Macarena Perich Rosas (CL) – On A Line
Andrée
Weschler (FR/SG) - Can A First Performance Be Relived (2003-2015)
Rinyaphat Nithipattaraahnan (TH) – Emotional Power and Woman
In 1993, Peggy Phelan famously wrote that performance was
the art of “disappearing.” Performance, Phelan argued, in its refusal to
remain, taps into a powerful economy of anti-visibility, one that flies in the
face of the politics of the visible and the material that have characterized
the culture of late capitalism. Phelan’s thesis, articulated in her book Unmarked, have been somewhat undermined
by the fact that much of the work that she championed was in fact extensively
documented and often re-performed. In his 1999 book Liveness, Philip Auslander demonstrated how our notion of what
constitutes “live” performance is completely mediated by media—we watch “live”
television, for example, or expect musical acts to sound like their albums when
we go to see them perform “live.” Auslander is right of course—we are always so
completely imbricated and immersed in our present culture that it is difficult
to step outside of oneself and realize to what degree Liveness is a fiction or
mythology that has changed in response to a culture that has become
simultaneously western and global—we ALL speak English, even though we don’t,
for example. Nevertheless, I still find a great deal of power and
persuasiveness in Phelan’s argument, by now over 20 years old. It might be true
that one can recreate a “live” performance and do so quite successfully.
However, there is also something to be said for having actually been there, and
been present at and with the artist. This experience is particularly relevant
when the performance is one that is rich in imagery rather than words or
explanations. The three performances on the third night of the festival had in
common the absence of words. Instead there were images: a young woman,
violently ejected from her shoes and her clothing, lying with her limbs tossed
akimbo against one of the pillars, an elegant woman covering her face and arms
in red lipstick while reprising the memory of an earlier performance, and a
spreading ink blot on a lovely dress, once white but already stained with earlier
applications of ink that had been washed into a fuzzy overlap of colors.
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| Macarena Perich Rosas. On A Line, 2015. Photo by Author. |
Macarena Perich Rosas comes from the region of Patagonia,
which is shared by Argentina and Chile. She lives four hours south of Santiago,
Chile, and many hours (by plane) from just about every place else in the world.
She lives in the uppermost region of Joaquín Torres García’s drawing América Invertada, 1943, pictured below.
Torres García’s drawings emphasize the imaginary line of the equator,
which is labeled Ecuador, and the tropic of cancer, designated by a 15th
century Spanish ship. The drawing is inverted, suggesting that the designation
of South America as existing below North America is one that is arbitrary,
making Patagonia almost the top, rather than the bottom, of the world. Perich
Rosas’s On A Line, like Torres
García’s drawing, emphasized the line as arbitrary border and means of
organization. Like Torres García, Perich Rosas turned lines upside down, making
lines of concrete materials such as flour, the edges of foil constructions,
tape, milk, and ink. Perich Rosas is part of an artists group called Conflicta, which seeks to reunify humans with their environment. Based in Patagonia, Conflicta has identified three main lines of action: research, education, and residences.
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| Macarena Perich Rosas, On a Line, 2015. Photo by Jemima Yong. |
The performance begin with Perich Rosas lying akimbo, as
though she had been blown out of her footprints, which were traced on the
ground with neat outlines of powdery flour. Rising, Perich Rosa pulled on her
jumpsuit and donned a helmet. Unrolling a large piece of tinfoil, she cut a
circle into which she stepped and then fell deliberately, protected only by the
helmet. After removing her jumpsuit, she entered a small canopy of diaphonous
material. Extending her legs from under the curtain, she created a starburst by
outlining her legs in flour. Finally, she removed some tape from what appeared
to be a first aid kit or an old fashioned carrier for Barbie Dolls, and begin
to tape a line out of the door and into the parking structure. The final images
was of Perich Rosas stepping into two large yellow boots full of milk, which
sloshed out around her, making yet another line, while allowing black ink to
drip down her face and body in order to merge with the milk, which then ran
downhill in the direction from which the original line had come.
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| Andree Weschler. Can A First Performance Be Relived? 2003-2015. Photo by Jemima Yong. |
Perich Rosas was followed by Andrée Weschler, originally from France but presently living in
Singapore. Weschler’s piece Can A First Performance Be Relived
(2003-2015) was a reprise, or re-performance of the first piece that she had
ever performed in Singapore. Weschler’s work is characterized by an emphasis on
color and tactility. She transforms her body and the environment in which her
body is situated through the use of material objects and a painterly
understanding of the power of color—whether it is white, black or red. I first
saw Weschler perform a few years ago at the National Review of Live Art, for
which she performed Innocence, which
involves her wearing a heavy and very long rope of pearls. Innocence, which was white, was premised on 50 kilograms of
pearls—Weschler’s age at the time.
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| Andree Weschler. Can A First Performance Be Relived? 2003-2015. Photo by Jemima Yong. |
In Weschler’s work, there is a tension
between the present and a not so distant past—a kind of melancholy nostalgia
that acknowledges that what was once there cannot be recaptured. More than any
other performance this evening, Weschler’s Can
A First Performance Be Relived demonstrated how right Phelan was when she
said that performance’s ontology is one of disappearance. The elegant woman who
covered herself with red lipstick was Weschler, but twelve years older, her
earlier, younger self forever gone. An allegory of vanitas, Weschler’s performance emphasized the impossibility of
ever being able to perfectly reprise the past.
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| Rinyaphat Nithipattaraahnan Emotional Power and Woman, 2015. Photo by Jemima Yong. |
The final performance of the night was also one that was
iconic and painterly, involved yet another line. Rinyaphat Nithipattaraahnan’s
performance, Emotional Power and Woman,
was a tableau vivant—a living
painting, through which Nithipattaraahnan moved. Entering the space of the
performance from the right side of the room, Nithipattaraahnan unspooled a
brown ribbon that was tied to her neck, creating a boundary between the
audience and herself. Garbed in a white dress trimmed with Alonçon
lace and stained unevenly with various colors of ink, Nithipattaraahnan stepped
on a stool that was covered in lace and placed a pair of scissors in her mouth.
Posed in the manner of a medieval Ecce Homo paintings of Christ before the
Jews, a flower of black ink appeared on her skirt, reminiscent of menstrual
blood, but the wrong color. As the ink spread and pooled on the floor beneath
the stool, Nithipattaraahnan began to slowly revolve on the stool, re-spooling
the ribbon that she had unfurled. The performance ended with Nithipattaraahnan
walking out of the space, trailing a black line behind her from the remains of
the ribbon, which had dragged through the ink. Nithipattaraahnan’s performance
was aesthetically exquisite—quiet, and yet suggestive of suppressed violence,
and sacrifice. Her reticence demonstrates how much power resides in images, and
how unnecessary words can be.
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| Photo by Author |
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