Good in theory, better in practice the second time around
contact Gonzo
Air Hole: Another Form of Conceptualism from Asia
30th April 2011
National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan.
This is a story about how I changed my mind. I was not wrong before I changed it, and I am not necessarily correct now. While this is a meditation about second chances, it is also a story about how every experience of art is personal, valid and couched in a very particular context of time and space. In particular, it is a reminder that the words of the critic can only ever be taken as partial, never as truth.
Last month in Osaka, I saw a performance by contact Gonzo, a group of performers who combine contact improvisation with the brutality of street fighting, all in a self-reflexive tongue-in-cheek milieu. In plain words, contact Gonzo is a bunch of young Japanese guys who get together and beat each other up, in more or less stylised and codified ways, sometimes incorporating lifts, leans and fairly architectural pile-ups of bodies. While they do this, they take pictures of themselves with disposable cameras, and these images are sometimes displayed around the performance site. contact Gonzo has become the darling of avant garde dance festivals around the world, not least because they embody a very trendy combination of masculinity, violence, and conceptualism. And when I first saw them perform, I hated it.
My first experience of contact Gonzo was in Jakarta at Indonesia Dance Festival 2010, packed into a ring of sweaty passers-by on the hot dusty sidewalk in front of Taman Ismail Marzuki. The oohs and aahs of the audience, when the boys landed each other a particularly reverberating thwack on the chest, or when one guy spat blood onto the asphalt, made it seem much more like a brawl, much less like art. Later that same week I saw them perform a slightly more structured version in the main theatre at Taman Ismail Marzuki, backed by the inflated silhouette of a tiny Japanese girl pounding on a drum set. Although I admired the dedication of the drummer, I liked the rest of the performance even less. I thought the performers look bored, the setup was too similar, and the wall of sound disguised the impact of the slaps and punches. The performers’ attempts to take photos of themselves from the bottom of the scrum I viewed as pretentious and gimmicky. By the end, I could not bring myself to care.
Less than a year later, watching contact Gonzo perform in Japan, my reaction could not have been more different. So I went back to my notes from Jakarta to tease out the details and to try to understand how one group performing the same kind of thing in the same style can elicit such a variety of responses from one person.
You cannot step in the same river twice, goes the adage, because both you and the river have changed. Did I have a different experience watching contact Gonzo in Japan because I was a different person than I had been in Jakarta? In the interim I had gone from being in a frustrating personal relationship, with little patience for what I saw as the juvenile posturings of neanderthal males, to being a single woman able to derive a lot more amusement from the performance of masculinity. I had also visited the Tanz im August festival in Berlin in September 2010, where I witnessed the cutting edge of global contemporary dance in action. I left Berlin with a fresh appreciation for the potential of masculinity as a rich topic of exploration (not least because there I watched a sweaty duet between two burly men who stripped each other naked, whipped each other with their belts and dragged each other around by their penises, to, surprisingly enough, hilarious effect).
So my perspective had shifted (I hesitate to say ‘matured’, perhaps it did quite the opposite), and both the river and its environment — the context and the work itself — had shifted too. In Jakarta, the sidewalk audience consumed contact Gonzo as they would WWF wrestling — perhaps not a terrible analogy, given the self-conscious performative nature of WWF. But I found the crowd’s easy complicitness in the performers’ jokes irritating and their gasping response to blood predictable. Plus it was hot and crowded, and I was tired. At the second performance in Jakarta, the theatre audience was more sophisticated, perhaps too much so. I detected a lot of earnest art afficionados nodding sagely over contact Gonzo and assuring each other, “Aren’t they terribly interesting?” As the mob mentality inflamed my rebelliousness, I dug in my heels and thought to myself, “Whatever!”
In Japan, however, contact Gonzo performed before a home crowd of friends, peers and people who had seen them many times before. It was a mostly young audience, fashionable, highly educated, on the one hand familiar with the culture of exploitation of violence — from Japanese slasher movies like Battle Royale and hardcore hentai — and, on the other hand, citizens of a country recovering from fresh tragedy. It was certainly a more relaxed crowd, who seemed to know what to expect, allowing the performers to practice their craft without feeling the need to prove themselves. There was appreciative laughter, rather than gasps, at the pile-ups, and laughter too for a little boy who ran into the ring to retrieve a fallen hat for one of the performers.
