T1 Zine by Jeso O’Neill and Tara O’Con

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Team One: Kristin Hatleberg on Bradlee Hicks

Paraphrased Reconstruction of What I Said While Proposing Bradlee’s Work:?

I got very excited when I got the email about this project and knew within a few seconds who I wanted to present because it seemed like perfect timing. So there’s this guy, he’s currently in grad school for sculpture at Yale, and he works very intuitively so there is a real flow throughout his body of work. Bradlee’s collaborated with two different guys, Will and Aaron, for probably about six years. So he invents what I think of as really imaginative realities that are genuinely "other" that what we usually have in front of us. They take on lives of their own, follow their own logics, and open up space—both by making new visual realities for your eyes to see and by making new sequences of events for your mind to process. The work that gets made has evolved into this kind of collage of narrative video art and sculpturally costumed beings. Most of the ones I’ve seen are these creatures, he calls them carebears; they’re abstract, furry creatures. So he makes these normal, often day-to-day narratives that have these absurdities and unrealities inserted into the stream of the normal elements, the carebears being an example of that. He makes a complete environment and his audience is inside it for however long it is and soaks up the environment and what happens inside of it through these narratives he creates.
Questions I Answered:
Someone: If he does installation-based work, how will he handle duration?
Me: He has things that are shorter, he has things that are longer, I’m sure he and Aaron have a lot of things in their heads that he might try to construct just for this. I think he would look at the parameters that we give him and choose what will work best given the constraints. But I can’t really guess how he will handle duration. He may choose to do a performance-based work instead.
Chase: You mentioned something about timing and this being a perfect moment or something…what were you skipping over?
Me: That’s my own thoughts, should I go into that now?
Chase: I’d be interested.
Me: Okay—this is just me, what I’m thinking about. I can’t articulate all this succinctly, but I see a lack in our societal structure that the field of dance/movement has the ability to fill in and balance. There’s a real division occurring within the human consciousness regarding what it means to be human nowadays. On one side, we’re animals, which means that we have to figure out how to survive within the environment that contains us. Dance performance can be an isolation of that aspect of life because that’s what we do up on the stage: We do what we need to do to carry out the dance in the environment that we are in, and that reality is what facilitates the audience’s ability to respond. And our society has advanced enough technologically that we are now living within a certain environment that is partly of our own construct, partly not. As far as day-to-day reality goes, we are living very much within an environment that is of our own construct. And so, as a society, the balance between animal and other inside of humanity is in flux. There’s this intersection of technology and animal reality that is in crisis to a certain extent. Now, that’s my own thing, my own belief. But it makes me very interested in looking at Bradlee’s work, because what I see in his work is that intersection of technology and animal reality, and an embodiment of the crisis in flux. I see it in the way he juxtaposes day-to-day normality and complete absurdity, in how he merges other realities that are of his own making with the reality we all accept as the world we live in. So. That’s what I meant by perfect timing.

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Team One: Chase Granoff on Ishmael Houston-Jones

Team One / 1

T1

A curatorial event. An event / presentation in a circle with food and drink.

Lively discussion and presentations. --------------> leading to a show. 3 artists.

What is the role of the curator / curatorial in the presentation of dance / performance / ?

Is the role / activity of the curator typically hidden? What is the agenda?

I proposed Ishmael Houston-Jones.

What was my agenda?

Most simply to create a situation that would bring Ishmael out of his self declared retirement.

I have seen Ishmael perform in work of others. Once I saw him perform some of his writings while playing a porn.

I want to see Ishmael perform his movement. I have heard about / read about it / seen images from it. But I want to see the real thing. The live event. I figured it would take a special event / frame to be able to do this. I had a thought that Team One might be such an event. I did not come to propose Ishmael by myself. Earlier in the day (Sunday) I had not decided if I was going to attend the one and only curatorial meeting of Team One. I was undecided as I did not know who to propose. I was having brunch with my girlfriend (luciana achugar) at a diner by our house. She suggested Ishmael. I loved the idea. I have not spoken to Ishmael since he agreed to be a part of Team One. As the one who proposed him (the curator?) I feel that we (him and I) should speak. I feel that I should explain why / why I proposed him...

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

http://ishmaelhj.com/

Some stuff like I really like from his site / material I used in my proposal:

PIVOTAL PERFORMANCE: Toss up:
• 1."Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders" my favorite collaboration with Fred Holland, I got to ride a horse, meet a real cowboy in the Bronx and share half the Bessie Award check with Fred.
• 2. "THEM" an intense piece. My first collaboration with Dennis Cooper and Chris Cochrane. Got to dance with a dead goat.
• 3. "f/i/s/s/i/o/n/i/n/g" a solo that really synthesized my art and my politics at the time, plus pictures of me naked made the papers.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
FAVORITE PERFORMING EXPERIENCE: The prologue to "Knife/Tape/Rope" with Jonathan Walker. I was blind folded, tied up, and we danced to Kate Bush on the wrong speed.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
MOST TERRIFYING PERFORMING EXPERIENCE: OK, sticking my head inside that goat carcass in "THEM" was no picnic.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
FAVORITE PROP: Tie:
• The recurring cinder block.
OR
• Carrying my Mom over my shoulder in "Relatives."

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
EARLY 80’S BRUSHES WITH FUTURE FAME:
• 1. Worked in a SoHo restaurant, FOOD, alongside Joie Lee (Spike’s sister) and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth). Customers of note -- Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, David Byrne, Meryl Streep, Caroline Kennedy.
• 2. Had a substance fueled night in an Amsterdam hotel with a "graffiti" artist who later had a posthumous one man show at the Whitney.
• 3. Shared an apartment on the Lower East Side with the actor Steve Buscemi when he made his first film, "Parting Glances."
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

I really like this http://ishmaelhj.com/_wsn/page13.html. It is about Ishmael’s time in Nicaragua.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curator

Curator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Curator is Latin and means guardian or overseer.

