ARTIKLID / articles

Marian Kivila "Performance’iplahvatus “Diverse Universe 2008”", 17.05.2008 Pärnu Postimees

Silja Joon "Pärnus kogunevad tegevuskunstnikud", 22.05.2008 Pärnu Postimees

Silja Joon "Kunstifestivalil kohtusid kultuurid", 23.05.2008 Pärnu Postimees

Andreas Sepp "Pärnus tehti tegevuskunsti" Fotod: Ants Liigus / Pärnu Postimees, 27.05.2008 Postimees

Thomas Millroth. Den ljudliga performancekonsten. Soundofmusic #9.

Orion Maxted "Kuidas kunsti ja elu vaadata: kull või tuvi?", Sirp 20.06.08, nr.25/26

Orion Maxted "How to Watch Art and Life (1): Hawk or Dove?"

Sandra Jõgeva "Mitmekülgne universum", Sirp 20.06.08, nr.25/26

Marian Kivila "Eripalgeline universum Polymeri Kultuuritehases", Sirp 20.06.08, nr.25/26

Thomas Millroth "Heliline tegevuskunst"

Thomas Millroth "The sound of performance art"

Ýrr Jónasdóttir "Diverse Universe IV" (swedish)

Ýrr Jónasdóttir "Diverse Unvierse IV" (english)

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PRESSITEATED

DIVERSE UNIVERSE 2008
PERFORMANCE EXPLOSION

Performance plahvatus – Diverse Universe 2008.

Diverse Universe 2008 Performance Explosioni´i põhjustavad üle 50 live-aktsiooni Pärnus, Tallinnas ja Helsingis. Süütenööri läidavad 30 Eestis esmakordselt viibivat ja esinevat tegevuskunstnikku Okeaaniast, Lõuna- ja Põhja-Ameerikast, Aasiast, Ida-, Lõuna- ning Lääne-Euroopast, Skandinaaviast, lisaks neile kümned Eesti performance artistid rühmitustest Non Grata, Avangard, Cnopt ja Rubens.

18.- 30.maini kestev plahvatuseseeria haarab NG Kunstikonteineri, Tallinna Kunstihoone ja Kumu auditooriumi, Pärnu Kunstnike maja, Tammiste Hooldekodu ja Helsingi Kaabelitehase, lisaks aktsioonid linnaruumis ja transpordivahenditel.

Sissejuhatuseks keevitab hiljuti Ameerika meelelahutusosariigi pealinna Sacramento seksikamaks meheks valitud Horse Cow Steve Vanoni – „Make Noise not War“ juhatusel kohalik low tech installatsiooni yksus Erik Alalooga ja Meeland Sepa isikus Lääneranniku parimate traditsioonide kohaselt Eesti esimese NG Art Car´i - tuldsülitava imeriista. Saksamaalt Kesselbergi kommuunist toiduõlil töötava mikrobussiga saabuv ultraroheline vegan alternatiivteartitrupp GoGo Trash jätab oma negatiivse ökoloogilise jalajälje Teeme Ära puhastustules kirgastunud Maarjamaale, korjates üles kogu ülejäänud läga oma esinemiskostüümideks. USA avaruste Põhjast Lõunasse ja Idast Läände kattev esindus annab hea ülevaate ookeanitaguse undergroundi eripäradest - Florida kommertskultuuri, Bostoni noore tõsikunsti, üleenergiseerunud New Yorgi ja „this is fun“ California spetsiifika erinevad üksteisest kui hunt kalkunist. Hiljuti oma performance 40. aastapäeva tähistanud Lõuna –Korea on välja käinud nende uue laine, üle 500 tegevkunstnikut ühendava Kopas Grupi mootori Kim Baek-Ki. Tšiili noored talendid Guido Casanova Solar & Marcelo Faundez Santiago de Chile´st lisavad latiinohõngu ja eksootilisim esineja on Russ Butler Bermuudalt, kes on läbi aegade teadaolevalt esimene Eestis esinev mustanahaline performancekunstnik.

Vaatlejatena esinevad festivalil New Yorgi ainsa puhtalt tegevuskunstigalerii Grace Exhibition Space omanik Alice Chilton McDermid ja kirjutajatena Thomas Millroth ja Yrr Jonasdottir Rootsist ja Islandilt ning William Orion John Wolton-Maxted Inglismaalt. Diverse raames avatakse 2 performancenäitust NG Kunstikonteineris Kultuuritehases Polymer, neist esimene „Performance Explosion Diverse Universe V“ Konteineri uuel laiendatud ekspositsioonipinnal 1. korrusel ja ryhmitus „Cnopt“ tavapärases galeriiosas 4. korrusel. Pärnus Academia Non Gratas toimub Performance AV-konverents ja 24. mail exporditakse kogu interkontinentaalne seltskond ülelahe Helsingi Kaabelitehasesse hollandlase Wilhelm Wilhelmiuse koordineeritavale “Art Contact“ üritusele.

Diverse ajaks astub ametisse ka Academia Non Grata verivärske rektor järgnevaks viisaastakuks Ernest Truely New Yorgist, kes peab pressikonverentsid festivali ajal nii Tallinnas kui Pärnus. Jälgige reklaami.

Anonymous Boh

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Rahvusvaheline tegevuskunstifestival
„Diverse – Universe IV“
esitleb:
„ARTCAR 2008“
&
'Trash Costume' workshop

19.-21.05 2008. a. toimub Pärnumaal Tammistes esmakordselt Eestis tõelise „Artcari“, ehk kunstilis-motoorse liikuri füüsiline loomisakt. Steve Vanoni (USA), Rachel Hoffmann (USA),Gogo Trash (Saksamaa), Guido Casanova Solar & Marcelo Faundez (Tšiili) ning Meeland Seep, Erik Alalooga Eestist reanimeerivad trööbatud sõiduauto unustamatuks kunstiliseks mobiiliks.

21. mail juhatab peaaegu eimillestki sündinud kunstiteos sisse festivali „Diverse – Universe IV“ performance´ite päeva Pärnus.

Kell 16.00 astuvad Tammiste hooldekodu territooriumil (Tammiste tee 1) üles Nongrata „Artcar“, Andrus Joonas (Eesti), Zane Matule & Kriss Zilgalvis & Gatis Vectirans (Läti),Gogo Trash Group (Saksamaa).

Kell 18.00 sooritab „Artcar“ pompöösse protsessiooni marsruudil Tammiste tee – Papiniidu – Riia maantee – Vanapargi – Aia – Esplanaadi – Nikolai ning päädib rahvusvahelise performance´i õhtuga Pärnu Kunstnike Majas (Nikolai 27) kell 18.00 - 20.00. Kunstnike Majas esinevad lisaks eelmainituile Maurice Blok (Helsinki, Finland) Micha Steger (Germany) Andreas Stadler (Germany) Kim Baek-Ki (Korea) Travis McCoy Fuller (USA/Rome) Edwine Mondrou (France) Joseph Sledgianowski (USA) ja Performance group Cnopt (Estonia).

19.-21.05 2008 toimub Tammiste Hooldekodu pargis workshop „Trash Costume“. Saksa ökoideoloogiarühmituse Gogo Trashi juhendamisel läbiviidav töötuba keskendub kunstiliste kostüümide valmistamisele olmejäätmetest.

Valmivat kollektsiooni esitletakse 21. mail kell 16.00.

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Kaks uut näitust NG Kunstikonteineris!

Rahvusvahelise tegevuskunstifestivali Diverse Universe videonäitus "Performance Explosion" 

23.05- 15.06. 08

Avamine 23.05 kell 18.00

Näitus toimub NG Kunstikonteineri uuel ekspositsioonipinnal- kahenädalase kestvusperformance`i tulemusena valminud, verivärskes, värvilõhnalises galeriis, Kultuuritehas Polymer teisel korrusel. Eksponeerimisele tulevad performance´ite videdokumentatsioonid festivalil eelnevatel aastatel toimunud aktsioonidest ja käimasoleva Diverse Universe IV külaliskunstnike uudisteosed. Osalejad ja lähem info: www.nongrata.ee
....

Kunstirühmitus CnOPT "Needle Healing"

25.05 -15.06. 08

Avamine 25.05 kell 17.00

Vastu tulles kunstipubliku palavale soovile astub eesti vihatuim kunstirühmitus Cnopt üles oma uute taiestega. Uue laine punkvideot, -maali ja -digitaalgraafikat kogu perele. Avamisel performance: Tatjana Kristall (Est) & Ernest Truely (U.S.A.).

