FOI 10: Day 4: Farah Ong, Yeh Tzu-Chi, Marta Moreno Muñoz

Farah Ong (SG) – Some Day I Am Going To Let You Go

Yeh Tzu-Chi (TW) – Let's Go For A Walk
Marta Moreno Muñoz (SP) – I Will Miss You

One of the slogans of the second wave feminist movement in the west was “the personal is political.” By invoking the personal, feminist artists hoped to stress that their most private experiences were structured by patriarchal ideology. The subjective experience of women was thus influenced by the cultural milieu in which they operated, one in which they were always second-class citizens, confined and shaped by the expectations of gendered behavior. The three performances on Day 4 by Farah Ong, Yeh Tzu-Chi and Marta Moreno Muñoz all address the issue of feminine subjectivity and identity, although in very different ways.

Farah Ong. Someday I Am Going to Let You Go. 2015. Photograph by Jemima Yong

In her performance Some Day I Am Going to Let You Go, Farah Ong (Singapore) explored her fraught relationship with her mother in a quiescent performance where she did little more than write down her thoughts. Dressed in white and wearing a garment that possibly had belonged to her mother, Onh moved around a small installation space that she had created with saran wrap and sheets of waxed paper that were taped to the windows, and the installation itself. Ong’s writing was accompanied by the beat of a metronome, which she often paused to reset, possibly in order to echo the degree of trauma that she felt at the time. The performance ended when Ong finally cut down all of the pieces of paper and sliced up the saran wrap. Ong’s performance would have been difficult to engage with had the audience not realized the necessity of actually reading the writing, which revealed Ong’s difficulty coming to terms with an overbearing parent (I am assuming it was her mother) who expected more from the daughter than from the son, and whose illness left Ong startled by the vulnerability of a once omniscient parent. Ong’s performance is of course specific to her time and place--Singapore in the 21^st century—and yet, it echoes the structure and theme of performances done many years ago by pioneering feminist artists such as Linda Montano. In the mid-seventies, Montano’s former husband, Mitchell Payne, was killed in a gun accident. Montano had left Payne for the composer and artist Pauline Oliveros. She was intensely ambivalent about her decision to leave Payne, and felt very guilty when he was killed while cleaning a gun. Convinced that it was suicide or murder, Montano undertook a exorcising performance Mitchell’s Death, which in its earliest incarnations was so intensely personal that the audience had trouble accessing the piece. Likewise, Ong’s Some Day I Am Going to Let You Go is equally personal, on the edge of being inaccessible, which added to the impact of the piece. Fortunately the members of the audience intuitively knew that they had to move through and around the space in which Ong was performing in order to understand the significance of the piece. Meanwhile, Ong’s mute body and restrained actions emphasized her discomfort and psychological pain without any need to spell out what was going on.

 

Yeh Tzu-Chi. Let's Go For A Walk. 2015 Photography by Jemima Yong

Yeh Tzu-Chi, from Taiwan, has addressed the role of women in history and art by using her own body in order to interrogate the way in which representation is often gendered and raced. In her 2013 performance Afternoon Tea on the Grass, Yeh recreated Eduoard Manet’s 1863 painting Luncheon on the Grass in a small courtyard inside In-Art Space, where she had organized a performance festival. Yeh, who has a master’s degree in western literature, has used her work to examine the patriarchal structure of language as well as stereotypes about women artists and older women in general. Let's Go For A Walk, which Yeh performed for FOI 10, employed red thread and chicken feet. According to Yeh, the performance was meant to address the mistreatment of animals, with the chicken feet and blood red thread meant to suggest the brutality of the food industry world wide. However, red can also represent good fortune and long life in both Taiwanese and Chinese culture, while chicken feet are delicacy in a number of Asian countries including China, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia. For the performance, Yeh, garbed in a black tunic and skirt, sewed together two strings of chicken feet with red thread and needles, which she attached to her ankles with more red thread. After pulling her shirt over her head to create a head covering the made her look vaguely like a European peasant/witch from the 15^th century, Yeh walked slowly around the room, dragging her chicken feet streamers and holding a chicken foot in each hand. Yeh’s performance addressed animal rights, as well as a more global issue around histories of women, women’s work (the sewing), food preparation, superstition and oral knowledge.

