Vanishing as a Performance     

GDES 692 Seminar

Performance is not always only about showing up on the stage. Sometimes, the vanishing is also a part of the performance.

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We are so used to perceive the existent objects. As time passes, we become indifferent and start to forget these objects. In my mind, monuments are something in memory of those historical heroes. Human use tools to create the shape of different kinds of strong materials and change them to statues of those famous deceased heroes. Erecting monuments is a ritual behavior that gives those dead heroes another new life. They are able to live and exist in our world permanently, our alive people have the opportunity to get the better understanding of their history.

However, the long history witnessed the change of the function of monuments. They start to become a part of decoration facilities in our city. Every day we pass by these statues in street, pars, school... but we are so busy that we always ignore the existence of them, they physically exist in the world, but they vanished in our mind.



Last year I did a research project about public's perception of five monuments in Richmond. I collected the perceptional data through the Yes-No questionaries in the spot near these monuments. The results show that the statues of Lee and Stuarts gain more attention and perception from the public. (about half of the participant people know their name) Others, however, facing an embarrassing situation. Only a few people know their name or the history behind these monuments.



I realized the physically vanishing is something that can wake up our insensible perception on the existing objects. My interest is about how to use the visual vanishing as a way to execute a performance.





Most of the magic shows are about visual vanishing. From small scale, the magician can make a tiny red ball disappear from his moving hands. From large scale, a beauty can easily vanish from a huge box, an elephant disappearing in a park in front of a bunch of audiences. When I watched the monument removal live video, it reminds me of the scene that David Copperfield used his magic power to remove the statues of liberty on tv when I was a child. I know that's just a magic show, the status is always there, but when David pull down the curtain and the statues vanished in the dark night, I was so shocked. Facing the empty dark space, I tried to remember and depict the image and details of the status which was at the same place couple minutes before. From then on, I remember that there is a statue of liberty who is wearing the crown and holding a book and a torch in New York, and once disappeared from the world for minutes. The visual vanishing created an unexpected watching experience for the audiences.



There are many ways to create the visual vanishing in the real and digital world.

1. Vanishing by covering

Using a barrier to block the eyesight to the object is the most common approach. The barrier is a surface in between the audience and the object. Just like the handkerchief most magicians usually use to cover their hand.

The various scale and material of the surface create the different experience for the audience. I am interested in the approach that people use a different surface to cover and hide the monuments. In Charlottesville, the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, covered with a black tarp, stands in Emancipation Park. The huge dark black surface is totally an artificial existence in the natural park. The rough and flexible tarp attaching on the monument creates a lot of creases on the surface and make it looks like a discordant sculpture in the park.

City workers arrived at Linn Park with large wooden walls and nail guns to cover the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on orders from Birmingham Mayor Williams Bell. Compared to the black tarp surface, the huge black color wood stands around the monuments, which visually cohesive to the original vertical monuments. It's interesting that the wood didn't cover the whole monument, it just covers the pedestal part of the monument. The workers used four gigantic wood boards to build up a black box to block the text information about the confederate on the pedestal. Without the text context and meaning, the monument becomes a pure public artwork. The function of the monument changed from memorizing to decoration

The mirror is the most common tool for creating the illusion in the magic show. In Karyn Olivier’s work The Battle, she built out a temporary acrylic mirror to encase the monument as a way to bring people closer to one another, their surroundings, and their living histories. The acrylic mirror surface gives the monument a magic power to vanish in the park. unlike the black tarp and the wood board, the acrylic mirror material made the monument became a surreal and isolated artwork in the park, just like a magic show happened on the stage. The most successful part of the installation is that it invited the public to engage in the work. The mirror material made the spectacular monument become approachable and tangible. The surface is a gateway between inside and outside, real and surreal.



01. Black Tarp on the Rober Lee Statues, Charlottesville
02.Wood board on the Confederate Monument, Birmingham
03. Acrylic Mirror on Battle of Germantown Memorial, Philadelphia

Covering -->















2.Vanishing by removing

Moving is the most direct approach to vanishing. Just like the vanishing red ball in the magician 's hand. The most important and tricky part is not about the disappearing objects, but the unnoticeable moving motion. The city of Baltimore removed all four of its Confederate statues on Tuesday night and into the early morning Wednesday. I am interested in what did the city’s mayor, Catherine Pugh (D) said that “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could.” Everything happened just like a magic show.










3.Vanishing in the dark.

From human's perspective, the existence of object mainly depends on what we see. Light is the most important medium to make things visible, without it, everything disappears in the endless dark world. I am interested in how did artist manipulate the light to execute visual performance.


In David Parsons' unforgettable signature stroboscopic tour-de-force, Caught, He features a solo dancer defying gravity and flying above the stage. At the climax of the performance, the stroboscopic light created a sequence of dark scenes on the stage. During each one second dark scene, everything vanishes from the stage. The transitory vanishing created the anxious and breathless watching experience for the audiences. The performance was described by one critic as "one of the great pieces of recent times."


Caught, David Parsons, 1982

4.Vanishing by degrading resolution

In Hito Steyerl's video work"how to not be seen", she mentioned that resolution determines visibility. Whatever reason not captured by resolution is invisible. Pixel is the unit to compose the digital visual world. When the resolution is degraded, the object starts to be ambiguous and eventually be simplified to squares pixel in the digital world behind the screen. The ambiguous between visible and invisible gives audiences a lot of imagination about the hidden content. The vanishing performance on the virtual stage is different than the physical vanishing in the real world. It is a graduate changing process of being illegible instead of being invisible.

Just like the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter' world, being vanished is always a magical imagination. Vanishing as a performance, the magic happened. Artists are like the magician, using various approaches to execute vanishing in the different medium. They made the audiences believed in what they see. For me, that is all about the magic of art.