How to understand the Friction II festival

One good idea is to use the programme questions to shade light on individual acts as well as the interaction between different parts of the festival.

What can we do and what can we not do?
What are we allowed to do, what are we not allowed to do?
What will arise from uncomfortable meetings and encounters?
How do we find and define friction in our daily life?
How can we use that friction in a constructive way?

The Festival curating is a part of the butoh choreographer SU-ENs pay back to the city of her origin. She is a rigorous nature. Nothing is left unattended. The intention and planning probably goes deeper than what we might expect from an ordinary artistic event. Friction II is also a follow up to the first Friction festival in 2006, and the planning started already there; all along the process the curator is improving, polishing, and exploring new possibilities opened up by success, or scandal.

The Friction II festival offered Live Art in Upsala city in a series of strange performance acts. Seniors citizens with Rollators were climbing the Castle Hill to the accompanying music of the Linné Quintet, Roi Vaara wrote and enacted on the pavement of the Castle Yard his work Spiral, the fakir Håvve Fjell in his work Floating hanged suspended over the Fyris river for two hours during the ordinary week end shopping, Delta RA'i offered his Feet Wash Ritual outside the Celsius Building at the mall of St Per, Malin Anrell made provocative acts of invisible theatre titled To Many Qustions entering situations of private citizens in the city area, Girilal Baars gave an out door/in door midnight musical performance Litanies in Zero Kelvin through the shining portal of the Chapel at the Old Cemetery, and Cecilia Germain, dressed up as a spruce, planted her Wild Seed in the Botanical Baroque Garden.

All these activities opened up for a more alert and immediate perception of our city. New aspects of places and restrictions, their richness and coerciveness, claimed their place in the consciousness of the audience. More questions were raised than will ever be answered, but the reflection over them is itself a creative activity. Here we might highlight a difference. People who just happened to be on the spot during one, or more performances probably have an all together different notion of the specific event, compared to those who attended the whole festival either as audience, or as part of the festival organisation. In the festival, the different acts were single Artworks, as well as building blocks in a sophisticated structure addressing philosophical and artistic issues concerning Performance Art. In this way the festival was interesting and relevant not only for the audience, but also for the artists and other stakeholders in the presence and future of Performance Art

Performance art was used as well, to explore the relations between institutions and individual artists, or art works, and further, between the art works and specific sites in the city kernel, or at the estate of the Ulva Old Mill.

Two main cultural institutions i Upsala were involved the City Theatre and the Art Museum. Together with the facilities of administrative, technical support, and arenas for the performances the institutions contributed with their different traditions and perceptions of performance art. There were clashes. For example when the aesthetic distance still prevailing in the Art Museum was challenged by the outright devotion to provocation, and the urge of theatrical performance to brake conventions, disregarding the mental disturbance it might cause. This was a fact when Malin Anrell in the announced Artist Talk was replaced by an arrogant boy (an actor) while the artist herself was lurking back stage. It was like the tool was taken directly from The Tool Box presented in the lecture by Danjel Andersson the same afternoon, but it wasn't. On the other hand, a conventional border line was perhaps unintentionally addressed in a subtle way when Arti Grabowski in the project room of the Art Museum attacked A Wall, while the audience was seated like in the theatre. Seen in this perspective Grabowski's performance became a comment to theatrical convention in a Visual Art setting. Interestingly enough, there is an art gallery at the city theatre; the Theatre Gallery. Here a video show was installed with five different works. Two live performances were presented here as well. It was the debutant work by Johanna Bodzek, Monastery of colours, where the artist played out with colours accompanied by the shaman music of Per Wedin, and it was The Seed, a work by the established performance artist Melati Suryodarmo based on black sesame seeds (who for mysterious reasons are hard to find in Western countries, while more common than the white seeds in the East). Video shows and two performance events were presented in the Project room of the Art Museum as well. Here Anna Berndtson presented her politically charged work Melt. Two elements of friction did occur during her act. Firstly, a conflict between the distanced aesthetic attitude of the audience and the urgent environmental message of the work, and secondly, the behaviour of the audience, framing itself as at the theatre, leaving chairs on the floor of the exhibition hall. The rest of the indoor performances took place in a regular theatre setting. It was the Fried Egg - Crazy Cabaret by Tine Louise Kortermand and Nina Björk Eliasson, which as the title suggests was well adapted to a scenic context. Further, Jenny Grönvall's A Briefing on Peggy Sue and Art was a faked lecture, and as such naturally addressed to a seated audience. Also in the video supported work 3/3 by Anders Rönnlund the seated audience was in its place. Finally it was comforting to see Seiji Shimoda executing his act On the Table in the same setting, now reminding of a circus. The scene comes natural to all these slightly different practices. In conclusion we might state the importance of institutional context and established practices for the possibility of discerning subtle qualities and friction between habits and news in art.

