The Customer Is Always Wrong

The other day I filled out the Air France online complaints form. It took about 20 minutes because it was very precise about how things were formatted. I submitted the follow up complaint and received this message in response:

Error 500: Request processing failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The validated string is empty

I tried again just now and this time managed to get the following:

This is an automated e-mail, please do not reply.

Dear Mr AITCHISON

Thank you for your message.
The Customer Care department will study your request and will reply at the following address: [email protected]

For a better follow-up of your file, your request has been registered under the reference: 4915781001.
Please quote this number in any correspondence.
Given the unprecedented number of requests we are receiving at the moment following the flight disruptions across Europe and North America caused by weather, we may not be able to handle your communication as quickly as we would normally wish to.

You have our assurance that your message will receive our fullest attention at the earliest opportunity.

We thank you for your patience and understanding in these exceptional circumstances.

Yours sincerely,

Europe Customer Care

The data and information contained in this message may be confidential and subject to professional secrecy and is intended for the exclusive use of the recipient at the address shown above. If you receive this message by mistake, we ask you not to copy, use or disclose it. Please notify this error to the sender immediately and delete this message from your system. Société Air France – Limited company with capital of 1,901,231,625 euros – Bobigny register of companies (France) 420 495 178 – 45, rue de Paris, 95 747 Roissy CDG CEDEX Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij N.V. (also known as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines) is registered in Amstelveen, The Netherlands, with registered number 33014286.

Now this is all pretty standard fare designed to throw you off the trail with the impression that something is being done when actually nothing is nor will be done. What struck me as interesting in the reply however was the bit towards the end where they add that Société Air France is a Limited company with capital of 1,901,231,625 euros. So they have over a billion euros and they are still robbing people like me hand over foot. A curse on them! I heard KLM are opening up a new route Xiamen – Amsterdam at the end of March. I will be able to get my performance in 2 days before they make their first flight. Maybe I should take my performance to Xiamen airport… That would be quite fun.

For some reason quite beyond me I was unable to log onto the a-n site and add a new entry until today. I write this because this sort of unexplained behaviour of technology is quite common here. I cannot say if it is because of technical compatibility issues or something else but all I can say is that placed in this position I do not try too hard to understand why, as an explanation is not likely to be found, and instead I simply work practically.

Spring festival is now over and I am getting back into a work pattern again with language exchanges and some preparations for a performance next Saturday. As ‘The Customer’ is not ready to be shown in public yet I will perform another performance of mine ‘2012’. I was looking over some images of when I did this piece in Beijing in 2009 and I will have to renew some aspects of it, not the least of which is my appearance.

I have been going a bit further into The Customer and in order to break down the idea of using Maxims to structure the performance I broke down the title ‘The Customer Is Always Wrong’ and will use this as a test case. Doing this reminded me that I played some not dissimilar word games when creating the Chinese translation of 2012. What will make The Customer different is their relationship to action, I will be mixing two quite distinct languages of words and actions.

I saw a curious advert the other day which I took home: the playboy babies. I liked it because it was doing something quite similar to what I am doing and it was unclear how knowingly it was doing it. It could look like a misunderstanding of what ‘Playboy’ signifies in the West, taking this two part word at face value, namely ‘PLAY’ and ‘BOY’ to arrive at a picture of two smiling young boys. What is more, the playboy bunny ears could simply be an innocent reference to the new Rabbit year. It could however be far more knowing than this and be working off double meanings. It is rather sleazy however to be using infants and Playboy in the same image and I have to ask myself, if they are indeed doing it deliberately what was the intended message and to whom was it directed? Are they trying to reach out to new generation of Playboy customers, to start them early? The ad is for a home furnishings store so it is all quite inappropriate and unclear. I like this vague quality and I hope to be able to find similarly suggestive combinations, though I will probably leave infants and pornography out of my list of combinations to work with.

