Superintense: Da Final Showdown

Ooy. Back in the hotel at last. Half the FCPettes are off partying at a bar; the rest of us hopped on the nerdmobile and came back to snooze.

Nope, the evening's not as hardcore as the Singapore edition, but it still took a lot out of the presenters. Meg went up first with her improv jam compacting memories of Vietnam into violent physical movements.

“Is this improvisation still happening? Intimate spaces make me nervous.”
“This is for me.”
“This is for Mich.”
“Melati.”
“Where’s Naeem?”
“To live in a city where it scares you to just go from A to B, across the road. And you get used to it. I just think people like you must be very brave.”
“You are from?”
“Here.”
“May I listen to your heartbeat?”
“I like him.”
“I just want to say I‘m so happy all these apples could get toether. These Mac computers.”

Naeem did a remix of his Singapore material, now entitled "Our Revolutionary Sweetheart", jiving off e-mail correspondence with a Bangladeshi revolutionary's daughter who peeled him oranges while he interviewed her father.

“All my father wanted is to be free of history. He wondered why his son is turning out this way.”

Koosil-Ja screened excerpts from Dead Man Dancing, in which she dies more than 40 times: her reflection on how broadcasting media saturates reality cf 9/11; her hack of the noh play Dojoji with her boyfriend as the monk on electric guitar and herself as the snake spirit coiled around the bell where he hides. I ran up and did a semi-intervention with a reading of my performance poem The Right Hand from VISTA Lab 1.0: Impetus with a pen stuck between my teeth; Brian showed off his collaborative videos with The Necessary Stage, Ananatural, 72-13.

"I like the idea of contamination and creative promiscuity."

A break to visit San-Art, where Tiffany had a new hanging of urban photography: back at 8pm, for Melati's performance, cradling a colossal liver of an ox in her arms while dressed in red with an impossibly long river of hair snaking before her feet.

Then Tadamime: “I showed very sexual stuff in Singapore. So I want to show another side of mine.” Nonetheless, this man has a preoccupation with the naked body: stripping and exchanging clothes in Greenwich Village in the early 90s; his video Inertia of a the panties of a woman gone train-surfing, skirt billowing up to the corners of the screen; dance multimedia based on the contact of feet and buttocks on the ground.

Chee Wai's abstract sound: "It’s the idea of performing non-performance. I string this thread across almost everybody. And work with the idea of the moments, the gaps, the problems of translation. I played just looped samples, and I didn’t make an effort to actually perform them." Electronica converted from digital photos of ourselves on the cruise to nowhere, in the gallery space itself.

Then Rachid, moving slowly, joint by aritculated joint in black motorcycle gear. Then Julie's videos: tarted up in black vixen outerwear and glitter makeup, playing "I Am the Moon and You Are the Man on Me", "Divine Comedy of an Exquisite Corpse", "High Art at Low Tide": herself as universal woman, nude satellite with an American flag in her butt and mermaid. Then her improv piece: Arriette is confused over how to translate “I'm just going to fuck around with my balloon.” She blows up the latex and whoomphs it around the space, throws it over the head of the audience, nearly brings the videocam crashing down; boings Tadamime on the head, crawls inside and pops it round her ankles so her slinkdress becomes a fishtail.

And lastly, Kaffe, blending noise art with a Vietnamese string instrument she bought yesterday off the street; the house is pitch-darken and we lie there, listening, listening. In the five minutes she has left, she describes Music For Bodies, her line of sound furniture, including her sound beds in Quebec, Shanghai and Texas: "It social experiment: will people take off their shoes and lie down in bed with stragngers? And in fact they do."

Twelve o'clock and we're ready to break: the room is a nice mix of Vietnamese and expats, artists and culture vultures, adults and children (yes children). Keng Sen thanks everyone, impressed by the number of people who've stayed: “I hope this is the future," he says, "that there’s this really blurred space between what is art, what is life, what is work, what is holiday.”

I'll end this posting with a brief list of the remedies prescribed by people at Superintense for my upset tummy and impending fever:

Bananas
Rice/noodles
Panadol
Chinese medicinal pellets
Fruit juice
Coca-cola
Lots and lots of water.

May be sleeping in tomorrow to convalesce. Otherwise, time for some shopping.

Superintense Viet Nam Edition 2 and 3/3

... well, that was different.

The 25-minute format really does allow for much crisper presentations: I'm totally understanding now where Tiffany's coming from with her mixed media installations trying to convey the Technicolor hyperreality of Saigon after a youth in America; from her misfit Smurfette fixation to her photoshoots-cum-fake-reality TV; the thing I’ve realised about Vietnam is you cannot use just one medium to make work, she says, because there’s just so much visual stimulation when you walk out into the street. Ka Fai's presentation was so crisp it left out the show that I collaborated with him in. Grrrr.

To tell the truth, something shifted in the air since I last posted. Came up from an awkward ground floor Q&A to see Marco kneeling on the ground as a miniature Hitler, sprachstimmering the entire score and text of The Wizard of Oz.

