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Welcome to Culturebot’s “Ephemeral Evidence” live, streaming part of each day from Exit Art, where we’re in residence April 17-21. Gallery hours are 11-6 during the week, so please stop by. Our closing bash on Saturday, April 21, will be from 12-6, with performance at 3, and food, drink, and discussion starting around 4:30. Live feeds will be starting between noon and 1 pm EST.

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Aretha Aoki. Photo by Ian Douglas

I met Aretha Aoki during grad school in Western Mass about six years ago. She’s half Japanese, I’m half Vietnamese. We bonded over our hapa status and moved on to more interesting discussions (often at my kitchen table, with a bottle of Maker’s Mark) with fellow grad Vanessa Anspaugh, about art and life and how those things intersect. Aretha’s work interested me first in discussion; our first semester was built more around reading, writing, and talking. We weren’t necessarily rolling around the studio together much, so our connecting points were mostly concept and theory and how these would inform our individual processes. There was something vital to each of us about the role of “the Author” and what that meant to our interests in individual and shared experiences. We would consider mining the personal to build artistic treatments of the authentic-integrated-sincere Self. Our various experiments in performance and process (and life practice, really) would inevitably lead to an understanding of impermanence as a constant state that challenged static notions of artistic ownership. Impermanence, in a sense, ephemerality not just in dance but, in all lived experience, provided us with a grounding foundation. We were able to reflect on our own work within constantly shifting categories leading to clearer definition, greater expansion, and eventual decay.

We worked together after surviving school and getting back to NYC and I’ve appreciated watching her choreographic work develop at various venues in the city. She’s currently a Fresh Tracks artist at New York Live Arts and the “Ephemeral Evidence” project caught her in the midst of that residency. The Solo Project that she will be investigating on Tuesday at Exit Art,  looks at narrative, at a personal story that reaches “beyond the personality of the solo dancer.” For the day she’ll engage a relay process that she (and fellow EE artist Arturo Vidich) identified as a kind of ekphrasis, the transposition of one form to another in with the intention of conveying the essence of the original.

• She’ll begin the day alone, then will be joined by two dancers Lily Gold and Jessica Ray. They will move and write, generating stories based on the movement work.
• After they leave, Tanya Marquardt, a playwright, will arrive and write a play from their texts.
• Then an actor, Becca Kauffman, will arrive to read and record the play.
• Ryan MacDonald will be emailed the sound file and will develop a sound piece offsite.
• Kim Hennessy will arrive and create an installation with the play and the writings while Ryan’s sound piece plays in the space.

The project pulls apart the solitary nature of a solo dance by bringing other artists in to generate material and giving them license to create their own versions of the individual works. The choreographic authority is subverted in a considered sharing of authorship. And, in a pragmatic way provides Aoki with the chance to “work out some very early questions and curiosities” and with the opportunity to collaborate with a range of artists she might not normally be able to gather in one shot.

The process shifts away from dancing pretty early in its progression. In a sense, the evidence of the dancer’s ephemeral activity arrives pretty early in the day, but each resulting form must work to reflect the fleeting nature of the first exploration. As Aretha states:

I’m very curious and excited to see how dance translates into other mediums and also that these mediums can act as a container for a future dance and for all the dancing that preceded them. For instance Kim, who makes incredible, wild and intricate installations out of paper and cardboard and more… I wonder how her work–undeniably ‘object’–can point to, in its objectness, the dance (and maybe more) that is intangible.

There is a focus on maintaining an interconnected relationship between the modes of expression and an egalitarian autonomy for each medium, reflecting Aoki’s interest in not privileging any individual form. In addition to a collaborative spirit, it engages a discussion around what she describes as disciplinary limits and how the different forms can inform and extend those limits.  We recently had an exchange via email.

When did this kind of interest (in not prioritizing) take shape for you? Is it based on the community of artists you find yourself among or did you have to seek out artists to make these ideas happen?

I think there is a bit of both happening. Your work comes to mind as an example within dance, of the trust you would put in your dancers to make certain decisions and choices. So, there was not this sense that you had all the answers and our job as dancers was to give you what you want. I think in NYC in general, people are working for little or nothing and a hierarchical model simply doesn’t work.

I’ve also worked in an interdisciplinary way for a long time, since I started making dances. The first dance I ever made, “Synergy” was a collaboration with Rica Kunitate and Debra Ao. We collaborated on every single detail on that dance…every movement, everything. I remember how painstaking it was but also, I discovered how that process resulted in a deep connection onstage. It was an “Aha!” moment about process and performance.

I went to an interdisciplinary undergrad school in British Columibia—Simon Fraser U–and worked with my peers in the theatre and visual art departments. In some of my earliest works, I worked with actors and dramaturgs. I also formed the collective “kitchen” with visual artist Cindy Mochizuki and theatre artist Tricia Collins. We collaborated on making site specific, performance installations. We made it our mission to explore each other’s disciplines and make work that didn’t speak loudly as any one medium in particular. I think this experiment [for Ephemeral Evidence] is allowing me to return to my earlier practice of making work.

Aoki in a piece by Emily Johnson, during an MANCC residency

By bringing additional dancers into this process, what are you saying about ‘solo’-ness and how do you hope to use their input?

When you asked me to be a part of this experiment I had just begun rehearsals for my Fresh Tracks residency, working toward a couple performance opportunities. As far as any sort of plan, I had none, other than to go into the studio and see what was happening–generally, to be guided by intuition. I realized that at least for the purposes for these upcoming showings, I would be dancing by myself. I wondered what it means to be making a dance on myself. It felt wonderful and luxurious to not have to go through the scary process of being in a room with other dancers and having to direct them, and to be on no one else’s schedule but my own, but also very insular for the same reasons, especially because at that point, my research wasn’t grounded in any articulated ideas, just the mercurial voice of moment-to-moment intuition. So I decided to take the Exit Art experiment as an opportunity to work with other people, to find out what of the material I’ve been working on translates on other people and in other mediums. If I’m not dancing this material what of it remains?