Alternative point of view.

NG Kunstikonteiner
Kultuuritehas Polymer
Madara 22/ Ülase 16
Tallinn

www.artcontainer.ee

Galerii avatud K.-P. 14.00-19.00
info: (+372) 55 94 12 11
(+372) 55 43 961
(+372) 51 93 70 0

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Homme Pärnu Kunstnike majas:
DIVERSE UNIVERSE 2008 PERFORMANCE EXPLOSION
Performance plahvatus - Diverse Universe 2008.

Diverse Universe 2008 Performance Explosioni'i põhjustavad üle 50
live-aktsiooni Pärnus, Tallinnas ja Helsingis. Süütenööri läidavad 30
Eestis esmakordselt viibivat ja esinevat tegevuskunstnikku Okeaaniast,
Lõuna- ja Põhja-Ameerikast, Aasiast, Ida-, Lõuna- ning Lääne-Euroopast,
Skandinaaviast, lisaks neile kümned Eesti performance artistid
rühmitustest Non Grata, Avangard, Cnopt ja Rubens.

21. 05.2008 kl 16.00 Performanced ja ART Car avamine Tammiste Hooldekodus,
(Tammiste tee 1, Pärnu)

21.05 kl 18.00 Performanced Pärnu Kunstnike Majas

Kunstnikud:
1) Steve Vanoni (California)
2) Rachel Hoffman (Tampa)
3) Maurice Blok (Helsinki, Finland)
4) Micha Steger (Germany) & Andreas Stadler (Germany)
5) Travis McCoy Fuller (USA/Rome)
6) Kim Baek-Ki (Korea)
7) Kriss Zilgalvis (Latvia) & Gatis Vectirans (Latvia) & Zane Matule (Latvia)
8) Edwine Mondrou (France)
9) GoGoTrash Group (Germany)
10) Joseph Sledgianowski (USA)
11) Guido Casanova Solar (Chile) & Marcelo Faundez (Chile)
12) Performance group „Cnopt“ (Estonia)

Järgmine Diverse Universe IV üritus Pärnu Kunstnike Majas 26.05. 2008 kl
16.00!


Pärnu Linnagalerii
www.linnagalerii.ee

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Neljapäeval 29. mail kell 18.00 leiab aset selleaastase DIVERSE UNIVERSE lõpplahendus KUMU auditooriumis Weizenbergi 34 / Valge 1. Tunniajalises programmis osalevad Saskia Edens (Shveits), Steve Vanoni (California, USA),  Open Space Performunion (Berlin), Jill McDermid ja Erik  Hokanson (New York, USA) Guido Casanova Solar ja Marcelo Faundez (Chile) jt.
http://www.nongrata.ee/
http://www.hot.ee/diverseuniver seiv/

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How to Watch Art and Life (1): Hawk or Dove?
Thoughts and Connections from Diverse Universe IV, Estonia, May 2008
Orion Maxted

The Diverse Universe (IV) Performance Art festival, took place in Parnu and Tallinn, Estonia, and Helsinki, Finland 19 – 28 May, 2008. Artists were invited from Chile, England, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, France, Germany, Switzerland, South Korea, Bermuda, Poland and USA, and the festival was notable for its inclusion many artists who in their own countries work in groups to form their own communities of different sorts.
This text is the outcome of many thoughts and conversations that took place at Diverse Universe. It’s the result of the artworks; the artists and organisers themselves; and the momentum and energy of the festival as a whole. The ideas then extend outwards from the festival taking in alternative readings along the way, and can be thought of, if you like, as embodying one of the sub-themes of the festival: obscurum per obscurius, (explaining the obscure by means of the more obscure).
In terms of Diverse Universe, its organisers, artists and audiences, I suppose that these are some of the key questions to which we’re looking for answers: what? how? and why?
This is the beginning of this obscurum per obscurius conversation.
OK, so here goes. Coming into prominence with the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern), Game Theory looked to gain new strategies for thinking about the complex ways that human beings make decisions when interacting and competing with each other, and when ones success depends on the choices of others. Allegedly, the theory soon received much funding from CIA who wanted to harness its potential power to gain the upper hand in the Cold War with The Soviet Union. In 1982 an English scientist called John Maynard-Smith published Evolution and the Theory of Games, taking the ideas in a new direction starting to use Game theory to think about evolutionary Biology.
What follows is The Prisoners Dilemma, a famous thought experiment used by evolutionary biologists, in order to begin looking at the complex nature of modelling seemingly simple two-sided interactions between two human beings. It goes something like this:
Imagine you are one of two people who have just been arrested for the same crime. The police know for sure that one of you did it, but they don’t know which one, and their keeping you both in separate cells so that you don’t have a chance to confer. They ask both of you individually; ‘Alright, which one of you did it?’ and offer you a deal if you defect on the other prisoner.
Irrespective of who really did the crime, both of you have the same two choices: you can either be a Hawk, i.e. aggressive, and tell the police the other person did it; or be a Dove, i.e. non-aggressive, and say nothing. ‘I’m not gonna’ be your talking monkey copper, no way!’ 1
(By the way: in the thought experiment, the desired outcome is to get the least years in prison, so no one ever says ‘I did it’, and admits to the crime.) OK, got that? You’ve got two choices, Dove or Hawk, now what are you going to choose?
OK, now you’ve both made your choice, and according to the rules of the thought experiment, from the combination of both prisoners choice to be Hawk or Dove there are now basically three possible outcomes:
Dove vs. Dove = In which case both prisoners only 6 months in prison each.
Hawk vs. Hawk = In which case both prisoners get 5 years in Prison each.
Dove vs. Hawk = 10 years in Prison for the Dove, and 0 years for the Hawk.
So we can see that the best possible outcome, overall, is for both prisoners to go Dove, i.e. both of them say: ‘I don’t know who did it’ and not lay the blame on the other one. But the dilemma is that this is also the most dangerous strategy individually, because you stand to lose big time and get 10 years in prison if the other guy blames you. So then should you just be a Hawk whatever? But then what if the other person just thinks the same as you? – Then you’re bound to lose, even if its losing less. The Prisoners Dilemma thought experiment is asking ‘what to do?’ What is the best strategy to think-in, act-out and model this situation?
In order to try to find the best strategy, some evolutionary biologists started a kind of festival of their own. Each year for the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, people would write computer programmes that played the Prisoners Dilemma many times in a row – thereby, importantly, taking into account the past moves of the opponent. During the competition all the computer programmes would play against each other, and at the end, the one with lowest total number of years in prison would be the winner. Simple enough.
From this process, in quite a small number of years of the competition some very interesting phenomenon emerged about the most successful computer algorithms:
1. They tended to be non-aggressive and Dove-like at the outset, trying to go for the absolute minimum number of years in prison.
2. But if the opponent programme starts to play Hawk, then one must quite quickly start retaliating, playing Hawk as well, otherwise they’re going to start losing big time.
3. However, once you have gotten into an aggressive Hawk vs. Hawk situation, you need to try to back off pretty soon, play Dove, and trust the opponent will start doing it too, otherwise you’re both going lose the competition anyway.

As Robert Axelrod first pointed out in The Evolution of Cooperation, what emerges out of this then isn’t only a computerised model of some stereotypical human social interactions, but actually, a pretty exact match of some central human maxims: the ‘Golden Rule’ and Universal Morality and justice.
1. The ‘Golden Rule’ is arguably the basis of human rights, and is the common thread through most of the worlds religions. E.g. Christianity: ‘Do to others what you would have them do to you’ (Matthew 7:12); Confucianism: ‘Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself’. (Analects XV.24); Islam: “That which you want for yourself, seek for mankind.”
2. ‘Lex talionis’; tit-for-tat; ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. This is more or less the basis for much of the judicial system.
3. Forgiveness, E,g. Buddhism: ‘He abused me, he struck me, he overcame me, he robbed me’ - in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease. - ‘He abused me, he struck me, he overcame me, he robbed me’ - In those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease. (Dhammapada 1.3-4; trans. Radhakrishnan); Christianity: “You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5:38–39);

