For some reason quite beyond me I was unable to log onto the a-n site and add a new entry until today. I write this because this sort of unexplained behaviour of technology is quite common here. I cannot say if it is because of technical compatibility issues or something else but all I can say is that placed in this position I do not try too hard to understand why, as an explanation is not likely to be found, and instead I simply work practically.
Spring festival is now over and I am getting back into a work pattern again with language exchanges and some preparations for a performance next Saturday. As ‘The Customer’ is not ready to be shown in public yet I will perform another performance of mine ‘2012’. I was looking over some images of when I did this piece in Beijing in 2009 and I will have to renew some aspects of it, not the least of which is my appearance.
I have been going a bit further into The Customer and in order to break down the idea of using Maxims to structure the performance I broke down the title ‘The Customer Is Always Wrong’ and will use this as a test case. Doing this reminded me that I played some not dissimilar word games when creating the Chinese translation of 2012. What will make The Customer different is their relationship to action, I will be mixing two quite distinct languages of words and actions.
I saw a curious advert the other day which I took home: the playboy babies. I liked it because it was doing something quite similar to what I am doing and it was unclear how knowingly it was doing it. It could look like a misunderstanding of what ‘Playboy’ signifies in the West, taking this two part word at face value, namely ‘PLAY’ and ‘BOY’ to arrive at a picture of two smiling young boys. What is more, the playboy bunny ears could simply be an innocent reference to the new Rabbit year. It could however be far more knowing than this and be working off double meanings. It is rather sleazy however to be using infants and Playboy in the same image and I have to ask myself, if they are indeed doing it deliberately what was the intended message and to whom was it directed? Are they trying to reach out to new generation of Playboy customers, to start them early? The ad is for a home furnishings store so it is all quite inappropriate and unclear. I like this vague quality and I hope to be able to find similarly suggestive combinations, though I will probably leave infants and pornography out of my list of combinations to work with.
