square white world

Bruce Barber in his lecture yesterday, given as part of the Action and Delay conference hosted by AUT, raised for me the question – what is meant by performance in the ‘art world’, and in the institution in which I currently find myself? Why, indeed, would I want to align myself with it, if, as Bruce suggested, after Gregory Sholette, the vast pyramidal-base-sized majority of artists, those engaged in performance, he seemed to intimate, preeminently, are destined to become the ‘dark matter’, their efforts and their art invisible, that holds the Ponzi scheme together and keeps it from flying apart? While a few, as few as there are Russian oligarchs, profit from the existence of an art market, succeeding as artists, at the rarefied tip of the pyramid, they would hurtle off into non-existence without the infrastructural support of curators and managers, middle-men, critics, publications, research interest, courses and conferences that the vast and overwhelming mass of those who will never accede to such heights – or such success, failing inevitably – enables, the existence of which it feeds and feeds on, as an underwater milieu and vast sea-bottom.

What is at stake in ‘performance practice’ as used in this milieu? It seems on the face of it that performance practice is the last place to think about and reflect on performance or think through what it is. Even the documentation has a tendency to collapse into or onto the practice. Whatever thinking goes in to the practice occurs before the outcome which is generically the performance itself.

My understanding of a practice is however exactly the thinking through, about and reflection on the methods, beliefs and ideas that are brought to it, to itself think, and reflect on itself. The question, ‘how does performance think?’ seems to arise less in the milieu of performance than in theatre. The difference being that the performer thinks in theatre through the practice of performance – which is what is meant by technique, acting technique. While the performance artist expresses herself in acting, in an action, intervention, interaction, all the inter-s, she does not interrogate the practice except in research or theory – the technical practice being relegated to a position outside the performance.

The performance artist does not generally have the technical means to think in performance. The performance is an outcome of thought.

How the theatre actor thinks is in the technique of making transitions between states of being in performance, during performance. This insight is due to Esa Kirkkopelto.

Milo Moiré’s performance, PlopEgg #1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKFZOIv5sS0 and at her website http://www.milomoire.com/ has the theatrical components of a technical mise-en-scène – the trestles and scaffold platforms, the canvas support for the finished Rorschach – and the strangley improvised modesty curtain behind which the performer inserts paint-filled eggs into her vagina. She has a stage-manager manoeuvre the latter at several intervals allowing her to refill. But the performance as performance according to the art-world milieu and the tenets of its self-understanding is not and could not be acted – there is only one state of being in the performance, between which the transitions are of low interest in technical terms: between Milo in performance and Milo preparing, backstage, behind the modesty curtain; between Milo pushing out eggs and Milo taking care of the business – albeit nude – of rolling and folding the paint squibs in a canvas. The canvas, it might be said, folds into the performance as its documentation. But the performance is the one repeatable action or operation of plopping eggs.

Where in this performance would there be room to think? As Bruce Barber pointed out, with the Paypal price for the uncensored version of the video at 4.99 Euros and the YouTube views at over 4 million, the thought is, how much money could Milo Moiré potentially make? The success or failure of this performance as performance rests on its reproducibility and functional iterability (this is PlopEgg #1) and statistical and quantitive considerations.

[Martin Heidegger’s] Being and Time was published in 1927, [Alfred North Whitehead’s] Process and Reality in 1929. Two enormous philosophy books, almost exact contemporaries. Both books respond magisterially to the situation (I’d rather not say the crisis) of modernity, the immensity of scientific and technological change, the dissolution of old certainties, the increasingly fast pace of life, the massive reorganizations that followed the horrors of World War I. Both books take for granted the inexistence of foundations, not even fixating on them as missing, but simply going on without concern over their absence. Both books are antiessentialist and antipositivist, both of them are actively engaged in working out new ways to think, new ways to do philosophy, new ways to exercise the faculty of wonder.

– Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, p. ix

Did you take her?

He recalled, “I rang her up the next day and said: ‘Do we need to be doing this?’ And she said: ‘No. Start with your friends first and then go from there.’ And she told me to bin the list.”

Helen said this girl had in ivory.

Obviously some serious piece of other for a while, and presently began to cry.

Brought in contact with the surface of Uganda they take another walk.

Their nudity is based not upon tray from a pile at the end.

Every clearing is densely overgrown.

Wheeled and bounded away.

He is intensely resentful of the man who tries.

Or organ the better its equipment for carrying out the work of that organ and the more does it tend to express itself.

There may you read what kind of a man I am!

She appeared in court wearing a white, short-sleeve top, a black skirt and black heels. During the 50-minute long hearing, she consulted with her attorneys frequently.

And was not at all afraid of him.

Everything was spruce and neat in the cottage: on the table was spread a white cloth, and there were seven little plates, seven little loaves.

She was grown up, he was anxious that she should be well married and provided for.

When the brother came home, they asked him about the castle of Stromberg, and he told them.

But when it turned out ultimately done and now we managed to get there it absolutely was so much enjoyable.

The abatement performer back pack of your respective dreams at the aboriginal on the net bank you examine.

Third Flower My wife and that I …

In social psychology and healthcare, behavior change is explained through health belief model, social cognitive theory, and theory of reasoned action.

With a 50cm waist and 81cm hips, Ioana Spangenberg’s hourglass figure has made her famous over night after pictures of her incredible 20-inch waist began to circulate the Internet and also caused a lot of controversy.

War is business conducted by other means.

Le poème tu.

It’s impossible to do anything other than tell our own stories in our own words…

Stories told by objects. What is an object?

Make up a language.

Tell me the story of your life, starting from your earliest memory, in your made-up language.

Recount in as much detail as possible the worst period in your life in your made-up language.

Truth is useful if it is the category of greatest creative possibility.

Required his chin was propped on a spreading cravat which was as broad and as long as a bank-note, and had fringed ends his boot toes were turned sharply up, in the fashion of the day, like sleigh-runners – an effect patiently and laboriously produced by the young men by sitting with their toes pressed against a wall for hours together.

please

diligently

write

down

your

questions

in Liberia

of malaria

“Glawo, your unexpected and tragic early death tears an eternal hole in our film landscape!”

– Danny Krausz