By working with Lily and Jessica, two people I don’t have a lot of history with in the studio but would like to get to know better, I feel like I can simply get an understanding of what it is that I’m doing. I’m leading them through writing and dancing scores I often do by myself to get into a sort of rhythm for movement. I want to know what kind of material these scores generates for them, to see how other people respond to what feels like personal choreographic motivations. I also want the practice of articulating the scores to other people. And of course, I’m very literally using their input-their writings–as material for Tanya to write a play.

Did your time with Sarah Maxfield’s One-shot influence your interest in solo?

I hadn’t thought of One-Shot, though it’s funny you mention it because Sarah and I hung out recently and I recalled how that experience helped me to get back into choreography in general after having taken some time away from making work. Solo work is just what I’m consistently drawn to. I sometimes feel a bit of shame around it–that ‘real’ choreographers make work on large casts–and even though that’s an absurd and judgmental voice I’m trying not to pay much attention to, I want to search for ways to relate the world of me in the studio to the world outside.

You mention “layering and juxtaposing visual, written and embodied forms to both generate and disturb a sense of character, place and narrative.” What is it about narrative that interests you? Or rather the formation of narrative?

I am very drawn to language. Language–poetry and short stories–are very generative for me. In rehearsal I may read a poem and then improvise, or shift rapidly between writing and dancing as a way to find a sense of rhythm. Within dance, I think of narrative in a very generous and open way, not linear at all. To me, stories exist all the time in performance–the stories that are carried in the bodies onstage, of the overall experience of a work, the stories that audiences bring into the theater. Stories don’t just exist in books, they are the way we make sense of the world. I feel like dance is a way to bring attention to these stories in a nuanced sort of way.

You’ve described bringing together movement, text, sound and video, to allow for spaces where the unexpected can emerge. What is it about the un-expected that you are after?

I think it’s related to the last question. I want to create a space where fictions are invited to exist but that they also can be undone, replaced by new stories, and so on. To me, the unexpected is that space of possibility where anything can happen and one’s perceptions are invited to shift a little or a lot.

I’m also as a maker, I’m just not interested in knowing something from beginning to end. I want to create ways to surprise myself.

What is your take on ephemerality and dance?

Dance is ephemeral and that is a beautiful thing! Dance doesn’t last and neither do any of we and we are so lucky to be in a medium where we have to confront that always and maybe then reflect on our own mortality. And left with essentially nothing, the process or experience of making the dance becomes primary.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Photo by Tasja Keetman

In a Culturebot manifesto laying out the fundamental differences between visual art performance and contemporary performance, Andy Horwitz suggests that visual art performance is essentially predicated on object making (or the rejection thereof), while contemporary performance is based in time and the notion of creating experience.  He argues that visual art performance is more often than not created in isolation, where concept and execution are easily separated (the artist’s intellect and the assistant’s labor), while the contemporary performance experience is most likely collaborative (lighting, sound, decors, music, digital media – each represented by their own designers).  Applying this model, Rebecca Davis is perfectly placed in the center of its Venn diagram.  Her hashtag might well read:  #contemporaryvisualperformanceartchoreographer.

Rebecca is a conceptual artist whose object-as-subject orientation predates the messy blur of the experimental performance/performance art/durational art/visual art performance rhetoric.  That an object or group of objects is always near the center of her work is primary, but of equal importance is the body as it relates to and experiences these objects.  From a recent artist statement, Davis explains, “Alternating between the material and the immaterial, between working with my hands and my whole body, allows me to access different modes of thinking and generates a dynamic relationship of ideas and methods.  What can I do with movement that I cannot do with objects?”   But it’s more than just her use of the objects.  The act of collection, the practice of object acquisition, is as much a part of the process as the choreographic structures.

Photo by Tasja Keetman

For Davis, the emphasis is placed not just on the object in and of itself, but how the object is gathered (or, if not how, then simply that it IS gathered).  She doesn’t just amass 100 purchased umbrellas to make a work.  She spends months, sometimes years, going around with plastic bags after heavy rains and picking up thrown away broken umbrellas.  And, if you know her, she might tell you she’s doing this, as she did with me several years ago.  And without realizing it, I became part of her work.  I started noticing, after heavy rains, that there were always broken, blown out umbrellas lying around.  And I started thinking about her every time I saw them.  Pavlovian, in a fun way – it rains…then it stops raining…then I see a discarded umbrella…then I think of Rebecca. And I grabbed a few, here and there, and saved them for her, and when I saw her, I brought her the objects like some sort of art offering.  She made weather patterns relate her and me, forged a connection out of chaos, between us and who knows how many people that she had canvassing the streets as I was.  I’ve done this with ribbons too.

Seen within the context of the visual arts world, this notion of collecting seems more than apropos.  Museums are nothing if not collections.  And, in this way, Rebecca’s collection-based works could each be seen as self-contained museums of a sort.  She ritualizes our everyday experience into collectible notions – almost fetishizing the by-products of our existence: the coins in our pockets, the pages of our newspapers, the receipts from our daily purchases, threads from our clothes.  If it passes through our hands or touches our body, and chances are you don’t even think about it, somewhere else in the world Rebecca Davis and her cast, and other willing and unknowing participants, may be keeping watch, suddenly drawn to something they hadn’t ever paid attention to before, and that’s just the beginning.  The performance, such as it is, therefore begins long before the actual performative event, and in a way encompasses it.

The process is cyclical, or self-referential, in that Davis begins with the discarded fragments, the ephemera, of our existence: detritus, or unwanted materials, or broken things – in other words, that which is already in a certain state of post-use – and assigns new function to the object, initiates a practice for the collection of the object and experiments with choreographic devices independent of and dependent on these very things, to create a new encounter, a re-purposing.  In the end, there is a new ephemera – an achieved state of re-use.

Photo by Tasja Keetman

For Rebecca’s exhibit/performance as part of Exit Art’s Collective/Performative show, she both generates ephemera and destroys it: one object’s disintegration allows for another’s manifestation.  A loss and a gain.

