Passive Aggressive Bonds
Performance. Clay, sound, participants. Single iteration, 2015.
Freedom Boat: Harbouring New Truths, Singapore.

Passive Aggressive Bonds was staged aboard a vessel in Singapore waters for Freedom Boat: Harbouring New Truths, a one-day exhibition presented by MARUAH, Singapore's human rights organisation, and BRACK, as part of Project 50/100.

The work proceeds without script, choreography or rehearsal. Wet clay is worked across the deck by the participating artists, accumulating into a circle. The material transfers on contact and does not release. Over the duration, the distinction between those making the work and those attending it is eroded by the medium rather than by instruction, and the audience is implicated through proximity and residue. Sound enters intermittently and without fixed cue.

The performance's principal subject is documentation. Performance art has conventionally been recorded from a fixed third-person position, by an operator understood to stand outside the event. Here the photographer and videographer are drawn into the work and prevented from withdrawing from it. The resulting images are not a record of the performance but a component of it, produced by participants rather than observers.

The conditions are constitutive. The vessel offers no exit for the duration. The material marks every person it contacts. The collaborating artists accepted the invitation without knowledge of what the performance would involve, and were given no brief and no advance description of the action. The work was constructed entirely in response to the site, the weather, the available objects and the persons present.

The question the work advances is not one of authorship, or of who is performing, but of consent and its distribution. Audience, documenters and performers each enter under a different degree of disclosure, and none under full disclosure. The work withholds its own terms from every participant except the artist, and proposes that this asymmetry is the ordinary condition of being photographed, recorded and represented, rather than an exception constructed for the occasion.

Collaborators: Jun Tsujioka, photography. Naaz Sedilix, sound. Alexander Yang, video.

Photography: Jun Tsujioka.