Selections: The Work of Victoria Eleanor Bradford

My dear—

Our shared sense of space, this spatializing of language, the talk of fields and houses, swamps and creeks… You asked of my “house unbuilt,” after the fact or is it before the fact?—and my first thought to that question is must it be either/or? can’t it be and/both?

Movement, too, is one of the things I can do to re-route the intensity when it comes. To find small moments, gestures of my body and go exploring there.

All this is to say that when I danced Saturday evening, while all very honest and sincere, my body perhaps read as dramatic, romantic(ized), coming out of a depth of feeling that is not fully moored in “reality” as is normally considered. Yet this is where I stand, start, circle, cross, continue, sit, park walk, turn and stop, and any distance between you and me is meant to be felt and is part of the landscape being charted.

23 Jan 2012

Introduction. What is it all for? Purpose vs. Use

from A Letter in Which a Dance is Made in Correspondence
a book in draft form, download full pdf

He writes:

Just now, standing in front of the large windows that separate the city from my desk, I watched a child run up and down a set of stairs. It was a chance encounter between my sudden glance and his joyous, irreverent activity. Neither of us expected for me to be watching, and from my perspective on the third floor, no one aside from myself was watching. As he broke from his mother (she continued down the sidewalk pushing what I can only assume was a sibling in large stroller) the men working on the church across the street continued their labor, making and remaking the architecture which holds not just the images of god, but our images, and the images of our dead, but I watched him move, bounce really, from one step to the other, and then a turn and a tumbling descent. As I watched I began to ask myself: Of what use was this action? and for what purpose?

Purpose comes naturally. It is the experience of the movement that motivates the body. The sheer joy of acquiring physical knowledge, that unknown that is only articulated through waving limbs and bouncing frames. This is the reason for moving after all, for the invention of the dance. The universal language, the occupation of time and space, in other words the nature of performance, the heart of it. Why we move? because it articulates that which is sensed but unnameable, that which is known non-consciously, the felt, the spirit. Why run up a set of stairs and down the other side? I’d just have to show you.

Use is harder. Much harder. What we do with this newly acquired information remains to be seen. This is the real work. To take that which we now known to be, as we have breathed it into life from having moved it so, this is the work. That which requires practice. While I can not tell you what we will do, even while I may suggest upon meeting a use for our insights, I can say that we will work and that through that work we will arrive at a use for the thing. A use that we will have made together.

She…

Later:

What USE is the dance?

not VALUE… no, it has great value, even the materialists can attest to that.

But what USE? What is to be DONE with the dance?

In some ways, this presupposes that we have not USED other things to get to the dance, that the dance is some tool or just a fragment rather than an end in itself… but then I wonder, is it an end in itself? No, not entirely, or not in the way that sounds out the gate.

The dance, dance, is a form of communication. And communication is an activity involving at least two parties, involving a call and a response, a question and an answer, even if only to say, see, feel, and hear in response, I see you, I feel you. Contact.

I see dances everywhere. The buildings dance. A text dances. An image, another’s voice in conversation, a stranger’s body in the seat next to me, the wax and wane of my correspondent’s letters, my collaborator’s body in time and space… each of these things, often enough, offer up dances when I look upon them, and my own body is compelled to respond, to answer, to make USE of the dance by dancing another, even if just to rephrase the one that came before.

My collaborator tells me this is perhaps a problematic view—in the sense of, it leaves no need of an audience (and aren’t I in the business of making work for an audience?). But I tell him that I do need an audience, I very much need an audience. I TOO need a response. That is, the dance I make, it is also asking, it is also calling out, it is also communicating or trying to, with someone, something outside itself, and in the absence of a response, it falters, loses grip. In silence, I panic and fabricate an overblown response to fill the void. One overblown fabrication leads to my own paranoid response which in turn cycles on and on until I’ve forgotten how it started. I fully believe the fabrication (my own sincerity in responding to it makes it all the more hard to dismiss), and thus it then leaves me paralyzed.

At this point, both myself and the dance will have become useless. So there’s that. That if the dance is not used, then the dance forgets what it was there for/made for in the first place.