A curator of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., archive, gallery, library, museum or garden) is a content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections and, together with a publications specialist, their associated collections catalogs. The object of a curator’s concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be inter alia artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections.

Curator responsibilities

In smaller organizations, a curator may have sole responsibility for the acquisition and care of objects. The curator will make decisions regarding what objects to collect, oversee their care and documentation, conduct research based on the collection, and share that research with the public and scholarly community through exhibitions and publications. In very small volunteer-based museums, such as local historical societies, a curator may be the only paid staff member.

In larger institutions, the curator’s primary function is as a subject specialist, with the expectation that he or she will conduct original research on objects and guide the organization in its collecting. Such institutions can have multiple curators, each assigned to a specific collecting area (e.g. Curator of Ancient Art, Curator of Prints and Drawings, etc.) and often operating under the direction of a head curator. In such organizations, the physical care of the collection may be overseen by museum collections managers or museum conservators, and documentation and administrative matters (such as insurance and loans) are handled by a museum registrar.

[edit]

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

the curator is not a taste-maker. I think that the role of a curator is that of being a frame-maker / contextualizer. A curator bears the responsibility of how to present / show / communicate. In an ideal situation the curator would not only present the work of an artist but would create a situation around the formal presentation composed of talks, presentations, workshops, writings etc. that would help the audience / spectators better understand and engage with the work. By curating an artist you are creating / engaging in a relationship with artist and audience. you are an intermediary. The curator has to understand the responsibility that their role bears. I believe that the curator should / often does have an agenda. Curating allows the opportunity to bring attention / visibility to the things that they think are hidden, missing or under exposed. To me this is what is most exciting----> a curator can create exposure and context. a curator can create excitement (different then being a taste-maker). Curating is an inherently political act. But what isn’t?

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

hello / team one
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Chase Granoff to Ishmael, ishmaelhj

show details 1:06 PM (0 minutes ago)


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Hi Ishmael.

Sorry I haven’t written to you sooner. I am so excited that you agreed to be a part of Team One! I had a feeling you would agree to do it. But I also had my doubts.

Do you know what you are going to do?

You know I would love to see some of your work from the 80s. I think my first experience of seeing you perform was watching you in an audience across from me practicing sign language. Remember when Jon, Beth, Eleanor and I drove down to ADF a couple of years ago. That was a fun couple of days. We went to see that horrible French hip hop company, some of us took your class and you cooked risotto for us. Eleanor got mad at me because I did not offer to help to clean up and wash dishes.

I don’t remember how we met though? Maybe through Arturo?

I just wanted to put it out there that since I am the one that proposed you I feel a certain responsibility. Maybe responsibility is not the best word. What I mean is that I want to make myself available to talk / discuss. Of course I understand if you just want to do your thing though and that you don’t need to talk about it. But if you do I am here.

I can’t wait to see what you do. I am excited to see everyone perform. I think it is going to be an awesome show!

Best regards.

Chase.

ps. I think this email will be part of this thing I have to write for the show.

--
Chase Granoff
699 Flushing Ave 3
Brooklyn NY 11206
917.912.4524.
.. chasemanhattan1
b0red0m.wordpress.com

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Team One: Sarah Paulson on Lee Walton

LEE WALTON
www.leewalton.com

"Often regarded as an Experientialist, Walton’s work takes many forms- from drawings on paper, game/system based structures, video, web-based performances, public projects, theatrical orchestrations and more." (taken from website)

Through this curatorial process, we are exploring the "What is dance?" question at the same time as the "What does it mean to curate?" question. Since I’m coming more from the visual art side of things, I’m a bit more familiar (or overly-familiar!) with the "What is art?" question, so the dance question is interesting for me to talk about (even though it’s virtually the same dialogue..but with a different community, which brings about many differences). The curation question overlaps both (if there is a "both") communities and is an integral part of the presentation and organization of most art programs/exhibitions/performances/etc. Dance is obviously art, and through this project and many others that AUNTS (and some other dance-oriented groups and individuals) has brought to the table, the dance world and visual art world are moving towards one another in the way that they should.

This (the Team One experience) is a good opportunity to actually invite those who consider themselves part of the visual art community or those who have been placed within the visual art community to join or sample the dance community. As dance should and is working towards obtaining a voice within the art community (i.e. the Performa dialogue, etc), it is then important to bring visual art (especially those artists who are dealing with the body) into this community. There needs to be a trade. That being said, I am certainly not suggesting that we invite artists whose work might not be appropriate for this forum. Instead, I am suggesting that we say, "Hey! I know you’re a visual artist, but perhaps your work can also be considered dance. The dance community has looked at your work and values what you’re doing not only as visual art, but also as a type of dance or choreography."

Lee Walton is already involved with a similar back-and-forth give-and-take trade between art/performance and life, two stages or forums. At the same time, though I haven’t found any evidence of Walton labeling his work as "dance", I would like to suggest that he is indeed choreographing work on both himself and others. He performs a "solo" in much of his work; however, the public (or audience) is necessary for the work to exist. These solos are documented in finished videos.

As participants in Team One, we are functioning in a very similar way that the PUBLIC (as a medium or component) functions in Walton’s work. We are objects (with opinions, feelings, and life--living breathing "objects") or the medium of Team One by AUNTS. The artists, both Lee Walton and AUNTS, have chosen to work with time-based media that produce a time-based product. Both are dependent upon the spontaneous actions and decisions of their respective media. Walton and AUNTS create an environment in which self-selected humans can influence their work. Both moderate what is a self-generating artwork. Both control the finished product through the editing/filming/presentation process.

