Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance

http://www.culturebot.org/2011/11/11663/visual-art-performance-vs-contemporary-performance/

I remember reading this article a few years ago, but I found it useful to re-read it again. Horowitz characterizes this difference in terms of object design (visual arts performance) and "experience design" (contemporary performance). Since reading this article, I'm excited to have encountered work that I think troubles this distinction, as experience designers are increasingly becoming interested in making objects in a proscenium context, or where visual artists are designing experiences. In the subjective experience of the work, I think these divisions and categories are just snapshots of a more total experience (emotional, conceptual, somatic, and otherwise) that we are having anyway. Shorthand for the sake of connecting to a particular history (among the many).

I'm curious about this distinction because concepts can be emotional and emotions can be ideological. I mean that in the most basic of ways. I think calling attention to these general trends in the two contexts, however, is refreshing to me and other artists because it highlights the boundaries of creative territory that artists are preventing themselves from moving through--like how I wish this post were a poem instead of snapshot of an idea. That an idea becomes isolable in its saying, or is limited by the assumption by some that an idea can't dance. Like an experience designed with language that doesn't say but does, and doesn't say it does. Like the construction of feeling in a reality show or the design of contestant's experience on a show (in their own subjective experience of being a contestant and in our external experience of their reactions to that construction). In other words, I'm really hooked on X-Factor auditions. It's feelings in a tube. You get to see the build up and release of what this other dance or art object or performance might not make so readily clearly available for you to see the experience of at a given moment when you were hoping to have some identifiably named experience interpreted by you feeling like you wanted to have that feeling that was so familiar a feeling you would like to have had a chance to have.

When I watered my friends plants today, that kind of experience was an idea. And, the idea smelled pleasantly of shrimp chips. Of course, I questioned my greasy fingers, but the idea left a bad taste in my mouth.

Making rubrics

In a workshop with Chryssa Parkinson, we created "personal bibliographies." These were a way to make explicit the kinds of personal/historical points of reference we had for the exercises she gave us. The rubric was:
content  /  style  /  material  /  topic  /  method

I wondered how my work and the work of those around me fell within the spectrum. Of course, certain work is focused more on style and others on method. The rubric also calls attention to the many evaluative systems in dance, art, and writing that focus on one or more of these areas. Perhaps, the value of hitting all of these rubrics is itself a value (one of inclusion); I'm not sure this value of inclusion in the artistic process needs to be elevated above the embrace of a single one of these categories. All in all, the headings are useful, but I also wonder about such divisions, which tend to reinforce historical categories (i.e. form v. content). Even as a provisional measure, the categories, however, are useful toward finding ways to frame one's working process. I find it exciting to have a set of signposts to mark my way through the often murky territory of making something. Then again, I do enjoy getting lost.

Tino Seghal

Paul McCarthy

Sincerity and Failure

It was August and the night was hot.

What we were proposing already exists.

This is a history of sincerity.

The tree uses silence.

The three layers of air flood the sky.

My face is tilted upwards.

I wanted language to be a vulnerable and exact instrument of glass, pressures and chemicals.

It has provided us with a cry but explains othing.

I understand passivity.

[...]

I wrote a story of beginnings, of beginnings, of meat, of words.

I wanted to realize failure as a form of tactile thought.

I intended to be nourished.

Because of the signals communicating from the florescent cavity of the

   chest, because of the vaults of touch, because of the feral knowledge

   moulded by the lips, because of the nearness to armies, because of

   smallness

I intended to be nourished.

And then we went visiting.

--from R's Boat by Lisa Robertson

Robertson

"Construct face. Now soft unleashes. We rest on deep rhetorics. Sometimes what we perceive best is shaded. Becoming ornament. Now swiftening. We speak as if our tremors our postures posed spaces." --from The Weather by Lisa Robertson

Empathic Kinesthetic Perception

“Empathic kinesthetic perception suggests a combination of mimesis and empathy. Paradoxically, it implies that one has to close one’s eyes to look at movement, ignoring its visual effects and concentrating instead on feeling oneself to be in the other’s body, moving.”

--Deidre Sklar, “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance”