Experiments in art : digital : life

“31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.”

What does it mean to re-perform a drawing? Even if the original drawing was life-sized? How does involving the body – as a viewer, as opposed to a producer – change the experience with the artwork as object?

There is a sort of object-producer dichotomy in the drawing that is absent when we perform the action. Our bodies are object. Object twice-removed…When we do reperformances, we don’t claim authorship at all. We break free from the notion of authorship, so in a very real sense, Longo is still the author; we’re just allowing him to use our material, to use us as material.

Why Longo?

We were looking for: A portrait. A couple. An object that captured the idea of identity wrapped up in the exterior. Something to model Cash & Ruby on. Something that was already present in – already visually present in the art world – while at the same time, related to our cultural consciousness. Our awareness of ourselves during the 1980s in America. A man and a woman wearing business suits. Money. The notion of surface. Radical surface. A young Caucasian man and woman, well-dressed, attractive.

Transporting ourselves from the analog to the digital. Flattening everything. Giving it all the same value. That’s what happens with the composite. We don’t put ourselves into any sort of scene: it’s a completely clean, neutral space, a non-space, digital space. The original piece of work has all sorts of potential. Our reperformance is just one type of actualization that is available for Robert Longo’s original drawing.

This video by Circlesquare takes it to the next level.

Part I: What is performance studies?

p5: “Self consciously positioned as liminal…between two states of being and belonging to neither.”

Essay 1: “Performance Studies, the broad spectrum approach” by Richard Schechner. pp 7-9.

• A working relationship must exist b/t teachers and professionals in the field
• Performance is a broad spectrum of activities including at least the performing arts, rituals, healing, sports, popular entertainments, and performance in everyday life.
• “Broad spectrum approach”: treating performative behavior, not just the performing arts, as a subject for serious scholarly study
• “Performance quadrilog”: author, performer, director, spectator
• “Performative thinking must be seen as a means of cultural analysis” p8

“I believe that if the study of performance does not expand and deepen, going far beyond both the training of performance workers and the Western tradition of dram and dance, the whole academic performing arts enterprise constructed over the past half-century or so will collapse.” p9

<<This essay seems like a good place to look to for teaching philosophy.>>

<—-! No notes taken before p48: may want to re-read —->

* Elin Diamond, “Unmaking Mimesis” 1997

(first 2 major feminist performance theorists: Sue-Ellen Case & Jill Dolan)

p 54: “Now [Freud] suggested that melancholia was in fact essential to identity formation, since the ego itself seemed to be built upon a series of rejected “object-choices,” such rejection being the source of melancholia.”

Ch3: The performance of language – linguistic approaches

Semiotics was proposed as a new approach to the study of human social behavior by Saussure in early 20th century

Poststructuralist thy in large part defined itself in opposition to semiotics

p 57: “Thus a theatre which sought to reflect life and consciousness accurately should be built, as life and consciousness themselves were, not upon the “representative substitutions” of signs, but upon the “libidinal displacements” flows of psychic energy” [paraphrasing Lyotard]
In 1982 essay J. Feral distinguished b/t theatre and performance by saying     that the theatre is based on semiotics and that performance seeks to
deconstruct those semiotic codes

p 59: “Talk is not simply a set of propositions transmitted from encoder to decoder, in which context is occsionally useful as an added interpretive grid through which to pass strange utterances. Rather, peple use talk reflexively to build the very contexts in terms of which they understand what they are doing and talking about with each other.” [quoted from Dore & McDermott, 1982, footnote 8]

p 64: Emile Benveniste insisted that for an act of speech to be performative in nature, it must be “the verb in the present and in the first person” and must be uttered by “someone in authority” that authority being sufficient to cause the act uttered  to be carried out. If these 2 things are not present, then the speech act is “nothing more than words.”

p 74: “…the concept of performance seems to be serving as an impetus to dissolve traditional disciplinary and methodological boundaries in order to explore more general concerns.”

* J. Derridas “Signature, Event, Context” essay