A Few Months at Watermill with Raymond Roussel
At the Watermill Center, Southampton, Long Island, 2009.
On Saturday June 20, 2009, an immensely talented group of friends worked with me to present an event at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center, based on our residency spanning several months. The work traced connections between Robert Wilson’s secluded artistic laboratory and the labyrinthine writing of Raymond Roussel, a posthumously celebrated French writer of process-generated literature. The Ariadne’s thread that linked Roussel and Wilson passed among disparate agents, including a photo of their mutual admirer, Louis Aragon, and the theatrical reverence that both gentlemen hold for portraiture, extremely durational process and the ritual totems of non-modern cultures.
The collaboration was not without its tensions and ambivalences. To say the least, it was challenging to work within Robert Wilson's highly controlled modernist estate (even the trees are forced to grow at 90-degree angles). Surrounded as we were by the evidence of Wilson's primitivist collecting habits, our group had to negotiate fault lines between creativity and oppression, white and black, colonizer and colonized—a historical dialectic that is part of any engagement with the avant-garde and its inheritors.
The residency culminated with a day-long summer solstice performance event in which guests had the opportunity to discover the diverse ways that we had superimposed our surplus and sentimental objections onto the Wilsonian-Rousselian parallel universe.
This included a reenactment of Roussel’s daily 20 course meal with a stuffed bunny rabbit; a chance to don costumes, play games and sing songs produced in collaboration with students from the Hayground School and the Girl Scout Brownies of Suffolk County; a yarn-guided tour of Rousselian replicas and reanimated museum objects; and a screening of "Grey Water"—an inspired soap opera parody of the whole residency made by Colin (Emcee C.M.) and Huong.
My collaborators for this project included Elizabeth Adams, Amanda Boekelheide, Ryan Dohoney, Emcee C.M., Master of None, Huong Ngo, Julia Rich and Chris Piuma.
Peripheral Art Fair for Artstar
At the Scope Art Fair, Miami Beach December 7-10, 2007.
This was a project that I made while on the television series Artstar. For our final project, a group show during ArtBasel Miami, I created a “fake" art fair on the periphery of the “real” one and encouraged a group of local kids to take back their neighborhood from the commercial art world. I printed the performance as a conceptual score left in the Artstar booth, while we went outside to make our art fair with the kids.
We used a nearby basketball court behind the Art Fair tents, and started the project with some basic materials (chalk) to re-define the b-ball courts as numerous galleries filled with art and words. Pretty soon, a dozen or so kids started helping; first by re-copying whatever I wrote, and then eventually by creating their own art.
The Swan Catchers
At the Chocolate Factory, April 24-26, 2008.
This was a collaborative performance project that I began in the fall of 2007 with Composer Aaron Siegel. He invited me to direct the live and visual components that would accompany the musical score and libretto. The performances evolved over three nights and took place at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City.
Collaborators included Siegel, the FLUX Quartet, Ryan Dohoney, Kate Soper, Emcee CM, Jeff Gray and Huong Ngo.
Lesser Habits and Petty Wares
A concert performance at Links Hall, Chicago. April 7, 2007 and the SAIC performance space, May 2007.
This performance was an extension of my MFA thesis. It was a concert performance expanded from an event that we did at Links Hall. The performers included Ryan Dohoney, Mabel Kwan, Nick Anaya, Hannah McKeown and Kara Kane.
Minimal at Liminal
A concert of American minimal music, performed at Liminal Space, February 2003.
Minimal at Liminal was the first in a variety of performances by Liminal that surveyed the ensemble’s roots in avant-garde music, art and theater. This performance was directed and conducted by John Berendzen. I participated in the performance and in the design of the show.
For this particular production, American Minimal Music primarily referred to the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who all began to focus in the early 1960s on the audible transformation of small musical phrases through repetition and the execution of processes determined by the composer.
Scenes from Liminal's 2003 concert of American Minimal Music performed in Portland, Oregon. Clips include Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Pendulum Music.
FluxConcert PDX
A concert of old and new Flux, presented at Liminal Space, March 2003.
Liminal organized Fluxconcert PDX, the first Fluxus event of its kind in Portland, Oregon. The evening consisted of several short performances executed by Portland artists from classic Fluxus scores and several entirely new Fluxus scores conceived for the event.
Still Act for the Portland Armory
Performed at Portland Center Stage’s 2007 JAW West Festival, Portland, Oregon.
