7a*11d Festival

Fridiay night, my friend invited me to the second-last event in the bi-annual 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, which has been running for the last ten days in Toronto. I was told that the name of the collective that organizes this show is constructed to suggest a crossword puzzle (7 across, 11 down), as well as encoding information about the festival’s origins (formed in 1997, I forget the detail about the 11). Apparently, there is significance to the asterisk as well, but this bit of the group’s mythology is revealed only to a select few—though I was informed that the inclusion of this character makes it difficult to use the group’s proper name on bank accounts and websites, neither of which recognize the symbol. The group’s name thus eludes certain conduits of incorporation, just as performance art itself has historically attempted to do by focusing on process over product, practice rather than goal, corporality, affect and community/audience-engagement in an effort to short-circuit (or at least comment upon) the commoditization of art in the modern world.

While a case can be made that the often inscrutable projects that fall under the umbrella of performance art still manage to effect an elitist cultural consumption that serves as a form of class distinction in Bourdieu’s sense, I read these kinds of performances more in line with de Certeau’s concept of tactics, or the surreptitious and temporal acts of resistance to meanings and ideologies that are inscribed into the mental and physical spaces we inhabit. Performance art's self-reflexive engagement with the spectator/participant often uses humour, performed metaphor, and sometimes shocking imagery and action to confront the viewer with a spectacle that challenges established meanings and expectations. Just as modern poetics theorizes the artist’s use of language as renewing our experience of a world deadened by habit, performance art appropriates the world of everyday objects as a kind of text with which to startle us into new perceptions and ideas. And just as there is a great deal of “bad” poetry produced, so too does performance art generate its share of poorly conceived happenings, leading to the stereotype of the inscrutable, self-indulgent artiste parodied in such films as The Big Lebowski by the Cohen brothers, or Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered.



At the same time, performance art’s attack on the commodity-form attempts to problematize the distinction between good and bad art, and thus recuperates failure as one of its recurring tropes. It is for this reason that I consider the above mentioned film by Tom Green to be an example of performance art rather than a spoof, while the Maude character from the Cohen brother’s film does serve as a kind of parody in the somber formalism and pretense that she illustrates. But the presentations I saw on Friday night were interesting and original, and even the hauntings by the spectre of high art were productive. The Toronto artist Henry Adam Svec opened the evening by appearing behind a podium and delivering an ironic and well-theorized reflection upon the nature of authenticity. Svec appeared wearing an unassuming blue Detroit Lions pull-over with a small sticker identifying him as a Festival Participant. His talk ran the gambit of post-modern theory in a pastiche of the academic conference paper that attempted to historically locate his topic while simultaneously performing the concept he claimed to articulate. This all in building up to a performance of a folk song with an acoustic guitar. Authenticity, argued Svec, was to be found not in the lyrics or music of the songs themselves, but in the quality of his own voice, the authentic dimensions of which exceeded the formal elements of the song to become its fleeting, original, content. And, just in case the audience were to mistake the song itself for the authenticity of which it was the carrier, Svec sang a second song about love and longing so that, by comparison, his listeners might be able to discern the quality in question. The whole delivery was saturated with irony that was only augmented by Svec’s expert rendition of the songs, both of which were by the same songwriters, making the attempt at comparison all the more futile.

The second piece was by Irma Optimist from Helsinki, Finland. Appearing in the space dressed entirely in black, Optimist proceeded to stretch a red ribbon across two of the gallery walls. She then produced a series of balls of scrunched-up paper, which, one-by one, she unceremoniously flattened out and hung from the ribbon with cloths pegs. In their scrunched form, the grapefruit-sized balls had been dipped in black paint or ink, so that when they were flattened, each had an irregular spot of black in its centre. After hanging a line of this strange laundry, Optimist cut out the black centre of each sheet, leaving a large hole at the centre the paper. She then roughly pulled each of the papers off the line and placed them around her neck via the head-shaped hole, taking care to re-assert her messy, shoulder length blond hair each time the pile of paper around her neck succeeded in confining her mop. When all of the papers were around her neck, she moved to the centre of the space an bent forward toward the audience so that all that could be seen of her head was her dangling hair framed by the large, crumpled sheets of paper. She remained in this position for several minutes while an electronic recording of what seemed to me to be the artist saying the word “poet” was repeated in such a way that the two syllables of the word shifted in and out of phase with each other, rendering an experience of the arbitrary nature of the signifier reduced to pure sound. I found this piece to be very powerful. The final image of the artist stockade by her own work, with the doubling of the artist’s work and body, seemed to me a wry comment on the processes of commoditization inherent in Western art practice.

