Cao Fei

Cao Fei - UN-Cosplayers, 2006
C-print
(published in Artkrush by courtesy of Cao Fei's Blog)

Cao Fei (b. 1978 Guangzhou, China, lives in Beijing), a video artist, theatre director, photograph, writer and blogger, has become a notable presence at contemporary art events around the world: New York at MoMA, Paris at Centre Pompidou, Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center, biennials at Singapore, Sydney, Moscow, to name but a few.

The cosplayers that inundate her videos and photographs play a double role: they are the heroes of an alternate universe Cao Fei is proposing to us (the Second Life, to use her definition), while also youngsters from nowadays's China emphasizing that a new generation has come and world is now different.

So, what are cosplayers, anyway? People dressed like manga heroes, and performing that way anywhere but on the stage: it's Performance Art. They are not playing in roles, they are rather emphasizing roles; they are not playing fictional characters, they are simply emulating the appearance of these fictional characters. You will ask me now what manga means? It's the Japanese term for comics, and cosplayers don't emulate only manga characters, but also manhwa personages, and so on.

Well, as I said the cosplayers of Cao Fei play a double role: they invite us to imagine an alternate universe and they tell us that maybe this Second Life has come: Cao Fei's works demonstrate that Performance Art is but another form of Conceptual Art.

I will come back to Cao Fei and her cosplayers soon.

• i.Mirror
  

(Contemporary Art)

Lin Yilin

Lin Yilin, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road, 1995
Performance, 90 min. Guangzhou, China
Credit: Creative Time
(http://artlog.com/posts/189-artists-and-activists-curating-socially)

Lin Yilin (林一林) (b. 1964, Guangzhou, China) is an installation and performance artist. Lin grew up during the Cultural Revolution which has been one of the primary influences on his work. Through performances, large installations, sculptures, photographs, videos and oil painting, Lin explores how change and transition on a grand scale relates to individuals on a more personal scale. Lin currently lives and works in New York City and Guangzhou.

(wiki)

(Contemporary Art)

Melt, by Noémie Lafrance, at the Salt Pile

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/arts/dance/21melt.html?th&emc=th)

Seven dancers perched on a wall and wrapped in sculptural beeswax and lanolin costumes are slowly melting away, progressing in euphoria and exhaustion as if approaching the sun, melting until their souls escape their ephemeral bodies and disintegrate into light (Sens Production).

A site-specific dance installation by Noémie Lafrance in Lower Manhattan at the Salt Pile (Pike Slip @ South Street) until September 12. There are two reviews, not positive, in NY Times and Wall Street Journal.

(video by sensproduction123)

(New York, New York)

(Contemporary Art)

Phyllis Chen Playing Toy Piano

Phyllis Chen

Is there a place, a moment, when Performing Art ends and Perfomance Art begins? A place, a moment, that differentiates bewteen concert and happening?

Phyllis Chen is a concert pianist trying to express herself in the fullest extent, and here comes the free space of Performance Art.

She will play tomorrow toy piano at Christopher Henry Gallery, on Elisabeth Street in SoHo (NY): works by John Cage, Julia Wolfe, Adrian Pertout, and Karlheinz Essl. It's the release of Phyllis Chen's new CD, Uncaged Toy Piano.




(Musica Nova)

C.L.U.E. at New Museum

C.L.U.E. stands for Color Location Ultimate Experience, a multi-video installation on view at the New Museum. For me it offered also the clue for this museum as a living body where the components are balancing each other.

The main exhibition was an Elizabeth Peyton show: a figurative artist with hundreds of beautiful portraits spanned over two floors. As I was taking the narrow stairwell between the two floors I came across a tiny space where C.L.U.E. was installed. And I realized that this challenging artwork was making the balance with the figurative approach of Elisabeth Peyton's portraits.



So the portraiture show was largely exposed over two floors, while C.L.U.E. was on a very small surface in between: very narrow while very tall, a chimney-like volume (actually named the Shaft Projection Space). You were coming across unexpectedly, a moment of unconventional art on the journey along the portraits.

I wonder what would be exposed in the Shaft Project Space were to be somebody like, say, Damien Hirst on view on the third and fourth floors? Probably not another challenging guy like Rob Pruitt with his Viagra Falls (anyway, there would not be enough space in the Shaft, rather on the stairwell). No, Damien Hirst on the main show would leave the Shaft empty, because only a video installation is possible there, which eliminates the conventional from the start. And not any video art work: the Five Angels of the Millennium of Bill Viola need much more room, for example. Perhaps the videos of Kimsooja?



