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.
