E.L.

also, check out http://www.erosie.blogspot.com/ in general

showup

let's put on another show

jan/feb.

something small

something manageable

[impt.] something for us

showup at my house for a drink

wed.jan7.8pm.

m∆ke eh h∆ppen.

BUTCH FEMME

Kimmy Fung Photo Stream

MORE

RTRI@YEARN

i am privilege

i wondered, just now, why am i spending time writing a paper on making things when i could be making more things?

hey this was cool

so why dont we do this?

violent youth and photography by robbie cooper

duality of structure

facesspacessound

E_MERGE_N_C meeting

alexis sent me a package which i have to distribute the contents of at a gathering of all of us, so, we need to get together before xmass break to see what she sent us from her travels. how does next week sound?

shepherd

i love you.

dutch foliage

Certainly Afraid

A CALL TO ARMS

our space has been lost in the waves of formal- institutional- climbing to the top- busy-busy-busy bullshit. we need to reclaim our special connections, we need to fuse our creativity once more. RTRI WE MUST MEET MORE. RTRI WE MUST MAKE THINGS. RTRI WE MUST FUCK SHIT UP/EACH OTHER AGAIN if you are in agreement with this, respond here. what do you need more of from each of us? what do you need more of yourself? TIME PLACE DATE NOW. let us not get caught up in the excuses we give ourselves on a daily basis as to why we are not doing. let us end our own tyranny to ourselves. let us be glittermashdemiterrorists!!!!!!

russian futurism

specifically, watch the "movie" and avoid the "manifesto"

What Did You Buy Today?

the(sis)

so i thought that i was really on top of things, until i began to take feminist theory. i think that i was stronger and more successful without it. is this what happens? when you get into this stuff? that you loose your agency and your confidence and yourself in the name for a particular kind of higher learning? i thought the point was to feel more empowered, feel more a sense of yourself, get to know yourself kinda thing. i am comfortable with myself, what i am uncomfortable with is other women telling me I shouldnt comfortable with myself be for a lot of reasons, and that i am, in fact, better off in this knowledge of reactionary anger that they give me. well i say fuck you feminist theory: you have made me a walking mind fuck and loose aspects in my life. (******space*******) so i am doing this project where i write something over and over and over (big surprise huh?) on a large scroll that probably cannot be hung up on the wall because it will be so big, and i will unveil it during a show. oh i know what it references, but for me the catharsis of the event lies not in how it is reacting to something grandeur and universal, but how it can be purged from my body by making it public and physical. and i love you.

i wanna look into yer soul

loves, i'm working on a project right now where i need the time you were born and the location. long story short

possible sound/ art references

i hope you like it

Hey David Bennett

Maybe one day I'LL BE SOL LEWITT. Or Phong Bui.

Phong Bui, Hybrid Carnival for St. Exupery, 2005:

Sol Lewitt:

oh shit oh shit

sorry

i have just been formally introduced to existentialism. woopsy- daisy. a bunch of little worms to form one bigworm.

erotic asphyxiation

hey guys. i love you. just thought you should know.

I MISS NASH

don't you?

green porno

so nash showed this to me last night. also this: http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/TV/05/05/isabella.rossellini/index.html

completely naked

british group who does interactive art.

Also

Body & Mind. Apparently they think that what makes their nude photos of women "more beautiful" than others is that they have moral value...."nudes with a wholesome twist", as they say. Their philosophy of feminine beauty, or "super beauty" (again, their words), basically says that female beauty is a literal representation of our values. And, as the founder claims, "When female beauty is attacked, it is by twisted monsters bent on destroying all human values, the things female beauty represents to all of us." DISCUSS PLZ

Daddy and I

O Zhang, photographs adopted Chinese daughters and their Western fathers. Meant to bring up issues of interracial gender roles in the family, but every time I see these pictures all I see are precursors to child porn...but I probably wouldn't feel that way if the images were of a Chinese father with his Chinese daughter, or a white father with a white daughter. At the same time, though, I feel like a lot of these images are set up to make them look a little sexual, or at least possessive. Father-daughter relationships are hard to portray without some element of creepiness.

cryingwhileeating.com

Eating: Coldstone cheesecake ice cream with graham cracker pie crust Crying because: Fuck you, Batman!!

man of my dreams

independence day

i spoke to you in the shower today but i got no response. i miss you. where are you guys?

i just made a video. for the art show. and i need to edit it. but i am having a hard time watching it. big surprise, huh?

birds birds birds

this came from my latest crackpot tattoo idea: bear walking on my shoulder, head facing away from my spine. puffin in flight behind bear, sparrow in front of bear and various other birds of that type to wrap around my shoulder and arm. so i came across this blog. and it is awesome. enjoy!

something for everyone

i think i'm in love

this rules

http://www.vimeo.com/993998

for future reference

(beat beat beat beat) forever ago...

so i would like to propose an idea. i think we should have another art show toward the beginning of the school year. i think that the students who know us will attend and i think it would give incoming students a chance to see how new college projects can be awesome. blah blah blah. everyone knows the reasons why an art show at the top of the year is good. anyhow, i think we should all be working on stuff this summer for it. if we want to put on a show. for example, i am compiling stuff for a video (though i dont know if it will be done by then), some 2D pieces and some performances; maybe an installation. i think it would also be interesting to do some kind of cataloging. for example, i have been drinking about four to five times a week. (whether that be two beers or eight, it doesnt matter)and i have been thinking about saving them and altering them somehow, maybe all one color with a label on time and date. the same thing for cigarettes. i know ive been smoking more now because i dont have to be in class, ect. saving those boxes. how many did i go through over the course of the summer? by seeing that all there at once, how will that affect my view on my personal habits, etc. hell, even masturbating or counting the number of times i check my facebook: some kind of habit catalog. ok. so i think it would be neat to see if you guys started that too. maybe we could construct an entire room out of these cataloged habits from the summer. lemme know what you guys think about that stuff: the beggining of the year art show, if we should be working on stuff for it, and if each of us should be cataloging something about our summers. ok i love you!

pickle surprise

48gfc.com

this is exciting, even if nobody participates.

on standby

Well, I've missed my flight to Texas & the Homeland Security Warning is orange.

The news is on. A woman took 2 of her 7 kids with her to sell heroin. No babysitter.

This is stupid. This terminal is under construction. Yep. Cloudy skies over Boston Deana.

There's a guy in a hardhat looking worried at some blueprints. A tornado killed 7 people and destroyed a bank and Ed McMan may lose his Beverly Hills home. And the drop out ceiling is missing. Ducts.

I wonder what Jill Scott is up to. Singing probably.

Nash. What's the first book we're reading? Maybe I can buy it at the News & Gifts.

"Five years ago we stayed in Miami for 3 days and it rained every day." "Oh...."

A guy just walked right in front of me and pulled a Starbucks cup out of a deep trashcan. How'd he know it was there? He's drinkin' it.

Fewer planes means fewer seats for us. 18% domestic cuts.

Happy birthday to Angelina Jolie and Dr. Ruth.

this guy

so i was bored and looking around port performance website and i thought about how performance art maybe differs from other performance because of the consideration of visual reiments and overall aesthetic quality that can compare more to sculpture or painting than it can set design, costume design, or general conventional theatrics. (yes, i know we have covered this topic extensively) but i am still interested in finding examples of this difference. i think this guy does that. moreover, i think port performance stuff does that too or, at least, that seemed to be the case for the students who participated in the berlin show last year. anyhow, i think this is good to look at, and for me, a way to continue to explore how performance can be all sorts of things, and that it doesnt have to remain in the realm of, or reaction to, conventional theatre. if you are bored or wanna look at stuff, look at this and tell me what you think. love you babies!