The feeling in public space of the city where Art met people in their every day lives was very different from the intimate atmosphere at Ulva Mill estate, where the audience attended the artworks due to their conscious choice. Only three works were presented at Ulva, the closing lunch uncounted. Melati Suryodarmo in the middle of the Fyris River made a two hours long Silent Trip, standing in the water with wings of red cloth suspended from trees on the shores, and wrapped around her body. Roi Vaara gave a fifteen minutes performance digging surrounded by singing birds in his work Showel, and Delta RA'i continued with his Feet Wash outside the mill. Finally, the closing of the Festival made us all participants in a blindfolded Concluding Lunch at Ulva Inn, where the distance of the glance was replaced by the intimacy of touch, as we were mutually finding ways to handle the challenges of this ordinary life situation, while deprived the sense of sight. In the city the Art clashed with non art events of different kinds. These clashes caused questions and comparisons concerning art versus commerce, traditional rituals, or the normal behaviour in public situations. At Ulva, on the other hand, the situation invited to make comparisons and search for cross references between the different artworks themselves at the actual site, or during the festival as a whole. The setting at Ulva was also dominated by the beauty of nature itself, which interacted in the most surprising ways with the performances in the perception of the works.

Litanies in Zero Kelvin, by Girilal Baars (II)

Installing a musical performance in an atypical surrounding is a way of challenging the concept of performance art. The conceptual, sensual and visual elements of the experience must be taken in account. The obscure inside of the White chapel illuminated in the night creates out of the black box an experience of a shining iconostasis. Through this archway, then, the voices of different traditions reaches us, as through the medium of the artist. The physical experience of standing in the misty, chilly, darkness of the cemetery contribute to the uncanny feeling of standing in a twilight zone, very far from the white cube of a traditional modernist art museum. And eventually, this adds dimensions to the bracketed question in the work title: How to Clear Your Voice?

Remember Me and Make Me Come Alive Again

A performance has its afterlife, where memory makes the act interact with other phenomena in the world. Remembering is like putting the pieces in a puzzle together. But there is a great difference. The performance act remembered will result in many different world views. In fact, it seems to me that this feature is essential to performance art.

In my memory then, the act of Cecilia Germain as a young spruce walking around in the botanical garden of Uppsala, from now on, will be connected to the visit in Paris by Kerstin Ekman in the fifties. The well known author, and withdrawn member of the Swedish Academy , commented in Swedish television on her alienism in the metropolis. - "I felt like a spruce on Place de la Concorde", she said, and the comment made me see Wild Seed in the light of a long since ongoing struggle for a language of female experience in Art.

The Focus of the Artwork

The intended focus of an artwork might be characterized by a set of key words. At the moment I have this short list of potential foci: spiritual matters, body, politics, duration, place, event, social behavior, conventions, gender, myth, ritual

Introducing a 4 D Colour Mark Up Test

Four Fundamental Dimensions of Performance Art – A Colour Mark Up System

Conceptually charged - blue
Creative ground breaking - green
Emotionally engaging - yellow
Mentally disturbing – red

These four dimensions will make it possible to characterize any work of performance art in a colour code strip. It is a tool for discrimination and judgement, which might help me express my personal perception and share it with others using a simple bar graph. The height of each bar in the diagram would then indicate to what extent the artwork fulfils each dimension. But instead of a graphical representation I might use more or less formal expression like slightly, very, and extremely, which would result in a four graded scale where:

slightly conceptually charged = blue 1,
(simply) conceptually charged = blue 2,
very conceptually charged = blue 3,
extremely conceptually charged = blue 4,
et c.

