RAY LANGENBACH
SHORT REVIEW PC5

Perhaps the best way to gauge the success of a performance art conference is to not be able to tell when it ended and if no clear boundary can be claimed between art and life, or between problems of aesthetics and the problems of the social realm.In this case, the Artperformance Conference in Bangkok, attended by 55 artists from Asia, Europe and north America was a complete success. Forsome, the conference was still going on in Volker Harmann's hospital room a week later, where , surrounded by bottles of food and saline and phlegm, he was talking with a finger over the tube in his throat. For others it was still happening in the street, outside the gates of the Thai Petroleum Company (PTT) or in small forest , close to the Myanmar border, in the path of a gas pipeline, which, unless the protests by the consortium of Thai NGOs is successful, will cut through the living fabric of one of the last protected National Forest areas. Somehow, Volker's throat --seriously burned , during his final 55 second performance, at Silapakorn university when a fireworks he was holding it in his teeth accidentally exploded inwards, -- and the small forest, violated by a misplaced pipeline, became linked in my dyslexic mind.

But, for others , the conference ended just in time. Some of the Singapore artists were speculating that if the conference lasted a few more days, major disagreements would have arisen between the Thai and the German artists: issues of social commitment, aesthetic concerns, economic concerns and political strategy. These conflicts perhaps reflected subtle cultural differences or differences in the present economic topology. Differences that could not be easily ignored.

In the views of some (but by no means all) of the Thai artists, the Germans had little real desire to understand Thai work. This sentiment was unfortunately inflamed by a comment of a lecturer at Silapakorn University that the Europeans would show the Thai students "real performance art," implying that the Thai artists do something less than real.

Other Thai artists thought that the Westerners were not "serious" in their work, that they approached it with a frivolity that highlighted its absurdity and futility in the face of real social problems. Meanwhile, some (but by no means all) of the Westerners felt that the Thai work was too literal and blatant in fronting its political agenda;

that the Thai artists privileged politics over aesthetics, hoping that the politics would carry over half-baked concepts and sometimes unrefined performance strategies.

Both views , in my view, had some understanding and some misunderstandings. And it should be said that the struggle of views gave the conference a depth and validity as a cross-cultural experience.

New internal tensions and anxieties have arisen in the last few years in Southeast Asia, including a resurgence of the significance of economic class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and religion as socio-political determinants. Artists have responded to these conditions with new types of art work, often deploying socially contextualised forms and practices, sometimes in alignment with the State's ideological project, and sometimes in opposition to it. But in either case much of the cutting edge work must negotiate politics in a very pointed manner.

A number of the Thai artists, particularly those who also work closely with Non-government organisations (NGOs), dealing with the environment, human rights, AIDS , labour rights, and women's rights or the oppression of the

present economic downturn, were producing work not designed for their German guests or even for the other Asian artists at the conference but for an audience not present. Their work was designed to be accessible to people across class lines, who would have no familiarity with a performance art tradition. To do this, it could not be encased in hermetic aesthetic questions or subtle metaphors. Performance art and social activism are intimately tied in Thailand and throughout much of Asia, and must find its justification for what is basically a privileged middle-class occupation in newly developed nations.

But the Germans, new arrivals in a foreign land, found themselves unable to comment effectively on the intricacies of local politics and traditions, in a way that they would feel quite comfortable doing back home. Basically they found themselves in the uncomfortable cast of "art tourists", a condition in which I , as a white American artist working in Asia, also find myself , and have commented on previously . The tourist photographic chronicles of the Swiss/Hungarian, artists, Tâche/Magos, drew attention to this condition, as they tried to find "moments" in their travels that were then frozen on Polaroid film. They attempted to representing the moment of freezing the exotic landscape or portray their displacement by embracing the cliché's of tourist photography.

But displacement does not adequately sum up the differences. European and particularly German and Swiss performance art springs from a modernist lineage, reaching back to at least the Dada and surrealist movements at the turn of the century, and from there to medieval times. It draws on a carnival and cabaret tradition that was the assumed base of the actions of the Dadaists at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and continued through the Fluxus period in Koln, the home of the Ultimate Akademie. This lineage was formative to subsequent European and American performance, and humour and satire is an essential component of this type of work.

Laurence Senelick has described this phenomenon:

Emerging from bohemian haunts, the cabaret was the earliest podium for the expressionists, the Dadaists, the futurists; it was a congenial forum for experiments in shadowgraphy, puppetry, free-form skits, jazz rhythms, literary parody, "naturalistic" songs, , "brutistic" litanies, agitprop, dance-pantomime, and political satire." (Carlson, 1996, 87)

Heinrich Luber's (Switzerland) body sculpture extending into the environment by, the music pieces of Volker Harmann, the absurdist weather symphony by Ben Peterson (U.S. /Cologne) and the exquisite actions of Boris Nieslony (Germany) , and in fact fell squarely in this tradition. An analogy in Southeast Asia would perhaps be the hybridised, satirical Bangsawan tradition which grew out of the Malay, Indian and Chinese communities of peninsular Malaysia.

To make matters worse, the "Conference" promised a space for dialogue and discussion, based on a previous Performance Art Conference organised by the German consortium, the Ultimate Akademie. The dialogue began on the first day with the expression of basic binary stereotypes: East is communal, West is individualistic, East is hungry and political, West is comfortable and bourgeois, Asia is economically oppressed, West is the economic

oppressor, and the two are in a state of "economic war."

The dialogue was cut off after about an hour and never returned to, except in small groups amongst the participants, the artists concentrating on communicating through their works. Unfortunately so many of the above unstated assumptions were embedded in the works as to make the absence of in depth dialogue painfully apparent.

But, this is not to say that convergence or confluence was not experienced during the conference. Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of the conference was the confluence of not just individual artists, but artists groups and organisations: including the original American Fluxus group, the Ultimate Academie from Koln, ASA European also from Koln, Concrete House in Bangkok, Project 304, Green Bullet Group among others.

That's all I have for the moment. A full review will be out this spring.

Thanks, Ray

Sources
Carlson, Marvin, 1996, Performance: a critical introduction, New York, Routledge

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