For two performers, four channels, kitchen utensils, and assorted vegetables.
Graphic score and sculptural score; 20 mins duration.
First performed with Reed Wixson at Monk Space, Koreatown, Los Angeles in December 2024.
Score featured in the Yes or NoTation exhibition at Kohta Taidehalli (Helsinki, Finland), July 2025.
Program Notes
To make, to create, to produce: these generative activities, whether in artistic or everyday contexts, must necessarily produce waste. As a performance artwork, Chop, Chop! is a meditation on everyday rituals, and on how these rituals proceed via temporal cycles of production, consumption, and indeed, of waste. Engaging with the lineage of everyday performance art, "Chop, Chop!" recalls Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’ Proposition #1 (1962), which simply reads:
MAKE A SALAD.
Throughout Chop, Chop!, performers prepare a series of vegetables; the repetitive sounds of peeling, chopping, and slicing establish moments of polyrhythmic juxtaposition against the shifting periodicity of the tape track. These various sound sources are heterogeneously spatialised across four asymmetrical channels, blurring the expected audiovisual continuity between gesture and sonic output.
This stylised ritualisation of the quotidian —and moreover, of the typically solitary task of basic food preparation — invites observers to reconsider the interlocking patterns and cycles which characterise their own everyday life. The ritual space of "Chop, Chop!" centres on a collection of unremarkable household plastic vessels, arbitrarily assigned as salad bowl, washtub, and scrap bin. This focal region lies at the junction of two asymmetric tablecloths, both festooned with an interwoven network of colourful vegetal trails, hand-printed with linocut blocks. These textiles serve as both sculpture and score, indicating to performers the order in which they are to retrieve and process the constituent elements of the slaw.
Observers are welcome to move freely throughout the space during the performance.