An artist cutting himself with a razor blade, for example, might be conceptually charged, and very mentally disturbing, while being only slightly emotionally engaging, but it would not be an extremely creative ground breaking act. Of course, the perception of and the response towards an artwork are very personal matters, but it might still be helpful to have some standard expressions to start out from. The audience of a certain art form is capable of making judgement in advance on an artwork or event by reading reports of the critics, as long as they are acquainted to the habits of the critic. Key words and standard expressions are useful as a measure of the critic as well as the artworks. If you trust the critic on the judgement above, you might get interested in the artwork, or discharge it, depending on whether you like, or dislike mentally disturbing experiences. In the long run it is possible to work out better concepts and a sharper critical response if you start out from some set of concepts and elaborate your discrimination by comparisons. That is the reason for me to apply the grid of my chosen key words on the artworks of the festival in the upcoming entries where comparison will play a more important part.

Fried Eggs Crazy Cabaret, by Tine Louise Kortermand and Nina Björk Eliasson

Uppsala Municipal Theatre

Kortermand with a huge microphone, recording the sound scape of a frying omelet prepared by Björk Eliasson in live performance, introduced the surrealist musical and mixed media show. The show was loaded with references and complex conceptual puns going all the way back to the sixties and the Fluxus movement.

The recorded sounds of frying omelet was to appear later in the show as a composition. This kind of an artistic loop has a lot of references in surrealist music and performance art. Related, as it involves cooking and a musical scene, is an example from Fylkingen 2001, where a man is tapped of his blood, which eventually is served to him as a meal in the form of pan cakes. Peggy Sue's dream of having her own Cooking Show in Jenny Grönvall's impersonation is another reference to an act where repercussion plays an analogous characterising role.

To a quite large extent this performance was about sound, ryhtm, musical expression, experiment, and instruments. The other main topic was the exploration of traditionally female experiences and spaces. Cooking, make-up, calling for a sick leave, clearing a kitchen cabinet to create a hide out et c..

Cool conceptual design, combined with the intimacy of domestic life turns out have a very good artistic result in the separate acts. It is another question whether it is possible to appreciate the rich qualities of each act, in this rather compact cabaret format.

Kortermands make-up on the trampoline examplifies the complexity of interacting dimensions. While singing and jumping a trampoline the artist painted her face with the traditional make-up tools. The result, due to the conflicting demands of the parallel activities, was not at all a perfect face. The colours were all over her face, in stead of being delimited to their proper places. The grown woman looked like a little girl who had sneaked in and borrowed here mothers lipstick, mascara and eye-liner. Her appearance was rather touching through the rest of the show, when she acted as if all was normal, using the ordinary facial expressions. Under reflection the work opens up a rift in time and space where feelings, attitudes and concepts merge and opens up the world to different perspectives.

But disregarding the confusing complexity, the theme was elaborate and grown to fulfilment in this cabaret. The cooking and vocal experimentation of Björk Eliasson also merged into an aesthetic of the sensual and the conceptually sublime when the omelet eventually was served to the audience, as smell was united with taste and the aftermath of a daring musical experience.

At Least You are Funny, said Helen Karlsson

while dining on the Theathre

In fact I have been impersonating a rather sloppy middle aged man at the Friction II Festival, namely myself. Whenever I dealt with a female artist I was acting as a jerk. Either I completely misunderstood their work, as was the case with Anna Berndtson, or disliked it, as in the case of Malin Anrell. And during three performances, all of them performed by women I fell asleep, or was barely keeping awake. It was my duty to attend every act, so I may have an excuse for getting worn out and tired. But still, it was like an act of gender determined discrimination when I failed keeping awake while attending works presented by women. It is a symbolic coincidence, as I have spent a lot of time dwelling on the hardships of women who have taken the fight to find expressions for female experiences in literature and art. And still I find myself a fat old arse, when I am confronted with gender politics in contemporary art. Attitudes are seated beyond reflection and consciousness. Some would say in collective opinions rather than in the individual, and I here find my self an automaton delivering old fashioned, and even obsolete, reactions from my guts.

To find a way of admitting these flaws is by no means easy. Even to address the problem with the artists might be taken as an insult, but once I felt the urge to do so. At the dinner table, then, I confessed, and excused, and dodged the best I could. To my great relief it all ended in laughter. It was at that moment the coordinator of the Festival, Helen Karlsson, who had all reasons to worry about my capacity as a critic and philosopher, let out the comment:

- At least, you are funny!

