…begin beginnings…resisting…desire…a manifesto…
The key to my preliminary research has been psychoanalytical readings of my subjects.
The event of 11th September 2001 and its discourse in the United States is analogous to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's gaze qua object in Four Fundamentals Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Lacan accords a blindspot to the subjective gaze due to its being possible to see from one view only. This limitation acts as an obstruction to the 'locus of truth' posited from without (i.e. the fact one is observed from all sides and perspectives inaccessible to the subject). Regardless of any theoretical absurdities '9/11' discourse must exist beyond the United States for "they" - those over there in the United States - are situated in a relation that is too intimate in its proximity to approach a 'critical distance'. As such the implications are profound for a globalised world. Like the in-house management of paedophilic priests in the Catholic Church, without a literal distancing, a detached, 'objective' perception is impossible.
In Agitated States –Performance in the American Theatre of Cruelty, author Anthony Kubiak's thoughts suggests the perpetual death and destruction wrought by American foreign policy around the globe; in that "the video images [of '9/11'] both marked and indicated a Real violence really occurring elsewhere, wordless and fathomless" .
The literal hole created by the devastating impact, following the collapse of the World Trade Centre's Twin Towers in New York City's Lower Manhattan area, signified the gaping metaphorical hole constituted not solely in American history that day, but the world's within a late-capitalist era of globalisation. Referring to the terrorist attackers as "the Others who lived (and live) among us like toxic spores", Kodiak recognizes that this anonymous Other-'they'; "understands us in a way we do not yet".
I foreground this piece of writing by referring to the above as the event par excellence, circumscribing not only my project, but that of art including performance and Lacanian psychoanalytical theory.
The concept of a performance at the Eisenberg Experimental Gallery of Victoria, Nicholson Street, Brunswick was initially informed by the treatment of detainees at the specific sites of Guantanomo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Titled Welcome to the Funhouse, a durational performance was to be undertaken. An improvised dance form influenced by illicit drug use was to be performed . An accompanying soundtrack inside and outside the gallery was to loop repeatedly the seminal punk rock and roll musical act Iggy Pop and the Stooges' long playing record – Funhouse. The performance aspired to represent the global influence of a frustrated and decadent contemporary American culture with 'post-9/11/War on Terror' iconography.
This transformed into visions of a suspended naked figure, floating in space and being coated from the ceiling above in a thick, viscous substance. The accumulative time-based effects intended to induce 'the uncanny' (notions of that which is strangely familiar) as asserted by the Viennese father of psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud.
The performance event I am now proposing tentatively titled ""Study Master, Masters Study'" assumes the United States' Arthur C. Danto's incorporation of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's notions of art fulfilling its historical and spiritual destiny when its practice disclosed a philosophy in action.
The historical avant-garde movement of the Dadaists and their political critique of art's conceptual status and its institutional structures (including theorization and commoditisation by capitalist markets) act as a signpost for this concatenation. Exemplified by French artist Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, the art of this performance is conceptual, in that it analyses what the art of performance is by an ontological and empirical research as practice. This 'pure thought' evokes the "thinking through performance" model of Victoria University – Footscray Park's Division of Performance Studies in its Human Movement Faculty. As well, the United States' Herbert Blau posits the 'methodological doing' of performance in order to think in the final essay 'Limits of Performance: The Insane Root' in The Dubious Spectacle. For French existential humanist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, being is such that it is one which can only do whatever is in its power. Beyond it, one can count on nothing but what is lived in action and not hoped for. To this mode I aspire.
I intend for the performance to play with notions of the metaphysical consciousness founded in the Platonic philosophy of Ancient Greek Antiquity. Perceived as mimicry, imitative conditions of art as a mere copy of the reality in life accorded it as being at a third remove from the essential nature of things – ideal forms and their essence. The history of contemporary art has sought to disprove this inferior ontological status. It is within this context that my performance work and German avant-garde musical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and British artist Damien Hirst's contentious provocations – that 11th September 2001 was art – situate themselves.
I equate the art of my performance work as an epistemological research practice whose knowing and being are 'ideological life moments' rendered as 'Other'. Its pedagogy relates specifically to the experience of autonomous life. It is what the United States' Richard Schecner's book Performance Theory – following American Fluxus artist Allan Kaprow – asserts as a mystery and the "simple but altogether upsetting idea of art as an event – an 'actual'" . For Kaprow, this process of actualization became 'non' or 'lifelike' art.
