I have been on the ground in Shanghai for 5 days, absorbing my surroundings in preparation for implementing surrogate pieces at the 2010 World Expo as part of People In Space.

Participating in the international performance art festival circuit requires one to tread through environments to challenge their voice, aesthetic, and conceptual practice to be expressed in the potentially unfamiliar. I believed that being active in festivals, both as an artist and organizer/curator would have prepared me for my excursion to Shanghai. It’s now clear that nothing could have prepared me for this overwhelming city. I have caught myself, mouth agape, stumbling through streets of infinite people aggressively pushing each other to get from Point A to Point B. Equally impudent smells abound from the trash baking in the oppressive heat, the accumulation of bodies, and street vendors selling any food imaginable on a stick (The melon impaled with chopsticks is an essential experience for anyone visiting Shanghai).

A cacophony of a language I cannot understand funnels through my ears. Everything is lit up here. Gargantuan buildings pulse with colorful lights. After physically bulling my way through crowds of consumers, I am rewarded with the Shanghai skyline, twinkling above the water.

Decorated boats bearing the names of corporations float by, each one more decadent than the next, engaged in a grandiloquent competition.  Before arriving in Shanghai, I expected the massive population to be the most overwhelming and enticing, but the masses of people cannot compare to these monstrous manmade structures.

The third night I was here, I went to “Moved, Mutated, and Disturbed Identities,” an international post-master program organized through the Luxembourg Pavilion at the Expo at DDM Warehouse in Shanghai’s Art District. I stumbled into a concrete room, with a mass of people staring in the center. I snuck through the crowd and folded myself on the ground, a familiar scenario. Light illuminated a pile of trash and a pile of pig flesh accumulated on the ground next to a cart. Two men entered the space. Facing one another, one of the men tried to make intense eye contact with his counterpart, while holding what looked like swine tongue in his hands. The other man looked around his surroundings with a great sadness in his eyes, ignoring his collaborator. They engaged in these counteracting versions of looking for some time. They embraced, and then the man holding the meat returned to his position in front of the pig meat.

Nguyen Anh Tuan and Street Singer

He began to engage in an action of stomping his right foot on the meat while simultaneously hitting himself in the face with the swine tongue he held in his hands.

Nguyen Anh Tuan 2010

Nguyen Anh Tuan 2010

After a while of doing this, the other man, a Chinese Street Singer began to sing a folksong about memory, and being forgotten.  When his singing ended, the men hugged.  

Although Nguyen Anh Tuan’s actions presented in “Celebrating the End of a Relaxing Time,” consisted of stomping, punching oneself in the face with raw meat, and confronting deep sadness, the piece felt strangely gentle. Perhaps it was because the action was framed with a warm embrace between the two men. Maybe it was the familiarity. This experience reminded me of how far reaching the universal language of art truly is. No matter how out of place one may feel, there are always ways in which we can communicate through the cultural barriers to find a piece of comfort.

In 6 days I will be on ground in Shanghai as part of the People In Space project. We will be venturing into the 2010 World Expo in an attempt to bridge the participation gap between the US and the rest of the planet.

Approximately 375,000 people attend the Expo each day. Many of these visitors will spend over 10 hours waiting in lines consisting of thousands of people in order to enter popular pavilions. The Artists involved with People In Space will be enacting surrogate pieces to spark unexpected dialogue among the waiting. I will be one of these individuals, acting as a physical filter in one of the largest attended events in history in one of the most populated cities in the world.  Simultaneously, I will be blogging, using The Present Tense as one of the main platforms for archiving this experience.

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Last week, Big Red and Shiny, an arts journal that served as a staple in the Boston art scene for the last 6 years, launched their final issue. After providing our community a forum to challenge and create dialogue around the state of the arts in New England, Founder, Matt Nash decided to “close up shop and make way for the next group of motivated artists to build a voice for their community.” Nash points out that Big Red and Shiny had been online a full third of the life of the Internet and lists poignant changes that the Internet has endured through the years. Nash expresses gratitude for the endless art, food, and music blogs that have sifted through content, providing him with the knowledge of “how best to spend the few years I have on this earth”. As I read Nash’s farewell, the worry lines began to subside and I became filled with hope and excitement for the future. In this move to end, Big Red calls upon the creatively minded to meet the challenge of building platforms for one another while simultaneously filtering through the blossoming chaos present in the internet age.

Big Red and Shiny has been crucial to The Present Tense’s evolution. It has been a cheerleader, a source of inspiration, and brain candy for us over the years, publishing interviews about our endeavors, posting our calls, and giving me another platform to publish my writing. In my grieving for the end of one of my favorite Art Journals, I have concluded that it takes courage to end something good to make room for the equally tenacious.