Lee Walton
Medium = audience/passersby/public ? participants

AUNTS
Medium= Team One volunteers ? participants

EXAMPLES OF LEE WALTON’S CHOREOGRAPHIC AND IMPROVISED ARTWORK:

Getting a Feel For the Place, 2007
"Walton visits Belfast, Ireland and gets a good feel of the city." (description from website)
http://www.leewalton.com/performances/getting_a_feel_for_the_place/index.html

Many other works similar to this public performance are scattered throughout Walton’s website.

Pulling Strings, 2007
"An Invitational Exhibition by the Students of the Digital Technology and Cultural Club of Washington State University, Tri-Cities"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKJt1upJP8k


Just Walk Away, 2007 (Portland, Oregon)
http://www.leewalton.com/performances/just_walk_away/index.html


Press Record, 2006
"A Series of Video Collaborations with the Art Students of Middlesex High School, New Jersey.
A one-day visiting artist project organized by Kelly Clark, Instructor of Art at Middlesex High School and supported by a Dodge Foundation Grant."
Moving Desks, 2007
http://www.leewalton.com/projects/press_record/moving_desks.html

(*beautiful sound composition…example of Walton’s work not in outdoor/public environment)

Gym Class, 2007
http://www.leewalton.com/projects/press_record/gym_class.html


In Remote Instructions (2004-ongoing), Lee Walton also asks for participants to carry out a process. He is curating his own body of work through the use of volunteers. We have already been curated to curate. Most likely, the participants in Walton’s Remote Instructions encounter a type of transformation and are faced with various decision-making opportunities in their efforts to create a finished artwork (obviously conceived of by Walton). As participants in Team One, we are in a similar position. The experience of Walton’s collaborators and Team One will both be presented in the art institution environment. Both comment on the creation of presented work, whether it is in the museum environment or an alternative art space. The description of Remote Instructions from the artist’s website is as follows:

Remote Instructions
2004—ongoing
Remote Instructions is a web-central project that utilizes both the communication capabilities of the web and spectatorship of its users. From a central hub, Walton is collaborating with strangers globally via the web and orchestrating a series of video performances that will take place in real cities, neighborhoods, villages and towns around the world.
If you are interested in collaborating or know particular people around the world that may want to participate, please contact the artist immediately.
Video collaborators will be paid for their services. Professionalism and adequate equipment is necessary.
The video work created will be exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2008). All participating performers and videographers will be credited.
A Project By Lee Walton, funded by Rhizome.org of New York.

Union Square: Giving It Up For Life
September 15, 2006—life

From an interview with Joseph del Pesco (April 2007) Walton talks about his project where he gave up Union Square Park for life. He states the following which is very much in line with what we are doing here today and how as artists/dancers we are able to move around certain boundaries and make these boundaries work for us…How do we make sacrifices within the system? The problem of Artist-As-Curator arises (I imagine in most cases). We cannot submit our own work—that which we are most familiar. We must watch from afar, in a certain way, and cast judgments on someone else’s playground…Maybe from as far as DSW Shoe Store? Here it is:

…This dissolving of the boundaries between art and life is understandably necessary. However, to be honest, art was separate from my life until I was in my twenties. I wasn’t even thinking about things in the context of art – I was just living. ?I have found it more useful or meaningful to integrate art into my life rather than separate it. For example, by giving myself a life-imposed ban on Union Square Park, I have set myself up for new and alternative experiences. Not better or more memorable experiences, just new ones.?This artwork has affecting my life already in various ways. Here are just a few:

1. I learned about Lee Lazanos "Dropout Piece".?

2. I have spent time under Union Square Park researching the subway station at the park. I now know all the possible exits where I will surface outside the parks boundaries. This took a little time, and still I am careful and cautious each time I exit.?

3. I have been spending more time at Madison Square Park. I actually have grown fond of it and am beginning to feel attached.
?
4. Recently, a group of my students at Parsons the New School performed their final project at Union Square Park. Unable to attend, I watched the performance from a window across the street at Barnes and Nobles. I then held a critique via cell phone.?

5. I met a man that gives private tours of Harlem and the Bronx.

?6. I found myself looking at my own personal map of Manhattan and wondering if I should cut Union Square Park out with an exacto knife. I decided against it. (Mostly because I would then have the dilemma of figuring out what to do with the little cut-out park.)

?7. I have become very comfortable with DSW Shoe Store across the street from the park. From these windows you can watch all the activities in the park.?

8. When I make plans to meet a friend in the city, we always spend extra time struggling to agree on a meeting place besides Union Square.?

9. I was once strolling my daughter and was forced by unpredictable construction circumstances to walk right to the edge of Union Square Park. Unable to get on the sidewalk, I walked along the street and put the stroller on the sidewalk next to me.?

10. I have a better idea of what the last few minutes of my life might feel like.?Anyway, this could go on. Of course, the affects are constant- at this point, most of them being very subtle and personal. I have definitely regained respect for the park. Often times, when I catch myself admiring it from afar. If I let my imagination go- I will get a little pain in my stomach, similar to seeing a beautiful woman and knowing that my time has past and she forever untouchable. The park is now part of my history. My memory.

His process is directly related to our process here. Had this experience not been heading in the direction of bringing the private to the public (in that this will be documented as an artwork and improvisational composition and exchange), I might not propose this artist. However, in challenging ourselves and having been invited (to volunteer via public broadcasting methods) by AUNTS to challenge the limits of dance (based on what "AUNTS is…") and the curatorial process in general, I think it is also important to challenge the selected person/group/work. If we choose something that is not challenged by the boundaries and possibilities of this environment, there will be a sort of moat or boundary between the selection process and the finished event, which is the very thing that we are seeking to stitch together.