15 Dec 2011

This is not rehearsal.

But we are always rehearsing for unknown ends.

This is not a workshop or a class either.

But it is perhaps a laboratory, or a site that we are approaching with a spirit of experimentation, with a spirit of trial and error, even of play, and, insistently, of humor.

And by humor we mean the ability to laugh at ourselves and find joy in what we come upon even as we begin to take ourselves too seriously.

This particular site is of course an MFA studio at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. However, we do venture out beyond these walls, scouting for sites everywhere, backyard fences, abandoned piers, new construction, etc., experimenting readily and relentlessly in the world that surrounds us. We do this—”inside” and “outside”—often, more than often. We do this work with rigor.

But today we are inside,And welcome…Did we mention…This is not a rehearsal?

This is live improvisational dance.

We may climb high but we may also fall flat on our faces—quite literally in fact.We have skin in the game…Because of you.Our audience.You have raised the stakes.

And all that we ask is for you to remember:

This is not rehearsal, andAny and all response is greatly appreciated.

7 Dec 2011

So, too, a person need only step onto a stage to become purely frontal, to lose his backside and have it replaced with a backstage. It is a back room that he can never enter, but must circle endlessly.

from Behind This Curtain… I too have been thinking about the stage, the way it frames things in two dimensions, the way it restricts not only our view as audience but as performers too. I’ve been thinking about that portable stage we carry with us, always on demand—the smile. There is always something behind the smile. A backstage as such, where things other than that stretch of saccharin are left to wait, perhaps to be used as props or scenery at some later date… We—our selves—are left outside/offstage, neither back nor on nor front of house. Indeed, we are left circling the yard as the smile plays on without us.

25 Sep 2011

Who ever said anything about love?—ha!

About FALLING, yes, but not LOVE—I am in no place to make claim to that overreach of a word—that mirage, that Trojan horse, remember?

I LIKE YOU ALOT. I see how easily we slip into the seductive ways of language and often lose sight that we are writing in indelible ink. we do mark each other so… And while this is in No way a retraction, when I said, out of a frustrated and exhausted place in myself, that “I have fallen for you,” I meant I have fallen, quite literally you could think of it, off a chair pulled out from under me, off the tenuous beam at the pier, off the not-made-for-scaling walls of the school building, off the rickety ladder in my studio, off the neighbor’s fence outside… I have fallen in that OH FUCK kind of way, for(?) you, or is INTO you a better choice of preposition? What I was saying, last night, was “OH FUCK!” —oh fuck because what or where I am falling is shrouded in darkness. Oh fuck because who and what you/we are is too far away to see, and yet there’s no clue as to when we might get a better line of sight. OH FUCK, is all. I’ve fallen, is all. It’s so dark in here, is all. What’s new?

#text
#blue

1 Sep 2011

Absent Partners—Dearest……,

I want to be typing a letter to someone, and yet, instead, I’m just writing—writing to no one, to nowhere…

I’ve been suffering from a headache all day long. I suppose it started earlier, earlier than even the day, as I was woken up at—or was that me who woke—and then… too many stressful hours in waking before the sun rose, and a futile attempt to get back to sleep for two hours. Then. Up. Coffee. Bacon. Smoke. Shower. Tears. Exhaustion. Some slow dancing. Headache continues. Headed to work.

I made it to the train station before the rain started to really fall. Up the stairs, under the awning, and then it came, pitter patter, then pour. I caught the wind in my cardigan, and my cardigan pulled me up with the wind. A slow twitching, my arm, out out in. My right leg perched on the ball of my foot, ankle cocked, out out in. The wind pushing and pulling at my knee like a loosed gate, out out out in.

And on the train, I closed my eyes and tuned into my headphones, and tried to breathe. Then the woman beside me scoffed and tapped me on the knee, “I NEED to get off,” she said, as if I were holding her hostage intentionally. I turned my body aside, swinging my legs into the aisle, pulling my bags close to my body so she could have room to pass. Her annoyance was visible, but I swung back into the seat, and with a lift and swoop, sat myself where she had been, closer to the window. Now I could close my eyes, drown in the music, and soak in the train’s vibrations for a good thirty minutes before having to reconnect with the world.

