Archive for the ‘ General Wanderings ’ Category
What does it mean to be someone’s friend?
The dictionary on my dashboard says it’s “a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.”
My facebook says that I have 337 friends. Some of them are family. I have had sex with at least 2 of them, and there are probably close to 100 that I have nothing that even imitates a “bond of mutual affection.” In fact, many of them I have never met. They are friends of friends, organizations that have facebook pages, “friend collectors.”
So what does it mean, in this digital age, to be someone’s friend?
I feel like there are all kinds of connotations that go with the word: someone you can turn to when you need something, someone that will help you, listen to you, go see a movie, have coffee…in other words, someone that you would feel comfortable spending time with in the flesh. Someone that’s more than just an acquaintance. Someone who would be there for you.

Number 1 image
Search term: performance art
Safe search: off
This was actually a really great image search. I was interested in following all the links. Take me there.
TItle: Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties
Author: Linda Montano
Published: 2000
ISBN: 0520210212
From the introduction:
Shall We Talk? Linda M. Montano performs autobiographical voices
by: Angelika Festa
I like these 2 paragraphs because it gives me ideas for how to think of our own work and its transcription:
p2: “Montano’s talking performances combine the personal stories of each artist with her own performative vision. These performances are restaged in PAT as a “portable exhibition” in the form of an “artist’s book” that is a significant document of an era in American cultural production as well as an addition to Montano’s own work.
Montano’s performance raises complex issues concerning performance as art and as language. These issues include: (bulleted list is mine)
• an emphasis on the vernacular and everyday
• an insistence on the integral relationship b/t art and life
• the indexing of events and concepts
• the use of personae as a way of problematizing issues of identity within performer-audience relationships
• the practice of art as an exploration and critique of the conventions of daily life, rather than as virtuosity and mastery.”
p2: “Performing the autobiographical “voice” is among the more challenging explorations that have shaped the history of American conceptual and performance art since the 1960s. ”
p3: “Artists’ talking performance use language (speech, writing, and reading) as a medium for expression, construction of identity, and social change.”
As a limited pedigree for “talking performance”, the author refers to turn of the 20th century cabaret, Dada, and Surrealists, as well as Gutai, Situationist International, Nouveaux Realistes, Art & Language and Fluxus. She also includes a list of “landmark talking performances” from the US.
p5: “Talking is not neutral; it reveals complex social conditions and power relations.”
READ: Roselee Goldberg essay, “Performance: A Hidden History” reprinted here
p7: “As performance art continued to shift and change throughout the 1980s, it combined elements from the visual, verbal, and performing arts, popular culture, and daily life and used these to introduce the artist’s body and voice as formal art mediums, as ideological constructions, and as political agents.”
p30: “To underscore the integral relationship b/t art and life, Montano calls her work “living art” or “art/life”…Art/life opens up the categories of art by dissolving conceptual, social, and economic boundaries that tend to limit conventional art forms and artistic expressions.
(Note that by the 1960s, these terms had become popular among artists, but the problem of recognizing and evaluating art that appeared to be identical to life remained unresolved for many audiences and critics.)