peering through windows

After twelve months in New Zealand, I still have much to understand.
It wasn’t long enough to find a deeper understanding of culturally significant issues for Maori and Pakeha communities as well as the many subtleties in contemporary New Zealand society. I still have trouble understanding all of the rules concerning use of vowels in the English spoken there. Had I stayed longer, there may have been a deeper absorption of influences leading to more elements I could have incorporated in my work. American artists have enough trouble dealing with differences based on cultural perception within the borders of the u.s.a. The NEA four were performance artists creating work concerned with identity issues. They became famous when their work provoked ultra right wing politicians to revoke their funding. People are so polarized here on so many issues that even if you did performance, specifically planned for a micro- geographic region, tailored it to concerns pertaining to that community, you could still have a lot of things misinterpreted. If certain people here in the states were to see some of the performances I did in New Zealand, I can guarantee how it would be experienced. Anyone who commits an imagined political or religious blasphemy here can receive hate mail, slandered by the press, death threats, beat up, arrested or even subjected to organized protests by religious zealots. Political forces are still attemping to regulate content or simply de-fund the practioners of the art they don't like. This month the right wing republican congress is considering terminating all federal government spending for two of the most important funds for the arts in the u.s.a.

Framing is important. It is now clear to me that attempting redressive performance outside of one’s region or country is much more problematic than doing a more formalistic visual art performance. To bring attention to a problem within a society, a performance is also dependent on the viewer to also have a little awareness of the issue and some prior shared meaning of the images for the message to come through. I knew that a lot of american multimedia that I was using had made it’s way to New Zealand and at the time I was under the assumption that people there would have a similar reading of the images compared to mine. I was wrong. There were definitely some areas of intersection I encountered on more recognizable images like george bush or cowboys. But I kept running into obstacles when it came to using more subtle media not widely known outside the u.s. or introducing social issues that New Zealanders saw differently than americans. When the issues and images intersected with the viewers in Dunedin during a performance, there were still disagreements on the strategies employed. There was also the issue of my identity. I did not factor in the effect of being an outsider or how that could compromise the work or even how I would be perceived as an american. This omission was due to the fact that I had been previously hung up on a societal acceptance aspect of identity in that I had felt marginalized and considered an outsider by the larger culture within the u.s.a. When I arrived in New Zealand, I didn’t contemplate how the perception of others would affect a performance because I was so accustomed to it getting in the way of my everyday life in the states. That’s why I locked onto the possum as a reflection early on, reviled, an outsider, I still wanted do work that contained aspects pertaining to social approval. What totally left me astonished from all of this was how in only one year in New Zealand I found more genuine heartfelt acceptance from everyone I met there than I had my entire life in the u.s.a. This was an interesting contrast with the states where was consensus within my own art community about the work I was doing but I was at odds with the dominant culture within the social order. In New Zealand, there were many points of contention with my art practice but I found an overall greater societal acceptance there.
I witnessed some of the differences between the New Zealand / american perception about images when I attended a Wednesday night seminar at the polytechnic where Michael Morley gave a talk and presented some of his work. Of them, he screened a video segment that he had photographed on a trip to the U.S. It was an american flag limply draping from the top of a flagpole, slowly waving in a breeze. I’m trying to remember his exact explanation of the image but something to the effect of an exhausted imperial giant with worn out ideas. I share this view, by the way. Nevertheless, one could play the same video in the states and it would be hardly read the same way. It would merely be thought of as some kind of post 9/11, poor Old Glory (our name for the flag) maybe even patriotic, which I think may have been the antithesis of what Morely’s intent was.

While I was attending the Polytechnic I think one of the main things I overlooked was investigating just how differently the New Zealand perception and interpretation would be of american media, the way I chose to use it and how I myself as an element in the performances would be seen and understood there.

Prior and during my stays in New Zealand I had the wonderful opportunity to have a glimpse of the world through the eyes of some dear friends that were not americans. They helped me look on my own country from a different perspective, one that few of my fellow citizens are ever fortunate enough to perceive. Despite all of the challenges of navigating the two worlds, something must have been rubbed off onto me in that time. During my last month in New Zealand, I stopped an all night dairy where I asked the young woman behind the counter for a pottle of chips. As she was measuring out the chips she asked me, "what part of the north are you from?"

a matter of trans-location

Understanding the way that cultural framings affect the way specific works are read is increasingly important. Travelling your work is a very good way of understanding the parts of your own framing that you are bringing to bear, once you understand more clearly what you are unconciously presenting it is easier to begin to understand your audience and their reactions.

