14. Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself (2007)

Sophie Calle

'Take Care of Yourself' (Installation Views)

APRIL 9 – JUNE 6, 2009

Paula Cooper Gallery

This is such a work that addresses loss of love but doesn’t possess any grief, pain or melancholia touch in it. Artist Sophie Calle’s lover sent her an obscure and ambiguous E-mail to admit the failure of maintaining a faithful relationship, so as to end the affair between them. Being unable to fully understand what was his intention, she reached out for a friend for help and thus came up with the idea to invite 107 women from different profession for reading aloud and providing interpretations.

What I think is fascinating about this work is this is not simply a ‘feminist’ work that deconstructed a intimate and personal experience, then built it into a collaborative project. This is a work that investigate the ‘repetition and difference’ of the experience of loss.

In an interview, Calle suggested that the invitation is not only specifically send out for women as a gender criteria, but also women working in a profession that engage with different form of the work of interpretation. In this action, a personal email addressed to her at the first place disappeared and distanced itself, turned into 107 simulacra. Each woman reads the letter based on their own professional habits, without knowing either the author of the letter or its receiver. Through it, the alterity took place of the identity of self, devoured the representation and replaced it with its genuine presentation. As Kittner suggested, "The ostensible identity becomes visible through the acts of viewing and appropriating by the Other, but it is then canceled in an artistic form of ‘méconnaissance.’"

It opens up my way of considering to what extent can I investigate a personal memory. I also have collected multiple letters (even hand written ones) from my exes in the past, I know I have been consciously avoid exposing too much of the materials from myself. I wonder what will come out of it if I fully embrace it.

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“The Artist Taking Care of the Presentation. Sophie Calle’s Prenez soin de vous.” In: Assign and Arrange. Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance. Ed. Maren Butte, Kirsten Maar, Fiona McGovern, Jörn Schafaff, Marie-France Rafael, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.

13. Romy Rüegger, Language is Skin: Scripts for Performances

Romy Rüegger

Language is Skin: Scripts for Performances

228 pages, 20 x 13 cm, softcover, Archive Books (Berlin)

Romy Rüegger

What She Said Before Leaving Society, 2013.

Performance, 25'.

Courtesy of the artist.

ccording to her residency video, Romy’s sound based practice-performance, audio work and installative settings- shares a great interests in politics of languages and memories, knowledge production, learning and unlearning.. And she uses montage as a technique from film making and appropriated it to audio in order to work with documentary and fictional materials.

Unfortunately I actually didn’t find any documentation for her performance, but I did find her publication Language is Skin: Scripts for Performances which inspired me a lot in terms of what direction I could carry out and develop my text-base performance.

(I haven’t got the book but) In the description, it goes ‘the scripts… were written to be spoken.The scripts as they are printed are not just documentations of performances, but are rather indications of spatial and temporal layering, juxtapositions of aesthetic and poetic elements and bodies.’

I don’t think I put too much focus on structuring the position of the text in the performance. In another word, if asked how my text function in my works, I would answer with they are vehicles to convey meanings. But now I realized in this way I most likely would overlook the text itself and focus on speaking instead. What's the difference between a written text and a spoken text? Besides they're different means of transmit to the audience, if a text is written for the purpose of being speaking out, what quality should it possesses?

12. Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas

Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy, 1972

Performance, video

Original performance at Palais Galliera, Paris, France

As a pioneer of video and performance art, Joan Jonas is an important influencer for me. I am intrigued by her early video and performance works in the 70s, which helps set the tones of my artistic practice.

The way she mediated between and integrated different mediums is just smooth and seamless. In an interview on early New York performances she mentioned at the very early stage, even before working with video and performance art, she already sensed interests in how to translate her works into another medium so that it would not disappear. Indeed there’s this harmony flowing between performance, dance, video and installations that happening in an inclusive space. It goes so natural that they generated a whole new language invented by Jonas, through body movement, music, sound and some simple props like mirrors and masks.

In this new language she invented, ‘ritual ceremonies’ is its ‘grammar’. This has a lot to do her intention of searching and questioning the possibility of a female imagery, a female archetype. Her interests in these ritualistic dance from different cultures lays into this role of women throughout the history. Women are witched, shamans, midwives, storytellers… As Banyi Huang suggested, these marginalised roles are firmly embedded in our collective consciousness.

It is interesting that she mentioned when her alter ego ‘organic honey’ performed, she always looked into the camera and made sure performing inside of the frame while filming and recording. In another interview (https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-42-spring-2018/interview-joan-jonas-rachel-rose-the-performer) she also mentioned that in comparison with two mediums film and video, she values video more as ‘the most radical thing – for me – was that artists could sit in front of the camera and see themselves.’ I never really thought about the immediate feedback of the artist/performer him-/herself, I wonder how this self-awareness functions here.

My work ‘Evocation’ (later on changed the title to ‘Mother is a Container’) has a great connection to this concept. And except for the influence about female imagery, how she deployed mirrors to extend the space, reshaped the space into a self-reflective realm, and hence to mediate the dynamic between the viewers and the performers are very important for me to reframe my work.