THURSDAY AFTERNOON May 25th Part B
photos: DOMIPORTA by Saradis RauchPART B: Chat with Sarada Rauch
It is raining and cold. The wide streets of Edmonton
(parenthesized by shiny/reflective modern buildings)
are full of disenfranchized youth, the homeless/working poor,
& lost aboriginal people. Today's newspaper pix are of
PM Harper grinning through his explanations
of yesterday's civillian casualties. I have a long talk with my personal
trainer/fitness leader counterpart at Grant MacEwan Wellness
Centre comparing Alberta and BC medicare. My mood is grey.
Zoe Kreye is down with the stomach flu; Phillipe and
Anna are not feeling so good. Flurry of pharmacy trips
& hand washing. Artists pitch in to clean the kitchen.
CLEANING ALWAYS MAKES ME FEEL BETTER.
Laura & Norm shop for large meat pieces for
Clemente Padin's performance tomorrow. I feel very
blogged but feel like I am wrestling with a bone,
pursuing a scent, not sure of my question but just
knowing I want to know. I feel frustrated with the
panel discussions (forced conversations) and happier
with my one-on-one chats with each artist although
I feel unable to communicate what was illuminated to me
(you-just-HAD-to-BE-there-ville) through our chats.
It would be better to have Spock's Vulcan mind probe?
I slow down and spend time chatting with SARADA RAUCH.
SARADA is an LA/NY artist who comes to Visualeyez after living
1 yr. in Berlin and doing a 4 month art-residencey in Leipzig.
She self-describes herself as "transient" because she is and has
been living without a home/place or being a visitor/houseguest
for quite some time. She works in painting, sculpture,
video & performance; she is also a successful artisan
and-making jewellery as well as designing/constructing
high-end home decor from recycled natural fabrics.
I asked her what drew her to performance
and about earlier performance work. She said she enjoyed
"the tendered concept" of performance art.
A well-know performance work by SARADA was her devising
a way to get herself & a friend on a US-network reality-TV show
in the Jerry Springer mode with an entirely fabricated drama
of Love Lost Lesbians as a way to deconstruct/criticize
this entertainment's impact on our culture.
She has also performed in galleries & outdoor locations
(alone & with others) doing aktions with sets/costumes/props:
-- stewardess/rockstar gushing red glitter blood from her
heart while singing into a microphone
-- blonde-jock-strapped or naked women pushing
giant astro turf ball up a huge staircase but the astro turf
ball falls again/again and is pushed again by them a la Sisyphus
while also creating performative-sculptures like her vacuum cleaner
tricycle that both spews dirt & vacuums
and her sugar-water pissing machine that choreographs ant colonies.
I laugh when she tells me that she (somehow) landed
at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and it had been a difficult experience.
Fringe fests are mostly theatre and audience's readings are
informed and drenched by rigid theatre conventions.
I can see producers reading Sarada's work as approaching theatre
and thinking she might "fit" but I also know how difficult/uncomfortable
it is to present work contextualized by theatre. Aaaaarrrrgh.
There are many slippery slopes and blurry boundaries
between performance art and other multi-inter-disciplines
but it is the Motivation and Essential Drive of the art work
that signales the audience/viewer to "know"
if what they are viewing is performance art
or a traditional discipline experimenting in pushing its own boundaries.
posted by admin at 2:30 PM
3 Comments:
What's your specific frustration with the panel discussions, Margaret?
I would say that a lot of my own difficulty with panels / artist talks in general is what feels like "hovering around" the thing that speaker wants to say, rather than directly saying it. Getting lost in a maze of semantics. Is this just the difficulty of speaking about the ethereal? And yet, artists are used to articulating their work through words (artist statements, grant apps).
It can also feel to me that people say their piece, but there is less actual dialogue -- and very little challenging of one another when we don't understand / don't agree. I don't know if this is out of a desire to make space for one another when there is often little space made for art.
It could have to do with some aspects of the personal being very visible in many of the performance works (not just this year). Do high levels of assumed "personal" content (not that content isn't fictionalized at all in performance, as in written "autobiography") mean that we are reluctant to say: I'm not sure this worked. Is this an outdated question?
Or, are we just trying to be open to differnt methods of narrative?
The festival also functions in compressed time, where the artists/volunteers/staff: meet, perform work, troubleshoot obstacles, socialize, develop relationships in a 10 day period. Each year, I feel like I see tight bonds forming between many different people -- but do these bonds help develop artists' practices, or not?
It might also just be that everyone is tired from an intense festival.
This frustration of mine is not solely about art at all -- in work, social life, etc. I often feel like I'd like more wrestling with ideas, more attempts to create meaning and concrete understanding.
Not everyone needs this, I know. But it comes back to what I've said before about my own dissatisfaction with everything ending in the personal, rather than moving outward.
I told Todd, Laura, & Norm last night this may all have to do with my own feelings of rootlessness: I'm thinking about buying a place to live in Edmonton (no perm. job, but a well-pd temp job), which leads to worry about $ and ability to sustain a purchase that big. There are other jobs open to me beyond Edmonton, which means starting over in new city, new community, etc. This might all have to do with some panic about where my own home is.
A rambling comment!
thanks for the space,
Allison
Hallo I absolutely adore your site. You have beautiful graphics I have ever seen.
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Looks nice! Awesome content. Good job guys.
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