KVT – Performing at Goethe

Performing at Goethe

Most people reach for their bullsh*t detector when they hear the term performance art, but those of us who have been exposed to really good performance art get hooked.

Performance art today is still influenced by that generation of artists who were into challenging stuff that involved nudity, pain, difficult endurance tests and even bloodletting and was spurred on by that high priestess of Performance Art, Marina Abramovic.

Abramovic has recently had a retrospective of her work, that used to disgust and outrage the public, at MOMA in New York. Thousands of viewers watched her in a marathon 700 hour staring endurance performance with individual members of the public and viewed naked performers re-enacting some of her pieces of the past 40 years. Videos of her slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade- and other potentially self harming performances were shown.

My favorite performance artists of the past fifteen or so years have been the three Chinese artists who sort of started the trend in China, Zhu Ming, Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming and I can’t leave aside the ‘invisible man’ Liu Bolin. These men also tend to work from the same basic core as Abramovic and have, perhaps, been potent in the Vietnamese interest in the art form.

Vietnamese performance art has yet to come of age a few dribbles of great stuff have trickled past, a stream of good derivative attempts and a Red River of tedious or sometimes embarrassingly bad experiments. So it was good to see an internationally renowned performance artist from Germany, Nezaket Ekici, take workshops with a large group of young Vietnamese students and artists. Ekici appears to have Abramovic as one influence but naturally, as a leading artist of the next generation, is pushing the art form in new directions.

A work in progress, stimulated by the workshops, was viewed by an amazingly large, mainly young, audience at Goethe on Friday night who, in the main, didn’t mind the prospect of seeing people inflict pain on themselves or the audience in the name of art.

The premise behind the performance piece seemed to be challenging us about our control of our actions and our honesty and a group of young artists very capably took control and, in an Abramovic manner, poisoned themselves with cigarette fumes (a la Zhu Ming with his famous fire in a plastic bubble), chewed on hot chillies, humbled themselves at the feet of the mass, invited the audience to violate their bodies with kicks, kisses, hugs, kicks and alcohol, showed anger and demented behavior, presented bodily deformities and physical appearance insecurities and gave sustained endurance feats which would have painfully tested muscle control etc etc…and, had the politics allowed, would have involved nudity as society’s biggest, public vulnerable confrontation.

Abramovic states in one article about her work that “ To be a performance artist you have to hate theatre, theatre is fake, the knife is not real, the blood is not real and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real and the emotions are real”, the young artists on Friday were on the way to making that statement a truth though thankfully the bloodletting was kept to an absolute minimum. It started to fulfill one of performance arts basic tenets that it may be entertaining , amusing, shocking, or horrifying but no matter which adjective applies, it must be memorable.

An interesting and worthwhile night that may bode well for the state of performance art in its present, controlled state.