Marta Moreno Munoz. I Will Miss You 2015. Photo by Jemima Yong

The Spanish artist Marta Moreno Muñoz has focused, according to her statement, “predominantly on ‘feminine’ subjectivity, dissolution of the ego and the notion of pre-oedipal nostalgia in response to a patriarchal and undesirable reality.” Moreno Muñoz’s performance I Will Miss You was by far the most experimental of the evening, employing sound, touch, and smell in order to shift the perceptions of the audience away from the visual and towards the haptic. This is not to imply that Moreno Muñoz ignored the aesthetic aspects of the piece. In fact, the performance space was carefully coordinated into shades of gray and black as was the artist, who has gone so far as to tattoo her forearms in a shade of grey. The monochromatic presentation forced the audience to concentrate on the other sensory experiences that were assaulting them. All the while, Moreno Muñoz walked around the room repeating the sentence "I will miss you," a statement that invokes both desire and loss, particularly in the sense of psychic trauma. In the performance, Moreno Muñoz is engaging with a feminine, even maternal subjectivity that has been theorized by Julia Kristeva and more recently Bracha Ettinger. While Kristeva and Ettinger have very different notions of what the language and representation of maternal subjectivity might be, as well as the point at which it originates, both are very interested, as is Moreno Muñoz, in the language of the womb, or the exchange between the mother and the unborn child, which has a language or system of representations that for Kristeva is pre-symbolic (she terms it the semiotic) and for Ettinger is symbolic and joined with patriarchal language but not recognized as proceeded that language (matrixial). Both Kristeva and Ettinger view this language as being best expressed through representations other than words. Moreno Muñoz thus created an environment of sound that was at times quite painful, vibrations that shook the room and could be felt within the body, and smells that pushed the edge of tolerance. Walking around the room with a mic, Moreno Muñoz played with the possibilities for sounds that occurred when the mic was used incorrectly. In the center of the space, an installation of bags of street rubbish were piled atop one another-- Moreno Muñoz climbed over these bags, releasing their scent to the audience who was assaulted by the performance. Both Kristeva and Ettinger, but particularly Ettinger, have argued for a shift in consciousness through an invocation of maternal/matrixial/feminine language. Certainly Moreno Muñoz is intended to push this consciousness upon her audience with her refusal to allow her performance to reside in the realm of the visual—and partriarchal.

FOI 10: Day 5 Chia Chu Yia: Gardening – Wheatgrass Malvina Tan: re: 130912 (move)

FOI 10: Day 5

Chia Chu Yia (SE/SG) – Gardening – Wheatgrass

Malvina Tan (SG) – re: 130912 (move)

Day 5 was characterized by two elegant performances, both of which addressed memory, loss and nostalgia/trauma. Chia Chu Yia’s Gardening—Wheatgrass was an elegant presentation and preparation of wheatgrass shots, which she painstakingly prepared prior to sharing with the members of the audience. Chia rendered the MalvinaTan’s re: 130912 (move) was her final Singaporean performance prior to leaving indefinitely for Sydney, Australia. While playing record albums on an old turntable, Tan slowly demolished a heap of coal. The performance ended at exactly 9:44 p.m.

