Written by lainie at 03:30 PM on April 19, 2008 in Friends, Events, Arty stuff.

I've uploaded the Cammies blog with a few new posts: Joanna Bessey, Best Director Nominee, and Mark Teh, Best Director Nominee.

I know Mark, and the interviews were the first time I spoke to Joanna (phone conversation). They're both very friendly people - Joanna's peppier, Mark's got a selamba vibe. Go check out their interviews on the Cammies blog yeah?

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I'm broke at the moment, but managed to get out of the house, mostly through goodwill and great luck.

I went for a performance, Melati Suryodarmo: Solitaire, in Annexe the other day. A Germany-based Indonesian performance artist (topographic details supplied solely to let you know this was a limited opportunity to watch her perform here), Melati Suryodarmo, was down to perform her piece, "I Love You".

(photo from Melati's website)

Melati's performance consisted of her dragging a huge plane of glass around a bare room (with members of the audience scattered around the periphery), while repeatedly saying "I love you".

She struggles with the glass. It's heavy. She's dragging it on her back across the room, leaning it against her chest, lying down under it. Everything is done slowly. Intermittently, she says "I love you" to the glass. She says this on her website:

Okay here's two aspects:

1) Watching this fucked with my mind (I liked that) because it made me come up with all sorts of questions* and interpretations.

2) There is only so long I can sit and watch a woman drag a sheet of glass around the room.

Let's face it - it's unnatural for a room full of people to sit and watch one woman struggle with a weighty, fragile object. I kept getting this urge to help her with the glass. But the glass was a symbol here, not just a matter of furniture moving, and the nature of conventional love is not one that others should involve themselves in, unless cari-ing pasal .

This symbol that received her declaration of love was more like a ball and chain, a flat piece of prison she wouldn't let go of, something that didn't give back anything. My frustration was in thinking her I Love Yous were reaching a level of sadness / petulance / ritual chanting, and I kept waiting for her to let go, metaphorically, physically. Of course, like most relationships I was reminded of, the letting go didn't happen anytime before my patience / sympathy evaporated.

Sometimes she's holding a section of the audience in the glass, saying to them "I Love You". At one angle, I seemed like the only person in there. In a literal sense, everyone was seeing different reflections in the glass depending on where they positioned themselves. Sometimes, she looked at the glass / her reflection and repeated the tired three words again.

After about 40 minutes, my butt got numb. I noticed a few of my friends scattered around the room had discreetly left the performance. I thought it couldn't last much longer, how much stamina could this woman have? Then I picked up a brochure next to me.

It said "Performance time: 2 - 3 hours". Holy hell.

Ended up heading to grab free food from next door, and talked with my friends about how we felt leaving a performance midway. Was more interested in her documented works on display (photographs of her other performances, video installations).

Found one dude with a camera really irritating because he didn't turn off the sound setting (I'm guessing he's media, or blur, cause there were "No photography" signs around), so everytime Melati paused in any action, he punctuated it with camera shutter sounds. And he took so many. Like shit, GET YOUR SHOT AND SHUT UP!

*I always think it's silly to say some art begets questions - since the existence or action of anything is to me, inherently filled with much opportunity for questions. However, I of course blatantly ignore that some actions do provoke certain questions. By the way, I said it raised some questions to me, I didn't say I'd share them.

After that Rach and Annie (Loft friend) wanted to go see Darryl over at Palate Palette. Rach and I saw some "Nokia Private Event" sign outside, but figured we probably knew enough people inside to crash the party and blend in (I already saw a few people I knew as we drove by).

Turned out I knew so many people because Nokia had invited a lot of musicians for their IAC thing- it's essentially a distribution platform for free uploads and downloads for local music. Of course, in order to supply that content they need the artists to start contributing their material.

My friends were aware this was a friendly way of buying them over (I mean, why Nokia and not...Samsung?), so I guess it's a matter of which brand is better at wooing them.

I know it looks like we were there for the food, but really, we weren't. Went to the usual haunt, Ceylon Bar for drinks after, before I headed to Tei's place.