Do you know Tino Sehgal? You know, the artist that doesn’t allow any pictures taken of his works? And doesn’t write any introduction, or artist statement? Or make written agreements with museums? That wants no material artifacts in his works?
Does it matter what the works are?
They are performative. More: they are performances. They are people doing things in exhibition spaces. They are things happening with people within an exhibition framework.
They could be happening to others (say, someone kissing). Or to you (say, someone talking with you).
You might never discover which part was the work. Yet somehow, you often do.

Once again: Does it matter what the works are? Once you experience something, what good is the analysis?
But we are pretty smart animals. We may experience, and still want to think about it. We may want to decide what we think, and if we will go to see this thing again or not. We may rework this experience in our mind until we decide, say, that this is just not enough. That a good ice-cream would have done the job. Or a meeting with a friend. Or both combined. Maybe in a museum. Maybe accompanied by a stranger, having a conversation about progress. The luxury of conversational art. Now isn’t that progressive.

Then again, what is wrong with living a series of perfectly good conversations put into a gentle, clean formal frame? Can’t we just accept this? What is it that makes one (me) so voracious?
Is it the fact I’ve never actually seen a Sehgal, done a Sehgal?
Isn’t the picture enough?
Or the reviews that seem to make a huge effort in taking the mimetic weight off the image and putting some of it on words?
Paradoxically, all the effort put into keeping it live seem to make us focus not on the thing, but on this very effort. Would Tino Sehgal be at the Guggenheim had he allowed taking pictures? So what exactly is the work, here? How come I feel it so clearly, if it’s all about presence? Or am I just feeling its double, its fake, the afterthought? But isn’t that crucial in experience? Doesn’t that re-constitute the experience once it is over? Can one re-construct something one did not experienced in the first place?
You would have to have been there. The most dreaded sentence in the world. What are we supposed to do with it? Take a hidden snapshot?

Tino Sehgal is on at the New York Guggenheim until March 10.

You know I don’t usually do this. But this party – Like the Virgins, at Ch?odna25 – was a work of art in its own right.
Imagine a Madonna-tribute event gone haywire. Gone insane. Gone absolutely wild, illogical, ending up deep into the night somewhere between Abba, death metal and improvised Polish hip-hop. With a stage that is only a stage as far as you want it to be one, with musicians changing all the time, most singers not knowing most of the lyrics, but making it somehow seem perfectly logical, and blasting our way into the night. Imagine a stage progressively invaded by members of the audience, imagine not being sure if you’re still part of the audience, or the fact that you’re singing your guts out with one foot on the stage and one of the several microphones extended towards you every once in a while make you part of the band already. Oh, that’s right: we’re all part of the band. And surprizingly enough (not so much if you realize how amazing were the musicians involved), it was the best thing that could have ever happened to the concept of tributes.
The pics were stolen from here.

This is not a review. And it will probably remain incomprehensible if you don’t at least read what the Wooster Group show is about. So you might want to start off with a positive review and/or a negative one.
(And, possibly, move to an insight into how they prepared it. And an insightful interview about the group. And an interview with Kate Valk.)

I had been waiting to see this for a long time. This is the group I always talk about during workshops and I have never seen act live. This particular show, well, could be an experimentum crucis of my (wavering) faith in theater as a live form of live art. I leave you with my transcribed raw notes from the show, and below, a couple of ideas.

Theater as reproduction
- of what?
of our reality
=> cinema (is our reality)

other way: reality reproduces art
body is our basic reality

body as choreography

BUT it’s first and foremost a SHOW

spaces of absence

The dance of the impotent body

to perform = to enact

puppets

retro

conventionality of movement

performance as video art or rather as
echo of image
=> afterimage

–

The action lies between the acts

–

Playing on the players like on instruments
The players accompany a great
video
Is that bad?

“They killed theater” (audience member, calmly)
(So many deaths of theater before)
Good Heavens,
if that be so,
if this is the thing,
I humbly thank you.

Musical work – when works.

Women have more problems with show formula- because of
more emotional roles?

2nd part much better – uses the new convention.
(but also ends up more conventional)
Hamlet – actor – manipulates the actors – logical gesture.
Strong
–
search for an
aesthetic experience
(e.g. songs)
showSHOWshowSPECTACLE

5 technicians operating video/sound/lights
–
Brilliant technical solutions – eg. moving screen in loop CCTV.