The world. It was still there thirty minutes later. It was waiting, as I stepped off the train and chose to walk the short distance through a slow rain. I rathered the bit of wetness over unloading my bags and backpack to retrieve my umbrella and stay dry. My head was still hurting and I felt an urgency and hope toward the studio bringing some metaphorical sunshine my way. And it did, in part, keeping me there and working for the better part of the day. However, the paint fumes and construction dust pricked at my skull, and by 3:30pm, I could take it no longer. I’m sure it will be more tolerable on days when I’m not at the beck and call of the heightened senses of a migraine.

I found myself putting on my dark glasses when leaving the building, heading outside into overcast skies and a steady shower of rain. Dark glasses like those of the heroic lover, hiding “the turbulence of his passion: his desires, his distresses; in short, his excesses” (Barthes). I found my way into these dark glasses much as I found my way while in studio through the heroic dancing virtuosos Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The buddy heroes best usurped by the Beguine, the “white lady” who danced Fred back across the floor, facing him now but still not looking at him, her steps reflections of his, and then they were side by side again, swinging into a tap cadenza, their feet and the swirling skirt and the fake stars reflected in the polished floor, in the screens.

As I worked through their movements, slowing the video down, attempting to get the timing, the impossible subtleties of her steps, Eleanor swung into a turn, not looking at Fred, not having to, the turn perfectly matched to his, and they were side by side again, tapping in counterpoint, their hands almost touching. Fred tapped out a ripple, and Eleanor repeated it, and glanced sideways over her shoulder and smiled at him, a smile of awareness and complicity and utter joy. A blue smile, both nostalgic and impudent, utterly complicit in saying “I want you to know that I am hiding something from you… I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings” (Barthes). I want you to know that there’s so much more behind this glimmer of a smile you see now.

Dancing is much a metaphor for loving, dance for love, dancers, lovers, …and to dance a duet with ourselves, or to partner when no one else is around, this is the heroic dance, the dance in which we put ourselves in situations where we cannot control our own bodies for they are being driven by another who is absent, those missed catches, that empty embrace. Our dark glasses can only hide so much, but at least they say we are trying to hide it, even a bit of it, and our blue, the most expensive of colors, both prize and cost. Intimate prize, intimate cost. “Blue says: outrageously and absurdly: I am yours or you are mine! And no other… can judge us” (Berger). We are hero.

Shaded. Dancing. Blue. Hero.

#text
#blue

1 Sep 2011

It is hard to rid ourselves of those ghosts that have taken root in our body, in the surface of our skin, in our every breath somehow recalling that gasping intake of air that held us in a moment’s torment and holds us still in it’s bonds. Perhaps we need to shed this skin of ours, be raw and unprotected for the chance at not just a moment’s reprieve, but rather a lifetime of renewal. Perhaps we cough up our lungs as well, and fashion for ourselves a new set, out of materials on hand, known to us to be of comfort and support, and after the fashion of a —— (what is that Spanish word you often speak of?), unconventional and of greater complexity than practically necessary, yet there too so expertly addressing all the impracticalities of our lives that keep us from carrying on with hope and confidence.

20 Jul 2011

HIM:: we are not benign /let’s not pretend /let’s let it be so /let it pass through /this objectionable /substance /coughing, scratching, /spitting, clawing, retching /at least it’s happening /it is there /but let’s make it here /let’s not run away /not to beauty- and not to pretty places /let’s arrive there /so that when we /finally do, it wasn’t /in vain. it wasn’t easy /and the sweat becomes /vibrant

HER:: everyone’s ugliness is not the same /everyone/me /me /to pass through the warrior in oneself /to wretch out one’s own limbs /to stare down the monster you /are afraid of to slow dance there… /what becomes of us, embraced, /swooning in the throws /of despair /what are the wounds of that /cruelty- do we lick at /them or claw at the scab /perhaps we do one, then the /other, waltzing in time /to our own hypocrisy /lick at it. claw at it. /roar in exhaustion- /how can anything be ugly there?