VACC. pt. 2 of 2

VACC. pt. 1 of 2

ryan trecartin

nytimes article also his stuff is on ubuweb

ATEAST

http://arsonisnoway.livejournal.com

I like to look at what other artists are making. I don't get any of this. and that's a weird feeling- feeling good about that. and I'm not posting this to bash Steve McLaughlin, whoever he is.

except some of his ideas are cool. and some of his pictures are cool.

get off the stick and get a ring

david bennett

David Bennett is really strange. I think he lives in his head and comes out of it every now and again when he has to in order to interact with others. But even when he does that, I wonder how much he still remains inside David’s world, the place that is swirling and visual and funny. So when David does a performance, sometimes it is well thought out, like his Vivisexing project, other times it is completely made up and he is phoning it in, an example of this is when he crawled to the side of the couch in the study room and tried to push the couch with his legs to the other side of the room. Granted, we all liked it, but we knew he just came up with the performance a few seconds before he did it. And maybe that is ok. I think david’s sometimes haphazard way of performance is a good balance for those of us who take it really seriously. David reminds us that there are really silly and dry things about this medium of expression, and that in doing so, it reflects life. David also really likes parties. He loves going to and throwing them. He makes some of the best posters for a dumb Friday night party that I have ever seen. Some of us think that the last art show was shit, but David really liked it because of how it made people feel and he likes to entertain. As a matter of fact, I am on board with him on making a alternative space tutorial in order to find more places for art parties. I think that when David approaches performance, he considers the party. He likes to feel a kind of satisfaction in everything that he does, even if his projects look like they lack a sense of satisfaction, like his Vivisexing performance. A strange kind of satisfaction happened between the two characters, even though they were sad. David Bennet loves music as well. I think that he sees words as lyrics and motions as sound. For one performance, he played music, and at the art show, he developed that idea further. He likes ambient sound that swells and repeats. I think that his newer performances will most definitely include this concept. David’s performances, like his 2D work reflect a kind of inner world that he sometimes gives us access to, like when he repeated the phrase “tiny horses” for an entire class. We didnt know where that came from, but he was so amused by something about that phrase or image the phrase made that he just repeated it. His music is personal and internal too, he never engages the audience. And even his video for this semester was about something only he was going to look at. All this internal world stuff makes David and interesting fellow. People are drawn to him and this shtick, he doesn’t disappoint either; I still cant figure him out and I am around him a lot

western

For this video project I wanted to explore a few different concepts. The most obvious being western, but I also wanted to simply begin to understand the medium of film making as well as attempt to undo myself in icon form. I will begin by discussing how this film project reflects “western” themes and then move on to the other concepts involved. My designated week for mod two was western theme. Fo r this, I decided to divide the theme into two major ideas. The first idea was based on a type of “Hero With A Thousand Faces” narrative in which the ‘lone ranger’ was one that the western film highlighted, but was prevalent in much of American culture. The second idea was the icon of the western: the masculine form, the gun, and the justice. The two, I think, coincide, but I wanted for us to look at films with those ideas in mind. How does Kill Bill reflect these concepts just as much as Outlaw Josie Wales? When is the image stronger than the narrative, or how do we apply the cowboy idea to “heros” in the local paper? With that in mind, I wanted to make a performance where I “killed” myself. I had a face off with myself and lost. But my issue with this was whether or not the physical me should die or the video me. Each ending had merit and each ending could reflect that western showdown, but the good guy should always win, and here, that line was faint, if not nonexistent. I liked that conflict, but once I did the performance, I thought about how there could be all these outcomes, all these chances because I could fluctuate between good and bad. For the western, I think, that dichotomy must exist I could become good or bad based on the way I handled the gesture of pulling the gun out. And that is where the idea for a longer video came into play. For the video, and like a few performances I have done, I wanted to dissect and explore the various ways one gesture can shift and change. So I pulled the gun out a lot in front of the camera and played with how that movement can grow and imply a number of things. Here, I think I definitely covered the icon component of westerns, while at the same time, responding to other video and performance artists. I think that this project was similar to Hannah Wilke’s videos, such as her film Gestures and So Help Me Hannah. My piece is similar to Gestures in that I attempt to explore/ exploit a single movement over and over, confronting the camera and engaging the viewer. In So Help Me Hannah, Wilke walks around the city naked with a gun, implying gender roles and the power of the gun, I think my video is similar in that I reference the image of female with phallus, but I try to negate a completely female form by only showing myself from the shoulders up, clothed. I wanted to create a kind of narrative using the clips I gathered. The first chapter was confrontation, in which I stare down the opponent. The second chapter was preparation, getting ready to duel, to kill, to defend. The third chapter was posing, an homage to characters like Travis Bickle; funny and strange and threatening. The fourth chapter was shooting. The fifth chapter was recognition, and this came as either satisfaction or fear or guilt. The sixth chapter returned to the first, only now it was confronting the action, unsure whether or not the action was good or bad. I think the result was a myriad of forms, pictures, and gestures that derived from one iconic image. I like that. However, I am still interested in how that can be interactive. How can I shoot myself in video or live that can create a dynamic narrative? How can I be more selective in my clips so that the powerful images really stand out? I do not want to copy those clips from films directly. I don’t feel like I need to. My audience knows those images so well that I only need to reference them. However, I think there are editing choices I could have made that would be more cohesive, such as how my sepia and black and white are used. This is a work in progress for me, and I want to see how this vast idea can become tighter and more effective.

Shotgun Wedding

cleaning

i want to go back to reading. organizing rules, but i am glad the heyday of "corridoors" is over. but, a few notes, i think that though we could have condensed the space a bit more, meaning, to make all art fit into those cramped space, the show was visually alright. people engaged with the show as a kind of treasure map, and i think nash and kim's installations really aided that idea. people saw the space differently, but i dont think we transformed it in any way. also, fuck new college, i am definitely on board for a kind of alt space for art shows. lets think about that possible tutorial for fall... ok so the performances: nash and alexis' i think was very successful. a large enough crowd gathered and, since they had the experience, i think that it ran smoothly as well. kim and melenie's cigarette piece was also good, again, drawing a small crowd but maintaining a very clear performance structure. i think jared's piece was a nice progression from the last performance, but it still lacked the sense of control that the performance ultimately revolves around. visually it was also nice, however, i am unsure about how jared wanted to deal with the material he presented. i think that when you isolate something like porn, there are a lot of implications at play, especially when said porn is connected to a body and sex. my piece needs some work. i was happy with my installation. i might finally put that little treasure to rest. ok, it is 4 am and clearly i have not assimilated back to non-art show hours, so i am going to try to sleep now, and get excited about new things tomorrow.

ART SHOW TODAY

ARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWARTSHOWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

today i

watched a polish movie, saved a baby bird, did a headstand, mushed gak-like clay onto my chest, made a sign for bongs, and fell in love with a western themed radio show. it certainly has been a bowl of oranges kinda day.

consistently impressed by liars

this projection thing is getting pretty big check out the snowden video "like bullets" for more

embodiment, layers, nostalgia

For future reference bjork is the shit

it has been a good day

re Vivisexing - David Bennett

3/3

re Vivisexing - Jessica Borusky

2/3

Vivisexing- Nash Lawhead

1/3

henry darger

western fucking rules

color construction

video video videobaby

building a pavilion

I think this is worth your time.

Cinema of Transgression

Cinema of Transgression Manifesto by Nick Zedd We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade. We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over. Legitimising every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts centres and geriatic cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our rank - such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man. We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema. We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves. go to ubu and watch their movie "mommy mommy where's my brain?"

who knew: Banksy's pretty cool (click here)

this is related to our class

CLICK THIS X

Thanks again Nash. I hope your car is fixed.

intro to avant garde film

pretty self explanatory.

Blendtec

go to willitblend.com

JASPER IS BALD

I found this last year while researching Jasper Johns and now it seems relevant.

Vaginal Creme Davis

I dont know. But, if you put headphones into the library computers and move the mouse up and down it sounds like you're playing an ATARI game. Like pacman or something.

WARNING FOR GAY BOYS

ok, you guys. you should watch this. it's kind of long, but worth it. i'm sort of in love/hate with this women right now. mostly love though. let's talk about it in class.

