Repetition Island

An interview with Ieva Miseviciute and Michael Portnoy

LW: Could you describe your performance?

MP: It is the complete history of Obdurance Art from 1860 until the present.

LW: Do you want to give a few highlights of that history, for the folks at home?

MP: One of the most known pieces of Obdurance Art happened in 1935 with Louisa Edgar and Beth Schemmel. It is called Yellow on Yellow and it is the first Obdurance opera. It happened in Vienna. Most Obdurance art was produced by couples, with only a few exceptions. There were maybe three or four pieces of Obdurance Art that were done individually but most by couples. This is because the first work of Obdurance Art in 1860 was made by a couple, Lisa and Johann Pogandorff, and it sort of set a trend. So, Beth Schemmel was Israeli and Louisa Edgar was Czechoslovakian and this piece Yellow and Yellow just involved pushing a lemon back and forth between them. They are seated sort of elegantly and they push the lemon back and forth with their tongues slightly out of their mouths and making a sound.

LW: Is the fact that you are performing the history as a couple in reference to Schemmel and Edgar or have you worked together before?

MP: This is the first time we have worked together on a formal presentation. Bent R. Sigurskjold finished making the book, The Complete History of Obdurance Art, a year or two ago and there has been maybe 30 or 40 significant works of Obdurance Art since then. Our plan is to cover a lot of those in Part II. In this performance we only do about 20 pieces because that is the corpus of Obdurance art from 1860. Those pieces were so significant that people were afraid to top them for a while.

LW: And there has recently been a resurgence of interest and practice?

MP: Exactly. Finally people are starting to feel free to explore it. But most of the newer work is highly referential to the history. People who are making Obdurance Art now always have bits of reference to the early works.

LW: How would you describe the relationship between your individual practices and Obdurance Art?

MP: What I would say is that as a couple it makes a lot of sense. I like to think of Henry Flynt, who was the originator of the term concept art – which is what conceptual art comes from. He was a mathematician but he is also associated with Fluxus and he was against formal art. He though it was more interesting to do your “just likings”. So, the things you do around the house – refusals to do normal behaviors - he though this was far more valuable artistically. In that way I would say that there is some kind of formal relation between the things that we do around the house and Obdurance Art.

MI: Yes. I think that is why we have such an interest in it. Because we discovered that we were doing it already.

LW: What sorts of things do you do?

MI: We sing and dance. I think that a lot of these art works are very performative.

MP: Also, again about this persistent resistance to engage in a normal set of behaviors, and substituting them for an alternative set of behaviors.

LW: Michael, do you see the attention thieving that you are also doing on Repetition Island as an extension of this Obdurance practice?

MP: No it is totally different…. well…. actually…… yeah, there are definitely relations. I hadn’t though about the two together. The attention theft is a pretty basic concept. I steal attention from whoever is performing at the moment.

LW: Can you describe the best theft that you have done so far?

MP: The one I liked happened around 7 o’clock. Mont Analogue were performing. I was wearing all white – white pants, shirt and jacket. I took one of Pierre Bismuth’s blue circles into the middle elevator. There are three glass elevators that go up two levels over Repetition Island. I went up and down maybe 3 or 4 times. The lighting was amazing and the sceneography couldn’t have been better. It extended the whole experience downstairs up into the museum. In the beginning the attention theft were very quick acts but some of the later ones have taken on an abstract narrative character.

LW: I wanted to ask you about the T-shirts that you put on at the end of the Obdurance performance.

MP: Well Machine Machine, who did that work the we demonstrate – with the electronics – they would always wear cool artsy T-shirts.

IM: And glasses.

MP: Yes. So we had to ask them for permission to re-perform this and their one condition was that we wear specific T-shirts and glasses. So they actually sent us the T-shirts that they customarily wear.

LW: Really, the very same T-shirts?

IM: Yeah, the one I am wearing is very old.

LW: Did they send you the glasses too?