For the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in 'The Origin of the Work of Art', art is the conflict between concealment and unconcealment of truth. It is an event and art is the specific site of truth. And it is within this – the truth of art – that an essential nothingness or absence in presence is laid bare or made to appear present.
At the heart of my performance work is a principle of exposition. Art's privilege is in making absence, the absent, the unnoticeable or non-visible be made to appear or make its appearance noticeable as if present. The meaning of Being is manifested as a sublime mystery of presence. Something else 'other' appears, making its appearance, itself present as a noticeable presence and unconcealed in an openness to the hidden mystery of being itself or as enigmatic 'thing-in-itself'.
Truth as an artistic creation is essentially historical. Its happening occurs in the manner Heidegger asserts in 'Conversations on a Country Path About Thinking' as a 'higher acting'. That is to say, transformational time-based effects are incurred by means of waiting – that is to say, durational.
According to French artist Antonin Artaud in the seminal book The Theatre and Its Double, the ideal public always responds to the true – truth – when it appears, namely in the locus of the streets and not within art per se. My performance work will solicit offers of gifts, in return as truth itself, literally on the streets at an often frequented traffic intersection. Such notions evoke Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek's reading of Lacan's psychoanalytical theory whereby communication is structured like a cybernetic paradox. That is to say, the sender receives back from the receiver a return of their own message in its 'true form'.
As per Artaud, a crude, immediate means of the banal and its quotidian-everydayness-of-life will be employed that appropriates pedestrian actions and observations. The more simple, plain and pure the art, the more directly engaging are things as an approach towards a greater extent of Being as per Heidegger.
Again following Artaud, this will be refined into impressions, producing vibrations in the subjective organism, in order to perceive a reaction in the 'other-as-audience-participant'. Together we as active participants might recognize a truth and authenticity, or rather, each of our authentic, subjective truths beyond inauthentic procedures of techne or craft.
As such pre-existent techniques of production impose a certain particular kind of consciousness by rote. Formulae's pre-conceived purposes contrive categorised definitions that limit dynamic relations to being as 'either/or' (e.g. either black or white, either art or non-art (i.e. life), either freedom fighter or terrorist, either good or evil, either us or them, either me (i.e. I) or you, either mine or yours, either self or Other, either subject or object) and not becoming i.e. 'and/both'. My performance artwork is undetermined.
As such, the art of my performance work will play with post-modern ideologies that assert 'things' as being merely constructed and do not essentially exist. Like god and art itself (now philosophy); because of their perceived 'deaths', everything is permitted. In doing so, defined categories are rendered as an 'and/both' space beyond the inherent violence of 'either/or' propositions in Western culture.
Sartre's 'Existentialism and Humanism' asserts an inter-subjectivity or wholeness of unity, evoking the French theoretical duo of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's 'rhizomatic' transformations or becomings (following from Ancient Greek Antiquity's philosophers – Anaximander's individuation process of 'flowing formlessness' and Heraclitus' flowing river as well as Italian Enlightenment philosopher Baruch Spinoza and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's absolute and infinite substances) as well as Lacan's topology of the moebius strip (the inverted three dimensional figure eight, materialised as a torus or Klein bottle) existing prior to that which is considered 'proper', in the formulation of barred and alienated subjectivity. Feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz's Volatile Bodies advocates this model by way of transformative torsions between states.
Interestingly, Schecner's essay 'Selective Inattention' proposes a chart (configured whilst collaborating with anthropologist Victor Turner) with the same schemata, ordering the flows of energy between social and aesthetic drama. That is to say, art utilizes consequential actions of social life as raw material to produce aesthetics, and in turn, society derives techniques from art to support itself. Subsequently, this refuels the cycle as perpetual, perceptual experience.
The 'absoluteness' of art and its 'authentic truth' is transcendental experience. That is to say, to know I exist beyond self. For there is an-Other which is both present and absent. In this (the 'absolute truth' of the art in my performance work) an immediate sense of one's self-awareness is experienced not as merely a simple materialistic object – as perceived by the cogito ergo sum of 17th Century French Enlightenment philosopher Rene Descartes – but that which is 'and/both'. The art of my performance work contradicts the spectre of "I think therefore I am" haunting Western metaphysics, as it pertains to a being present with (an)-Other as the pure condition of one's own existence and actions.
