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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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True Love Is Yet To Come, 2005, performance commissioned by PERFORMA for PERFORMA05. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of the artist and PERFORMA.
Last November, Jesper Just’s True Love is Yet to Come opened to a standing-room-only crowd in the large white box of a space that is the Stephan Weiss Studio in New York. As a red curtain parted on the raised stage of the custom-built theater, set in the gallery as one might expect for a giant Punch and Judy show, the tinkling notes of a music box filled the space and the figure of a young man dressed in a white suit was revealed turning in the air: a lifelike, life-size projection, like a hologram. As the Ink Spots’ orchestration of the song “Whispering Leaves” rose to a crescendo, Baard Owe, of Lars Von Trier movie fame, sang to the brightly spotlit youth (Johannes Lilleore) and, at song’s end, tried to embrace his ethereal body. For almost 30 minutes, the interchange between projected figures on stage, including a remarkable sequence with 20 members of the Finnish Screaming Men’s Choir and Owe, the only live performer, mesmerized the audience, many of whom returned again and again during the performance’s eight-show run to witness the seemingly inexplicable magic of hovering life-size people and to listen to the touching songs of Owe, as he sang of lost love in the rain and sank in the end into a virtual watery wasteland.
True Love was the outcome of an unforgettable moment in late 2004, when I previewed Bliss and Heaven, 2004, a video by then-30-year-old Danish artist Jesper Just, in the back room of the Perry Rubenstein Gallery, a month before Just’s first show in New York. The eight-minute video began with a young blond man emerging from a field of wheat, stepping into the back of a trailer truck and being transported, as if in a dream, through the truck into a brilliantly lit theater where the burly truck driver, silver tresses and long silk scarf streaming behind him (propelled by a fan), belted Olivia Newton John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting” in a deep baritone. My instant response was to commission Just to create an opera for PERFORMA05, the first visual art performance biennial, then still in its early planning stages. By the following summer, Just had taken up the challenge, and in a very short timeframe, would storyboard a performance, shoot a film, record a sound track, and, with PERFORMA, plan his stage debut in New York. Visa complications delayed the arrival of Just and Owe from Copenhagen, who made it to the Weiss Studio with only 24 hours to spare before opening curtain, during which time Owe would step onto the newly constructed stage for the first time (only a small model of the stage existed before then). Artist, performer and technicians had mere hours to prepare before doors opened on November 3. Just’s achievement in creating this lyrical work with its mix of sadness and elation, which, previous to opening night, existed in two-dimensional form only, set a new standard for the very idea of artists’ performance, establishing at the same time the debut of the PERFORMA Biennial and its mission to inspire new directions for performance in the twenty-first century.