Collage in 2020

(1) Yesterday Barry warned us not to get too attached to the internet because it could "go at any time." (2) It takes Barry 42 minutes to check his email.

response

[and this] Christopher Olszewski

CHRISO a scene [The stage is empty except for a large washer and dryer set down-center. Both are covered in beer bottles.] [Professor Barry Freedland's nerves are a mess. Earlier in the day he had been put off when, having instead to stand by while his students yelled at imaginary children and tortured themselves, Chris, who was supposed to be keeping him company was out cavorting with another member of the art department. Now he stands, well-dressed, in front of a small crowd of twenty or so. He tries to speak, but all that comes out are small, red hearts, dripping in his lunch.] Barry: Excuse me. [clears throat] I'm pleased to introduce my friend Chris Olszewski. [Barry wipes his mouth and shakes the traces of his gushing from his good shoes.] [A low rumbling begins to separate itself from the din of the auditorium. The sound seems to come from above and grows steadily louder. Suddenly, as the noise peaks, a forest green Jeep Grande Cherokee explodes down through the ceiling, crashes nose-first onto the stage, falls forward, and lies upside down, the wheels still spinning and white smoke pouring out of the radiator. After several minutes a body begins to struggle from the wreckage. It is artist Chris Olszewski. While he untangles himself we see that he is dressed casually in a giant ceramic shell and a pair of jeans. He is covered in blood.] Chris: [unfazed and yelling] Hey fuckers! Let's get something straight right now! Art is about three things: money, weed and tomahawks. Money first because if you don't have the money you can't buy the weed and if you don't have money or weed, you don't have anything to protect with a fuckin' tomahawk. [pause, pacing around] Now I'm sure you all can find some weed on your own. You don't need me for that. And you might think that because I'm a Native American that I've got loads a' tomahawks just lying around. Well, lemme tell ya, if you come over to my house, you're going to find diet Pepsi in my fridge and my wife yelling at me to make some money- so I'm here to talk about money. [A student in the audience raises his hand.] Chris: Yeah, go ahead chief. Student: [standing] Could you use a gun? Chris: What? Student: Could you use a gun to protect your shit? [sits] Chris: Listen buddy, you can do whatever the fuck you want, okay? Alright... Do you think we can just hold all the goddamn questions? Could we try that shit? I'm trying to tell you how to make some money and you're already worried about how you're going to spend it. [short pause] Hey! Tonto! [points at the same student] Yeah. Stand back up. [At this point a fist, bleeding, punches through the center of Chris's eggshell chest, opens and whips a Chinese thrown star at the student.] Chris: Try to catch this. [Just as the words leave his mouth the star flies through the student's hand severing it at the wrist. The student screams as he is covered in a gyser of blood. He remains standing.] Chris: Calm down. Just look at your hand. [The student glances apprehensively at his nub only to find the hand returned and in a tight fist. The blood has disappeared.] Chris: Alright, Sitting Bull, go ahead, open it up. [The student opens his clenched hand to reveal a fresh, twenty-dollar bill. He sits with a look of astonishment on his face.] Chris: Lesson number one: stars are actually money. You just have to work 'em hard enough. So get yourself some stars. [pause] Thing is... stars don't come easy, and twenty bucks doesn't buy a whole lot of weed when there's bills to pay. So you gotta do other things... [Chris makes his way over to the washer and dryer, takes a beer bottle and shatters it on the side of the washer.] Chris:...patriotic things. [He bangs on the top of the dryer with his fist still holding the broken bottle neck.] Chris: Lookaat! [He whips the door of the dryer open and out rush a stampede of Great Plains buffalo with toothpicks for legs. Chris stabs one of the smaller ones with the broken bottle, removing a plug of meat and fur. The other buffalo continue to run aimlessly around the auditorium.] Chris: Ya see this shit? This is what artists call material, Jack. Now when a canvas and a hunk of wild meat like this get together, God willing, with a few drinks in 'em and some soft music, they make what's called a painting. And you can sell a painting. [pause] For money. [pause] For weed. [pause]Ya see where I'm going with this? [A student in the audience raises her hand.] Chris: [squeezing his brow] Yeah, Interrupts-My-Shit, what's you're question? Student: Yes. Hi there. I was just wondering. What if that painting doesn't sell? Chris: Well, God forbid! You know what you do when that happens? [mocking] In a big emergency? Show the slides! [The lights drop and Barry flips on a projector. Shown on the back wall of the stage is a slide of a small brick house.] Chris: Next. [The second shows Chris approaching the house. He is dressed in tweed suit pants and a jacket that barely covers the eggshell.] Chris: Yup. [In the next he can be see holding up a pink slip of paper. The next shows what looks like an argument between Chris and the homeowner.] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Past this. Just keep going. [The slides advance showing quick glimpses of mild violence.] Chris: Stop here. [The slide shows Chris leaning forward his arms spanning the the doorway of the house, looking out, while in the foreground is piled with children's toys, heaps of clothes, boxes overflowing, lamps, a mattress.] Chris: Oh, one more I think. [The final slide shows Chris standing the the foreground, his arms crossed and smiling. Behind him, in white paint above the door reads: # 287 For Sale by Not Guilty.] Chris: Detroit real estate is what happens. Any questions? No? Well, remember liberty kids. Liberty. Audience members: ¡Olé!

Michael Scharf- "I Love Systems"