As such, truth is mediated as a relation to (an)-Other who is indispensable and an intimate knowledge is accessed as a revelatory inter-subjective circularity. The art of my performance work is ultimately constituted on the planes of an aesthetic morality and recognizes we are not ready-mades but self-made. And yet still, we are condemned to the burden of a complete, profound responsibility of freedom within the necessities of being in the world – i.e. of having to survive or die whilst surpassing limitations such as these, within actions denying or accommodating our survival or death.
Ultimately, anguish, despair and abandonment to desire with an accompanying anxiety is conferred. This is the ethical imperative of Lacan – "Don't give way on or cede your desire". That is to say, that we must insist becoming subject of our own desires by free, unconscious associations. This is constituted in the art of my performance work as improvisations in-the-moment-here-and-now.
Such notions Artaud evokes when he states "I will do what I have dreamed or I will do nothing". The art of my performance work will approach a dream-like event, ultimately transcending the banal artifice of its quotidian-everydayness-of- life. A personal, 'naked' fatality will pursue unconscious directions with desires to reveal the meaning of our waking life's states, whose various multiplicities are too numerous to name.
My performance artworks ambivalent constradinction of self-commitment and ethical action is indistinguishable from the 'authentic' or 'inauthentic'. This evokes the ambiguous antimony of art with life and life with art. As such, one approaches ratified definitions apriori.
The art of my performance work is essentially transgressive because it is of a 'non-utlitarian value'. Following French Surrealist Georges Bataille's 'Notion of Expenditure', principles of classical utility and loss as well as production, exchange of 'unproductive' activity, gifts or potlach as sacrifice will inform the performance artwork.
The utilitarian form of the social bond – a concentrational anxiety – is constituted as a freedom that is never more authentic then when it is walled and analogous to a prison or (as per this proposed performance artwork) site of a gallery space.
My performance work aspires to approach an authentic truth of life's being in art. Inspired by and aspiring to 'Nietzschean will' and Heidegger's Gelassanheit, a courageous process approaches a vertiginous experience of freedom as a 'releasement towards things' concealed (i.e. that which is unwilling, namely the psychoanalytical unconscious) in order to transform being into that which is the unconcealed. This is Heidegger's doctrine of a thinker – that which remains unsaid within what is said.
Analogous to this is Goat Island artist Matthew Goulish's quotation of fellow American and avant-garde musical composer John Cage in 39 microlectures in proximity of performance. Referring to the music of Morton Feldman that the highest responsibility of art is concealment, Goulish defines a work as implying an unconcealment as one becomes aware of a presence beyond what is. For Goulish an artwork's singularity is comprised of infinite time-based events or becomings.
Appropriation will play with ideals of 'art for art's sake' whose distinction from life renders both as a neutered (that is to say, castrated, in psychoanalytical parlance) spirit. Without being beyond its own realm, art's grandiloquence in-effect does nothing and (re)-produces itself as negation.
My performance artworks approach the most extreme possibility and actuality of life's existence. It is onto-theology and a radical, indomitable risk like the act in Lacanian psychoanalytical theory or French post-structural theorist Jacques Derrida following the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard – it approaches, courts and embraces failure like Goulish and Britain's Forced Entertainment director Tim Etchells — both of whom have dedicated a website to the documentation, study and theorisation of failure (www.institute-of-failure.com) — or French artist Jean Cocteau "the only work which succeeds is that which fails" and Ireland's Samuel Beckett in his early critical work on Proust, that to be a modern artist "is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world, and to shrink from it desertion." Or as the Unnamable reassures himself, "I am doing my best, and failing again.". The predicament of being alienated from the "real" world and then be, or become at home with it.
Like Artaud, it all depends on the manner and purity. This is how 'authentic truth' even if mythological (i.e. powerful yet seemingly incomprehensible) wills itself, in-itself, for-itself and an-Other(s).
Ultimately, it is an expression of being, as 'limited' within a relation to what is 'other' in being itself.
Dear Peta…resisting desire…our inaugural meeting was encouragingly optimistic…"with potential"… I quote you in your own words…transporting me… literally…
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