A briefing on Peggy Sue & Art, by Jenny Grönvall

Uppsala Municipal Theatre

"By the way, My name is Peggy-Sue. My dream is recently to have my own Cooking Show on TV" my story

This is a quote from Jenny Grönvall's homepage www.trailerheart.org, where the artist pretends to be a rather sloppy young woman, expressing herself without limits and taste. Peggy Sue Svensson in fact turns out to be a charming creature, and her homepage a nice place to dwell on! It is a work where duration plays an important part. Grönvall has continued her impersonation in different media since 1998. I think it may have affected media in Sweden to accept lives of self expressing women as being of common interest. Today it is possible to see Dolly Parton or Viktoria Silvstedt talk about themselves in Prime Time television. Not that their lives or attitudes were ever of a second grade quality, but in the public sphere they traditionally tended to be treated with ridicule and looked down on.

Thus Jenny Grönvall works with a subtle irony, with a thought provoking long lasting after effect.

At Friction II, we were presented with a talk and slide show where Peggy Sue presented herself and her view on Art. But, I am sorry to say it, I fell asleep during the performance and lost it almost completely. As in a dream I can recall Peggy Sue mentioning her three monochromes, while pointing at a photography which showed practically nothing of the works. Of course this was very embarrassing to me. Not Peggy Sue's slides, but me falling asleep. To make it evermore agonizing I was not alone, but together with to ladies who laughed at me afterwards. Perhaps my reaction was a delayed effect from the shock of experiencing a bearded young man impersonating a woman performance artist the night before, or perhaps it was no reaction on the artwork at all, but simply the consequence of having a late dinner after a hard days work.

No Title, To many Questions, by Malin Arnell

presented at EDGE seminary Artist Talk

Uppsala City and Municipal Theatre

Malin Anrell gave a provoking performance in the Artist talk Uppsala Municipal Theatre breaking the conventions of dialogue by shifting herself to an arrogant young boy, who refused to respond in English, which was the announced language of the talk. As he had nothing much to say, no one bothered to translate his answers and the international guests at the talk of course didn't understand much. Or, rather, the strong impact and mental distress caused by Anrell's experiment in social psychology, when she silently entered the private sphere of ordinary people in acts of absurd intimacy, was delivered to the people attending the discussion as pure as could ever be wished.

Anrell spent the day in the centre of Uppsala, dressed in the clothes of this boy, a student of hers, who seems to have provoked the artist by asking to many questions, walking around and silently entering other peoples lives. She could take place between to men having a chat on a sofa, and just sit there silent. Or, she approached a mother walking her baby in a pusher taking a hold of the handle of the carriage, as if she was the real owner of the kid. Through actions like these the team of photographers luring around could document a social an psychological drama as it was played out in reality.

- If an art work like this was presented i Poland, Arti Grabowski said, addressing the boy on stage as the artist, there would be personal risks ivolved, as people i Poland are prepared to defend their privacy in a more resolute way than the Swedes.

Chivalrously he invited the artist to give the piece a try in his home country. In retrospect I find Grabowskis comment more expressive than at first. He gave voice to our collective anger, by inviting the arrogant boy to have a good beating up by strangers in a foreign country. And this time the boy responded in English.

-"No", he simply said.

But Grabowski was the only one to react on the flagrant exchange of persons. Everybody was thinking of it all the time, and somebody like me tried in vain to see a likeness, and recognize the same person on the scene as in the pictures projected behind him. It was like a bad dream. Ever since, I have this tendency to react with disgust on strangers coming to close to me, but I hide my feelings carefully. The work had a long term impact on me, if it was an artwork in the first place. A Performance it certainly was.

Frictions - First Sketch of a Summary

Roi Vaaras works embraced the Friction Festival. His conceptually based Spiral, beeing the first performance of the festival, and his Showel, the concluding work, as far as it comes to the public part of it.

SU-EN was of course the coordinator of the opening ceremony with her Performance with rollators, as well as the Concluding Lunch, which brought the Festival to its end, but these works were, either before the opening, or a part of the closing ceremony.

An embraced embracing, Vaaras works played out different aspects of reference in performance. In the first work the core consisted of conceptual pairs, words painted on the court yard of the Uppsala Castle. One concept with a darker timbre was crossed out and replaced with another concept in a happier mood. These pairs, as it occurred to me, were pairs of surrealistic twins. Clearly related, they were opposites, but leaving us in a suspense characteristic of surrealist Art. The inner logic of these twins eludes reason and emerges in a slow process of fulfilment in the aftermath of the experience.

