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The concept of the E/S research is that an erogate performer creates a starting point and suggests a performance for a surrogate to perform, as a proxy; here the erogate performer creates a frame in the form of a performance or an instruction, where the surrogate performs or delivers the piece on behalf of the erogate. In this process a dialogue between the two performers begin. As we saw in last year’s performances these can have a varied degree of collaboration inscribed, from the total alliance to the more instruction-given process.

http://mpa-blog.tumblr.com/post/50898365943/erogate-surrogate-performance-series-part-1

http://mpa-blog.tumblr.com/post/51068636727/erogate-surrogate-performance-series-part-2-and-3-by

http://mpa-blog.tumblr.com/post/51646558140/a-conversation-with-ilya-noe-about-the-processes-of-the

The experience of being led

As of following the erogate/surrogate series closely during last year’s Month of Performance Art-Berlin, it was very interesting to be invited by Ilya Noé to be a part of the fourth performance in the series. It seemed as the perfect way to write about this piece, this time coming even closer.

The piece Trust Me is conceptualized by artist Gema Álava and as the title indicates, it deals with the trust-relation between two people; in this performance related to when you have no eyesight. Álava performed this piece in New York in 2010 with 11 participants selected out of an open call.

The Berlin version of the performance was staged at two major museums in Berlin and I was first informed about when and where to meet up with Noé and Álava the day before. Noé had for this performance invited 6 participants to give each a blind tour in one of the museums. The participants were Lise Mignon, Anaïs Heraud, Raegan Truax, Jörn J. Burmester, Camilla Graff Junior and me.

I arrived exactly at 17:00, where Noé met me outside and we walked in separately. When entering the museum space, Álava was waiting for us and Noé put a black pair of opaque glasses on me, constructed so that it was impossible for me to see anything.

Then the tour began. Noé took my hand firmly and gently led me into the exhibitions. As we slowly walked through the museum spaces, Noé spoke in my ear, telling me about what she saw, describing the artifacts, the objects and the architecture in the museum space. She described and narrated in great detail and my imagination started to create inner images based on Noé’s words.

The tour was very much a journey of the senses due to the very intense experience of having your sight deprived and relying on a person to guide you through a space, where you have never been before. A situation where trust is an important issue. Quite quickly your other senses also increase; especially the smells of the rooms, the sounds, the temperature and the surfaces and materials of the building appear to be more present, e.g. the floors become of great importance on how and where to walk. To a high degree, also the other people in the rooms can be sensed and I felt the movements around me in a way I have never imagined possible; without even touching them.

Álava was also present in the space during the tour, but as a photographer documenting the piece quite close. A factor that to some extent took away some of the intimacy of the experience in the one-on-one session with Noé and thus created another space of being framed, that was presumably not intended for the concept of the piece.

The tour lasted for approximately one hour and when the glasses were removed, I had a strange feeling of confinement, since I had been blind for a while. Also the expanded senses had an impact on the immediate response to suddenly to be able to see again.

One thing is the process of the erogation and surrogation, another is to make a public performance piece in an institution without the museum knowing that it’s taking place. We arrived at the museum as visitors with a ticket and went into its public, yet limited space and created an intervention. Here the visitors of the museum became an audience to a performance they didn’t even know existed. They might have thought that something was happening since Álava was extensively taking photographs during the whole performance, as well as the spectacle of us walking through the spaces also gave attention to the other visitors.

A post-performance reflection of the project together with Ilya Noé

According to Ilya Noé, the E/S project in general experiments with a potential expanded notion of authorship, where a certain degree of ping pong between the two parts is essential. Interesting is it therefore to speak with Noé about how she felt being the surrogate of the Trust Me piece, how her preparation together with Álava was made and how this 4th E/S was in regard to the previous ones from last year; in relation to preparation, collaboration and shared authorship.

