Where Is My Space?
WHY IS HE TAKING OFF HIS CLOTHES???
It’s going to be fine. It’s part of the performance.
BUT WAIT NOW HE’S CLIMBING TOWARD ME!!
That’s probably THE performance. Calm down and just enjoy it like you are supposed to!
My mind was battling itself as Brontez Purnell was setting up for his performance, or was he already performing?
On March 8, our guest lecturer Dena Beard prepared a surprise for our course and invited Brontez Purnell to Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive to perform for us and the rest of the audience. After Dena Beard introduced to the audience about Purnell’s work and invited him onto the stage, Purnell himself, surprisingly enough, did not say a word about what he was going to perform for us.
As he approached the stage, he dropped everything that he was carrying with him: a bouquet of various blooming flowers, a roll of bubble wrap, and his backpack. He dropped all of his belongings so carelessly, spontaneously, and almost intuitively. As if dropping them onto the cold, hard floor in front of more than one hundred people was not cruel enough for those delicate flowers, he then proceeded to literally DUMP them out from the plastic wrap that came with the bouquet.
What is he doing?? I could not help myself but wonder. Then, he also flipped his backpack completely upside down and poured everything out onto the stage.
Aren’t artists supposed to be careful with the medium they work with? He kept pacing back and forth on the stage, gathering, arranging, and rearranging his props. At some point he also started taking off his top, then his shoes, and finally his socks. What is he going to do next? I was getting anxious, but I reassured myself that performance art is meant to be liberating, and Purnell taking off his clothes had to contribute some significance to the performance. While I started to wonder when would he be done with the setup and finally start performing, I realized that everyone among the audience was silent, attentive, and focused on Purnell’s travelling back and forth on the stage.
Oh so this IS the performance. I’m so dumb. Why don’t I ever get performance art!
So after the pre-supposed “stage” was all set-up with the bubble wrap unrolled, Purnell scanned across the first row of audience and spotted a few empty seats and started climbing over them. And then he climbed over the second row.
No he was not just climbing over the chairs. He was climbing toward ME.
I started to freak out in my seat, ready to sprint out of the room if he were to get any closer. (I was not exactly afraid of him but that I would not know how to respond if he chose me to “participate” in his performance, as I thought that his performance already started.) I tried to calm myself down by reassuring myself once again that this is part of the performance, and that Purnell was making it interactive by breaking the barrier between the performer and the audience.
I would like to say that I was right about the interaction aspect since it turned out that he was trying to tie a rope across the room, and he could have easily walked to one side of the room without disturbing the audience but he chose not to. While he walked to the other side of the room to tie the rope, Purnell suddenly broke the silence that everyone was trying to maintain since he started setting up (or performing?) by suggesting this time to be a Q&A session.
I was thoroughly confused by then. I thought the performance already started, and Q&A session is usually saved for the end? Anyway, while I got calmer from knowing that I was not about to participate in his performance, I began to worry for the audience who had the rope hanging right in front of them. What is he going to do with the rope? And with those audience? Moreover, the fact that the rope was hanging mid-air across the room seemed as if it was separating the first two rows of audience from the rest of us, that the rope had redefined where the stage was supposed to be since the rest of the audience was obviously paying so much attention to the rope.
Purnell’s performance was definitely one of the more disturbing ones I have seen, not because it was trying to convince its audience to join some radical movements, such as Feminism and Civil Rights Movement, but because it was so dissimilar to every other performance I have seen. It did not follow any rules of performing or the expectations of the audience, and therefore was constantly messing with the audience’s mind, or at least mine.
Its lack of structure made me freak out because I have always been so used to some form of hierarchy all my life. Hierarchy almost made me feel safe, like I knew exactly where I was supposed to be and did not need to wander around or question anything.
By redefining the boundaries between the stage and the audience, Purnell not only reminded me that these expectations and structures are arbitrary and artificial but also that we are all constantly performing in front of each other. We are all actors playing different roles in different situations. There is no exception even if we want to stand back and simply be an observer.
As a first-generation college students, sometimes I can’t help but to feel that college is not a space created for me. Whether financially, academically, or socially, I feel incomparable to most of the rest of the students.
However, Purnell’s performance reminded me that I cannot isolate myself from the rest of the students even if I want to. By taking exams I am contributing to the score statistics, by speaking at class discussion I am voicing my side of the story, and by doing work study I am modifying how our tuition is budgeted. Today I am an actor playing the role of a student, not a minority.
