PSi #11 – Day 2 & 3

I am still trying to figure out my orientation to this conference. Every person I meet, every panel and performance I attend is tweaking me a bit. This is a remarkable place in that the people are generally so friendly and open as well as so tuned to the world as performance.

I realize that I walk around with the assumption that when I perform that a good deal of my audience lacks the same background or even interest in performance to consider performance work without a good deal of seduction, entertainment or explaining if you do not want to isolate the audience. Not so here. It seems like even the most minimalist gestures can fly because they are actually being paid attention to and the audience has a lot to bring to the events.

This evening I met a friend of Deva’s from Germany named Helge. Such a kindhearted German man and performer who seems so interested in supporting social interaction. Talking to him has started to make me aware of the European networks of performance artists and how they work, perform and supported. This is really what I am here for I think.

The academic stuff I am having mixed reactions to. I am still learning how to figure out how to pick a panel. Themes are rather meaningless 80% of the time because of organizer goofs, missing panelists, or lack of moderation to tie things together. I constantly am questioning myself. I wonder I am hearing papers that are just meaningless babble, or if they are just using theoretical languages in ways I am not tuned to.

Deva described this tendency of the academics to use and reuse “sets” of terms (like “community”, “near miss”, “resistance”, etc) and sometimes I wonder how that is useful. I am familiar with some of this stuff but there are defiantly points where I am left behind.

And today I went to a fascinating panel on thresholds, such as between an ordinary gesture and a performed one, life and death, dance and architecture. Pia Lindman gave an interesting artist talk on this performance and drawing work she has done with images of grief taken from the New York Times. Heidi Gilpin showed this fascinating CD-ROM archive of performance strategies, collected by the Frankfurt Ballet to orient new dancers, to articulate some ideas on the possibilities of motion in architecture. Barbara Formis gave the most lucid talk I have heard yet at this festival on art in theory-speak…she was looking at the relation of the performed and the ordinary. These folks were all able to make sense for the most part. Why is that so rare here? Is it just cause their media all worked when it was supposed to?

I am generalizing too much but usually I enjoy just one paper in the sets of panelist and finding little of the post talk discussions interesting. The moderator of the thresholds panel made a wise choice I think in declaring that all of the presentations would be quite different and took a couple questions for the presenter after each one went rather than having a general q&a at the end.

I am seeing some interesting little performances as well, which I will write more about soon. They are often a relief to too much theory.

e

PSi #11 – Day 1

(Pre Day 1) I arrived in Providence, RI a day early to visit my friend Ben Russel (SAIC alum and filmmaker) and quickly realized this small town is a strange little place. Like the other small towns with scenes, this place has an active music scene and a couple colleges (Brown and RISD). There is also a good deal of very wealthy folks too which sets up the fundamental social segregation here (not so much race stuff, or country/city divides just educated white folk with radically different amounts of cash). Went to a bar and met a couple Asian folks who contract from the government to produce purple hearts and other medals. I could not get a purple heart for my visit to Providence. It also turned out that the girl’s boyfriend friend’s father owns Metro Vivid (the porn mongers) and had all these stories about porn/sex parties they go to in NYC. Ben is set for the next trip.

PSi #11, Day 1. Registration day. You can walk this town in 20 minutes. I got registered and filmed Deva Eveland doing his performance at the registration table. He was having some problems because his whole thing was to be this voiceless armless rather helpless guy with a pen in his mouth who would help people make name tags, but the organizers decided to create a name tag making station away from the sign up desk at the last minute and then spent the entire day pointing arrivals away from Deva. He is going to make adjustments to try to get more interaction today. I imagine there will be more arrivals today as well.

What is performance studies? I only started looking into this stuff a year or two ago. It is an academic discipline within cultural studies that looks at how things are performed rather than what they are…if I can make such a broad statement about a group of academics that pride themselves on always changing and adapting. The field investigates actual performance art mediums in various ways as well as social rituals, unplanned performances (say trying to get out of a traffic ticket) and everyday activities. The great thing about this conference is who open they are to the praxis of having workshops you can sweat in along with panel discussions along with formal and informal performances from many disciplines.

The theme this year is “Becoming Uncomfortable”. On day one we all went to a banquet which included performer hosts and waiter who made us haggle for the silverware on our table using “bush million dollar bills” we where given at arrival. The divided us up to sit at tables based on staple foods we picked we arrived (I was at the cheese table. Picked cheese cause it makes me really sick…like curl up in a ball for 6-10 hours sick.) My table was fun and was made up of several of the conference presenters. Everyone seemed open to playing along with the games. The concept of the event wasn’t so effective but there was lots goin on, we ate frogs legs and smelt, and I wore a party hat for 4 million dollars.

I perhaps wisely stopped at one of the corner dunkin donuts (which spot Providence in abundance for some reason) and ate before I went when I started to realize this was going to be a performance event. It turned out to be patty-cake but you can end up unsatisfied at these things. See the Futurist cookbook.

Uncomfortability (Panel Discussion) @ PAC/edge

[3/30 - This blog entry has gotten a bit of response. If you read the comments you will see a few comments that I am complaining a lot and that I am not creating dialogue this way. This makes me uncomfortable, and it seem a few of the readers so far are uncomfortable (and maybe they are right about my complaining too much?). What to do? Well, I am adding this intro which makes me a bit more comfortable.

I am also gonna restate here that I really like PAC/edge a lot. It is the only time in Chicago where I can feel sustained energy around performance. I also really like panels and workshops and this year's PAC/edge has taken a nice step to expand those offerings. I also am a big fan of the moderators of the Uncomfortability panel as people and of their performance work? This said I feel a bit more comfortable.

