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For the past week, I have been in Graz blogging for the festival Steirischer Herbst as part of their Randnotizen. My posts were as follows:
Cinema and Anxiety
The year when it disintegrates
In this photo the second moon was removed
The Night of Counting The Years
The blue and the gold could catch the light
Without a theme, under what other organizing principles might an exhibition be curated?
I’m here to make you feel. I’m not here to seduce you.
My lack of conviction in saying even the most obvious things, or the things I most believe in, works against me at times.
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September 30, 2011
September 29, 2011
Artists, by definition
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Artists should, by definition, have a more bohemian life in which they work less than other people. This is apparently not the case.
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Artists should, by definition, have a more bohemian life in which they work less than other people. This is apparently not the case.
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September 16, 2011
Trondheim > Malmö
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In Trondheim we had one day of sun followed by three days of rain. And, staring at the strange juxtaposition of dark clouds against blue sky, I think of them as a mirror. In my artistic practice perhaps one day of sun is always followed by three days of rain. We’ve had especially good shows in Mannheim, Olso and, last night, here as well. There is a moment when the work takes over and it is as if you are thinking alongside it. You are not in control, if you ever were, and decisions occur in the space between your intentions and what you have made (and what continues to remake itself every time you perform it.) I feel the paradoxes piling up all around me. I am an ideologue, fighting for a certain, fairly specific, way of thinking about and enacting performance, a way that I feel is severely under-represented within the contemporary performance landscape and that many believe is a bit amateur (while I feel they do not see the critical subtlety and complexity. The humanity that speaks louder than skill.) And yet I am an ideologue against ideology, fighting for something that is relaxed, warm, intimate, flexible, spontaneous and open. I am fighting for a way of thinking about performance that refuses to fight for itself and is easily destroyed in combat. What I love is fragile and crumples under the weight of my own critical scrutiny. And yet I don’t want it to crumple, I want it to prevail. I want to fight but believe if we fight too much we lose everything. And yet I don’t know what to do with my anger, which most of the time feels unreal. I’m not exactly sure but it often seems like audiences see almost none of this. The fight occurs behind the scenes, though I am certain they can feel it. The differences between what is seen and what is felt. In which case the spectator is also presented with a paradox: a warm, welcoming space that barely conceals a world of almost infinite confusion and conflict. A fragile oasis in the eye of a tornado. Tomorrow we head to Malmö.
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In Trondheim we had one day of sun followed by three days of rain. And, staring at the strange juxtaposition of dark clouds against blue sky, I think of them as a mirror. In my artistic practice perhaps one day of sun is always followed by three days of rain. We’ve had especially good shows in Mannheim, Olso and, last night, here as well. There is a moment when the work takes over and it is as if you are thinking alongside it. You are not in control, if you ever were, and decisions occur in the space between your intentions and what you have made (and what continues to remake itself every time you perform it.) I feel the paradoxes piling up all around me. I am an ideologue, fighting for a certain, fairly specific, way of thinking about and enacting performance, a way that I feel is severely under-represented within the contemporary performance landscape and that many believe is a bit amateur (while I feel they do not see the critical subtlety and complexity. The humanity that speaks louder than skill.) And yet I am an ideologue against ideology, fighting for something that is relaxed, warm, intimate, flexible, spontaneous and open. I am fighting for a way of thinking about performance that refuses to fight for itself and is easily destroyed in combat. What I love is fragile and crumples under the weight of my own critical scrutiny. And yet I don’t want it to crumple, I want it to prevail. I want to fight but believe if we fight too much we lose everything. And yet I don’t know what to do with my anger, which most of the time feels unreal. I’m not exactly sure but it often seems like audiences see almost none of this. The fight occurs behind the scenes, though I am certain they can feel it. The differences between what is seen and what is felt. In which case the spectator is also presented with a paradox: a warm, welcoming space that barely conceals a world of almost infinite confusion and conflict. A fragile oasis in the eye of a tornado. Tomorrow we head to Malmö.
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