Third bloc was even more bizarre: after 10pm, moonshine rules. Trung Loong, the Hanoi performance artist, told a brief story about his love-hate relationship with his red Communist scarf and began to swing it, whip it, snap it in triple permutations; then invited audience members to crack it against his bare flesh to paint his body.


After two very violent young male whippersnappers, I volunteered and used it to tickle and seduce his body in between smacks. S&M always adds the spice of variety.

Then David and Mich came in bargain market kitsch, presenting their work Made in Vietnam: arriving downstairs we discovered they'd paid the carrot cake wagon lady to wheel her stall into the gallery space and provide free food and beer for the audience; also exhibited were Saigon postcards, an audio recording of the duo speaking Vietnamese with the volunteers translating into English and an unheimlichly verdigris statue of a chef hauled in from next door at the foot of the steps. You had to be there: freaky indeed.



And then upstairs, where Francis Ng and his assistant Ping rode children's tricycles in a figure-8 outline of chalk wearing Chinese gigamasks: bilingual projections on memory and a looping instrumental of some 90s popsong with "girl" in the title; after X rotations they paused the vehicles and distributed petrochemical bubble-blowing kits, the kind we used to play with: suddenly rubbery rainbows puffed from short straws all over the gallery; someone planted one on my nose and all of a sudden I became a focal point for bubble deposits: myself as an iridescent Pinocchio/Elephant.


I'm supposed to be a documenter, not an interventionist! And certainly, not an art object.

Finished on time by midnight, buzzing amidst the circus animals over how they can top this tomorrow: Julie asks for papers over the windows because a plainclothes policeman came by earlier this evening (you can tell by the shoes). Went drinking with Francis, Chee Wai, Tih and Trung Loong (I only had a sapodilla juice): TL explains that his roots may be read even on his body, in the kueiwei squareness of his shoulders well-fed in the 60s as starving 70s children never grew: how his intellectual parents wept when they had to send him into the country, cutting short his piano lessons, handing him a paper and a paintbox and letting him splotch. Thank god, he says: because I'm happy to be a visual artist, I'm happy to be doing what I am today. It's only when my 10-year-old son comes home with a red scarf around his neck that I remember the past.

Superintense Viet Nam Edition 1/3

We’re keeping good time so far, and all new stuff too – Caden’s presented live-editing of horror movie clips, Katarina’s showing some autobiographical stuff about her Danish Nazi refugee father, Keng Sen’s come up to talk about the private/epic dialectic of Disapora and the interrogation of exoticism in Geisha, and Nibroll are showing their freakily beautiful recursive animated installations – and the cosiness of the Galery Quynh space, with everyone on grass mats, packs the Viet audience and ourselves into a sweet sanuk little dumpling of a community. Ooh, Mikuni and Keisuke have extra time now, so they’re showing their dance.

“Why do people want to live in the city? I don’t understand but also I understand.” -Mikuni

“We used to be about no border. Now we are no no border.” -Mikuni

Superintense Viet Nam Edition starts now!

Lineup is as follows:

7 November: 1800 hours, Gallery Quynh

Caden
Katarina
Keng Sen
Nibroll

Luigi & Marco
Ka Fai
Tiffany

Tran Luong
David & Mich
Francis

8 November: 1600 hours - 1800 hours: Gallery Quynh
1800 hours - 2000 hours - San-Art opening of Tiffany Chung's show
2000 hours onwards: Gallery Quynh

Meg
Naeem
Takamime
Brian

Melati
Koosil-ja
Rachid

Chee Wai
Julie Kaffe

Everyone presents for 30 min each, inclusive of time for translation. The gaps indicate Q+A sessions.

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Finally I'm beginning maybe to understand. You see daily I worry about directionlessness: umpteen artists, each established in hir field, gabbling, chattering, sharing tea and pop and biscuits and Singapore Slings, no workshop no panel no ticketed performance no VIP. Something Paul said tonight on another ride on the bus: “renewing and comparing” our practices, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, which is simply the act of talking: learning to think in another person’s language. I don’t know but communication must often take me out of my comfort zone, how about you?

Presentations: Friday night on the Pulau Ubin Chinese opera stage; Saturday morning to small hours of Sunday at 72-13. Some hawk branded techniques: Caden Koosil-Ja explicates her “life processing” approach to dance, Caden Manson his “real time film” which is neither film nor real nor in realtime. Some exhibit: the multichoreomedia of Nibroll, the music videos of Brian Gothong Tan. Some simply bear witness: Tiffany Chung exhibits V-pop/scooter culture, Raqs Media Collective revisits the Mahabharata in contemporary consciousness, Naeem documents rendez-vouses with ancient Shah-Jehara revolutionaries.