Warping time/space

But then it becomes simply multimedia entertainment.

+ + +

A man crosses the stage, says Peter Brook, and you have theater.
Pathos. That’s what you get when a man crosses the stage. Anthropocentrism. The idea that it’s all about us, really. The sin of vanity in all its splendor.

Who are we, really (on stage)?
How do we conduct our paths (on stage)?
What can we see if we introduce breaks into the surface of our behavior (on stage)?

The body becomes heavy.
It becomes an accessory. An object more than a tool. An instrument that cannot be played in a clean way is more of itself. It is less melody, and more instrument.
This body that struggles to fit into the image that will always outsmart it.

Their “on/off” stage presence (in the middle of a scene: “Let’s skip this dialogue”) is not shocking, it is part of the language of contemporary performance. It is part of our thinking, feeling of the frame/work of art as ambiguously present, intermittently present. Nice: it’s when it turns us on, not the other way around. Hence the decadent flirt, hence the false opening, hence the play outside of a play outside of a play.

______________________________

What do you want out of this? Out of this experience? What do you want out of a play?

Try this: Say: This is silly. Say: Theater is the essence of the misconception that it is all about the human. It is the place of the old-fashioned, stubborn faith in 1) the communion of the believers, and 2) the hierarchy of presentation. It is a stage which seems so enchanted with the universal human condition, it forgets the subtle yet profound changes of the aesthetic, the sensible, the eye of the beholder. It is a place whose very existence in this time is so out of joint, it is funny.

What if we accepted this as part of the game? What if we played this game, using this as a platform to inquire into what conditions we are in, as the humans that have no choice but to, at one point or another, remain anthropocentric? What if we surrendered ourselves to the collision of times, this our present time of, say, having to read this text one line at a time, and the time of too many lines behind, and the time of too many lines besides, after, above? What sort of figures are we once we let go of our need for the unique now? Entirely?

Sensation> This our too too solid flesh is extremely flexible. And it goes along with the lines of tension, it follows the cracks and bounces off whatever is left as the aftermath.
Abstract? No, this is not abstract. It means: somehow, miraculously, we deal with change, since we live through it. And yet, we do not melt, we do not resolve ourselves into a dew. If we manage to tune in – we dance. Every step, stumble, vibration becomes a choreography of ourselves.

Sensation> We are not enough. The body fights to correspond to the twitches of the images, yet it lags behind. The eyes go back to the screen. We have no way of knowing how correct we are, yet the need of knowledge unveils our total, complete inadequacy. We are but thinking puppets, we are but repeating Plato, we are but warming up the stage for the image that comes behind. Whatever surrounds us is more powerful, and yet -

Sensation> The eye of the beholder might make a difference. The beholder as object, the beholder as a weaker alter ego. The beholder as the one who submits to the role of a prop, and whose tragedy, a subject realizing he is an object, becomes the juiciest work, the perfect crack in the façade of the perfect spectacle.

Oh, and don’t pay attention to the ending. Don’t pay attention to the illusion that the slave has become the master, that the technology is, after all, a tool, that we can use the past, control the present, cope with the future, that things are what we want them to be. Don’t fall in the trap of theater, which numbs us into believing it’s okay, images end, we are here, devising our entries and winning our exits.
There is a stage behind that one, and on it, well, take a peak.

On June 4, 1989, Poland held the first (partly) free elections of the so-called Eastern Block.
It was the first time since WW2 that opposition parties could legally participate in the political process, and the result – a smashing success of the opposition – was the end of communism and the beginning of a new, free Poland. These elections are generally considered the single event that began the overcoming of the totalitarian regimes in this entire region of the world.
And among the ways in which Poland will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of these events, one is particularly interesting.

