Holy cow. I have no idea why, but man did people blow up my blog last weekend! My phone was literally buzzing and beeping every 5 minutes for about 12 hours. That’s never been a thing before… So thanks to you all who came and checked me out here, and for everyone who also started following me as a result. It’s nice to feel special every once in awhile. I apologize if I don’t follow you in return, but I can’t keep up with everything anymore. Rest assured you are noted.
I’ve been terribly absent recently, and for that I apologize. A lot of things went very wrong back in August, and then my marriage kind of started to… unravel. And I went into survival mode. Which means I was functioning on a day to day, minute to minute basis, just trying to keep my head above water. Seriously. My brain was elsewhere. But now I’m back on track, and that’s happy! I’ve been digging through my “sketch books” (in quotes because I don’t actually ever sketch… EVER), and pulling out all the random ideas I wrote down but forgot about. Then through a very scientific process I am calling The Whiteboard, I’ve been sorting them out, making connections, and basically trying to understand what my thesis is actually going to be. You see, I’ve been theising hardcore. I’ve also been working on a professional website, job applications, teaching, and drinking copious amounts of coffee…Well, copious for me anyway.
Back to the theising… As it stands right now, the written paper will probably revolve around my failure/success research as well as my interest in the way that photography mediates and fails as a tool for documentation. I’ve been reading a really great book about Performance art and archive, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History which has helped me to clarify my thoughts as they relate to performance and photography, as well as introduced me to the idea of a viral ontology of performance art. The essay this idea comes from (The Viral Ontology of Performance), was written by Christopher Bedford. He contends that a performance cannot be limited to it’s “originary” event. Rather, he says it “[S]plinters, mutates, and multiplies over time in the hands of various critical constituencies in a variety of media, to yield a body of critical work that extends the primary act of the performance into the indefinite future of reproduction.” I’m really drawn to this idea for two main reasons. The first is that it implies that any document made during the originating performance, cannot and should not define the work. As I feel that photographs fail to capture the performance fully anyway, this makes perfect sense to me. Secondly, the idea of a viral ontology extends the ephemeral nature of the performance. The performance happened within a certain time and space, which cannot be recreated or made concrete outside of documentation. Since these documents are all that exist, and not the thing itself (unlike say a painting), they move forward in time, being constantly re-contextualized, re-interpreted, but never concrete. I’m not sure that makes sense…. It does to me though. In any event, I’m excited about that.
The work itself is 99% likely to be performance and installation based. I’m playing around with some ideas involving playing telephone (almost literally…) and mediating the viewer’s experience of the performance in order to address both the ideas of failure and the primacy of my viewer’s experience in the context of my work. I was considering doing something with handing out fake awards to my fellow MFAs that constantly moved around all night…. Buuuuut maybe not. In any case… This shit is real. It’s happening. In like less 6 months. Crap. I’ve now given myself an anxiety attack.
That Whiteboard thing I mentioned earlier? Yeah… Not joking, it is my scientific process. This is what’s been happing in the studio lately:
There is just something about writing that helps me focus. It is so way better than sketching. 😉 Hopefully I’ll be back on track with the blog posting now, but I make no promises! Have a peachy keen evening… I’m off to eat some dinner and check out a visiting artist lecture here at FSU.
the anxiety and the artist 