Though I have never seen Walton’s work in person, I have followed his work via the internet for a number of years. I think it would be interesting to see how he would work within a stage environment or possibly what he would send in his place. He focuses on the broadcasting experience, the game of telephone that occurs through translation and transmittance, and how performance can function in different environments. Though the theater/stage is a traditional environment for dancers, this is a non-traditional stage. We are looking for something that lends itself to a non-traditional environment, but in playing the role of curators, we must also challenge the artist/work. There is always a responsibility to create history, immortality, and change.

To me it is important to curate a series of works that lends itself to the experience of Team One. As mechanisms for decisions, within the framework of Team One, and as volunteers, it is our responsibility as performers/actors/dancers/medium to uphold the artistic intention. We have been curated to curate about curation. At the same time, we must keep in mind that this curation scenario is a unique one.

Last thing/example with a description below parallels this unique experience and artwork rather nicely:
http://www.leewalton.com/projects/you_make_the_call/rockland.html

Golf Drawing
2007
(Curator TIm Laun at Rockland Center for the Arts, NY.)
In Lee Walton’s Bryan Park Drawings, the artist?collaborates with curators Tim Laun and Lynn Stein to?produce a site specific floor drawing determined by?rounds of golf Walton plays in North Carolina. Many of?Walton’s work involves long distance collaborations—?often conducted over the internet with people Walton?has never met—yielding unpredictable results. Typically,?Walton establishes rules for his collaborators to?interpret and work within, but the end result is?unknown. Walton is interested in surrendering control?of the final piece—the completion of the work is?ultimately determined by the other participants. Bryan?Park Drawings is a project developed specifically for the?Rockland Center For the Arts, and will occur throughout?the duration of this exhibition.

SPECIAL SECTION

*Special and semi-unrelated-related note: Check out Lee Walton’s drawings…especially the early ones. They’re quite nice:
http://www.leewalton.com/drawings/index.html

This one is really beautiful:
http://www.leewalton.com/drawings/2000/66_golf_balls.html

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Team One: Sarah Paulson: YOU HAVE BEEN CURATED TO CURATE ABOUT CURATION

YOU HAVE BEEN CURATED TO CURATE ABOUT CURATION:
THIS IS JUST A SNIPPET. SNIP IT.

You are already in this space. You have been self-selected, but not entirely independently elected, to take part in an improvisation of presentation methods, hierarchy creation, and all that follows the artistic process of curation. Let’s ask the question: What does it mean to curate? Are we asking the previously curated (artists) or the currently curated (artwork)? In either scenario, we are asking ourselves to decide our role in the experience—as artists and as administrators.

What does it mean to give your ten pets two bowls of food and ask them to ask the following:
Who determines which bowl belongs to whom?
Who gets to decide who gets to eat first?
Who has the loudest bark? Does it matter?
Who has been in this position before?
Who deserves it, and who gets two desserts?
What will this say about those who decide?

As part of the curatorial panel, we can look at the TEAM ONE process in one of two ways:
A) We are part of a piece that requires that we play the part of curators. Therefore, we will make decisions based on our role only as curators. The finished series of work is the goal. We must present a successful evening and series of work to be presented on April 17-19, 2008.

B) We are part of a piece that requires that we play the part of curators while keeping in mind that our role is part of an art piece that is a self-generating curatorial process which was initially curated by AUNTS. Our role as part of a process-oriented work is to maintain the viewpoint that we are Part One (after the initial curatorial call by AUNTS) in a series of multiple pieces that co-exist to form one multi-media artwork/dialogue/time-based installation to be transmitted on April 17-19, 2008.

The question arises regarding whether, as self-selected curators, we should respect the request put out by AUNTS and carry out our duties according to the instructions. In this case, we must imagine that as a group we emerged naturally and in direct relation to the finished and projected event. This is an isolated experience. We must limit our historical experience and focus on historical knowledge. Past and future are to fold in on one another to create a present that projects a successful future. These are the boundaries of option A.

[I side with Option B.]
AUNTS is watching from above and stepping in to direct traffic and drivers’ concerns. TEAM ONE by AUNTS creates a crowded roadway on an elevated bridge above the water ballet that the drivers are instructed to create, coach, and critique. Every move in the three-tiered spectacle is under surveillance. This is a unique experience that is to be documented from above. The work of AUNTS is dance dialogue through movement. The medium of AUNTS is the breathing body (as a body of beings/life/animals or the body of the individual). We are the ants of AUNTS in the TEAM ONE scenario. We are building a farm for communication, dialogue, and weight-carrying based on the subject of curation and our relationship as a body of volunteers exchanging the information of a collaborative work. We are carrying our own weight, TEAM ONE’s weight, and the weight of the final live show. We are carrying the wait—the space between the outside and the office where news is delivered and emotions are exchanged. We are using the waiting room as a platform for performance. We’re doing it in the performance space. We’re doing the Waiting and Exchanging dance. We’re doing the WE dance. The devices in the weight room are in human form. We’re exercising here—for the public, for ourselves, and for our performers. AUNTS is carrying more than the weight of its own body through a self-generating art medium of movement—the dialogue of the living.

We are able to successfully carryout the instructions of part one of TEAM ONE while also understanding ourselves as art objects functioning as curators. For most or all of us, we must add to this conglomeration of roles and responsibilities the burden (or advantage) of the ARTIST-AS-CURATOR scenario. As ARTIST-AS-CURATOR I have bypassed the very thing that is governing my accessibility. Yet, as ARTIST-AS-CURATOR AS-ART-OBJECT, I am vulnerable to a system of the system of art.

As an artist, I am accustomed to creating rules and marking the floor with tape to tell my viewers how far they can come to the art and artmaking/performance. [I will tell you where to touch me. I will tell you how close you can come to that part. I will allow my art piece to be exposed to you. I will control your viewing of my private work(ings). I will control the snipping/cropping/stopping.] As an artist I am vulnerable to the decisions and whims of the art institution and curator. As an artist I am playing with power. As an artist I like to do it. As artists we are doing it now.