I'd like to talk about this on Tues. I love systems; corporations exploit systems and deform them to channel capital. I love habits; capital destroys habits so that implements must be replaced, which requires further raw materials to be drawn and further labor added, and fetishization and idealization to be the main quality of cathexis. I love cathexes; people murder and hurt one another because their drives have been pushed into fucked up images or ideas, either by genetic predisposition or by a variety of family pathologies, psychological or physical abuses, that often stem from economic factors, but cross class lines and can express themselves in large-scale non-egalitarian modes of power, as well as in their more familiar manifestations within the living space, a determiner of roles among those sharing it. Neglect, a pathology, results when unstructured time, which is now a kind of structure, is eroded by capital, which requires labor in order to accumulate, via the insinuation of value into cathexis as a result of consumerism, and not consumption, which is necessary. Even when actually coming into contact, people carry distorted images which they bring to their chosen objects, and they hurt these objects, which are people, because such images represent strong cathexes and demand to be reproduced. People also create systems specifically to coerce people into exchange, to force them to play prescribed roles which have real psychological and material realizations. These systems draw energy from libidinous dementias, from partially destroyed cathexes, and result, at best, in exchanges whose participants are profoundly alienated and which are mediated, however indirectly, by money, which was itself created when the direct comparison of the values of goods proved impossible, and is the basis for city life, a kind of idealization, which seems to be preferred by artists because of the kind of social contact it allows, because of the care that its infrastructure evinces, or has remnants of, and because of the kinds of work it affords. There is a little time to write. I am paid per hour for my cube labor, which involves writing, a “shit where I eat” problem, since writing is one way to resist the incursions of capital. But I am an agent. I love systems; they are but structures for action, for encounter and exchange, and come to life only when taken up, providing terms for decisions, terms that should be able to be accepted and used or rejected and reformed but are not, but yet not all of them are corrupt, although the rate at which they are corrupted as they arise, meaning those systems that do not have to do with law or state or corporate power, the lag time in which they are allowed to hang, poised and expressive, is shorter and shorter, as the movement of capital has become more and more efficient, part of which is due to computers, though studies dispute the actual gains. Systems must be changed from within by agreement or destroyed by revolution, which means destroying sets of images and the people who carry them, which is accomplished by agents, who are people, and replaced by other systems, but distorted images linger as traces embodying former sets of terms, in books and in pictures, in buildings and in testimony to be discovered and recovered, or reproduce themselves through genetic predispositions triggered by abuse. Power itself forms a current wherever there is more than one agent or its image, so that in the absence of state power or enforced legislation, which often appears to itself as a coherent, logical system directed at a collective good, but can also appear, even to itself, as an organized and perpetual structure for murder, in its absence, arising when one or another group, concentrated in a locality, has the power of enforcement without the rule of law, which is just as often abused, the results seem to be worse, as we know them from books and images, recordings and translations. Some argue that this is the case in parts of the world of which I have no right to speak, especially being a subject in a state that creates and acts on the indirect or direct demands for their exploitation, particularly in terms of labor power and raw materials, and in terms of culture and in terms of peoples’ bodies, their very lives. In the U.S. itself ideas and images have been, within some formations and often involuntarily, replaced with a more subtle brutality taking the place of the old, overtly physical and more directly linguistically transmitted subjection. There will always be exchange, the question is how to structure it, what system to use. People have been coerced into habits and cathexes that lead, directly and indirectly, to the exploitation of others, but this exploitation and its results are hidden from consumers, who must participate in the system or perish, ceasing to exist within recognized or vigilantly maintained alternative social formations, dying, though there will be a day when to be a consumer will not be a pejorative, for there will always be consumers as long as there are exchanges, and there will always be exchanges, but for now the exploitation and its results are hidden, so that responsibility for consumption is made impossible by more active participants in the systems, who produce them and produce the images of them, and work to shunt the capital into calibrated sinks, or accounts. Those with ideas for more efficient or transfixing systems can either work for corporations, or strike out on their own as entrepreneurs within legally defined structures, a decision which is represented as a kind of freedom. There are magazines that cover, that reproduce with words and pictures using raw materials plus labor power, including packaging and delivery, the imagining and actualizing, the building and maintaining, the reacting and the prescribing of system creation, cover it from the idea or image stage to the addition of capital, which allows systems to materialize, literally, and to shunt the needs, habits and cathexes of people, who put their money into weighted exchanges that concentrate it with the corporation or entrepreneur, which as a legal entity has discretion as to how and when it will again appear in the public domain. Often, because of psychology, and, currenly, because of poorly theorized neo-evolutionary demands, capital is concentrated and passed down among those whose genetic bases are most similar. I personally have benefited from this system in myriad ways. When my father became sick with Hodgin’s Lymphoma, he and my mother, 27 and 26 respectively, if age affects decision-making, took out a 100,000 dollar policy on his life, on which they were, with the help of other family members who had accumulated capital, able to meet the very high monthly payments as his condition worsened, and then improved, until his sudden death on May 15, 1974, after which the policy was paid in full to my mother. This policy was a partial image of the labor power represented by my father and reflected a bet by a corporation against his early death; that the labor he did, which was adjusting the habits and cathexes of people who were not able to function completely and efficiently within the system, arguably serving the ends of capital as well as of those, more directly, whose suffering he worked against, was not relevant. The apartment in which I live, in which I write this and which I own with my wife, who is 28, was bought with money directly generated by the investment of money from that policy, by the further accumulation of capital that resulted from the payment being committed to certain corporations, including Merck, Thermo Instrument, and Archer Daniels Midland, of which I had fractionary ownership, and is itself, the apartment, a form of acculated wealth, though its exchange value is dependant, like currency, on the market and easier to pass in the U.S. to people with similar genetic material or with whom legal relations are permitted. Writing this is a form of narcissism, now in wanting to insert myself in a debate over a magazine, but originally as a reaction to answering a questionnaire, which asked for certain cathexes and, indirectly, economic conditions to be named, thus aiding a kind of class consciousness; since the naming recalled an image or idea of a “life,” as a life is a construct made up of representations of decisions plotted over time and intimately bound up with the control of capital, the commonality of the terms of which led to narrative conventions, the questionnaire established a basis for comparison with the decisions, cathexes and degrees of control of the participants, all of whom are at least acquaintances through text-based exchanges. The expression of my cathexis with an image of my father, here and elsewhere “in my work,” can be said to be a luxury afforded by the capital that I accumulated as a result of his death, although the cathexis would remain, I feel, regardless of the amount of capital involved since it was not known to me, conceptually let alone with numeric specificity, when the cathexis formed, which allowed a kind of cathetic purity that is often idealized, the image of love pointed toward transcendent value, one that can trump the market, within literature and most religions, and within many actual lives, if I can speak of them, other than mine, but writing depends on material conditions unattainable in most. If I am allowed to speak of your life, a set of decisions plotted over time, it is a form of exchange; because of certain histories of exploitation, the subject position created by my relative control of capital and my physical characteristics encounters quite forceful and correct barriers to exchange in various contexts. Though they are often portrayed as protecting images of sets of physical characteristics or images of set of habits, called race and culture, gender and sexuality, such barriers are forms of resistance to the incursions of capital, because capital tries to keep as many of its mechanisms as possible hidden, including labor, a transcendental category, in that in most climates one cannot live without working or paying or forcing someone else to work, so that capital, an image or meme carried by people, makes use of psychological prejudice as part of its hidden mechanisms for exploiting labor; it blurs into such habits and cathexes comfortably and easily, through other ideas and images, and attaches itself to them without dissipation or diffusion, as well as targeting the barriers resistence to such images provokes. To target these incursions via economic analysis is the “class trumps race” theory, which can be extended to other categories, and which when implemented led to the splintering of the left in the late 1960s in the U.S. and to the attempted recovery of origins, previously subsumed by the promise of reform and of a better life,both of which are images, origins and promises, though when lived attain the status of memory and experience, testimony and impression, and then out to the endgame of economic self-justification. Such analyses are abstracted so as to locate the systemizing terms at work, finding them in appeals such as “France for the French,” which paradoxically allows a majority within a locality to feel that their genetic material benefits from redistributive action, though the complications of having 3,000,000 post-colonial citizens, if I may speak of them, particularly as a Jew, since Jews have been closely associated with the market and demonized via that assocation by Christians and others, leading many to convert or to become adherents of Marx, a son of converts who conceived of class consciousness as the royal road to revolution, but the presence of those citizens in France has led, because of the contradictions it heightens in certain images and ideas, to the creation of parties such as the National Front, which tries to define what the French part of “France for the French” might mean, and has certain distorted cathexes with that idea, though anyone can shop at Fauchon if clean. Similar movements exist. Class does not always seem to trump race, or gender, or sexual orientation, though this may still turn out to be the result of false consciousness, which most often today is applied to consumerism, and there is no right of return, a material re-creation of images, for anyone. Some theorists believe hetero- and homosexuality to be chimeras created by capital, and believe race and gender to be so as well, though one does not hear the latter spoken of as lifestyle choices, and medical research continues into their bases.

A Duel Chronicling

sorry that I didn't get the whole thing

george brecht - drip music

powered by the wind

yeah, really.

HOLY

RADIO

spring break

so this is the things i want to do over break: upload videos from class think about next art event/show/thing look at some stuff we might want to read or look at, etc. in terms video, movement, theory, artists, etc. have an art sketch book get together to work on 2d or collaborative or crafts or make out. find a unicorn bake some pies or cakes make my philosophy on life concise and communicable stop trying to be so trendy and explore the merits of longevity in my actions if you wanna do these things with me or want to add, lemme know!

Kalvertoren Drums

thanks for your feedback everyone

Water [Glass] [Empty]

[1] I know we last touched on this a week ago, but nonetheless, getting back to Cage, Pollock, recording (sand and wire): Cage is saying that the permanency of Pollock's work is its major failure- its failure to be performance. That is also his problem with recorded, synthetic, music - that it can be played back at will. It can be permanent. What saved sand art and wire recording for him, and what Pollock lacked, was a way to erase the art object. This is why he was preoccupied with being reborn without cultural knowledge (as a European-influenced American), as technology (i.e. wire recording) erases cultural memory and to erase a thing is to remove its intrinsic "thingness"- the things that Pollock's paintings became when completed. [2] I think what we are doing might be dangerous. I don't know if you share these uneasy feelings - the idea that by making art - producing "new" art, just gives whatever comes next some template to subvert until there's nothing left. Maybe the trend is cyclical and in thirty years people will be undermining performance thru Renaissance-re-revival painting, or maybe there's no end, or maybe there is. To say it another way, perhaps we should think about subverting progress. (This does not mean to hold on to what there "is" now, or what we "have".)

francis alys = amazing

This guys is amazingly intense. I couldnt really find any good videos except for this one. In most of his other work he combines performance, painting, installation and politics in one. He's kind of my idol right now. Google him. It's worth it.

Experimental music @ Mack B

For those of you who weren't at the Experimental Music performance last night at Mack B Gallery, here's what went down: New College students performed a piece by Cornelius Cardew called The Great Learning, Paragraph 7. Performers move start on any pitch, complete the instructions at their own pace, and move amongst each other, finding pitches and sounds they want to mimic, work off of, or be a part of.

Paragraph 7 1/2 page for any number of untrained voices Duration about 90 minutes Composed 08.04.69 sing 8 IF sing 5 THE ROOT sing 13 (f3) BE IN CONFUSION sing 6 NOTHING sing 5 (f1) WILL sing 8 BE sing 8 WELL sing 7 GOVERNED hum 7 sing 8 THE SOLID sing 8 CANNOT BE sing 9 (f2) SWEPT AWAY sing 8 AS sing 17 (f1) TRIVIAL sing 6 AND sing 8 NOR sing 8 CAN sing 17 (f1) TRASH sing 8 BE ESTABLISHED AS sing 9 (f2) SOLID sing 5 (f1) IT JUST sing 4 DOES NOT sing 6 HAPPEN hum 3 (f2) speak 1 MISTAKE NOR CLIFF FOR MORASS AND TREACHEROUS BRAMBLE