21 Jun 2011

A Museum in My Body

I want to tell you something. This idea that I have been mulling over for the past few months. Maybe not mulling over so much as the idea has been mulling inside of me—in my every move finding a new way to seep out of an intellectual domain and into the skin, the flesh, the marrow of my being. I’m sounding melodramatic perhaps, but really, this is how it has happened.

The body—found.

Was it lost? Yes, perhaps. When I started this project, this practice, this quest (is it?). When I started. It was February 16th.

What was I starting? A six word novel, multiplied by an hour each day. An hour spent noticing, spent giving in, spent failing, faltering. An hour spent cultivating risk and signing the permission slip to be beyond what the world has made me. An hour spent experimenting with an unfixed identity and a temporary ethics: House unbuilt. Home broken. Evacuate. Escape.

On that Wednesday, February 16, 2011, I was in my studio advising with Ellen Rothenberg. We were discussing my inflexible schedule, surmising how I might actually find some time for making, much less eating, sleeping and breathing. In some ways, such a tight schedule gives me a rush, and every obligation was carefully selected in the hopes that it would infiltrate and bolster my practice. A practice that had stalled after a critique in December. At that point I was unsure of the next step, or of taking the wrong next step… so I stopped moving altogether, with the work and within the world in general.

After so many hours, weeks, nearly two months of turning my wheels deeper into the dirt (read: thinking fatalistically about whether I should really be pursuing “art” etc. etc.), I gave myself permission (with the help of some friends and advisors), to not have an answer, to not be productive, to not perform. I gave myself permission to do whatever it was that brought me some solace, some rest from my defeatist mind, some delight—even if that whatever was watching whole seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and the Tudor’s on Netflix or going to Vinyasa class as often as possible.

And as I was squeezing in the telling of this same conundrum to Ellen on my lunch break, it was then and there that she too gave me permission. She asked me, what amount of time could I find for myself each day, what was realistic? And how could I use that time to activate that permission, every day, and how could I document that time, what could stand as a record of it? She said that perhaps I could start there. Even more, that I should start today—that day.

And so, I did. I answered her questions: an hour, I think I could find an hour. And maybe I’d listen to music (because I never do that anymore for some reason), or I could paint (because I love to but had decided I wasn’t a painter so shouldn’t paint), or I could go to Dinkel’s Bakery and have a donut—actually EAT one (because I usually just go in and walk around smelling all the goodness and leave without tasting a thing). I could find images online, photograph, video, capture audio, or write in order to document it, I said. And maybe more things, but that I had permission to learn those things along the way, to add things, subtract things, exchange and so forth. This was about a living document, a process, a performance, a coming to know.

I felt good after the meeting, went back to teaching my class, and then set off to Dinkel’s at the end of the day on my way home. I wasn’t sure how to go about things. There was an awkwardness, a reluctance even, and yet I made myself take those steps, enter the bakery, choose a donut, and eat it—all of it, even though at first I told myself I would only eat half. I sat at a table in the little nook for doing such things, taking bite after bite, thinking how I didn’t want to spoil my dinner. And yet, I found I was less concerned about dinner and more ravenous for that delicious donut on the napkin in front of me. So, I drank my Dinkel’s coffee, ate my entire Dinkel’s donut, and sat for a while just floating on a high of sugar and fried goodness.

Dinkel’s was my start. Ellen helped me frame it, and I stepped up and made it. I was making something again, still too early to tell what, but I could feel the muscle back at work.

Waiting—manufactured.

What am I telling you?

That I’m working toward a theory? —no, a methodology maybe? That I’m building a museum in my body and that it is the museum of the future? Or that I am teaching my body how to see the residue of lived experience as museum-quality stuff?