TEAM ONE is a statement about a statement. This is a statement sandwiched between the statement between the statement about the statement. TEAM ONE is a statement about curation and a statement about the artist. TEAM ONE is a statement about who/what is on the team and the constitution of the team.

The framing of the childhood role model sums it up best (text from 2002):?

MR. RODGERS AS PERVERT THROUGH HIS PICTURE-PICTURE:?
picture-picture = compartment-compartment?

This is the nesting of the outside into the inside—the inside swallowing the outside and becoming the inside. Mr. Rodgers serves as the voyeur of the Land of Make Believe—his Land of Make Believe in a land that already exists and functions without him…There is this taking through copying/following, rather than a cutting or removing; so, as long as the Land of Make Believe is conscious of its own functionality, its well-being is never sacrificed. ??What we have is a dilemma with compartmentalization when the private is brought into the public and back to the private through a select audience. It is the sieve of censorship—the monitoring screen of exposure. Mr. Rodgers seems to have defined it best in his memory square.

TEAM ONE consists of time-based media that produce a time-based process. As participants, we are the medium of TEAM ONE by AUNTS. There is an interdependency between the producer and the participants. There is an interdependency between the participants and the product. There is a facing of those who do not bear the same face; there is a facing of those who all have the same face. Differentiation becomes impossible; starting and stopping are indiscernible; outside and inside reverse and fold up upon one another.

The support system between these three Ps points to the process of art-making with an awareness of self, audience, and institution. TEAM ONE has become a statement on the teamwork of opposing teams wearing uniforms of uniform color. Which team members face the others? Which team members frame the others? What is the role of the coach in a fluid experience of teamwork, complete with the team mentality of locating opposition, consistency, the goal, and options for maneuvering.

We have been curated to curate about curation. This is the dialogue dance; the last section will moderate the translation. Three performances will capture our movement and spit it back out in a different direction—at a different circle formation. They are the future, and they are the snippet of the exchange of words in part one of TEAM ONE. As a team of recorded, but otherwise faceless, volunteer curators who have come forth in the critical, yet celebratory, manner of our roundtable [roundfloor] discussion, we are creating a history of the moment. We are building a family tree of curators, and in the end, our three selected performers/works will mark the curatorial team of one historical moment. A combination of these moments will silently exchange the weight of their experience and mark their places in the history of performance, if their volunteering bodies are accepted. They have been curated to curate about curation.

[I side with Option B.]

-Sarah H. Paulson

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Team One: Thoughts by Curator Anne Zuerner

I had never curated a performance before being a part of Team One. I still feel that I have not curated a show. This, to me, is the most important part of the Team One process. No matter how much each of us had thought about the implications of curating and the power of our choices, none of us had any singular power. Our collective aesthetic made the final decision. Team One created a show that could not have been put together by any one mind. Team One was about thinking deeply about artists we love. It was about considering the power of the curator, but in the end, relinquishing all power to the group. The beauty of Team One was in shaping a final product we ultimately could not shape

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Team One: Ben Pryor on Glenn Marla

Glenn and I met at Marymount Manhattan College and produced a number of performance events together in our time there. Since then Glenn has been focusing on performance work, finding a great outlet in the queer nightlife scene. Lately Glenn has been interested in working through a dance frame, incorporating past training as a tap dancer. I proposed Glenn because I thought this would be an interesting introduction to the dance world. Not too bad that he didn’t get programmed as my proposal was pretty weak and I don’t even know if he would have been interested in trying to get something together so quickly.....

Glenn Marla

The Portland Phoneix calls Glenn Marla’s work, "performance art that pushes the envelope without pushing the audience away." The New York Times calls Glenn "an obese transvestite in tights." Glenn Marla is New York City’s hottest fat go-go boy and a beauty pageant queen (Miss L.E.S. 2006). Glenn Marla graduated from Marymount Manhattan College with a B.A. in Performance and Directing. Marla’s early original work was featured in festivals at the Culture Project, Theater for the New City, HERE Arts Center, and traveled to NYC public schools with a grant from Liberty Partnership Program. This year you may have seen Glenn on stage in American Body Language Experiement at Dixon Place or in Julie Atlas Muz’s, Divine Comedy of an Exquisite Corpse at P.S. 122. As a solo artist Marla has performed at Joe’s Pub, Ars Nova, Dixon Place, Galapagos Art Space, and 3rd Ward. Glenn has done everything from Shakespeare at churches in Harlem to late night shows at the Cock

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Biba Bell Writing: Sedimentation 3

Biba Bell
Sedimentation 3
21 December 2007

The Effects of Presence

In his book The Politics of Aesthetics Jacques Rancière critiques the role of aesthetics and art in the political functions of society. For Rancière art participates in aesthetic regimes that are both geared by and constitute what he terms the distribution of the sensible, which refers to:

…the implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made, or done.

The political undertones of acts taken for granted are both reflective and generative of an outside terrain (often resting in a transcendental interiority of the "genius" artist) of the general socio-economic order. Interrogated and exposed through Rancière's investigation, the distribution of the sensible instates an organization of experience, while at the same time provides a mode of accounting for and maintaining apparent autonomy in the field of art and art-making. Rancière says,

The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or the subversion they can claim credit for rest on the same foundation.

This process of distribution occurs on multiple fronts, from the institutional, policy-making, organizational, and evaluating angles defining culture as an industry to modes of reception, intervention, circulation and dissemination of art and art-making.

