HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Song Dong

Writing the Time with Water, Performance, London, England, 2000
Song Dong
Photo: Cang Xin, courtesy the artist, Beijing, China

Song Dong

Song Dong b.1966 (China)
lives and works in Beijing, China

launch interview with Song Dong

Song Dong's work embraces performance, video installation, calligraphy, sculpture, and site-specific projects. His strength lies in a capacity to summon or convene opposites. As he has stated, "I am interested in how the two sides of the East/West contradiction become one." Song attempts to relocate our experience of art to some place between modernity and tradition; past and present; Taoist philosophy and conceptual art traditions, first manifested in the 1960s, that privilege the process of construction or attainment over the finished product. For Song the root of all these activities, indeed of most human endeavor, is self-expression. Because of this, the audience is at times tangential, as in the example of his Water Diary (1995-present). This diary, written with water on stone, has become an integral part of his life. Although he has photographed this daily ritual for exhibition purposes, it is first and foremost a personal experience inspired by the memory of his own modestly lived childhood. In order to not waste precious paper and ink, Song's father encouraged him to use water on a stone to practice his calligraphy. As an artist, Song began writing his diary with water on a stone in 1995, and it became a way to release his emotions in absolute privacy, leaving no trace.

The evanescence that embodies his relation to art and to Taoism eventually led Song to work in video. The artist has said that "the medium of video is elemental. It produces moving images and sounds that cannot be touched. It has no shape but provides a strong light and can be projected onto any object." Song's video production seems to follow the same binary logic as his water writing. On the one hand, he explores larger social and cultural issues, as in Crumpling Shanghai (2000), which serves as a comment on the recent predatory urban development in China. On the other hand, his work explores very personal, intimate experiences. In Touching My Father (1998), he projected onto his father's body a video image of his own hand. In a culture that does not facilitate physical contact, touching his father in this way was a strong statement about the traditional relationship between fathers and sons as well as an attempt to bridge the generation gap that has appeared in China's recent development.

Whatever topic Song approaches, his critique always manages to walk the thin line between the politic and the poetic. Jump (1999), a performance during which he jumped aimlessly in front of the Forbidden City in Beijing, in the middle of the absolutely indifferent crowd, reveals the importance he places on both cerebral and physical experiences. Jump, with its Taoist absurdity, could find its roots in a traditional Chinese proverb: "Jump … no reason not to jump … no reason to jump." It crystallizes a sense of tradition, calls into play strategies sprung from a history of avant-garde performance work, emphasizes an aspect of the urban Chinese "everyday," and questions the status and visibility of art and culture in the world today.

Song has exhibited widely in Asia and abroad, including solo exhibitions in London and Beijing and group exhibitions in Germany, Korea, and the United States. He was included in Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998), organized by the Asia Society Galleries, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, and Transience: Chinese Art at the End of the 20th Century (1991), organized by the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, Illinois. He also participated in the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, and the Fourth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia (2002).

--Philippe Vergne

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

new practices. Nevertheless, as important and reassuring as the notion of thirdness and in-betweenness is, it might only be the third step on the way to change. It is not sufficient merely to acknowledge the notion of thirdness; one needs to make it active, to pull it toward an alternative center. If not, thirdness might become a definition that restrains and limits new knowledge rather than one that empowers it.[28]

For Atelier Bow-Wow and Can Altay, the starting point for their respective projects involves inventory and documentation. This impetus to record one's own environment is apparent in many artistic practices today, most obviously in the practice of film, but not exclusively. The logic of the documentary has increasingly emerged in the visual arts over the last decade, as demonstrated by the incorporation of moving images into art practices, using models borrowed from popular culture and entertainment, including Hollywood movies, music videos, and video games.

The exigency of information and realism reveals itself in Chinese artist Wang Jian Wei's film Living Elsewhere (1999-2000; pp. 245-247). The film, which documents a failed real-estate development project in the suburbs of Beijing, seems motivated by the need to record a socioeconomical and cultural mutation. The same drive applies to Zhao Liang's film Bored Youth (2000; pp. 253-255), which focuses on Beijing's predatory urban development, even though the pure documentary language is mixed with editing strategies inherited from music videos. In both cases, documentary filmmaking becomes a means for sustaining a tradition that has almost disappeared from art practice: the tradition of storytelling.

Although she does not use moving images as a medium, Yin Xiuzhen participates in this strategy when she documents--through installations or interventions--the way in which memory vanishes with the destruction or dislocation of communities (pp. 249-251). Such artists seem to embrace a sense of civic responsibility that redefines activism as a quiet subversion rather than a frontal and oppositional attack. The powerful body of work that has erupted under this logic of documentary has also allowed the practitioners to reassert their own proximity and to locate their practices, and the consequences thereof, on a very local or regional level. Again, this movement can be seen as an effect of a widely globalized culture. Here, the urgency is to find a way to make a difference. The local is becoming the alternative, and it contributes to a redefinition of the nature of the audience through the involvement of communities.

The paradox of the increasingly globalized world is that many artists are attempting to reinvent, or to establish, their difference. This movement, which might be the unavoidable flip side of globalization, was the cornerstone of the Gwangju Biennale in 2002.[29] One outstanding feature of this exhibition was the presence of twenty-six collectives or independent organizations from Europe and Asia. These groups have emerged over the last decade as fundamental protagonists in art-making and diffusion, developing alternative strategies that affect the relationship of art to the larger world. These groups/platforms, all active in their communities as exhibition venues, educational structures, or production units, serve as a metaphor for a new arena of negotiation that lies in between the global and the local.[30]

In many ways, the projects of Kaoru Arima, developed through his Art Drug Center in Inuyama-City, Japan, echo such concerns. In his own house, Arima opened an art center to provide a platform for fellow artists who might not otherwise find venues for showing their work. With a similar attention to the value of proximity, the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, composed of filmmakers and new-media practitioners, is working on a series of initiatives motivated by the desire to interpret, understand, and engage the urban construct of the city in which they live and work. One of their projects is based on the creation of a "cyber neighborhood," acenter for digital intervention with kids in a working-class settlement in New Delhi.