Tomorrow, the excellent Polish artist Pawe? Althamer (I’ve written a short note about him before), will land with 160 other passengers of a Boeing 737 in Brussels. They will all be wearing golden suits that look like a combination of space suits and fairy-tale costumes. Even the plane will be specially designed and painted gold – all as part of Althamer’s work Common Task (the Polish expression “Wspólna sprawa” could also mean “common issue” or “common quest”). Their first stop in the city will be the Expo 58, a modernist dream-town. A model of an atom will be a starting point of the visit to the European Parliament and “meetings with the residents of the city” (How does that work?). They will be making a tour of the city as strange, alien visitors. 160 gold-dressed aliens.
Who are they? Mainly Althamer’s neighbors, family and friends, who have been joining him for other performances he organized.
Who are they? Poles. Strangers. People from outer space.
They are the winners. The visiting winners. The happy neighbors. The curious onlookers, the modernist dreamers, the naive children of freedom, the believers. They are the pure creators, the dreamed Europeans, the perfect people, they are the unexpected turn of events, where everything turns gold.

The words on the page of the entire commemoration state:

The motto of the commemoration, It all began in Poland, is a bold reference to the fact that Poland was the first European nation to oppose, in 1939, the spread of Nazism and communism, and was the first to remove their communist government from power in 1989.

The gold suits seem to fit. And yet, what I like about this social sculpture (as Althamer sometimes calls his works) is something quite opposite to that spirit of heroism and pride we so desperately claim. It’s… you guessed it – the lack of pathos.
Or rather – the way pathos is masked by the gold suit.

(Working hard on a show with the Portuguese academic group CITAC…
Here’s a teaser of the performance, called Reality Show

CITAC apresenta REALITY SHOW from Vvoi on Vimeo.

The above excerpt (and pic) was taken from The Cost of Living, a film (and performance) by the British physical theatre company DV8.

I think art is something that makes us look at our lives and to think about them in a way that is more rich. I think there’s a big argument for poetry and for the construction of elements. When somebody writes a great essay, they have taken the words and placed them in a certain way to make you think more deeply about that subject. That is for me the very function of art. You get together, you get a group of people, you place things very carefully in order, and the placement is artificial, but if the integrity and the focus is clear, then hopefully it makes people see their roles more clearly. And think about them. And that’s what I would like to do.
– Lloyd Newson, DV8 director, in a great interview.

Being honest, good and effective is a rare combination in arts. Most contemporary artists avoid at least one of these concepts: honesty is considered by many as a ridiculous idea from art’s perspective, others consider art as being beyond moral issues. But the favorite scapegoat has in the recent years been effectiveness. Many associate it with a commercial, product-based approach that an artist should never accept. Effective, for them, is a synonym for McDonald’s. Effectiveness is about price/quality ratio and looking for the best buy. It goes against the spirit of experimental research we are encouraged to follow. Work-in-progress, work-in-process, open art forms and new modes of production are all back. In some milieus it seems impolite to speak of a finished work. This is a twist of the modernist idea of the “independent” artist, and a curious travesty of the fin-de-siècle artist enclosed in his universe and refusing to give in to the evil, ignorant and lost society. In this updated version, the artist retains the independent status, while accepting a parallel funding of his work. If no form of effectiveness is allowed, we can only rely on a funding that is based on some other form of quality. But what is this quality? How far from the spectacular (the show, the product, the work, the to-be-seen) can it go? It is no coincidence that somewhat similarly to the Grotowskis and Allan Kaprows of the 70s, several contemporary artists decided recently to stop showing their work (or creating any sort of showable work, which amounts to the same). The difference seems to be in how one sees one’s position in the world. While Grotowski and Kaprow moved away to work in relative seclusion from the art milieu (Kaprow concentrated on academic work, but stopped creating public performances). Today, the very shift from product-to-project-to-research is what the milieu is all about.
What is left for the spectator?
The spectator can certainly join the ride and follow each artist’s struggle.
Or wait and see what happens.
Or appreciate the DV8s that go on believing art can be good, and honest – and effective.

Daito Manabe is a funny guy.

But he also knows his business. This is no accidental work, as Manabe is a serious artist and very serious programmer. While looking through his work, I came across a video fragment of a stunning performance where he was in charge of programming (more specifically, of “sound/oscillation/programming”), a work called true, directed by dumb type’s Takayuki Fujimoto. And, as expected from the co-creator of one of the most outstanding multimedia performance groups ever, this is… well, prepare to be amazed.

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Still from Under Discussion, a video by Allora & Calzadilla (great interview with them here)
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Excerpt from Tine Van Aerschot’s first production, I have no thoughts and this is one. The actress is Forced Entertainment’s Claire Marshall.
Another excerpt and a short bio here.