The next piece by Francis O’Shaughnessy and Sara Létourneau, from Chicoutimi, Quebec, was interesting, but my appreciation of it was hindered by my being stuck in a back corner of the gallery, from which vantage it was difficult to see what was going on.
The artists seemed to be commenting on domesticity, alienation, and the relation between the sexes, using only a few simple props such as red thread (with which they constructed the silhouette of a house on the gallery wall, and which Létourneau, at one point, wraps in multiple tight circles around her waist to create a sort of sash), ordinary kitchen bowls, some form of pellet-like food (which the artists had sewn into pouches in their clothing, and which they procured and chewed on, rabbit-like, at various points in the performance), scissors (with which they cut open their clothing to access the foodstuffs) and a garbage bag. My awkward location beside the exit door turned to my advantage toward the end of the piece, when the artists scattered what smelled like Borax over the floor of the gallery and proceeded to jump up and down, creating a cloud of particulate that irritated the lungs of many of the spectators and sent them prematurely fleeing the gallery, coughing and wheezing.

For the next piece, Michael Fernandes sat in a chair at the end of the gallery, his face partially obscured by a large microphone, and read from a book about fairies. His slow, monotone presentation of this book cast a sort of spell over the audience, and the somewhat trite, new-age text on the life, habits and relationship to humanity (and the other orders of being) of the wee-folk, took on
profound meanings, almost becoming a kind of manifesto for performance arts itself. The fairies' distance from necessity, their inability to understand the cruelty and jealousy of human beings, their love of trees and animals, etc. all reverberated with the largely unacknowledged ideology of the performance art community itself. My favourite section was a description of the corporality of fairies as not circumscribed by an obvious skin or layer of fur, as is the case with humans and other animals. Instead, the book describes fairies as having levels of density that extend outward from a centre in such a way as it is impossible to discern a definitive break between the fairy and the rest of existence. As Fernandes’s lengthy reading went on, the audience sitting or standing on the concrete floor of the gallery became increasingly uncomfortable, and a mounting awareness of one’s own corporeality was brought into tension with the mesmerizing narrative of the transcendent life of the fairies, underscoring the difference between the two orders of being, and providing a physically-felt critique of fairy-life as a trope for the artistic lifestyle itself. Fernandez ended his recital abruptly mid page, like a tired librarian during a story hour that has gone over time, punctuating his reading with the deadpan comment that “The book goes on”, and “It’s not political”. I think this was my favourite piece of the evening.


The last piece, by Mexico’s Pancho Lopez was called “Anger”, and was prefaced by a curator’s introduction that Lopez almost didn’t make the festival due to difficulties getting a proper travel visa. Lopez's piece was accompanied by an upbeat Bossa Nova instrumental, and consisted of the artist emptying about fifteen bottles of champagne into a fishbowl on an obelisk. He did this while wearing an apron on which he glued the word VISA in black letters. Each time Lopez opened a bottle of champagne, the audience recoiled a little, worried that the plastic bottle stopper would be launched in their direction, but each time the cork flew harmlessly into the ceiling of the gallery where it sometimes ricocheted off the steel girders. When all the bottles had been emptied into the fish bowel, Lopez took a little sip from the top. He then peeled the letters off of his apron and floated them in the champagne.
The piece was brought to a conclusion when the artist suddenly produced a baseball bat from behind the obelisk and smashed the fishbowl, spilling champagne and glass over the gallery floor (but not, as far as I could tell, over the spectators, who were required to sit behind a certain line). Out of all the pieces that evening, I found this one to be the most predictable and poorly conceived. An interesting effect was produced when Lopez stood behind the fishbowl, and the letters glued to his apron were magnified and distorted by the champagne inside, but even this was made too obvious by the artist’s highlighting of the effect. My friend commented that she would have liked if Lopez had dunked his head in the fish bowl before he smashed it. I agree, and think the artist remained too detached from this performance, as though he were not implicated in the anger he sought to illustrate. At the same time, there was a degree of playful irony and detachment about the way Lopez conducted this piece, the construction of which--with a mounting sense tension, as the champagne level neared the top of the fishbowl--underscored the humour of Lopez's delivery. The final smashing of the bowl provided a fitting, if decadent, end to the evening, and a fellow standing next to me pointed out that gallery owners always leave the messy pieces to the end of the show.

Throughout the evening, in the basement of the gallery Toronto artist Martine Viale was working on a time-based piece in which she placed blue dye in tiny plastic envelopes and then scattered them about a section of the basement floor. Apparently, she had been working on this over the course of two days.
I found the basement room, with its low rafters, irregular concrete floor, and sections of historical stonework to be an interesting environment that Viale’s piece offered an opportunity to contemplate. My friend told me that the packets of blue dye were supposed to represent pieces of sky, a juxtaposition that worked well in the compressed space of the basement. I was lucky enough to wander downstairs just as the piece was coming to a close. Viale was standing in the centre of the room, a plastic container full of the last batch of “sky packets” held, for some time, above her head before she dropped them to scatter over the floor.