Well, I made it until noon. Noontime, sun at the zenith. I captured it with a masking tape circle on the floor, which is actually an enso really. No, really. I had a 76% urge when I showed up to not even open my pencils at all and fudge everyone out who happened to show up with that trick. To be completely honest, it's probably more powerful to expect a huge drawing performance and find only a bare floor with a circle on it, than to see some art student draw yet another random project in the hallway. It's like those monks who whack their disciples over the head to shock them into enlightenment. Much more penetrating. Much more better.
That said, I like my sun. I think I'll fill the rest of the page later on at my leisure, over the summer, to be a giant flaming flower planet-thing. And I need to figure out how to attach the little mirror without hurting the paper.
I also found out this morning while reading up on Shinto for class, that Amaterasu - the epic-ly epic primary Shinto Kami of the sun -- is often represented with a mirror! (!)
I love Amaterasu. Ever since I heard about the legend where she hides herself in a cave, until getting tricked outside to bring light back to world, well... I thought she was neat. Female deities are soooooo often associated with the moon, but not this girl, no, she was flaming from the get-go! Her brother Tsukiyomi is the Moon Kami.
Imagine if you might... the top floor of this building is a dislocated airport atmosphere, an ice age wisp-moment, a lavender ghost shark air-quarium. It'll be my home for a full day of drawing, all my pencils scattered around me as I slowly, slowly grow a sun in graphite, flames licking in slow motion to fill a gigantic paper on the floor. My temporary home and magic carpet ride, ha!
If I could extend this to a 24-hour performance and watch the nightlight twinkle in all colours of the city all around me, all alone in the sky........ I would, oh I ..... all for the want of an after-hours pass. :/
today I woke up and I was a ghost. How strange! made of lines, eleven years of words and promises and opinions and stories. boys and mistakes and doodles and heroes and days. I am having a hard time creating words. Right. Now. They are so permanent and so wrong... and just who am I now anyway? I walked up and down the street, fingers numbing in the cold and my mind numbing too... a Self dimming and fleeting to leave just the skin. So in a way it's a shell with no soul. OR is it a soul bared completely with no body to recognize? As much as a soul can be summed up in an A B C kind of way, and just how WAS your tuesday? Dear diary, I never wrote dear diary at all. Who was I talking to? It wasn't me. I haven't found a ME definitive enough to be the fulcrum of these words yet. There is a good story I'm wearing, it's a one-of-a-kind couture made from the hundreds of voices that all went by E. Ranger (except that phase where I wanted to be called - wait for it - Willow Moon, and I really don't count her as part of the Me-ish canon at ALL, what a chimp!.... <----- Artistic license). Like a relay race of my own name... with no prize and no finish but apparently a decent uniform and oh there's unlimited graphite!
ANYway. I hate reading my own writing. The End."
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I consider this my first real performance. I had to psyche myself up all morning to go outside but I needn't have been so reluctant. This was exhilarating!!!!!!!!
I only walked. That's it. I walked slowly and at one with the Persona. Cars slowed down, people did double and triple takes. My hands felt like they would crack right off in the sub-zero weather, but I kept going, vision at once blurred by the pantyhose and sharpened by the contacts and pure creative high.
Seriously, this is like my dreams coming true. Literally. The fantasies I lost myself in as a kid, the strange characters that I still draw... stepping off the page and into YOUR TUESDAY MORNING. What the hell??? I love life! I'm wearing this suit again.
This could sum up the tune in my head these days very well.
"Lately - and I think this is a cultural observation - I've replaced the post-romantic metaphor with one of a knot. I see individuals now as knots, in say, the piece of lace that one of Vermeer's lacemakers is making. Things go through us - the genetic code, the history of the nation, the language or languages we speak ... the constraints that are put upon us, the people who are around us. And if we are an individual, it's because these threads are knotted together in this particular place, and they hold. I also have no metaphysical sense of the self, and I see this knot as vulnerable; you could cut one or two threads of it... or you can, of course, get an unwieldy know where somebody has had so much put in that the knot becomes a large and curious, and ugly object. We are connected and we also are a connection which is a separate and unrepeated object." -- A. S. Byatt (1987; 26)
Last week we had our first taste of actively doing some performance art together for class:
There were other things done too - that black circle of tubing was filled with hundreds of downy pillow feathers that we sent cascading through the big glass sleekness of the new art building. Multiple times. I don't think the janitors were even chagrined! We also carried a couch into the big maintenance elevator and had a little hoedown in there, hoping that this time maybe we would get more random people to join us... and of course Kathy Kennedy (sound artist/professor extraordinaire) shows up with her sound class along with some guy eating takeout noodles and the place goes wild! The video's too long and unedited to show right now, but I may later when I get the final piece.
In other news I AM SICK. Oh woe, to have a head so full of gak! I'm probably not communicating very well if blog-land is anything like real-land, but you're bearing with me if you've gotten this far and that makes me happy enough to keep going.
Notably at the end of that class some of us got randomly invited behind the glass gallery of the FOFA to take part in a real (that is, meaningful) performance piece - Angela Silver's Accrétion where she takes outmoded pieces of writing equipment and gives them new life in contemporary ways. In this case, basically, she was wacking a wall full of carbon paper with a typewriter ball over and over, making strange partial constellations of letters and signs all over the wall. You also had to walk through Amelie Brisson-Darveau's jungle of knotted-up crimson fabrics to get to the action. (I think that also had to do with re-purposing objects - turning old clothing into measuring tools, borders, social nets, et al)
It was fairly neat, and a good denouement on feeling healthy I think. 30 minutes after this I was horking and trembling like a big 'ol microbe, but up until then... art. As it should be. :)
The next assignment for Perf. Art is to take on a different persona for a whole day... I was just thinking of switching gender, but now I think I might go a little wilder in concept. Any ideas? Mythical beasts, muses, barons and superheroes are kinda the wildness I'm aiming for. Moustache wearing is a highly amusing plus!
