Avant-Garde Now: Performing for the Camera
M+
Hong Kong
Dec 7, 2024

What is the relationship between performance art and the moving image? And how do artists who work in the realm of live events negotiate with the recorded versions—whether as artworks, documents, references, or as an accruing archive? These were the questions explored in M+’s daylong symposium “Avant-Garde Now: Performing for the Camera” on December 7, 2024, through the works of four leading artists active in the field from across Asia. 

The most established of these artists at M+ was Melati Suryodarmo, whose practice has addressed tropes of Indonesian (and often specifically Javanese) culture while also drawing from her experiences living in Europe. She screened four short documentation videos of performances including her iconic Exergie – Butter Dance (2000), which features herself on a stage in heels attempting a traditional Javanese dance while standing on blocks of melting yellow fat. She slips repeatedly, landing on the floor with a thud each time, butter covering her black outfit, yet she gets up to continue, each time more precarious and wary than the last. Even in the six-minute, edited version (of the original 20 minutes) it is painful to watch her persist in her suffering. 

As Suryodarmo explained in conversation with M+’s curator of moving image Ulanda Blair, audience reactions varied enormously from laughter to horror over the years, but these are elements not captured in recordings—the documentation video features a soundtrack of Indonesian percussion and the stage background is dark. On the other hand, she noted that the recordings helped her understand how the performance has changed over time; although she feels as if Exergie is the same each time she performs it, the recordings demonstrate variations, evolutions, and the impacts of aging on the body. The audience reaction is, however, inadvertently a feature of the video documentation for another performance, Transaction of Hollows (2016), which captures Suryodarmo wearing an all-white outfit and shooting arrows at the walls of a white cube gallery, their impact creating a thunderous echo ricocheting through the space. In the background we can see the comically fearful reactions of audience members, eager to stay clear of the artist’s aim. 

Audience reactions, as well as the impacts of aging on a performer’s body, became a central topic of consideration for Eisa Jocson as part of her performance lecture Corponomy (2017). This live stage performance accompanied by projected videos features Jocson revisiting four major projects, beginning with Death of a Pole Dancer (2011) to her subsequent pursuits of male erotic “macho dancing,” learning the routines of a “hostess” for Japanese night clubs, and embodying the classic Disney character of Snow White—all entertainment-service jobs that employ female laborers from the Philippines. In the lecture, she plays multiple on-screen videos while reprising gestures and personas from the works on stage. After conversing with audience members at M+ in the guise of Snow White, the performance culminates in her uncanny reprisal of the postures, movements, and gestures of the pole dancer, the macho dancer, and the night-club hostess while repeating the Disney princess’s lines “I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. But you don’t know what I’ve been through! I’m so ashamed of the fuss I’ve made. What do you do when things go wrong?” in an ingratiating falsetto. The collision of all these affects—the tropes and gestures of the sexualized, the submissive, the erotic, the naive—in one performative, Disney-fied figure cracks open these stereotypes to reveal the violence at their core. 

Looking critically at the social roles and expectations (and exploitations of) the female Asian/non-White body is at the crux of Suryodarmo’s and Jocson’s practices. In a similar vein, Thai performance artist Kawita Vatanajyankur embarked on research trips to visit factories and farms of Southeast Asia where women comprise a majority of the workforce. In her works, she uses her own body often as a tool or a machine, as in her “Performing Textiles” projects such as the video-performance Shuttle (2018) where she dives through the threads and slips of a textile as if she were a part of the loom. She also screened footage of Domesticated (2020), a performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Bangkok in 2020, where she kept her body rigidly straight as figures in white janitor suits treated her body and her long hair like a mop to clean the floors. In a new work for M+, Voting Theatre II (2024), developed in collaboration with AI specialist and MIT researcher Pat Pataranutaporn, she asked the audience to respond to two AI versions of herself posing existential questions about the relationship between humans and nonhuman consciousness. 

The technology of the image and its relationship to the body became Florence Lam’s area of exploration in Implantation (2022/24), a live performance using a boxy CRT monitor. On-screen there was only white noise, the pre-digital television’s default state when lacking reception or connection. In the M+ Cinema’s reception area, Lam hoisted the gray cube up onto her shoulders, held it in front of herself, sprawled out on the ground with it, and staggered with it from the museum’s interior out on the terrace overlooking Victoria Harbour. By then, despite an inordinately long cable keeping the device powered on, the signal had been lost, and Lam’s improvised movements appeared as a journey from the “cloistered space of discourse” within the museum back out into the world of Hong Kong.

The program concluded with a roundtable discussion between the artists and M+’s lead curator of moving image, Silke Schmickl, who asked the four artists to discuss their relationship to technological tools in the area of performance art. Vatanajyankur replied that her concerns were driven by the rise in machines with artificial intelligence, and how not only are they threatening to replace human labor, but in the process they appear to be threatening our humanity as well. Lam explained that her approach to technology is undergridded by an “animistic” perspective, treating objects as equal entities. Suryodarmo reflected that her relationship with technology has been organic as the necessities of documentation have evolved, and she will reprise her first technology-related performance work with an EEG machine in Singapore in January. Jocson summarized well the dynamics between the body and technology for all those who work in the field of performance art. She proposed that the moving image offers a “mirror in which you can really see the friction of the vocabulary with your body as you learn it” in what becomes a “constant feedback loop” as the body is increasingly programmed for how it will appear on the screen. As we know from our daily lives, we are all continuously learning how to perform for the camera. 

HG Masters is deputy editor and deputy publisher of ArtAsiaPacific.

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