Performa 2011: Live Wires
Ming Wong Persona Performa 2011 Courtesy of Performa / photo Paula Court
Performa, New York’s fledgling performance-art biennial, has quickly become vast, busy and bewildering, not unlike the city that hosts it. This year’s edition, the event’s fourth turn, took place over three weeks in November, with more than 100 artists doing work in collaboration with more than 25 curators and at least 40 arts organizations. That may not sound like much compared to other international biennials, but with the wide range of venues, and the demanding nature of much contemporary performance art—notably an ever-increasing commitment to durational work—the festival can easily overwhelm and, indeed, might be accused of over-programming.
It is necessary, then, to choose one’s own Performa. My main picks, based entirely on taste—Ming Wong’s Persona Performa, Guy Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed and Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss—seemed, however, to speak to greater trends within the event. Everywhere at Performa, artists were looking backward. Elmgreen and Dragset’s opening-night work was Happy Days in the Art World, a take on Samuel Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days. Archival exhibitions and events, including at the festival’s SoHo “hub,” explored the trajectories of the Russian avant-garde and Fluxus. Jonathan VanDyke’s (intentionally?) hilarious Lower East Side durational melodrama With One Hand Between Us referenced Fassbinder and the abstract expressionists. Guido van der Werve staged a 30-mile run north of the city to Rachmaninov’s grave, to which anyone was invited, provided they were in marathon shape and brought a bunch of chamomile flowers. One could go on and on. There was no official theme, but “hauntings” or “revisitations” might as well have been it.
To some, this may be proof that performance art is in a bit of a conceptual mire, endlessly fixated on (oftentimes obscure) re-enactment and reference. That was certainly the impression given by Ming Wong, whose work straddles film and performance art, typically involving identity-play restagings of classic art-house cinema. (Canadians might be familiar with his work through the Toronto International Film Festival’s Future Projections program, which last year hosted his video deconstructions of Wong Kar-wai and Fassbinder.)
The rather unfortunately titled Persona Performa was Wong’s version of the iconic Bergman film: an ostensibly momentous commission for the artist, who was given a significant amount of space at the beautiful Museum of the Moving Image building in Astoria. The evening unfolded in parts, beginning with three projection-based pieces in the museum, and proceeding with performances in the café/lobby and main theatre respectively. Twenty-four actors and dancers from various New York neighbourhoods, and of differing genders and ethnicities, participated. In the first part, black-and-white fragments of their faces were overlapped on film and video using various editing tricks—an obvious gesture towards the aesthetic of Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist. The café/lobby’s piece showed the rugged landscape of Faro Island in Sweden, where Bergman shot Persona. Strangely, a performer dressed as Death from another Bergman film, The Seventh Seal, loomed and paced in shadowed profile across this landscape.
Ensuing performances were introduced by a kid with a Queens accent; he claimed to be Bergman wanting to show us his famous film. The actors and dancers then emerged, all in drag as Liv Ullmann’s character, an actress who loses her ability to speak and retreats to Faro with her nurse, where the two soon become engaged in psychological warfare. A subsequent series of dance and speech pieces (Wong’s tinkering is often dialect- and language-driven) seemed intent on replicating this sadomasochistic pas de deux.
| |
|
Ming Wong Persona Performa 2011 Courtesy of Performa / photo Paula Court |
But what of it? A woman sitting beside me during one of the performances loud-whispered to her husband the same question, whereupon he told her and she replied, “So, the same thing as the film, then.” Indeed, Wong’s addition of a multi-ethnic and -gendered cast couldn’t have shed new light on Persona, one of the great modern statements on the absolute slipperiness of identity and expression. Wong’s decision to have a boy play Bergman, and then to have his Death from The Seventh Seal act as an aged analogue, came off as cheap camp. New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl’s barb about Richard Prince’s redux of de Kooning springs to mind: “An adept of juvenile sarcasm… is well advised not to invite comparisons with grown-ups.” Wong’s Persona Performa merely stood as proof of how remote a high-water mark Persona, only 45 years old, now is. It seems unthinkable that any artist working today could create something so formally succinct, and yet so utterly unique and universal.
| |
|
Ragnar Kjartansson Bliss 2011 Courtesy of Performa / photo Paula Court |
In this context, Bliss by Ragnar Kjartansson—winner of Performa’s inaugural $10,000 Malcolm Award—was honestly defeatist, sparkling with an absurdism more intelligent and less troubled than Wong’s. The Icelandic Kjartansson, who, along with Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir and Davíð Þór Jónsson, just finished leading an artist residency at the Banff Centre, finds inspiration in the European baroque and romantic movements. His performances can be durational, as was the case with Bliss, a continuously repeated, noon-to-midnight performance of the two-and-a-half-minute aria at the end of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, complete with a full cast and period sets and dress. (Kjartansson himself was a member of the cast.) A stunt to be sure, Bliss nonetheless underscored the magical artifice of opera and of the marriage plot, and then the very human labour behind them. I visited twice: once at the start, where the singers, including tenor Kristján Jóhannsson, seemed giddy about their collective task, and then around 3pm, when the production was just beginning to show its seams. At that last glimpse, Bliss may have been on the verge of turning into No Exit, but the singers shared tidbits of food and drink, and swapped roles, in a still-loving display of camaraderie. Opera singers are legendary stalwarts (did Kjartansson have them wearing diapers?), and Bliss became a symbol for their commitment to a centuries-old art form and thus, movingly, for the custodianship of culture over time.
| |
|
Guy Maddin Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed 2011 Courtesy of Performa / photo Paula Court |
Icelanders were also in fine form for a retooled performance of the Winnipeg-born Guy Maddin’s 1988 cult classic Tales from the Gimli Hospital at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater last Friday, the first solo Performa commission from a film director. Done in the style of Maddin’s recent live performances of his Brand Upon the Brain!, with foley artists and idiosyncratic narration—here, by Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, former member of the band múm, who also co-composed a new score—the results were breathtaking. Maddin’s typically self-effacing introduction, during which he ridiculed Canada for being “horrible at self-mythologizing” and basically described Gimli Hospital as a dusty curio, did nothing to prepare the audience for how utterly fresh the film—with or without the new sequencing and footage he had added—remains. Maddin’s hyper-eclectic vision from over 20 years ago, so reverent of silent film and melodrama, bears little to no traces of the time in which it was made; its references are so personal, so idiosyncratic, as to be divorced from the proverbial anxiety of influence, and, indeed, from temporal constraints entirely.
| |
|
Guy Maddin Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed 2011 Courtesy of Performa / photo Paula Court |
This is part of a series of postings by assistant editor David Balzer, who is in New York for the fall season. For earlier articles in this series, continue reading here, here and here.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
