ARTS After just three minutes in boiling water the pasta was ready, and after 10 it was gone, leaving behind it only a trace of olive oil at the bottom of a white bowl. Last Friday, lunch was not only free; it was also a performance, served up as one of the many “situations, happenings and events” that comprise the art performance biennial Performa, now in its third run. As the product of Marije Vogelzang’s “Pasta Sauna” neatly illustrated, the festival celebrates a medium that is by its nature ephemeral, and inclusive to the point of indefinable (the pasta was delicious).
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| Food chain: ‘Pasta Sauna’ |
Perhaps to illustrate the truth of this argument, Dutch “food-designer” Vogelzang had attempted to create an environment that was as soporific as possible: a “sauna” made with steam from large boiling saucepans. Sheets of pasta, squeezed thin in machines that doubled as music boxes (playing lullabies, of course) were operated by cooks dressed in white boiler suits. Diners certainly looked very warm, and just a little sceptical – although most were soon won over by the piece’s playful and participatory charm.
Vogelzang’s performance might remind audiences of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled 1992 (Free)”, re-enacted in 2007, in which the Buenos Aires-born Thai artist served free Thai curry out of the exhibition space. Grainy films, press cuttings and written documentation of this and other performances are on show in the PS1 gallery’s 100 Years (Version 2). Drawing the spirit of the originals from the past century of performance art can feel as testing as imagining a meal from an old menu, but this absorbing exhibition provides invaluable context for the month’s live offerings.
It was impossible, for instance, to watch Friday’s “Mother Earth Sister Moon”, by Polish artists Christian Tomaszewski and Joanna Malinowska, without thinking of the 1920s geometric costumes of Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances on display in PS1, or of the large installation of Rebecca Horn’s 1974 “Body Sculptures”, in which Horn extends her own hands with scissor fingers, her arms with wings and her head with a 10ft-tall hat that requires several people and lengths of rope to balance upright. “Mother Earth Sister Moon” explored how the future was imagined by the regimes of the former Soviet Bloc; the audience was invited to enter a giant female space suit (via a zip between the legs) before watching a fashion show of outfits that included an umbrella (worn over the head and shoulders, without holes for vision, opening and closing like a jellyfish) and what looked like a giant crochet table cloth. White, foamy space-drink (banana milkshake) was served by a woman dressed in white. It was a spectacle, even if it lacked the pasta sauna’s satisfying simplicity.
The PS1 exhibition also provided useful background to Tacita Dean’s new film, The Craneway Project, which screened in St Marks Church in-the-Bowery on Saturday. Merce Cunningham, who died in July, was a protégé of Martha Graham, several of whose dances are shown (on 1970s film) in PS1. The Craneway Project takes us through three days of rehearsal in which Cunningham, aged 90 and wheelchair-bound, watches over his dancers.
The film is almost impossibly beautiful, the hangar-like space of an old Ford motor factory in northern California acting as a reflective light-box in which dancers are transformed into willowy Giacometti silhouettes. In St Marks, the stained-glass windows glowing with light from the projector, Dean’s restrained insight into Cunningham’s world created an unusual sense of intimacy. When the dancers did their final run-through, there was no one to applaud the lonely performers but us, and so we did.
Dean is one of those female artists who – as Tracey Emin said earlier on Saturday – “just keeps coming and coming and coming”. Emin was talking about the (sex) lives of male and female artists, about her book of prose, Strangelove, and about herself: her body, her love of sex, her new position as poet-in-residence at GQ magazine. The British artist seems so used to turning her own life into art that she answered even the most direct questions (“Does size matter?”; “Have you ever gone out with a sex addict?”; “Are you a sex addict?”) with touching honesty.
When asked if the autobiographical aspect of her work was an illusion, Emin took a sip of wine and said: “None of it’s an illusion. It’s real. It’s in the gallery. It’s hanging on the wall.” But while reading her own “New York Diary”, her composure slipped. “Oh God,” she said, in the middle of a particularly graphic sex scene. “I really haven’t read this for a long time. I’ve embarrassed myself.”
On Monday night, South African artist William Kentridge gave a performance that began with a literary exploration of Gogol’s The Nose and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In “I am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine” (2008), Kentridge stands in front of a projection screen that resembles a smudged drawing pad, confidently delivering his engaging lecture – before another William Kentridge, of about the same size, projected on a screen behind him, steps into view, looking a little sheepish.
During his polished and high-tech performance, Kentridge spoke of “the division of the self”, “the terror of hierarchy”, “the completion of the world from the garments it gives us” – a little too much, perhaps, to fit into an hour’s monologue. But when he described smaller moments, such as that time at 2am when, in a hotel room, you can’t decide whether to go to bed, he spoke not only to his own projection but to a past generation of Futurists, and future audiences too: “Come on! Come on!” he cried. “Get out of bed! Let’s explore!”
To November 22