A prominent position in the networks of relations between art, politics and the socio-economic sphere is that of the critic who plays an important role of liaison between the arenas of art and industry, defining hi and lo art, translating mediums and thus producing the sensible as effects of particular aesthetic and phenomenological distributions. The political predilection of the critic becomes a decisive force, shaping arts and their disciplinary distinctions, directing movement within the arts, and potentially bestowing a metaphysical dimension on the form, artist, or experience. The critic is educator, epiphanic narrator, activist, specialist, mediator, and esteems him/herself in a role of general authority when it comes to the case of art. The critic maneuvers between superficially contradictory domains in order to provide the foresight of negotiation. The theatricality of this critic as actor becomes all the more prominent in moments when art takes on a controversial edge, when suddenly there appears to be something at stake in potentially shifting or multifarious definitions of a form.

Such an instance arose in 1967 when art critic Michael Fried published his seminal essay "Art and Objecthood" in Artforum magazine. Proposing a insurmountable clash between modern art and what he terms literalist art, not only is Fried's anxiety as to the autonomy and discretion of disciplines brought to the forefront, but so are the fundamentals as to his particular stake in the distributions of the sensible defining object and subject, experience and product, spatial and temporal frames. Fried eventually alleges the rift a war between art and theater, proposing that theatricality has infiltrated the realm of modern art through the guise of literalist art, commonly referred to as minimalism. For Fried this war is not only "a matter of program and ideology but of experience, conviction, sensibility." The essay overtly resists the infringement of a supposedly impure and transgressive form, persuading its eradication from the privileged domain of constituted art work, and his critical method performs its utmost agency as he places boundaries, qualifications, convictions, and terminology on the movement he wishes to quarantine. Central to Fried's argument is a comparison between what he calls presence (literalist art) and presentness (modern art and sculpture), which emerges as aesthetic effects and eventually becomes the crucial dividing factor between authentic and inauthentic art, attenuating and denoting the possibilities of grace.

Fried defines a literalist artwork in terms of a number of aesthetic dimensions: unitary/wholeness of form (lacking separate parts or inner compositional dynamics), repetition of forms, gestalt, obdurate materials, hollowness (insinuating an interiority of the object), singularity of shape, anthropomorphic qualities, an "inert" look of nonart, and importantly an apparent predilection for its existence as object. An artwork's presence in this context entails an object's concurrence with its own identity as object—it's objecthood. Inextricable to the situation of objecthood in literalist art is the presence of the beholder. The act of witnessing heralds an event, a situation of interaction, which concurs the presence of the work. Presence is evidenced through a processual length of time, duration as Fried puts it, and thus becomes a temporal framing that routes the work out of the visual and towards the theatrical. The strength or gestalt of the work evidences in a distancing effects of presence. "It is, one might say, precisely this distancing that makes the beholder a subject and the piece in question …an object […] Things that are literalist works of art must somehow confront the beholder—they must, one might almost say, be placed not just in his space but in his way." Literalist artwork creates an impasse with the beholder and forcefully and assertively grasps its role as object, its objecthood, which is an interpellating effect of the presence of the beholder who is simultaneously cast as counterpart, as subject.

The temporal dimension of presence is a crucial in delineating literalist art from modern art. While literalist art maintains presence through durational time, inexhaustible, indeterminate and characteristically (for Fried) ominous, modern art exudes presentness. Its righteously complete and autonomous form is instantaneous, perpetually creating itself, and "at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest." Modern art completely absorbs the gaze and attention of the viewer, fantastically obliterating lingering temporalities, "one's view of the sculpture is […] eclipsed by the sculpture itself," can be access in a single moment, and is always already complete. Presentness is what gives art conviction as opposed to interest, what gives it its authority, which is maintained and contained by the artwork itself. It does not deviate or stray from its material artwork product.
On the other hand, presence insists a particular situation of exchange and reception and, while Fried simply condemns its "theatricality," at stake is the transfer of product from the domain of the material to one of the experiential. Fried insists on the adversity of literalist art and relates its effects to the function of stage presence:

It is a function […] of the special complicity that that work extorts from the beholder. Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder take it into account, that he take it seriously—and when the fulfillment of that demand consists simply in being aware of the work and, so to speak, in acting accordingly […] the experience of being distanced by the work in question seems crucial: the beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended—and unexacting—relation as subject to the impassive object on the wall of floor."

Literalist artwork acquires a force of subjection which it asserts on the beholder, forcing them into an open-ended and indeterminate temporal frame within which Fried's anxiety comes to the forefront. Disclosing a particular affinity between literalist and surrealist art, Fried relates this temporal dimension of reception to experiences of "expectation, dread, anxiety, presentiment, memory, nostalgia, stasis." The theatrical experience undoes the autonomy of both the art field and work which is no longer self-contained or complete unto itself. Conversely, modern art's success lies in a defeat or suspension of its objecthood, which for Fried imperatively means that "it defeat and suspend theater." But why is theatricality attributed solely to literalist art? Why is not the modern art agenda of representing itself as other than object, which coincidentally distinguishes it art as such, this suspension and defeat of its own objecthood not a theatrical transformation, guise, or gesture of sorts?

Perhaps Fried's critique would be better articulated as an event of literalist art, where its constitutive reception and relation to the beholder inherently leaves the work somewhat indefinite and undefinable. The comparison of temporalities that Fried makes strikes a chord in relation to the temporal description of Gilles Deleuze's concept of the event. Just as the present measures the temporal realization of the event—that is, its incarnation in the depth of acting bodies and its incorporation in a state of affairs—the event in turn, in its impassibility and impenetrability, has no present. It rather retreats and advances in two directions at once, being the perpetual object of a double question: What is going to happen? What has just happened? The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about the happen' never something which is happening.

The deferral of present in Deleuze's event, supporting an impassibility and impenetrability, is what alarms Fried as he calls theatricality "an endlessness not just of objecthood but of time […] simultaneously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective." By motivating Fried's analysis of literalist art into the mode of Deleuze's event his war against theater translates from a discussion of the autonomy of a discipline to a metaphysical predicament of the (in)adequacy of representation and signification. Fried's position moves from the political to a question of ethics (or perhaps the ethics of the question).

