XYZ OUTLET #23: Nicolas Vass // Re-constructing Hasil: a performance by The Hasil Adkins Traditional Ensemble // Tuesday 6 December // 20:00 - 21:00XYZ Outlet continues, “DRY: No drinks, no party, just an art quickie”. On Tuesday 6 December we are presenting, in conjunction with the 3rd Athens Biennale 2011 MONODROME, Nicolas Vass’ work Re-constructing Hasil: a performance by The Hasil Adkins Traditional Ensemble.
XYZ Outlet will be open to the public for one hour only, as always, between 20:00 and 21:00.
About Re-constructing Hasil: a performance by The Hasil Adkins Traditional Ensemble.
Re-constructing Hasil is a tribute to Hasil Adkins (193? – 2005), a one man band who began performing in the Southern USA in the 1950s. Born in West Virginia during the Great Depression, Adkins’ performance style, where all instruments and vocals are played by him alone, is based on a mistake he made as a young boy when he thought that the music he heard on the radio was performed by a lone musician. The motif of people traveling across the U.S. carrying their very few worldly possessions on their back, characteristic of the Depression period as narrated in books like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, recurs in Adkins’ self-schooled, self-made and self-reliant form of musical performance. Arms, legs, vocal melodies, harmonies, beats, guitar riffs and harmonica croons emerge energetically from the performance of a single man.
The Hasil Adkins Traditional Ensemble’s re-enactment of Adkins’ one man band began in 2007, and has continued through a recession that repeatedly references the stock market crash of 1929. Where Adkins may be seen as the quintessential example of the self-made man that is at the heart of the American Dream, the Ensemble's performance is not intended as fuel for the myth we currently hear from governments trying to flog austerity programmes and so-called 'creative economies': that in times of hardship superior forms of individual creativity emerge. Rather, Re-construcing Hasil is performed as a tribute to the pains and the actions of the hyper, multi-tasking, infinitely flexible, auto-didact and excessively self-reliant individual touted as the ideal type of the contemporary worker and survivor of a dismantled welfare state. Furthermore, the Ensemble performing within the realm of contemporary art highlights the relationship between this virtuosic, self-propelling and self-organising worker and the contemporary artist who is in many ways its prototype.
About Nicolas Vass:
Nicolas Vass is an Argentinian artist born in Buenos Aires in 1977 and currently lives and works in London. His work is performance, drawing and text based, investigating the dynamics, tensions and politics between individual and collaborative work. In the past few years he has been working with several collectives.
