Panther City Arts

Performance Installation: Week 2…

Our assigned reading was Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone. It’s a chaotic text, to say the least. In reading it, I knew what Tom was trying to do. Unsettle us.

http://www.amazon.com/T-Z-Temporary-Autonomous-Zone/dp/1460901770

TAZ is so far out of the box it’s nearly absurd. Or totally absurd. It’s the “ends of performance” as I like to say about work that is so far out there, meaning is lost in the ether.

I wish I could offer more reflection on TAZ, but it’s indefinable. Anarchic, chaotic, deconstructed. It’s a series of essays, thoughts, reflections, calls to action, examples, etc. from how to unsettle the hierarchy. As Joker might say, “Introduce a little chaos.” Or as Bey advocates at one point, go into the lobby of a Citibank and take a shit on the tile floor.

Of course, as my notes briefly reflect, what makes an action like this art? You could sign and date it, but is that enough? Where are the limits of art? Is it art if you’re the only one that “knows” it? This, obviously, gets into a much bigger discussion…which is exactly the point. I recommend it for anyone in the art world. Especially those in performance art and installation work. It’s a short read. And entertaining, when it’s not head-scratchingly insane..

Here are my notes…

But, in taking us to that extreme, now we can start to walk it back and find our own artistic identity along the way.

Or at least that’s what I took it for.

Report on 1st Performance Installation class session…

Assignment: Etude #1 (Ready Made)

Etude – a French word meaning study) is an instrumental musical composition, usually short, of considerable difficulty, and designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill.

I see what he did there.

We have weekly assignments to bring in installations. This first one doesn’t seem to have any performance applications.

The assignment is to “make” (construct?) a readymade, a la Marcel Duchamp, so I guess this is my Green Box.

Within this assignment are parameters.

We must use several objects, and they must satisfy the following categories: historical, cultural, spiritual, personal.

One “found” object for each.

Of course, putting requirements like this on a ready made is somewhat counter to the whole point of Duchamp’s readymades as he often chose objects at random that he was “indifferent” to.

Picking objects that satisfy something historical, cultural, spiritual, and especially, personal, seems to fly in the face of the spirit of the form. But, okay…

I tried to start using Duchamp’s method. I casually looked around my apartment for objects I felt indifferent to. Of course, this is close to impossible. And given the assignment, not intended to be?

So, what about those categories? Cultural, Historical, Spiritual, Personal…

And, we’re supposed to think outside of the box. Using objects to represent something other than their intended purpose.

My process was a lot of playing around. Something that’s difficult to document without filming myself.

I came up with this…

Spiritual – My macbook pro. I’m reminded of a story that goes, when future civilization find the ruins of ours, they’ll naturally think that our deity was a box at the center of our main living spaces. This is meant to be a statement on our addiction to television. But of course, times have changed. Now, if they were to find my body now, they’d find my laptop in front of me. It is holy to me, and all of us, on some level…

Historical – An old acting trophy from middle school – yes, that was a thing. It reminds me of my origin in the arts. That time in junior high drama really set me on whatever course I’m on now…

Cultural – My Ice King vinyl Pop figure. In the set up of the installation, he represents me. As an expression of pop culture, I’m saying that I too am mediated and constructed by pop culture. My identity is socially constructed, as is all of ours, to a certain extent. It may be a bit of a stretch, but I’ve got an assignment to do…

Personal – My yellow legal pads. I work exclusively on yellow legal pads and usually, in blue felt tip pen. I have dozens of them full of ideas, notes, random other things. They are a big part of my life and who I am. When I die, the story of my life can be pieced together in these notebooks.

Construction notes to follow with pictures…

Installation Overview: Preconceived notions…

An admission: I’m writing this pretty late in the process. But, process, as we come to understand in the creation of art, is an interesting thing…

In the spring of 2014, in my next to last semester of PhD (in the arts and humanities) coursework at the University of Texas at Dallas, I signed up for a class taught by one of my primary mentors, Thomas Riccio, called Installation Performance.

I enrolled in the class primarily for the fact that it was taught by Tom, someone I look to as a mentor and advisor. The man who talked me into continuing my education at UTD after a tumultuous time in my masters degree. Other than the fact that it was a performance class (my primary academic and artistic focus) taught by Tom, I admittedly had little interest.

Tom runs a theater/performance group in Dallas called the Dead White Zombies. And like with Tom, I admire their work. However, Tom and I diverge when it comes to the definitions of theater and performance in today’s age. In a pre-semester meeting, specifically, as we talked about my future, interests, and various other book keeping matters, Tom had said to me, “Theater is dead.”

Now, my masters in in Performance Studies. Within that program, our practical application of the scholarship is in performance art. And I’ve done plenty of performance art over the years. That said, I come from a traditional theatrical background, and still have a great affinity for what I call “the box”. The classical design of the theater as we know it. A proscenium stage facing rows of seats. While I acknowledge the staleness that holding closely to a form can bring about, I still have a great deal of affinity for the classic craft. Put it in a thrust, or the round, or otherwise, I still like the stage and the rows of seats. I think it’s important.

Of course, the declaration that “theater is dead” isn’t necessarily an absolute statement. Clearly, theater is not dead, and that’s not what he meant by the statement. I think what he meant is that it’s stale. Hackneyed. Dare, cliche. It’s been done. And we live in a different age. Some odd postmodern, or post-postmodern age where relativism reigns and objectivity is thought to not exist in most respects. There is no “big T” truth, as it were. Therefore, theater itself has to change. We have to reject (deconstruct?) the traditional theater space in favor of something more visceral, more personal, and specifically, site specific.

Site specific is a catch all term, in my opinion, for any performance that takes place in a non-traditional setting. So, Dead White Zombies perform in warehouses and former crack houses, as opposed to theaters made to look like these places. There’s a certain emphasis on the agency of the space that, perhaps, didn’t exist in the same way in the past. Not that DWZ were the first to employ this tactic. After all, the Donmar Warehouse is one of Britain’s National Theatre’s primary performance spaces. But, in my own personal experience, in a city with a thriving and surprisingly experimental theater community, DWZ was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

And so, Tom tells me over breakfast, “Theater is dead”. Mind you, I’m in process for a one man show set to debut in a proper theater in Dallas later this year. And, at the time, I thought my creative dissertation project would also be a one man show on my favorite research topic, humor. Imagine my world crashing down moment of being told by the man I consider a mentor that all of my designs for a career in theater are bunk because the form is dead.

That serves as a primer for my mindset going into his class on Performance Installation. I’d asked him at breakfast that day, “Is this essentially like a how to on what Dead White Zombies does?”

“Yeah.”

So, I thought I’d at least get some exposure to this world that was trying to destroy all of my designs on a creative arts career.

What exactly was this Performance Installation stuff all about?