Performance Anxiety

Angela Bulloch’s sculptural works make use of simple technology to emit noise, produce light, and draw on the wall, among other things, at the touch, sound, or movement of the viewer. Her participatory pieces include drawing machines, light pieces, and sound works that exist with a parallel oeuvre that includes videos, text pieces, and extended projects that explore the physical and psychological aspects of a particular site.

Bulloch’s earliest participatory works were environments with light or sound that were affected by the presence of the viewer. Before and After Follows Each Other (1989) is a room with two rows of spotlights on the ceiling that are timed to dim and brighten at slow, although different rates of speed. The rhythmic lighting stops when someone opens the door to use the bathroom at the end of the space. Unsuspecting viewers thus kill those lights but, in the process, become spotlighted as they enter the bathroom.

Similarly unexpected results occur in Bulloch's sound installations. In Crowd Sound Piece (1990), the entrance of a viewer into a small room triggers the clamor of an immense crowd, and in Laughing Crowd Piece (1990), a visitor steps on floorboards in an empty gallery, prompting the laughter of a mass of people. Both of these works are humorous yet oddly humiliating, as the unsuspecting visitor can cheer and laugh along with the throng or, as the possible object of the crowds' attention, feel self-conscious. Either way, the viewer is caught unawares, inevitably leading to a sense of powerlessness. An inversion of roles also occurs as the spectator becomes the one "observed" by the anonymous implied audience. This effect is most explicit in the silent King of Comedy (1991), a room with only the image of a laughing crowd projected onto an entire wall. The viewer confronts an intimidating sea of faces and the implied roar of laughter as he or she walks into the room, casting a shadow onto the image and thereby further integrating with the scene.

In these works Bulloch investigates not only the psychological effects of sound, but its physicality as well. She has referred to Crowd Sound Piece as a sculpture "because it questions the size of your physical space and your imagination of enormous numbers of people within that."1 Bulloch uses a similar strategy of aurally evoking a visual experience in Tyson Spinks Sound Mat (1993), a door mat that, when stepped upon, plays the bbc broadcast of that record-short championship fight. The brief narration of the fight momentarily transports the listener to that quick bout, which is over just as one begins to understand the proceedings.

In a 1991 series of "sound chairs," Bulloch gives the viewer a choice of words. Yes Sound Chair emits the word "Yes" in various inflections when someone sits in it, while No Sound Chair Piece and Maybe Sound Chair Piece have their own soundtrack with, respectively, "No" and "Maybe." Once one uses it, the chair begins to talk back, incessantly repeating its message until the sitter gets up. The ultimate control of the piece is in the hands of the user, but the chairs take on a life of their own once they are activated.

Bulloch explores the issue of control perhaps most directly in her series of drawing machines. Works such as Pushmepullme (1991) and Betaville (1994) are large x/y plotters that draw lines directly on a wall and are mobilized by the sound or movement made by a viewer. The thrill of activating these big machines is tempered by the realization that they will do what they will once they are set in motion, regardless of the desires of the virtual artist. The futility of one's control over these works is most obvious in Blue Horizon (1990), a drawing machine that uses disappearing ink, and finally On/Off Line Drawing Machine (1991), which independently draws a line in one motion and erases it in the next. Speaking of the drawing machines in particular she has said, ". . . the drawing is a record of the machine's activity over a period of time. An initial idea unfolds over time and is transformed." Bulloch's emphasis on the idea behind these works ties her to the tradition of conceptual work, and the drawing machines, in particular, seem to embody Sol LeWitt's famous dictum about conceptual art, "The idea becomes the machine that evokes the art."

Bulloch takes LeWitt’s wall drawings, which are executed by hand according to his explicit instructions, a step further. She not only deletes the originating artist’s gesture but also the mark of any human hand by replacing it with a machine that responds to anyone’s touch by drawing on the wall.

With the Rules Series, begun in 1993, Bulloch continues her interest in issues of control and human behavior. These editions are text pieces that list actual rules found by her for different situations. They include regulations for strippers, bungee-jumpers, waiters and waitresses, the British Parliament, models, and even for the handling of the Rules Series. At times she returns them to their original contexts by hanging them close to where she found them. The owner of an edition decides how and where to install them.

More recent works are large beanbag chairs that Bulloch uses to create an environment so that viewers can sit and, for example, write personal musings in notebooks, as in Happy Sack with Notebooks (1995). In a 1996 installation for a group show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, she placed her brightly colored, immense beanbags in front of monitors showing recent British videos in a room covered with murals by Raoul Dufy. Other works incorporating furniture are personal environments such as Light Reading Bench (Snow Crash) (1996), made of a bed with a drawer containing the bestseller of the moment for a lounging viewer to enjoy, and Formation Dancing Bench (Virtual Hmmm . . . ) (1996), also a bed, this time with speakers and socks that one can put on to lie down, listen to music, and either dance or relax.

The most common form of interactive machines are video games, and in 1993 Bulloch began a project at the Trocadero entertainment complex in London, which has an arcade full of these amusements. She studied the games and compiled a list of them along with playing instructions and shot a video of the players, all of which she later presented in an installation. More recently in Space Invaders with Laser Base Switch Stools (1996), she slightly alters an early video game. Depending on which of the two attached seats one chooses, one can play alone or with a partner. In addition, Bulloch amplifies the shooting sound of the game so that players are accompanied by an exaggerated soundtrack.

Along with the interactive strain of her work, Bulloch produces a parallel output of larger projects extended through time and space that examine the nature of a site. For example, in Panorama Island (From the chink to Panorama Island), a project sponsored by the Public Art Development Trust in 1995, Bulloch explored and researched that particular stretch along the Thames river in London. She photographed and collected historical, contemporary, literary, and anecdotal materials about the location and produced an archive that gives a multilayered picture of its past and present, which simultaneously speaks of the changing British culture. An additional manifestation of the project is a narrated walking tour of the area by Bulloch and William Furlong in cassette form produced in the audio publication Audio Arts.