Presence endures as an effect of the event of literalist art, a process which Fried considers a self-reflexive claim to objecthood which fixes the beholder in his/her subjecthood. But is this overt objecthood that literalist art appears to project, and the theatricality Fried immediately obsesses over, an opportunity to question the very differentiations between said object and subject, liveliness and value, signification and intangibility? The force of the event would then participate in another type of presence, one that relates to Martin Heidegger's discussion of the essent in An Introduction to Metaphysics. Here the act of questioning provides an encounter wherein a willful force draws out that which exists, the essent, and brings its being into visibility. For Heidegger philosophy is this act of questioning, "to inquire into the extraordinary," and it is in this questioning that the essent emergences and has presence. This is also a moment when "this essent […] is held out to the possibility of nonbeing […] the essent no longer that which happens to be present; it begins to waver and oscillate." The question prescribes a leap, which is simultaneously the arrival of a ground upon which this oscillating essent stands. Heidegger continues, "The ground that is now asked after is the ground of the decision for the essent over against nothingness, or more precisely, the ground for the oscillation of the essent, which sustains and unbinds us, half being, half not being, which is also why we can belong entirely to no thing, not even ourselves." Standing upon this complicated ground the essent is, it stands in its being, yet remains inexhaustible and continuously resists the possibility of nonbeing. Furthermore, Heidegger indicates that all definitions of being are "grounded in" and "held together by" the experience of being denoted by the Greek word parousia whose German corresponding term is An-wesen, translated to presence. Presence in this light becomes the manifestation of a philosophical question of existence, Heidegger's primary question of philosophy: "Why are there essents rather than nothing?"

Returning to Fried's essay, literalist art potentially insinuates a reaction to hidden, underlying indeterminacies of art's autonomy and composure. Horizons extend in an open temporality and spatial recession that the literalist art project procures, inviting questions, blurring boundaries, ideologies, and discretions between object/subject. Here the essent/existence/being of the work lies in a wavering, oscillating, questioning experience, where Fried's own sense of self, subjectivity and existence is brought into the process. It is also here that art brushes up/pushes against life, and a particular distribution of the sensible is put to the test.

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Audrey Kindred

Audrey Kindred performance at AUNTS HHCC
The Event Center
November 29, 2007
written by Jessie Kindred




On her first stage in years, she starts in the center,
triangulating two large eyes. She stands like a tree
under a veil to the sky, surrounded by fallen leaves.
She picks them up one by one, bending over, reaching
down. She raises them. We watch them fall, two at a
time as she lets go. One clings, stuck, and falls alone.
She wonders out loud where have all the dances gone,
and remembers when dancers didn't talk. The tree
becomes a mind, having seen and put behind. Each
dance falls as a leaf, like days from a calendar.
She fetches her memories of dances she's seen and
done. It becomes a metadance, where she is dancing
the bodies of others as a dialogue with dances of the
past, with memory, while sustaining a dialogue with the
audience—inviting them to cymbalize and symbolize—
passing out instruments and inviting speech. Finding
itself through recounting a history, her voice is the
biography of a witness, reconstructing a reality made by
those who made dances before, even (lastly) her.
There's a wish that reality were that short lived, always
in the present. It's a claim of performances as reality—
the way they were. It's a memorial to the way they
used to be when dance became four legged, bodies to
the ground.



Remember when touching was innocent and
awkward. When people danced naked? When dancers
didn't talk? When the belly was in dialogue with the floor
—bellies dancing with gravity. Remember when people
danced naked? Remember when handstands were new?
Women were getting strong, lifting themselves and each
other. Remember them standing on their hands, turning
dance upside down. Was it being 20 or was that the first
time it happened, she asks. The need for a third to
distinguish biography from history and see them in
unison unconflated. Remember when dance was
unrecorded thoughts in motion. I loved their mistakes,
she said, holding an earth of air as big as her arms
could reach.



She climbs into the eyes, wearing them. She asks Do
you remember? She says You remember, you do, don't
you remember. It is a call to the others in the space, for
shared memory, an appeal to intersubjectivity, the view
of witnesses as historians, keepers of the only record.
The naked women with hamburgers came first, you
remember. DanceNoise, someone said. There was the
man who walked up the center, taking the stage like a
priest. A dancer interested only in the space, blocking it
out with squared reaches. Maybe that was the priest
too. Remember the stacked plates, yes, crashing to the
floor, yes. I scratched at the cymbal in my reach.
Remember dances with nature, the birds in dance
before burlesque, the feathers and shapes, she says
walking like a pigeon. Leaves she had been dropping
from her head were memories of dances and then
tokens of the dances. I can't remember which I said yes
to, and upon which I received a leaf—large and drying.
We all got something. Close your eyes, she says, and
remember. We watched, putting down our instruments.
Not sure. She made someone come inside. Come inside
she said suddenly, opening the door wide, the cold rush
of early winter into a too warm room. The internal
consistency of dialogue as a model seemed
spontaneous, reactive. Dana! She yelled stopping a
second entrant from going downstairs. You remember,
don't you. The answer was in the question. The
improvisation was personal, the memory in the
description, but Dana didn't. You remember, she told
her. She was there, she told us.
The dancer splashing her hands in water like a fountain,
then harder and faster, till the floor got wet. So did I,
she said. It seemed sexual, humorous, planned,
inevitable, but it wasn't. I took the more innocent read:
Self as floor like the eyes on the floor, the body looking
up from underneath, a foundation. Self like floor getting
wet with the water splashed from the bucket in
performance. The silent (now wet) audience.
She pulled the eyes off her body, rolling them into a
ball. I rolled down a hill with a stone, it was so heavy,
she said. Holding the eyes like a pregnancy or an other
in the cavity of the curling body. Biography of the
witness, all rolle up, as the other, the partner, in a
dance with gravity.
Asking us to lie on the floor like the eyes laid down in
her performance on the floor looking up, she asked us
to close our eyes, a bid she'd already made many times
as the eyes herself, moving around, up from the floor
with us in a circle around her. Close your eyes and
remember.
I invite you, and we did. Well, we tried, reluctantly. She
bid for memories, invited to join, even having asked us
already to imagine all of hers. I could think of little else,
nor wanted to.It was hard to know how to find the
memory. Others were quicker to respond. Dancing
naked in the rain. I remember seeing my mother
dancing alone in her kitchen. That was my favorite. I
remember women dancing with tvs I said, in shorthand,
jumping in my mind between Anne Iobst and Kathy
Weiss. With Yvonne Meier still there in my head. Too
many memories in a single reference, but everything
else seemed vague or hers.

