art – Page 8 – Inquiry Observation Analysis

June 18, 2012

There is no theory.

There is no theory.

There is only practice.

What you do is your practice.

Whether you are sitting at a table or lying on the floor or doing push-ups or aligning your heels with your sitz bones or quoting dead lovers of knowledge, you are engaged in a practice. If you are repeating it, you are rehearsing it. If you are rehearsing it, it is your practice. If you are sitting around a table discussing the possibilities of choreography, you are practicing sitting around a table discussing possibilities. Why are you not stretching or sharing weight while discussing the possibilities of choreography?

It has been scientifically proven that those who sit more live shorter lives.

Do you want your practice to lead to a shorter life span?
one article
another article
a third article

This leads me to another point. Philosophy. Philo coming from the Latin for love and sophy from sophia mean knowledge or wisdom. Therefore, someone who loves knowledge is a philosopher. Anyone who is involved in a practice is therefore a philosopher. The more rigorous the practice the more rigorous the philosophy. Therefore anyone who has an interest, whether it’s comic books, ballet, baseball, anatomy, is a philosopher. He or she loves knowledge of a sort. It might not be knowledge that someone else finds particularly useful or valid, but it is still knowledge. Whether Green Lantern could survive an attack by the Silver Surfer is just as philosophical a discussion as an aesthetic and textual examination of King Lear.

A chef is a philosopher.
A soccer coach is a philosopher.
A hair dresser is a philosopher.
A rancher is a philosopher.
An eye doctor is a philosopher.
A second grade teacher is a philosopher.
A Shiatsu practitioner is a philosopher.
A forest ranger is a philosopher.
A stat quoting baseball fan is a philosopher.
A contact improviser is a philosopher.

May 16, 2012

I.E.P.

Something I wrote on the subway today about improvised performance, especially in relation to my project as part of my third semester studies at SODA –

Improvised Ensemble Performance intentionally has such a limited palette in relation to props, music, set etc. as each of those elements and the unnamed ones are all ways that we can distract ourselves from our existence. Think of cell phones, portable music and video sources on planes, trains and automobiles. We use those forms to pull us away from ourselves, intentionally or not. But consciously using the limited (yet infinite!) palette of shape, space and time, we are drawing our own attention to the barest form of our existence. We will not distract you, the audience, from your experience with sound, set, drama, overt story, magic, the space of appearance etc. We invite you, maybe challenge you, to experience what is happening before you.

May 6, 2012

A Quote

Dance [is] a practice that remobilizes language – Biba Bell, May 5, 2012

April 18, 2012

organistic or artistic

Is a performance an artistic event or an organization event? Both, but…and there is always a but…after the initial creation of the artistic event all that is left is the organizational event. Following this line of thought, could we then say that famous touring artists are not necessarily successful artists, but products of successful organizers?

The artistic feats of Cafe Müller, Glacial Decoy or Content with Content (to put myself in lofty company) happened but once, the initial birthing of them. But every other iteration of them is an organizational feat, not an artistic feat.

After taking a workshop here in Berlin about funding bodies and grant, and hearing about another workshop about international touring and funding, I began to wonder about organizing and creating. Creating something is definitely more fun than organizing something that is already. And as we all have a finite amount of time on this earth we can only do so much. Is it an either or situation? Do I have to pick one or the other? Or can I do both? It as of now has to be me doing both as no one is organizing for me. Haven’t sparked the interest of an agent or a funder to do that part for me. And I do not have the natural tendency to organize.

The creating of a piece has to come first, no? Not necessarily. One can apply to make a piece and then the funds to make it. But then should one wait to make a piece until the funds are there? I say no.

Often after I make a piece and perform it a few times, I lose interest in revisiting that idea or experience again. That road has been traveled and I do not want to travel down that path again. This lack of interest in repetition prevents me from creating situations(applying to festivals, etc.) to show my work multiple times. I would rather spend the time, money, energy investigating something new, making something new. At least when I make it I know that I will have some measure of success. By making something I do not necessarily mean a whole production with lights camera action and audience. But thinking and encorporealizing it for myself. Exploring those neural pathways.

Maybe then, moving to Marfa and building a studio will be a viable option for me.

Make, make, make. Let the organizers sort them out!

(or maybe this is all just rationalization for someone who can’t organize!)

March 25, 2012

Spirals

Below is the piece I made during the Erasmus intensive on Composition at my university this past fall, October 2011.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/33711374 w=500&h=281]

March 13, 2012

Looking at Rembrandt

The quotes below are from an article on brain scans on people who are looking at Rembrandt paintings.

Some snippets below –

“Brain scans revealed how much the enjoyment of art is influenced by the information given to the viewer.”

“The study showed the strength of suggestibility in such artistic responses.”

“The pretension-puncturing experiment suggests that the appreciation of art is strongly linked to the accompanying information – rather than an objective judgement.”

“This warm glow of aesthetic pleasure was absent when the viewers looked at an image they had been told was fake. Instead the brain activity was associated with strategy and planning, as though the subject was trying to work out why this was not an authentic painting.”

This shows how context can be made to increase or decrease viewers’ enjoyment of a static object. Is this a good thing?

What does this mean for live arts? Could audiences be told that the piece they are watching is a fake Bausch, or a fake Cunningham? Or do a piece as faithfully as possible by someone else and call it your own?

How much does it cost to rent an FMRI?

March 13, 2012