The process of preparation was not as extensive for this performance as for some of the previous presented last year at Month of Performance Art, but sometimes month long conversations are not at all necessary. A good example of this was Shannon Rose Riley’s surrogation of the Lie-in Lion piece, where she became a last minute surrogate of the surrogate Sarah Lüdemann and the preparation was consisting of an email from the erogate Joanne Bristol and for Riley to be for a few hours in the Zoo studying a lion. Asking Noé how she prepared with Álava, this was more in a mutual interest in the concept of blind leading and trusts than an actual exchange of materials pre the performance, even though this was an initial part of the plan – and in hindsight something that would have been beneficial for her and the development of the piece; instead the negotiation and exchange will be happening afterwards.

The mutual departure point for this E/S collaboration was Noé’s relation to the subject of blindness and blind-leading, both due to Noé herself being blind for a while some years back, but even to a higher degree through her previous collaborative piece done together with Andy Houston, called Co-mapping Berlin+Berlin that dealt with both issues. The difference between the Trust Me piece and the Co-mapping piece, was the notion of co-guidance. Noé and Houston called this a way to map their collaboration, focusing on how to navigate space, co-guiding each other. The focus was for them to cooperate and be in conversations and to navigate through the spaces in question. According to Noé, her concept of co-guidance can even be applied to the Trust Me performance, even if we as participants were led and depended on her as a guide; to an extent we as participants were also guiding Noé to then be guiding us. In that sense Noé responded to us as both participants and co-guiders, which gave an extra layer to the performance, based on Noé previous work.

During working with the Erogate Surrogate project, Noé has additionally changed her language and use of specific words and is now to a higher extent using the word sharing to characterize the process. One of the most important points that Noé realize through this project is regarding the ‘gifting’ of the piece, which is not about giving the work away, as if it was an object, but to create a space or a situation, where the people involved can choose to take the offer or not; as an act of receiving. According to Noé, to make that offer can change the artists own situatedness and change their practice. In this process it is not the gift that is changing you, but it gives you the possibility to change and being collaborative.

The concept also embraces the fact that there is no obligation to do anything with the gift and to keep it in circulation, but Noé hopes it is set into circulation and slides into collaboration; that the participants will go beyond the thought of pure instruction and dictatorial directorship, but she is also OK with if they don’t. Even for those that have problems with letting go, the erogate surrogate project still potentially have changed their work, even if they aren’t instantly aware of it!

Most artists that Noé approached with the idea, especially last year, were happy to question the identity of their practice and the immediate bond between themselves and their work. Noé says, the project reveals that erogacy and surrogacy are not two separate activities or roles, but different stages of the creative process; in that sense everyone is a surrogate and everybody is an erogate; that’s a part of the conversation, a back and forth process – a ping pong. In the Trust Me piece, Álava is a surrogate as well, through the pure actions happening in the museums. The interesting point here is whether the artists embrace the reality of the E/S or not – or has a more traditional approach to authorship and ownership and never really let go.

The result of this research could be said to question, if the relations that are previously called collaborative, could in fact be called collaborations. For Noé this means a redefinition of what she means with the terminology and modes of collaboration and specific artistic practices. The same with the terms of authorship, for with a piece like Trust Me, Noé wonders if the notion of a three-way authorship could even be beneficial: the erogate, the surrogate and the participants, with an open approach to make all participators potential authors of the piece, which indeed is about trust!

‘Ein Gesamtkunstwerk’

watching, listening, hypnotizing, writing, healing, teasing

Most of the artists were presenting duration-al work, transforming the lawn before the Genezareth church and the market promenade into a ‘Performance Art Park’. The duration al acts were complimenting each other, moving with each other and entwining with each other. 

Patrick Jambon, (Supervision,) appearing and disappearing, transforming himself into an over dimensional vertical Dadaistic human surveillance machine, with tubes, mirrors, and a camera, finding again and again hiding spots, and playfully catching adults and children off guard.  

As did Amy J. Klement, (Eine Linie Spazieren führen,) eavesdropping as a well dressed reporter from another time, writing the flood of words heard, the stream of collective conscience:  shoppers, lovers, children, the market sellers and in the course of the early afternoon, producing a 300 meter document of red words on a thin white strip of paper which trailed behind her. People followed and read, children carried it and arranged it.