When I was in Sweden in August 04 I met up with a Japanese artist, Masashi Kawamoto who I had already worked with once before in Korea. At the Swedish event the two of us were like goldfish in soup bowl...we (yes me too, despite looking so similar to them that old men spoke unselfconsciously to me in Swedish in the street) were seen as exotic aliens by an arts community who had no understanding of the Asia Pacific peoples history or even a vaguely accurate geographical sense of where we were from. (admittedly I had to look at an atlas to find Sweden too, so we were even in that..)

we both presented at a forum, as did several other of the non swedish attending artists. The organisers asked us to present a perspective of living and working as an artist in our own countries. Kawamoto-san has travelled widely and is also an experienced event producer and curator in his own area. He decided to show something of the parallel Japanese history of event based exhibitions (like the one we were at)..which in Japan tend to focus on performance. Performance that has developed from a very diferent set of traditions of movement and thinking than performance as you are discussing it.
One of the works he showed as historical perspective was an endurance work that was performed (in the mid eighties from memory) where the artist, naked except for a loincloth, attempted to roll a heavy boulder up the side of a steep valley wall. the rock would keep falling away from him and each time he would crawl back down the slope and begin again. Everything about the image was outside the audiences experience. almost immediately there was nervous sniggering in the room, which developed into quite a widespread laughing while he tried to discuss the background of the work. As Kawamoto-san was presenting a serious work and a peice of japanese contemporary art history that he thought was significant, he was understandably offended, cut his explanation short, stopped the video and fell silent. the laughing fell silent too. The seemingly oblivious facilitator called for an audience response, someone made the dissmissive comment..'its very strange' and that was the end of that.
I was also offended on his behalf, prepared to dislike all Swede's for the serious discourtesy that some in the room showed my friend...but I did understand that the sniggering was a sign of discomfort from an audience that just had no way of judging what they were seeing..and who clearly also found the emotional and physical intensity of the work very challenging and confronting. I thought at the time that while the work was one form of cultural expression, the embarrassed laughing was another...
the refusal to engage and discuss...that was just lack of sophistication, education and manners. yes Im still mad!

At the same forum a young curator from Berlin spoke about what he perceived as a false globalism in the arts...a globalism that was about presenting different ethnicities as curiosities while simultaneously effectively denying the differences of regional voice.
I was encouraged (and somewhat mollified) by his perspicacity...he was describing the dynamic we were experiencing as a more widespread phenomena. He went on to point out a spate of bienalle exhibitions peppered with the work of artists who were primarily identified by ethnicity but who where all trained in european/western art schools and so (inevitably?) presented in the same art vernacular as their audience. artists such as egyptian Gada Amer, Palestinian Mona Hartoum, serbian(?balkan at least) Marina Abramovich, Iranian Shirin Neeshat

interestingly to me what remains of the voice of the outsider in these artists work is a certain politicisation that could be related to the kind of redressive approach that you have mentioned.
its a good question overall...how much do you have to adopt the dominant or local vernacular to be understood? when does that mean assimilation and a loss of identity?
related question where does political agenda meet art practice when identity issues are the subject?
I dont think this is merely a post-colonial question, as it also relates to nomadic art practices

running against the wind

Reflecting on the work I did as a foreigner in New Zealand, some of the pieces were better received by those viewing, but some others were not as successful.
I tried to tie in my work to my location when I chose a possum as a character in some of the performances. Although they are not indigenous and very undesirable, they are still a prominent element in the New Zealand landscapes. The possums are just trying to do what nature had built into them, adaptation and survival. I was also non- indigenous to New Zealand and trying to adapt as well. The work that Possum Pete engaged in was mostly accepted in part due to the image being recognized there.
To those watching the performances, the works involving a greater amount of form making involving body, time and space were generally critiqued as more favorable ones, redressive or not. Viewers were not as keen on the message oriented, cultural inquiry pieces like nude weight lifting or following me-following a string around a building. In the piece "Moth", I had been just as engaged in bringing up issues as the other work but people seemed to like it based on the visuals. Of the redressive work, it was accepted but only contingent on the forms present in the work and the larger the number of formal elements contained within the work, judged more penetrating. Overall, when it came to the discussions after each piece, regardless of the message it seemed that the students would fall back to using form as a strategy to analyze the performances. In trying to do redressive work I think the crux of the problem in that the pieces were judged through criteria that Meiling Chang would term "art performance". She illustrates some of the differences between "redressive performance" and "art performance" in her book"The Other Los Angeleses". On page 275 she writes,

"In what ways, then is an art performance antithetical to a redressive performance? Above all, an art performance differs from a redressive performance in that it does not originate in a remedial desire but departs from the premises of its own medium. An art performance does not strive to offer a positive alternative to a preexisting condition of stasis or malaise; nor does it attempt to compensate for the ills produced in realms of occupation other than art. For an art performance rarely responds to anything other than it’s own expressions-even though it may play with a wide range of themes or subject matter. Characteristically, an art performance shows little interest in contesting an unsatisfactory social condition or in overcoming a personal trauma."