The performance began on a dissonant note, and gradually moved in and out of harmony/ atonality. Audience members were encouraged to walk around/through the performers. Aaron and I were the first people to take them up on this offer, first walking around them to get a sense of what they sounded like from all angles, and then going straight into them, standing amongst the singers and becoming enveloped in the sound and the arbitrary creation of that sound. I got two impressions of my relationship to the performers while I was standing amongst them. First, that I was listening to a symphony in which I could pick out any part or sound that interested me and physically walk towards it, focus on it, get inside it. I could position myself in such ways that I could hear some voices more clearly or more faintly, and although all the voices were constantly changing in volume, pitch, content, and physical placement, I felt like I was in control of my aural intake, like my own recording and manipulating equipment. Second, if I stood still, the performers moved around me constantly and subtly, changing intensities and volumes as they moved closer and farther from me. In this respect, I felt that the performers had become sound objects and moving architecture: the structure of their voices together was constantly shifting not only in accordance to the instructions, but also to the amorphous movement of each person towards and away from other sounds. Standing still amidst them was similar to standing in the middle of a building in which all the walls were moving around you: the sounds came to you, in antithesis of the power to selectively hear what you wanted to hear if you were to take the initiative to move around within the structure (which, of course, is still constantly moving).

musicals are the most bizarre thing on earth

i am in rehearsal right now for the hot mikado, already generating strange ideas about the nature of performance, and then i decide to continue with readings on fluxus and john cage and the like. i do not recommend this combination, in short, it is a mind fuck. the point is, i think that the article written by Nyman is really smart. i feel as though i am gathering a good cross section on a specific type of performance art and coming up with great performance ideas for my personal work as well. i like the way nyman compares cage's approach to performance with brecht's , stating that cage sees "performance through total unpredictable configuration" and that cage is not so "interested in the quality of individual things", while Brecht "isolates the single observed occurrences and projects". for me, this comparison was important in thinking about ways of filtering gestures or concepts in a performative way. so a few performance ideas that i had while reading this stuff was to perform a variation of kosugi's piece Anima 2, (which i may do for the last class next week) and exercise of slowing down sounds or gestures, repeating sounds or gestures halfway in various ways. some other projects that i have thought about this term i now have the inclination of labeling "performances" (these include tee shirt assimilation and photo collection), due to continuing reading about performance. i think that these reflect a more Schechnerian observation on performance, yet nonetheless, i think may be more appropriately seen as performances. so rehearsal is almost over, and this has been pretty self indulgent so i will end this post, but on this note: today in dance class two girls were lifting up a stool in order to make room for us to dance and about five of us stood around watching. after they finished, i really wanted to clap. are these moments, which happen all the time, meant to be recognized out loud, or are they better left alone? cage mentions that " theatre takes place all the time, whenever one is and art simple facilitates persuading one this is the case."

puttin' on the fritz

what's wrong with the blog? it erased a bunch of posts and made fonts annoyingly big. it is bad and i hate it.

Beckett - Not I

Petey Greene: Messiah

PAROLE.

john roberts

Lauren Larkin

i am unsure whether or not i think she is legit or a complete idiot. i think some of her ideas are worthwhile, like the global blog, while others are rather trite- getting dressed in new york city. i would like to know what you guys think about it too.

Phillip Glass on Seseme Street

Fuck yes Also, a lego reenactment of Phillip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach: Just for some context, this opera lasted 4 and a half hours.

RE: Schechner

I like Susanne K. Langer's quote about re-enactment as expression rather than experience. Also, I like how Schechner goes on to describe the state of modern performance art, enabled by technology to present very little space-time distance between art and action. "A considerable amount of postmodern art does not offer viewers objects or actions for consideration," he writes. This seems to ripple out in a variety of interpretations of "doing" or doing as "not doing", ie YouTube webcam blogs or Cage's four and a half minutes of silence. It makes me think about the line of doing and not doing during a performance, how we worry if we are performing too much or not enough to be believable or get our point home. All of the divergent means and ends lead to a really malleable medium. I think during our first showcase we played with this line pretty readily, drawing out would-be daily rituals (dinner table, shower, ice cream) into performative elements based on a mixture of context and performance.

For Friday

Since we never agreed on an assignment for Friday, I was hoping that people would post suggestions. My idea was to organize a performance around "a completely original" behavior. The discussion would be about what components of the performance were original, what parts were were examples of "restored behavior", and why the assignment was impossible.

JOSEPH BEUYS

Joseph Beuys was a German-born artist who worked in a variety of mediums, including innumerable drawings, sculptures, installations, and performances. Born in the German town of Krefeld in 1921, but soon transferred to the industrial town of Kleve (which Beuys was adamant about being native to), Beuys’s childhood was spent largely in this region. An aspect of Beuys’s upbringing, his involvement with the Hitler Youth, is often brought against him; however, it should be noted that at the time of his adolescence in Germany such involvement was absolutely mandatory. Given this military background, Beuys was training as an aircraft operator in 1941 when he decided to take leave. During this time he attended lectures in biology, philosophy, botany and geography. It is also said that it was during this time that he first considered working full-time as an artist. As his work, particularly his large body of drawings, would later come to reflect, Beuys “seems to be investigating a possible underlying geometry to [his] natural forms” (Jeffreys, p. 561). This fascination with underlying concepts to structure at every level may well stem from Beuys’s early interest in the natural sciences. In 1942, Beuys was stationed in Crimea as a member of various bomber units. On March 16th, 1944, Beuys’s JU87 bomber plane crashed on the Crimean front. The pilot was killed, but Beuys was found by a German search commando and brought to a military hospital where he stayed from March 17th to April 7th. Beuys’s recollection and embellishment of the incidents notoriously included a rescue of his unconscious body by Tartar tribesmen. Beuys quite avidly describes the Tartar’s language and actions, claiming to have been wrapped in fat and felt to retain body warmth and fed milk and cheese. The story has served as a powerful myth as to the origins and nature of Beuys’s artistic intent and explorations. Beuys is a seminal figure in the history of performance art due to the all-encompassing nature of his “artist-persona”. Beuys attended every lecture, opening and public dialogue in virtually the same garb, year after year: a workmanlike button-up shirt, slacks, leather shoes and his infamous rimmed sun hat. In fact, his outfit was directly related to the image he intended to convey through his public speakings, exhibitions and writings. Arising out of his fascination with the materials alluded to by the plane crash myth, Beuys sought to portray himself as an everyman; clearly within the confines of the natural world and owing not to posessions but to the implications of the materials contained therein. This consciously applied aesthetic, coupled with Beuys’s willingness to beguile, created a far-reaching persona that came to define Beuys and recognition of his work and rhetoric. Beuys tended to mythicize and obscure his past with historical data both plausible and implausible, references to interactions with famed people that never occured, and highly embellished accounts of real events, such as the plane crash myth. This circular method of obfuscation and personification has led to a widespread labelling of Beuys’s explanations, manifesti and intentions as sheer rhetoric. Viewed from the lense of his Utopian ideals, Beuys’s outspoken approach to matters ecology, sociology and more become interconnected in their all-encompassing theories. “Everyone is an artist,” Beuys has famously said. Such rejections of the hierchical institution of art-making and culture at large become apparent in Beuys’s actions, such as when he famously abolished all entry requirements for the Düsseldorf class he was professor of at the time. These public displays of personal politics eventually caused Beuys to be dismissed from his post in 1972. This perception of Beuys’s catalogue as mired in Beuys’s own personal symbolism has led to a tendency by critics and scholars, especially Americans, to try and wrest the potential and control of the works away from the artist’s rhetoric. These discussions of the work tend to focus on the materials represented therein, and the wider processes and discursive elements present. That meanings may be sifted through to arrive at conclusions about Beuys’s body of work is a productive take on the common criticism that Beuys has tried to control his art through “dubious esoteric or symbolic codings” (interpreted from an essay by Buchloch that dissects and attacks Beuys’s work and intentions). Several overarching themes in Beuys’s work recur in a variety of manifestations. One is the “radical ecology” Beuys proposed as a solution to the capitalist outcome of the “complicity between the power of money and the power of the state” (Adams quoting Beuys, 26). Adams deserves that “radical” ecology is concerned not only with ecological systems within the natural order, but also all levels of human interaction. Beuys studied and expanded upon the idea that art can tackle the Western philosophies and attitudes formed fundamentally as “individual modes of thinking and self-imaging” (Adams, 26). This universal approach to art as a supreme equalizer came to further reflect Beuys’s earlier comment that “each man is an artist”. This did not mean every man is a painter, Beuys later clarified, but that his observation was meant to explain “it is man aided by no god, as in the mystery of Golgotha. It is man himself who must accomplish the resurrection” (Michaud quoting Beuys, 36). Along with this leveled socio-ecological standing for all men, Beuys also stressed the importance of action and theory in every individual’s life. The artist-molded future Beuys sought to achieve could only be reached if man deployed this “resurrective force” in an effort to transform the social body. Beuys often tried to reach his own people, speaking of the “task that the Germans have to accomplish in this world” or the “duty of the German people” (Michaud, 38). Beuys critiqued Marcel Duchamp’s silence, that which Duchamp had contented himself with in lieu of developing a theory on the basis of the work he achieved. Beuys saw Duchamp’s contribution -- the establishment that it is transferral of the object from one place to another that makes it into art -- as empty without the simple and logical follow-up that, in turn, every man is an artist. Beuys sought to convey time and time again that artist’s works without meaning are “objects with no consequences”, and that art must seek to reflect a meaning “so that it later becomes a practical idea within society” (Michaud, 39). Beuys tried to be an acolyte of change in every facet of society he could. As a performer, he built himself into a healer, teacher and practicioner, he who could overcome societal ills with the prescription of self-worth, validating that you who is observing is, also, an artist. With his drawings, sculptures and installations he sought to represent the radical ideals of his personal ecology, readily evident in such vast undertakings as his widespread tree-planting installation across Kassel, 7000 Oaks. In all of his speakings and writings, Beuys stressed the importance of the spoken word over the plastic, of real communication over simulation. This universal connectivity, a theory of recognition and abolishment of doubt, lies central to Beuys’s philosophy and contribution to art and the world at large.