In terms of evolution, i.e. ‘survival of the fittest’, winning, being there in the next round, of evolution, or not, is pretty much all there is. It’s as close to a pure evolutionary drive as you’re likely to get. Now if you’re a convert to Darwinist ways of thinking, the Iterative Prisoners Dilemma shows that its possible - in reality - for some of our most fundamental and cherished guidelines on how to be good, civilised human beings, to have emerged directly from a straight forward biological imperative to ‘win’ and ‘avoid loss’. (And also that it’s possible to map this mathematically.)
So with the insights from evolutionary biology, this now sets up a very curious dialectic. We can see that on both sides of the equation; both winning in terms of competition (and the avoidance of loss) and morality stem from the same root: a central, fundamental, biologically innate drive to win. So for those of interested in ‘how to change the world’ the big questions might become: ‘how to you convince somebody to win less, if we are programmed to win?’ (i.e. via charity or coercion.) Or even, ‘how do you convince somebody to lose, so that some other, possibly wider, group of people might win more in another time and place? - if winning is central, biologically hard-wired at the centre of who we are?’
What is at issue is that ‘winning and losing’ is both the root of the problem and the root of the solution; it is the source and the guide. If winning or losing is in a fundamental sense, all that there is, then what can we possibly do about it?
We are engaged in an epic struggle – that perhaps ultimately we may never win, but just hope to sustain – it is a war between the different outcomes of our drive to win.
When talking about winning and losing, we’re also talking about competition. Competition has its good and bad sides. Competition for limited available resources is one of the fundamental conditions for evolution to take place at all (otherwise everything could survive and development and refinement would be of no advantage). Competition can be a part of what drives people to do their best. Competition drives capitalism, which has delivered many great advances in technology and human welfare. You would not be sitting there, and neither would this text, were it not for competition.
There are also much darker sides to competition; where there are winners there are most often losers.
Adam Smith, famous Scottish father of modern economics and author of Wealth of Nations wrote “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. Yet as Jonathon Porritt, author of ‘Capitalism: As if the world matters’, points out, to focus only on this aspect as a justification for purest economic liberalism, as many have done, is misleading. For Adam Smith was also the author of Theory of Moral Sentiments where he tries to remind us time and again that self-interest, competition, must be “pursued by people of conscience, informed by their capacity for moral awareness. Without that, the invisible hand of self interest will not work for the public good.”2
There is one last twist in the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma Tournament. For many years or so, the competitions were locked into the best strategy that had emerged so far – making refinements to the Golden Rule / universal morality model – and there were very close competitions. But on the 20th anniversary a team from Southampton University had the idea to enter 60 of their own programmes into the tournament instead of just one. With competing programmes, they would play more or less normally, according to the strategies of universal morality. But the first few rounds of the game were used to transmit a coded protocol to establish if the program was playing against one of its own sibling programs – in which case one side would deliberately lose, allowing the other to win much more, and ultimately, win the entire competition. The program only needed to follow the moral code sometimes, on the other occasions, when playing with a sibling program it can be alternately seen as encountering extreme selflessness; some form of subordination or even some form of weakness.
By including additional complexity (i.e. many more than just two people in the model) the same basic primordial traits of ‘winning and losing’ - from which competition and morality can both be seen to emerge - also leads to some people being driven to lose more and more by the same processes which create larger and larger concentrations of power.
The expression ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, meaning, if the economy grows then everybody benefits, has been used endlessly over the past 50 years by those who advocate extreme economic liberalism. But there is now a common recognition in some circles that this model is incorrect - only the most powerful really benefit. As economies have developed around the world over the past few decades, in most cases, the gap between the poor and the rich has increased; voter participation has decreased in relation to the wealth of the countries; America the richest country in the world also has apparently the lowest levels of upward social mobility of any developed country. At a time of relative economic boom there have recently been hunger riots in over 30 countries – whilst foreign investors push the prices still high by investing in food stocks.
…
Of course, what does it mean to win? You have gotten this far into this article and still we have only really defined winning in terms of the outcome of an imagined encounter in a police station. Who wins? There are different definitions of winning and losing. Differing definitions of who ‘I’ or ‘us’ is that does the winning or losing.
Non Grata, (the performance art group who organise Diverse Universe) have, especially in the past, been notoriously cautious of the mainstream ‘art world’, preferring to associate with or embody ‘underground’ art. And some would say quite rightly.
As can be seen both from the ‘twisted’ version of the Iterated Prisoners Paradox, and also simply from the observations of the art world; the ideas, power and values of artists can often be distorted by their contact and subsequent absorption into large concentrations power, i.e. powerful art institutions and curators, (and the pressures on those institutions from still larger (concentrations of power) institutions and agencies which lie beyond) - if there is not a solid game strategy in place to resist this process in some shape or form, and allow trust to flourish.
To my mind, the point is not about being underground or over-ground, the point is to have some strong principals of what you want the work to achieve, stick to them and to build a world around them. The aim is to develop a fertile environment for the creation and progress of the work and the people.
Anonymous Boh of Non Grata has also spoken about the need to create, both physically and conceptually, an ‘experimental space’ where art can ‘feel free’. These ‘experimental spaces’ represent alternative strategies for ‘winning’.
There are many different purposes for art, different reasons for making art, watching art, many different worlds that need to be entered into or connected to and other artists represented at Diverse Universe IV also strive to create such spaces. E.g, Go-go Trash, from the Kasselberg commune outside Berlin; Horse Cow (Steve Vanoni), part of an autonomous artists street in the middle of the desert outside Sacramento, California; myself with protoPLAY in the UK we have been experimenting with temporary zones of shared experience and intelligence, such as the Deconstruction/Reconstruction project.
These artists are not addressing questions of how to change the world in some wholesale idealistic way, (nor looking to be incorporated into large concentrations of power,) but rather establishing ones own ‘oasis’ in the ‘jungle out there’, where at arms length from concentrations of power, the ways winning and losing takes place - who and how - can be controlled to a greater degree. Numerous strategies can thus be seen to have emerged to make sure that the integrity of the ‘experimental space’ is maintained by protecting it from outside concentrations of power where necessary, whilst constantly inviting and training ‘new blood’ into the space, where direct collaboration can be made, thus developing shared ideas, shared principals, trust, and strength and resilience from working as a group. Of course Non Grata’s main activity is not organising festivals, primarily, they are international performance artists – but the strategies for group work that they have developed are clearly manifest in the delivery of the festival.
Funky Chicken of Non Grata speaks in a very humanistic way about the central points of the group. She sites trust in ones colleagues of paramount importance, as well as sharing and non-individualism as expressed through anonymity.
In a real way, these ‘spaces’ set up the conditions where players can choose dove more often – and even choose hawk, but with far less fear of personal or group loss. This is not to say that there are not politics within these groups, or that within these groups people are somehow saintly individuals.3 With the initial Prisoners Dilemma, one of the key points was that you were not allowed to communicate with the other prisoner, and we see that it was exactly this point, in some sense, that the Southampton team managed to circumvent. Thus communication, and beyond this – collaboration, has a tremendously important role in making artistic strategies work, and is one reason why so much time has to be devoted to it at a festival like Diverse Universe. Art is only free as long as we do not set up rigid expectations of what will and what will not work.
We should perhaps briefly observe that these phenomena are in no way unique to artist activity, but part of a much wider set of social movements. For example, Noam Chomsky has written very clearly on anarcho-syndicalism; there is also many forms internet-driven collaboration which share many of these characteristics and will surly become a greater force with our society in the coming years, such as flash-mobs, Wikipedia and many other examples for which Charles Leadbeater has coined the term We-Think.
One aspect that these ideas have in common is a dynamic approach to defining who ‘I’ or rather who ‘We’ is. These strategies of winning involve expanding the realm of who, how many people one, one considers ought to win for you to consider it winning. In a sense we’re also touching slightly on a not uncommon definition of the meaning of life, which is also unsurprising derived from the notion of winning: To learn to lose oneself; to help others (us?) to win; to extend outwards from the individual self, and give yourself and your resources to something which is perhaps more important.4
…
OK, we’re nearly at the end now, and hopefully I can now introduce this last section and draw obscurum per obscurius to something of a close. This is the main thing that I’ve learnt about watching art:
Some way in to a festival with the momentum of Diverse Universe, after say about one day of watching performance art, I find that something in my mind goes ‘click’ and I can stop having to analyse the works in order to interpret meaning bit-by-bit. Instead the meaning can just flow slowly from the artist, and their associated activities, straight into my eyes, ears, back of the neck, shoulders, body and my brain - in a way that feels much more direct than trying to understand. Meaning and interpretation flows in like colour, like pure sounds, like smell.
What happens next, or perhaps what I simultaneously do to make this happen, is to simply look at the artist and their environment in such a way as to see them getting on with their life. Just trying to get on with their life, seeing the battles they have to fight, the games they have to play, the advantages or disadvantages they feel, what they might need, what they might have to give. You can see it in the expression in their bodies; in the lines and expressions of their face. You can see the effort they’re making to try to communicate - whatever it happens to be - through the actions and objects around them.
When in this state of mind of watching-people-trying-to-get-on-with-their-life in some senses - we’re watching their efforts and ambitions, and the accumulation of past efforts - to win and to avoid loss.
What I find happens next is that when watching and thinking in this state of mind is that further qualities of mind seen to automatically emerge, which are akin to compassion, patience and tolerance. It’s interesting to note that these are three basic principals of Buddhism.5
In How to Practice the Way to a Meaningful Life, the Dali Lama writes, “In truth we already know one another, profoundly, as human beings who share basic goals: We all seek happiness and do not want suffering.”6
Perhaps simplistically then we can perceive a structural symmetry with what we have said already: losing = suffering; winning = happiness.
In a sense, if we consider that Hawk and Dove; winning or losing; or, happiness or suffering, are at the core of our evolution, and concurrently, at the core of our life goals, then its not surprising that we should be able to find these aspects so abundantly when we watch art.
Performance art – where you can be there, watching the artist trying and living, close-up – has a particular ability to render abstract ideas to the resolution of real life.
A performance festival with the energy and diversity of DU is an ideal place to cultivate this state of mind, after which it might be possible to extend the same principal, outside of the experimental space. Watch life, ‘ordinary people’ trying to get on with their lives, through their expressions, through their actions, through the architecture and ideas they built and left behind. Meaning articulated through core innate life goals might then flow from everywhere; everything man-made may be meaningful, poetic and surprising.
Generally when performance art takes place with an audience, it is the audience who form the stage on which the art takes place. Their very way of watching the work, their attitudes, concentration (or lack of) determines what the work ultimately means. The audience creates as much as the artist does. Little Tom of Non Grata observed that the audience at the Diverse Universe Off-Topic event at Art Container had been the best audience for performance art ever in Estonia. There is a symbiotic relationship between the development of the art and the audience; they develop the space together.
DU extends space of alternative ways to win outwards, inviting artists and audiences with different reasons for making and watching art into a shared experimental space.
It provides a fertile ground for communicating and developing sensitivity, where ideas can be rendered to the resolution of real life in a way that is likely to encourage such states of mind as compassion, patience and tolerance. If this space were to extend outwards indefinitely, and these sensitivities continue to develop, then putting these actions together would ultimately, idealistically, transform the world. – But like I said, it’s not about that. The world is changing, in the interim DU is not so different from the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma Tournament: it is a sort of competition, where winning and losing, Hawk and Dove, are considered in much broader terms.