The performance in Japan also occurred in a more thoughtful and, to me, appropriate context: in a carefully curated exhibition of Asian conceptual art at the National Museum of Art, Osaka. Conceptualism, at its worst, can be inaccessible and self-indulgent, reducible only to an interesting idea. A novelist once said that if it was possible to tell people what the book was about, it would not be necessary to write the book. Sometimes conceptual art is like the unnecessary novel — you can describe it to someone, they can imagine it and appreciate the idea’s significance, but that is all. It never becomes more than the sum of its parts. Like the white on white canvas at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they may serve some purpose in the evolution of art, but you never feel the need to fly across the world to see them.
The exhibition in Osaka, however, combined varied and extremely strong examples of conceptualism, all of which had a form-based aesthetic as well as an experiential quality, reaching out and enveloping the audience. All were good in theory and even better in practice. In practice, contact Gonzo seemed just as visceral as when I first saw them, with all the immediacy of sweat, panting, and muscle hitting bone. Their performance still had its lightning shifts of improvisation, but the effect of this was eclipsed, in my point of view, by my emerging perception of both the animal and the human elements in contact Gonzo’s work.
When people see contact Gonzo for the first time, they immediately suspect that there is some kind of code of conduct at work, although its details are unclear. Despite the apparent indulgence in violence for its own sake, there is more a sense of Queensberry rules than of no holds barred. Watching the performance in Japan, I was reminded of the show fights among male animals during mating season. Neither wants to hurt the other permanently — this would not be to the advantage of the species — only to demonstrate superior strength and dominance, and thereby ensure survival of the fittest.
Thus the show opened with two guys, in the group’s trademark slouchy sweatpants, t-shirts and baseball caps, slowly circling each other and sizing each other up. When they finally come to blows, it is like rutting stags or mountain goats: they lock shoulders, brace their sneakers on the cement floor and push with all their might, the fluctuations of their body weight sending the pair staggering and puffing across the space. Later, the rest of the group joins in the fray like a pack of wolves, liable to gang up upon the underdog: whoever falls, or is tripped, is jumped upon by the others. Being top of the heap is king of the castle, and there is a sense a stylised desexualised mounting to demonstrate dominance. But you always know that the alpha male in this pack is contact Gonzo founder Yuya Tsukahara — the rest of the group seems particularly aware of him, and they look to him for endorsement or censure.
Juxtaposed with this animal-like sense of release and restraint is a kind of trust, cooperation and unspoken communication through eye contact that point to the apex of human civilisation. These lend the performance greater finesse: the pile-ups have clearer structures, there are lifts that borrow heavily from the consensual weight sharing of contact improvisation, and there is a sense of a dramatic arc running through the performance. Rather than what I remember as the free-for-all of Jakarta, the Osaka performance has a sense of people consciously working together to build something.
The stage set constructed in the white gallery space of the National Museum of Art also lends the performance clearer form. Within a ring of chain link fencing reminiscent of inner cities and prison exercise yards, a high platform with a long slide reaching up to it has been made out of thick planks. The group charge up and down the slope, sometimes using it as high ground from which to launch themselves on people below, sometimes combining weight to push some resisting individual to the top of the ramp.
Towards the end of the performance, Yuya sets up a wooden board about 10 feet from the bottom of the ramp. Two guys sit on a skateboard at the top of the ramp, one behind the other, and slide down. The first time — you can tell it’s about to happen — they careen off course near the bottom and land in a crash of jumbled limbs, without making contact with the board. This makes it all the more exciting when they repeat the trick, scoring a direct hit that sends the board flying and draws applause from the crowd. We feel like we, too, with our collective bated breath and our sympathetic surge of adrenaline, have worked together with the performers to achieve this small victory.
After the clapping, the audience breaks up, talking and laughing. The little boy and his smaller sister run up the ramp and try to slide down. Yuya holds their hands to prevent them from falling off. He tells me that the boy has wanted to be in contact Gonzo since before he could walk. Now, with my fresh perspective on contact Gonzo, I think this might not be such a bad idea after all.
contact Gonzo’s appearance in Air Hole at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, continues until 5 June 2011.
