Museum of Modern Chinese Performance Art- MOMCPA
Trip Start
Dec 2007
1
26
41
Trip End
Aug 2008
Beijing,
China
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Just down the street, not more than 300 feet is the next performance. This piece I will call, "Isolation is a Lonely Word." A man stands with a group of friends near a location that repairs bicycles. A woman comes out from the wings of the stage (actually a small house) and comes to speak with the man. The man says three words to the woman, and she turns, walks three steps to the wall, faces the wall and stands there silently. It was so very much like the final scary scene from Blair Witch. She stands there as the man and his friends laugh and carry on... She stands up against wall, and just stands there. Such an important art exploration, while at the same time an insightful social observation of how we can be surrounded by activity and still be isolated within the fabric of our own loneliness. I give the performance 5 stars, with particular kudos to the female actress and her incredible ability to make it so real, before continuing down the road.
It's up to the corner, a turn right and further down towards to Lido, when I happen upon a performance that is always underway. After forgiving the artists for not waiting for me to begin, I settle in to enjoy another important political art piece involving social comment and personal expression. An artist portraying a taxi cab driver stands in the street yelling at another performer also playing the role of a taxi cab driver. Both of the "taxi drivers" scream at each other, and then suddenly an old woman who doesn't seem to have any to do with the situation at all, starts screaming at the both of them. Now the taxi drivers include her in there screaming....a few nasty words at each other and then a couple at the old woman. Quite a stirring piece, although it does lose something in translation. Off to breakfast...
Later I stop in at the neighborhood grocery store to find the next performance. It is similar to the first of the day, starring another little kid. I guess diapers must be a foreign concept for Asia. Instead of embracing the concept of catching anything a diaper might, the Chinese have decided after 5000 years of culture to just cut out a flap on the back of any toddlers clothing, so any, um, let's see, any, you know what I'm saying here, anything the child might need to dispose of can just be jettisoned without anything blocking its exit path. So here's the scene, I'm standing in an aisle choosing which of many bottles of liquids I might purchase although it is impossible to tell what exactly each of these elixirs will do to me, when about 35 inches from me the flap on a rather nasty little brat gaps and a liquefied combination of unsightly and equally olfactory challenging concoctions comes spewing from the brat's backside to the floor of the supermarket. I immediately forgot the performance art aspect of the act, and immediately am repulsed...to an extreme level. I literally race from the location trying to distance myself from the scene of the crime. The little angel is equal parts proud of his achievement and disappointed they his audience hasn't taken to his latest project. In the time it takes for pride to transform to self-doubt and self-loathing (I know from many personal experiences that this amount of time is approximately 4.8 seconds) the kid starts wailing and crying. The mother does nothing and continues shopping for chicken feet and eels. It is the Grandmother who is dispatched to take care of the situation, and she is all over it. She rips a piece of cardboard from the edge of a nearby full box of some food product and scraps the crap from its centralized disaster zone all the way across the aisle with the corrugated squeegee. Two teenaged girls in white smocks that look like they could be Dental Assistants or Mad Doctors in 1940's 3 Stooges shorts (the ones with Curly, of course) come from nowhere and with equally inadequate utensils smear the mess to additional spots in the store.
It is at this moment, I recall a memory from around 1989 or so, when I first moved to Los Angeles, I went to an art gallery with a group of very fashionable uber-hip Pasadena power couples to see a collection of new works by three international artists. The first artist had very long walls painted with car metallic paint and across the walls were silk screen frames from what appeared to be 1970's Grindhouse movie car crash, isolated frame by frame. Every 3 feet along this wall, which must have been 250 feet long, the artist had scattered auto parts to simulate the car crash we saw in the photographs. The second artist had painted pieces of rope with designs. The third artist however, was the real attraction. She was from Eastern Europe and had a very import "rep," as she had been mentioned in that month's Art In America magazine, right next to the girl who painted with her long hair (I'm not making this up...) so the place was packed. She was a performance artist and she appeared in front of a large Warhol-like painting of herself on a riser about 3 inches above the ground. She wore a man's shirt that was only fastened by one middle button halfway down the center of the shirt. Underneath she wore nothing else, except a pair of men's boxer shorts. She stepped into a lighted area of the stage, and began to bark out harsh poetry-like utterances. Then an assistant walked amongst we audience participants and distributed large hen's eggs. We each took two or three, or more and we were instructed that we should throw the eggs at the famous artist. We did so, and the more we threw, more she barked at us about something. Soon the 40 dozen eggs or so were extinguished, the performance ended. Did I happen to mention, she was mentioned in Art In America magazine? Does taking a dump on the sidewalk really seem all that weird in comparison? I offered to represent the kid on his American tour of Modern Art museums but apparently he has already signed with the William Morris Agency.
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