Chia Chu Yia Gardening--Wheatgrass 2015 Photograph

by Jemima Yong

Chia Chu Yia, originally from Malaysia but currently based in Sweden after having lived in Singapore for 13 years has long been interested in the way in which humans have manipulated the environment in order to grow food. She is particularly interested in genetically modified (GMO) super foods that have been created by scientists in laboratories and then marketed to people as healthier choices. For her 2013 performance Golden Rice is Free, Chia painstakingly painted single grains of rice with gold paint, and then cooked the rice with gold glitter and pigment. Golden Rice is Free was a response to the Giant food company supplementing processed rice with beta-carotene in order to replace the missing Vitamin A. Likewise, Chia replaced the missing gold with gold of her own—thus rendering the rice inedible. She attempted to hand out containers of her golden rice, suitably labeled inedible, and found that the audience was uninterested in taking it.  For her performance at FOI 10, Chia addressed the fad of wheatgrass (which has actually been around since the 1930s) by growing, preparing, and serving wheatgrass “shots” to the audience. The performance actually began two weeks earlier, when Chia started growing the wheatgrass (which has been around for thousands of years) in flats. By the time of the performance, she had a rather nice crop. Garbed elegantly in a black dress, Chia harvested the wheatgrass, carefully cutting and placing it in a sack around her waist. In order to make the juice, Chia ground the wheatgrass using a mortar and pestle, and then strained it through the same sack in which she had gathered it. After presenting the audience with six “supplements” such as fresh cut ginger and fresh squeezed lemon to enhance the taste of the wheatgrass shot, Chia invited six members of the audience to join her in a ritual that was part tea ceremony and part toast, with the members of the audience linking arms with Chia and downing the shot. Chia’s work falls into a venerable history of environmental performance that can be traced back to pioneers such as Newton and Helen Harrison and Bonnie Sherk. What distinguishes Chia’s work from the pioneering environmental work in the seventies is her emphasis on genetically modified and/or constructed foods. Chia’s performance, which recalls older rituals of food preparation prior to GMO, demonstrates that newer does not always equal better. Although Chia’s performance was quite humorous, there was nevertheless a real element of nostalgia for an almost forgotten way of food preparation and consumption.

Grace Ling Hui

Date: 25th November 2015

Title of performance: re:130912 (move)
Materials used: Textile Paint on Canvas

In contrast to Chia’s performance, the Singaporean artist Malvina Tan’s re: 130912 (move) was quiescent and somber. The explanation provided by Jason Lim on the web site and during his introduction of the piece was that Tan’s piece, which was durational rather than narrative, was her farewell performance prior to leaving the nation state where she had lived for many years. Tan’s piece, however, was actually about much more than her sorrow at leaving the place she knows so well. It also reflected her sorrow as another year elapsed between the time she was with her husband, Adrian Justin Dhanaraj, and the time that she was—is—not. On 13 09 12, Dhanaraj was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He passed away on 11 09 13. At 25, Tan, who recounts this story on her online research journal 130912, became a widow, something she never expected to be at that age. Much of Tan’s online journal, as well as many of her performances done after Dhanaraj’s diagnosis, have addressed her loss, her memory of Dhanaraj, and her sorrow as time moves her further and further away from the time that she was with him. Her performance re: 130912 (move), a move undertaken in conjunction with the beginning of a new relationship, was a good-bye to both Singapore and Dhanaraj. Time, which is so important to Tan, was represented by a carefully placed broken watch. Next to the watch sat an i-phone 5, a new addition that replaced Tan’s broken i-phone 4. For a set amount of time, Tan crushed and ground the charcoal down, all the while listening to record albums on an old turntable. Periodically, Tan would say something as though she was responding to someone conversing with her—an ongoing conversation that only she could hear. The performance ended when her phone rang, a call that she answered, but never acknowledged.  Tan’s evocative performance recalls another performance done with charcoal by Melati Suryodarmo, I’m A Ghost in My Own House, for which she crushed and ground hundreds of kilograms of charcoal. For Suryodarmo, the grinding of the charcoal, which released (or destroyed) its energy potential, represented a release and liberation of her own thoughts, a kind of cathartic transformation. Although Tan has not weighed in one way or the other on the meaning of the charcoal, certainly it appeared to be a similar release, one that would permit her to finally leave Singapore and her past.

Malvina Ta. re:130912 (move), 2015
Photograph by Jemima Yong