Reckoning with Wreckage: The Work of Nancy Tam

In biology, moulting is the process by which many species of animal shed a part of their bodies, often an external layer of skin or fur or feathers or, as with arthropods, an entire exoskeleton. This can happen annually at specific times of year, or over the course of an animal’s life cycle. Humans do not naturally moult, although not for lack of trying. Loofah sponges and pumice stones, exfoliating face scrubs, micro-derma rollers, chemical peels: we have invented all manner of products and processes to slough off our dead skin cells and attempt, however momentarily, to cheat time. And to the extent that, as human animals, we are now evolving along with our technologies, it might be that we eventually do away with the need for bodies altogether, uploading our consciousness to a computer in a version of what theorists of superintelligence call “the singularity.”At the end of “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin, citing a “recent biologist,” writes of the history of humankind as “a monstrous abbreviation” within the larger timescale of what we would now call geologic “deep time.”1 That is, to the extent that it is always the present moment that, as human actors, we experience most insistently and urgently, we would do well to remember that such moments are but blips in the history of the universe. On the one hand, this might seem to absolve us of taking responsibility for, or preventative action against, our climate emergency. But this is only if we think of time as continuous and linear and the present as a simple transition between past and future. For Benjamin, precisely because of its intensity of experience (what he would call its Messianism), the present is at once a point of standstill and a point of potential rupture. In other words, it is a place from which we can blast apart historical axioms (noting, for example, that a belief in human exceptionalism is what, despite our abridged existence, has wrought so much damage to our planet in so little time) and rewrite the scripts by which we might move forward from now (which means recognizing that the real catastrophe is accepting the continuation of things as they are). In the space between standstill and rupture, time is momentarily suspended, and change becomes possible. Something similar happens during the process of moulting. And in performance.In . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . ., which was remounted at Kitchener-Waterloo’s Open Ears Festival in June 2022, the Vancouver-based sound and performance artist Nancy Tam takes up this idea of betweenness in the form of a durational performance installation and immersive soundscape that posits the body’s architecture, along with its ghostly traces, as a site from which to reflect on the intersection between an abstracted sense of historical time and one’s physical experience of material, fleshly existence. Over the course of the performance, which can range from several hours to an entire day, Tam, working with her collective A Wake of Vultures, as well as composer and sound artist Charlie Cooper, wraps her naked body from head to toe in plastic cling wrap, encasing herself in a human chrysalis, and also mummifying herself as an artifact of the present. Once this process is complete, she then carefully cuts away the protective materials in an act of forced moulting, leaving behind an eerie gossamer shell of her body’s shape that she illuminates with a small tea lamp. She then starts all over again, sculpting and then shedding more than a dozen second skins whose placement within the performance space accrues additional sensory and affective meaning with their multiplication. They are past selves and discarded avatars, rejected likenesses and poor clones, cast off inheritances and future hauntings, the dead and how we must learn to live with them. Taking its inspiration (and title) from Benjamin’s ninth thesis in “On the Concept of History,” in which the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus (1920) prompts Benjamin to liken historical progress to an accumulation of ruins, . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . asks how we commemorate our daily and hourly survival of a system that posits capitalism as the end of history. What are the rituals—as women, as minorities, as queers (or, in Tam‑s case, as a queer minority woman)—by which we account for, and honor, the work of living as forging connections between past and present, rather than simply seeking to reproduce the next interchangeable instant?Appropriately, Tam foregrounds this through the labour of her performance. The homeliness of her materials—plastic wrap, tape, a pair of scissors—belies the extreme physical effort that goes into the creation of each of her sculptural selves. Beginning with her feet and legs, moving to her torso and then head, and finishing with her arms, the process of wrapping her body, taping down the loose ends of plastic wrap, and then cutting everything away can take Tam anywhere from thirty to fifty minutes, depending on the time of day, and her energy level. Indeed, over the course of the documentation of the Open Ears performance, we frequently see Tam taking rests, massaging her limbs and neck, letting down and then re-pinning her hair. For most folks, the labor of living is indeed exhausting. But in our post-Fordist society, the alienating conditions of much of that labor are made invisible and deemed immaterial. By repurposing a common household item that is not just paradigmatic of how such labor is additionally gendered within domestic contexts but also tied to the inequitable financial distribution of petro-capital across different class strata (for much of its history, an “everlasting” and non-biodegradable but relatively cheap means to preserve leftover food), Tam deftly comments on the means by which different groups of people are able to leave their imprint on this world. To this end, it strikes me that . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . is an ideal performance to mark our slow emergence from Covid-induced lockdown. On the one hand, the metaphor of moulting points to the shedding of old habits or patterns, and the re-invention of work and life routines, that for many was a hallmark of the pandemic pause (although sometimes chosen and sometimes imposed). At the same time, in looking at the profusion of plastic that ends up littering the stage at the end of the performance, I can’t help thinking of the excess consumer detritus that is one consequence of two years of pandemic buying, with warehouses across North America now filled with panicked or bored customers’ returned items.As with the elasticity of time, so many of us experienced as a consequence of quarantining or sheltering in place over the course of the pandemic, the performative intensity of . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . also ebbs and flows. The sound score by Cooper, composed from improvised material made in response to Tam’s rehearsals, responds to this bodily sense of chronicity, of being at once stuck in and outside of time. Structured as a fixed sixty-minute loop, it progresses through its own peaks and valleys of sonic intensity in ways that are less about cuing Tam’s actions than attuning our sensory experience of them—not least by subtly underscoring rather than layering over the sounds of Tam wrapping and taping her skins. The score’s use of AI-generated text functions in a similar manner. The language we hear is the result of Cooper feeding a range of sacred and secular texts into a software program that then began replicating its own “holy” syntaxes, complete with unique grammatical structures. Seeking out interesting repetitions of phrases, while also paying attention to their aural cadences within the text-to-speech system he was working with, Cooper then included in the score a selection of text that, on the one hand, reads as nonsense, but that we hear as almost oracular or quasi-divine: “We have from the organisms beneath our feet a methodology of experience. From the organisms. Sterile. Sedimentary. So we think. A methodology of experience. Beneath our feet. But to realize this experience, especially in a grim light. When we are aggregates. Is a condition to where. A condition to where. A condition to how. A condition not met. But a condition. Not failed.” As Cooper has himself said, it is as if the skins that Tam is making and shedding are speaking to us, their whispered susurrations at once comforting and disquieting.2Of course, the very properties that make AI so troubling to my university colleagues are also what establish it as an especially generative tool for artists like Tam and Cooper. That is, AI’s ability not just to mimic human cognition, but to learn independently of it, means that it becomes another potential collaborator and compositional partner in the artistic process. In this scenario, the creative application of AI is neither a usurping nor a counterfeiting of human authorship; rather, in a version of Annie Dorsen’s “algorithmic theatre” or Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking,” its aesthetic use forces us to question the exceptionalism of the human agent and the singular meaning and originality of their creative endeavor.3 Instead, our focus shifts to the relationships established between and the social actions set in motion by all the participants (human and non-human, performing and “non-performing”) in the room. As the AI-generated text previously cited posits, and as Tam’s repetitive labor proves, when are we not aggregates of a larger system? A condition not met, in computing as in durational performance, is still a condition, and hardly a failure. Indeed, because the text in the sound score for . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . relieves us of the burden of sense-making and primes us instead to be more open to the conditions of our sensing, the AI elements in the work paradoxically encourage a deeper awareness of the body’s own intelligence. We see the artificial evidence of this in the proliferation of Tam’s illuminated translucent casings, a reminder that the extent to which we are evolving along with our technologies is perhaps best measured not by the ubiquity of human-computer interfaces but by the accumulation of microplastics in our bodily tissue.. . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . was one of two works by Tam showcased at the 2022 Open Ears Festival. The other was Walking at Night by Myself, an eight-channel surround-sound composition and two-person performance conceived by Tam that also features a complex projection design by Wake of Vultures collective member Daniel O’Shea and a movement score by Vancouver dance artist Lexi Vajda. Originally staged in Vancouver in 2018, the piece features two Asian performers (at Open Ears, Jasmine Chen, replacing Tam, and Anjela Magpantay) wearing matching cheongsams, and later black and white shirts and skirts. Their movements to the right and left, backwards and forwards, are accompanied by a live spatialized sound design performed by Tam that is based on original field recordings of her nighttime wanderings around Vancouver’s cityscape. We hear footsteps and the whoosh of traffic and other ambient noises, which are in turn manipulated, distorted, and overlain with electronic music recorded in the studio. As the performers are moving, O’Shea’s strobe-like projections (switching back and forth between vivid color spots and angular monochromatic lines) outline, shade, travel up and down, and create tessellated patterns across their bodies, sometimes isolating or warping body parts, at other times doubling and tripling profiles and magnifying silhouettes. In this way, a noirish moiré effect is enacted acoustically and visually, the sonic interference of amplified rain and binaural beats combining with the abstracted movement and the trompe l’œil nocturnal imagery to compel a series of double takes not just in one’s spectating experience, but also in one’s assimilated cultural references. For example, there is a moment when Magpantay, at this point alone on stage, repeats back and forth what appears to be a simple quarter turn, her body at once moving into and out of, with and against, the luminous vertical white lines O’Shea is just then sending across the stage. The effect, when I first saw it in Vancouver, put me in mind of Canadian visual artist Michael Snow’s iconic “Walking Woman” series (1961–67), an art historical appropriation that in this context blasts open the homogenous and white-supremacist continuum of female representation in visual and performance culture via a reclaiming of the Orientalist femme fatale figure, while also serving as a very material reminder of what it still means for a woman of color to walk by herself at night.To this end, it merits historicizing Tam’s performance of . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . within a larger genealogy of solo-body performance by Asian North American artists. One thinks, in this regard, of the durational performance pieces completed by Tehching Hsieh between 1978 and 2000. Though working to a different temporal scale (diurnal rather than annual), Tam shares with Hsieh an interest in marking and documenting the “doing” of time—whether through time-stamped cards and photographs or time-stamped digital video.4 Even more pertinent, however, are the instructional Fluxus scores of Yoko Ono. Maybe it’s because of the scissors, but when I watch Tam in . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . I can’t help thinking of Cut Piece (1964), the famous work by Ono in which she invited audience members to come up on stage one-by-one and use a pair of fabric shears to cut away a piece of her clothing. Though it wasn’t as such the work in as a of and Cut Piece has up in art history as a work of performance that, as a result of its documentation of the performance, by the which are via is as an of In Tam’s case, she alone has over the in of to the representation of her But it that there are of Cut Piece and . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . that Indeed, to the extent that pieces are with what it on an to as bodies in time and space that at once act and are what would it in the of to works as to think through “the and that this is not to a of by is it, in Tam’s case, to her as I in the ways that Tam, like her audience in the experience of In Tam’s case, this has much to do with the of her piece as a durational and immersive in which the of is by the that audience members must in not just to Tam’s body and its proliferation of ghostly but to each In other words, the bodily experienced by Tam in to an collective is in different ways and to different the we might experience as a result of our looking being in I I not the only audience member to experience the ways in which my as a is not only being but also I this performed Cut Piece times between and and several of the piece other In at and on a rather than the stage, she performed the piece once more in as a in of . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . has several first in the in later the same as part of in in as a work that was included in the performance the at in with Daniel O’Shea as part of the Festival in in 2022 at Open Over the course of its Tam’s work has shedding and its from a to an work and back again, from a that is durational and to one that was a performance and then and and from a sound score composed by Tam to one composed in or in part by invited and Cooper And while it would be a to that the of Tam’s and works in of the it is that for in performance is about and time, about making different times by the of what is in the past into the future. In other words, when time through the affective labor of performance, it along with as for other theorists of in art history and performance is at once an aesthetic form and an that for a not just with the of performance, but with the of experience and this way, of an is by the of its original context and by the for that as with Cut to and change over time for and So with . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . in its was first as a performance, the of Tam’s when she was seeking to her as a composer and sound artist by with of the and of and performance She however, that the piece was not to the temporal and spectating of an as it was at in June Indeed, in its of not just the bodily labor of performance, but the of that . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . . to be over a from to At the same time, the very of the as an in the body’s the of additional performers and Tam, in O’Shea performing in and it to different for me as a documentation of the Open Ears of . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . ., I not just by a sense of Tam past of her performance I also back to the of the which at in of a in one of the and of and I remember that it was very during the and that then as was in the of a And at the and the a vivid I was for the of in Tam and her . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . ., I thinking that the second skins they in their for our and plastic that would at once and our of its their focus on temporal and Benjamin in her on She so in a in which she the of still that for Benjamin an with an old the past not simply as with the and but much like a or performance as an to future In this the live and its through the technologies and of documentation need not be Instead, they or each troubling the of and that in much on Indeed, has so as to that “the act of documenting an as a performance is what it as This is when thinking through Tam’s methodology in the For not only is she documenting her in real time through a performance of moulting, making the of her labor as an agent of and in she also into the performance a documentation of that with and less a in time, of than an to across and over time, with its and its present from a response to the of the Open Ears documentation and the of past live each as to the of my of this work the of the the of history, us to our in the past or while also what can be made to happen when things are So with the of Benjamin’s from which Tam takes her for most of its in as on the of History,” and appears as such in the of by and by But in the began many of Benjamin’s iconic and this one is now to as “On the Concept of In the version I citing by the famous ninth on Angelus upon as on of As with live of Tam’s performance, the one not out the as Benjamin of the of more each an of the and each in but at a the that Tam is a sound I to the as a metaphor through which to not just this of . . . wreckage upon wreckage . . ., but also my of it As has in an there is “a time between what is and what is from being this or to use Benjamin’s is of is an to more to one’s body more carefully in to a This is what Tam has in her own is what I have also to do in in to its