Although works such as From the Chink to Panorama Island may initially appear to be incongruous with her other more object-oriented work, these projects are similarly concerned with process and duration. In her participatory works, Bulloch sets up a situation for viewers to create an effect that continues through an extended moment. Bulloch’s interest in the process of how a work evolves through time is connected to her use of simple technology. The mechanics of the drawing machines are basic, and the wires, speakers, and switches in her other works are usually visible.

Bulloch's interest is not in producing magically invisible effects but in examining how viewers use her works. Yet the term "interactive" seems inadequate to describe them because they often frustrate and go beyond simple cause-and-effect functions. The sounds of her pieces can be humiliating or scary, the drawing machines defy any real control, the light works can provide unwanted illumination, and even the large beanbag chairs that she recently has produced have the potential to completely envelope a sitter. With the cooperation of the viewer, Bulloch investigates human behavior and the psychological and physical aspects of creating and experiencing works of art. Her intentions are clear:

"It was interesting to me that the person looking at the piece was involved in a level of power given to them unexpectedly or that they could take it upon themselves to use. This renegotiation of power interested me."

Cai Guo Qiang is best known in Europe and Japan, where he has created a number of public works. He designs explosions for particular places, incorporating the historical and social circumstances of each individual site. In these large-scale projects and in indoor installations, he combines traditional Eastern philosophy and ritual with contemporary Western forms, the spiritual with the physical.

Cai's 1994 exhibition for Art Tower Mito in Japan illustrates his unique merging of East and West. In Chang sheng, one element of this two-part project, Cai evaluated the city of Mito using "Feng shui." In this ancient Chinese art, buildings, objects, and activities are favorably arranged in relation to the invisible currents of energy pulsing through the earth. After his research, Cai made suggestions for the improvement of the city's "Feng shui," using that most contemporary of tools, a computer, to depict the flow of Qi, the essential life force. In Cai's words, the project endeavors "to open up the system of contemporary thought to the pulsation of eastern culture."

Since 1989, Cai has produced a series of Projects for Extraterrestrials. These spectacular pieces are outdoor, controlled explosions made with gunpowder; Cai creates them after studying the history, geography, and social conditions of the area. Numerous people collaborate on the projects, including gunpowder experts and fire fighters, and their participation is crucial to the work. The explosions are short but directed to take a particular shape and move at a particular speed, and the scale of the works is such that any life in the cosmos should be able to observe the blasts. According to Cai, "The moment of explosion creates chaos in time and space. . . . After the brief chaotic moment, the work disappears from our vision and flies away into the space with the speed of light to meet another audience."

Cai's Projects for Extraterrestrials have included Add 10,000 Meters to the Great Wall of China, a piece completed in February 1994 with an immense trail of fire that extended from the Wall, and Horizon Project in March of that year, a 5,000-meter "belt of light" with fire at the horizon line on the Pacific Ocean outside Iwaki City in Japan. Future plans include the launch of a 400-meter spiral of fire by the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago to commemorate the 126th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire. The most poetic and seemingly straightforward proposal is perhaps the most impossible—to turn off all the lights on Earth for two seconds between the passing of December 31, 1999 and the first minute of January 1, 2000.

While Cai's outdoor work, in his words, "seeks dialogues with the external universe," his indoor installations are concerned with the "inner world of human life."3 Cai's preoccupation with these two realms coincides with the ancient Chinese world view of human beings as a microcosm of the universe. In this view, humans are inseparable from nature and form part of its wholeness. Just as the universe consists of the oppositional and complimentary forces of "Yin" and "Yang," so do humans. Just as there must be a balance of forces in the universe, there must be a similar balance within each person.4 In order to maintain this healthy equilibrium, Chinese traditional medicine makes use of acupuncture and herbs, substances Cai employs in his works.

Cure the disease and Guard the Body, Cai’s installation for Performance Anxiety, incorporates principles from acupuncture, foot reflexology, and the Shiseido Company’s Fitness Promenade, along with traditional Chinese herbal medicine. On the floor of the gallery, Cai arranged a path made of pebbles of different sizes and shapes, which visitors can walk on after removing their shoes. On the wall next to the path are drawings explaining the theories of reflexology, which viewers can read as they traverse the course, at the end of which is a vending machine filled with bottled herbal cures. One can insert money into the machine, choose from one of five cures for a particular ailment, and buy a tonic.

In his notes for the installation, Cai explains that by walking on the stones, viewers stimulate the "reflection points" on the soles of their feet and can thereby improve their health. This activity promotes the circulation of each person's Jing-luo, "an information network . . . which links the life system from internal organs to skin." Viewers thus perform a type of self-induced reflexology treatment, a therapeutic form of foot massage that is related to acupuncture. Both treatments posit energy links between specific parts of the body and organs. In reflexology, the application of pressure on a particular area of the foot can affect a corresponding organ. The goal of this treatment is to promote balance within the body and induce relaxation.

The contemporary American vending machine at the end of the therapeutic path offers not the usual junk food, but five different Chinese herbal medicines. The formulas correspond to the five "zang" organs, the heart, liver, spleen, lung, and kidney, which form the core of human life. They in turn correspond to the five elements that make up all matter: fire, wood, earth, metal, and water, respectively. Although they share the same Western terminology, the organs are believed to function differently in Chinese traditional medicine. For example, the heart is the most important organ, and it controls one's mental faculties as well as the circulation of blood. Cai's formula for the heart, as its labels states, treats palpitations of the heart, constipation, and premature ejaculation.

The wall drawings along the path depict the theories of reflexology and are made with Chinese ink and small, localized explosions of gunpowder. Cai has linked the herbal medicines with gunpowder by pointing out that the Chinese character for "gunpowder" means "fire powder." He proposes: "If gunpowder has been used for communication with the outer universe, then water medicine might be a means to evoke the redevelopment of the inner universe originally contained within all life." In his view, drinking the cures is a way to "bridge the gap between humans and their environments."

