Caution responds to performance art. Here, the man reappears on the prestigious oval lawn in front of the library, where students walk by to go to classes. A normal day on an American campus. Nothing is likely to happen, and for a few minutes, that is just what you see, from the distant height of a rooftop, as well as from the frontal and side positions on the ground. The tiny figure walking the middle of the path opposite the high viewing point, strikes as slightly out of place: the gap is put in place, visually. It is also put in place in the performance, as he walks faster than others, as if he had a purpose.

He begins to unroll red-and-white European caution tape, routinely used to block off areas that represent a danger for the public. He knots the end of that tape to a tree. With fierce determination – or is it resigned repetition? – he screens off an area. First, between trees, so as to block off the busiest path that leads to the center of campus. Repetition, constituting a dense sculptural wall of bright colors, establishes the hallmark of the series as video installation. Then, he begins a somewhat longer walk over the lawn to the other side of the oval. After attaching the tape to a tree there, he returns.

Color, sculpture, and performance vie for attention as the kick-off media, measured against video’s power to make surface stick on the retina. Some of the images ask how it is that space can get overruled by intervention. When the people behind the tape lose their visibility, or their faces, for example, one can wonder how abstract art – here, blocks of bright red and clear white – takes over figuration as if it had always been lodged at the latter’s heart. Or, whether the walking man is the sculpture, or is it the tape waving in the wind? One wonders, too, about the blandness of the public space before, and its new look after the intervention. And of course, the close-ups of the action are fundamentally different from the long shots, just as the actions differ.

The walk across the lawn is bolder, and longer, and more incomprehensible than the earlier, shorter itinerary. His walk is steady, remains faster than “normal,” and his face remains unreadable. At one point, he is himself inside the space he is creating, turning sculpture inside out. But this being inside is only for the performer; everyone else is kept out. This inside-outside dynamic creates a new gap, between expectation and the small change effected upon it by this stranger. Instead of protecting the people from accidents, the caution tape pushes them out of the space they consider legitimately theirs.
When the act is completed, he turns around and walks away, just as briskly as his arrival stride, trailing the last end of the tape behind him. Mid-path he tosses the remaining spool into the bushes, and he is gone. The image from the roof shows the difference he leaves behind. He has come and gone, but the space remains definitively altered.

Mieke Bal