Lisa Tan | Mere Document
Beverly had taken me on in her retirement because she was interested in the Asian American psyche (her words). She was married to a poet, and I suppose that’s how she ended up living in a loft in Westbeth. I once saw her husband duck behind their sofa, hiding from me as I made my way past their living room to the office where she held our weekly sessions. Everything in the loft was thoroughly lived in—most of all Beverly herself—she was ancient, one of Westbeth’s early residents, many of whom were/are art world luminaries: Lorraine O’Grady, Hans Haacke, Diane Arbus, but most of the artists, writers, dancers, musicians, filmmakers, activists, are not as readily known.
Therapy is good, if for nothing else, than for the ritual it creates outside of work. Westbeth had the symbols to lend by way of its tenant’s doors. The corridors became a kind of processional walkway and a yellow triangle on Beverly’s door consecrated each session. She wore the same thing: leather pants, a silk shirt, a potent red lip. She’d sometimes use ‘fuck’ as a response to my stories, and she called the guy I was dating—the one I’d end up moving to Sweden for—‘the Swiss.’
Beverly’s daughter was a dancer. She had worked with Merce Cunningham, who I’d occasionally see, by then in a wheelchair. His company’s studio was on the 11th floor. Once, Lisa Oppenheim and I poked around up there and filmed on 16mm. Although I’ve long suspected that my friend was humoring me. I thought I’d finally found an excuse for the analogue, since Westbeth itself was analogue to the core. It originally housed Bell Labs where early broadcast and communication technology was developed. In 1968 Richard Meier redesigned the building into affordable housing for artists, inaugurating the first work-live lofts in the country.
Neither the footage that Lisa and I took then nor the pictures I’ve taken over the years ended up becoming anything. Some things resist being made into art, or art of a certain order. There’s just nothing more to fabulate. What takes hold instead is mere document.
Lisa Tan is an artist and educator based in Stockholm. She works with video, photography, text, installation, and other gestures. Her own experiences of desire, loss and otherness, serve as drivers for explorations into consciousness, the formation of individual subjectivity, and the role that different representations play in shaping a person’s relationship to the world and to others. She regularly draws from literature and the history of photography.
Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions and screenings at institutions such as Moderna Museet(Stockholm), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With) (Rotterdam), MIT List Center (Cambridge), Kunsthall Trondheim, ICA Philadelphia, Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Tabakalera International Center for Contemporary Culture (San Sebastian), Contemporary Art Gallery CAG (Vancouver), and Artists Space (New York). Tan’s work was presented in the 11th Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA) (2021), osloBIENNALEN First Edition (2019-2020), ever elusive, Transmediale festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017), Why Not Ask Again?, the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), Surround Audience, the Triennial exhibition at the New Museum (2015).
Her work is in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Malmö Konstmuseum, the City of Oslo’s public art collection, Coleção Moraes-Barbosa, São Paulo, and Artium the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz.
Mere Document was originally drafted for Maria Lind’s instagram.