News (working title) is a durational performance that yields a large-scale drawing.  Wearing shoes constructed from newspaper, performers walk continuously in a circle on a large sheet of white paper throughout the day until the gallery closes.  Over time, the newspaper ink rubs into the white paper, leaving a visual presence of the path walked by the performers.

The work creates a simultaneous physical construction and deconstruction (walking destroys the shoes but creates the drawing) and also a symbolic one — as the drawing underfoot becomes increasingly dark, the headlines from which it was created fade in our collective memories.

With Ephemeral Evidence, Culturebot’s curatorial interest lies in how the act of writing can be integral to and integrated into performance practices.  I will attempt such an endeavor by addressing the following questions through participation, interaction and encounter with artist, objects, performers and observers.  Do the objects acquire an inherent value through the process of creation, or are they simply evidence that an event occurred?  Are they cultural artifact worthy of collection or the effect of an experience that can only be remembered?  If they gained value, how much is value as meaning and how much is value as commodity?  How is the work influenced by the presence and labor of the body?  And how does it speak to cultural memory or, rather, amnesia?  How does the memory of experience differ from the remembering of facts?  What we read and understand today is constantly being updated and replaced tomorrow – what we feel and experience is, in a similar way, being processed by the body and catalogued or forgotten.  When all knowledge, indeed our very existence, is ephemeral – what does it mean to create, and to leave behind?

Rebecca Davis and Aaron Mattocks will be at Exit Art on Wednesday, April 18 from 10:30am-6pm.

Observation is open to the public at all times, and participation is encouraged.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Edward Stresen-Reuter, Matthew Nasser, and David Commander. Photo by Big Art Group

“This is really coming out of a project we did in Italy, where we were in a contemporary art gallery,” Jemma Nelson, the co-founder, along with Caden Manson, of Big Art Group, was telling me. “And also thinking about the American artist Gordon Matta Clark, about his sculpture on houses, his ‘drawing on houses,’ as he called it. To call them sculptures or to call them performance doesn’t really matter, but he would saw a house in half, and capture it on video, and that would be the ‘drawing.’ And so that sort of exploration is part of the background of this piece.”

This was the first of two talks I had with the creative team behind Big Art Group, about Broke House, which is currently playing at Abrons Arts Center (through April 22; tickets $20). The official premiere of the show was back during APAP, as one of the most highly billed shows at American Realness, though it only played a handful of times. I first spoke to Manson and Nelson shortly before Christmas, and followed up with Manson a couple weeks ago.

Founded in 1999, Big Art Group has a remarkably diverse resume, producing a series of stage performances, live spectacles, and site specific works throughout the United States and Europe, though they’re probably best known as innovators in the use of technology and mediation in live performance, despite eschewing that sort of narrow label.

“Our first technology is the actors themselves,” Nelson made clear, “and it’s the way that we train the actors, and that’s really the foundation about which all this orbits. It’s interesting that people often look at us as a heavy tech company, when what we mostly try to use is consumer grade electronics and things that are available to everyday street users. And we’re really talking about the ways we use technology every day, in which we are facile in manipulating our own images and sending our images to other people and receiving them back. So it’s that language around technology, it’s the use of it–that’s where we’re quite heavy.”

Added Manson: “Yeah, when you say ‘technology,’ I say ‘language.’ Because it’s the language we all speak. In fact we can speak it three different ways at the same time. Not so well, but that’s what we do. So our work is really written in that language.”

All of which is fair: It’s almost glib to even talk about the use of technology as a choice in live performance these days. Not only is video in live performance around 40 years old at this point, but technology and mediation are so embedded in our daily lives that the real question is how artists are engaging these changes, not why.

Broke House, though, does mark a new shift in BAG’s work. Not only does it make use of a large mechanical set (as opposed to primarily relying on implementation of projections), but it’s also one of the company’s first real stabs are an established theater text.

“We’ve been making work for twelve years, and it’s one of our tenets is that it’s all original work,” Manson explained. “But we wanted to look at a classic–a canonical piece–and make a response. Not a really an interpretation. So Three Sisters is sort of embedded in there. But you’ll have to really parse it to get it out.”

Seeing the show last weekend, I wouldn’t go that far (though my guest did suggest, alternately, that in some ways the show could be read through the lens of The Cherry Orchard). The show takes the rough outline of Chekhov’s play and translates it into the present, except rather than dreaming of a better life out of the provinces and in the capital, BAG’s characters imagine their dream life through the creation of a series of trippy online videos. The story is structured around a documentarian (Edward Stresen-Reuter) who arrives to film the family as they produce their latest episodes, even as their life is falling apart. The family has been living in the house their parents left them, spending down their inheritance, and they’re now quite literally broke and about to be evicted.

Just as they collectively mediate their own desires through the invention of imaginary worlds through low-budget web films, the main characters find their hopes and dreams mediated through various technologies. One sister, played by Heather Litteer, is somewhat comically taken in by romantic Nigerian-email scams; Matthew Nasser’s perennially unpaid handyman is smitten with Litteer’s character, and hopes to convince her to go into making more profitable online films (to be euphemistic about it) to get them the money to escape their perverse situation they’re in; and finally David Commander, who plays Litteer’s brother, longing for romantic engagement, convinces himself the documentarian’s in love with him.

The audience is turn experiences the piece through varying levels of mediation: while the actors are performing on a complex and ever shifting set, the documentarian’s camera feed is projected live throughout, as are the feeds as the group film their twisted, Dayglo-y sci-fi movies.

“This piece is very different from any other piece we’ve made,” Manson told me. “A lot of it is exploring the inability to cope, and a constant kind of breakdown. So we built it on trying to remember things. The script was first improvised for about four weeks, and then we’ve taken that–I edited it then Jemma started to change it more.”

“Doctored it,” Nelson corrected

“Doctored it!” Manson added with a sardonic chuckle. “It’s very doctored now!”