As in his other works, in Cure the disease and Guard the Body Cai fuses the traditional and contemporary. The trail of stones may be a curative footpath, but it also resembles the piles of rocks that form the work of the contemporary English artist Richard Long. The vending machine is an up-to-date American design and thus particularly suited to its site. Cai first exhibited such works in Venice in 1995 as part of an exhibition entitled Transculture, but in that case the machines were appropriately Italian-made. The medicines are manufactured by a homeopathic pharmaceutical company in Belgium that produces them according to Cai’s instructions. Although wall drawings may be the most ancient type of artistic expression, they are also very contemporary. The concept of an outdoor exercise route is new and, in this case, Cai was inspired by one designed by the Japanese cosmetics concern Shiseido. The route is on the roof of one of Shiseido’s corporate buildings in Tokyo, and employees use it to stay fit.

By forging these contemporary inspirations onto ancient Chinese traditions, Cai offers viewers a spiritual alternative to current Western art by placing viewers within rituals of healing. In our secular contemporary society, can this type of work retain meaning? As Cai has asked:

Could art created by an artist be a special medicine for modern society and contemporary art? Purify a mind and spirit, bathe a soul, and develop life and the light of wisdom that exists as potential in all life. When a life gets closer to the truth of the universe, it approaches true freedom. Can art do that?

Willie Cole transforms discarded domestic items and electronic gadgets into sculptures that refer to African art and mythology. Old blow dryers become African masks; ironing boards with scorched-on patterns from hot irons resemble shields; women’s high-heeled shoes metamorphose into totemic figures. Cole rescues throwaways that are textured by time and gives them new life as works that evoke multiple associations - domestic labor, religious ritual, and the history of Western appropriation of African forms. As an artist who works in an industrial section of New Jersey, he finds his battered materials, with their obvious traces of use, close by. He adds to these items the legacy of his African ancestry and his interest in and knowledge of African art and world religions.

Cole re-created The Elegba Principle, a 1995 installation, for this exhibition. Originally presented at Capp Street Project in San Francisco, this work is based upon the West African Yoruba religion. In the Yoruba cosmology, Elegba is the "orisha" that governs choice and guards the crossroads. He stands at thresholds and acts as a messenger between the human and spirit worlds. Not exclusively a benign guide, Elegba is also known as the Trickster who mischievously sets obstacles to those trying to make a decision.

In Cole's installation, viewers must endlessly make choices as they weave their way through a labyrinthine arrangement of doors. On each door is text such a "freedom" or "financial security," and viewers must choose one of these phrases in order to pass a threshold, only to encounter ever more doors and decisions to make before reaching the end. A metaphor for life and its constant challenges, The Elegba Principle is a slightly cruel game concocted by the Trickster to urge one to take responsibility for one's actions, while highlighting the futility of thinking that the path will become clearer.

Cole's installation functions as a place of trials, placing willing viewers in a ritual space of transformation and self-knowledge. This testing ground is explained by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell discusses the mythologies of different cultures and outlines the similar patterns of rites of passage in various belief systems. He compares stories in which a hero must enter an obstacle-filled realm before emerging victorious and changed. " . . . The hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ïthreshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power." Once within that zone, he "must survive a succession of trials . . . .The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region."

Cole imposes an African god upon an American image, paralleling the practice of African slaves who secretly worshipped their traditional gods in the forms of Christian saints in the new world. "Unbeknownst to the slavemaster, however, the African, more interested in spirit than form found their original gods from home (Africa) alive and well inside the saints and saviors of their new Christian belief system. Thus St. Peter became Ogun, the Virgin Mary became Yenoja, St. Michael (the gatekeeper) became Elegba and so on." These hybrid religions evolved into Candomble in Brazil, Santerâa in Cuba, and Vodoun in Haiti. In Black Religions in the New World, George Easton Simpson states that among American slaves, the "trickster-god" became associated with the Devil, who can be good or evil. This trait derives from African thought and is illustrated in the phrase: "The Devil could be a friend in need." Simpson traces Elegba to the "little man" of conversion stories of the 1920s among black rural Southerners. Like the Trickster, he is a mischievous character who announces death but can also bring good luck.

In his work, Cole carries on the tradition of grafting African content and forms onto Western images. The modernist model is of the Western artist (such as Pablo Picasso) borrowing the forms, but not the content, of African art for his or her work. Cole performs a similar co-optation of form but imbues his works with a sense of spirituality and ritual. He employs the Trickster’s sly humor.

In West Africa, offerings to Elegba are placed in front of the home or at a crossroads. At the end of the road in the installation, viewers encounter Elegba himself in the form of a lawn jockey. According to Cole, this image is:

"A kind of covert signifier of the Elegba principle. The jockey boy's job was to bring the horse to the rider. In all Yoruba-based ceremonies, Elegba is greeted first because it is he who stands at the crossroads between man and spirit (horse and rider). Until the civil rights movement, lawn jockey statues were placed outside of homes, usually near the front door, or at the crossroads of the driveway and street. They were often painted red, black and white (the colors of Elegba) and held in the hand either a ring for hitching horses or a lantern for showing the way. The Trickster strikes again!!"

Renee Green’s installations are complex examinations of overlapping themes that are usually related to the exhibition site. Using an anthropological approach toward her subjects, she researches historical and cultural topics and then offers viewers the results of her studies in videos, texts, and sound elements. As viewers, we move through the installations, reading, watching, and listening; we uncover layers of meaning our engagement is physical and, above all, intellectual.

Import/Export: Funk Office (1992), a work originally produced for an exhibition in Germany, serves as an example of Green's working method. The overall theme of the piece is the cross-cultural flow of ideas between the United States and Germany. Green researched several cases, one of which was the relationship between the German philosopher Theodor Adorno and the American activist Angela Davis, who studied with Adorno in Frankfurt before returning to the United States to join the Black Panthers. They serve as the historical figures in the work, while Diederich Diederichsen, a German music critic, is the contemporary example. Green stayed in Diederichsen's apartment in Cologne during preparations for the exhibition and, while there, she discovered the enormous impact of black hip-hop music on the German music scene, to which Diederichsen had contributed as editor of the influential music magazine Spex. Green's installation appears to be an office with metal shelves filled with books, cassettes, and videotapes as well as four desks that serve as "funk stations" with photographs of Green's New York and Diederichsen's Cologne apartments. Here Green supplies white gloves and magnifying glasses, enabling viewers to study the pictures of their bookshelves and music collections. She also provides boom boxes for the pleasure of listening to music as well as speeches and interviews. Helpful texts on wall plaques translate terms such as "rap" and "hood" into German. The entire installation functions as a lively study room to trace Green's discoveries and in the process make some of one's own.

