Jon Wah
1980-2008
Bachelor of Arts, Electronic Arts (Hons)
Graduation show: 2006 (Hons)
Artwork in Space YZ
Dressing, 2008
Performance Documentation (including post performance footage)
Videography: T.R. Carter
Dressing (Serial Space, 2008) was Jon Wah’s last performance work. Naked, he summoned the crowd to follow him down a flight of stairs where he ritually wrapped himself in barbed wire, pulled on clothes and then re-ascended (in wincing pain) to retreat behind closed doors. In the following symposium Wah’s analysis amounted to frank confession: the performance was an allegory for a life lived increasingly out of control. When his wire cutters didn’t work he had to call friends into the back room. Finally the audience saw the ambulance men arrive to disentangle him.
Repenting his extreme behaviours, Wah apologised for demands beyond those with which friends could cope. The clown-prankster doing the thing that he does best, going in too deep and needing help to get out, acknowledges the debt and what he has put the other through.
When viewed through the history of performance, and more recently, relational aesthetics, it’s a complex work. The ‘for whom’ of Wah’s barbed wire piece goes beyond the ruse of “I f’d up on the wire cutters.” Wah was revisiting those 1960s works of risking the body in the contemporary context of the politics of friendship: art as an examination of the demands on the other.
“Art is easy, it’s life that’s hard.” Jon Wah interviewed by author, March, three months before his death on June 29, 2008.
Ann Finegan
This excerpt was originally published in RealTime Issue #87 (Oct-Nov 2008).
Dressing, 2008