My work has been about what I have seen, lived through, discovered. I hoped to convey a portion of that to an audience at the polytechnic but I realize some of the issues or media chosen were maybe only of concern to an American audience. Will I have to alter what I’m doing for the work to be read in New Zealand? Perhaps doing work more obscure or abstract, filling the space with forms that could be more easily analyzed? In New Zealand when people go to see American films, I imagine they would not expect the stories to be rewritten and have the actors dubbed with Kiwi accents. how my work was received in California was a confirmation of the differences in between the hemispheres. I had the opportunity to give a presentation in the Santa Ana artist’s village where I gave a brief talk and then screened videotapes of the performances. Works that the audience had the strongest connection with were the ones that were the least relevent/shared/received by the New Zealand viewers. I could spend the rest of my life in another culture but no matter where I go and how hard I try, it will still find me slightly out of context, viewing the world through a pair of Southern California sunglasses. I need to find some common ground here if all of this is going to succeed.

Detourn and Redress

Detournement is a technique that involves the combining of different preexisting or found elements into a single one. The success of the combination is dependent on the viewers’ memory of the original contexts in which the elements were first used. In joining them, a new meaning can be created. Any media can be utilized such as film, newspaper clippings, comic strips, famous phrases or poetry, photographs or audio recordings. Guy Debord stated,

"the main force of a detournement is directly related to the conscious or vague recollection of the original contexts of the elements"

There are many examples of the technique being used today such as the music sampling by hip hop performers or the subverting of corporate logos by artists working in the anti- globalization milieu. There is extensive literature from it’s originators on it’s use, here’s a link A User’s Guide to Détournement
Some of the techniques of detournement had involved collage but I was particularly intrigued when looking at comic strips that had been used with new slogans placed over the original dialogue balloons. I was interested in using the technique as a way to shake a finger at my own culture while using familiar material from my childhood in the U.S. such as toys and elements from television and movies. It had been some time since the Situationists had done the comic strips and posters so the techniques had been rather low-tech. I thought I would try an updated use of the strategy by use of computer scanning and photo retouching toy labels then changing them. I began to think of other methods to use the general idea of detournement. Looking back at images from my childhood, like the costumed characters that appeared on television shows that I loved to watch. I was thinking of these guys when I came up with Possum Pete. Their behavior on the programs were mostly acting out slapstick comedy and being silly most of the time. I thought changing the context in which a costumed character was used could be another way to use an image from media to address issues I felt were important. I didn’t explore the other Situationist techniques such as derive, but instead focused more on ways of communicating the idea of media spectacles. Once I went beyond the Situationist material, I found that I was cherry picking in a way from the various writings of other theorists to support the argument for media influence, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes among some of them.

I think it boiled down to this, my belief was that anyone who indulged in television, film or magazines anywhere in the world were being lied to by those who controlled the production of that media, and I just wanted to yell "liar!"

Redressive

In the book, "In Other Los Angeleses" Meling Cheng states "By virtue of its goals, the redressive function places performance in between artistic invention and cultural intervention; it galvanizes performance to address both the meta-reality of art and the empirical reality of life"
Performance can be a medium where the artist may use himself or herself as the medium that is being manipulated along with time, space, and the audience with the end pursuit of making forms. Redressive performance is less concerned about creating a forms; its focus is to convey the issues contained within the performance to the audience. In this way, it can address conditions within the society at large wherever one is, to intervene, give testimony, or suggest alternatives.

leaning into the wind

Ive been thinking a lot about balance, not in the aesthetic sense, nothing to do with inner ears and riding bicycles either...
balance in a relation to an ethically responsible art practice that is sensitive to its context..a practice that is neither too violent or too passive but is situation responsive in an art conversational way that has nothing to do with formalism or architectural features.
Ive been thinking a lot while travelling this last year, landing in the middle of these different communities to make something called art and leave again two weeks later..each place has such a different tone, a different mood. I find myself adjusting the tone of my work like water finding a level, semi instinctively seeking to create some kind of situational balance.

art performance is context dependent as much as any public sculpture is, it demands reflective consideration about how the SITE contributes to the way the work is read ...and the reverse also...how the work contributes to the way the site is read. you know each significant act in a place prints itself on the history, hangs in the air...how can you want less for a performance? even if only a momentary inscription

for 'site' read context/ environment/ location..cultural, social, geopolitical et al