For a few years, I created arrangements of people and things held in stasis for long durations, and called them still acts. The term comes from anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis who uses it to describe social events that alter normal modes of perception and attention. The effect is similar to the theatrical tradition of tableaux vivants, which were used for religious and ceremonial processions prior to the nineteenth century, and as a form of trompe l’oeil entertainment up to the present day.
Over time, the still act is not entirely still. Imperceptible movement occurs, muscles shake, and the spectacle changes due to forces that the performers cannot control. The more the actors attempt to suspend life, the more things work to break the stasis.
For the Portland Armory still act, I invited 20 individuals and slow-playing musicians to compose a line of stillness that started at a table of theatrical props and costumes, snaked through the lobby, and ended along the sidewalk outside the theater.
Still Act for Performance Works Northwest
Part of the Annual Richard Foreman Festival, August 17-18, 2007.
For this annual summer event in Portland, I created a still act on the lawn of the performance venue. There, a sprinkler clicked and a man in a lawn chair slept with a can of beer in his hand. A mother in a party dress held a birthday cake in her outstretched arms. And the beer was spilling. And men hummed on a porch and candles burned on the cake. And a woman reclined on a blanket with balloons in her hand. And a girl in a wading pool cradled a houseplant.
And the sprinkler soaked the man who was sleeping. And lawn torches blazed. And the cake slipped from the mother’s hands and an overturned television showed a woman tied to a chair. And she was shouting. And a blindfolded man held a pin on a tail near a picture of a donkey on a tree trunk. And someone passing on the sidewalk held a melting ice cream cone. And a rogue figure was caught in the headlights, clutching a suitcase.
Photos by Scott Jackson.
Still Act for Looptopia at the Chicago Cultural Center
Part of the City of Chicago's Looptopia Festival, May 11, 2007.
As part of the events surrounding Chicago’s first all-night Looptopia event, I worked with a large group of 30 performers and musicians to produce a performance in two parts. One part of the performance took place in a gallery within the Chicago Cultural Center building and involved an installation with musicians and a strange variety of domestic objects and actions. The second part was a long-duration still act with 25 performers arranged in poses drawn from art historical references. They appeared sprawled out across the east and west building entrance steps.
Both parts took place simultaneously. During the performance, the streets of downtown Chicago, as well as the Cultural Center building, flooded with thousands of people. Eventually, the crowds became so dense, that the police closed off the streets around the Cultural Center, and locked the doors of the building to prevent more people from entering. But we stood still throughout. Photos by John W. Sisson.
Still Act for Goat Island
Performed at the SAIC performance space, 2007.
One of the last still acts that I created in Chicago was inspired by the situation comedies of Lucille Ball and a still life painting by Frans Snyders in the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. I created the performance with David Cook and Ryan Tacata.
Still Acts for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Performed at various sites around Chicago between 2006 and 2007.
I created a variety of these living pictures while working on my MFA at SAIC. Some were performed in the studio. Others were performed outside. One infamous performance occurred in sub-zero temperatures on a busy street where the event was interrupted by a limousine, police cars, and a passing fire truck. It was definitely the most painful, and probably the best, of all the performances.
Remaking The Making of Americans
A generative exhibit at Liminal Space, Portland, Oregon, 2012.
"The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything." - Gertrude Stein
This is an installation of ink drawings and image projections that Ben Purdy and I created at Liminal Presents Gertrude Stein. The installation consisted of a small room containing twelve ink prints, four of which housed projection mapped output from a dynamic simulation. The simulation was an autonomous system based on the characters and interpersonal connections from the novel.
Our project was a visual response to Gertrude Stein's novel, The Making of Americans, and her attempt to write a history of every American. Here's what we said about it in the program:
"In the living we are doing there are things that make us and things we make, something like bubbles. And the space between holds the possibility of unexpectedly anything. So making this has been a tracing of unending families of foam and residue. And it is something like the making of the Making of Americans."
Press
Above: A video clip of the installation. Ben selected hundreds of portrait photographs to form a changing collage of people, which were projected into the ink prints around the room.
Below: A demo of Ben’s simulation program, which was tuned to unfold over the course of three hours, starting in a very simple configuration and ending up in a massive swarm of character instances. Initially only a single instance of each character exists, over time, interactions within the system yield new instances, and old instances die and accumulate.
Painting & Drawing
These are images from various projects and studies for performances. I work mostly with inks, metal point, graphite, gouache and some oil. I’m especially fond of monotypes and other methods that generate one-off transformations through repetition and reproduction.