The layering of themes and amalgamation of different media in an installation is typical of Green's strategy for providing viewers with multiple points of access to her work. It also allows for more creative readings of her themes, as viewers deduce their own conclusions. Suspicious of absolute truths, she has said, "Hopefully my work demonstrates the complexity of things, that to make any one kind of authoritative statement about the way things are is specious."1 Green has stated that her goal is not to be didactic or obvious: "I'm more interested in sparking the viewer to ponder something, especially the very blurry divisions between fiction and history.... I'm less interested in clear narratives and more in characterizations."

Green's themes are often the hidden or forgotten history of a particular site and, by placing the spectator in the midst of her efforts to uncover that history, she involves them in that process. In Seen (1990), Green places the viewer directly in the scene and pairs two images: one of Saartjie Baartman, an African woman who was displayed as an exotic specimen, the Hottentot Venus, in Europe during the eighteenth century, and an image of the American performer Josephine Baker. Green made seeing the images a bit of a challenge. They were partially hidden by a curtain, and one had to climb onto a platform in order to see them. Going through such efforts to look at the images underscored their seductive power and implicated those who took the trouble to look. Furthermore, in ascending the platform, viewers' shadows were cast onto a screen, putting them on display, much like Baartman and Baker. Speaking of this work and her concerns in general, Green has said, "I wanted the viewer to become the performer while simultaneously trying to extract information."

The genesis of Green’s work is her research of particular topics, and the information she offers viewers often appears in the form of text. This reliance on text and information ties her to the conceptual art tradition of artists such Lawrence Weiner. To this legacy, Green adds her personal history and experience as an African-American woman artist.

Green's autobiography has informed her project for Performance Anxiety. Entitled Partially Buried, it is a simultaneous study of several topics related to the year 1970: the concept of site-specificity and the ideas of Robert Smithson; the Kent State student protest; and her mother's presence as a student at the university at the time of the killings. In researching the piece, Green returned many times to her birthplace, Cleveland, Ohio, and visited Kent State University. She interviewed various people who were present at the time of the infamous protest as well as people who may have known Smithson when he was working there. Her readings of Smithson alerted her to the work he had made at the university in 1970, which was entitled Partially Buried Woodshed and inspired the title of her own piece. She also interviewed her mother, who studied experimental music at Kent State but does not recollect anything about the protests. This instance of forgetting became associated in Green's mind with "the slipperiness of memory and genealogies, subsequent forgetting or renarrating."4 Partially Buried thus refers to both a forgotten history and the Smithson piece. Via photographs, video, audio, and architecture, the installation deals with all of these issues as well as attendant concerns. Surrounded by a 1970s environment with the appropriate rock music piped in, spectators immerse themselves in the work of art, becoming engrossed in a web of references and associations that enrich each finding and place the viewer at the center of the experience of uncovering information.

In Partially Buried, Green traces, in her words, "genealogies"„her own family history as well as that of the idea of site-specificity. She has used the term in previous works. In an interview, she defined genealogy "as a fragment. That seems the only possible way to perceive history . . ." She compares this fragmentary view of history to her own way of working with bits of information, tying it to her own experience. "Being a diasporic subject myself, I have no linear history. No one truly does, but I think I'm acutely aware of not being able to find some direct trace back ten generation."

Partially Buried, like all of Green’s work, is an attempt to unearth hidden histories and in the process expose the beliefs inherent in supposedly unbiased portrayals of fact. To communicate with her audience is of the utmost importance to Green. She characterizes this communication as:

"More like a conversation, a way to continue to engage in thought. It's amazing how cultural production, such as art and movies, can instigate discussion amongst all kinds of people about important issues. So art certainly has a function. And it's not one to be taken lightly."

Amorphous Body Center, a series of nine sculptures that incorporate music, is the result of a collaboration between Charles Long and the British pop band Stereolab. Each of the works includes podlike, organic forms with headsets that viewers can wear in order to listen to a Stereolab song. Each sculpture has a particular tune that plays on a continuous loop, so that listeners can plug in anytime. In the statement that accompanied the first showing of the series in 1995, Long and Stereolab declare that the goal of the Center is:

"To promote better understanding between body and mind, to emphasize the new role of the body as prescribed by the rapid developments in communication. The near total transformation of our culture into an information based state has left little chance of an active role for the body beyond its image value. At the center we accept and can even embrace these developments but have found it necessary to defend and draw attention to the physical realm for its potential value as well as its vulnerabilities."

With Amorphous Body Center, Long and Stereolab attempt to reassert the importance of the corporeal, which is, according to them, in danger of becoming irrelevant in the emergent information-based world. The quasi-scientific text has the idealistic tone of a 1970s self-actualization group (or "center") combined with a New Age sensibility that anticipates the coming of the millennium. The statement has a retro-futuristic feel that is a quality of both Long's sculptures and Stereolab's soundtracks for Amorphous Body Center.

Long had been an admirer of Stereolab from the emergence of the group in 1991 and had met them briefly at a concert that same year. He listened to their music while working in his studio, and it began affecting his work. Stereolab uses outdated electronic equipment to achieve their contemporary sound, and that aspect of "looking forward and backwards at the same time"2 appealed to Long, who noticed the same tendency in his sculptures. He eventually contacted the band and shared with them information about his work and his ideas "about connecting to bodies and the distribution of music."3 The collaborators worked separately on their respective parts, and neither sound nor sculpture is a mere illustration of the other. Nevertheless, the popular science-fiction look of the colorful blobs, which could have emerged from a horror movie of the 1950s, are appropriate containers for Stereolab's neo-psychedelic, ambient music with socially concerned lyrics.

