A project for Wellcome Collection (2010)

The following project has been commissioned for the symposium 'China: Birth and Belonging', being held at Wellcome Collection to accompany the exhibition 'Identity: Eight rooms: nine lives'.

I have been commissioned to carry out a series of interventions for an evening of performances, organised by Chinese Art Centre as part of the symposium.

The interventions are detailed on the back of my business card, which will be handed to attendees during the course of the evening.

Actors will be hired to distribute the cards on my behalf.

Here is a mock-up of how it may look on the evening.

None of the interventions will be carried out.

As part of the project, I commissioned the following text to be written.

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A Note upon a Card: Brendan Fan at the Wellcome Trust

“Take a card, any card”. [1] In fact the choice is not so open. Brendan Fan’s performance at the Wellcome Trust – it would be more accurate to call it an “anti-performance” – involves the giving out to members of a conference audience a business card, an object distributed while drinks are being served and introductions made. One side of the card carries the usual kind of information found upon such items, the name, address and occupation of its bearer, but the reverse holds one of three distinct statements: “Our conversation may be being recorded and documented.”; “I may try to attract your attention away from something that you will later regret having missed.”; I may try to engage you in a performance without your prior knowledge or consent.” The action of the cards’ dissemination is complicated by Fan having arranged for friends to mingle amongst the conference attendees to give them out, thus rendering their authenticity as personal “business cards” problematic, as well as raising the issue of who exactly is the author of the work in which the conference goers are apparently participating, whether knowingly or not.

A note upon a card of the kind above described proposing that one may be unwittingly “opted in” to a work of performance art, may be regarded as somewhat challenging, or even threatening. It suggests that one is being employed for the artist’s own, essentially undeclared ends, exploited, even, by this “uninvited guest”. It further implies the exercise of a power that the artist may not in fact actually possess. Just who or what is it, after all, that turns a casual and mundane incident into “art” as opposed to a prank or a piece of idle game-playing? Is something art simply because the artists says so? Who exactly does the artist think he is, Marcel Duchamp or some other radical progenitor of the avant garde? Acting to reveal to the receiver of the card, assuming they read it, that he or she may be, or about to be engaged in helping the artist make “art” does not diffuse the problems implicit within this potentially scurrilous creative act. In fact it may exacerbate it in terms of its potential for irritation and abuse of what is, in the context of a conference gathering, an orthodox, predictable and complacent exchange of information. In handing out a statement that indicates the recipient may be co-opted into the “game” of the making of a half clandestine work what is being referred to, oddly enough, is not so much the text printed on this particular card but what one of the other cards contains. That is, the claim that the artist or his stand-ins may distract the person who takes the card from noticing something else. This other thing might then be the very performance in which one is given a card, and which is in fact constituted, or at least triggered by the passing of the coded rectangle from one hand to another. One is caught, it seems, in a peculiarly recurrent loop, a sort of smug and insurmountable trap.

The passing out of little cards to the gathered “elite” of an academic forum may be carried out in several ways. Just what are the conventions of “putting oneself about”? It is useful, one imagines, to have ready a slim and convenient instrument of transmission, so that if asked one’s name or number the giving of information can occur quickly and easily. Perhaps one was already involved in a conversation before either party offered his or her card, or it could be that one sees someone whom one would like to contact at a later date; in this case an interruption may be required. Or might the transference occur in a manner paralleling the scene in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in which Julia secretly but assuredly slips Winston the note containing her declaration of love? One thinks too of Poe’s “purloined letter”, a loose but apposite signifier of the very act of the circulation of the sign itself. [2] If, how and why such a card is read is at the crux of the matter here. Passing this kind of card in such a sphere is mundane, an incident without incident, but Fan’s cards are not what they seem. One holds back with some effort the possible puns upon meaning business or being in, as artists are supposed to be, the business of making meanings. Fan, in a roundabout but ultimately undecidable manner lets this ambiguity operate to its greatest effect. Such a slippage between categories of function is one of the central engines of this work.

One of the most prevalent themes apparent in what one might term traditional performance art is the emphasised presence of the artist’s own body within the making of the work. But this existential investment is absent from Fan’s present piece; this is one reason why I have called it an anti-performance. On a certain level Fan’s arranged distribution isn’t so different to the usual utilisation of business cards, letting people know who you are and what you do by means of a small printed mnemonic. Whoever bothers to read Fan’s cards will see he gives his profession as artist, and some will spot that an actual work was being produced for which they are the audience, and the indispensable participant too. But unless people literally compare notes they’ll probably remain unaware that there are several texts in circulation; such comparisons may, on the other hand, leave most people in the gathering little the wiser. Short of carrying out a miniature sociological survey there would appear no way for Fan to gauge how exactly his work has worked. Entertainment or party trick, idiotic action or subtle artistic intervention, one wonders how, in the end, the piece will actually be seen, and who will see it. This simultaneity of states is the work’s richest vein.

Peter Suchin

1. The phrase is a cliché of stage magic, a standard instruction accompanying tricks involving sleight of hand.

2. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, 1959, p. 89. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is included in his Selected Writings, Penguin, 1980. For an extensive discussion of the meanings implied (or confounded) by the elusive letter in Poe’s story see John P Muller and William J Richardson (Eds.), The Purloined Poe, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, passim.