ASSUMING THE WEIGHT OF LIGHTNESS
by Nathalie Perreault

It’s not easy to write about a BMI action… It’s hard to depict a 4-hour action in which 8 persons worked without a theme or a predetermined goal. Description will be of no great use. BM is first of all a principle of work, or a body of working principles around the notion of begegnung, of encounter, so it will be more interesting to evoke, through certain gestures, images, or values, some ideas that will lead to multiple degrees of interpretation and reveal tensions that are below the appearance. All we knew about this action is that it would start around 5 pm and finish around 9 pm, so as to go through the change of daylight, going from day to night. After having gone through 2 evenings of individual actions, the performers were going to hold a collective action in a space suggested by Le Lieu: l’Ilot Fleurie. How can we describe this “encounter”? We can only be witnesses of what we got out of this experience. To see 8 persons occupy a space of 2,500 square meters for 4 hours without falling into animation or entertainment is an experience. And recalling the concentration of the public, one third of which witnessed for 4 hours this passage from light to darkness, I think that this feeling was collective.
We had been longing for BM. Its presence in Québec was much more than a simple presentation. For the past few years, the travels of BMI involve a diversified program of interventions, including collective actions, exchange and experimentation with local artists, especially young ones. And on these terms, BMI was invited to Québec for the 20th anniversary of Le Lieu: to confront two distinct types of self-managed art action. The BMI operation consisted of a collective action, solo actions, presentations of their individual practice, and a practical workshop that lasted a few days with a group of students from Québec.
The quality of the public’s presence was also due to the fact that about 20 of them felt intimately involved because of their participation in the workshop. It seemed that humility and mutual respect on all parts made so that it was one of the most intense performance evenings I have seen. The public was not only viewers or consumers and that is exactly in line with le Lieu’s philosophy.
So this was the background before the start of the collective action. I must also talk about the space, which will have a great influence on the action. L’Ilot Fleurie is a very charged space. Charged with the signs that are encrusted, witnesses and traces of art events that have taken place there over the years; spray paint screams spitting the toughness of social exclusion on the concrete. In fact, the graffiti artists will be working along almost during the whole time. Traces and signs of human and social scars also of those who spend the evening or sleep there. I knew BMI wouldn’t address those problems, it is not their job. The metaphysical anchorage implies a particular attention to the space and an interaction that discloses the underlying tensions. By creating a different function for the space for a few hours, BMI acutely emphasized the cruelty of that misery. Without doing it in a literal sense or without including it in narration, the gestures of the performers, their signs, their silences, their presence or absence, answered with disarming poetics to the hushed cries of this urban shelter awakening the memory of what has become a point of reference for the residents of Québec looking for political, social and esthetic alternatives to the careerist models offered by our societies, based on the profitability of each gesture.
BMI actions are not collective anecdotic improvisations. It is something difficult to define, a singular working principle in which each performer transposes his own practice in a space and time shared with other performers, having no idea of what to expect, without knowing what kind of rhythm, visual or sound environment they will be facing. If we think that some of them know each other and each other’s work deeply, having collaborated so many times and having known each other for 20 years, that doesn’t change the radicalism of the principle of hyper availability that this kind of work requests, strengthened by the arrival of new artists or the occasional addition of special guests.
It is a very demanding process. In public actions, one must already deal with the unexpected, with materials that can decide to act in an unpredictable way, with our own reaction to the public around us…in front of us… that is performance. We are also at the mercy of our own limits, our fears, and our most profound weaknesses! But they are ours and we are confronted with them at al times in art and life… But in a situation like Black Market, the risks are multiplied not only because of the number of participants, but by the absence of a track, because the artists agree beforehand only on a few technical details… When a collective action is based on a common objective, this channels everyone’s behavior towards a goal, leading each artist’s rhythm and actions into a collective cohesion. Here, none of this can reassure anyone. Furthermore, no one can count on what he had planned, because everything is at everyone’s disposal, and can be conveyed in another direction at any moment. And this must be incredibly stimulating for artists forced to go down a little further in the depths of the abyss!
