In Service of Who?
On our first meeting, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Aya Rodriguez-Izumi. She drew, painted, took photographs, worked as a museum educator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and hinted at an adoption of performance in her practice. After that get-together, I scanned Rodriguez-Izumi’s body of work: her Thank You (2012) plastic bags had this trace of humor coupled with a caring, social sculpture sensibility; and Lynesse as ‘American Buffalo’ (2014)—a convergence of fashion, costume, craft, and photographic image—mingled in registers of performance, something out of a page of Athi-Patra Ruga, a South African artist whose practice queers those in-between, border-zones where we contest the place of fashion, performance, and contemporary art. This similitude with Ruga locates Rodriguez-Izumi’s practice in a doubling realm—a shape shifting sense of disguise and decorum—that tends towards a betrayal of what is to come. Naturally, I found myself questioning what aesthetic would her performative turn take?
Looking back, perhaps where we first met psychically anticipated this service aesthetic that courses through Rodriguez-Izumi’s emerging performance practice. We struck up a dialogue in a kitchen under very unpretentious circumstances. Beer lubricated the conversation, as did the fact that we both fled former lives: she was in fashion design, while I was formerly a psychotherapist. It was a serendipitous beginning really, one that spoke to the queer fecundity of failure. Let me explain. There’s a way about Rodriguez-Izumi’s practice that exudes a 1970s sensibility in that if you were good at something you often wanted to deviate from it—a drummer took up painting; an architect engrossed himself or herself in music composition. Success was sought in the unconventional, in the precipice of failure. It was this sort of queer art of failure that didn’t necessarily have a recipe or a clear rhyme or reason. It wasn’t an all out welcoming of failure, but a belief that alternative modes of success could be constructed through failing at something. Exhausting something in a Deleuzian frame only inspires the will to try again, to push possibilities by exploring “that which is not realized.”1 That is not to say Rodriguez-Izumi was tired or that she couldn’t cut it in fashion or those other forms of artistic expression. Rather, she embarked on performance fully aware that it’s this tenuous terrain, one that often shouldn’t be—and really isn’t—scaled alone. In this terrain, there is often a public there, waiting to be engaged and entertained: how do you go about servicing them, and servicing them well?
I wouldn’t have called it, this practice of service that Rodriguez-Izumi’s performances bring to bear on the understudied vein or détournement of relational aesthetics. But it’s there in performances like HOLY $HIT and Get Well (both 2016). And someone had, in fact, called attention to this aesthetic: curator, critic, and author Steven Henry Madoff had identified this service aesthetic as one distinct from the activism of the ‘60s and the crowd-centric relational aesthetics put forth in the ‘90s by critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud. Madoff writes:
Yet it is becoming ever more clear that there is a category of art that focuses not so much on the social relations of the artist and audience but on the atomized power of individual relationships with the social whole…practitioners of service art are not drawn primarily to collective experience. The models they use typically replicate the transactional sites that fill the landscape of the service economy: doctor’s offices, clinics, hair salons, and shops. The audience is not seen as an ad hoc participatory community of social disquisition, but each viewer is instead implicated as an individual participant—implicated not in the general sense as an audience member but specifically as a client to be served.2
Now HOLY $HIT was staged at the School of Visual Arts in Rodriguez-Izumi’s studio, which isn’t typically deemed as scene of service, but, in many respects, the hours of toil and labor on the part of these budding artists cannot be overlooked. The artist is servicing this industry, period. And Rodriguez-Izumi serviced us in the most surreptitious way: a clairvoyant reading complete with shots of vodka—the latter was if you were lucky and played your cards right! Seated on cushions in a bedazzled, glittery studio, HOLY $HIT was this one-on-one, cozy encounter where Rodriguez-Izumi gave you her undivided attention for a minute or two, and then beckoned you away without a fortune other than to reflect on the absurdity of the shit that just went down. Service was turned on its head for a moment.
But Madoff had noted that “an intimacy in the charged space of the performance of a service is central to these works, and the psychological status of the client is an active element. In fact, server and client ratify each other’s identity in the process of the transaction.”3 Reflecting on HOLY $HIT for a bit: what if the transaction had a dubious air to it? Would restitution be on the table? And how important did self-reflection, on the part of the client, become in this well-intentioned, but seemingly hollow service?
