So I'm talking about him now- because I'm feeling lost but not in panic- because these blogs were due like a lifetime ago and every memory of feeling like an inadequate student is circling me like the cold Spring Frost that is Regina. I'm talking about him now because of his exhibits and performances and how different they were from my work, and yet similar. I'm writing about him, because his work grounds me in my work- and right now my work is needed.
Benny as an artist and as a human being resides in a few different spaces. He is currently working out of Berlin, Germany. He was born in Montreal, QC, Canada. He identifies himself as an artist and diarist.
I'm trying hard to keep up with this blog style of writing, but time is has run out. So I'm gonna jump in and pray that this doesn't read of desperation... because it actually kind of doesn't.
I'm going to talk about his exhibition, Day Breaks Instead of Night Falling which existed in 3 visual installations and a forth component which was a performance.
As I walked into the Neutral Ground Gallery in Regina, SK. I was distinctly aware of my foreign-ness to the space. Many familiar faces of the tight knit arts community stood almost as part of the installation itself which created (for me) a start image of a very esoteric group of trendy people gathered to ponder over art that must be too deep for regular people to understand.
Suffice it to say, save a couple colleagues with whom I found solace, I needed to escape- so down the hall I pranced until I landed in the white and winding gallery that housed DBINF. Along the walls were letters and notes handwritten by Benny that transcribed the text of sound pieces and presented bios of work and artists. Along the top of the wall were bronzed speakers that were reminiscent of what you might see in a fenced school playground or an internment camp.
Against the back wall are images of a made up constellation, connected with a video that loops of a young man in a yellow flowing tank top, dancing and signing in silence to the song You and Me, by Blu Ray feat. Jimmie Sommerville. At the end of the song, the sound suddenly cuts on and viewers are left with the sound of the chorus looping as the young man stops moving and is transformed into the fabricated constellation.
Next to the video screen is a darkened entrance that led me into a dark room with large projections on the wall. The projection depicted a young man walking through a forest wearing an ornate mirror helmet as gay elders stood by singing and sharing wisdom. Arguably the most relevant quote from the piece,
"Do not attempt to conform to society. Stay right where you are and let society form itself around you, because it most certainly will. Neither look forward where there is doubt, nor backward where there is regret, but look inward to discover what you have to unpack."
These words and all the words were underscored by a synthetic melody of arpeggios that constantly moved like rushing water. All the performers' voices were modified and autotuned to resonate quite high.
As I exited the dark room, the sirens started to sound... but they were recordings of human voices- male voices, voices that rung in the falsetto register simulating alarms.
Later on the evening, the performance began with Benny sitting in front of the audience reading from a text, as a dancer wearing the same yellow tank top as in the installation video, moved and sounded (live obviously) in concert with the sirens and the text. It was incredibly cohesive, and the experience took weeks to process... but we had a bit of help.
Post the exhibit, Benny presented a session at the University of Regina and discussed his work. The crux of his work in this specific project and in many of his projects deal with the sound of his voice. As an out and open gay man, BNR took interest in the femininity of his voice. Counter to the deeper, and more resonant stereotype of what a masculine man should sound like, Benny decided to explore this. Through diverse projects that often connect with pop/popular music, and with him performing said music, Benny creates work that provide a sense of call and answer.
I had many chats with him upon a studio visit, and through facebook messages where he provided the title quote to this post "I believe my work is socially engaged, just not social practice." as I discussed the nature of the work and this course. Benny explores the ideas and constructs that people use to identify themselves, and document themselves.
In this exhibit, he is very present in the work and proudly presents his voice. In terms of methodology- BNR creates intermedia specific visual installations that he then incorporates films and moving images to manipulated and recorded sound- all focused on one concept of the feminized male voice. He then enters the space and turns it into a performance space where he guides the audience through another layer of his concept.
For the bronzed siren soundscape, Benny worked with many artists, one group included the Vienna Boys Choir.
Where as this exhibition focused on the voice, the concept is very similar to my work and interest. From my background I am of the belief that we perform and present ourselves everyday. And that the very act of living is a frame in which we perform. This difference is that I am more interested in how this applies to our bodies (of course integrating how our bodies affect our sound and voice). I believe that we present our stories and autobiographies without even thinking about it, and when we do think about it- it somehow transforms us.