Carlson

I think we talked the Carlson readings over pretty thoroughly on the 26th. On the distinction between performance and theater, I think a point of interest is the way in which they approach affecting the viewer or audience. In theater, it often seems, you rely on an audience's perception of a character -- an established archetype within the frame of the narrative -- and are able to twist perceptions (as is the crux of modern theater) based on the reality of this character. While characters are present in performance art, often guiding us through a swampy juxtaposition of narration and activity, we recognize these more readily as false or ironic. Basically, the overlap between modern theater and performance is the number interpretations of characters which are opened up.

Carlson: a dialogue

JB: Do you want to start? JD: You start. JB: Okay. JB: yeah so i think that the readings really just boil down to process/performance/ happening vs. art object/finished work. JD: well i think that is really just about semantics. JB: i mean.. JD: wait, why aren't we just writing this down? JB: oh yeah. (JD hands JB computer) JB: ok so tell me what you think about these articles justing being about semantics? JD: well its just that they are all about foundations and in relation to science that is how things start, and that is fine but it is not interesting to read. JB: i agree, from my perspective, i found that the readings were uninteresting because they skimmed a lot of different surfaces, and in order to really engage with this material, i think it would have been beneficial to have read the source material, and that would have required, like, a whole different kind of course. JD: you cant be all inclusive, all you can do is name drop, but i cant think of any other way to do it, but i cant think of a way to respond to it. JB: I think that although reading that formally, I'm finding a hard time responding...but the next time I do a performance I think this reading will help me think in terms of a formal theater tradition. For example, when I think about the performance I did with Sarah, I can use these readings to understand which parts were "minimalist", like how we interacted with the audience was....in a mass watching us, but not physically engaged (traditional), but on the other hand our narrative arch did not follow a traditional narrative arch, in that it did not have a text, and repetition of movement of gesture called on, like, a certain visual art tradition, versus a theatrical one. And since I've done the readings, I've been thinking about how'd I like to create that distinction for myself personally. Like does that occur with action. Does my body, acting, relate to the body of the audience, with imagery, etc, etc. And I haven't concretes it. JD: I mean, I agree, but I feel like it's less constructive for me to think of things in terms of, "Is what I'm doing postmodern? Am I playing into all those defined sensibilities? What would Banes or Copeland say about my shit?" I agree that it is a necessary starting point. What else is there to begin with, and all of this preliminary stuff IS really important if we really want to assess what is performance- trying to actually integrate the "formal" qualities of art making into whatever art we are doing. I just think that having this varied background in the steps leading up to whatever modern sensibility of "performance art" is stifling in its jargon. JB:I think the problem is that it runs counter to what Carlson is saying performance is. This anti-art-making, process orientates thing. And I think the, um, idea of practicing the dissection of what is performance turns, we have to call it a product, into a calculated process and into a product. I'm comfortable with that academic exercise when it comes to straight theater, because the concern is about dissecting a final product, but I don't I should be so comfortable with it in this genre because it is so different and it has such different goals. JD: What do you think the goals of performance are versus the goals of theater? What's the difference, because I get the idea that the two are inherently inseparable. JB: Right now it's just these feelings for me. I can't make them tangible yet. And I agree. I think that the relationship is really close. And the relationship between performance art and visual art are really close. JD: I mean, I definitely see that in terms of Man Ray. I mean his process was very per formative, cutting shit apart, making Dadaist statements about the roles of the art product, but at the same time he did do 2d art. JB: Yeah. And I can see how installation art and sculpture are lumped together with p art. And I think seeing those relationships for myself will help separate where performance art and theater are in my mind. JD: I'm interested in this Foreman quote: "Theater attempts to infuse the audience with some imaginary idea or emotion." I mean, despite this larger objective, which is still undefined for you and I and whatever that means for our performances, isn't performance art doing the same thing? I mean, isn't that what art is all about? Just because an audience is a little less disenchanted doesn't mean you can supplant affect. Viewing art and interpreting art is subjective and people build stories and people rely on the idea of "theatrics". JB: the big thing in theatre is the Aristotelian model, or, a response to that model. everything that happens in theatre is based on that model or is trying to respond to it, whereas, in performance art, there is no response or need for the Aristotelian model. i can bring that lens to it while viewing a performance art piece, but that just isn't what performance art is concerned with... is there anything else you wanted to mention? JD: fuck you. they shot rice. i don't know, make something funny. (yawn) (sigh). KEREM OZKAN: go suck a dick.

Artist Paper 1: Chris Burden

Kim Vorperian Spring 2008 Advanced Performance Art IRP

There is a Fine Line Between Genius and Crazy and Chris Burden is a Master Funambuler

Chris Burden is known world-wide as one of the prominent performance artists of the 20th Century. His career has been long, consisting of numerous performances most of which have been on the more controversially dangerous side of performance. Chris Burden has been shot, drowned, burned, dragged across broken glass, bedridden, and “doomed”. All of these acts were self-inflicted, but the real question is why? Some say because he's an idiot or mentally ill. Others look at Burden's work as an extreme way of working with important issues that concern the conceptual properties of art. I waver, leaning sometimes towards the former explanation for his performance activities, which is why I will not be focusing on his approach to the psychological experience of danger, physical risk, and pain. Nor will I address his aggressive abuse of the body as an art object. I am more interested and convinced aesthetically by his work dealing with the psychology of the artist/spectator relationship, which is what I will be discussing through his works in this paper.

A quick look into Burden's past will aid in the understanding of his concepts later in life. Burden was born in Boston in 1946. His father was an engineer and his mother got her master's in biology. He moved around a lot living primarily in Italy and France. He went to Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where his declared major was in architecture. On the side he studied physics, but gravitated toward art, with a special interest in Dadaism. One of his major influences is Duchamp which becomes quite apparent with later use of the body as an object. Burden graduated from the University of California, Irvin, in 1971. It was his master's thesis, the 5 day locker stint, that allowed him to be taken very seriously by the art community from that moment on.

Burden has dealt with the psychological aspects of the artist/spectator relationship in a variety of contexts. For one performance in Newport Beach, 1972, he sat immobile in a chair, wearing dark glasses, facing two cushions and an inviting box of marijuana cigarettes. The people that walked by naturally assumed that he was watching them, but the insides of his glasses were painted black, and he refused to speak. He reported, in his record of the work, “Many people tried to talk to me, one assaulted me and one left sobbing hysterically.”

In another work called “Back to You”, 1974, Burden lay half-naked in a moving elevator. A volunteer was requested and then proceeded into the enclosed elevator. Visibility was completely cut off between the audience and the inside of the elevator except for a monitor connected to the outside. The volunteer was instructed by a sign on the wall to “stick push-pins into Chris Burden”. In this particular performance the volunteer hesitated and then asked if Burden “want(ed) them in a particular place?”. There was no reply and the audience shuttered as the volunteer proceeded to stick push-pins into Burdens torso.