Long has described Bubble Gum Station as "the centerpiece" of the series. Of all the works in the series, it has the potential to most physically engage the viewer. One can sit on a stool, listen to Stereolab on the headphones provided, and use sculpting tools to carve into or form sculptures from the pink mound of clay that encircles the table and protrudes from the undersides of the stools. Every ersatz artist can conceivably spend hours in the creative process while contemplating the continuous music. In this work, Long blurs the line between artist and viewer by offering his audience the opportunity and instruments to become the artist and alter his work. Bubble Gum Station exists in a constant state of change as each successive participant contributes to its form.

A total of three people can participate in Bubble Gum Station at one time. Everyone can partake of a similar experience, physically close to a fellow "artist" yet psychically isolated from each other while all listening to the identical soundtrack. This same phenomenon occurs in all the works of the series, perhaps most humorously in Buloop Buloop. This sculpture presents an alternative to the clichع about people gathering to gossip around the watercooler. A blue rubber glob with four attached headsets appears to have landed on top of an ordinary watercooler. Visitors to the cooler can put on the headsets and quench their thirsts while listening to the sounds of music. The most intimate of the series, this work offers participants life-sustaining water, thereby acknowledging the vulnerability of the body.

Long suggests a physical communality in Buloop Buloop that he also implies in Good Separation in Soft Blue. The centerpiece of the work is a blue blob with headphones that sits on the floor and appears to have spawned an offspring. As with the other sculptures, the work comes alive with human participation, as people recline on the surrounding cushions and tune into the Amorphous Body, which looks like a popular depiction of an outer space alien. The work has about it the apparently relaxed but enforced familiarity of a conversation pit. Rather than foster verbal dialogue, however, the piece encourages physical proximity among strangers who may find themselves drawn to it.

3 to 1 Groovy Green includes a more formal seating arrangement with a generic-looking couch and a coffee table topped by a green pod form. As suggested by the title, three people can sit down and tune into the sounds generated by the Amorphous Body. This work brings listeners into close contact with each other, since they have to use the same couch. Rather than sitting down to have a drink or talk, participants share the experience of listening to the music.

With Amorphous Body Center, Long and Stereolab provoke a sensory engagement of the body. Participants in these works become aware of how they move through a surreal landscape of bizarre, organic shapes, rejecting everyday sounds and becoming immersed in the mood music of Stereolab. They unite in a communal activity in a public space, aware of themselves and those around them as they interact with the works and each other. With Amorphous Body Center, according to Long and Stereolab, It is hoped that the body is made to feel privileged in this environment and that the pleasures that it makes possible engender the respect that it must come to have in the coming future.

Paul McCarthy has incorporated performance elements into his work since the beginning of his career. This practice began in 1966Ü67 when, as a student, he created a series of all-black paintings by charring the canvases with a blow torch. That work led him to concentrate on performances, which began with his performing simple actions such as jumping out of a window in Sudden Leap (1967). In Hot Dog (1974), he started to include the audience in his performances "as a prop in the arena of the action."1 In that work, the audience sat at cafe tables, which McCarthy had arranged in his studio, and could eat the hot dogs (and ketchup and mayonnaise) provided by him while watching McCarthy perform like a stand-up comic. A video camera taped both McCarthy and the spectators as the event unfolded. In subsequent works such as Pig Man (1980) and Death Ship (1981), he also incorporated audience participation by staging volunteers in chairs, as part of the action. In films and videos, he has documented simple actions, such as painting a white line on the floor with his face, and elaborate performances that include several performers. In 1984, McCarthy temporarily stopped performing and concentrated on producing sculptures using mannequins, stuffed animals, and robots.

In 1987, he returned to performing in videos and has, finally, provoked viewers into participating in video installations that resemble stage sets. The irreverence of that initial gesture of burning the canvas of his painting has continued and magnified as McCarthy uses the grotesque, scatological, and generally tasteless to question the assumptions of American culture’s most ingrained beliefs. He has explored patriarchal authority within the family, modernist notions of the purity of art, and the cultural and historical fantasies propagated by Hollywood, always riding the edge between the appropriately critical and politically improper. In the 1995 video Fresh Acconci, for example, McCarthy and his collaborator Mike Kelley restaged several performances originally enacted by Vito Acconci in the 1970s. They substituted attractive, naked, young actresses for the less photogenic Acconci, endowing the scenes with a slightly pornographic air. The production was inspired by the renewed interest in early performance art and youth culture that McCarthy and Kelley had observed in recent art.2 Fresh Acconci uncomfortably raises issues about exploitation and sexism and refers to the seamier, soft-porn side of the film industry.

McCarthy often borrows the costumes, props, and settings of Hollywood to present his own demented version of it. As the most powerful producer and disseminator of popular culture and values, the entertainment industry is a natural target of McCarthy’s attentions. The video and installation Bossy Burger (1991) was taped on the unused set of a television sit-com. Painter (1995), also a video and installation, was performed by McCarthy and other players in an environment that mimicked a sit-com set and, in Pinocchio Pipenose Householddilemma (1994), viewers watch a video in which a dysfunctional, costumed family enacts a domestic drama worthy of a soap opera.

McCarthy's most recent efforts are elaborate but obviously artificial stage sets that refer to Disneyesque locations such as the Wild West in Yaa Hoo (1996) and Santa's Theater (working title), included in this exhibition. Of this interest, McCarthy has said, "The references I make to the media and to Disneyland/Hollywood is another subject. It has to do with virtual reality settings. . . . I am not critiquing it, its destructiveness. . . . But it does put people in crisis."

To say that critique does not figure in his approach to his subjects may seem disingenuous; the image that McCarthy presents never offers the official cheery picture. Viewing McCarthy’s work brings about a sense of witnessing a private horror„from the incestuous activities of Heidi (1992) to the improbable sex in Yaa Hoo, which continues in Santa’s Theater. The voyeuristic gaze has been consistent in his work and is a result of McCarthy’s early interest in film and his fascination with the view through the lens. He has also traced this tendency to Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnes (1946Ü66). This last major work by Duchamp is a tableau with a nude female mannequin that can only be seen through small holes in the wooden door that shields it from the public. Duchamp’s use of mannequins, windows, and reflections also interested McCarthy.