Over the past year I was able to participate, view and consult on a few different projects where different artists explored the act of autobiographical performance. The common outcome was a narrative storytelling (often monologues) of past experiences to an audience. Sometimes, the stories were personal experiences, other times it was shared common beliefs/cultural practices. Within the theatre department, I consulted on the Aboriginal Theatre Project, where First Nations playwrights worked with students to produce, direct, and act in a conventional North American play performance. In Rebecca's THAC 360 clas, we had performances from Listen to Dis'Voice where one actor recounted a deeply personal and intense story about personal trauma and... healing. I will talk more about these in an upcoming post.
All of my pieces Alien Soiled, Rice, and Spitting Too Close exemplified similar forms products in performance, I just feel that in some ways they went beyond them as well. My performances have been a progression and correlated to my development and understanding of what I do and what I want to do.
Focusing on Spitting Too Close, as it pertains most relevantly to Benny Nemerofsky Ramsays' work and this blog post, I will break it down a bit more...
Over the course of 2 weeks (4 rehearsals) I invited 4 young actors to participate in a workshop exploration for a component to my final thesis. After a night of drinking and celebrating the 19th birthday of one of the cast members, as an out-queer man, it was fascinating to sit in a room of teenage, heterosexual actors in the winter of Regina in 2013. The ensuing antics (none of which were instigated by me) left me questioning how much I actually knew about sexual orientation beyond my intensely reflexive thinking about Queer Asian Subculture. I knew there was something here, and something that I needed to unpack to have a better understanding of my piece. If nothing else, it would provide a needed contrast to the sometimes one note thought/throughline of my work.
Through contact improvisation, and guided free-writing, and sharing of anecdotal experiences and stories, the cast created scenes and vignettes that created/explored spaces of heterosexual male expression (locker rooms and urinals), as well as liminal spaces where the boys talked about how they negotiated and conformed their images of themselves in relation to a common idea of what being a "man" meant. Woven around spoken word poetry that I created and posted on facebook, Spitting Too Close used personal art practices, improvisation, and autobiography to locate ourselves between who we believed ourselves to be, and what we presented to the world.
The final product was a collection of scenes, songs, and stylized text that can be seen here:
Spitting Too Close
Feedback from the audience questioned how we maintained the integrity, and sincerity of personal stories and moments when these stories were framed through classically trained actors, musicians and dancers.
It's this question that made me think of Benny's work. I should note here that there is another piece of Benny's work that could be argued as more comparable/fitting to reflect on- which is his remake of Rosa Song which I linked to in my last blog on Jan 28 (link above). There, he gathered a bunch of diverse gay men to discuss queer life and identity as part of a recreation of the original Rosa Song.
The reasons, I am making links Day Breaking Instead of Night Falling is that:
1) it's a continuation of a long term interest where the voice has been an integral part of BNR's work 2) his appropriation of recognizable pop music, and how he plays with that recognition- there is a strange jarring feeling of familiarity and nostalgia when hearing music that one might hear on the radio over and over again, and suddenly have it appear in an art installation/performance
3) the piece itself is similar to what I expect my final project to be- which is a series of performances and installations that take place within a large (possibly gallery) setting that lay out as a map of sites which attendees need to journey through
So what's the social outcome of this? Why now? Why is this important?
The point of the work is not to make it make sense to everyone. Both BNR and my work I think don't aim to prescribe a way of thinking, or push an agenda that is biased to some political view other than what might be intrinsically laid within the views of the "character." I think the work evokes ideas of the familiar, and engages audiences to questions within their own psyche about their identities and how they are connected to the communities around them.
What I'm literally trying to say- through an example- is that we present aspects of our identity in a format that does not victimize us, or compartmentalize us. When I worked with a group of women in Ontario who were developing a performance piece about their struggles to return to school and pursue their dreams for better careers and futures after some pretty tough life challenges- it was a struggle to find:
1) the theatricality within their stories
2) focus on finding ways to tell the story without them becoming victims, and worse- potentially reliving their traumas in their process of recollecting them
3) building a framework for the presentation that could support the entire ensemble.
BNR's work cause attendees to question and reexamine the frameworks within which we live in, and questions it in a way that doesn't focus on any one area (i.e. Queer studies, or Ethnic studies) and as he quotes- engages people socially as opposed to working as a practice to involve attendees in a role other than that.
I'll speak more of my work and how it relates to this in an upcoming post.
Nemerofsky Ramsay, Benjamin "Art for Lunch" University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Riddell Centre Room 050. January 11, 2013. Public Lecture.
-name
of
a specific work for each artist, and
-an
analysis
of how they made it.
-how
it
relates to your work and questions,
With
the
socially engaged artists, this would need to include both the
-artistic
methods and
-the
social
outcomes (preferably why one leads to the other!).