And there are slippages: Melati describes how she uses the body as a container, a form for all memories with a capacity to resist, but she does not capture the impact of her Butter Dance, in figuretight evening dress and red high-heeled shoes, twisting her arms Indonesian-dance style while her shoes slide from beneath her, falling splatonherback hard and ugly on the floor, caked with butter. Chee Wai plays a silent Internet chat with a blind woman; he plays a blackout strain of noise art; he speaks of Hadaka, his pan-Asian experimental sound collective. Half the artists attack him for lack of distinction from Euronoise; half the artists attack the other half for presuming to presume distinctive Asianness. Kim presents her music theatre: neotraditional Viet opera to improv and fingers on cymbals in the Museen Glyptothek until her DVD encounters technical difficulties of fast forward back shut down.

Guests are officially (un)invited to elude the government screening process: hence performance, of Luigi’s imitatio Heliogabalus, buck-naked donning papal mitre chasuble lipstick vagina on his navel, attempting to Alpine-ski towards an AM radio God. Hence performance, of Julie as third-wave feminist burlesque dancer, cavorting in a colossal latex balloon, singing Eidelweiss with her pussy, raping herself with a hoodoo-voodoo dismembered hand. Hence performance, of Takamime’s Kimura-san in which he jacks off a panplegic victim of the 1955 Morinaga Arsenic Milk Poisoning Incident who guffaws into his head microphone as he cums onto his own face.

There’s a back-and-forth at work: uh-huh now I get it I say when Francis walks us through his photo/sculptural/video series: the confluence of commercialism - fashion’n’tourism – and critique thereof: mad babydoll models in a Chinatown heritage site. Paul aka DJ Spooky and Kaffe come up with rival models of sound philosophy: music as information says Paul, x-referencing Amiri Baraka/William Gibson/Romare Bearden/Luigi Russolo/Alexander Graham Bell/Garrett A. Morgan/muzak/the Luanda Triennale/Rebirth of the Nation at the Acropolis/NYC subway graffiti artists bombing the system. Music as sensation, says Kaffe, enclosing us in absolute darkness and sampling/resampling ourselves/oursounds until even the clitter-clatter of my fingers on the keyboard is also one with the medium.

Presentation: both a word that says “this is a mask” and “this happened”. This is why Arts Fest/Esplanade/ Museum programming officers come to witness the work: this is a happening is not happening; will not happen officially unless it’s festivaled or Sisticdotcommed: watch them watch Rachid do Death and the Young Man, crossing his feet on two bags of transfused blood, watch them watch Meg paroxysm into the violent spasms of her dance troupe Damaged Goods; maybe poach them for curatorship like you did Pichet Klunchun and Jerome Bel, you know where the good stuff is, huh? They say:

Come play me. Come play with me. For there is foray – Mich and David describe 25 works of their performance group M+S aka Mitsune and Subal in 25 minutes, cellphone alarm beeps now and move on every 60 seconds. Katarina admits no strategy or ideal but that of collaboration: video that allows a linguist to elevate her voice into epic Swedish gobbledegook, that allows a violinist to negotiate herself through double stars. And already this is what is happening: I am numb to aesthetics, munching hot dogs and Pocky and banana cake but the true artists are talking together, are critiquing gushing brushing the elbows of the other with their bangs and saying, we must work together. I would not have thought without contracts that chemistry arose but yes it rises.

What am I doing here, tapping out what has become a mere summary, a purposeful omission of the clearest strategies, playing the sex for cheap and the concept for mere vocabulary. Why am I outside, why am I falling asleep at 4 ayem, SUPERINTENSE they call it, but zone out and you are hyperdiffuse with the passage of dulcet moments and ennui; I am unable to endure and I pass out on the beanbag but Kaffe keeps playing, playing, and the lights come on and the champagne is not yet drained to the lees.

Because the directionlessness actually happens to the outside, where I squat with my laptop. Once you accept the word of Art you are drawn bulkily toward the Platonic ideal, the hot white light of wow oh wow? It is a Flying Circus, the clowns and bearded women aloft in a big-top-dirigible, everyone on the inside tumbling, rumbling like camisoles in a dry cleaner, making breaking contact and coitus of static cling, while farmers and hoeboys stare from below and wonder why. And yes we ascend but the Kansas we collapse exhausted into is not the same Kansas we left.

Brian Caden Chee Wai David Francis Jeebesh Julie Kaffe Katarine Keisuke Keng Sen Kim Koosil-Ja Luigi Mark Meg Melati Mikuni Monica Naeem Paul Rachid Shuddha Tadamime Tiffany; I love you where are you and will the human race itself grow hipster angel wings, and fly into the tent to become you?

I SURVIVED SUPERINTENSE!

.... and all I got were these lousy eyebags. We just finished: the tech guys are clearing up and Keng Sen is treating everyone to da baoed chicken rice. And he shifted the meeting time for tomorrow, when we're going sailing with Charles Lim. He roxxorz.

Superintense

My god. We're running two hours late on our presentation schedule. At this rate, we'll end at 3am.