In Santa’s Theater, McCarthy employs the obstructed view, windows, and human surrogates in a large-scale environment that resembles a children’s movie version of Santa’s house in all of its quaintness. In order to enter the house, viewers must wear one of the costumes and masks of Santa Claus, the elves, or reindeer provided by McCarthy. Viewers must thus choose which role they want to, literally, step into. When fully dressed, one can enter Santa’s world as one of the players and sit down to watch similarly dressed characters performing on videotape in what appears to be the same house. On tape, McCarthy transforms the wholesome greeting card image of Santa and his helpers into a caricature of violence and excess.

The experience of watching the havoc on video is simultaneously funny and disconcerting, since one may be dressed to resemble the tormentor elf on tape and may be sitting next to someone dressed as the victim. By making viewers stand-ins for the video characters, McCarthy implicates them in the action. He completes the transformation of spectators into performers by luring them into a theatrical space where they can be watched by other viewers perhaps too timid to don disguises. These spectators can view the proceedings of the various fake Santas, elves, and reindeer only through the windows of the theater. As in earlier installations such as The Garden (1991Ü92), McCarthy controls the view of the action by limiting access to it. In The Garden, robotic figures commune with nature in the most intimate way in an artificial garden setting, and McCarthy offers glimpses of their antics through the trees and rocks. In Santa’s Theater, McCarthy allows only those who are willing to assume the role of one of the protagonists full passage to the piece.

McCarthy’s insistence on the viewer’s costumed role-playing first occurred in Pinocchio Pipenose Householddilemma. In that installation, spectators had to wear clown outfits and Pinocchio masks in order to enter a room to watch the violent home video of the Pinocchio family. Santa’s Theater expands that tactic as McCarthy offers spectators a variety of roles. The viewers then become performers who watch other actors in similar roles on video while they are watched by other spectators who are outside of the stage set, who in turn watch each other interacting in this ridiculous environment. The voyeuristic gaze bounces from one group of spectators to the next in an absurd performance, which ends only when the costumes come off and all the viewers disperse.

In Santa’s Theater, as in all of McCarthy’s major works, there is a sense of exposing the secret, shocking reality behind the innocent veneer of our culture’s most treasured illusions. The various themes of the work: the commercialization of every aspect of life, the contemporary obsession with an antiseptic fiction rather than the more complex reality, and the violence of American society overlap in a web of interdependent references. By placing us in the center of the action, McCarthy forces us to take responsibility for the absurdities on screen as well as those in our culture. The societal implications of this strategy are not lost on McCarthy, who has said,

"I was also interested in what happens when you put a frame, a camera window, in front of the performance and the viewer watches it through this window. You change the situation that way. You hide parts of what they could see and you control it. It reflects on culture's use of control. In 1987, he returned to performing in videos and has, finally, provoked viewers into participating in video installations that resemble stage sets."

Julia Scher uses surveillance technology to explore issues of power and control. As a bonded and insured security professional, Scher knows both the equipment and how people willingly participate in systems over which they are powerless. She employs standard surveillance tools in site-specific installations that mix live images of viewers with staged scenes and sometimes text or sound to expose the mechanisms of technological domination and examine our complicity with them.

Security by Julia is an ongoing series of installations that Scher has created since 1988. In one work, a female "guard" dressed in a pink Security by Julia uniform attends a control desk with a bank of monitors overhead. Throughout the galleries, Scher disperses surveillance cameras that capture footage of visitors and transmit these images to monitors. Viewers watch themselves and others onscreen as well as pretaped, bizarre choreographed scenes. At times Scher provides a printer, which visitors can use to print surveilled images of themselves or unsuspecting others in the galleries. The project transforms the normal occurrence of looking at art in a gallery into an experience of paranoid looking„at oneself, at others, and at each other.

In The Institutional State (1995), Scher connected two different locations, electronically linking the museum of the Fundaci÷ Antoni TapiÚs in Barcelona to the St. Joan de Deu mental hospital, where images from one locale are interspersed with pictures from the other. Her cameras have also turned their gaze outward, as she has recently put the entire German city of Freiburg under surveillance.

Often accompanying the surveilled images is text across the monitor screen or a spoken track recorded by Scher. In her Security by Julia persona, Scher speaks in a smoothly seductive voice that is reassuring in the same way as her shirt that reads "Don't Worry." In these sound works her voice takes on a sweetly authoritative, institutional tone as she persuades listeners, "Please do not leave until the sensors have completely absorbed you." The mission statement of her spoof on-line service, Information America, states: "We utilize freshly gathered judgments, identifications, and verifications to make our bright, shiny, and vitamin-rich database state-of-the-art. . . . Our goal is not to manage individuals, only space." She offers browsers a menu of choices such as "cleavage tongs and buttock analysis tongs," and "identity face peels." Although fabrications, these phrases appear to be glimpses of a foreseeable future when technology offers all the solutions. Scher's text is so effective because she perfectly mimics bio-medical jargon while adding a note of absurdity to the possibilities.

Scher uses provocative language and images to lure viewers to her work. In her words: "In a gallery situation my first task is to gently suck you in and let you get used to the space. Then the electronic threats and dangers are perceived, and then you get nailed."1 Female guards in vaguely S&M; gear precede the "hot" pink Security by Julia uniforms, and her texts are full of psycho-sexual suggestions. One's bed is the final frontier of privacy, but Scher depicts even sex as under threat of surveillance. Always There (1994) is a bed with video monitors and security cameras attached to its four posts. Whatever transpires on it can be watched by others or the inhabitants, but what is unclear is whether the occupants would find this menacing or enjoyable.