Because the Big Red and Shiny archive is uncertain, check out these Present Tense related posts:

Contaminate 1

Seconds Festival

Contaminate 2

Contaminate 3

Interview with Sandrine & Phil

Revolt2Die @ MEME

Sandrine’s review of The Human Cost of War

Alternative Art Spaces

Sandrine’s Review of X Me Lab

The 2010 World Expo in Shanghai anticipates 70 million attendees who
will wait in lines for hours to catch a glimpse of the ideas and
innovations that will shape our future. Hosted in the most populated
city on the planet, the Shanghai Expo will be one of the largest events
in history. In an effort to address sustainable urban development 189
countries have built temporary multi-million dollar pavilions addressing
the theme: “Better City Better Life.” Yet few Americans know its
happening.

What Are We Waiting For? is a curated project by Daniel S. DeLuca
and Sandrine Schaefer as a facet of the People in Space Project - An
interactive artistic research delegation to the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
What Are We Waiting For? invites creative thinkers from a variety of
backgrounds to consider the context of waiting in lines as an opportunity to
spark the imagination through unexpected actions and interactions. We are
looking for ideas that are simple to implement, have a strong concept, and
engage the people waiting in line. Proposals that are selected will be
performed by a team of expert practitioners in and through the lines present
at the Shanghai World Expo Pavilions. You come up with the actions and we
implement them as your surrogate!

Click here to download a PDF with a description of the guidelines.

Performance art, most would agree, is best observed first-hand. However, performances frequently are subject to fragmentation through word-of-mouth recollections and opinions. Justin Cooper and Benjamin Bellas’s performance was one that I did not witness, but definitely heard about. Watching it for the first time, I was struck both by how different it was than in my imagination when I heard about the piece, and how faithfully its witnesses had relayed the performance’s incredible humor.
As Sandrine recently said, performance and theater are two different mediums that share characteristics, which can often be confusing for thespians and performance artists alike. Cooper and Bellas have done a wonderful job of bringing out the best of the familiarity of stand-up comedy or theater, while totally juxtaposing it with the attitude of farce that performance art encourages. I was reminded while watching this piece of great absurdist comedy, like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or George Carlin’s stand-up routines—with the added bonus of the (slightly) controlled mania of a dynamic performance. Jazz Wolf is a performance that one watches and wishes to pass on to anyone else who hasn’t seen it, and the Present Tense is pleased to share it with you.
-Coco

Being a performance art initiative, it seems vital that we touch on Marina Abromovic’s MoMA exhibition, even though it seems that everyone and their cousin  knows about this piece. I often look at a sports event or concert and think, why won’t that many people show up to see a piece of art? This is the first time that I’ve seen anything come close, and its thrilling to see the ways that it infiltrated so many of our familiar platforms (If you don’t know this piece, a simple google search will be more than enough information on it). First off, if you were not able to make it to NYC to witness the piece, there was a live webcam that allowed to you to see the performance as it happened. While it may be problematic to witness a piece that is so deeply about presence via a webcam, it provides a heightened level of access to it and and opens it up to and audience that may be to timid to approach a piece of “Live Art”

What is more impressive, it the life this piece took on with other social networking and creative platforms. It had/has a presence on just about every one I can think of, facebook, youtube, flickr, tumblr, vimeo, and even a parody tumblr. Many people, myself included, were reluctant to embrace these facets as tools, but when the self proclaimed “Grandmother of Performance Art” proves that they can be invaluable, it is clear that such components are pivotal in advancement of the medium.

Our process developed to acknowledge the exercise of meeting in the middle.

Our process has evolved to mimic the shape of a diamond.

“Congratulations on your Empire” was our first experience within the walls of MEME (then 55 Gallery). It evolved with an intentional beginning, middle, and end, that shed new light on our potential as collaborators.  Shortly after, 55 was gifted to us and MEME emerged.  Today begins MEME’s 2nd cycle.  Alice Vogler, Dirk Adams, and Vela Phelan will continue with MEME, bringing it into a new epoch.  As we examine the future of our collaboration and The Present Tense, we eagerly anticipate MEME’s development and we feel sincere gratitude for having the opportunity to contribute to it’s genesis.

In this piece, Jeffrey Byrd, an Iowa-based performance and video artist transforms from Maria Callas to Brittney Spears right before our eyes. He begins with a somber nod to Butoh and moves through a myriad of emotions. By the end, we have experienced Jeffrey’s rendition of Madame Butterfly while watching him expose a deep piece of his imagination that has inspired laughter and a sense of hope. Reminiscing about this piece prompted me to spend some time on Jeffrey’s website. I giggled through Jeff performing household chores dressed as a Stormtrooper and I cheered him on as he attempted to scale walls in a sexy Spiderman suit. My heart melted while watching a video of a Mephisto, a comic book character dancing in his underwear. I fantasized about what it would be like if I made an effort to retain my own creativity at work by tap dancing on my desk like Jeff did in “Tap Desk”. In this exploration, I noticed Jeff had chosen to include a quote from Sebastian Horsley on his site. “We are what we pretend to be”. If only we all could follow Jeff’s lead and spend more time pretending, the powers of our imaginations could truly and genuinely be realized.