- Venue
- On a Bench
- Location
- United States
November 1st 3-6 pm. Artist Dave McKenzie ‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building Plaza.
On Thursday 1st November from 1-3 a black man in a leather jacket sits on a bench in Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building Plaza, Harlem. It doesn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary. It’s not. And that’s the beauty of Dave McKenzie’s performance. Amid the other highly choreographed or larger staged events of Performa 07; with its celebrities, fashion designers, famous curators and artists- most of whom I don’t know- it is intriguing and radical to be invited to simply go and ‘find’ someone sitting on a bench at a certain time as a piece of art.
The works’ radicality comes in part from its unpredictability. ‘I’ll be there (2007)’ is Dave’s open invitation to be ‘found’, but it is not listed as happening anywhere but the Performa programme. This makes it a relatively secret rendezvous in which neither you nor the artist know who will turn up to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building Plaza, or what will happen. It’s also a public, and hence relatively unsupervised, event. Such instability enacts one of the fundamental underpinnings of performance; that it has the ability to be un-tethered, and perhaps not to be trusted. ‘I’ll be there (2007)’ also returns at base to one of the paradoxes of live work; it is simultaneously structured and timetabled yet represents a wholly chance encounter in which neither you nor the artist have full control; you can choose not to go, Dave can choose not to be there. There is also the possibility that the normal nature and look of the piece may lead you to not find, not recognise, or worse still misrecognise, Dave. Either way, the performance of ‘I’ll be there (2007)’ still happens, the work is still completed.
‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ could be overtly and radically political; deliberately performing a black face (his own) in a historically predominant black part of New York (Harlem) in a plaza named after a black civil rights hero (Adam Clayton Powell Jr) that is now best known as a site for contemporary political protests and street-side vendors selling gospel psalms and black activist memorabilia. It could also be of fundamental importance to ‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ that nearly all the Performa visitors who actually do find Dave are white. These are undoubtedly important elements to the work but ‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ feels much less banal or soap-box than that. Instead the work operates on a more open-ended, fragile and quiet level that is clearly indebted to Allan Kaprow’s politics of the performance of the everyday and the subversive, quiet, often un-witnessed performances of Adrian Piper and does the vital job of refreshing these narratives for the 21st Century.
In the end I did find Dave. He was there, as he said he would be, sitting on a bench in the plaza. We had a pleasant chat together then went our separate ways. In our technologised, wireless everything, age ‘I’ll Be There (2007)’ indulges us in a desire for a bygone era when spontaneous, low-key yet intimate one to one social encounters were commonplace. It also allows for the fantasy of meeting a dark, handsome stranger at a pre-arranged time and place and so putting your trust, and fate, entirely in a printed paper advert.
Dave McKenzie’s ‘I’ll Be There (2007) is part of ‘All Together Now’, a series of four performances in PERFORMA 07 that look at the artist’s past and current performances and interventions. Curated by Romi Crawford. Presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem. Courtesy PERFORMA and Studio Museum.
Dave McKenzie will be performing ‘Babel’ (2000-2006) on the 14th November and Private Dancer (2007) on the 18th November as part of PERFORMA 07. See the Performa programme online for more details.