28 On this topic see Leslie A. Adelson, "Against Between: A Manifesto," in Unpacking Europe, eds. Hassan and Dadi, p. 245.

29 The 2002 Gwangju Biennale, titled Pause, was co-curated by Charles Esche, director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden,and Hou Hanru, freelance curator, director of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, and member of the Walker Art Center's global advisory committee.

30 For more on this topic, see Hou Hanru's essay on page 36 in this book.

Content, Context, and Cultural Commitment: Curating the Performing Arts
Philip Bither, Baraka Sele

PB: That approach to traveling is also connected to the emotional experience of performance, of seeing live artists performing in the same space in real time. We often talk about the essential need for contextualization, but there is something about being in the moment of a live performance, an appreciation for the work that transcends all the historical background, all the critical performance theory that you might gather. In fact, you appreciate it on a completely different level. That may be something that differentiates our work, perhaps, from the visual arts. There is that fine line between contextualizing and overpreparing an audience.

BS: It's completely experiential. Sometimes I love just experiencing the work and not having the burden of trying to tell someone what it means.

PB: Or why they should like it.

BS: What does it mean? Where does it come from? What is its history?

PB: There are times when too much information undercuts the power of the live theatrical experience. There's a balance that curators need to strike in terms of when the information is best delivered and in what format.

BS: And when that contextual information weighs the performance down.

PB: Sometimes we choose not to have anything happen in the performance space itself right after the event. There's a magic, a sacredness to that space, which the didacticism of a quick informational exchange or a question-and-answer session immediately following a performance can sometimes destroy.

BS: We often talk about the afterlife of a performance. How can it live on and not become ephemeral? In my opinion, that is more of a concern from the visual arts perspective; I don't have a problem with the performing arts being ephemeral art forms.

PB: It lives in the spirit and in memory.

BS: In the here and now. There is an appropriate time for archiving and documentation, or seeing that the work tours and has an ongoing life. But nothing compares to being in the moment; it's like meditation.

PB: It's perhaps part of what drove avant-garde visual artists to start performative practice in the first place. There was such a focus on the object and, often, the commercial value of the object. The Dada and Fluxus movements, Joseph Beuys and the tradition that he spawned, Happenings, and many other early performance art practices were attempting, in part, to create the spontaneous moment, were realizing that art didn't need to have permanence. It could be of the moment and about our lives and our everyday ephemeral existence. But it's still challenging for institutions that have been, for much of their histories, built around the collection of objects and the permanence of those objects. There certainly are some interesting ways to combine the practices--creating art exhibitions out of the sets, scores, videos, costumes, writings, and sound of time-based performances.[3] Also, digital documentation and performing arts projects translated onto the Web offer new bridges between worlds.

The Walker's framework for presenting work is quite specific. It's about contemporary and experimental work, work that in some way is challenging the norm. How you define those terms becomes very complex when you are operating in a global context. What is the avant-garde? Is there an avant-garde? What are the distinctly different forms of modernism? As we have discussed many times during this initiative, there is not just one story of modernism.

BS: And sometimes, modernism is not even the story at all.

3 For example, the Walker presented in 1998 the exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and Meredith Monk, co-curated by Philippe Vergne, Siri Engberg, and Kellie Jones.

Cabelo

launch interview with Cabelo

Cabelo is a cultural seismographer, creating public performances and sculptural environments that chart the fault lines and energy flows of the physical, psychic, and geographic spaces of his life in Brazil. After studying, and abandoning, engineering and then vermiculture (earthworm farming), Cabelo undertook the study of poetry and performance at the Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. It is the merging of these two very different backgrounds--the scientific and the aesthetic--that gives Cabelo's work its particular power.

Poetry is central to Cabelo's work and he speaks about his performances and environments as manifestations of the poetic in the physical world. By referring to himself as a cabello, or horse, he invokes the use of this word to describe a medium that embodies a spirit in certain Afro-Brazilian rituals. In this sense the artist suggests that he is himself a "horse of the world" or "poetry's vehicle." Like the earthworms he previously raised, which process waste into nurturing fertilizer by consuming it, Cabelo thinks of the artist as a conduit through which poetry can enter the world and in so doing transform it.

For Cabelo, the human body is very much like a radio receiver--bombarded with invisible lines connecting it to the invisible transmissions of energy sources emanating from the world around us. As the artist has stated, "I'm possessed by entities, energies, acting jointly or separately. Like one or two soccer teams. The combination of forces guides the body." His performances seek to channel these transmissions into the visible world by con-cretizing them into both plastic and poetic forms. In his performance Cefalópode/Heptópode (1996), for example, the artist and his cohorts transformed themselves into human worms, crawling through the streets of Rio de Janeiro at dusk with their legs and heads bound in black plastic. At the conclusion of this intervention, they crawled into an abandoned cinema where an ambient rock band theatrically performed a rap song with lyrics appropriated by the artist from Charles Baudelaire's poem "Les Fleurs du mal." Works such as this can be read in a number of different ways: as a critique of urban homelessness or an alchemical invocation of the poetic.

Cabelo has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions at venues such as Galeria Paulo Fernandes, Rio de Janeiro (2002), and Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (1999). His work has also been included in a number of group exhibitions including Violência e Paixão at Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo (2002); Côte à Côte: Art Contemporain du Brésil at CAPC Musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2001); and Documenta X, Kassel, Germany (1997).

--Douglas Fogle

Song Dong