entropy. redress.

My friend and collaborator Rhonda Soikowski, who works on the edge of performance practice, embodied research, and pedagogical innovation, recently asked me to participate in her current project titled entropy. redress.

Rhonda invited collaborators to create short video pieces incorporating a single red dress that criss-crossed the globe. Shortly before I got my hot little hands on it, the dress was ripped untimely from the land and disappeared into the Mediterranean. Our small constraint reduced to none, myself and my collaborators Joe Moore and Beth Hersh took to the beach to try to reach towards the lost object.

Click on the image below to see the results of our work. How Rhonda will incorporate it into her piece is still unknown, but it was a privilege and a pleasure to be a part of the journey.

We Are Living in a Material World...

Relational Aesthetics is a term coined by art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to describe the kind of art wherein the medium of creativity is not marble or paint or sound or even words, but the interaction between human beings. It's not a completely new idea; Duchamp was talking about it in the 1950s: "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world."

But Bourriaud takes it a step further, questioning even the importance of a legible "work" at all. What if all that is made is a convivial, participatory experience? The notion of Relational Aesthetics makes even blurrier the line we sometimes draw between life and art, and is ultimately aligned with the project of collectively sculpting culture itself: "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist" (Bourriaud).

Responses to this provocative idea are manifold. Jacques Ranciere, a French philosopher, believes Bourriaud sells short the importance of the audience's act of viewing. In his book The Emancipated Spectator, Ranciere asks whether or not complete entanglement of audience, artist, and artwork is necessary for a real engagement to take place. Isn't watching, thinking, and considering a work of art also a shared experience? Are we ignoring the very real, if subtle, labor performed by the attentive spectator by demanding that she jump into the active space of convivial relationship? What would we lose in giving up the quiet receptivity of watching?

I find both of these positions compelling. I can't choose between them. I want a world filled with art that does both. I want art that demands I engage completely with it (like this, this and this) and I also want works that invite me to surrender to the experience of viewing, where I can fall into the sea of perception - not just the sea they've crafted for me, but the deeper waters of my own experiences, ideas, beliefs, and feelings to which I compare the world that they present to me.

I offer to you a snippet of a performance piece I made with some of my favorite collaborators in response to my readings on Relational Aesthetics and its discontents. This is only a portion of our piece, which involved fishing good-luck coins from a fountain, financial negotiations with our audience over rental of their footwear, and ritualistic foot-washing in preparation for performance. Playful and presentational, our silly dance number was a prefabricated gift to the audience as well as an attempt to collaborate on the continuous project of coexistence.

Only A God

In On the Marionette Theatre, by German Romantic author and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist, the first dancer of the Opera insists to the narrator that the grace of the marionette is superior to the grace of human beings...

"My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet." (Kleist, On the Marionnette Theatre)

In this video, an inanimate object (the fans) animate another inanimate object (the fabric). The result is so full of vital grace that it calls my own liveness into question. In the interaction of these two non-sentient phenomena I see and feel emotional depth, symbolic meaning, a dramatic arc, and a clear aesthetic vision. I'm not sure if this is an argument for a god-less universe or one where god-full-ness is everywhere. Perhaps that's the place "where the two ends of the circular world meet."

P.S. Everything in this post is borrowed from the brilliance of my friends: performer Grace Booth, who found the video, video artist Joe Moore, who showed it to me, and playwright Elizabeth Hersh, who connected the beauty of this dancing scarf to Herr Kleist and his automatons. And Daniel Wurtzel (not yet a friend) is the installation artist who made it in the first place.

Conscious Spectatorship

Yesterday I woke before the sun to attend the Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Ceremony on Alcatraz Island, an annual sunrise gathering that honors the traditions of Native American tribes as well as indigenous people the world over. Blessed with a gorgeously clear morning, the event, which included guest speakers, musicians, drumming, and dancing, was a powerful way to celebrate an ever-problematic national holiday.

The event made me very aware of my own spectatorship. Descended quite literally from settlers who appropriated land from indigenous people, my participation in the ceremony is colored by a sad awareness of my own implication in our current cultural scenario. As an ally to oppressed cultures, I watch and listen with reverence, bearing witness to the traditions that remain vibrant in Native communities. My gaze is attentive, appreciative, and also, I hope, ultimately generative. Rather than watching with the hungry eyes of a tourist or the analytic eyes of an anthropologist, I try to watch in a way that is simultaneously aware of the past yet looking imaginatively towards the future. How can my work as an artist and scholar contribute to the flourishing of intercultural dialogue? Can I, through conscious spectatorship, learn from and help further the vibratory movements of embodied knowledges of cultures that are not my own?

As the sunlight hits the crumbling barracks on the top of Alcatraz, I can't help but think of the rise and fall of cultures. Despite the attempts of the dominant power to control and subordinate any elements that threaten that power, nothing that is built by human hands lasts forever. Sometimes I feel comforted remembering that everything, given enough time, crumbles.