Orion Maxted, May 2008

Thanks
Many thanks to all the artists at the festival, especially Non Grata, Sport, Steve Vanoni, Ernest Truly, Travis McCoy Fuller and Rachel Hoffman, for the great conversations, passion and inspiration.
About the author
Performance, sound and video artist living in Brighton, England. My artistic practice is divided into two complimentary parts: solo work and group work. Broadly, both these parts, cognitively and collaboratively, enquire into the world that we make for ourselves. I am supported by Basement Arts Production SE in the UK, and work with the artist collective protoPLAY, www.protoPLAY.net
References
Wikipedia/GameTheory
Wikipedia/JohnMaynardSmith
Wikipedia/PrisonersDilemma
Wikipedia/TheGoldenRule
Wikipedia/Forgiveness
We-Think, Charles Leadbeater, Profile Books 2008
Capitalism: As if the World Matters, Jonathon Porrit, Earthscan, 2005
Politics in an age of fantasy, Stephen Duncombe, www.turbulence.org.uk
How to Practice the Way to a Meaningfull Life, The Dali Lama, Atria Books, 2002. (Given to me by Steve Vanoni at Diverse Universe IV – Thanks again)

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Heliline tegevuskunst.

Thomas Millroth käis eesti performance rühmituse Non Grata korraldatud festivalil “Diverse Universe Performance Explosion” Tallinnas ja Pärnus otsimas uudset lähenemist eelnimetatud kunstiliigile - läbi kuulamise.

Performance sündmusena on tegevus, mis paiskab segi argipäevased tunded nagu jää purustab kive. Oleme harjunud performance´t nägema mingilaadse narratiivivaba teatrina, mis keerleb vägivalla, komöödia ja veniva poeesia vahel. Metafoorid ei seisa järjekorras; tôlgendused peame me looma ise. See on tihti nagu kuulaksime sosistamist läbi paksu müüri – nagu Ovidiuse kuulsas poeemis.

Külastades seekordset Performance Explosionit Kultuuritehases Polymer ja Pärnu Kunstnike Majas môtlesin palju iidsetele legendidele Pyramosest ja Thisbest, kes liikusid teineteise järele janunevast himurast igatsusest traagika lõpuni. See algas sosinaga ja lõppes surma ja vägivallaga. Mulle tundus see sobiv sümbol performance´le enesele, midagi, mis argimõistusele on kättesaamatu.

Otsustasin seekord kasutada oma kõrvu samavõrd kui vaimu, silmi, aju ja ülejäänud keha.

Performatiivsetes kunstides on jôuväljad ja energiad, mis on omased mürale, elektroonilisele ja eksperimentaalsele muusikale. Seal on heli. Mônikord aga lihtsalt puhas lärm vôi kokkusurutud konkreetsus, erinevate esemete kokkupõrge segatud elektroonikaga ja elektrilised lained.

Noor eesti rühmitus COPT (nagu Sport) esitleb end väljaelavaid videoteoseid, kus vägivald, rôôm ja nali on segunenud raevuka tempo ja järskude vaadetega. Oma näituse avamisel Tallinna Kultuuritehase NG-galeriis oli see rühmituse liikmete grupp täis vägivaldset ürgjôudu. Nende kodukootud instrument, mis sarnanes gaasiballooni ja keelpilli millegi vahepealsele, osutus endas sisaldavat erinevaid mürategemise vôimalusi, mis justnagu murdusid vastu kitarri moonutusi ning lôikavat kaja. See oli peaaegu rituaalne.

Veel ühe vägivaldse elamuse pakkus ameeriklane Joseph Sledgianowski, kes enese väljaelamiseks kasutas raudkappi, mille sisse olid monteeritud mikrofonid. Alustuseks ônnestus tal ajada see kolakas osavalt ventilatsioonitoru alla, nii et heli seejärel tugevnes nagu hooguvôttev orkaan. Jalalöökide ja hoopidega lôhkus ta tükkideks kõik need ilusad kôlad ja kogu ruum tundus olevat täitunud teravate kildudega.
See oli vôimas. Kurnatult kôndisime me minema. Performance suudab helid muundada peaaegu füüsilisteks.

Just enne teda olime kogenud festivali peremehi, legendaarset Non Grata´t. Kultuuritehase Polymeri toores alastus oma valusate jälgedega sealsest varasemast industriaaltegevusest kõlab kokku eksperimentaalse kunstiga. Pagasiks halltolmune valgus ja katkised seinad, süütas Non Grata väikeseid tulepesi, külvas viljateri, ladus omaenda paksudest punastest raamatutest kõrge riida. Üks liikmetest tuli mootorsaega, tômbas selle röögatades käima ja suunas keti raamatute poole, üritades need hävitada kuhja poolitades. Mitte nii lihtne! Ja järsku purskas ootamatu ja piinarikas juga üle publiku. Kôik varjusid, kuhu said ning samaaegselt tekkis peaaegu idülliline kooslus kahest imetuvast naisest koos piimakotte täis kolmandaga. See oli idülliline ja kaootiline. Valge vedelik voolas. Väljakannamatuks muutunud heli segunes paksu tolmu ja paiskuvatest viljateradest tekkiva terava valuga skalbil, silmis ning kôrvades.

Siin viis heli meid teispoolsusesse, kaugele igasugustest eeldustest. Ei olnud vôimalik olla tavaline naerev publik. Kôike oli ülekülluses. Muutusime üheks osaks selle totaalse performatiivse keskkonna tekitatud liikumises - pôllumajandusproduktide ja industriaalhelide segunemises.

Higistamaajav elamus, vahendatud läbi naha ja trummikilede.

