PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, May 2010, Vol. 32, No. 2, Pages 17-23
In defining itself against traditional theatrical characteristics, performance art has gravitated towards the ephemeral as one of its theoretical lynchpins. The photographic document of the performance preserves only fragments of the event yet secures the event’s posterity. With Marina Abramovic’s
Seven Easy Pieces, performed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, 9-15 November 2005, Abramovic boldly put forth the rare alternative proposition of re-enacting past performance works from the 1960s and 70s – one of her own and five seminal ones from her peers.
1 It was a daring interpretative intervention, one which undertakes a role to make anew (and thus undercut their preciousness) what have already been enlisted within a performance canon.
But cast within art historical and practical genealogies, such a feat may not look so out of place. Even with the contemporary valorization of the ‘copy’ and postmodern refusal of the originary genius, one acknowledges that the backward and mimetic glance has long been part of artistic practice in both East and West. As the historian of renaissance art Svetlana Alpers succinctly puts it, ‘Art is made out of art’. In copying an earlier work, a complex attitude can be evinced; it is at once an emulation that acknowledges an artistic debt and puts the later artist within an assured lineage, and also the staking out of an intellectual rivalry, a striving to best the precursor.
2 In many cases, it is part genuine admiration and part self-serving ambition. Such an imitation is not a dispassionate affair but struck through with an adamant wish to re-create or re-imagine the experience of the original work as it courses through the contemporary. Appropriately, Alpers quotes from TS Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’:
The poet is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but
the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious not of what is dead, but what is already living.
Working out of tradition, to take on the enduring legacy of predecessors, is to make new meaning out of what has historically been received and rested. We would conceivably be thinking that such a working method only behooves us to make art in accordance with the approved principles and spirit of the past work, but to boldly inhabit an entire form down to its distinctive details should cause us to think beyond the mere act of sycophancy. True, such blandishments do not serve to dislodge the certain position of the forerunner but they help us ask another question: why is a particular artwork of such significance to the latter-day artist that he/she might want to emulate it?
In the case of the Singaporean performance artist Lee Wen, his interventions within the performance corpus are not fomented out of envy and artistic supersession but are rather ways to more legibly sketch out the contours of performance history to his local audience, who may not be acquainted to the same degree about the constituents of performance art. In short, this is Lee’s pedagogical service to his immediate community. He has modestly and informally called his series of re-enactments ‘revisits’, suggesting a more partial and personal venture into his own memorial track. At the same time, he has termed his first two forays more stringently as ‘redux’ and ‘revision’, where the stress lies more within a purposive drive to revivify and restore through a changed performance modality. Lee’s homage to John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Yves Klein, Nam June Paik and La Monte Young is not wrought from a distanced respect but a willingness to be engaged with material that he believes will speak to the current phase of life in Singapore.
Lee’s archival jaunt began with Lennon and Ono’s 1969
Bed-in, ananti-Vietnam War protest where the couple stayed in bed for a week in their hotels in Amsterdam and Montreal and sang their anthem
Give Peace a Chance to the world’s media. In Lee’s
Give Peace a Chance: Redux (2006), his bed-in was staged, in collaboration with a fellow Singaporean artist Kai Lam, at the concourse of the Singapore Management University to commemorate the fifth anniversary of September 11. Lee and Lam exhorted the crowds to join them in their demonstration for peace and pacifism whilst dressed in their pyjamas and armed with a guitar, and the signs ‘Hair Peace’ and “Bed Peace’ aloft over their bed. In Lee’s mind, this is not merely an idealist antidote to the current malaise of cynicism but the very importance of reviving histories for a generation which has no knowledge of real political strife or effective countercultural (op)positions. A different (and less political) tenor is struck however with Lee’s
Zen for Head, Clay and Leg (2009). Performed at the opening of the exhibition ‘Drawing as Form’ in August 2009, Lee found Nam June Paik’s appropriation and actualisation of La Monte Young’s instruction to “draw a straight line and follow it” in his
Composition Nr 15 (1960) to be an instance of exploring a mark-making towards form in drawing.
3 Whilst Paik had interpreted the command by dipping his head into a bucket of black ink and proceeded to make a line on a scroll of paper with him, Lee re- interpreted Paik by adding substituting a block of terracotta clay for the ink and proceeded to push the clay-block with his head over a moistened trail on a primed canvas scroll.