Fausto Gracia continued his theme of arranging yarn and blowing and bouncing his strange bubbles as on May 19th at the Performer Stammtisch, but here the action was in another context, children stood mesmerized, searching to understand it as if it were a new game, without a goal of winning anything.

Jorge Tadeo Baldeón Rodríguez, (JA/NEIN), was working the market space, with a bag over his head, throwing a disk. On one side JA, the other, NEIN. The public had to tell him the result as he could not see it himself, and he counted the ballots so to speak, referring to our local political moment.  I was told that he moved his action to the nearby Airport field at times, where the excitement was growing the day before the impending public vote determining the future of this unique city space.  

Remarkable that these actions in the context of the event succeeded to supersede the conventions of clownery or the cliché´s of the street harlequin. Young couples with children took long pauses. Troubled souls hovered around the periphery, and neared slowly.  Often during the day I heard parents reading the bilingual sign above my head to their children, “if my hands and feet are tied, and my mouth is gagged, (and so was it,) could you write down my thoughts for me?  The writing table and chair in front of me was nearly always occupied. The book and the individual exchanges were profound, no two were alike. I have chosen one entry as an example:

“Can you untie me?

Forget the border between me and you and love

You and me, untie me, let us go together.”    

Behind my writing table, I observed visitors, considering for a very long time entering the oasis of Emily Kuhnke, (Fall into my lap), many submitted to the game, telling her their problems intimately, sleeping on her lap, or merely enjoying being gently stroked.  Her performance area was surrounded by many signs, stuck in the grass, humorously and intelligently con-notating a modern version of the possible concerns of the holy Mary, without tired clichés of anti-religion, without judgements whatsoever.

Shortly before 2 pm. Lars Crosby, as a dancing waiter, began to move through the market in slow approach to my table with a cake which he placed before me, he untied my hands and I fell into the cake and began trying to cut it with the remnant of the bird cage tied over my eyes. Amy J. Klement exhibited the huge pile of her text stream. Kuhke, Jambon, Gracia and Rodríguez had one by one finished their actions,

or perhaps Rodriguez was still working the airport field, we never saw him again.

Cut - Finale

Orion Maxted, (I am the universe thinking about itself,) provided then a splendid surprise, a finale beyond compare.  Maxted, a performer who I have known for over ten years possessing the enormous capacity to “direct” an audience without manipulation, a recurring theme in his work. Effortlessly the audience was transformed into a huge circle and without knowing at all how it happened, was engaged in a remarkable folk dance with him, willing and ready, circling and spiralling as if they had been prepared.   After waking them up to the point of breathlessness, sweat and laughter, they ran together into the church, where they said and did nothing, silence, pause. They re-emerged from the church then as suddenly as they had gone in and spontaneously delivered short solo speeches, visions of transformation were pronounced, visions of freedom, and of hope. The audience playing the final act of this visionary day.

Performance Art as diversion, as decoration, as gentle provocation?

One could say, this market and this space before the church is so lovely, it needs no embellishments, however, this ‘Performance Art Park’ functioned gracefully as an open air exhibition, the elements, whether moving or still, placed in such a way that one could focus on one element and also feel oneself as part of a collective mise en scene. The artists, although engaged in separate acts, feeling and timing themselves with each other with ultimate care. The neighbourhood, clearly enjoying a deflection, reflections on many levels, full of humour, cruelty, with depth and with diversity. Performances which responded to the location, (church and market,)  and to the moment of local politics with an easy confidence. 

From my position, I often heard children asking the inevitable, “Was macht er da?”, (“what is he doing?”) and “Warum macht er dass?”, (Why is he doing that?”).

Well, isn´t  that what we are asking ourselves, and isn´t it great that the question is repeated, whether from the inside of the performers consciousness, or from the recipient?

Text by philip kevin brehse (open space performunion)

photos by Nabi Nara