It seems absurd to try to describe an action that is absolutely open rather than concerted, where energies are not concentrated on narration, or on precise or intentional representation, or on the construction of a message or a collection of messages that are more or less coherent. It is impossible to see all that is put in motion by 8 people on more than 2,500 square meters… during 4 hours! And it is dangerous to describe such an action because of the nature of its working process. How can you describe without reducing, trivializing, caricaturing? And many actions are trivial, minimal, and anodyne. How can you avoid detaching each gesture from the multidimensional weave in which they intermingle? There is a danger of trivializing because the description cannot convey what really makes the action, what gives it rhythm, all that is not immediately visible or perceptible, the tension that exists between the artists, between the public and the artists (even when the public in plunged in their own thoughts, which proves the non-univocity of such an action), all the glances, the silences, the hesitations, the doubts that precede and feed all that will become visible, all the micro-answers of each of the performers in front of the other 7 accomplices. There is also the inverse danger of creating a myth. How can you enumerate such simple gestures without giving the impression of making them solemn when BMI implies the self-derision of Zen? As Roi Vaara said in a video interview in 1998, he has a tendency to meticulously structure his individual performances, but on the contrary, when he works in the BMI context, he tries to have nothing ready in order to create a space that will allow people to feel a part of art just like everything else.
So what happened during the 4 hours that Saturday in that space? In addition to the photos published here, I will mention a few traces of some artists. Elvira S. had some cables fixed to the structure of the highway above the space, with which she created spaces within the space, and also used to long poles that she handled by pointing them in different directions, the ground, the sky, some performers or elements of the action, or by using them as giant chopsticks to shift objects or materials. As the action progressed, she intervened with installations elaborated by other performers.

For the whole 4 hours of the action, Alastair M. kept a permanent concentration, following the rhythm that distinguish most of his individual actions. Wearing sunglasses and a black classical trench coat, he slowly pushed a shopping cart full of artifacts, photos and personal belongings that he disseminated all over the space. Imperturbable, even if we felt that he was constantly attentive to his coperformers, he hardly interacted with the others. At most, he adjusted his journey according to their positions.
After having transported many loads of bricks in his cart, Roi Vaara changes out of his black pants and red striped sweater and put on his black suit and white shirt that he usually wears to perform. Then he started constructing what would become a tower inside which he shut himself as he was building it, then set it on fire and knocked itdown until it fell on top of him. 4 hours went by from the beginning to the end of this process. As this element ended up being the most predictable element of the whole action, he acted as a central pole around which other actions came into being as counterpoints, to destabilize him, be it Elvira hammering the structure or playing croquet with the bricks, or Helge introducing small objects in the structure, among which small flags, which probably helped in making the structure more fragile.
After having lined up on the ground medium and big sized rocks, mirrors and charcoal, Helge M. is probably the one who first got implied in an installation scheme. Stating from a 3 meter ladder on top of which he had put a suitcase, he went up and down and covered himself with mirrors on which he wrote: wisdom, love, conflict… taping them on his head, arms and legs and went back and forth to the other end of the space where there was a 5 step ladder. Untiring, he went up and jumped down over and over again. Gradually, all that was left weresome stones that he had taped to himself and that he used to break the leftover mirrors. This self-imposed constraint of the heavy materials weighing him down and making his movements arduous, was exacerbated by Boris N. who glued his arms to the big stone that was acting as his thorax…until he fell and Lee Wen came to help him. Even though his action was very structured by the repetition of his gestures, Helge was always aware of the globality of the action, doing actions connected to others and nourishing the global occupation of the space.
The presence of Lee Wen and Jacques VP., on the contrary, was articulated in a more evasive and less concentrated way, according to the other actions. For Lee Wen, the first confrontation was with the immensity of the site. After having walked around it to feel its vastness, Wen stayed motionless for a while, leaning at 45 degrees on a pillar of the highway, before walking again through the vast space, empty yet full, troubling and dizzying, whose scale seems to have commanded him to do minimal gestures: work with a watering can, watering the ground, put down stones and turn it into an aleatory percussion instrument. He then interacted with other performers’ actions.
Jacques VP., who is often exuberant in his solo performances and who had amused the gallery the night before, was quite discreet in this action. Siting on a suitcase and a ghetto blaster, he took out some sticks, played drums on a red white and blue flag on his knees, walked around taking pictures or carrying around the booming sound of the ghetto blaster that spat out Nirvana and other random sounds of the radio, I don’t really remember, but it clashed with the meditative tone of neighbouring actions.