Vaaras second work, through its striking likeness with Seiji Shimodas perfomance On the table, became much like a repetition in another media. Think on the separation again and again, of the upper and lower parts of the body, of the body from earth. Shimoda san played out his statement in the salon of the theatre, in the air, on top of, or underneath a table, exposing his naked body to the audience. Vaara on the other hand, made a performance in the open air calling the birds who gave response in an exalted choir. He was on the ground and dug his head down in the earth. As in a slow dance, with his head buried he exposed his dark suit towards the spectators in a circular movement.
This was not the ass of an artist it was the End of Art.

In the end, what ought to be left, after the art work is performed and gone, is the intention of the artist whose efforts to fulfil its purpose only can come to completion through Grace. And grace ther was, and bliss for a moment took a hold of a blind folded group of stake holders consuming a Last Supper, waited on by a like wise blind folded staff of servants.

Thank You SU-EN and Helen Karlsson, and all others contributing to this extra ordinary celebration of Performance Art.

Silent trip in the river of time

In the silence of now there is an emptiness of being, which has its natural place in the core of flesh itself. It is always possible to make the journey towards the inside of now, towards a stillness that is pregnant with existence in its totality. The world emanates from, and is fulfilled, by this sole intention. Yet it is so far away in the depths of history, personal as well as collective.

From this stillness, empty, silent spime, a gentle timbre resonates through all heavens and the single earth of every universe. It carries from within the marks of a position echoing the world as fulfilment of a silent mind. From the heart of being the sacred blood of my soul pours away and returns to the horizon of my world right at the centre of it all.

Where is my master now, his golden shoes lost in the stream, his footprints in the sand of the seashore. Where in memory hides the seed of an eternal bliss. Now Here else than Nowhere, and the eye of a deer is gazing from the forest depth.

Untitled, by Arti Grabowski

Uppsala Art Museum

In his performance, without title, in the Art Museum of Uppsala, Arti Grabovski attacks a wall from the inside, and later tries to mend it by sewing with a rope.

Arti Grabowski is a sculptor. SU-EN talks about his work as a rock-performance. It makes sense in an equivocal manner. The white wall he presents to the audience has volume in the room. It is as we could see the marble block of the sculptor and his efforts to realise its inherent potential. It is almost like we could see the sculptor in the treatise On Music by Saint Augustin sweating in his struggle to imitate the ideal world and to make a manifestation of human liberty in the media of his Art. On Music is an aesthetic manifesto written by the saint around 400 a. d.
We are all seated as in a theatre. In front of us there is the white wall and we can hear sounds from behind the wall, telling about someone using machines and tools. Suddenly a circular hole is sawed through the wall. An arm projects, radiating with power and competence. The arm examines the wall around the hole and the disappears for a moment and returns with a stencil, which it attaches to the wall. The stencil is then sprayed with colour and removed, leaving the word revers written laterally reversed in red. This is the opening of a series of unexpected events, who in retrospect seem meaningful, in the internal logic of the work which holds the audience in suspension all along the performance. Nothing, or close to nothing can be figured out in advance.

The wall turns out to be a big box, with a let-out where the artist can sneak in and out. The wall gets marked by a series of break-through more or less exactly formed after used pieces of brick, or wounds brutally torn open and afterwards stiched together with a thin rope, through holes drilled for the seam. It's the same rope that the artist tied himself up with, in order to handicap himself, while clinging through the holes of the wall.

Behind in the background a cement mixer is occupied breaking bottles. Heaps of broken glass are produced this way and the artist awkwardly tries to dispose of them on top of the walls of the box. This gives a dramatic character to the work as falling glass beads may fall on the face of the artist, or cut his feet up when hey have fallen to the floor.

An intriguing lyrical logic takes form in front of us The work seems to present an interpretation of the artistic creative process on a very basic level. We ar looking at a screen. Objects are projected in the screen. Voids opens up in the screen as apertures towards the world and inwards, but they are seamed together with rope. It is as we saw the invisible body write on the screen of consciousness. A phenomenological manifesto.

Performance as Spime, or Spime Specific Art

A work of art may characterised as site specific if it is planned for and installed on a specific place. A work of performance art, though, has a well defined duration in time, as well as a place and we need to find an expression for its qualities relative to space and time. The Latin American philosopher Ivan Illich coined the expression vernacular spime to describe the intimate relation between local language and the situation and tradition they are used in. The word spime itself was coined by Einstein as a denominator for space time. Further, Bruce Sterling, in 2004 used the term to designate an informational object of a specific kind:

The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime," which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a "Wrangler." At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.