Peaagu sümfooniline, kui antud vôrdlus on lubatud. Kuid sellel on olemas ka teine, kôlav külg.
Argipäev. Väikesed helid Kui Ross Butles Bermuudast meid sisse kutsus, pidime kôik seisma kahes reas, et tekitada enda keskele koridor. Riietatud kollakasrohelistesse spordirôivastesse kôndis ta cd-mängija juurde ja pani käima ühe lühikese loo Metallica kolmandalt plaadilt. Nagu pöörane hull tormas ta pealtvaatajate vahel nüüd juba pimeduses ning keeras tagasi just selleks hetkeks, et muusika taaskord mängima panna. Ja uuesti ja uuesti. Kuni Metallica muutus läbileierdatud minimalismiks ning Butler üha enam väsinuks ja jôuetuks kiirjooksjaks. See sportlik helirada kestis kokku 20 minutit. Sammud kajasid kitarrikôlades veel kaua hiljemgi. Muusika sihikindlus muutus ajusse kinni jäänud sundtegevuseks. See performatiivne tegevus oli ümber kujundatud nootideks - üks ei oleks toiminud ilma teiseta.

Performance on kehaline ja ruumiline. Omal moel sarnaneb selle tantsu uurimine just selle ruumiga, ja loomulikult antud muusika koos oma koreograafilise kvaliteediga. Esinemine muudab muusika millekski muuks kui totaalseks elamuseks. On ruumimôôtmelisus. Mina môistan seda kui midagi väga eksistentsiaalset.

Eriti kui paljud juhtumid ja tegevused segunevad keha enda häältega. Nagu hetkel, mil kuuleme agaralt kiirustavaid edasi - tagasi liikuvaid samme, ajal kui poolakas Marta Ziolek valmistub oma etteasteks. Hingetu ja paljana sammub ta meie ootavasse vaikusesse. Astub üks- ühehaaval kôigi pealtvaatajate ette. Ta tuleb lähedale ja astub üle sellest nähtamatust puutumatuse piirist, mis meid ümbritseb. Ta tuleb väga lähedale, sealjuures liigutamata ühtegi näolihast. Silm silma vastu. Need rasked hingetômbed. Konsentreeritud aeglus. Siis kükitab ta koos oma käes oleva punase plastmassmunaga, mille sisuks osutuvad plastmass-sôdurid. Ta laob nad ritta. Kôigepealt käsivarrele ja seejärel kukutab end maha. Ta asetab need oma puusale ja keerleb vägivaldselt maas ringi. Proovib kôhu, selja, kintsude peale ja kukub ja kukub.Ta keha prantsatab tugevasti vastu pôrandat. Potsatused muutuvad vaikuse taktijoonteks. Ta liigub edasi-tagasi seinte vahel, kuni seisatab nurgas näoga seina poole. Viskab end ilma käte abita kord korra järel vastu pôrandat. Rütmilised löögid vastu keha. Lôpuks mätsib ta figuurid rasva sisse, vaikuses vôitades neid hoolikalt oma jalgade vahel. Kui ta kônnib, julgeb keegi vaevu hingata. Aga ruum, kus ta on olnud, hoiab veel kaua neid reeglipäraseid hääli higise naha kukkumisest kôvale pôrandale.

Puhtalt kehalised helid puudutavad meid sügavalt, kuna me ei suuda säilitada oma tavalist kultuurset suhtumist nagu mône instrumendi puhul. Seda kasutavad edukalt paljud helikunstnikud. Kuid küsimus on hoopis, kas olen kunagi varem seda tundnud niivôrd tugevalt kui shveitslase Saskia Edensi etteaste ajal. Ülearuseid liigutusi tegemata astus ta sisse, kükitas ning asetas enda ette kaks ilmetut lamedat karpi. Üks neist sisaldas jääst valmistatud juuksenôela ja kôrvarôngaid. Need sobisid hästi kokku ta tugevalt punaste huultega.
Teisest kastis tôstis ta välja jääst plaadi. Suunas selle vaikselt hingates oma soepunasele suule. Kuuldus rütmilist madalat sisinat ajal, mil ta peaaegu transis olles liikus pulbiku poole jää maskina näo ees vôi siis oli see pigem nagu külm membraan ta hingetômmete jaoks. Ta pööras end kellegi näo ette. Teda saatis hingamise kahin vastu seda külma ja kôva plaati. Kui ta minuni jôudis, hakkasin konsentreeritult talle vastu hingama. Nägin ta punast suud säramas läbi jää. Kihisevad ôhuvoolud. Ja siis ootamatult tekkis jäässe auk ning külmus muutus tema soojaks hingeauruks. Tasane heli tugevnes läbi meie suude. Kerge kaja, tugevndus, mis oma vaiksuses oli ülivôimas ja ootamatu. Vôibolla keegi teine peale tema ja minu ei kuulnudki seda muutumist. Olin täiesti keeletu, ma polnud iial varem tundnud sellist füüsilist heli. Etteaste oli läbi ja hetkel, mil ta lôpetas hingamise läbi jää, muutus vaikus ruumis totaalseks.
Saskia Edens oli ootamatult puudutanud nii häguselt müütilise ja ekstreemse eksistenstiaalse selgusega alghelisid, kust kôik muusika kunagi alguse sai. Sidet teise inimesega, mida saab vahendada läbi heli.

Ma arvan, et Kurt Schwitters on viimaks saanud vastuse oma Ürgsonaadile.

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The sound of performance art.

Thomas Millroth has visited performance festival Performance Explosion
arranged by the Estonian group Non Grata and tried to find a new
input - through listening.

Performance or event, to create an event that blasts the everyday
existence's minds like the frozen water cracks the stone. We are used
to to see performance as a kind event related to loose theatre
commuting between violence, slapstick and subtle poetry.

Metaphors do not stand on queue; we have to take care of our feelings
by ourselves . It is often like a whisper heard through the wall –
like in Ovidius´ famous poem. When I visited the Culture Factory
Polymer and the artists' houses in Pärnu during this year's festival I
often thought about the old story about Pyramus and Thsibe, that
started as a lustful longing for onenanother and ended tragically. It
started with a whisper and ended with death and violence. It felt as a
suitable symbol for performance in itself, impossible to reach on
common sensible. I chose to luse my ears as much as my mind, eyes,
brain and the rest of the body.

In the performative arts there is strong energy fields that lie near
noise, electronics, experimental music. The sound is there. Sometimes
as clean noises or dense concrete sounds. Everyday sounds like chats,
words, clashes of different objects mix with electronics and waves
from electricity.

The young Estonian group C P OPT (read sport) showed very expressive
videos, where e violence, desire, slap stick are intermixed in furious
rate and precipitous angles. On the opening of their exhibition on
NG-gallery in Culture Factory in Tallinn played a pair of the members
played with one violent primeval force. One home made instrument, as a
compared cross of gas tube and chora, itself showed to contain roaring
possibilities, that met with the distorting guitar and jarring fairy
curse back.The music had a feeling of a serene ritual.

Another violent sound experience was signed by the American Joseph
Sledgianowski, that went loose on a container with microphones on it.
First he succeeded dexterous to push the monstrosity during one
ventilation drum so that the sound was amplified equal to an
increasing hurricane. With kick-sleds and kinds he broke he all
beautiful sounds in pieces until the entire room felt vast only filled
with fragments. It was a strong experience. Whacked we went from
there. Performance shows the sounds almost as physical facts.

Just before we had also experienced the festival's hosts, the
legendary Non Grata. The Culture Factory Polymer's raw nakedness with
wounds from earlier industrial activity matched well the experimental
art. In a gray dusty light in a room with broken walls Non Grata lit
small candles , sprinkled out grain, restacked a mound with thick red
books about themselves.

Someone came with a chain saw, starting it with a roar and tried to
destroy and cut in halves all the books. Not so easy! And suddenly
with painful force the grain spurted over the audience. People hid
behind walls and pillars, while an almost idyllic group was drinking
milk from small bottles attached on one of the members. It was idyllic
and chaotic. The white fluid flowed. The sound became almost
unbearable, itself intermixed with thick dust and the wasp the pain
then small barleys got catch in scalp, eyes and ears.

Here the sounds took us to another side, away from the expectations.
They did not want to satisfy a commonly watching audience All
attitudes were redundant. We became a part of that big business that
this performative noise achieved; a mixture of agricultural products
and industrial noise

A sweaty experience provided through skin and eardrums.