I am also raising these questions: how do we negotiate this uncomfortable diatribish post? isn't it a cliché that people one respond to controversy...does the uncomfortablity have something to do with initiating agency?

I hope you have the facility to handle what uncomfortable statements still lay ahead and will feel un/comfortable to post a response to some of the points I bring up/complain about/compliment/ignore. If you start a conversation elsewhere about the topics I discuss in this blog, feel free to let me know and I would be happy to link you if appropriate.

I am always happy to meet for a tea and further conversation on these topics...if you are comfortable with that.

e]


The first thing that made me uncomfortable at Saturday’s panel discussion on “Uncomfortabilty” at the PAC/edge fest was that panelist Loren Crawford had decided it was ok to bring her young daughter on stage with toys and all during the talk.

The second thing that made me uncomfortable is that everyone on the panel ignored the crashes, flashings, and walking about that the young Miss Crawford was performing and that panel blazed ahead in a rather general, unfocused discussion.

It made me uncomfortable that Loren was obligated to eventually leave with her daughter in tow having little chance to add to the conversation.

It made me uncomfortable that only a small collection of the performing artists from the festival were in the audience.

Again, it made me uncomfortable that the conversation, which was just an hour, was so general and just seemed to get started as time ran out.

It made me uncomfortable that there is a value system being asserted around “uncomfortablilty” but was unacknowledged by the group. It seems these panelists easily accept a system of the-more-uncomfortable-the-better, with the hedge that there are some limits. It seemed that most artists on the panel were interested by and a spend a great deal of time negotiating the point when they start to reach a limit…when their value system of “uncomfortablility” comes in conflict (or anticipated conflict) with those that hold a value system of “comfortablity” (these folks where mentioned as funders in Chicago, and conservatives of various sorts who at times are in the audience). Is it a lingering avant-guard criteria?

It made me uncomfortable that no one suggested that maybe uncomfortability is no longer a sufficient criteria for evaluating art.

I was uncomfortable with the moment when the group quickly agreed to the moderator’s assertion that art can produce change and that uncomfortability encourages change. (I maybe be misquoting that idea but that is what I came away with).

I was uncomfortable with my feeling that Susan Lipman was secretly the puppet master here.

I was uncomfortable with the assertion that people simply need critical skills to understand art. They need specific art-language knowledge-bases, which give the viewers the medium to understand and apply their critical skills. A traveler with a sharp, critically trained mind is still gonna have an uncomfortable time in another country if they do not speak the language.

It was uncomfortable never hearing any suggestions to what some of the possible qualities are for managing uncomfortability. How can it be taught?

I was uncomfortable with the lack of any orienting descriptions of what is an uncomfortable situation. To me a starting formula might be one of dissonance. When two or more things are out of harmony in some way then you have some degree of uncomfortability. Such as when a joint is bent the wrong way, it is uncomfortable. Such as when particular political views are asserted in an art piece then an audience member who is heavily identified with a different view feels uncomfortable.

I was uncomfortable with the assertion that the uncomfortable is fundamentally political. As pointed out above a political frame would be one way of looking at it but in sufficient for understanding how a joint is made uncomfortable.

I was uncomfortable that I had to leave the discussion before it ended.

I was uncomfortable that the talk shifted wildly to the role of art criticism after moving down into the café because they had an art critic there to pick on.

I was uncomfortable that even as the frustration about the lack of dialogue around art in Chicago was raised by panelists that I got no sense that any of these folks were going to attempt to extend the dialogue.

On the other hand, I was comfortable with the talk happening and that it was aware that this was a theme at the PSi conference next week.

I was comfortable that Susan Lipman (PAC Exec. Dir) added some informed comment to the talk.

I was comfortable with the quality and good spirit of the folks gathered for the panel.

Comfortable when Greg Allen, the Director of the Neo-Futurists, kept trying to offer that a quality of “openness’ is something that can be strategically employed in performance.

I was comfortable with an audience member's statement of concern that there wasn't a more politically diverse panel.

I was comfortable with the critic offering humor as a tactic for being uncomfortable.

-----

I would suggest that PAC needs to do more of this and in a less reactive way. If they are going to be Chicago focused then they need to push and id themes that are of issue in Chicago to performers. To some degree they are forced to go through this time of building infrastructure but it would create a much more sharp event if there were ideas behind the show. Not a constricting thing but an interpretation of what is going on which is displayed by the line up choices and some critical writing perhaps.

The suggestion in the panel that Chicago funders don't know want to fund what they say they want to fund came up in the panel. As did some interesting points from Barbara DeGenevieve about a couple failures by AIC to teach Chicago that it is the role of art to create work that at times make people uncomfortable. The suggestion that not taking on this responsibility puts AIC in position of fear that they will lose funding isn’t right. It is the same sense I get from the people PAC was courting for funding at the auction/dinner event last year. The guests had little interest or understanding of the art they were being asked to support. Maybe education is needed, maybe you need a new board, and maybe the intelligent people on the board are just bored and need a more rigorous expression of civic leadership and aesthetic concern from the festival.

In hindsight, I am uncomfortable that Deva Eveland, who is performing a rather uncomfortable performance installation most nights at PAC/edge and who is performing at the PSi conference on "Being Uncomfortable" next week, was not on the panel. It seems to speak to a general unawareness to the installations in particluare by the organizers, and to an ignorance to the kind of themes the artists are engaging in during the festival.

e