Thursday, March 6
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.
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I hate the internet and the post-eating monster that inhabits it.
So I thought the Schechner articles were both pretty repetitive, and most of the things he said were pretty blatantly obvious to me. How many ways can you say "Everything is a performance!" without repeating yourself? Apparently a lot. I did, however, relate to his assertion that the units of behavior that comprise "me" were not invented by "me". I'm interested in creating a performance/installation involving picking apart everything about myself, from my manner of speak to the way I walk, think, and am, assigning all of my traits to whoever I picked them up from, and seeing what's left over...probably precious little, considering what social sponges we (I) are (am).
I was also inspired by Langer's quote about beauty/aesthetics (especially with my roommate constantly talking about Kant's aesthetic theory...universal subjectivity WTF??), and Schechner's assignment of the two roles of the target audience of "offensive" (transgressive) art: those who are made uncomfortable by it, and those who are amused to shit by other people's discomfort (or their own, for that matter).
Idea for performance: attempt to create a situation that fulfills all seven of Schechner's "functions of performance: to entertain, to make something beautiful, to mark/change identity, to make/foster community, to heal, to teach/persuade/convince, to deal with the sacred/demonic.
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