Almost symphonic, if the parallell is permitted. But there is also
another loud side. The everyday existence. Small sounds. When Ross
Butler from Bermuda invited us, we were asked to stand in two rows
making a small space for him. Dressed in yellow green sport clothing
he rushed to the CD-player turning on a short part from Metallicas
third album. Then he rushed away again as far as he could reach to
turn back and start the same piece once more. Over and over again.

Back and forth. Back and forth. After a while Metallica turned into a
grinding minimalism through Butler s increasingly tired and stressed
leap march. This sporty sound loop lasted nearly twenty minutes. In my
ears the guitar riffs echoed long after. The music was turned into a
manic act that stuck in your brain. This performance did remould and
change the tones; nothing was the same before and after.

Performance is physical and spatial. In the same way as dance and
choreography measures a space or a room; and of course certain music
with choreographic qualities. A performative act changes the music the
sound or the choreography inte something else than only a traditional
experience. The room is the limit the body the mind the movement the
challenger. I consider it as very existential. Especially when many
events and movements intermix with the body's sounds. As when we
consult eagerly dashing stages forward and once more, then Polish
Marta Ziólek prepares your admission. Breathless and naked she enters
into our expectant silence. She slowly goes very close to the
spectators one after another. She deliberately crosses the indivdual
limit of phsycial integrity. In a way that made me think of Marina
Abramovic. Face to face. Eye to eye. The naked body fragrant of sweat.
Very slowly. You hear and fell her breath. The she sits down with a
red plastic egg, that contains small plastic soldiers. She first puts
them on her arm then falls heavily. She lines up them on the hip,
spins violently around.

She puts them on her abdomen, spine, thighs,hips falls, falls. Falls
heavily Her body hits hard against the floor. The thumps become rate
dashes in the silence. She goes on, examining the room´s limits and
possibilities. Until she stops in front of the wall standing there in
deep silence. Throws herself headlong time afterr time on the floor.
Painful. Heavy. Rhythmic reports against her body. Finishing with
covering the little plastic soliders with grease that she slowly puts
over her pudendum.

When she leaves the room is stirred in its balance between her
bouncing falling body and the silence that she leaves us in.

The clean physical sounds make echoes deep in us, because we cannot
keep a common cultural attitude to it as we do with a regular
instrument. Many sound artists use this with success. But the question
is if I ever experienced it so strong as with Swiss Saskia Edens. She
did not use big gestures or loud sounds. She entered, sat down and
opened two insignificant, flat boxes. One contained ear clips and a
hairpin of ice. She put them on, matching her strongly red lips. From
the second she lifted a flat piece of ice. She solemly held it in
front of face so that her lips could be seen through. The hot red
through the cold ice.

A rhythmic low hissing was heart while she almost as in trance
breathed on the ice then turning to the spectators holding her cold
wall in front of them expecting them to breathe from the othere side.
All the time the warm breath against the cold hard. A very subtle
physical and rhythmic sound. When she stood in front of me slowly
leaning against my face so that only one cold centimeter was between
us we both breathed. I heard this little sound seeing her red lips
through. And then suddenly a hole opened in the ice, our brathings
were mixed, I felt her warm air and the hissing was strengthened in
our half open mouths. An easy echo, a strengthening that in spite of
its tinyness was overwhelmning. Perhaps,no one else in the room
experienced this but me and her. But this was the first time I felt
this physical sound as close and clear. And then the event was over.
Leaving me breathless.

Saskia Edens passed through mythical levels into the most immediate
existential clarity: to watch sounds, this is where all music once
begun. And the conjunction to another person that can be provided
through this sound.

I think that Kurt Schwitters at last got a relevant reply to his Ursonat.

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Diverse Universe IV

Efter en kort taxiresa från Tallins flygplats kommer jag trött och hungrig till Culture Factory Polymer i en av stadens förorter. Jag befinner mig på en, för mig, helt okänd plats i ett land som jag aldrig tidigare har besökt. Med viss osäkerhet blandad med spänning och nyfikenhet stiger jag in i den gamla fabrikslokalen. Det är trånga korridorer, stora rum och betong. Ljuset sipprar in i de mörka rummen genom några få fönster. Det är rått, hårt och dammigt. Fabriksverksamheten har flyttat ut och kulturen har flyttat in. Jag kastas rakt in i Performancefestivalens Diverse Universum IV intensiva program som precis har börjat. Jag har ingen aning om hur kvällen kommer att arta sig men något förvirrad följer jag publikströmmen upp till andra våningen där jag hamnar mitt i de Estniska arrangörernas Non Gratas performance och det kan man säga är ett mycket speciellt välkomnande!

Non Grata har full aktivitet utspritt i rummet, det är energiskt, galet och hänsynslöst. Som publik möter man ett motstånd då man utsätts för bl a oljud, rök och tårgas, det krävs verkligen vilja att stanna kvar i rummet. Jag minns deras performance på min arbetsplats Ystads konstmuseum i Sverige då vi var tvungna att utrymma publiken efter att brandlarmet hade gått. Det känns inte som om något larm kommer att varna i den här lokalen. Det är osäkerheten jag upplever, den som uppstår av motståndet och gränslösheten i deras agerande som är spännande. Hur långt kan de gå? Non Gratas performance är starkt i den här råa lokalen. Det klassiska konstrummet den kliniskt rena vita kuben känns långt borta såväl som skrivna och oskrivna regler och bestämmelser.

Rummet där performancet uppförs är en av de fyra milstolpar som utgör performancekonsten, de andra är mötet med publiken, konstnärerna/aktörerna och tiden. Diverse Universe IV erbjuder under drygt en veckas tid olika spännande blandningar av dessa komponenter. Resultatet blir en mängd varierande upplevelser och möten.

Det är kanske rummet som sätter ribban för konstnärens agerande och publikens mottagande. Oftast känns det som konstnären är underordnad rummet. Rummets begränsningar blir också konstnärernas begränsningar. Men det kan också vara tvärt om; jag upplever att Culture Factory är underordnat konstnären. Den bastanta råa lokalen kräver ingen respekt och endast ytan är konstnärens begränsning.

Här känns det som om man som publik får lita till sitt eget omdöme och själv sätta sina gränser, för här kan vad som helst kan hända. När Rachel Hoffman gestaltar en sexuell fantasi och låter sin nakna kropp smörjas in med chokladpudding, för att sedan uppmana publiken att äta från den, är stämningen uppspelt. Männen kastar sig över henne med hunger i blicken och tar sig ogenerat friheten att skrapa pudding från hennes intimaste områden. Samma scen visas i ett annat renare, ljusare och mera respektingivande rum ett par dagar senare och publiken uppträder mera städat och kontrollerat.

I fabriken är de nakna aktörernas kroppar påtagligt nakna. Kontrasten är stor mellan den nakna kroppen och den hårda miljön. Mycket olika typer av vätskor rinner, skvättes eller kletas, det brinner och det smäller. Publiken lämnar den ena nedsmutsade platsen efter den andra för att gå till ett nytt utrymme för att ta del av ett nytt performance.

Ibland blir det högljutt och brutalt som till exempel i Joseph Sledgianowskis och Fred Pinault ljudverk där Sledgianowski respektlöst kastar omkring ett stort metallskåp med en mikrofon på. Det är inte många rum som erbjuder möjligheter för ett sådant både fysiskt och ljudmässigt mäktigt verk.

Maurice Blok bygger omsorgsfullt en scen med lysande glödlampor och trästockar för att sedan i ett ryck rasera och krossa.

I fabriken hålls det ett mycket högt tempo. Det är inga pauser vilket säkert påverkar den mycket intensiva stämningen bland både konstnärer och bland publiken. För mig är det mitt första möte med Estland.

Festivalen fortsätter dagen efter på andra sidan sundet i Helsingfors Finland, även här används en gammal fabrikslokal. Men den gamla kabelfabriken är renoverad, det är rent och fräscht. Konstnärerna har två rum att välja mellan, en klassisk blackbox och en white cube. Här är stämningen en annan, de flesta av konstnärerna väljer att agera annorlunda och det är ett annat fokus ifrån publiken. Nakenheten känns och bemöts med mer respekt, brutaliteten och vätskorna är så gott som borttagna. Det finns ett undantag; Chilenaren Giodo Casanova Solar som utsätter det vita rummet och publiken för stänk av mat och öl. Efter en stunds nersölande sätter den finske arrangören stopp! Gränsen för vad han kan tolerera är tydligen nådd. Det är intressant, i fabriken i Estland hade Solars agerande bestämt inte stoppats. Frågan är vilken gräns Solar klev över? Rummets? Den kulturella? Eller arrangörens personliga?

