sierra’s ‘Veterans of the Wars of
Eriteria, Kosovo and Togo’
had war veterans standing in a corner facing the wall. Tino Sehgal’s piece involved two gallerists competing to create a
sentence using one word at a time.
The conceptual framework of this set of works necessitates the
use of ‘other’ performers, in synch with the curators’ vision, where the artist
acts as a director or instructor. Together,
the collection pushes us to think about the associations that have been built
overtime around performance arts. Do we
need a more encompassing term like ‘live art’ or something else, to address these
time-based, experiential works? Is the
14 Rooms a challenge to the academia and critics, who label and tie concepts
within the frameworks of definitions that keep getting narrower in a supposed
search of an assumed ultimate truth?
Defining or Limiting?
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| Laura Lima's work |
Personally, I am very comfortable with the idea of ‘no
labels, just a flow’ or at best loose and overlapping labels, that can allow
one not only to breathe but stretch and jump
around too. The apprehension that
unless we define something properly it will not be academic enough, or may lead
to confusion, rests merely on our definition and understanding of confusion from
a seemingly market-based approach which actually allows a much larger
collateral damage to pass by unnoticed.
It is these narrow definitions that divide health care, which concerns
with a living human body, into numerous departments and specialties, each
focusing on tiny organs and parts of the
body, forgetting the being in its totality.
It is such definitions that segregate health, poverty and food in the
administrative departmental structures of governments. And it is precisely this approach of narrow
definitions that pitches art against science and so on and so forth needlessly, as if knowledge comes in man-defined compartments.
While labels tend to confine and frame thoughts, as well as
people, and condemn them to specific roles and visions, they are of some use to academicians; in furthering researches and encoding large processes and
events into shorter phrases or just a word.
They allow exchange of ideas and communication within the academic fraternity
much faster while maintaining a ‘we know more / better’ kind of sense too. In case of performance art, the child that is
yet to completely conform to norms and that continues to assert its identity as
a free-ish form, it seems to be that in-between kind of time of push and pull
before the animal gets tamed, claimed and framed by the institution in a
precise definition. It is that wild,
unpredictable and ephemeral nature which makes it an exciting form in the
present time. And the same properties
become a reason of discomfort for the establishment that struggles to find a
common ground to address and claim it.
The End or a Beginning?
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| Ed Atkin's piece |
Most of the works at the 14 Rooms, barring Ed Atkins’ and
Santiago Sierra’s, were reproductions or slightly evolved versions of previous performances
of the selected artists. Was it then mainly
a historical archive, and if so, of what, since the curators reject the term ‘performance’? Sifting through these questions, one walks
out of the 14 Rooms inner hall into the outer to find a fifteenth room, the
‘Epilogue’ as the curators suggest, pushing the boundaries even further to
reckon with the digital age.
Enter the room and a woman-like machine dances infront of a
mirror, with it’s back to you. What
apparently freaked out many visitors was that it looked them in the eye through
the reflection in the mirror. The
tete-a-tete with a human-like non-human by Jordan Wolfson makes one wonder what
next. Even the term ‘Live Art’ goes for
a toss now.
The show that began with thoughts of displaying the dead,
ends with a non-human dance. Certainly no other ‘label’ could have suited these
rooms more than ‘14 Rooms’ itself. What
remains circumspect though is the purpose of this exercise. Is it extending Art
as a practice or a mere entertainment for the crowds that could be encapsulated
in a more-evolved-circus than just a circus?
Art and artists (like any other knowledge domain or people who question) are known to challenge existing notions and evolve beyond
the given boundaries every now and then.
If nothing else, the 14 Rooms exhibition has certainly managed to trigger some amount of confusion. The ephemeral,
that has been considered a hallmark of Performance Art, and formed the essence
that posed a challenge to the market-driven art world, vanishes at the 14 Rooms
even from the works that were once labeled ‘Performance art’ and considered
ephemeral. Is the basic premise of 14
Rooms therefore resting on containing and packaging Performance or Live Art
into tangible products for the market that had long struggled to make sense of
it or is it really a push for its form to expand beyond the clutches of
conventions and definitions? I would
love to believe that the tilt is towards the later but then, is not a fair is about
buying and selling and buyers and sellers, ofcourse along with some fun and
entertainment too?
Parvez
(The writer was involved with photo and video documentation of the '14 Rooms Workshops' led by the Art Education Team of Beyeler Foundation. The workshops were held from June 16-20. The photo-documentation evolved into an exhibition of selected photographs at the same venue and ran from 17th - 22 June, 2014. The above article is a result of the same project )
(All material on this blog is copyrighted! Sharing of complete articles or their links, without editing, and with due credit, is allowed for non-commercial purposes only. For publication or any other use, please contact the author.)
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