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Ana Keilson's The Populous Project

This piece is an experiment.
It is called: think of an image, send it to someone, follow the instructions.
Here are some images we are working with:

The house smelled like spring and the house was empty, the smell was empty house and the leaves of the chestnut trees covered everything we did upstairs the smell is the only place that I want to get back to. forever ephemeral patterns. tiles and firework geometries. layered explosions interwoven and dis/connecting behind the eyes. sulfur smokey veil, greens and reds and fluorescent residue charm. This is one of my most vivid memories from childhood: I am little and I wake up in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. I walk across my bedroom towards the window: the wood is cold beneath my feet, it is dark, it is late, or very very early. The window-pane rattles from the wind; I push my face up to the glass, my breath makes shapes on it. Outside the snow is falling, and it looks orange in the glow of the street lamps along the sidewalk. Playing "taxi" by holding on to the back of a bicycle seat on my rollerskates when I was 10. A group of children playing duck duck goose in bryant park at lunch today. Running around and around and around in a circle singing Old MacDonald until I fell down when I was 2. A little girl in a summer dress making monkey noises while her mom laughed. A young man running as fast as he can down the subway platform. I walked hunched into a headwind in winter holding hands with my 6 year old daughter. Simultaneously we flung our hands in the air and let the wind propel us backwards. Odd also was the near-total absence of the loneliness that comes with that kind of solitude; I guess I came here enough when I was a kid that it feels kind of like a second home. Ok. Here is what I was thinking of. When I was a kid I lost a tooth while snorkeling. It floated down into a pile of tiny white pebbles that all looked exactly like teeth. My brother dove down to the bottom and picked up every pebble and examined it, and eventually found my tooth. All the while, I kept trying to get down there myself, but blowing the air out of my snorkel and diving straight down was really hard for me since I was so little-- I have this memory of flinging my arms around trying to get to the bottom and just floating upward again. we were eating cantaloupe in the hot sun on our break from playing tag.


Here are the instructions for our project at the Judson gym on June 1.

1. Please read through all of the instructions before starting.

2. Several weeks ago, I sent out an email asking my friends and family—most of whom are not dancers—to send me a few sentences describing moments or images from memory, from books or movies, from childhood, from a recent interaction or experience, anything really. The only request I made was that the scenes be short and relatively straightforward.

3. Shortly after you receive these instructions, each of you will receive another email containing one or two of these sentences. The sentences will be written by the same person and will be given to you anonymously.

4. Imagine the person who wrote this sentence. Decide for yourself several characteristics about this person: with the limited amount of information the sentence discloses, try to establish who they are, what is important to them, why they may have chosen to send this image or memory in particular. More importantly, try to figure out how they see and describe the world around them.

5. Give your person a name, a job, a history. Decide what they like, what they dislike, what they are indifferent to.

6. Develop a series of questions you would ask this person if you were to meet.

7. Once you have received and read your sentence, wait at least a day or two before following any of the instructions listed below. Use this time to complete steps 4, 5 and 6.

8. Either standing or sitting down, imagine you are this person and that you are being interviewed about your sentence. You can mouth words silently and use facial expressions to answer questions, but you are not allowed to use gestures or movements. Remember to leave pauses when you are being asked a question. The interview lasts fifteen minutes.

9. Standing up and staying in one place, develop a series of small arm gestures that describes your person and/or your sentence/scene. Rather than create a set phrase, try repeating an improvisation several times and see if any particular movements, or movement qualities, "stick." You do not need to remember these movements exactly; however, try to remember the tone and feel of your improv. This lasts fifteen minutes.

10. Imagining that you are this person, walk around a room, or rooms, in your apartment. Using the information from your interview, improvisation, and steps 4 through 6, interact with objects in the room. Go through drawers and cabinets, flip through books, look at pictures on a wall, pick up objects and inspect them. Make and drink a cup of coffee or tea. This lasts fifteen minutes.

11. Now that you are familiar with the objects around you—and still imagining you are this person—return to each of the objects in the order in which you inspected them. Imagine you are being interviewed for a television show about where you live and what you own. As you return to each object, describe it in detail to the camera. Feel free to go on tangents, and make sure to tell anecdotes associated with any of the objects.

12. You must do each step at least once. You can repeat any step, if you like.

13. You are not allowed to ask me, or anyone involved in the project, questions.

14. There is no incorrect way to do this. You are doing this perfectly.

15. After you have finished reading through these instructions, follow this step first:
sit down and write a sentence describing a memory, scene, or image. It can be anything that comes to mind. Paste it into an email and send it to me: anakeilson@gmail.com.

by Molly Brush, Marie-Charlotte Chevalier, Elena Demyanenko, Sharon Estacio, Ana Isabel Keilson, Emily Moore, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Molly Poerstel, Eva Schmidt, Paul Singh, and Devika Wickremesinghe.
Thank you.

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