I början av sitt performance öppnar Solar de igensatta fönstrena och får publiken att hålla andan när han klättrar upp i dem för att fästa stora vingliknande plaststycken som hänger med himlen som bakgrund. Det handlar kanske om frihet, kanske vill han pröva friheten i konsten? I ett demokratiskt samhälle? i EU? I Norden? I Finland? Han kom i alla fall inte så långt och under resten av festivalen, som fortsätter på olika platser i Estland, uppträder han med byxorna nere.

Det är Performancekonstens andra milstolpe aktören som bestämmer språket, dennes kropp är instrumentet för kommunikation men den behöver den tredje stolpen publiken att kommunicera med. Jag ser tre olika typer av möten med publik: Det väntade mötet då publiken har gjort ett aktivt val att ta del av performancekonsten. Största delen i denna kategori är en van och intresserad publik, den är fokuserad och beredd på att kommunicera och gör det på konstnärernas villkor. Publiken som besökte fabrikerna i såväl Tallin som Helsingfors tillhörde denna kategori. Sen har vi det oväntade mötet, detta sker när performancekonsten beger sig utanför givna rum och ut bland allmänheten. I Pärnu agerar konstnärerna ute på Pärnus gator och på stranden. De möter Pärnuborna en helt vanlig onsdagseftermiddag. Den största delen av denna publik vet inte vad denna avvikelse från vardagen är för något. Konstnären är betydligt mera utsatt inför dessa oväntade möten.

En blåklädd Rolls Rolf Langhals med ansiktet inlindat i blått bandage sitter vid en fontän, han ska snart börja vässa IKEA blyertspennor och dela ut till publiken. Polisen får syn på honom, ger honom order att visa ansiktet och provoceras av att han inte lyder order. Situationen räddas när en gulmålad Micha Steger spelandes på en flöjt kommer med ett gäng människor i släptåg för att ta del av Langhals performance. Incidenten får polisen att förstå situationen och skratta. Så småningom lämnar de platsen.

Jag kan bara föreställa mig vad bilisterna tänker när de tvingas stanna mitt i stan denna eftermiddag för Fred Pinault som intensivt skrapar den vita färgen på övergångsstället med frigolit. En förbipasserande gångtrafikant erbjuder sin hjälp men tröttnar när han inser meningslösheten.

En tredje kategori av möte med publik finns mellan de två tidigare nämnda. Nämligen den publik som kommit för att ta del av konst men inte nödvändigvis performancekonst. På vernissagen av utställningen ”Obscurum per obscurius” i Tallin Art Hall uppträder några av Diverse Universe IV’s konstnärer. Performancekonsten möter här inte bara vernissagepubliken och rummet utan också konsten. Här är konstnärerna verkligen underordnade rummet och situationen. Detta löser de genom att ge sig i dialog med situationen på olika sätt; utställningstemat som handlar om religion passar Marcelo Faundez som handen i handsken. Hans verk kommenterar ofta kristendomen och här väljer han att utföra en slags ritual som avslutas vid en kyrkoportal utanför konsthallen.

Travis McCoy Fuller väljer att ge sig i dialog med Terje Djavers installation Out of breath som består av några sopsäckar som innehåller någon slags mekaniskt skelett som gör att de rör sig likt människor. McCoy Fuller bygger sin vana trogen upp en scen med sparsam rekvisita och några statister som han plockar från publiken. Efter en stunds regisserande fortsätter han sitt agerande nedkrupen i en sopsäck.

Det är både högtidligt, uppseendeväckande och komiskt när den estniska performancegruppen Avantgarde med Marcus Tamm i spetsen går runt bland den minglande vernissagepubliken och med applåder delar ut ordensknappar till slumpmässigt utvalda personer. Knapparna är kopior på ordensmedaljer som delas ut till högt uppsatta personer i Estland.

I mer neutrala rum som kunstgalleri i Pärnu och hörsalen i Konstmuseet i Tallin KUMU fortsätter konstnärerna att möta publiken.

Jill McDermid och Erik Hokanson gör en sammanhängande performanceserie bestående av olika fristående delar i olika rum under festivalen. Out of the balance handlar om en relation som förlorar balansen och innehåller aggressivitet, förnedring och kampen att åter hitta balansen. Den som ser alla delarna får en annan bild än den som endast ser en del.

Många av konstnärerna kräver publikens delaktighet.

I Saskia Edens poetiska Breath är det bara hennes djupa andetag som hörs när hon med ett tunt isblock framför ansiktet närmar sig publiken. Hon går fram, ställer sig nära, det är bara den tunna isen emellan våra ansikten, vi andas och jag känner hur det kalla vattnet droppar i mitt knä när isen långsamt smälter. Det är poetiskt och det uppstår en intim situation mellan konstnär och publik.

Marta Ziólek konfronterar publiken genom att kräva ett bemötande när hon naken går runt i rummet, stannar upp och kräver ögonkontakt. Hon för en slags maktkamp med publiken och lyckas genom blick och rörelser ta rummet i besittning. Hon skiftar fokus, gör publiken medveten om sin egen existens och tar ifrån dem den trygga anonyma åskådarrollen.

Rachel Hoffman däremot utelämnar sig i publikens makt när hon gör en parafras på Yoko Onos Cut Piece från 60-talet där publiken uppmuntras att klippa av henne kläderna. Medan Yoko Ono sitter tyst och stilla i vanliga kläder är Rachhel Hoffmans version betydligt mer underhållande, exhibitionistisk och sexuellt laddad när hon iklädd vitt tyll med kaninöron sjunger karaoke till Kim Wildes version av ”You keep me hanging on”. När showen är över och musiken tonas ut står hon ensam kvar på scenen naken och skör.

Show är det också när Steve Vanoni intar scenen hans verk utgörs i stort sett av publiken. Han trissar upp stämningen genom att dela ut visselpipor och gör den till en hejarklack för en tävling som äger rum på scenen och även själva tävlingen utgörs av publiken.

Russ Butler förlitar sig helt på publikens blixtar när han i ett beckmörkt rum ger järnet! Han hoppar, headbangar och spelar luftgitarr till den symboliskt passande låten Hit the lights med Metallica. Publiken fotograferar flitigt och ger varandra på det sättet ögonblicksbilder av Butlers energiska framträdande.

Ernest Truely kräver inte bara integration från publiken utan han lämnar synliga bestående spår på deras kroppar när han utför brännmärkningar (endast på frivilliga). Brännmärkningarna är en slags metafor för de spår som konsten kan lämna hos människor och i bästa fall kan konsten därigenom förändra oss lite.

Till sist vill jag nämna performancekonstens fjärde milstolpe tiden. Performance sker i nuet. Endast vi som är där kan uppleva verket. Det kan aldrig bli detsamma igen. De fyra benen rum, konstnärer, publik och tid är en kombination som aldrig kan återskapas så länge vi inte kan vrida tillbaka tiden.

När jag efter en intensiv veckas tid lämnar Tallin har jag ingen brännmärkning på kroppen men jag har nog efter alla möten och upplevelser förändrats en smula. Och jag är förmodligare tröttare än jag var när jag kom men jag är mätt och belåten!

Ýrr Jónasdóttir

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Diverse Universe IV

After a short trip with a taxi from the airport in Tallinn I arrive tired and hungry to the Culture Factory Polymer in one of the city suburbs. I’m in what is, for me, an entirely unknown place in a country I’ve never visited before. With a certain insecurity mixed with excitement and curiosity I enter the old factory. There are narrow corridors, big rooms and concrete. The light trickles through a few windows in the dark rooms. The environment is raw, hard and dusty.

The activity of the factory has moved out and the culture has moved in. I’m thrown directly into the intensive program of the performance festival Diverse Universe IV which just has started. I have no idea how the evening will turn out. Slightly confused I follow the audience up on the second floor where I land in the middle of the Estonian organizers Non Gratas performance and that I can say is a very particular welcoming!

Non Grata is spread out in the room and there is full activity. It’s energetic, crazy and reckless. As an audience, one meets a resistance and exposes oneself to loud noise, smoke and tear-gas. It really requires a strong stamina to stay in the room. I remember their performance a few years ago at the Art museum in Ystad, Sweden where I work. Then we had to evacuate the audience after the fire alarm went off. It doesn’t feel like there is any alarm that will warn you in this place. It is the insecurity I feel that arises from the resistance and the boundlessness in their performance that I find exciting. How far will they go? The performance of Non Grata feels strong in this raw environment. The classical room for art, the clinical clean white cube seems far away as far as the written and the unwritten rules.

