Some notes on ‘12 Seconds’, by Jon Sack

For those of you who could make it to last Friday’s opening of Notstand, and viewed the performance of ‘12 Seconds’, I feel it necessary to issue a statement, and some thoughts about it from my perspective.  For those of you who missed it, I’ll describe here what it entailed (as well as putting some photos of it on the website soon):

To begin with, I had other installation/performance ideas I wanted to explore.  But I realized that I might never get the same opportunity to stage this again in another context.  Basically, it’s an idea I had around the time of my final show for my MA at Goldsmiths, but I felt not only did I have too much going on already at the time, my tutors would frown (read: would probably fail me) if I carried out this performance.  It involves waterboarding, a form widely recognized as tortured and widely practiced.  But as the idea lay dormant for several years, several new layers of ideas merged with the original concept.  At its core is to invite people to pour water over me as I am hooded and strapped onto a board. 

 I was deeply intrigued by a performance I read about around the time of my MA show, but can’t remember who did it or any other specifics about it.  In fact, it exists in my memory as a malleable, probably fictitious and warped description of a performance I thought maybe Chris  Burden or Vito Acconci had done.  Through subsequent research, the closet thing that I can find to my memory of the performance was one by Vito Acconci called ‘Claim’ (http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?CLAIMEXCER), where he was lodged in a stairwell of a gallery, blindfolded , swinging a crowbar, repeating to himself such utterings as ‘I want to be alone’.  There was a cctv camera trained on him, beaming his image into the gallery space, a bait to entice people into the stairwell, which when they did, he swing violently and blindly at them, driving them back up the stairs.

The performance from my memory consists of people entering either a house, or a gallery, and one by one, are invited down a stairwell into a dark basement.  They finally encounter the artist, who conducts some type of interview with them, asking such questions as ‘why did you come here?’, ‘what did you expect of this performance?’, ‘what do you expect of artists?’.  In any case, it was a very personal experience, and rested firmly on word of mouth hype and secrecy about it (I believe no one knew what the performance was going to be beforehand) and the ‘aura’ of the artist.

Now, add to this Christopher Hitchens.  He was invited last spring by Vanity Fair magazine to participate in a waterboarding session, as the ‘boardee’.  He accepted.  Now, for those of you who might be unfamiliar with Hitchens, his latest bromide was a book against religion called ‘God is Not Great’, and is widely lauded and despised for his views on the Iraq war, for which he is an apologist for, arguing the neo con, neo imperialist project as a just liberal interventionist war for the liberation of a people.  He widely and roundly condemns the anti war movement.  Anyway, so he was bundled off to what I imagine is the Blackwater facility in North Carolina, was waterboarded, and deems it torturous indeed (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808).  You’ll notice I borrowed quite heavily from the video and photos of his experience to create my mise en scene.

The other element to dovetail into this performance was Garry Kasporov’s chess matches against IMB’s Deep Blue computer, which he ultimately was defeated by.

So, after that somewhat lengthy preamble, ‘12 Seconds’ (whose title comes from the comments section on Hitchens’ Youtube video, where some idiot commented something to the effect that he didn’t even last 12 seconds) begins by a chess match between two actors who are in the loft, and whom nobody down below in the party can see.  However, the match is being recorded by a cctv camera, and relayed to a monitor in one of the rooms below.  To my surprise, people were actually following the game.  At about 8pm, people, one at a time,  climbed up a wooden ladder into my loft, which is also my studio, after signing a legal document saying that upon returning from the loft and into a crowd of curious friends, they would not discuss it until the performance was over.  Upon entering the loft, they are bombarded by a soundtrack of horrible cheese, (thank you Than), bright lights, and handed a sheet of paper that reads: ‘The artist is on the board.  He wants you to pour water over his face until he signals to stop.  This is a form of torture known as waterboarding.’

From there, they are shown the pitcher of water by one of 2 masked facilitators, who pull a towel tight around my face while the water is being poured.  It stops when I signal, by dropping a size D battery from my hand.  In corner is another masked person, who is making large drawings of every encounter. Now, roughly a dozen people took part in the performance.  And of those, 4 did not go through with pouring water on me.

Firstly, this is torture.  It’s something that needs unequivocal stating as there are inevitably some uncomfortable questions that arise with a performance like this, such as, can it be torture when he’s just layed there and let about a dozen people do this to him?  What I don’t want to happen is to de-value the nature of seriousness around the phenomenon of waterboarding - this isn’t a game, this isn’t just some frat boy hazing ritual or an outtake from Jackass, and I shudder somewhat when people have said I am brave to put myself through this, as I feel like the thin divide between bravery and foolishness or stupidity has been obscured even further.

What it feels like:  as Hitchens puts it correctly, this isn’t ‘boarding’, it’s ‘watering’: the board is the instrument, not the method.  The first time it happened (incidently, there were no ‘wet’ runs of this beforehand), it was a shock to my system.  This is not a simulated drowning.  It is drowning.  Every time you try to breath, water is entering, you swallow it, it flows through your nose, through your sinuses, into your throat.  I would try to spit it out to no avail.  Same with holding my breath:  at some point, you need to come for air.  But I had the benefit of handlers who were very concerned with my well being, who would stop everything had I said so.  Every time I let the battery drop from my hand, one of them would ask me in my ear if I was ok, do I want to stop.  At some point, I think during the Air Supply song, I was crying.  I wasn’t sure why, but there was an emotional surge where everything took on greater significance, and greater distance, even though I knew that distance was a false one, as I was not in the hands of acutal torturers, and would again in a matter of some time be downstairs, sipping rum, trying to warm up.

I’m writing this on my lunch break, I’ll continue in a little bit.