It’s not a Place, It’s a Shape

Aug 1, 2019, an email from Andy to Piibe: […] Nice to hear from you. Last week I went to a park near Chelsea to see a butoh performance, where a 3 year old girl repeatedly wiggled away from her mother and tried to join the dance of the almost unmoving performers. I was too slow to record it, even though she kept on going back multiple times. […] Andy Männik is a 85-year old dance loving carpenter in New York City who became one of the founders of the avant-garde art space The Kitchen. It was established in 1971 when video and sound artist couple Steina and Woody Vasulka got together with Andy to establish a space for performance and nascent video art experiments. Andy and I met six years ago and bonded over shared love for contemporary dance. Before getting involved with The Kitchen Andy toured as a carpenter with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. As the only morning people in the group Andy and Cage became good friends over breakfasts and shared a sensibility of looking for chance, unexpectedness and untamed moments that would make an artwork truly alive. 

Like a small child repeatedly joining butoh dancers in a performance. To explore what these notions mean to Andy, I proposed to him a game – a series of situations in New York City in front of the camera, that are setups for chance revelations, frameworks for improvisations, moments for something new to emerge: I ask Andy to join me in butoh dance class that I have practiced for years and that we have seen many performances of together. Andy thinks he can not dance. He is trying to teach me some woodwork – his craft that he would like to pass on. We go on a quest to make the best pasta carbonara, hunting down the recipes of all the famous NYC chefs whose barcounters he has built over the years. We organise a dinner party with friends, dress up and play a maffia game where participants personas and real-life personalities start to mix. We go on a film set in Bushwick where Andy is an extra as a Serbian peasant in the 1950’s. After he talks about his characters history that starts to mix with his childhood memories of Estonia and US army service in France in 1957. These scenes are partly preplanned, but the outcome of them will be left to chance and revealed as they unfold. Throughout the film they are juxtaposed with scenes of archival footage from the Kitchen in 1970s. Andy and his peers filmed performances and directed happenings for the camera. The material quality of the early video will be one of the visual elements of the film contrasting with the contemporary digital footage, as the New York of Andy’s youth contrasts with the current city. We learn how he became the background force, facilitator and a friend of many significant figures in the avant-garde, never becoming an artist