4 In fact, Lee had drawn a line not once but twice, the first being the wet mop dragged across the paper surface. But the operative word here is ‘follow’ because in repeating Paik’s philosophical and physical gesture, Lee is also falling into line with a lineage, to follow in Paik’s footsteps but also in ensuring that he had two lines drawn to acknowledge both historical figures in the eventual creation of
Zen for Head at the first Fluxus concert in Wiesbaden in 1962. Watching Lee exert himself as he crouched low to slowly roll the clay-block along the ground, the significance of the word ‘leg’ in the title is thus thrown into relief. No emulation is without effort and cost to a singular artistic personality, and ‘leg’ becomes the exact signifier that will allow him to wager his creative autonomy because his legs and movement have been gradually weakened by a neurological dysfunction. The ‘leg’ is both metaphor and literal impediment, commenting on the difficulties of copying a past work but also a way to stamp his identity over the new iterated piece.
But thus far, the work that has most exercised Lee’s imagination is Yves Klein’s then controversial but indelible
Anthropometry of the Blue Epoch (1960) staged at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris. Entitling it
Anthropometry Revision: Yellow Period (after Yves Klein), engaged with it on two separate occasions in two different locales: Chengdu, China and then Singapore. As is well known, in a contrived late evening soiree, Klein directed three nude female models to sponge themselves with his signature International Klein Blue (IKB) paint and had two of them imprint their bodies against the large sheets of paper on the wall behind, climbing onto pedestals of different heights to create a rhythmic composition of silhouettes, whilst the third rolled and was dragged across the large sheet of paper covering the floor by the other two. They were accompanied by a group of male musicians performing Klein’s
Symphonie Monoton-silence, which was twenty minutes of one-note music followed by twenty minutes of silence. Dressed pristinely in a white-tie tuxedo, Klein kept his distance from the ‘painting’ throughout the performance and was rather more preoccupied with orchestrating the spectacle for a hundred invited members of the art world elite in mandatory evening dress, who were alternately bored and shocked by it.
Proceeding to re-situate the performance in an Asian context, Lee conscientiously recalibrated and substituted every structural element of Klein’s work.
Anthropometry Revision: Yellow Period (after Yves Klein) was first presented at Red & Grey Art Contemporary in Chengdu, China, in the afternoon of 13 April 2008. The directed passive bodies of the all-female group of models were in this case replaced in favour of a more collaborative mode of performance comprising Lee, a female artist Jiang Jing and another male artist He Liping. Consciously factoring in the condition of volition and agency, Lee asked Jiang if she would be comfortable performing naked, offering her the choice which she eventually declined by preferring to don a flesh-coloured full-length leotard. Klein’s motivations and strategies of removing the artist’s hand, ego and intentionality had, in this case, dispelled the psychically invested and affective states of the artist’s body, the willingness to submit somatically to the materiality of painting. Klein did on occasion imprint his own body but we only see the final product, never his dirtied hand or body. He had rather succeeded in de-corporealising than in depersonalising his practice, and ironically Klein’s purported disarming of artistic intentionality only reinstates the magisterial co-ordination of the male artist. In his revisionist enterprise, Lee removed the artist from his position as an external point of control and restored his body as comingled with his other collaborators in the painting. The only point where Lee appeared to be conducting was when he was facing his all-female classical Chinese orchestra, which was engaged to have each of the five traditional Chinese instruments play one pitch of the five notes of the pentatonic scale. Lee’s ‘Pentatone Symphony’ made use of the five-note pentatonic scale of traditional Chinese music to contrast Klein’s ‘Monotone Symphony’ and draw attention to the seven-note heptatonic scale of Western music. The questions that so concerned Lee about Klein’s performance were answered by Lee’s thorough sinicisation of the work, with the most salient revision falling on the use of Lee’s signature yellow paint in place of the IKB. Like Klein’s models, Lee, Jiang and He helped themselves to the pails of pigment and covered their bodies in paint, but unlike the French version which kept up some measure of restraint and was elegantly spare in the wall imprints, Lee’s enactment was more of the laissez-faire all-over, and the performers became delightfully and messily coated in bright yellow. The potential for a revision of Klein was always already present through the parts which it had repressed, for as Judith Butler reminds us, ‘[w]hat is refused or repudiated in the formation of the subject continues to determine that subject. What remains outside the subject, set outside by the act of foreclosure which founds the subject, persists as a kind of defining negativity.’