Norbert K., who comes from the theater and had done in his solo some nice allusions to Zen minimalism, started reading a list of numbers… an inventory...? The rest of his gestures was playfully absurd: he threwmany eggs on the pillars of the highway, he then worked with coloured papers that he shaped with modeling paste and wore them, walking around the space looking like a tattered buffoon scraping the arid space with a rake, as if he tried to clean up this poetic mess.
Boris N. seems to have a particular presence in this context, as if he could be absorbed in his almost autistic actions while scanning the whole situation with his antennas. He fed the tension creating energy circuits as soon as the tension seemed to drop. He started out with a poetical gesture that made me laugh. He through many times a feather in the air and caught it back (l’ilot is a haven also for birds). Then he walks out of the site and crossed over to the park across the street. At one point, I thought he would leave us there to follow his performance elsewhere, which would have been a nice trick (like the humor he sometimes reveals, like when he wears his Don’t press my suicide button t-shirt!). One of the most memorable interventions of Nieslony was the presence of a blond doll that he lay on the gravel, letting the batteries die out, to then burn it with butane and tow it around a few times, inviting it to walk again… He also spent a long time on the ground in an almost fetal position, slowly pouring bird seeds in his ear.

These are just trace between which other interactions were weaved, braided and blended. Elvira put dead pigeon wings on Helge that had collapsed under the weight of his stones and mirrors, Helge and Boris walking next to each other with a dense connivance, Boris holding a stone on his head in deep concentration, Norbert next to him, motionless, inflexible, looking at the ground.
As Alastair said in a video interview, contrary to painting or other static mediums, in performance, the artist cannot set himself aside, cannot look back at his work to add elements to his work. In performance, everything comes to life at once, the artist cannot be director of his performance because the person doing the work and the work itself are one. In order that the intention of the artist be acute, he must be cohesive in his action, in a more essential way than with other mediums. For this reason, there is no future for performance, but as many possibilities and visions of performance as there are performers doing it.
I am not bringing up this statement of Alastair’s to compare mediums. I do not agree with making categories in which performance prevails, or that oppose performance and maneuvers, for example giving more importance to relational eshetics or actions being done outside art spaces… What interests me more and more in these practices, and what distinguishes the projects, is not merely their adherence to or refusal of one medium or another, but their ethical dimension, be it in esthetic choices or any other aspect of actualization, process, financing, dissemination, and the coherence of each of these aspects in relation to their philosophical articulation. That’s why BMI still interests me.
BMI refuses the notion of ownership of its founding principle. BMI is neither a group nor a collective. There are no members of BMI. Each participant in BMI actions accepts to the elements of his practice at the disposal of the others and of the collective action. The BMI actions are also modes of experimenting different forms of intellectual and sensorial attention, that is of our presence in the world… Starting in the beginning of the 80’s by Boris N., BMI was a parallel track of experimentation at the time, trying to offer an intercultural meeting between people of different European backgrounds. BMI wanted to create not only a space for reflection-action-inquiry on individual-collective relationships, but also a space of investigation on the world and on art, on the role of the artist facing his practice and his involvement in developing favorable conditions for art. BMI is a way of experimenting that some artists chose to work according to principles other thatn competitivity. Since then, BMI was active in different contexts, mostly in Europe until the end of the 90’s but now also in Asia (only one appearance in America before they came to Québec, at the Franklin Furnace in New York in 1991, and one appearance Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987).

Behind BMI’s activities, Boris N. states a series of principles that I have partially recapitulated, that are neither exhaustive nor exclusive, but that define the nature and the motivation of BMI (see ASA website, which is another global alternative self-managed project: ): principles of opening. Through many of these principles and many ways, the work or the preoccupations of BMI seem in precarious equilibrium in front of a recent discourse tied to a certain understanding of performance. BMI seems anachronistic with these notions of interactivity, animation or conviviality that is often linked to relational esthetics or the impression of innovation linked to technological performance.
BMI would not be user friendly in the sense that it takes no charge of what we call public. BMI gives no key that could assemble a public around a common axis. BMI leaves everyone to himself, and lets everyone seek in himself the meaning of its actions, and that is what interests me. Even though there is a level of humor that people can cling to, the disparate feature of the actions and the recourse to banal materials and gestures release a whole series of interpretations and perceptions of these actions that reveal in a certain way the derisory nature of our certainties.
BMI would also be hyper rigorous without taking itself seriously, and assuming the weight of its lightness.