Hanging with M.S. again the other night, he told me some bad news - that his grant application for the international performance art festival he was planning in Myanmar had fallen through. Commiserations for this perplexing, depressing blow took the form of dinner and beers.
Smoking some criminally strong cigarettes (thanks z.), our conversation stumbled and flopped around broken language. Silences were punctuated with random, gratuitous cries of 'beyond pressure!', raised glasses, cheesy laughter. It was so totally geeky I'm glad no one else was there to witness it.
Somewhere along the way we managed to have bouts of furious back and forth about performance, language, access, economics and power. A light started to shine on that confused part of my mind that's been pondering on relative inequalities - reflected in all levels of living in the world, and thrown into stark focus when two artists like me and M.S. interact. In between the market, national and global politics, biennial fever, superstar curators, supernova artists, criticism, writing, professional careers - where is art?
Here is art. The importance of M.S.'s proposed festival of performance art - Beyond Pressure - is this: one, that people who are not in Myanmar have access to different ways of looking at what is happening there now, which I am certain is nothing like what's in the media; two, that it creates from within a space in which people who are in Myanmar can take part in the representation of themselves, a reaffirmation of their place in the global community. Here is art - that beyond day to day survival, we can resist the pressures from within and without that insist on keeping us where we are: firmly in our places in the first or third world, firmly dependent on a feudal system of global economy.
This is not about inequality and a futile attempt to level it. This is about representations - access to an alternative system of representation can profoundly change the way we look at (and act in!) the world. An example close to home: who amongst us middle-class Malaysians has not harboured thoughts of suspicion and fear towards immigrants from Myanmar, Bangladesh and Indonesia? And if it's not suspicion and fear, then isn't it a profound discomfort underpinned by guilt and a sense of helplessness each time you're served by a waiter for Myanmar and you know she has no rights in the eyes of either her employer or our government? This is where art comes in and does what nothing except art can do - it presents an alternative. Beyond the language of politics and NGOs, which in many ways reaffirms conditions of inequality even as they attempt to allay the symptoms of it, there are other ways of approaching and getting to know each other.
Performance. We were talking about how there seemed to be difference in approach. For convenience we were throwing around the category 'west' with total hubris, like a beach ball - how a 'western' approach to performance seems to invest hugely in language and text, evidenced in how more meaning is put in to the text of a performance instead of the action. True. Many times I catch myself conceiving of a work using language first, then the image emerges from that, almost as if seeking a way to illustrate the text in my head. Looking at M.S.'s work, it's different. The action/image holds the meaning, and is the starting point. The action is long, pregnant, complex; usually no text accompanies it. Why is it important to identify this difference? Because the way we access power in the artworld (manifest as connections, market value, etc) is through the 'western' (there's that beach ball again) system of language and text. Where and how a performance is written about perpetuates it as a commodity (lets call it nothing else) in a global value system that may have absolutely nothing to do with the very MOMENT and PLACE in which that performance was enacted.
What this is means is the degree to which you are valued (critically and commercially - although the two seem interchangeable these days) depends on your access to this system of language. For a country like Myanmar, the access is almost nil. Why no Burmese artists at Biennales? Why relatively few (but steadily growing) number of Malaysian artists? This isn't a question asked from the outraged position of the marginalized, rather I ask it instructively. Let's not kid ourselves. It may be one day we'll see Malaysia represent strongly at Biennales all over the world. It may be one day we'll have our own. Beyond glamour and recognition, what would it mean? It's high time art regained some of its teeth and courage; it's high time biennales take an honest critical position about themselves by putting the system of biennales squarely at the center of its own curatorial concern. Back to why I think it's imperative that Beyond Pressure performance art festival is held in Myanmar: it helps us to invent a new language of performance - both in the action and the word - that sheds light on how to believe in an art that goes beyond market politics and power. I want an art that lives, breathes and acts in the world today. It's possible, and it's important. It's not a utopian challenge, but one of resistance.
Beyond pressure! Cheers!