They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.

ur When Blobjects Rule the Earth by Bruce Sterling, 2004

Now, look at the performance artwork as a spime and you will discern some possibilities, and challenges which are seminal to performance artworks as informational objects. Performance artworks are spime specific, therefore they are also potentially in need of a definition as Spimes in order to be handled adequately in the emerging perspectives on future art.

Feet Wash Ritual, by Delta RA'i

Celsius' Square / St Per Market

Since Biblical time and Abraham, at least, it has been an established act of courtesy to offer a feet wash to strangers. like Abraham himself did when God appeared to him disguised in the shape of three wanderers.

... he ran to meet them from the door of his tent, and adored down to the ground. And he said: Lord, if I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away from thy servant. But I will fetch a little water, and wash ye your feet, and rest ye under the tree.
Genesis18:2-4 (Old Testament first published 1609 by the English College at Douay, revised until1899)

The Feet Wash ritual has been the most known act by the artist for some years and it has been performed at Art Museums all over the world. In 2002 Delta RA'i took part in the Art Caravan touring all around the county of Uppsala in a group of artists from different disciplines. He then gave 28 feet wash performances in strange places like a local grocery store in Örbyhus, a hill of Old Uppsala, or a woodworks at Alsike. As I attended the Caravan for documentary reasons I was appointed to play the part of Abraham and in the first five minutes after the arrival to every single place find volonteers for the ritual. It was a surprisingly easy task, and rewarding as well and I failed only twice. It gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people as a salesman offering a strange product, opening up the event towards ordinary people. I will never forget the eye of a woman who I approached in the queue at a bankers office. Initially she was reserved, but then, all of a sudden, her glance was changed as she decided to consent to my offer.
In 2002 I never had an opportunity to enjoy the experience myself, so it was a happy moment for me when I finally found myself in the lounger and had my feet washed in the 14 of june 2008. Sitting relaxed with my eyes closed I experienced something like a happy dance inside my body, as energy was elicited by the touch of the artist. At this point I realised the hidden pleasures contained in the work and ever afterwards I will remember it when I see or reflect on this ritual artwork.
As an artwork, and it unquestionably is a work of art, it fails when it is regarded with the traditional aesthetic attitude of distancing. Its secrets are revealed only as you consent to let your body take part in the work.

Floating, by Håvve Fjell

Fyris River at Dombron

I observed the actual floating of the suspended artist from the river side. It took a while, all preparations minutely executed. Then he climbed over the fence and his body floated free in the air except for the 12 hooks through his skin who were united by a thin rope to a hanger attached to a chain pulley hanging from a rope stretched over the river between to trees.
It is a work confronting perceptions of pain, and mental limits for what the body might endure. Although the skin is penetrated by several hooks, only a very small mark of blood is visible. This makes a difference, as the aesthetic attitude tends to change into an emphatic mood at the sight of blood.
The artist was calm, chatting with the audience while suspended, or making exercises to get warm. In a suspension act the experienced pain is balanced by an euphoric feeling caused by physiological reactions. This sensation is strong enough to make people willingly expose themselves to suspensions more than once. In this work it is obvious that the artist endures pain by his own conscious choice. Otherwise it would be unacceptable!

Monastery of Colour, by Johanna Bodzek

& Per Wedin (music)
The Theatre Gallery

Painting is a potentially shamanistic discipline. I know from my own experience the power of colour to express hidden feelings and secrets of a hidden consciousness. The Artist is dressed in white and she has paint brushes stuck in her hair as an Indian feather crown. She starts painting monochromatic, in yellow, in red etc. Papers are filled with colours and forms, expressing conflicting feelings of enthusiasm and mental distress in Art as a plastic medium. Expression is however not the destiny of emotions in this work. They are eventually to be dissolved in the sound scape created by the shaman musician as tiny drips of colour spread from the lid of the oil drum, where it has been poured, before the drum is hit by the stick. A white cube turns into a coloured space and the artist herself is a painted part of this new world.
I had a subtle feeling watching this, a warm peaceful wind reached for me from a secret landscape. So the next day, as I saw Johanna in front of the water at Ulva Kvarn, with a beautiful heaven and an archaic landscape in the far, it came to me that this was an image of my feeling while attending her performance. Happily Johanna confirmed that this was a part of the intention of their work. They wanted to bring the stillness of archaic nature into the gallery by their magic work. Thus I learned something about intention, quite different from my every day understanding of the term.