Here’s what I want to say. That the museum of the future is not about technology changing. It is not about virtual realities and science fiction fantasies. What it’s about is people. People needing time to adjust and adapt, people needing time to learn how to harness the power of the things we create. When we create things, we cannot know all that they will become, or even all that they do in that moment. And so these inventions pull us along. We race to keep pace, try to catch up, but we only get ahead when we’ve stopped trying, stopped looking… when we trip and fall into a chasm that opens a new dimension of thinking. If we already knew how to get there, we’d be there already. The internet is one such invention, a relatively new kind of archive, and blogs are an intervention within that landscape. Blogs, as personal and social archives, possess that latency of the chase—the latency that lives in us, the user, the budding archivist.

What does the archivist really know about the archive?

but, and

not

either, or

An archive of human experience will necessarily create…

Inherent contradictions and overlaps of different systems of ordering things.

Archive = Order of acquisition,

Act of affirmation: list all the things that have gotten me to the point to have this problem.

Articulating my grappling as: “I’m not doing this right” or “I’m not doing enough.”

But no, I am doing a lot, that’s why I’m grappling.

Not a crisis of understanding, a crisis of grappling with—

A conversation with life and the outside world,

A bunch of conversation starters…

Don’t be afraid of your input.

The nature of embodiment,

The way I am treating a document,

The repeated action, how it is transforming itself…

The crutch… propping the figure up,

as broom… what is being cleaned and what is being kept… image of caretaker, preparing, rehearsal beginning, cleaner, choreography,

Prodding as well,

Serving and servitude…

Code of manners…

Is there a passiveness or is it control? — the work about blurring this, a tension in this…

What role do we play in our own predicament? Who is in control? When is being passive a form of control? Is this an answerable question? If not, why ask it? Is it worth asking even if we can’t answer it? Asking the questions that have no answers—there is a reason for this… It’s not about an answer. It’s about where the questioning leads us.

Options about how to enter…

(Sometimes artifacts are inhabited and sometimes they are not….)

Leave the site available for the viewer to inhabit…

Cultivating the space between what’s unconscious behavior and what’s conscious inhabiting.

Today, the landscape of viewers or users is yet to be normalized. The range of people now nearly compelled to interact online is generationally vast, with some born over iphone “FaceTime” calls and others born before the military-industrial complex ever took shape. This generation gap creates stutters in our progress toward usability and acceptance of the blog as a source of meaning. Users today are not quite ready to hand over the reigns of cultural authority to the blogosphere, and yet the intervention is subtly occurring. As the generational landscape shifts, what some of us might think of as on-line behavior is now becoming just behavior. A new default.

Now, how do we get from people, “users” even, to a museum?

Museums as we know them today are these physical buildings that display tangible objects of art and culture. They are houses for storing, maintaining and entertaining. They are sites for gathering meaning and making an experience out of the residue of human existence. At their core, museums are collections that engage our natural curiosity. Today’s museums, however institutional and public as we know them to be, are the ancestors of the much more personal, private collecting that resided in Renaissance Europe’s Wunderkammer, or Cabinets of Curiosity.

I see a striking similarity between those Wunderkammer and the contemporary collecting behavior that is situated online, especially in blogs. Despite our common knowledge of these digital archives, we must remember how young they really are. It took nearly 200 years for private curiosity cabinets to evolve into the true public museum. And while the blog as personal journal took off around 1994, it’s use as a site for gathering and sharing discoveries as such (images, ideas, advice, prophecies, quotes, rants, videos, sounds), didn’t pick up until the early 2000’s. Over the past five years, new micro-blogging platforms have enhanced the efficiency of blogging and through their own interfaces, imposed a certain mode of curation on the individual user.

But still, we are less than 20 years into the evolution of this new, digital site for collecting—compared to the 200 years Wunderkammer took to evolve to the Louvre. I imagine a similar refining of blogs won’t take 200 years, of course, as something about digital space—perhaps its immediacy, interaction, and allowance for imperfection and exposure—spurs activity and innovation at an exponential pace. Perhaps this something is one of the key differences between Wunderkammer and blogs—that elastic, social stratosphere that instantaneously connects and propels what is personal into what is public. In this, the blog seems to have landed on the end and the beginning of the museum evolution, and yet it’s everything between the here and now that I propose is yet to develop.