Walking along the beach yesterday I had a thought over how to structure the material more in my terms. Maxims. Maybe it is the Confucius book that I am reading at the moment that led me here or maybe it was already there from the start with the title ‘the customer is always wrong’. In any case what is attractive is using a series of maxims that I would write out in Chinese to structure each section of the performance. Each character could have an associated action or object so that when working with the material these would come into play regularly. Admittedly this may lead to somewhat silly consequences if I allow it to go that way and maxims put through google translate can sound pretty daft too. I do want to play with or at least reference those cliches but I am also keen not to get stuck with them so we will see. In any case this feels like progress as it is the first proposition that connects my various elements (stories, images, movements, concepts, language) in an integrated way placing them on the same level rather than allowing one to be subservient to another.

I also arranged the performance a bit more having set a date for it in March and discussed the exhibition that will follow.

This last week I have not had any language exchanges as my partners are in their home towns and with their families for the Spring Festival. So, I’ve concentrated upon the performance’s form a bit more and I’ve hit a tricky and important phase in the making of it. I have been thinking a lot and trying things out and they don’t quite work as clockwork. What I cannot tell from here is whether that is because I still need to get a better grip on my material or whether it is because the basic game I am proposing is not coherent enough. Of course I am hoping it is the former and I am working through some or the ideas in a more practical way to see how they take shape. But I cannot yet tell if I will need to make some larger changes.

My ideas/structure board probably reflects this state of affairs: many things circling around up in the air. There is now a lot of yellow from post it notes, but no simplicity or pattern in the structure yet. There is time to arrive at this, I am not half way through the residency yet, but I will need to start shaping it soon so that I can properly develop my material within the structural form I choose. Of particular concern here is anything for which I have to speak Mandarin. For example, I translated and then printed my KLM/Air France letter of complaint and tried reading it out loud. I had the sense that my broken and phonetic way of speaking must be quite painful and frustrating to listen to for any length of time. I will get some slack as a Westerner making an effort but I should not exploit this and allow that to be an excuse for a dull performance. It is clear to me that in order to make the performance have some rhythmic variation I will need to be able to speak a bit more quickly or else limit my talking. I have however found the tone and relationship to the public that I want to work with; it should be clear that I am not sure about what I am doing and saying and that I require their goodwill and active ears and eyes of those present to fill in the blanks.

On the plus side, I have found people who can act as my ‘translators’ in the different cities I will perform in here in China. They will all face the opposite problem of mine, namely that of having to slow down their natural fluency in English and make their speech sound a bit more like broken Chinglish. That should be OK but I will have to be clear whether they are faithfully reading what they believe to be a good translation and they are doing their personal best or whether the ‘bad translation’ is actually the most faithful to the spirit of what I am doing and their role is to try to transmit the struggle for expression in a foreign language. For this last possibility it can be done with no need to act so this is what I will probably do, but, not acting can be just as hard as acting so finally it is no simpler than the other option.

Out and about in the city I have been noticing how the natural environment does not conform to my expectations. The plants are often unfamiliar and look like something out of a movie but the most simple and graphic example of the natural environment causing me to stop and look again to try and understand it, is the moon. With all the attention on it for the Spring Festival, or lunar new year as it is also known, it took me a little time to really notice how it is viewed at a different inclination here. It is lit by the sun from below rather than from the side. Being no astronomer I cannot say with confidence that we never see this in the West but I have a feeling this is not the moon that I know.

Last night the lantern festival opened. Not having access to much Western or contemporary art it seemed like a good idea to go to a traditional Chinese arts event and see what it was. I cannot say how this lantern festival might have seemed to someone from Xiamen who has grown up with it, but to me as a visitor from the West, it was quite simply, insane.

Spread out over the park and also placed in the lake beside it were huge fabric and wire structures lit from inside. There were over a hundred of them. Some were motorised, some made sound, many were as large as a bus and practically all of them featured rabbits. Rabbits dancing, rabbits rotating, rabbits playing trumpets, rabbits digging the ground, rabbits eating and rabbits just sitting there being rabbits. The crowds were out in force on this warm evening and so too were the army. A particularly bizarre lantern set in the centre of an amphitheatre featured a golden dragon sat atop a massive 10 metre tall red lantern, which itself had mini revolving lanterns inside of it, circled at a distance by eight army soldiers standing to attention and at regular intervals and completed by Kenny G style music. At the sight of it, one of the other artists said to me “you don’t need contemporary art if you have this.” I’m not sure I completely agree as this lantern festival was doing something quite different, but I can see how it does fulfil the entertainment and spectacle impulse more than adequately.