MP: No they said we could choose the glasses but they were very particular about the T-shirts.

IM: And the glasses too. They had to have thick frames.

LW: Where do they live?

IM: They used to live in Scotland.

MP: But now they live in Berlin. That piece was very detrimental to their career. They had been doing very poppy music before that and they lost a lot of their following after they did that piece. And now they perform for a super-niche audience.

IM: But in really prestigious venues.

MP: Mostly in Asian art museums.

LW: Was their music in any way related to Kraftwerk?

MP: No. It is more in the tradition of circuit-bending. Basically the concept is to take existing electronics – like these early Casio machines that people took apart – and you connect circuits that don’t normally go together and strange sounds are created. They were at once making fun of that tradition by putting an added seriousness to the performance but it was also a serious investigation.

IM: And they were also authors.

MP. Actually, they are better known as authors. They made very experimental children’s books.

IM: Three dimensional books.

MP: Pop-up books.

IM: And you can wear them on your hands. They are almost like theatres in which you can do plays for children,

LW: Like with finger puppets?

MP: Yes, but it is a combination between a finger puppet and a textual puppet. A symbolic puppet. You would put images, signs and words on your fingers and put them through the pages.

IM: There is a famous one that you can read and play with many people. You can make a whole football game in the book.

MP: And now they are making books for whole kindergarten classes.

IM: All the children in the class can access it.

MP: It’s amazing! The book is about a meter by a meter and all of the kids – up to 20 kids- stick their hands in the book.

IM: The construction is so beautiful. It is lifted off the ground about 40 centimeters and the parents watch from above. The kids lie on the ground and put their hands though and the parents can watch from a seated position.

MP: But the Obdurance audience hates this.

IM: Yes, and they do it under a pseudonym.

LW: What is it?

IM: We can’t say. Sorry.

MP: The Obdurance crowd is very weird. We did our performance once for an Obdurance crowd just to test it, in New York. Most of the people who do this kind of work are such assholes.

IM: Yes, when they are watching a performance or a lecture they stand with their back to the presenter and facing their partner.

LW: So do you have to have a partner to go to the performance?

IM: Of course, yes.

MP: The really orthodox Obdurance Artists don’t consider the works of Milda Monatroga to be actual Obdurance Art because the man who performed with her was not her boyfriend.

IM: She always said that she was in love with the musician Chelonis R. Jones.

MP: The partner doesn’t have to do the performance but they must at least be on stage with them. There was a scandal with the Obdurance pop star – the one who kicks the banana. There is a yearly Obdurance conference that is held in Helsinki and he had to bring his wife to it but he just hired some woman off the street.

LW: Do you have to prove that you are having sexual relations with the person who you claim is your partner?

MP: You do actually. Sometimes you have to do it on the stage to prove it. Or at the door of the theatre. Like at these clubs where you have to show our penis before you can enter – you have to have sex with your partner at the door.

IM: No, you can actually send a recording. A sound recording. Not a video. They are quite strict.

LW: And what is the conference like?

MP: It is very academic. Theorists present work.

IM: But a large part of it is that they agree on where the movement should go and who should be considered for entrance. So there is a lot of voting and decision making.

LW: Have you attended? Did they vote you in?

MP: We are not officially Obdurance Artists. Obdurance Artists wouldn’t believe in actually presenting a history.

IM: Our presentation can never be perceived and Obdurance Art because we would never get the certificate.

LW: And when you performed this history for the Obdurance Artists how did it go?

MP: Well a lot of time you can’t tell because the more excessive the head-headedness is the more they like it. So it is very hard to tell from an outside perspective. They were honored in some sense, because they do want to be recognized.

IM: We have heard that they approved of the project because it is being performed in the Pompidou.

MP: Some stuff happened in the 80s. They were supposed to have an exhibition here and it was a big mess.

LW: What happened.

MP: We shouldn’t talk about it.