While blogs still exist in the realm of the “personal” collection, you can imagine our trajectory with them over the next 50 years. This trajectory will harnesses the paradox of personal and yet shared, where there are no either/or’s only and/but’s. As blogs develop, we will see the rise of the museum of excessive subjectivity—a subjectivity that guarantees a certain objectivity. Here, “the realist imagination [will be] refused in favor of an impossibly sincere record of the real: perceptions, moods, facts.”

Here, individuals will curate private curiosities in a way that inscribes them as true, as authorized, as the meaning we seek out of a shared existence.

So, what I’m interested in telling you about, showing you even, is how people will come to see these blogs differently come the year 2060. How users will no longer be accidental curators, but active ones, and the museum won’t need to be couched in the binary opposition of physical vs. digital space. Rather, what is lived—whether in ones and zeros or skin and bones—will be real, will be worth investing in, will be a site for shared knowledge.

“The fundamental emotion,” of the blog, to compare it to another form of collecting behavior (the Merz or collage work of Kurt Schwitters) is “one of sweet frustration, the yearning for the out-of-reach, for what fingertips can graze yet never grip—the touchable/unclutchable. In this sense, [these] non-fictive micronarratives may in fact be shrouded in the dust of a nostalgic illusionism, any pleasure they give us being a function of poetic suggestion rather than historical authenticity.”

Composing—residual

There is something lost in the way we contain ourselves day in and day out, adjusting to the world around us as is appropriate to do and indeed expected of us. I’ve been brought up to take this task on as an art—a skill to be perfected. Some call it composure. Others perhaps reserve. I would say that it’s a certain politeness of disposition.

A friend recently described my particular mode of containment in terms of my accent—taking the opportunity to extend the reach of my vocal intonation to a general manner of being. He called it “debutantation.”

|’debyoô tän tã sh en; ‘debye-|

noun

a type of southern accent that involves hyper-enunciated, very slow speaking—genteel, and not longing for breath. One might say long-winded, but that’s not quite right. Rather, long pauses are thought of as trinkets that should not be adorned in polite conversation.

…clever, and somewhat adoring in its mockery. And yet somewhere in all of that something is lost, and something more can be forgotten if we travel along that slippery slope of composure. In an effort to resist this, I turned my affinity for composing myself into a conversation with life and the outside world. A conversation so rich, so savory. A conversation moving beyond intellectual stimulation and nearing the likes of desire. A conversation that sustains moments so full of ideas and imagery. A conversation that shouts—”hold me close!”—this emergence of voice, this capacity to connect.

In a way, each post or HUB on ahouseunbuilt.com (my blog as museum experiment) is a conversation with composure. A House Unbuilt has become my way to compose both a performance and an archive that explore the role of my own voice in a world that keeps telling me an individual’s voice is not enough. Not enough to keep its attention, not enough to cultivate meaning, not enough be a primary source of knowledge. As the artist Meg Stuart says, “I use dance and performance work to understand what I need to understand,”

and I think it is the aftermath, the residue of all this performative composing, that becomes my truth.

More importantly, though, I am creating the artifact. I am placing it in a role where it represents something that is happening currently in our lives, rather than something out of the authorized version of the past. While it is not always a direct relation between the thing and what is happening, I am cultivating multiple connections that retain the tangible essence of specificity that abstraction lets escape. They are spaces, artifacts, encounters — and it is ok if they are temporal and even fleeting. Their significance is not that they are permanent but that they really are reflective of what is currently happening to a real human being in this world.

Everything is an artifact—FOUND, MANUFACTURED, RESIDUAL.

Found artifacts can take the shape of an unusual photo found by searching Google Images, Image Spark, or Spezify.com using words from my retelling of the encounter. For example, on HUB 14, I am archiving my experience at a Baptiste Vinyasa Yoga class, focusing in on the Dandayamana-Dhanurasana, Standing Bow Pulling Pose for my documentation. However, rather than post a photo of someone else doing the pose, or just log my textual thoughts, I executed an image search and came up with an old photograph of a man casting a net, mid air, off a small dinghy. Something about the still action in this image and the personal connection I have to water, boats and fisherman, made this image the right one to document my thought that I had “found my center here today, expanded, and sustained balance through release… more of this please.”