It seems Rodriguez-Izumi upped the ante, considering these questions in subsequent performances, which also prompted audiences to do the same. While interiority of the individual client was not as present in HOLY $HIT, Rodriguez-Izumi turned to that anecdotal sweet spot in Get Well, a move to get folks thinking critically about private well-being amid the alienation that comes with service culture. In Get Well, patrons (or, in this case, patients) were asked to identify where they felt ill on a card: one could circle a body part and/or write down a pointed malady. The doctor’s office clipboard was done away with; body became a service as Rodriguez-Izumi or one of her collaborators’ physical back served as the support structure to scribble down our ailments. After getting prodded and poked, patients were playfully shoved onto an exam table and remedied with none other than rock music (well that’s what the DJ prescribed me for circling my head, heart, and genital region!). Again, service was reimagined in satirical ways; I wasn’t necessarily better after all this, but in that brief moment of writing down what was ailing me, there was some self-reflexivity. Get Well also came with a critique on the space itself—the performance was staged in the now-empty Pfizer factory on the border of South Williamsburg and Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. What does it mean to play doctor in the ruins of world’s largest pharmaceutical company that inflicts this two-faced biopower on us? I couldn’t help but meditate on how the site-specific context of Get Well was wresting back big pharma’s right to make live and let die.4
Rodriguez-Izumi is in good company in this lane of service aesthetic with a dollop of critique. For one, it’s an aesthetic that goes back to Feed Me (1973) where Barbara T. Smith made her physical body available to any guest who joined her in a closed room. Her service was her body—comestible, but also curious as to what the consumer had to offer. Lee Mingwei’s service was a private dinner (i.e., Dining Project, 1998) that was held at the Whitney Museum after the doors had closed for the day. Then in 2003 there was Andrea Fraser’s critique of the art market when she went a step further than Smith and slept with an unnamed art collector for $20,000.
In many ways, On Air, Rodriguez-Izumi’s upcoming performance at AC Institute, builds on this critical one-on-one service context but within the milieu of a late-night talk show. For one, there’s the fact that late-night shows are a gendered phenomenon, with only a handful of women playing host to this comedic outlet since the ‘80s. But there’s also this increasing element of delegation in Rodriguez-Izumi’s performance practice and what that means for this one-on-one service model. Similar to Get Well, On Air finds Rodriguez-Izumi divvying up the role of service provider: she oversees the audience cues, nudging the audience to applaud at random; actress (and muse of the artist) Lynesse Page acts as masculine-presenting talk-show host; guest actors like George Falero also sit in with Page, sharing the stage and trading comical gibes at one another or at the audience member turned volunteered “celebrity guest”; and the two musical guests, Erika Dolereta and DJ Kavorkian (who was on the ones and twos in Get Well) control the soundscape of the performance.
What do we make of this splintering, this reliance on a cast of characters to mete out service? One could read this as an increasing awareness of the limitations of service economy; that is, a weekly 50-minute session with your psychologist is not enough of a transformative gesture since a large part of self-actualization involves private work on self.5 Perhaps Get Well is exposing those very idiocies that we come to expect with service culture. We want it all, but can we ever? Another difficulty or need presents itself once one is seemingly resolved. In response, Rodriguez-Izumi abrupt approach to servicing us returns the onus on the client, the patient, and the individual in a way that the social whole would be better served.
So as Rodriguez-Izumi’s confidence and stature grows, and as her practice refracts in this delegated fashion of servicing, I’m reminded of our first rendezvous and that questioning of where her performance practice would go. There’s definitely been repetition—an identifiable form, namely servicing others with wit and wisdom—but there’s an insistence to reinvent. Again, it’s that ‘70s zeal to fly under the radar, pick up a new craft, and toss it once we’ve accomplish all that we can from it. But we can also think of it this way: there is a disservice to success or mastery in that it might no longer warrant effort or reinvention. Conversely, when we are new to an arena, our service may not be stellar, but there is an earnest care and attention to those who interface with us in that we typically seek to do our best on the basis of the customer. From HOLY $HIT to Get Well to Offering (2016), her recent interactive installation for the MAMI exhibition at Knockdown Center, Rodriguez-Izumi has picked up on this wheel of reinvention in performance, one that decenters how we think about benevolence and service in our twenty-first century culture.
—Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi
NOTES
1 Deleuze presented exhaustion as something subjectively distinct from tiredness by focusing on this notion of possibility between the two physical states. For Deleuze, “[e]xhaustion is altogether different: you combine the set of variables of a situation, provided you renounce all order of preference and all organization of a goal, all signification. It is no longer so as to go out or stay in, and you no longer make use of days and nights. You no longer realize, even though you accomplish.” This idea of exhaustion is similar to this 1970s sensibility of trying one’s hand at something to avoid developing a listlessness towards one’s vocation. In this trying one’s hand at something new, as Deleuze would have us believe, one moves away from this accomplished zone where tiredness can manifest. Conversely, through exhaustion, one explores what hasn’t been accomplished or “not realized.” Gilles Deleuze and Anthony Uhlmann, “The Exhausted,” SubStance 78 (1995): 3-4.
2 Steven Henry Madoff, “Service Aesthetics,” Artforum International Magazine, September 2008, 166.
3 Ibid., 169.
4 Foucault introduced his formulation of biopower as this shift to “make live and let die,” which was an added complement to the sovereign’s right to “take life or let live.” This power shift to biopower emerged in 19th century, focusing on the global mass, man-as-species as opposed to man-as-body. Prior to this, though, the 17th and 18th centuries saw the body as the focus. It is speculative, but one could argue that service aesthetic with critique in the machinations of Get Well contains this thread of a returning sovereignty to the body or the individual—an upheaval of biopower. See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 1997), 239-263.
5 Something I would tell my clients was that if we met for one hour every week across the entire year, then that would roughly be two days with me to mold your psychological and behavioral predilections. What would become apparent in these exchanges was that mental wellbeing goes far beyond the one-on-one encounter.
* * *
On the occasion of On Air at AC Institute, Rodriguez-Izumi and I caught up to consider everything from ritual repetition, the experience economy, and the importance of storytelling as a means to negotiate the inertia present in these two modes of address.
Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi: When we first met you informed me of your background in fashion and design, having spent time at Gap if my memory serves me correct. Reflecting on this culture of experience that runs throughout fashion and its lifestyle branding, am I mistaken to say your work—from sculpture to performance and drawing—borrows on that culture, but plays on it in wry ways?
Aya Rodriguez-Iyumi: Yeah I started my undergrad at Parsons as a fashion student, I really liked the designing and drawing part, this working with something that was meant for a body and could change how you feel, but I didn’t like the idea of the fashion world so switched to fine art after one year. Later I really just got lucky and kind of fell into a job at Gap through a friend and worked as a design assistant there before I started my MFA at SVA. I guess in a way my work asks the viewers to “buy into” a certain idea, maybe even a brand. But I think the difference is that the leap I’m asking viewers to take is much larger. With fashion, you see the clothing, you buy it, and you wear it. With my work, and especially the performance work, the viewer doesn’t have an idea of what they’re walking into, they don’t know what’s waiting for them on the other side or what’s even going to happen and most of the time they’re asked to give something back, usually information or an anecdote about their own personal history. There’s a huge amount of trust that the viewer is giving by participating in these performances and I’m really grateful that, at least so far, people have trusted me so much (hahaha).
That’s a telling point about not entirely knowing what they’re walking into. I spent some time in fashion publishing and retail so the whole intent of experience economy is quite fascinating to me. I know just by rejigging store layouts ever so often the brand and the aesthetic remains even though it’s reworked spatially. In a way, you still know, on some level, what to expect. Then again, there is an attention to decor, detail, and the type of sales associates hired by stores. There’s a similarity in your performance work—the attention to décor, detail, and use of delegated actors—like Get Well (2016) and On Air (2016) here at AC Institute that borrows from your time in design. What is the importance of props or creating a scenario?
