Anh Vo, Forever in the Same River Twice
“Am I supposed to run after them?” I asked as I watched artists Anh Vo and Erinn Buhyoff ride away together on a gold flake-encrusted Phoenix-brand bike. A fur coat-clad Vo was at the helm, veering left onto West 10th Street while Buhyoff sat directly behind them, a DIY woodwind instrument fashioned out of a bilge pump hose draped over his neck. This was the start of Vo’s guerrilla performance Phoenix Forever, a newly commissioned piece for the third edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial.
The event was cloaked in secrecy—the audience knew very little about it, and had to email or DM the biennial organizers in order to be told the exact time and location of the performance. No further description was given other than the enigmatic phrase: “Something happens at the river.” I was told that Vo and Buhyoff would spend the next hour biking around the West Village and reciting poetry, with the performance culminating behind the boathouse on Pier 40. I was given this information because I was commissioned to write a review of this performance, but how am I supposed to do that if I’m missing out on a full hour of it? I was in no state to chase down Vo and Buhyoff through the winding streets of the West Village, even if it was in the name of journalistic integrity.
In between chatting with my fellow audience members who also decided to kick off their weekend by attending Vo’s guerrilla performance, I thought about the unwitting audience members who accidentally encountered Vo during the first hour of Phoenix Forever. I imagined remote workers glancing up from a Zoom meeting and doing a double take at the sight of Vo and Buhyoff on their golden Phoenix bike, young children in strollers pushed by nannies who couldn’t even begin to try explaining what they were witnessing, and slightly annoyed delivery drivers dodging Buhyoff’s makeshift instrument.
My reverie was interrupted by Phoenix Forever’s curator, Sofia Thiệu D’Amico, urging us to spread out. Someone had warned her that the police were coming, and we had to momentarily disperse so that we did not appear as a suspiciously large crowd gathered behind a boathouse. Guerrilla performances always face the risk of being unceremoniously shut down by the authorities, even in a place like New York City that served as the playground for artists such as Lorraine O’Grady and Stephen Varble who famously infiltrated public spaces in order to critique the state of capitalism, art, and society.
Phoenix Forever is descended from this lineage of late-20th century New York performance art, as well as that of Hanoi’s guerrilla performance scene. Vo is constantly grappling with the prevalent dichotomy between the so-called freedom of the West and the governmental surveillance and censorship of Vietnam; the fact that Phoenix Forever was nearly thwarted only reminds us that this dichotomy is largely an imaginary one. As the police rode past us, we shared knowing smirks and stifled giggles. The people who had come out to watch Vo’s performance were no longer mere audience members, but now shared a conspiratorial bond as accomplices to something that was not quite a crime, but not exactly sanctioned either. Coming together to witness art had become an act of fugitivity.
Vo and Buhyoff arrived not long after the police had left. Buhyoff alighted from the bicycle, but continued to play his instrument as Vo removed his fur coat to reveal a black and purple wetsuit. Vo took one more lap through the crowd before riding the bike past an open gate directly into the Hudson River. I heard gasps and shocked laughter rise from the crowd as Vo’s body and bicycle fell into the sunset-tinted water. A lifering was immediately thrown, and Vo soon emerged from the waves to recite a translated text. “History needs not be re-presented. The prefix re- is a redundancy,” Vo declared as they struggled against the Hudson’s relentless current. “THIS IS A DOING. THIS IS A PERFORMANCE. THIS IS A TRANSLATION.”
I thought about the fragmented poetry recited in the first hour that I’ll never hear in full, the precarity of art in the shadow of censorship, and the futility of language and translation. I could write another 700 words and it still won’t fully capture the experience of witnessing Phoenix Forever. Vo and Buhyoff could decide to perform it again tomorrow, but it would be impossible to recreate the exact conditions that went into that day’s performance. Heraclitus famously said that because everything is in a constant state of change, it is impossible to step into the same river twice. In the case of Anh Vo, this aphorism could be amended to say that it is impossible to bike into the same river twice—after all, the golden Phoenix bicycle that was so central to the performance will now forever rest at the bottom of the Hudson River.