Scher plays with the thrill of watching and being watched. In her work, the voyeuristic pleasure of observing others is matched only by the excitement of being the center of attention. As viewers enter one of Scher's surveillance zones, they see themselves and others on the monitor, all engaged in a similar activity. The threat of constant vigilance fades as the roles of the watchers and the watched interchange. According to Scher, "Watching and seeing yourself in the switching monitor fields represents the moment of breaking through the restricted world hierarchy„seeing everyone in all positions."2

What one sees in this field is, of course, only an image, which is what security systems are designed to monitor. Scher toys with the slippery nature of these images by inserting fictitious events to disrupt the flow of live surveillance. In Wonderland, she stages a mock surveillance scene in which children control the security equipment and use it on each other. Viewers who watch the monitors might find footage of themselves immediately followed by this spectacle taking place in the same gallery. The strategy reveals the highly manipulative nature of these pictures. The danger with the evolving surveillance technology, according to Scher, is that these practices "take away our power of self-representation."3 One's image as digital or statistical information is filed and potentially available to many.

Using humor and outlandish tactics, Scher underscores the contradictions of our hypertechnological culture, where the promises of progress seduce us into accepting and even reveling in the creeping invasion of privacy and constant monitoring of ourselves. Scher’s work offers an alternative for, in her own words,

"The real gems of the project are created as individuals interact with the system, making, performing, and reclaiming images for themselves, or finding a peaceful moment within a string of images."

Since the mid-1980s, Jim Shaw has produced several series of works that are influenced by popular or lowbrow sources such as album covers, pulp fiction jackets, and thrift store paintings. In My Mirage, produced between 1986 and 1991, Shaw examined and exposed his adolescence by presenting the experiences of an alter ego, Billy, with approximately 170 works in an array of perfectly executed, youth culture styles from trippy surrealism to underground comics. In 1990, he organized an exhibition of his collection of thrift store paintings, which traveled around the United States and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. In his "disaster drawings" (1991Ü92), Shaw copied newspaper images of American tragedies such as the explosion of the atom bomb in painstaking (and absurdly futile) detail. He has referred to and emulated the embarrassing vernacular visual culture of late twentieth-century America in work that is imbued with a sense of poignant hopelessness.

In 1993, Shaw began to depict his dreams in pencil drawings that now number approximately five hundred. On identical 12- by 9-inch sheets, each drawing is divided into sections, which sometimes overlap as in a comic strip. The complexity of the drawings varies from the basic to the highly elaborate and sometimes includes styles appropriated from other cartoons. Accompanying each work is a text, on the bottom or on the back of the page, in which Shaw recounts the action. The dreams range from the ordinary to the fantastic but, in this perhaps most personal work, Shaw’s voice remains uninflected and unrevealing.

During the 1920s, surrealist artists such as Andre Breton began to look to dreams as a way to access the unconscious and free the imagination. Through techniques that included "automatic drawing," they attempted to liberate art from the constraints of reason and depict a new and purer reality. In order to reach the desired dream-state, they even experimented with hypnotism.1 æWhile the surrealist painting may depict dreamlike apparitions, it is less a record of a specific dream than a mysterious landscape of the interior mind.2

In contrast, Shaw’s dream drawings are accounts of actual nocturnal visions. Although some of his dream experiences are bizarre, many of the events are simply banal but implausible occurrences that include Shaw’s real friends, many of whom are identifiable artists. The overall tenor of his dreams is not of some higher symbolic realm but of a slightly modified continuation of Shaw’s everyday life. The flat, descriptive tone of the narration contributes to their sense of normalcy and mirrors the experience of dreaming, where even the most outlandish events seem logical.

Sigmund Freud, who influenced Breton in his theories about the unconscious, advocated the study of dreams in order to discover the roots of neuroses. In Freud's view, dreams are highly revealing, and specific dream images have specific symbolic meanings. Freud believed that dreams were predominantly visual experiences. "Part of the difficulty of giving an account of dreams is due to our having to translate these images into words. ïI could draw it,' a dreamer often says to us, ïbut I don't know how to say it.'"3 Shaw's dream drawings appear to be such a Freudian attempt to pictorially depict his dreams, but his most recent work for this exhibition is a departure from this practice.

For a 1995 exhibition in Las Vegas, Shaw provided spectators with a verbal narration of his dreams to accompany the drawings. Shaw’s recitation functioned in a manner similar to that of a museum audio-guided tour of an exhibition. Viewers used an audio cassette player to listen to Shaw recounting his dream while looking at the representation of it in the drawing on the wall. The experience mimicked that of watching a film with a voice-over that explains the action onscreen. Since most of the drawings have multiple scenes, the cinematic reference is fitting.

For Performance Anxiety, Shaw eliminates the drawings altogether and presents the audience only with an aural record of his dreams. Viewers are now listeners who use an audio guide and hear Shaw's narrations. The visual references that Freud thought so crucial have disappeared, and the listeners must now imagine the dreams for themselves. If with the drawings Shaw was exposing his most private recollections to the public eye, now he is placing them in viewers' heads for their own possession and making them their own. Shaw accomplishes this interaction with the viewer in a most intimate way, using the first-person "I" so that his audience imagines themselves as protagonists.

Shaw earlier experimented with direct viewer interaction in August of 1996 during a two-week residency at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica. During those days he accepted orders for drawings in person or via fax from members of the public. A spectator told him a story or explained a situation, and Shaw attempted to represent it.

Once he had finished, he showed the drawing to the "patron" who could either accept and pay for it or reject it. Working in the tradition of street artists who draw caricatures of tourists, the performance of creating the drawing "on demand" became part of the work. The MCA commissioned a piece by providing Shaw with real and slightly embellished stories from the opening festivities of its new building. Various members of the staff contributed tales, and Shaw produced a two-part work, which is reproduced in this catalogue.

For his current project, Shaw reverses these roles and imposes his stories upon the spectator. The listener then generates corresponding images in his or her own mind. As one does so, one inevitably begins to interpret the dreams in the current tradition of pop psychology, searching like Freudians for hidden meanings to latent neuroses, which have now become our own. But, as with Shaw’s other work, this search becomes frustrating, and we are left only with disconcerting impressions of our less stellar moments.

Ultimately, Shaw’s reasons for depicting his most private visions may be the most common human desire to fulfill one’s dreams:

"I think that once you start drawing dreams you're on a slippery slope to some other reality. At times I wake up and have some inane piece of music running through my head and I realize it's my subconscious trying to block me from remembering my dreams. By making the artworks I'd dreamed of, I felt I could make them come true."