Melt, by Anna Berndtson

Uppsala Art Museum

A discreet deluge is played out in the project room of the Art Museum. A well dressed hostess with her dark felt pen annihilates the outlines of the continents on the terrestrial globe in front of her.
The good looking woman and the power ball. The hostess in front of the world map. These two images from a world of success are contrasted with the action of the artist. She paints it black, and she paints it blue and with every itching sound of the pen a part of the world is deleted.
It took a while for this work to reveal itself in my reflective mind. The sponsor logotype in the program made the final difference. I realized how a new dimension of the work could be opened with a click on my computer, and I realized the catch. The work introduced me to the world of fitness, it is about world fitness, as well as friction and heat, and at the same time it is good publicity for the sponsor.

Wild Seed, by Cecilia Germaine

The Botanical Baroque Garden

The artist is disguised as a spruce in a holt, her feet buried in the fertile soil of the Botanical Garden in Uppsala. The small spruce slowly raises her feet above the surface and starts to examine her surroundings reading the signs attached to the trees of the park. After a while she starts for a walk out in the geometrically ordered Baroque Garden holding still in front of different plants and arrangements on her way. A secret longing for something unknown guides the young spruce around. There are the akin in hedges of spruces although cut down to conformity with an unfamiliar and harsh geometry, and in the midst of it all a small plant of unknown origin awakens the love of our Spruce. She lays an egg in front of her audience in a sensual act of birth, and so she plants this wild seed in a flowerbed near bye. A fairy tale without words, the performance itself is a wild seed growing into strange thoughts about the possibilities of our nature.

The Seed, by Melati Suryodomo

Theatre Gallery
She walks slowly forward on the gallery pavement, carrying a white plastic sac over her shoulder, now and then she cries out phrases like: ”I remember when I was five”. She is wearing light-coloured pantyhose patterned with islands of dark grey, as it occurs to me. Eventually she stops her walk and pours out the black sesame seed content of the sac on the floor. She also starts tearing her pantyhose apart, and the pattern turns out to have been formed by the same black sesame seed. From the remains of the pantyhose sesame seed runs to the floor. The performance closes with a drum roll on a bass drum. The skin of the drum cracks. The show is over.
In this work no story is told, and the internal logic of the work is conceptual rather than narrational. The act has a intensity. It catches the attention of audience and guides it to focus on some hardly understandable visual puns. All over Asia the black sesame seed is common, but in Western Europe it is almost impossible to purchase. The patterns formed inside the pantyhose reminds the artist of lepra victims she met in her childhood. This is Performance Art by the rule book. Intuitively, as well as by judging the reaction of the audience, I can state that it is high quality.

3/3, by Anders Rönnlund

Uppsala Municipal Theatre
3/3 is a work in mixed media by an artist who enters performance art from his former engagement in installation and video art.
The work contains an interplay between the artist and video projections on objects partly installed during the work. Everything is planned in minute. But something goes wrong and the artist tries in vain to abort the performance, as the projector is started to early. He has to work with a building site projected behind him and in a hurry to gain the lost time in relation to the video installation. The correct places for the objects who shall carry projections are measured out carefully. Then two boxes are put in the chartered positions. Thus, three versions of the artist are presented on the scene, two of which are videos projected at the boxes on the left and right hand.
An elementary chat takes place, where the living artist responds to job titles spoken out in English and Swedish. making very short comments in both languages. - Carpenter, says the projected artist on the right. - Snickare, the projection on the left hand answers. And the living artist responds: - It was a long time ago. --- Det var länge sedan. It is like a language course, or a rehearsal before a presentation of his CV at some official institution.
Eventually the scene changes slightly and the rythmic element of the reading expands into a kind of beat and percussion performance giving associations to hard rock culture. Through a series of subtle shifts we can discern an evolution where the artist is re-educated and takes on a new , more aggressive attitude.

Key concepts: Spoken word, mixed media, reference, language course, CV

On the table, by Seiji Shimoda

Uppsala Municipal Theatre
The table is an area for exposition, but at the same time an occluding obstacle making half the body invisible. Shimodas work places the performing naked body on the table, at the same time bringing the Body up for consideration or negotiation. His intention is explained by the double meaning of the expression, which makes it possible to encounter the loaded concept in a visually pleasing and sensually provocing act of acrobatics.