Okay, let's come back to C.L.U.E. It is the cooperation of a Video Installation artist (A.L. Steiner) and two Movement artists (the robbinschilds: Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins). Good, and what's Movement Art? Probably Aditza Ausch would give you another definition, but from what I saw in C.L.U.E. it's this: Performance Art in relationship with the changing Environment.



Essential is that Environment is changing and Movement responds to the new setting, in search for integration.

The performance is done in very disparate environments: seashore, highway in a deserted landscape, forest, grass, city, deck, roof, car cemetery, plaza, landscape bordered by mountains, the mountains very near or somewhere in distance, etc; it is warm or desolate, generous or sultry, urban or wildly natural. Their movement is flexible: recognizing the new stimulus, responding to it, integration in harmony.



So we have a row of disparate environments, a row of performance art sequences in response. Each one looks for the harmony within the surrounding environment. This is the Movement part of C.L.U.E.: the merit of robbinschilds.

The harmony of the whole is the merit of A.L.Steiner: decomposing each sequence in atoms, linking them together in units for the parallel videos; looking for an aesthetic relation between separate units.



I captured some stills from the web. I'm afraid they give only a very weak idea of the whole. You have to be there, in the Shaft Project Space and to watch the parallel monitors, the simultaneous units of movement, color, background, sound; to remain longer, till you start feeling like in a trance. Then you become part of the harmony.







(New York, New York)

(Contemporary Art)

Kimsooja

A woman standing immobile, with the back to the camera. Perfectly motionless. You cannot see anything from her but the silhouette. She's contemplating the continuous motion of the river. Water moving slowly, detritus floating, sometimes metallic junk, of various shapes and sizes, something white comes and goes, now and then, ice, or maybe chemical debris, birds flying over the water. Flow of the river, fabric of life.

For Kimsooja, artist's practices are similar to that of Buddhist monks in the sense that they both try to liberate and go beyond themselves.

Because the woman standing still on the screen, perfectly anonymous, her back to us, is actually she, Kimsooja, the author of this movie.

A movie that does not belong to Performing Arts. It is not a Performing piece: it is a Performance artwork. The difference is subtle: she did not perform in order to create the movie; on the contrary, she created the movie in order to perform in front of us each time.

She is staying there, motionless, contemplating the river, till she feels that the river becomes immobile and she is moving.

For us, to understand the flow of the river, a referential is needed. She, the motionless woman, anonymous, rear to us, she is the referential. As we are watching, we realize more and more that she is there as anyone of us. That's why she has to remain anonymous, she is only a reference point for us; and we enter the trance, her trance, till we are starting to feel that the river becomes immobile and we are moving.

In that moment the temporal has disappeared; it remains the eternal: no past, no future, only a continuous flow, flow of the Cosmos, fabric of Cosmos, and we become part of it.

I am thinking now at the movies of Satyajit Ray: his Apu Trilogy, perhaps the greatest cinematic artwork ever: the conflict between cosmos and history, between eternity and temporal.

A Laundry Woman, Yamuna River, Delhi, the 10 minutes movie of Kimsooja: there is no beginning, no end, no good, no bad, no past, no future, only a continuous moment, flowing unaware of us, till we become part of it, till we flow and it remains motionless, stillness and motion no more distinct.

So, she is - as Buddhist monks should be - a mediator, to make us realize where the temporal becomes senseless.

The approach isn't new: art critics have noted the similarity with the Rückenfigur from the paintings of the Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich. Well, Friedrich used as referentials not only humans - sometimes a solitary tree, sometimes the ruines of a church - but the approach is the same (look at the presentation attached at the end of this post). And the similarity is striking if we look at his most famous canvas, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog).

And we can go further back in the art history, to the Sprecher character from Medieval paintings: only here, in the movie of Kimsooja, the Sprecher is silent.




(Hirshhorn Museum)

(Contemporary Art)

(Filmofilia)

(Caspar David Friedrich)

African Dance

The dancers are undergraduate students and they give street performances just for fun. I saw them twice. The first time it was on the waterfront in Georgetown. This time they were dancing in a pavilion on the waterfront in Alexandria.

(Alexandria)