One work that stands out as a major accomplishment in the realm of artist/spectator relations is his work “Doomed” performed in April, 1979. This performance took place in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The piece consisted of Burden setting a clock on the wall at midnight and then laying down on the floor under a leaning sheet of glass. Viewers came and went, but Burden didn’t move. Forty-five hours and ten minutes passed, during this time Burden inevitably soiled his pants. Then a young museum employee named Dennis O’Shea took it upon himself to place a container of water within Burden’s reach. At this point Burden stood up and smashed the clock with a hammer and left. This was the only time that Burden took on a public piece that put himself in extreme danger. What “Doomed” conveyed successfully was the absurdity of the conventions by which, through assuming the role of viewers, we are both blocked and immunized from ethical responsibility. In O’Shea’s case, the situation was complicated by his duty to maintain the inviolability of art works.

The question that comes into my mind is, what is it about an art piece that makes us feel unable to act even if there is another being in danger of being killed? Does art exist in such a different dimension that it releases us from our moral consciousness and objections? I find the way in which Burden questions the stability of the distinction between art and life is impressive. He achieves this by demolishing the gap psychologically constructed between the two. There is no gap between art and life, art is imagined. There is always only life and death. A dichotomy that Burden used to catapult himself into the art community of the 1970's.

http://www.ubu.com/film/burden.html

Artist Paper 1: Orlan

Lauren Edwards

Spring 2008

Advanced Performance Art IRP

Orlan: Surgery, Monstrosity and Constructed Identity

Interpreting the work of radical French performance artist Orlan is a deeply convoluted act. Her work encompasses and incorporates a plethora of broad concepts, such as identity, gender, culture and race, and also tends to naturally contradict itself with the exploration of dualities—masculine and feminine, narcissism and self-disassociation, technology and the “natural” body. One of the many overarching themes throughout her portfolio is the relationship between women and patriarchal standards of beauty, whether the relationship is manifested in her radical surgical performances, her ‘Reincarnation’ through a series of mostly facial cosmetic surgeries (wherein she first appropriated the features of five idealized historical and mythological women as portrayed by male artists, and later began to transform herself into the ‘monstrous feminine’, the patriarchal definition of monstrosity), or in her more recent work with photo-manipulations, Self-Hybridization (altering her image on a less radical level to conform to standards of beauty in pre-Colonial Mayan culture). These performances are meant to supply the audience with a postmodern feminist discourse-parody of the patriarch-Other relationship in terms of standards of feminine beauty and behavior, and also to assert Orlan’s transcendent non-identification with her natural body in the technological age.

The issue of whether or not Orlan’s use of self-manipulation as a political tool is valid is highly debatable: by enacting cosmetic surgery and defying the natural materiality and mortality of the body, is Orlan really disrupting our concepts of patriarchal standards, or is she furthering the problem by reinforcing the malleability of the body, enforcing standards of beauty by appropriating and highlighting standards of ugliness or monstrosity, and implying that the implementation of cosmetic surgery is a medical/technological solution to a social problem?

It is important to note here that the nature of Orlan’s work and her manifesto is somewhat self-contradicting and ambiguous, and often it is difficult to determine what her ultimate goals are. Orlan states that she sees the natural body as obsolete[1]: “She describes her body as ‘a sack or costume to be shed’, declaring that her work ‘is a struggle against: the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as…artists of representation) and God!’”[2] However, her work continually seems to associate the alteration of her face with the alteration of her identity, equating her many surgeries with Reincarnation of the Self, labeling the surgeries “a woman-to-woman transsexual act”[3], and consistently reinforcing the “faciality” of identity[4], carried on by her Self-Hybridization series. By playing both the role of Patriarch (inflictor) and Other (inflicted) to reveal the hypocrisy of modern beauty standards and the practice of cosmetic surgery, she simultaneously reveals her own hypocrisies, cultural and evolutionary biases which must be considered when analyzing the validity of her work with self-transformation.

Orlan’s ‘Reincarnation’ and the additional surgeries that followed is a portrayal of the Other’s domination by the Patriarchy, Orlan’s objective performance of the roles of Patriarch and Other, and Orlan’s conscious imposition of patriarchal conditions on her Othered body all at once. Her surgical performances are rooted in complex cultural, literary, gendered and social themes, all highly interpretable (especially due to the artist’s vagueness in describing the goals of her work). The first six surgeries are a direct imposition of features taken from popular images of various mythical or historical women, chosen for their representations of Orlan’s ideal image of femininity, idealized feminine figures from the work of Western male artists.[5] During these surgeries she is fully conscious, though she feels no pain under a local anesthetic, and directs the entire operating room as a surreal and macabre performance, often involving dancers, music, vibrant colors and props, and costumes by world-famous fashion designers (fig. 1, fig. 2). She maintains as much control of the situation as is possible for somebody undergoing surgery, from what the doctors are wearing to the amount of pain her body feels to control over her interaction with her audience via satellite (fig. 3).[6] Her later surgeries move towards a transformation into the “monstrous feminine”[7], the highlight of these surgeries being two silicon bumps implanted into her temples, giving her face an extraterrestrial eeriness (fig. 4).

Although Orlan’s work is highly complicated and incorporates a plethora of issues and references, for the sake of simplicity we can whittle her work with self-transformation down two three basic goals. Orlan’s main goal is to disrupt beauty standards imposed by the patriarchy on women while exploring and offering new alternative, radical forms of plastic surgery as a form of subversion for her female spectators. “By taking up the position of the monstrous feminine occluded from existing models of spectatorship,” writes Kate Ince, “Orlan challenges those models, and offers new possibilities of identification to her female spectators.”[8] On a more specific scale, Orlan’s cosmetic performances are meant to reveal the hypocrisy and violence inherent in cosmetic surgery as it exists beneath our glamorized understandings of it. “Orlan is self-consciously exploring a means of identity transformation that is currently glamorized in our mediatized society without much reflection.”[9] Beyond these goals, Orlan continually asserts that the natural body is obsolete, a call back to Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth[10], a goal which has caused a great deal of controversy among feminist philosophers. “In doing so,” writes Llewellyn Negrin in “Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity”, “she accepts uncritically the idea that technology can transcend all bodily limits and tends to downplay the fact that we are defined by certain inescapable biological constraints and processes, such as ageing and dying, which, though culturally mediated, cannot be eliminated.”[11]

As parodies of beauty standards and the roles women play in their own self-transformations, several elements of social satire are incorporated into Orlan’s surgical performances. One the most consistent of these elements throughout her portfolio is the continual assumption of the dual role of both Patriarch and Other. In her Saint Orlan persona, she takes up the role of Saint both as a symbol of the Christian Patriarchy and as the ultimate defender of the oppressed Other[12], simultaneously creating a double-persona in the black virgin (fig. 5) and white virgin (fig. 6), representing the new, autonomous woman and the traditional, passive, patriarch-ideal woman respectively[13]. Self-Hybridization (fig. 7, fig. 8) carries on much in the same way as her cosmetic surgeries, wherein Orlan is inflicting change and pain upon herself to “expose the pain caused by heedless capitulation to the male desire for a sculpted body[14]”, suggesting the complicity of the woman in her own mutilation.

Orlan’s performances challenge the patriarchal imperative to control the body, since she consents to becoming the object of surgery even while remaining a conscious participant or subject of the process. In this way, she exposes the unacknowledged suffering that comes with any attempt to achieve the images of women as portrayed in advertising by fashion models. Orlan’s opened body exposes her audience to the body’s passivity and receptivity to pain and wounding, and also, in this case, its complicity in the wounding.[15]

Orlan also uses the gore, violence and surreality of her cosmetic surgeries to highlight the “secret world” of cosmetic surgery and the inherent, hidden violence it inflicts on women (metaphorically and literally) [16]. Alyda Faber writes, “Her practice of self-directed violence creates a spectacle that violates the viewer and establishes her body as a ‘site of public debate’.”[17]

In addition, Orlan vamps the technological and commercial aspects of her work in a satire of the commodification and commercialization of women’s bodies. “Each performance is videotaped, photographed, and some have been telecast live, thereby making public what has traditionally been kept an extremely private event,” writes Michelle Hirschhorn.

Not only does [Orlan] grant us visual access to the procedure, but through refusal to undergo general anaesthesia, she becomes an active participant heself. In so doing, she adds a third term, during, to the rigid binarism of ‘before’ and ‘after’, and thereby poses a direct challenge to the myth of magical transformation performed on helpless women by the omnipotent medical establishment.[18]

When her long periods of recovery (also documented to undermine the “quarantine” patients are usually confined to following a procedure and revealing the brutalization surgery inflicts on the body[19]) (fig. 9) are over, her surgeries, instead of creating a homogenous, socially acceptable visage of beauty, result in unideal outcomes (fig. 10) that challenge beauty standards either ironically (an unsettling, unresolved conglomeration of ideal features) or directly (features of the “monstrous feminine”, continued in Self-Hybridization[20]). Orlan also raises funds for future surgeries by selling her byproducts (“reliquaries” sold for as much as 10,000 francs[21]) in an ironic parody of the commodification of the female body (fig. 11).

