The Living Currency

This impressive framed mirror was being used to advertise a shop near King's Cross station--although hopefully the giant crack in the mirror wasn't an indication of the service customers could expect from the shop!

I was in King's Cross to see a pair of exhibits at Gagosian Gallery that ended today, and I was glad I made the effort to see the shows before they closed. The largest piece in Alberto di Fabio's series was spectacular, and somehow reminded me of a winter experience that Bob and I love in Vancouver: standing underneath the large decorated grove of trees on Beach Avenue at night, peering through the lights at the sky. Magical. Michael Craig-Martin's pieces were great fun, like number three on the show's "view work" page, depicting the choice between a sneaker and a sandal. By the time I left the gallery, I was starting to get hungry, so I got myself down to Borough Market for a bit of lunch. As usual with its Saturday openings, the market was super-busy today.

Since I knew I wouldn't be going home for at least a few hours, I resisted buying anything that would spoil (or weigh me down).

With prices like these, I didn't need any help resisting the truffles!

I was tempted by these wee potatoes, but managed to walk away without a bagful. Maybe next time?

Oh oh, this is more my price range than the truffles, but I haven't had lunch yet!

After sussing out the various queues and seeing what everyone was eating as they walked through the market, I decided to line up for an old favourite Borough lunch of Bob's and mine, and one that I haven't had in a very long time.

Roast pork, stuffing, and applesauce on a baguette. Mmmm!

Now where was that stand again? Oh yes: and crème caramel for dessert.

With all the take-away places in the market and very little sitting or standing room, sometimes you have to improvise a place to set your food down when you're at Borough.

From the market, it was just a short walk over to Tate Modern (my intended destination for the day), where live performances were taking place this weekend under the thematic umbrella of The Living Currency. The performances engaged with Pierre Klossowski's text La Monnaie Vivante, which posits a model of economic exchange whereby our bodies are the only true forms of currency we have to engage with the world. Specifically, The Living Currency aimed to highlight the degree of passivity we feel, show, and propagate when it comes to experiencing bodies around us. Okay, do you have the spiel down? Then here are the performances I saw today: Franz Erhard Walther's Werksatz (Workset) involved performers interacting with a variety of the artist's pieces, with "the object dictat[ing] how the body should behave." A man stood inside what looked like a burlap sack

and was completely hidden inside the fabric.

Then, three other people surrounded him/ it and stared thoughtfully as they paced around the indiscriminate object.

The funny thing was that unless you happened to see the man being put inside the object, you wouldn't know there was a person inside because he didn't move at all during the half-hour performance. These bags were lying in a corner, waiting to be used as part of subsequent performances.

Santiago Sierra's Group of Persons Facing a Wall was simply brilliant. These nine women walked up to a wall and stood perfectly silent and still as they faced the wall for one hour.

People didn't seem to know what to make of this, and although there was nothing to prevent audience members from getting as close as they wanted to the women, everyone instinctively left a large space between themselves and the eerie lineup.

Sierra "hires underprivileged individuals who, in exchange for money, are willing to undertake pointless or unpleasant tasks. The work creates a tension between the event and the spectator, who is exposed to what can be described as an articulation of the voice of the disenfranchised." That no one dared approach the participants even though we were all free to walk around the Turbine Bridge while the nine women stayed glued to the wall demonstrates the emotional tension created by this simple piece. Probably the most controversial piece of the day (one that I overheard more people call "disgusting" than probably any art performance I've witnessed) was Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet's X-Event 2. A group of five people stripped down to their underwear and held painfully awkward poses for about ten minutes at a time before shifting to other postures:

The aspect of the performance that people found disgusting wasn't the nudity; it was the fact that each of the performers drooled (today I learned that people here say "dribble" instead of "drool" since everyone was muttering comments like "Oh, she's dribbling," "Oh, they're all dribbling!") for the entire time. And not only that, but they aimed their drool so that it accumulated on various body parts of their fellow performers.

The performance intends to make "manifest an updated critique of the theatre industry, its standardisation and the role assigned to the spectator." Some audience members decided to cross the line between spectator and performer--this woman joined in with the gazing (but not the drooling)

until she was asked to step back by a member of Tate staff, which was ironic, considering the artists' intent to blur the definitions of spectator and performer. (You'll also notice our friend in the burlap sack being released in the background.)

I decided to go up a floor to get a few photos of the Turbine Bridge from above, and just when I settled in at the window, a remarkable thing happened.

Horses in Tate Modern? And with police officers too?

That was worth going back downstairs to see what was going to happen next.

The officers rode through the crowd, coming extremely close to some people (including me!), all the while giving orders to move this way, clear this area, move over there, etc.

While they rode around, giving their orders, another audience member decided to join in the earlier performance, even stripping down to his underwear!

Before he could fully join in, another member of staff informed him that this was a "private performance" and instructed him to get dressed.

It soon became clear that Tania Bruguera's Tatlin's Whisper #5 was all about demonstrating how bodies can be controlled. No one asked why we were being moved, and when we were instructed to move to one spot immediately after being cleared from that same spot, we started to feel the futility of assigning any logic to the manner in which we were being controlled.

Then a rather unfortunate (and inevitable?) thing happened:

The most uncomfortable moment of Bruguera's and Sierra's performances happened when they momentarily became one: the mounted police officer stopped for a minute just behind the row of women still facing the wall. As he turned to look at them, I couldn't help feeling nervous and extremely uncomfortable, and I wondered if this extremely effective interaction was a planned part of both performances.

With the horses (and their little "present") gone, Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam got down on the floor for Ein Ding Mehr (One More Thing), adopting "poses and expressions rooted in traditions of pictorial representation and anatomical idealism, in turn reinstating their conventions. It results in an artificial game . . . the artists' poses evoke artistic traditions, [but] it remains clear that the poses are out of context."

This one was my favourite:

Since I wanted to return home before the local football game let out (traffic in our neighbourhood is terrible on game days), I didn't stick around long enough to find out where this performance was going,

although the man stood in this position for quite some time!

The last performance I caught was Sanja Iveković's Delivering Facts, Producing Tears, in which an actor sat very still, staring into a camera

as he began to shake with tears.

As with the row of women at the wall, people gave the actor a wide berth, but it was a different story directly in front of the television,

which performed the miracle of its medium, showing the audience a close-up, sanitised vision of an emotional event happening at a greater distance.