Life was work and also a performance

I perform in art time and in real time, and you can't tell the difference — no one knows how to separate a real act from an art act in my work. 

— Tehching Hsieh

Memory Piece, by Lisa Ko, covers the past, present, and future, with each major section focusing on one of a trio of lifelong friends: respectively, Giselle, the performance artist; Jackie, the techy; and Ellen, the activist. They met as teenagers, bonded over a barbecue.

Giselle's life starts to come into focus for her when she hears about a performance piece that can only be Tehching Hsieh's Rope Piece (for which I will be forever grateful this book introduced me to).

She could not make her mother happy yet felt responsible for her mother's unhappiness. Her coping mechanism was to treat everything like it was a situation, but her performance self and real self had become indistinguishable. Work was a performance; life was work and also a performance. It wasn't that she needed to wait for the perfect idea or invent something new. Instead, she recognized how she could shape her life into the performance itself.

(Perhaps I should treat my life this way: perform as an employee, perform as a writer, perform as a doting daughter, etc. to the best of my ability. Fake it till I make it.)

This is the most interesting section of the book for me — its exploration of art, time, labour, intention, context, posterity.

After months of writing her memories, Giselle had begun to see everything she did as future memory. The mundane could be fabulous; everything became expansive. This made her more daring, because when you saw life through the lens of potential nostalgia, even difficult events could carry the smallest element of fondness for having survived them.

(I think we do this every time we snap a photo.)

In the spirit of archiving the everyday, Jackie pioneers some blog software, but grapples with data management and the battle between democratization and turning a profit. When the dot-com bubble bursts, some of her moral grappling is alleviated. 

But. The novel as a whole doesn't really work for me. It's giving writer workshop. A couple linguistic anachronisms jarred me out of the story (young women were not calling each other "dude" in the early 1990s; similarly "vibe" and "hook up"  appear with clear 2020s usages). It describes the old women of 2040 as if they were the old women of yesteryear. 

Most significantly, I don't understand how we get to that future from here. It's a housing crisis taken to the extreme, compounded by constant surveillance and border checks. Despite the known evils of gentrification, real-estate speculation, property-flipping and vacation rentals, construction industry and municipal corruption, and plain old greed, it doesn't feel right for Ellen's story as a squatter fighting eviction to end up as it does. (At some point I figured that Y2K had transpired as the apocalyptic event some feared it would be. Except even in the novel's reality we know it didn't.) And I'm a little disappointed that aspects of Ellen's alternative living — community building, recycling and waste management, dumpster diving, rooftop-gardening — weren't more fleshed out. 

But, admirably, this novel shows how three women manage to sidestep capitalism. A little.

Giselle said she had stopped identifying as an artist, but she still worked. Art work is work, it's labor. So is working in a café. It's all the same thing.