Experiments in art : digital : life

So this is a new idea: re-performing objects. We started with Longo sort of arbitrarily – we love his work, but probably wouldn’t have chosen it as a beginning for our investigation of material culture through performing the objects of that culture.

We’ve worked for a long time around the idea of object/surroundings informing identity. For instance, the image above, taken during the project being:paulandkate, captures a system of uniform objects that we created and built as our domestic environment.

But how does using the body to interpret images of the body (or even further: what about sculpture, Earthworks, Conceptualism…) work differently that the re-performance of actual “Performance Art” – or what we are attempting with the Cover Artists?

<—-! 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