Enacting herself (and literally rearranging her body/self) through technologies of representation as well as medical technology, Orlan produces herself as posthuman: her body/self is experienced (both by herself and by her audience) through technology.[22]

As I have explained, Orlan’s surgical parodies are an attempt to expose the hypocrisy and destructiveness of the surgical attainment of normative beauty standards in today’s society and assert the obsolescence of the natural body by becoming complicit in her own mutilation, commodification, and domination for the sake of grotesque satire. “I have given my body to art,[23]” Orlan has stated, and indeed she has: by choosing her own body as a medium of self-representation and as a means for making a political statement, she has made her own body the “site of public debate”[24]. The question is, does Orlan succeed in disrupting our concepts of patriarchal standards of feminine beauty? Does she offer a valid, accessible opinion of the body in terms of identity by offering a radical parody of aesthetic surgery, or is she simply reinforcing standards of beauty by becoming the epitome of standards of ugliness and monstrosity? In addition, could Orlan’s surgeries be further destructive by implying the patriarchal idea that women’s bodies are infinitely alterable and Othered through her assertion that technology is transcendent of the natural body?

Orlan’s work has sparked worlds of controversy among her audience, on the feminist front in the debate over the ethics of cosmetic surgery and in various other controversial discussions. Her work is most often met with a mixture of fascination and repulsion, and Orlan admits that allowing her body to be the “site of public debate” often puts her in a difficult position.[25] Orlan’s work is offensive as a violent spectacle and a direct insult to those who have taken part in the system of beauty and aesthetic surgeries. As Michelle Hirschhorn writes:

Seen from this perspective, Orlan’s actions are thus perceived as deliberate acts of disfigurement which she inflicts upon herself, and so pose a threat to our own hidden fears of disfigurement…Is it possible, then, to assume that a large degree of the aggression which is informed by this type of interpretation, and the accusations which charge Orlan with self-loathing, are perhaps a denial, or a projection onto her, of our own self-loathing?[26]

Because Orlan’s work is ambiguous and highly interpretable, it is difficult to say whether or not her work functions as a political tool or a form of discourse. As parody, her work has the freedom to be indefinite and radical simultaneously. As discourse, it does not. However, despite the incongruities and philosophical socio-ethical conflicts Orlan’s work with self-transformation projects, as a truly unique and rare enacted example of new possibilities for feminine subversion of patriarchal standardization, her portfolio will doubtless remain at the forefront of the debate on new forms of postmodern feminist identity and cosmetic surgery in years to come.

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[1] Ince, Kate. Orlan: Millenial Female. Oxford, New York: University of Minnesota, 2000. Quoted on p. 96: “Like the Australian artist Stelarc, I think that the body is obsolete. It is no longer adequate for the current situation…we are on the threshold of a world for which we are neither mentally nor physically ready.”

[2] Negrin, Llewellyn. "Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity." Body & Society, Vol. 8, No. 4, 21-42 (2002): 34.

[3] Davis, Davis, Kathy. “‘My Body is my Art’: Cosmetic Surgery as Feminist Utopia?” Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body. Ed. Kathy Davis. London: Sage Publications, 1997:174.

[4] Orlan’s principle site of surgery is the face (although one of her earlier surgeries entailed liposuction of her thighs), making the ‘Reincarnation’ aspect of her alterations problematic as she repeatedly denies the linkage of face (or body) to identity. In defense of the questionable consistency of this disassociation, Kate Ince argues: “By making her face the focal point of ‘Reincarnation’, Orlan has revealed the precariousness of faciality as the seat or site of human qualities and attributes—the literal superficiality of ‘humanity’ in our postmodern age.” (80)

[5] Ince 125: “Orlan chose the Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Venus, Diana, Psyche and Europa as the icons from which to compose her new identity as a woman because she loved their images. She did not want to resemble them visually, but she admired and wanted to associate herself with their qualities of character—androgyny, carnal beauty, temerity and aggressivity, fragility and vulnerability, and fascination by adventure and the future. To Orlan, her female icons were (homosexual) love-objects she could not personally know, but who have certainly played a part in the ongoing construction of her identity as a woman. In having a facial feature of each icon sculpted into her flesh, Orlan found a visual means of inscribing and displaying her always-already lost love for some of the heroines of Western art history.”

[6] Arguably, the only aspect Orlan does not have control over is the suffering her body obviously endures (she must recover from her surgeries, after all), which begs the question of whether Orlan can truly label the “natural” body as “obsolete” in the face of her own mortality, and also whether Orlan can ever truly remove herself and her art from accusations of masochism, polysurgical addiction, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, and general mental instability.

[7] Ince 73. “By taking up the position of the monstrous feminine occluded from existing models of spectatorship, Orlan challenges those models, and offers new possibilities of identification to her female spectators.”

[8] Ince 73.

[9] Augsburg, Tanya. “Orlan’s Performative Tranformations.” The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: NYU Press, 1998: 288.

[10] Ince 90. “The cyborg is a political myth intimately bound up with the rise of feminism, and like it, has a major role in shaping the future of humanity. The collective object that is women’s experience is, according to Haraway, ‘a fiction and a fact’, which has been both discovered and constructed by feminism; the social reality of women’s oppression is a ‘world-changing fiction’. Among the continually self-renewing forms of feminist humanity called for by Haraway, the cyborg is privileged because it figures innumerable possible multiple and hybrid identities. Its disrespect of the boundary between fact and fiction conjures prospects of as yet unimagined bodily identities and social formations.”

[11] Negrin 34.

[12] Faber, Alyda. “Saint Orlan: Ritual as Violent Spectacle and Cultural Criticism.” The Drama Review 46.1 (Spring 2002): 88: “Saintliness evokes an imperative to imitate, through the saint’s embodiment of excessive love and generosity toward the Other.”

[13] Rose, Barbara. “Is it Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act.” Art in America 81.2 (February 1993): 85: “[Orlan’s] incarnation as Saint Orlan focused on the hypocrisy of the way society has traditionally split the female image into madonna and whore.”

[14] Faber 90.

[15] Faber 89.

[16] Davis 172: “While Orlan begins her performances by apologizing to her audience for causing them pain, this is precisely her intention.”

[17] Faber 85. “…the primacy of the body as a means of communication creates meaning that cannot be limited to or by prepositional discourse. Orlan’s art develops a transgressive form of prediscursive communication by creating a spectacle of violence.” (Faber 88)

[18] Hirschhorn, Michelle. “Orlan: artist in the post-human age of mechanical reincarnation: body as ready (to be re-) made.” Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings. Ed. Griselda Pollock. New York, London: Routledge, 1996: 117.

[19] Hirschhorn 118. “After each operation, Orlan ritualistically photographs her bruised and bloated post-operative face—first thing in the morning, every morning—for 41 days, referring to the amount of time that quarantined people are kept hidden from the world.”

[20] Although Self-Hybridization features several monstrous-looking, digitally manipulated images of Orlan, the portraits, taken from the sculptures of pre-Colonial cultures, are meant to depict the ideal images of beauty in non-Western cultures, simultaneously remarking on the cultural universality of bodily objectification and on the tendency of cultures (i.e. Western culture) to view other cultures’ visions of beauty as monstrous and Other.

[21] Davis 171. “Under the motto ‘my body is my art’, [Orlan] has collected souvenirs from her operations and stored them in circular, plexi-glass receptacles which are on display in her studio in Ivry, France. These ‘reliquaries’ include pieces of her flesh preserved in liquid, sections of her scalp with hair still attached, fat cells which have been suctioned out of her face, or crumpled bits of surgical gauze drenched in her blood. She sells them for as much as 10,000 francs, intending to continue until she has ‘no more flesh to sell’.”

[22] Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998: 227.

[23] Ince 128.

[24] Ince 129.

[25] Hirshhorn 118. “[Orlan] explains that it is difficult to sustain because it is an act of aggression against herself that is often interpreted by others as an act of aggression towards them, who in return frequently respond aggressively towards her.”

[26] Hirschhorn 118.