“But we did rehearse with everything,” Nelson made clear. “When we say rehearse and improv and stuff like that, it’s with all the gear from the get-go, from the beginning. All the language is being developed at the same time.”

Asked recently about the experience of debuting the show so briefly in January, Manson assured me that, “It’s really to get to run something, then take a break, then work on it and run some more, with feedback from your audience–it’s what we usually do, actually.” Based on that early run, they “annihilated about thirty minutes of the piece and re-made it,” particularly by redeveloping the web-films the family is making.

The end result is around an hour and a half of multi-layered chaos smartly edited into a play. The show surges forward with anarchic glee, as layer upon layer is added until the made-world collapses under its own weight (“It’s like a house of cards. It’s about unsustainable systems, it’s about collapse, it’s about entropy,” Manson commented), propelled by the fantastic performances. Although scripted, the actors are free to improvise and talk over one another, creating a sort of mumblecore vibe.

“They can decide to sort of veer. They can go off the script and just improv if they want,” Manson explained. “Because we’re trying to build between them that sort of awkwardness and inability to communicate and that rhythm of language that you don’t really get when you have a script.”

“I think the challenge for us, having worked with technology for a while, is how to keep it organic. Keeping the focus on live and what is live, and what is that liveness-feeling,” added Nelson.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I don’t really know anything about this, but my friend Bertie vouches for it, so I’m putting it up here. And I like this quote they put in the promo copy:

“We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Still, I suggest emailing [email protected] to find out more first. Or visit http://brechtforum.org

The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) presents Cutting It Up: A Theater Workshop facilitated by Julia Lee Barclay. It is a one-day workshop that will be held twice, first on Saturday, April 7, 2012, 12:00 noon to 6:00 pm and again on Saturday, May 12, 12:00 noon to 6:00 pm at the Brecht Forum located at 451 West Street (West Side Highway, at Bank Street, one block north of
West Eleventh Street) in good ol’ NYC!

Here’s the description

In this beginning workshop, we will break down both the basic elements of how we communicate with each other and the (mostly unspoken/hidden) rules which govern that communication. Working with verbal and gestural clichés relating to class, race, religion and gender, we will look at how (and to whom) we speak, and develop tools that will enable us to get underneath social clichés in a playful way, thus coaxing the hidden rules into the room. By doing so, those rules will be shown to be mutable rather than fixed.

These tools are useful both for creating new kinds of political-philosophical performances and interactions, and also for learning new ways of communicating within and among groups which are interested in getting beyond stale patterns of hierarchical/binary “that’s the way it is” thinking. This workshop offers some basic tools to help change old perceptions and to allow for new ways of making things happen.

The Cutting It Up workshop evolved from more than a decade of work with actors, dancers, writers, visual artists and musicians in experimental theater labs in New York City (The Present Company,1997-2001) and in London (Apocryphal Theatre, 2004-2011).

This workshop is open to all and no prior theater experience is necessary to participate. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged. Please write to [email protected] for further information or to let us know you will be attending.

Tuition–sliding scale: $35-$65

If you go, let me know how it turns out.

Popularity: 2% [?]

When I invited Sarah Rosner and A.O. Movement Collective (AOMC) to participate in Culturebot’s upcoming ‘Ephemeral Evidence’ exhibition at Exit Art, her excited response was “we’ve always considered ourselves Anti-Ephemeralists!” I knew Sarah was a radical thinker, but didn’t expect this manifesto to be at the top of her agenda. (Full disclosure: Sarah and I share a cubicle wall at New York Live Arts, where we dwell in the non-ephemeral realm of arts administration.)

I first encountered the Brooklyn-based AOMC this February as part of Sarah Dahnke’s Object as Performer at the Center for Performance Research (CPR). I went to this mixed program with an eye towards Culturebot’s exhibition at Exit Art and a curiosity about objects in live performance, and was struck by the AOMC’s “string duet,” an improvisation-driven movement installation by two women who sew the fronts of their shirts together, and then test the connection this creates between them. Intimate, absorbing, and—as the joined t-shirts stretched, twisted, and tore, influencing every gesture and action—evocative of the cause-effect of relationships, this duet radiated a voyeuristic aura, even as it moved from CPR’s gallery to the more expansive performance space.

Images from the duet lingered in my head, and I asked the AOMC to join ‘Ephemeral Evidence’ this April with a day-long installation centered around their current work-in-process, barrish, which includes the “string duet.” On Friday, April 20, the AOMC will be in residence in the front gallery at Exit Art with an open rehearsal (11am-noon), followed by a series of free workshops on the improvisational movement scores central to barrish’s logic and aesthetic (noon-6pm). Artists and non-artists from all backgrounds are invited to take part in the workshops, or simply watch and participate in discussions about these scores as they are translated by new bodies. The workshops will be taught by performers Lillie De, Leah Ives, and Emily Skillings, and choreographer/artistic director Sarah A.O. Rosner. [Sign up for the free workshops here>]

This installation at Exit Art is part of a much larger structure around barrish, the MENU Project, which has shaped the development of the work. As Sarah explains:

The AOMC has always been interested in economic experiments that go alongside the choreographic work. When we started making barrish, one of the biggest questions for me as an arts administrator was how do we—a small company—get major investors attached to this project? What if we gave those people a different experience of the work than you would normally get in the theater? Rather than making a piece that has its premiere, and now we can’t tour because it needs this number of people and this kind of space, we thought about making something transmutable that would be appropriate for any space or cast, a range of audiences, and a different range of interests.

What happened is the MENU Project. Sarah began barrish in September 2010, working collaboratively with four women to construct a far-reaching dialogue about female desire, power, and privilege in Western society via a performative framework that relies on a mix of pedestrian and abstract movement. For the MENU Project, each section of barrish—approximately 35 in all, ranging from 10 seconds to 30 minutes in length—has been separated out individually. These segments are listed and briefly described online, and available for a la carte curation to anyone with the interest in hosting an event, access to a site, and a modest amount of cash ($200).