From the outset of his career, Rirkrit Tiravanija has directly engaged his audience. In the 1992 Untitled (Free), Tiravanija cooked and served Thai curry to the initially bewildered visitors to his exhibition at 303 Gallery in New York. The activity continued throughout the run of the show with Tiravanija or another artist cooking continuously and countless visitors eating. Besides watching the culinary performance, visitors also got a glimpse of the usually hidden packed artworks, office supplies, and gallery director, as Tiravanija exposed all those normally "back room" elements and relocated them in the front of the space. That early work indicated a number of concerns that Tiravanija continues to explore: the nature of the site where art is produced and exhibited, the economy within which art functions, and the process of making art.

An important part of Untitled (Free) was watching the artist cook curry. Assuming the role of performer, Tiravanija initiated the performance and then enticed viewers to participate by offering food in return. The resulting group effort, which extended for days and included numerous people, was the total work of art. In an intimate way, the viewer completed the work by joining in the group ritual of a meal and ingesting food. The significance of the audience in his works is most succinctly stated on the labels that describe the slides of his works. Along with the materials that comprise each installation is the mention of "lots of people" as an essential ingredient in the work.

The performing presence of Tiravanija was crucial in the food works, but in more recent projects he has acted as an often invisible catalyst to outside participation. In Untitled 1993 (CafÚ Deutschland), Tiravanija set up a cafe with tables, chairs, drinks, and books for visitors to enjoy in a private gallery in Cologne. For a group show in Dijon, he assembled Untitled 1994 (Recreational Lounge) with table games and comfortable furniture for his fellow artists to relax during breaks from installing the exhibition and later for the audience to use, presumably as a rest from looking at the other works in the show. Tiravanija’s installations emphasize their own functional aspects. An unpopulated Tiravanija installation has an undeniable sense of something missing; only through public use do his works gain meaning.

The issues surrounding how his works function are connected to where they function. For the most part, Tiravanija has located his installations in exhibition spaces. Because his works generally appear chaotic, they seem incongruous with their settings in elegant galleries. The seeming incompatibility between messy installations that include, for example, the remnants of meals or recreational materials and the pristine cube of a space where they are located raises questions about the nature of the exhibition site. The intrusion of normal life activities into the usually reverential space of a museum is unsettling at first. Visitors to Tiravanija’s works are often perplexed by the apparently unfinished clutter they encounter. Even upon discovering that, for instance, the drum set is there to be played, doing so in a museum only compounds the confusion for many people. Tiravanija’s work questions the neutrality of such a space by encouraging unexpected behavior and by redirecting the viewer’s attention from looking at objects to engaging in ordinary activities in that space.

The relationship that Tiravanija sets up between his audience and his work is an active one in which viewers become users and, more surprisingly, do their using free of charge. In a service economy like our own, in which we pay for every effort, receiving something gratis shocks us. The generosity of providing complimentary food or entertainment for visitors undermines the market economy in which art usually functions. To walk into a private gallery and relax in a cafe with a free drink is to subvert the raison d’Ætre of a commercial space in which art is for sale. Likewise, to consume refreshments or play an instrument in a Tiravanija museum installation is to sabotage the preservation function of such an institution. When he does sell the remnants of his installations, Tiravanija wants those elements to function as more than precious objects:

Basically I started to make things so that people would have to use them, which means if you want to buy something then you have to use it. . . . It’s not meant to be put out with other sculpture or like another relic and looked at, but you have to use it. I found that was the best solution to my contradiction in terms of making things and not making things. Or trying to make less things, but more useful things or more useful relationships.

If the source of Tiravanija's work is the everyday world of eating and socializing with friends, it is natural that his work carry a strong autobiographical element. The meals that he cooks come from his Thai heritage, and he has included a family slideshow in a work. That the food is "foreign" to his mostly American and European audience raises issues about cultural integration no matter (and perhaps because of) how ubiquitous Thai restaurants may be in urban America.

For his Performance Anxiety installation, Tiravanija is replicating a recording studio similar to one that he and friends rent at Context Studio in New York. As in the original studio, a set of equipment is supplied for those who want to use the space for rehearsals. The MCA studio, however, is silent. The sound of the electrical instruments is not amplified, and the musicians hear themselves playing through headphones. Transparent walls encase the studio, so that viewers can watch the sessions but not hear the music unless they wear headphones. At Context Studio, one can request that the rehearsals be recorded for an extra fee. At the MCA, visitors can also record their sessions, but for free. As in his other work, in Untitled 1996Ü1997 (Studio No. 6) Tiravanija offers a normally commercial service at no cost and in an unusual location. Users gain access to the MCA studio not only through normal visits to the museum but also by booking time to rehearse.

The historical precedents for Tiravanija's installation can be traced to the ideas of John Cage and Dan Graham. John Cage's insistence on inserting the chaos and banality of life into art permeates Tiravanija's work, and Untitled 1996Ü1997 (Studio No. 6) is a particularly apt example of his influence. To the viewing public, the predominant sound of Tiravanija's installation is silence and, because of this, it relates to Cage's perhaps best known composition, 4'3" of 1952. In that piece, a performer seated at a piano remains silent for the duration stated in the title, signaling the three movements by raising and lowering the keyboard cover. The see-through barrier in Tiravanija's installation that separates the performers from the audience is reminiscent of the glass pavilions of Dan Graham, with their staging of the spectator's gaze within a transparent architectural framework. Untitled 1996Ü1997 (Studio No. 6) can be seen as merging the concerns of these artists with Tiravanija's own up-to-date pop sensibility.

With Untitled 1996–1997 (Studio No. 6), as in his other works, Tiravanija proposes his own model of what an artwork is. Rather than resolved objects, he offers potential situations. In place of passive contemplation, he proposes social interaction. As Tiravanija has said,

My feeling has always been that everyone makes a work—including the people who take it to re-use it. When I say re-use it, I mean just use it.