KVT – Performance Art at Nha San Studio

…….black, white, black, white, green, black, white…….
Work ethic at Nha San

A chilly Saturday night at Nha San watching a piece of performance art that went on, and on, and on….The audience drifted away in dribs and drabs as the open photo copier kept churning out its pointless, unreadable memos that were laid out in a careful grid ; as a light globe was continually and unnecessarily replaced; as bubbles of empty mindedness or wasted ideas or fatuous decision were continually blown and floated around and vapidly burst; as a worker, with deliberate, concentrated tread, endlessly measured justice and righteousness with an unwavering plumb line…. The last is my Judeo/Christian background playing with the imagery and concept.

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Four young men in black and white in a black cube doing endless, pointless repetitious, boring work, with another lying inert on the floor possibly dead from boredom. A scenario most of us have encountered at some time and that those working on assembly lines or forced by circumstance into sweat shops know as a life style. I like to think that it was probably representative of bureaucracy, anywhere, at its 5 star best. I could keep on supposing but like a wise, caged bird, I don’t want to be tempted to poke my head too far through the bars and have it bitten off.

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All the time, as I watched, until after 50 minutes when I yawned and went off to somewhere warmer, I expected something to happen and change the scenario. Perhaps that body would jump up and start pushing the plot in some sort of direction. But, invariably, life is not like that, especially for those whose options and choices are diminished by circumstances of things like wealth, place in society, place of birth, type of community. The list could keep on, being churned out like those memos in the performance

As a work in progress it has potential…..

I can see it…or its hybrid….working brilliantly in a space so big that it seems impossible to reach conclusion or closure….or, in a small public space where the completed memos are picked up by a fifth person and the work has to start all over again, and again, and again or even better still, where the gridded piles of memos get taller and unreachably taller as time and labor goes on and inexorably on, repetitiously for days, weeks, months. In a public place it could become a good piece of protest art .

Like most performance art, a video has been made and this would be lovely if shown on continuous loop in some public space even in an art museum over a long period. My mind likes playing around with its potential, its format, its placement.

It was a boring performance……but then that’s all it ever intended to be…..and for some reason it has stayed with me and engaged my mind in several directions and promoted discussion and exchange of ideas with others.

Rose Lee Goldberg says in the text of ‘Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present that performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. The young men on Saturday are experimenting with this notion and have a concept that could well succeed.

A quote I’ve used before in these blogs states that performance art may be entertaining, amusing, shocking, or horrifying but no matter which adjective applies, it is meant to be memorable. The young men in black and white didn’t quite fulfill this dictum but there is a good promise behind their intent. Keep on experimenting, I say.

Thanks Nha San for providing a space that allows work of this kind to get up and go. It’s a brave risk.

PS: That continuous flash of green from the humming photocopier has a few connotations too but I’ll save you from my mental perambulations

Another PS: My apologies to the artists if I got it all out of whack.