5More surprising was Lee’s second attempt at
Anthropometry Revision (10-27 September 2008 at Soobin Art International, Singapore). If the first revision appeared to be a respectful part by part reassembly of Klein’s
Anthropometry of the Blue Epoch, the second seemed to want to take the iteration to the point of excess. It is as if Lee’s
Anthropometry Revision: Yellow Period (after Yves Klein) #2 aimed to assert the pioneering status of his first revision, to reclaim on Lee’s own terms what Lee had taken from Klein, to declare that his coming after Klein was as much a decisive break with tradition as it was a continued negotiation with it. More crucial observations can be obtained if we compared both
Anthropometry Revision(s). Where the earlier co-participants of the first revision were merely professional acquaintances (approximating Klein’s own relationship with his models), the second revision comprised of artist-friends within Lee’s inner circle. Such parity of status amongst the participants meant that fidelity to Klein’s work would surely be more fiercely contested and disrupted, with the collaboration effectively drawing out into the fore of the revised work each artist’s ego and interpretation. In
Anthropometry Revision #2, Lee performed next to Singaporean artist Lynn Lu (who agreed to be nude but was clearly uncomfortable with it such that she slathered on the yellow paint completely over her face and body) and Japanese artist Arai Shinichi, with the music provided by his fellow Artist Village members, Kai Lam and Jeremy Hiah. Dropping the Chinese orchestra in favour of a monotonic jew’s harp strummed by Hiah, and electronically mixed and amplified by Lam, the second revision moved further away from the original remit of placing Klein’s performance within a Chinese frame but closer to contemporising it.
But the waywardness of the second revision was most distinctly revealed through Arai’s insistent display of his own oeuvre and personality. Refusing to appear as Lee and Lu had (in the nude and preparing their paint buckets), Arai emerged fully dressed and took a camera snapshot of the audience and gradually took off his clothes to unveil to the viewers the customary start to his own
Happy Japan! performances – with a Pikachu plush toy attached to his genital area. As the performance progressed, Arai showed off more and more of his own performance proclivities, repeatedly slamming his body and limbs onto the background screen and at one point singing the Japanese national anthem, the Kimigayo. But does this mean that Lee’s second revision was inadvertently trumped by Arai’s boisterous irruption? Perhaps not. If we are to take seriously what Lee had intended to advance, which is a certain relinquishing of dictatorial control and the inclusion of individual bodily drives, then Lee could be said to have attained his objectives paradoxically through Arai’s circumvention of his own interpretative, authorial stamp.
Lee had approached his subjects in the same spirit of ensuring a ‘living’ canon as Abramovic had redone performance pieces she deemed historically and personally pivotal, although Lee professes not to be significantly influenced by Abramovic’s gesture. Having never personally witnessed the performances that were iterated except through partial documents, Abramovic had tried to come as close as possible to the original work, whereas Lee attempted instead take the predecessor apart whilst maintaining a recognisable spectre of it. Artistic training has often rewarded learning, studying and copying from past masters (either desired or detested) as a pathway towards building creative singularity but perhaps only in this fleeting, inexact and inadequate object called performance art can the ‘master’ be so fervently risked and gained all over again by its unruly disciple-interpreter.
- See Johanna Burton, Repeat performance: Johanna Burton on Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces, Artforum, January 2006.
- See Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, chapter 6.
- “Drawing as Form” looks back at “Drawing Show”, one of the early The Artists Village projects held at the Jalan Ulu Sembawang space in 1989. “Drawing as Form” presents works pertaining to questions about the conception, production process and eventual presentation of ‘drawing’, which practice constitutes the basis of visual language for artists and cultural producers.
- During the earlier International Performance Show-Ceramic Passion, 5th World Ceramic Biennale in Icheon, South Korea, Lee also made three clay-based actions paying homage to Nam June Paik as per La Monte Young’s instruction.
- Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, p 190
Photo: Lee Wen, Anthropometry Revision:Yellow period (after Yves Klein) #2, with Lynn Lu, Arai Shinichi and music by Kai Lam and Jeremy Hiah, September 10, 2008, SooBin Art International, Singapore. Photo: Lu Yifei. Courtesy of the artist.