Props are KEY to my work! Even going back to fashion, my drawings would be accessorized out—it had to be the whole package for it to be believable to me. With the current work it’s the same way—the devils in the details. And even though the work I make is super fantastical and borderline ridiculous, I want there to be a moment where viewers can get lost in it, suspend reality for a moment, and for that to happen it has to be believable and, for me, that happens in the details. A big part of my process is research: going out in the real world and experiencing these things I’m trying to portray. Like with the piece HOLY $HIT (2015) that was based on fortune telling and spiritual reading. I visited a spiritual reader in my personal life but for this I tried to go to other types of fortunetellers and readers to see the various styles, methods and different tools they used. It was about seeing a range and finding how I could transform objects around me to create a similar experience.
That’s fascinating that you sampled multiple soothsayers. Let’s touch on the element of anecdote for a bit; it’s something meaningful in your performance that emerges amidst the comedic or edgy elements of the work. Talk me through the story, and where that participatory aspect of your work comes from? Where does it begin and end, if at all? Through the story it’s as though you’re reminding participants of their selves, to not get lost in this invented world, this fabricated experience. It sort of intersects with Rem Koolhaas’ thoughts on his Prada store in Lower Manhattan. He finished the store in 2001 and said his ambition for it was “to capture attention and then, once we have it, to hand it back to the consumer.”
Anecdote and the viewer’s personal histories have become a really important part of the piece and also a really unpredictable part. I like my performances to be one-on-one so a specific person is the focus point even if there is an outside audience looking in. What I’m really trying to do with this work is to give the viewer a feeling and experience that they take with them, what that turns into all depends on the viewer. By involving the viewer so much, it really makes for each performance to be a unique moment—I love the range of experiences people have, whether it’s something they really feel and take with them or just something funny they encounter or even when they’re just totally freaked out! For me, any reaction (even if it’s a negative one) is better than no reaction and I feel for that to happen the viewer has to be invested in some way—that’s where their stories come in, to create a personal connection from the get go.
And to this expected/unexpected tension you brought up earlier, the story invites that as does other elements. It’s a part of your work that’s worth mulling over. I’ve come to expect that unexpectedness if that makes sense. How do you maintain that edge for the participant and the viewer (those not actively participating, but watching) considering your performances are working around this logic of repetition as seen in ritual?
I think the unexpectedness is partly due to my aesthetic and sensibility, partly luck and hugely due to the amazing people I’ve gotten to work with both as performers and viewers. A lot of the time, I don’t even know how a performance or piece is going to turn out! The weeks leading up to any exhibition, honestly, I’m usually still thinking, “I hope I don’t fuck this up”. I think a lot of artists think that. I consider my work in two ways: how is it going to look and how are people going to interact with it. How it’s going to look I have a lot of control over but how people are going to interact with it always surprises me and I’m always learning from it to make the next piece better and figure out how to guide viewers through my pieces. I think the unexpectedness is a given because a lot of the performance is improvised and done off the cuff—it’s a surprise to me too! I’ve been super fortunate to work with people like Lynesse Page, a friend and actress who I’ve worked with multiple times over the years, and Rich Vivenzio, an artist who played the role of DJ Kavorkian in Get Well and I’m so excited to work with them again in On Air. It’s really about the chemistry between us, as performers, and the viewers- there’s a huge amount of the work that relies on the viewers and their willingness.
It seems the ways you’ve parsed out your performance work—aesthetic look on one hand and sensibility to relational dynamics on the other, whatever they may be—gets at how you maintain and sustain ritual, keeping it from becoming staid, predictable. I think the story fits into this framework in a revelatory way. The story is relational but there’s a part of it that supplements the repetitive aspect of ritual, an aspect we often focus on, an aspect that keeps ritual maligned and marginal. The story as renewal rather than repetition. When things repeat over and over, it dies out, becomes extinct, and is often (mis)read as not being dynamic; non-western performance practices often get this shunted to this space. The story and/or the griot ensure renewal is very much a part of the ritual. I wonder: without the story what happens?
The stories people bring to the performance have a huge impact on the piece, especially in the case of On Air. What’s left when the performance is over in the installation and the residue of the various participants: debris, footprints, and empty cups. If the performance happens multiple times I’ll often leave the installation how it looks after the performance is done. A lot of the interactions add elements to the space, what is left is the aftermath of the performances and people’s interactions with the space.
