diskurso.com's May 2020 Picks

3 May 2020

diskurso.com

10 (Performance art)

Untitled (Bodégon). (Launched 25 April 2020, Philippine time, on YouTube)

FOR the seventh iteration of the Singapore-based annual Wuwei Performance Series, the event's organizers decided they could easily let the series go on this year in late April, even with the travel bans and global lockdowns. That's all thanks to performance art's not being restricted to live presentations, allowing via-media deliveries as still within its aesthetic perimeter, for as long as the other requisites are there, mainly the performer's presence in a singular locus. Of course a via-media presentation of a performance may create confusion about whether it is still operating within the language of performance and not rather within the lexicon of the short film, especially when the camera veers away from the performer to scan parts of the venue. Then again, isn't one's pair of eyes witnessing a live performance in a gallery actually operating like a camera itself, panning here and there and at times cognitively zooming in on an interesting detail, and so on and so forth? Anyway, suffice to be in the know that via-media performances are embraced by the category as still within the scope of its favor. And so, this year, the 12 participants of the series were instructed to just video their performance in the location they were caught in. That, in essence, became the most distinct flavor this Wuwei series ended up with that's now part of its art-historical added value.

That doesn't mean that the performances themselves are lesser materials for conversation. We found Filipino artist Alwin Reamillo's entry, for instance, titled Untitled (Bodégon), to be quite a conversation piece for our Filipino bias, even as it had messages in it that may not have anything to do with the pandemic issue, at least nothing directly.

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