Ok, "better late than never" is the theme of this week's blog posts. Below is info on each project and images from the show, which were kindly taken by MTAA's
MRiver and which are also available as a
Flickr photo set.
We Are All Together: Media(ted) PerformanceArtists Space, December 2005,
Performa 05 BiennialCurated by Marisa Olson
This show was conceived as a reflection on the ambiguous relationships between artists, curators, and their audience in the realm of performance art, particularly in the age of highly-mediated communication. Each of the projects makes manifest the layers of transmission and engagement involved in making the artists’ work, and in each case there is a question as to the status of the artist’s authorship. The curator, the viewers, and the artist all take on the roles of artist, audience, and curator, at various stages in the production and exhibition of the work. The show then picks up on contemporary discourse about the relative status of the object and of the audience, in performance contexts.
Sabrina Gschwandtner & Cat Mazza collaborate to perform 'Film to Fiber,' a project that explores feminized labor processes. Stills from a 1970s educational 16 mm film describing fabric production are translated into knit fabric on site. The performance illustrates the process of digitizing film stills into low resolution video stills, which are then transformed into knittted fabric. UPDATE: Mica Scalin has posted video documentation of this project, on
DVBlog.
MTAA (M. River & T. Whid Art Associates) used their blog to propose ten performance projects and let the community vote on (in a sense curate) what they should do for the show. These were all 'Pre-Rejected, Pre-Approved Performance Art Projects,' which had previously been declined by other venues, but were pre-approved by the organizers of this exhibition. The public ultimately decided upon 'Midnight in the Deli,' in which the artists withdrew $100 from an ATM at the deli closest to their studio, purchased what they could with it, and returned to the studio to craft a late-night assemblage: Frank the Snowman. Frank and the "making of" video are exhibited here.
Kate Pocrass asked restaurants in numerous international cities to add a “Specialty of the House” meal to their menu. That meal will be a dish usually eaten in the home upstairs. Pocrass exhibited sandwich boards advertising these house specialties, which featured personal narratives about the dishes.
Chris Sollars says of his "The shirt that gets around" project, "I have worn this shirt and then passed it on; the receiver is encouraged to do the same. The objective is to wear the shirt and pass it on to another person and to track where the shirt goes. Started in 1999 with 4 prototype shirts, TSTGA has grown with 10 shirts currently traveling the globe from San Francisco to Helsinki, India to Norway, and Seattle to Antarctica. Each participant is encouraged to visit a website and track their shirt number:
theshirtthatgetsaround.com Ten new shirts were exhibited on a structure made of the boxes used to move artist Mark Shunney from Red Hook, NY to Felton, CA, underneath which a monitor plays the cable-TV infomercial the artist made for the shirt. Also shown were Pete Riesett's photos of the various stages of the Shunney's move.
Lee Walton considers himself an “Experientialist." His work generally involves creating or working within elaborate systems, and making marks or carrying out actions in accordance with the system. More recently he's been working with outside actors in 'life theatre' contexts. In this case, one actor (Theodore Bouloukos, the man seen in this video) will carry out a performance on the afternoon of Saturday, December 17, entitled
Garbage Day. Viewers are encouraged to take a map of these Soho-area actions and attempt to spot the actor discarding trash at a series of numbered garbage cans.
