Record performance Zhang Huan blurs the line between performance and "fine" art at the MFA BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	My Boston + "Seeds of Hamburg" Through January 16 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

All day the sky had been threatening to rain from a sunless overcast, but only when several hundred people gathered at 6 pm a week ago last Monday on the front lawn of the MFA’s west wing for Zhang Huan’s performance of My Boston did the showers start. Then there were the badly behaved dogs. My Boston began with nine dog owners marching their leashed canines — mostly pedigrees, with a couple of mutts — several times around a multitiered mountain of used books.

The processional, given ceremonial importance by a loud rhythmic chant coming from a nearby speaker, began as orderly but quickly deteriorated as one of the huskies attempted to devour the Boston terrier just ahead of it. Held back by only a rope collar and an owner who weighed little more than her dog, the husky — and the impending bloodbath — distracted attention from the apparition a few yards away. A naked man, Zhang Huan, was emerging from the surrounding hedges. Hairless, muscular, and dark, he looked like a huge salamander as he slowly crawled along the manicured lawn, gripping the grass as if he were scaling a rock face. He moved slowly for a reason: tied to each of his ankles was a six-foot trail of books.

Eventually the dog march stopped, and each of the owners leashed his or her animal to a preassigned bundle of volumes at the base of the book mountain. The animals were supposed to remain there for the duration, but the terrier had other ideas, as did the retriever. After several attempts to secure the terrier to its books, the owner finally allowed it to sit in her lap for the rest of the show. The retriever barked and reared for the remaining half-hour.

Having traversed the lawn on his belly, Zhang lay on his back at the foot of a flagpole, whereupon what looked like two art-school students hurriedly covered his body in books; they reminded me of kids you see scrambling to retrieve tennis balls at the US Open. Slowly and with effort, Zhang stood up, expressionless and poised, and began shimmying up the flagpole, a feat all the more remarkable because of the downpour and the lengths of books that remained attached to his ankles. When Zhang reached the halfway point of the metal pole, the trailing books were entirely off the ground. The artist paused. In that pause lived the second instance of a genuinely dramatic image — the first having been his original emergence from the hedges — and I found myself thinking how much more engaging My Boston will be as a document after the fact than it was as an experience.

Robert Frost used to say that the test of a poet wasn’t in the delivery of great lines so much as in the strength of the connective tissue that got you to them. Zhang Huan, at least on this occasion, devoted little attention to the connective tissue. The casual clothes of the dog walkers and student helpers, not to mention the comportment of the animals, seemed inconsistent with the ceremonial, ritual nature of the work. And the comportment of the animals obviously had been left to chance. Meanwhile, other elements were predictable, such as the huge green bound book at the top of the pile with a large circular hole cut into its middle. It was inevitable that when Zhang got to the top of his mountain, he’d stick his head through the hole and wear the book like a (dog?) collar.

The haphazard narrative made My Boston less a performance than a photo shoot. When Zhang lay on a lower tier of the mound of books, and his assistants stacked volumes on his prostrate body, it was nothing we hadn’t already seen. There was no suspense when "smoke" poured out from the surrounding books while he lay motionless and weighed down; it was simply another element in a documentary project that an audience had been invited to witness.

Both the strengths and shortcomings of My Boston raise interesting questions about the temporal center of Zhang’s art. Is My Boston a performance — like theater or music, an event unfolding in real time — or an "object" — like a painting, photograph, or, for that matter, a poem? Zhang, who studied painting and didn’t take up performance until 1992, remains, ironically, closer to his former studio than to his current stagings: his art isn’t so much concerned with experience as with the record of that experience.

I’m not sure I’ll seek out another Zhang Huan performance anytime soon, but I will make it a point to see the next photo installation. His performance of My Boston occurred in conjunction with an exhibit of photographs taken of a performance he staged in 2002 in Hamburg, Germany. It would be a good idea, I think, not to read the wall text that accompanies the 12 large-scale color photographs in the Foster Gallery that compose "Zhang Huan: Seeds of Hamburg" until after you’ve taken in just the pictures.

A crouching male figure who appears to have been tarred but not feathered is attempting to enter a screened-in, shed-size structure containing a pyramid of plywood boxes and a leafless tree. He looks like a burglar given form by the night. In the second picture, he has entered the cage, and is upright and closer to the foreground; what looked at first like tar now looks like a body suit of black pebbles adhered to his otherwise naked body. It is an image at once simple and impenetrable, the deliberateness of his posture and the sobriety of his facial expression at odds with the absurdity of the circumstance: a naked man in an aviary. It’s difficult to tell what’s going on, but the artist’s purposefulness, his gravity and sense of direction, make that beside the point. Zhang’s ability to remain unflappable and authoritative while at the same time courting ridicule is testimony to his power as a personality, if not as a performer.

By the third frame, the story starts to unfold, as an assistant releases the first of what the press materials tell us will be 28 "doves" (pigeons, really, but technically rock doves), which then feed on our protagonist (the tar is actually honey; the pebbles, birdseed). Zhang lies on the floor of his makeshift structure while the birds perch on his skin and peck off his temporary body suit.

Zhang’s physical presence plays a central role in the resonant poses he strikes and the durability of his imagery, and that presence is enhanced both by the strength of his body and by its complete exposure. One of the tensions that Zhang’s nakedness induces is the exalted vulnerability of power — broad shouldered and fit as a gymnast, he’s nevertheless exposed to the elements and prey to possible mishap. I can’t be the only one to have winced, especially after the kennel-run-amuck beginning, when, at the end of My Boston, an unleashed (and fortunately calm and well-behaved) Labrador retriever met the artist’s genitalia at muzzle level. And in at least two of the pictures in "Seeds of Hamburg," the rock doves feed from the area of his crotch, introducing if not pain, at least danger.

At the far edges of a number of the photos, we can see audience members who witnessed Zhang’s version of dinner theater — the shadowy back of a head, a man taking a photograph. They could have been edited out for a cleaner, more formal appearance, and it’s telling that they weren’t. Zhang Huan’s unique stamp as pictorial recording artist lies partly in his requirement of a live audience, not so much to perform for, in the usual sense, as to be charged by. The stateliness and mystery he delivers to his enigmatic tableaux vivants is a function of those onlookers — they’re evidence of the "live" event, and if they weren’t necessary, why bother? And though he may not be able to deliver the drama of his vision directly in the live performance, he makes up for it in the poetic pictures he leaves behind.