You’ve stepped back a bit in your performances—they’ve become more delegated, collaborative, necessitating not just an active and willing audience but also the same of your collaborators. In essence, you’re no longer as front and center like HOLY $HIT. Can you speak to this shift? And how does this factor into conceiving performances? What are the premises that dictate whether you bring in collaborators or go it solo?
A big reason I brought other players into the performances is the fact there are performers who are much better than I am and can play the role to the level I want them to. I’ve taken on the role of director and writer in the performances and I also discovered that finding the right people is part of the process as well, it’s a really big and important part. I have a lot of friends who work in various creative fields: actors, musicians, animators; I’ve worked with so many of them for so long that I’m fortunate enough to have the kind of relationship where I can call on members of my community when I need their help. That’s a really large part of the work too: my community that I call on and draw from. It always changes the work to bring in more players but I really enjoy collaborating both behind the scenes and in the actual piece.
Similarly, your exploration with sound is taking an interesting turn here in On Air. The sonic quality in your work is gradually becoming more palpable, although there’s usually a twist like in Get Well where the DJ was charismatically gesturing as if he was spinning scintillating sounds, but we weren’t privy to it except if we decided to get well, lie on the doctor’s bed, and put on these headphones. We had talked a bit about sound and its body-to-body transmission while conceiving On Air. How are you envisioning sound working in On Air?
The sound and music is going to be much more front and center in On Air. It will be used both as entertainment but also as cues for reactions. There are multiple elements to the sounds on On Air. One will be the musical guest for the night, which will function as the musical guest on a late night show: they perform as they would a musical performance and play their own music or do their own set. The second musical element will be the element of sound effects. Applause and laughter will be played and act more as accompaniment to the interview and as cues to the audience. This element will also be done on the spot as the interview goes on so that will even be my own reaction to the performance.
Focusing on On Air, The Eric Andre Show figured into early machinations of the performances, particularly the absurdity of his humor as well as its (socially) painful qualities. How have you come to understand slapstick comedy and this sense of laughing at others in pain? And how does it figure in On Air?
To get ready for On Air Lynnese Page and I watched a lot of different late night show. Some a little crazier: The Eric Andre Show; Billy on the Street; Comedy Bang Bang, and some that were more conventional: The Daily Show with Trevor Noah; Jimmy Kimmel Live!; and Late Night with David Letterman. I wanted On Air to be a balance of comedy and interview. The comedy is more of an access point for the viewer. What became really important in On Air was the improvisation. We have no idea of what the person interacting with the piece is going to say so quickness and improvisation became key to the interview. While writing this I was thinking how can we lead the viewer to the place we want them to end up? How can we get them to interact with this piece successfully?
So how do you gauge success in performance?
Hmm, it’s hard to expect how well a performance is going to go, at least for me it is. But I think what makes a performance successful is what makes any piece of art successful, if it stays with the viewer.
And from the shows you rattled off, the common denominator in them is the male comic and the absence of the female comedienne. Outside of Chelsea Handler (and now Amber Rose and Samantha Bee), I can’t remember any recent late night shows hosted by women. I believe Monique had one on BET in 2009 for a wee bit, like two seasons, and Joan Rivers had a late show back in the 80s. It raises a feminist subtext to On Air and this larger conversation about women and comedy. The late sceptic Christopher Hitchens had suggested in an (in)famous Vanity Fair essay in 2007 that the since women were bound up in negotiating their reproductive responsibility their comportment was serious rather than comedic. Stoking the flames, he wrote in the piece: “Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with…whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.” I don’t entirely buy it, but how are you thinking about this gendered space of comedy, if at all, as you enter On Air and stage a sort of late night comedic performance?
The reason I use a lot of women in my performances isn’t because they’re women, it’s because they’re good at what they do and can bring the performance where it needs to be. It’s funny because we did make a conscious decision to make Lynnese’s role as the host more masculine, but it’s maybe closer how gendered roles in Kabuki Theater are sometimes played by the opposite. How I think of it is that it’s a character, the gender of the person who plays it doesn’t necessarily always matter. What I think does matter is if the person can play that character convincingly and that’s what I try to find in collaborators.