Manufactured artifacts are most often the photographs that I take while in the middle of an encounter, or directly following it. In HUB 63.4, I was fighting the cold and wind and wet as I stood on the platform waiting for a train that would never come. I began to look, at the blurring light from the steady mist. I began to shake and struggle to stay still in waiting. My hands starting to burn, I chose to put them to work. As I snapped iPhone photos with an unsteady hand, I seemed to be warming the space between these views in my eyes and this shudder in my skin. “All aglow, I choreographed the street-lit night.”

Residual artifacts are more rare at this point in the process. They result from either making or receiving something within the encounter, such as the video residue in HUBs 27, 45, 67.1 and 67.3. By pre-cursorily setting up a camera, I am just marking the time of these performance labs with my collaborators Maya and Ben. Somehow our bodies, our sounds, our emotions and ideas resonate in the frame and create a certain residue in the ones and zeros of the digital storage device. While I find myself recomposing this residue, reframing and reperforming their movement, it stands alone as the most generative raw material in the archive.

The blog, as on-line venue, is like a tool box that I pull from. I translate fragments into image and movement with other collaborators in my lab, and this work of course returns to the screen. And from there…? on a wall? a stage? in a storefront? a book? where else? The screen does not preclude a multiplicity of venues. Instead, it generates the potential for them, and the magnetic pull, the addictive feedback loop of an audience with access and an accessible audience, cultivates new worlds and new ways of knowing ourselves.

This is why I’m doing this.

To build the audience for a museum of the future that is already present, latent within us.

10 May 2011

What do you want to see?

Color.People in embrace.Flags blowing.Marching bands marching.A light at the end of the tunnel,Or maybe the tunnel with no walls.Children, wide-eyed, laughing.My own children—one day.

I want to not see.To discover the depth of other senses in blindness.Hear my own body creaking.My mind—smell the fissures and synapses firing.Taste without preconception.Feel with full permission.

I want to see the world,The oceans…To dive below and know what it feels to be completely out of my element.Perhaps that will force some perspective on this feeling of othernessThat follows me everywhere.Perhaps not.

I want to see where this is going.Why I am here.I want to be ok with what I see.To trust what I see.

This is what motivates me to be alive—to keep living, breathing, interacting, making work. You could call them simple pleasures, the small stuff… But how big can it become in our world at times, and how we let it hinder us instead of propel us at times. Call it sentimental, or nostalgic even, but the tension I’m interested in creating in my work is one of positive against positive, not negative against negative. It’s like tree pose… Opposite foot against opposite thigh—each pushing into the other’s strength, stability, a lifting up and grounding down, simultaneously.

We use necessary, simultaneous forces to create the flexible tension of a tree that can both survive and revel in a dance with the wind. This is the space I want my viewer to enter with me, to tap into within themselves. I want to get them below the brain, in that space where vulnerability begins, traveling in a circuit between throat and gut, and from there radiating out to the limbs. I work through the body because I find my access to this tension there first, and however close or far we are from our own bodies, we share in that experience.

#text

8 Apr 2011

Where night meets morning, and morning meets waking. Coffee. No rush. Alone… Where movement, repeated becomes a view, and listening to heat creates information without words or writing. Of course, a loose edit of the video composition, but a good start. (tag poetry)

16 Mar 2011

Somewhere in the space of yesterday, I woke up to my own emptiness in hand… empty by my own hand. Is it that I cannot remember or that I am afraid to. Is it that it seems more interesting if I can’t, or that I just don’t like what I do remember, so I say there’s nothing there at all…? Do you remember how it felt to be plucked out of the earth… was it fairly unremarkable or were you so caught up in that state of becoming that your consciousness was absent. Sorry. You cannot conjure it up. We cannot knead it together. I cannot feel —is it warm? You didn’t see that.

13 Dec 2010