The space where the performance is presented is one of the four disciplines of performance art. The others being the audience, the artist and time. The Diverse Universe IV festival offers for just over a week different exciting mixtures of those components. The result is many various experiences and meetings.

Maybe it’s the space that sets the crossbar for the artists act and the audience response. Most of the time it feels like the artist is subordinated the space. The limitation of the space becomes also the limitation of the artist. But it can also be the other way around; I feel that the Culture Factory is subordinate the artist. The solid, raw rooms requires no respect what so ever. Only the surface area is a limitation for the artist.

Here it feels like that as an audience, you have to trust your own judgement and set your own limits, because anything might happen. When Rachel Hoffman figures a sexual fantasy and lets her naked body be greased in chocolate pudding in order to challenge the audience to eat from it, the atmosphere is droll. Some of the men throw themselves over her with a hunger in their gaze and unashamed take their freedom to eat pudding from her most intimate areas. The same scene is repeated a few days later in another space, which is much cleaner and respectful and the audience behave more civilised.

In this industrial factory the nakedness seems very naked. The contrast between the naked body and the hard environment is stark. Lots of different liquids flow, splash and smear, it burns and it bangs. The audience leaves the one messy place after the other for a new place and a new performance.

Sometime it’s loud and brutal like Joseph Sledgianowski and Fred Pinaults sound piece where Sledgianowski without respect throws around a huge metal closet with a microphone on it. There are not many spaces that offer the opportunity for such a physical and noisy piece.

Maurice Blok carefully constructs a scene with glowing light bulbs and wooden stocks and then in one foul swoop crushes and demolishes it.

In the fabric the tempo is high. There are no breaks which I’m sure influences the intensive spirit among the artists and the audience. It’s my first meeting with Estonia.

The festival continues the next day in Helsinki, Finland. Even here an old factory is used as a space. But this space is renovated, it’s clean and fresh. The artists can choose between two different spaces, a classical black box and a white cube. The climate is different here, most of the artists choose to act differently and there is another concentration from the audience.

The nakedness receives more respect, the brutality and the liquids are ablating. There is one exception: The Chilean Giodo Casanova Solar who exposes the white room and the audience for splashes and smears of food and beer. Eventually the finish organizer stops the performance. The limits for what can be tolerated are reached. It’s interesting; in the Estonian factory the act of Solar would defiantly not have been stopped. The question is what boundaries did Solar cross, the spatial, the cultural or those of the organizers?

In the beginning of the performance Solar opens the covered windows and the audience holds their breath while he climbs up in them to put up big pieces of plastic that look like wings. They hang with the sky in the background. Maybe it’s about freedom, maybe he wants to challenge the freedom in the art? In a democratic society? In EU? In the northern society? In Finland? Anyway, he didn’t get very far and during the rest of the festival, that continues in different places in Estonia, he performs with his trousers down.

It’s the second discipline of the performance art, the artist that settles the language. The artist body is the instrument for the communication but it needs the third discipline, the audience, to communicate with. I see three different types of meeting with the audience: The expected meeting, when the audience has done an active choice to be a part of the performance art. The biggest part of this category is an interested audience that is used to performance art. They are focused on the act and are prepared to communicate with the artist on his or hers conditions. The audience that visited the factories in Tallinn and Helsinki belonged mostly to this category. Then there is the unexpected meeting that happens when the performance art leaves the expected space and goes out to the general public. In Pärnu the artists perform out on the streets and on the beach of Pärnu. They meet the inhabitants of the city on a regular Wednesday afternoon. The biggest part of this audience doesn’t know what this deflection from the every day life is. The artist is much more exposed about these unexpected meetings.

Rolls Rolf Langhals is dressed in blue with his face covered with blue bandage. He is sitting next to a fountain, soon he will start sharpen pens from IKEA and give to the audience. The police spot him and give him order to uncover his face. They get provoked that he doesn’t obey their orders. The situation is saved by a flute playing, yellow painted Micha Steger that arrives followed by a crowd that is going to take part in Langhals performance. The incident makes the police understand the situation and they start to laugh. Soon they leave the place.

I can only imagine what the car drivers are thinking when they are forced to stop in the middle of the city this afternoon because of Fred Pinault that is intensively scratching the white colour on the crossing with Styrofoam. A walking passer offers his help, but soon he gets tired when he realises the meaningless.

The third category of a meeting with the audience is somewhere in between the two I mentioned earlier. It’s a meeting with the audience that is expecting to see art but not necessarily performance art. Some of the Diverse Universe IVs artists perform on the opening of the exhibition “Obscurum per obscurius” in the Art Hall in Tallinn. Here the performance art doesn’t only meet the audience that came for the opening it also meets the space and the art in the exhibition. I believe the performance artists are subordinated the space and the situation. They solve it by going into a dialogue with the situation in different ways.

The religion theme of the exhibition is something that really suits Marcelo Faundez. His performances are often a comment on Christianity. Here he makes a kind of a ritual that ends in front of the church outside the Art Hall.

Travis McCoy Fuller goes into a dialogue with the installation Out of breath by Terje Djaver which is made from some garbage bags with some kind of mechanical skeleton inside of it that makes the bags move like human beings. McCoy Fuller constructs a scene as he is used to with a small means and extras picked out of the audience. After a while of directing he crawls into a garbage bag and continues his act.

It is ceremonious, remarkable and comical when the Estonian performance group Avantgarde with Macus Tamm in the front mingles with the opening audience. With a small ceremony followed by applause he gives away Order buttons to people chosen at random. The buttons are copies of the medals from an order that are given to highly represented people in Estonia.

The artists continue to meet the audience in more neutral spaces like the art gallery in Pärnu and the auditoria of KUMU the art museum in Tallinn.

The different performances during the festival of Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson are connective even though the different parts stand-alone. Out of balance is about a relationship that loses the balance. It includes aggressivety, abasement and the struggle of finding the balance again. The one who witnesses the complete performances gets a different picture than the one who only sees one.

Many artists demand the audience participation.

In Breath by Saskia Edens you can only hear her deep breath when she, with a thin block of ice in front of her face, approaches the audience. She gets close, very close it’s only the ice that is between our faces, we breathe and I feel how the cold water dribbles on my knee when the ice slowly melts. It’s poetic and there is an intimate situation between the artist and the audience.

Marta Ziólek confronts the audience by demanding a reply when she walks around in the space naked and heavily breathing, she stops in different spots and demands eye contact. She runs a kind of power struggle with the audience and she succeeds with gaze and movements to take the space in possession. She changes focus, makes the audience aware of their own existence and takes away their safeness and anonymity as a bystander.

Rachel Hoffman on the other hand leaves herself out to the audience when she does a paraphrase of Cut Piece from the sixties by Yoko Ono who encourages the audience to cut of her cloths with a pair of scissors. While Yoko Ono sits quiet and still with regular clothes on is Rachel Hoffmans version much more entertaining, exhibitionistic and sexually loaded when she is dressed in white tulle and bunny ears singing karaoke to “You keep me hanging on” with Kim Wilde. When the show is over and the music fades out she stands alone on the stage naked and exposed.

It’s also a show time when Steve Vanoni approaches the stage, his performance being the audience. Vanoni bumps up the atmosphere by handing out whistles and makes the audience cheerlead a competition that take place on the stage. Even the competition is created by the audience.

Russ Butler relies on the audiences camera flashes when in a totally dark room he goes wild! He jumps, head bangs, and plays air guitar to the symbolic suitably song Hit the lights by Metallica. By photographing Buttlers energetic appearance, the audience contribute to the experience.

Ernest Truely doesn’t only demand the audience integration he also leaves visible marks upon the body when stigmatising volunteers by burning. These burn marks are metaphors for the traces that art can leave and thereby capable of changing us.

At last I want to mention the fourth discipline of performance art time. Performance happens in the moment. Only we who are there experience the work, it will never be the same again. The interaction of four disciplines the space, the artist, the audience and time is a dialogue that can never be re-created as long as we are not able to turn back time.

When I leave Tallinn, after an intensive week, I don’t have any stigmata on my body but I’m sure after all the meetings and experiences that I’ve changed at least a little bit.

Ýrr Jónasdóttir