The artist undresses in a Japanese fashion keeping the sole of the foot close to the floor as he removes his socks. On the table everything seems reversed. His feet in the air slowly revolving around the surface of the table. Eventually, Shimoda starts climbing under the table moaning and groaning, as he is an aged man, who has taken up an act of his early career. This fact makes the act even stronger, and the performance of the body keeps the full attention of the audience until the act is finished.

Litanies in Zero Kelvin, by Girilal Baars

Litanies in Zero Kelvin (How to clear Your Voice)

Outside the Chapel of the Old Church Yard
This work is extremely site specific, it is conceptually charged, has a strong visual impact, it has a disquieting sense of being inappropriate, and the artistic elements from different fields in the work are melted together into a powerful performance. Yet, the work might be regarded as eccentric, more a concert than a performance artwork. And this is where friction enters discussion and make it creative.
What, then, makes a concert a work of Performance Art? Or not? Music in fact is a performing art; the concert is performed by someone, has its duration in time and place, is irreversible and to some extent unrepeatable, might be provocative, addresses an audience etc.. But what could make us apprehend the piece as a work of Performance Art? The Festival as an institutional setting is helpful but problematic, because of a tendency to frame the concept of Performance Art from a Visual Arts point of view. As in Art, the break with conventions has been a regular treat in musical tradition for a while. But as performance itself has been at the core of the historical musical concept, the challenges has been differently staged. Still, John Cages 4.33, where the pianist opens the lid of the piano only to close it after 4.33 minutes of silence, looks to me as an important work in Performance Art History. The work of course is regarded as a piece of music and silence has, since then, even been subjected to copyrigth trials. But the work, considered in a performance art perspective, is site specific, provocative, mentally distressing, conceptual, visual, sensual, open towards a specific sound scape etc.. And my point is, that Litanies in Zero Kelvin has exactly the same properties, except for the lack of silence.
To understand the work we need to perform a phenomenological reduction. Observe the musical elements of the work, then put them in suspension, bracket them in, or cross them out. Consider the rest, and then reconsider the musical elements as music in suspension, quotations, fragments etc.. Only this way we can set aside the strong impact of tradition. Basically, this a procedure useful whenever we need to distinguish a work of performance art from other traditional art froms included in the work.

Silent Trip, by Melati Suryodarmo

Description and pictures from Silent trip is available on the hompage of the artist

In the Fyris River at Ulva Kvarn Estate
Look at the archaic landscape at the old mill by the Fyris river and its running waters. There are old buildings, ruins of abandoned structures, and the shady forest surrounding it all. In the midst of this scenery we can discern, like a fairy, a female being. She stands still in the middle of the water course, her veins cut open and suspended between the trunks of old trees on each side of the river like the wings of an enormous dragon-fly. This is a poetic vision caused by the long red pieces of fabric that are tied around the tree trunks, as they projects from the enwrapped artist where she stands on a stone in the stream. In front of her a pair of shoes is placed on a stone, the golden shoes she once received as a gift from her teacher.
I deliberately try to frame this act in an Eighteen Century Diderotesque way. I find the work picturesque, romantic and lyrical of essence. Diderot in his criticism used emphatic story telling to set the background for analysis, as well as to enhance sensitivity towards different themes of the work. This is a way of creating an intimacy by conversational means, starting out from a well known ground, and chatting away towards more equivocal interpretations. As in conversation you don't have to agree, only accept the cues as entries in an ongoing discourse. In dialogue with the text you may create your own opinion and even write a comment on the web. It is in fact possible that Eighteen Century conversation around art may have a renaissance in the new media.

Performance and philosophy of art

How to respond on an artwork as a critic committed to the philosophy of art? Poetic response will not do the job. Neither will imitation, nor pure description. If Art is self sufficient it is in no need for comments. On the other hand, the artwork is our common focus of attention and we are entitled to render it according to our own associations. Then, in the dialogue, it is possible to generate a new perception of the work, as well as appropriate reactions in response to it. The real object of the critic is to open up a conversation focused on the artwork, and to take precautions to keep the focus, or, if the discussion departs from the subject, to point it anew back to the core of the work.

A lot can be gained from comparison. Putting two works aside we can discern interesting differences as well as parallels between them. This will help us at the same time to keep focus on the material available. This approach will also be helpful in order to understand the point of view of the curator who has planned the festival in detail. Now, to start a pursuit of friction, as a response to the curatorial questions seminal to the festival program, we will begin by comparing festival entries to each other.