AOMC opened barrish to curators right after the “pre-premiere” in May 2011 at the La MaMa Moves Festival. The first MENU curation was a small gathering at a private apartment in Boerum Hill in September 2011, hosted by two women who were on the AOMC’s mailing list, but didn’t know any of the artists personally. Other events have included the performance I saw at CPR, an on-campus workshop at Bard College, and a cocktail party in Washington, DC for a total of nine curations prior to what Sarah dubs the “final premiere” at HERE Arts Center in NYC, July 12-14.

How does all this relate to ideas about ephemerality and live performance? Sarah is adamant that “ephemeralism is the main, if not the only, reason dance as a live art form has been ghettoized, not just economically but in the canon of respected art.” Improvisation as a creative structure is the most ephemeral of the ephemeral, in that each rehearsal or performance is inherently singular; as Sarah sees it, “the MENU project takes something that would be just one event and multiplies and duplicates it on a much wider scope, even if the performances in and of themselves are ephemeral.”

The workshop-based installation at Exit Art is curation #7 of barrish, and we’re focused on whether the process of teaching these improvisational movement scores makes this performative work less ephemeral. The act of teaching, verbalizing, and absorbing the scores extends the intrinsic impermanence of barrish, and while the most tangible evidence of the day may be a pile of sweaty ripped t-shirts from explorations of the “string duet,” the collective residue of the score, ideas, skills, and physical memories will endure in multiple bodies. If we can disassociate “evidence” or “artifact” from direct correlation with a concrete object, is teaching a valid, viable strategy for making ephemeral art more lasting? Conversely, by transplanting this workshop from the dance studio to a visual art gallery, does the “evidence” from the day take on a different significance than it would in a more traditional performing arts setting?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Graz, Austria’s steirischer herbst festival is presenting a (possibly) interesting experimental forum this summer called “Truth is Concrete.” As the project’s website puts it:

The world is changing so fast that we can’t keep track: the rise of the populist right, financial devastations, fundamental destruction of educational and cultural structures, democratic uprisings, Islamic fundamentalism, threats of technological and ecological catastrophes – where to start, where to end? But what is the role of art in this race of events that we can barely follow, let alone properly understand?

I have to admit that I find the idea of “concrete truths” to somewhat questionable (about as questionable as the choice to make most protest art), but insofar as the experiment is dedicated to moving beyond critique and political activism, toward actually beginning to affect solutions, it could very well be an illuminating experience. “[A]desire for simple solutions is growing,” the site continues:

And we – perhaps indeed leftist hobbyists – seem to have lost touch with a larger base.So we take the possibility of concrete truth as a working hypothesis and look for direct action, for concrete change and knowledge. For an art that engages in specific political and social situations – and for an activism that searches for intelligent, creative means of self-empowerment.

So make it of that what you will; for those interested, the forum is offering a pretty stunning deal: 100 travel and accommodation grants for those who want to take part. Deadline is May 15, and if you wind up going, please let us know.

Popularity: 2% [?]

How many dance companies have websites in English, Spanish, Italian and Magyar? Not many. Well, at least one – the BLOOM! Dance Collective. This international ensemble with artists from Hungary, Spain, and Italy will perform its award-winning work CITY, a “bold and politically charged dance-theater piece” at The Abrons Arts Center on April 27–28, 2012 at 8PM.

From the press release:

Founded in 2009 and acclaimed for its sharp wit, BLOOM! draws on the diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds of its members to build thought-provoking collaborative performance pieces. Conceived as a “political pamphlet entwined with movement,” CITY grapples with the dynamics of power, fear, manipulation, and faith, and the consequences of social conformity. Wittily playing with conventions of individual versus group behavior, CITY was created and is performed by Viktória Dányi, Csaba Molnár, Tímea Sebestyén, Moreno Solinas, and Igor Urzelai.

Looks interesting! And if Jay Wegman says it’s good, we’ll trust him.

Following the New York premiere, BLOOM! will perform CITY in Philadelphia (May 3–4), presented by Thirdbird at Arts Bank, and in Pittsburgh (May 10–13) at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, as part of the fourth annual newMoves Contemporary Dance Festival

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As part of Exit Art’s Collective / Performative group exhibit, Culturebot will present a group project called Ephemeral Evidence.

Ephemeral Evidence consists of a series of collaborative explorations between writers and performing artists to investigate the relationship between practice and skill in performance-making, object-making and context. We propose an experiment in which objects are created directly from the result of the performing artist’s practice – their skilled application of learned techniques. Does the object, existing as residue of the ephemeral event, gain meaning as document or value object in itself? Both? How does the critical dialogue around the performance process and object inform our perception and valuation of the art?

The writer/artist pairs are Aretha Aoki with Maura Donohue, Rebecca Davis with Aaron Mattocks, Arturo Vidich with Jeremy M. Barker and Sarah Rosner & the AO Movement Collective with Alyssa Alpine.

The installations will be durational throughout the day with culminating performances at 5PM.

Saturday, April 21st, the closing day of the exhibit, will feature an all-day display of the created objects, a special performance by Dan Safer and Mike Mikos of Witness Relocation and conclude with COME OVER TO OUR PLACE (5PM) hosted by Andy Horwitz and Chloë Bass which re-creates the post-show hang-out as performance event, bringing together the artists and writers of EPHEMERAL EVIDENCE with other artists, writers, critics and passers-by to discuss the ideas around the exhibit and what it means to be making it at Exit Art, now. Guests are invited to participate, watch, or both. Food and booze will be served.

Ephemeral Evidence will occur on the following schedule:

Tuesday April 17

THE SOLO PROJECT
Aretha Aoki with Maura Donohue

THE SOLO PROJECT is a personal story that attempts to reach beyond the personality of the solo dancer, and will continue Aretha’s interest in the formation of narrative through choreographic structure. Can the dance act as language? Can a visual or literary text be movement?

By bringing together movement, text, sound and video, Aoki’s work allows for the formation of spaces where the unexpected can emerge. She is interested in layering and juxtaposing visual, written and embodied forms to both generate and disturb a sense of character, place and narrative, and often engage in collaboration with artists—dancers, writers and composers–to allow these tensions to surface. Along with this collaborative process, her practice explores disciplinary limits and the ways that dance can interact with other forms without prioritizing one over another, and rather, informing and extending the possibilities each.

Wednesday April 18

NEWS
Rebecca Davis with Aaron Mattocks

NEWS (working title) is a durational performance that yields a large-scale drawing. Wearing shoes constructed from newspaper, performers walk continuously in a circle on a large sheet of white paper throughout the day until the gallery closes. Over time, the newspaper ink rubs into the white paper, leaving a visual presence of the path walked by the performers.

The work creates a simultaneous physical construction and deconstruction (walking destroys the shoes but creates the drawing) and also a symbolic one—as the drawing underfoot becomes increasingly dark, the headlines from which it was created fade in our collective memories.

Thursday April 19

NOBODY IS PERFECT BUT YOU COME CLOSE
Arturo Vidich with Jeremy M. Barker

The best listener is one who never talks back. As a statement both for and against the uncollectible nature of performance, Vidich will address the septic time bomb of a roadkill victim as a live art object, and fellow performer. The roadkill will absorb the emotions and thoughts of the performer, like a morbid piggy bank, as well as stand in for other objects and people. The event will be thoroughly captured on video, with emphasis on collapsing the hierarchy of live performance, documentation of performance, and performance made for video. During the day, the public will be able to contribute to the performance by teaching something to the performer, or through conversation. Sonic, tactile, and video elements will be prepared on-site, as well as creating the performance score, which will be enacted at 5pm.

Friday April 20

barrish: the scores
Sarah Rosner & the AO Movement Collective with Alyssa Alpine

This installation manifests itself as an open rehearsal, followed by a series of workshops in which participants are invited into the AOMC’s current work in process, barrish, to embody and digest select movement-based improvisational scores central to the work’s logic and aesthetic.

Participants are invited to wrestle with unleashing hysteria and becoming “skinless”, navigating the intimacy of being sewn to another performer for “the string score”, queering notions of masculine certainty and female acquiescence by “glaciering”, or to simply bear witness to the practice and discussion surrounding these scores as they are translated by new bodies.

This exploring/embodying/digestion process both artifacts the score (via the collected/created images, words, and visual intake of the work) and displaces the work’s ephemerality outside of its former boundaries into/onto the performative bodies of those participating. Does teaching a score make performative work less ephemeral? What about verbalizing the concrete ideas, logic, and rules behind the more abstract movements? What parts stick and what parts evaporate? Are these potentially viable strategies for making ephemeral art last?

Taught/Rehearsed by performers Lillie De, Leah Ives, and Emily Skillings, and choreographer/artistic director Sarah A.O. Rosner, with additional credit to performer Anna Adams Stark (not present).

Saturday April 21

Giant Yves Klein All Out Attack (3PM)
Witness Relocation

In an homage to Yves Klein’s Anthropométries, action painting, and the monster battle films of Godzilla, Dan Safer and Mike Mikos of Witness Relocation will drink around 6 shots of whiskey, cover themselves in paint, and wrestle on a giant canvas. The canvas will then be displayed on a wall as evidence of the physical action that transpired on it, next to a video of the event, the bottle of whiskey, and the paint splattered wrestling costumes.

Performed by Dan Safer and Mike Mikos. Video by Kaz Phillips Safer.

COME OVER TO OUR PLACE (5PM)
hosted by Andy Horwitz and Chloë Bass

COME OVER TO OUR PLACE re-creates the post-show hang-out as performance event, bringing together the artists and writers of EPHEMERAL EVIDENCE with other artists, writers, critics and passers-by for food and conversation. Inspired by Lois Weaver’s THE LONG TABLE, a formalized performance-discussion as an “experiment in participation and public engagement,” this event contextualizes a meal (Chloë Bass’ performance PROCESS DINNER) as a public forum, encouraging informal conversations on serious topics. PROCESS DINNER invites guests to enjoy a dish as its recipe’s component parts: a reminder of the constant making that goes into every art world moment, even the farewell. Guests are invited to participate, watch, or both: as a shared social experience, all guests become observed performers.

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The past few months have been really pivotal here at Culturebot and it feels like we’re moving into a new era. A lot of the things we’ve done casually or sporadically over the years are being formalized and, for the first, time, I’ve been able to articulate some of the ideas around what we’ve been practicing for more than eight years. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share with you, our  audience and community, where we came from, what we’re thinking about and what we’re working on over the next twelve months and into the future.

CULTUREBOT HISTORY

When I first started thinking about Culturebot in late 2002, I had already been online for a while. I started a personal website back in 1998. I remember working at an ad agency in 1999 and pitching my co-workers on a website that would help people who met online and had similar interests to meet off-line and have social gatherings. They laughed and said that no-one would want to do that. If I only had understood what VC was at the time!

Technically I began “blogging” in late 2000 or early 2001, shortly after Blogger first became available.  In the early days of blogging there weren’t so many of us in NYC – or anywhere – and I remember when we’d all get together and drink and socialize – Choire, Jonno, Blaise, Ultrasparky, Uffish – where it was not uncommon to ask someone “What’s your URL?” before you knew their name. Eventually Nick Denton swept into town and scooped up the most popular bloggers to be his editors and help launch his empire. But I saw firsthand the power of blogging to build communities both of interest and of practice, before the money and the book deals came to town.

I have the dubious distinction of being the first person (or among the first, anyway) to blog 9/11.  That moment amplified, for me, what blogging could mean and could become. As someone who provided a first-hand, eyewitness account of the events of the day, in real time, on the internet, and who received comments, e-mails and responses from around the world instantaneously, I realized that things were very different than before, that the world was smaller and people more connected, that the internet had changed what was possible. It was amazing that we could really, truly share our experiences quickly and personally without intermediation; and that communities could come into existence and vanish in moments.

Shortly after founding Culturebot, I was at a PS122 party with my friend Chris Hampton, complaining about the impending doom of Valentine’s Day. We decided to hold the first-ever all-blogger reading/performance event  - “Worst.Sex.Ever” at PS122. The event attracted about 250 people, we had to turn people away, and it became an ongoing series called The WYSIWYG Talent Show, where over the course of three years we presented (and frequently debuted) a lot of people who went on to be quite well-known including (but not limited to) Emily Gould, Paul Ford, Todd Levin, Jessy Delfino, Faustus, M.D., Choire Sicha, Mike Daisey, Chelsea Peretti, Ron Mwangaguhunga and Ned Vizzini. We also presented the first video blogger film fest, to my knowledge.

I started working at PS122 in the spring of 2002 and over the first six months I made two key observations. First, general audiences didn’t seem to have much knowledge of or context for the work being presented. They knew the solo shows – the Danny Hoch/John Leguizamo stuff – but the more difficult or esoteric work – Yasuko Yukoshi, Richard Maxwell, dance in general, etc. – had a very small audience of downtown denizens and not much else. At the same time, there was almost no public space for dialogue around “downtown” or “contemporary” performing arts, nowhere to share ideas or trace histories, lineages and connections. Artists and audiences alike frequently came to the New York – and PS122 – with only the vaguest sense of what they were seeing and how to engage with it.  I had been in NYC since 1995, originally as a writer/performer who frequented PS122 as an audience member, and I still had only the vaguest notion of how the Ontological was connected to the Wooster Group was connected to PS122, what Judson was, what DTW was and how all these pieces fit together. I knew that there was a need and an opportunity to share information and knowledge, to build awareness and also create an ongoing, evolving, real-time document of performance in NYC. Thus Culturebot was developed as a collaborative, community-oriented web resource providing critical insight and conversation to practitioners, administrators and audiences at one. Our goal then, as now, was to be deeply informed and thoughtful while remaining accessible to a wide readership.

Initially I wanted Culturebot to be a group endeavor and I invited the marketing directors of all the major contemporary presenting institutions to a meeting at PS122 where I pitched them on participating. I said here was a chance to build community and at the same time provide a counterbalance to the hegemony of the NY Times. Apart from Aaron Rosenblum, who was working at DTW at the time, they all looked at me like I had three heads and said it was unnecessary and besides, who had the time to write for a website? They were already so busy designing postcards and printed brochures and organizing bulk mailings and print ad campaigns. So I took a deep breath and soldiered on, launching the site in December 2003.

When Culturebot first launched it was meant to exist in contrast to the “reviewer-oriented” model of mainstream news outlets like the New York Times. At first we only published previews, interviews and points-of-view, intending to serve the community and the field at large in an informational and dramaturgical capacity, creating space for conversation and dialogue, meeting the work at its own level, not from a place of judgement. However, early-career artists, existing under the radar of mainstream outlets, often requested to be reviewed. Culturebot responded, becoming an advocate for emerging artists by providing early reviews and critical feedback. Many artists who are now more well-known got their first write-ups here and we still try and cover early-career artists as best we can.

In October of 2007 I left PS122 and brought the site with me. Although Culturebot was initially funded by an NPN grant to PS122 for community outreach, we never received ongoing financial support from the institution and this was a big moment, for the first time Culturebot was its own thing, separate from a respected organization, and we had to sink or swim. We’re still swimming!

NEW MODELS AND NEW VOICES IN ARTS WRITING

When I was at PS122 Mark Russell always made a big deal about not putting work into categories. He strongly believed in the idea that dance, theater, performance art, music and time-based performative events, etc., all exist in this universe that is performance. He drilled that into me and over time I’ve come to adhere to that philosophy ever more strongly. I dislike putting labels on the work and most of the artists I’m interested are creating outside the boundaries of traditional discipline structures. This previously unarticulated perspective has finally become the norm, as reflected in the curatorial statement from Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, from the Whitney Biennial:

“…artists are functioning as researchers and curators, drawing on the histories of art, design, dance, music, and technology. Artists are bringing other artists into their work—a form of free collage or reinvention that borrows from the culture at large as a way of rewriting the standard narratives and exposing more relevant hybrids. There is also the radical production of new forms, fabrication on a more modest scale. Artists are constantly redefining what an artist can be at this moment ….”

This, however, highlights the unique challenge of this moment, which is that of context. As museums rediscover performance, dance and to a lesser extent theater,  incorporating it into their programming,  performing arts spaces are being left out of the conversation entirely. Years of knowledge, dramaturgy, theory and practical expertise are being consigned to the dustbins as visual arts curators apply a different set of critical criteria to the evaluation and interpretation of the performed art. Still heavily reliant on the critical theories of performance from the 60′s, visual art tends to reject craft in favor “authenticity” and be wary of mimesis and theatricality. So when they look at dance and theater, they are not, generally, critically equipped to make knowledgeable evaluations. They also don’t have any production infrastructure or knowledge, nor do the curators have experience working with performing artists to develop projects over time. I’ve already talked about this at great length and won’t rehash here. Suffice it to say that never before has the conversation about “The Black Box versus the White Cube” been more important.

Having spent my formative years outside the visual arts world, I was mostly unaware of the conversation and  discovered it when I was curating PRELUDE 2008, and that topic became the focus of the festival. During the curatorial process a colleague brought to my attention Harold Skramstad’s seminal 1999 article “An Agenda for American Museums In the 21st Century” (online here, downloadable 10MB PDF here). It is an incredibly thoughtful and powerful article and, I think, possibly responsible for the current trends in museum curating and the rediscovery of performance. In the conclusion of his essay Skramstad writes:

 The great age of collection building in museums is over. Now is the time for the next great agenda of museum development in America. This agenda needs to take as its mission nothing less than to engage actively in the design and delivery of experiences that have the power to inspire and change the way people see both the world and the possibility of their own lives. We have many practical institutions to help us work through our day-to-day problems. We have enough educational institutions that focus on training us to master the skills we need to graduate from school and get a job. Yet we have too few institutions that have as their goal to inspire and change us. American museums need to take this up as their new challenge. Up to now much of their time has been devoted to building their collections and sharing them through “outreach” to the larger world. Now they must help us create the new world of “inreach,” in which people, young and old alike, can “reach in” to museums though experiences that will help give value and meaning to their own lives and at the same time stretch and enlarge their perceptions of the world.

So what we have, then, is a wholesale re-imagining of the purpose and function of the art museum. Performing arts spaces should probably do a similar re-evaluation, but that is another essay for another time. But what this means, and in fact demands, is that as artists work increasingly across and outside traditional boundaries of discipline and as institutions adapt to create boundary-less contexts for the work artists are making, it is necessary to cultivate a critical voice and style of writing that meets the work on its own terms. As the lines between dance, theater, music, performance art, video and visual art are becoming less and less defined, we need new critics who can travel with the work and the imagination of the artist. At the same time we need a community of writers who can share their skills and expertise, who bring a collective pool of knowledge to bear on this ever-expanding and evolving cultural landscape. We need to bring visual arts, performing arts, music, film and new/emerging media writers together to develop a new criticism that reflects this cultural landscape and  the environment in which this discourse increasingly occurs – online.

As mentioned earlier, Culturebot was always meant to exist in contrast – even in opposition – to the “reviewer-oriented” model of mainstream news outlets like the New York Times. The traditional “reviewer-oriented” model of newspaper-based arts writing is predicated on advising the potential consumer whether a given performance is worth the investment of time and money. We reject that. We propose to distinguish the performing arts from corporately manufactured consumer-focused entertainment product and apply a different framework for analysis and dialogue.

At the same time that we distinguish between a consumer-oriented “reviewer” and a critic, so too do we distinguish between an old-model critic and The New Criticism. The traditional critical model proposes a “subject/object” relationship between writer and performance where the critic “objectively” judges the merits of a given performance. Culturebot proposes a new framework for arts criticism that we refer to as “critical horizontalism”. In this framework criticism is a creative practice unto itself and the writer exists in subjective relation to the work of the artist. The writer’s response is the continuation of a dialogue initiated by the artist. If this response is then published on the Internet, this creates a horizontal field of discourse with the work. This model resists the commodification of the performing arts as “entertainment” but rather situates it as time-based art. The performance itself is an ephemeral nexus where audience, artist and ideas converge. The critic supports the continued investigation of the art event across multiple platforms.

This theoretical framework is expressed in practical terms as well. As a primarily web-based endeavor, Culturebot’s aesthetics have been informed by our environment. We started as a blog and have evolved with the web as it has changed. We are influenced by the evolving and interconnected world of social media and strive to continue developing the voice we are known for – intelligent but familiar, rigorous but accessible, frequently informal and conversational. It is not that we can’t write like academics, it is that we choose not to. We choose not to employ jargon when plainer language will suffice. When possible and appropriate, we provide links to the work of our academic colleagues for our readers’ reference if they choose to investigate.

Culturebot’s mission it to be deeply informed and generally accessible, to provide a platform for dialogue and the resources for deeper, more thoughtful investigation. Our hope is to continue providing a platform for artists, administrators, curators and audiences to hold conversations, to establish relationships with other arts writers online, continue to develop new critical voices that reflect the aesthetics of the Information Age. We plan to work with professional journalists and new media innovators to identify a writing style and practice that reflects and engages with the new cultural landscape. This is writing intended for the Internet, criticism from a networked perspective.

LIVE CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS

In January 2012 Meiyin Wang invited Culturebot to work with Under The Radar to curate, produce and moderate two panel discussions as part of the festival.  Around the same time, in response to the essay “Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance”, Culturebot was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Exit Art Gallery in New York City. That project, Ephemeral Evidence, will be happening from April 17-21, 2012 and more details will be announced shortly.

The convergence of these two things led us to start thinking about Criticism As Creative Practice and Culturebot’s dramaturgical role in our community. In Ephemeral Evidence we have paired Culturebot writers with performing artists to create durational performances that will leave objects as evidence of the ephemeral event. The writers are responsible for creating the contextual writing in collaboration with the artists and being a part of the creative process. We believe that the New Criticism means that writer/critics should engage more deeply and over time with artists, so that they can provide meaningful dialogue in public space.

Developing Ephemeral Evidence informed our thinking about “Live Critical Intervention”. After the success at Under The Radar we were invited by Ron Berry to do an “as-yet-undefined-something” at the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX. We really weren’t interested in replicating the same old model of panel discussions and artist talkbacks that everyone always does, so we started thinking about how we could re-structure these important critical conversations in more interesting, performative ways. Thus Live Critical Interventions are our attempt to put “critical horizontalism” into practice. We started researching, analyzing the intellectual structures and presentational aesthetics of panels and talkbacks and identifying ways to subvert and undermine them. We are using existing techniques such as Lois Weaver’s “Long Table” and Everybodys Toolbox’s “Impersonation Game” as source material, while creating new interventions as a scalable framework to support the democratization of criticism and the idea of criticism as social practice. We will be at Fusebox from May 3-6, 2012 and will be presenting three “interventions” – more info on that to come. We have received a commission to  develop this project over the next twelve months and will debut the project in March 2013. We can’t announce where yet, but we will soon.

ONWARD AND UPWARD, BROTHERS AND SISTERS

Here at Culturebot HQ we’re incredibly excited to continue pioneering new landscapes in art, culture and ideas. We are leading the charge for a new way of engaging with performance and criticism and are looking forward to creating public platforms for conversation and dialogue. The next twelve months will bring significant change and growth,  we look forward to evolving from our humble blog origins into a new, multi-platform content creating networked robot of the future, replicating memes and busting rhymes like nobody’s business.

If you want to get on board, now’s the time. You know where to find us.

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