Diane Borsato - National Post / May 1, 2004

When does a private act become a performance? Is watering house plants or pretending to be a plant, a work of art? Ask Diane Borsato, an artist whose performances are so discreet they are rarely detected by anyone other than herself.

Borsato's fame for making subtle art started in 2001 with a performance at the Montreal artist-run centre, Skol, where she created the world's longest paper-clip chain. For 24 hours 60 people linked a million paper clips. Borsato built a rectangular rack to string it up like a huge curtain which she then lit so it shimmered like water.

Titled, How To Make A Sculpture In An Emergency, the performance/art is now listed on page 24 of the Guinness Book of World Records. "It was a found performance that turned into this sublime modern sculpture," she says.

After finishing grad school at Concordia, Borsato did an MA in performance at NYU, but found it difficult living in New York after September 11, when post-traumatic tension was still very palpable. She ended up staying inside a lot, making art with her plants in her apartment.

One performance she did in 2002 while still in New York was titled Carrying My Heavy Bag, where she had porters at luxury hotels carry her backpack into the lobby and back out again. "It was just so they could experience the weight of my life," she says. A year later, during a residency in Nice, France she performed Warm Things to Chew for the Dead, where offerings of food were left at grave stones.

Squeeze the Cat is a performance based on not doing something. "I didn't squeeze the cat," she says about the titled non-performance. "I was thinking about Yves Klein's famous Leap Into the Void and that not leaping into the void seemed as much a gesture." It was also a critique of the macho history of performance, "all that death defying stuff," she says referring to performers like Vito Acconci or Australia's Mike Parr who recently nailed his arm to a wall.

Borsato also started to wonder if completing a task was all that necessary. "It's important that I complete a task," she says, "but not feel restricted by that." That lead to what she calls "eating light." In a room of plants Borsato found in a seminary in Quebec she acted like a plant by sitting still in the room for a day emulating the grace of plants. "The priests seemed to know what I was doing. They’d ask me if I was doing a mediation of the sky." I'd say 'kind of,' and they'd just accept that. It showed me how performance and religion are quite engaged. All I did was sit and act like a plant. It was as if I learned how to eat light."

Borsato does do some live performances but not often, and usually they are non-theatrical, like the paper-clip project, or her Twitching Project (Le Projet Tic) performed at Musee National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec last year. On the museum site there is an old prison with six small cells that are occasionally used for art. Borsato had six performers sit in each cell and twitch their legs. She made an electrical device that calculated a certain amount of twitching into one stride, and then the number of strides in a kilometer, to represent the energy being expelled as a walking distance from the prison. "I had developed a kind of tick when I was in New York from all the stress," she says about the inspiration for the piece. "It seemed symbolic, like I was trying to get back to Canada."

Every twitch made a click so the noise of six twitching legs was quite anxious. "I see my neurosis is a kind of energy. When I was in New York, it was more obvious. In France I was way more relaxed, drinking wine, and pretending to be a plant."

Borsato's Touching 1000 Peopleproject, based on the belief that touching can heal, involves her discreetly touching 1000 people over a given period. She has performed the project in Montreal where she touched 1000 people in one month, and in Vancouver where the time frame was sped up to 10 days. "It was a full-time job in Vancouver. I was constantly focussed on my distance from other people."

She also noticed a few social patterns emerging, like teenagers were impossible to touch. "They just notice you more." Men and older people are easier, and it was easier to touch in Montreal than in Vancouver.

Many of Borsato's performances only exist however as photographs and as text which she writes as a record of her actions. They are the only evidence there is indeed sound when a tree falls and no one is around to hear it. Her photographs are part of this month's Contact Photography Festival. Warm Things To Chew For The Dead opens at Gallery TPW 96 Spadina Ave on May 6 and runs until June 5. - Catherine Osborne