THURSDAY EVENING May 25th Part C

photos: Sarada Rauch in DOMIPORTA

Part C: DOMIPORTA

Sarada Rauch spent 4 or 5 days in the smaller gallery
making a grey & pink reversable wall-to-wall "carpet".
We stood on it until Sarada folded/re-folded
her heavy floor covering. We moved from one side
of the gallery to the other as she lifted and folded
(like mom sweeping/vacuuming under your chair)
and we responded to her folding like a slow Red Rover game
until there was bare floorspace to sit/stand upon.
The big folds slowly became smaller folds
and we began to see an origami snail shell
then she crawled into it (the shell was on her back)
and then she left the gallery.

Her simple aktion was clean, sculptural, & aktion-based.
It was "loaded" with meaning(s): the created object, her gestures.
The performance was more like a haiku poem aktion
than a differently-laboured work that comes from
endurance/duration/relational performance.
DOMIPORTA perfectly suited a gallery space
and reflected Sarada's recent transient (no-home) history.

Remembering Sarada describing the displacement/loneliness
she experienced during the alone-time she experienced
as an AUSLAENDER (outsider) in Germany,
I feel both she and Suzanne Caines
are performing from a similar "place" in time.
They both share a performative impulse
originating from an investigation of the domestic without a home
including the territories of immigration/marginalization.

What does home mean if you leave it/lose it/escape it?
Is home where-you-hang-your-hat?
Is it a refuge?
Is it a prison?

Over whiskey with Todd Janes in my hotel room at Dayz Inn,
I vent about the pressure of my domestic life:
MOTHER of 18 yr old girl graduating from High School to university;
DAUGHTER of 82 yr old mother with Alzheimer's;
common-law PARTNER to my best friend of 20+ years;
Squished/squashed to serve/give/support/fix
and be the bottom-line.

I long to get away from the domestic
(like Vida's performance COMPLICATED ESCAPE).
I'd like to navigate and even some day come to terms
with the burden of family history(ies) and politics
(like Naufus's peformance MARIACHI HISTRIONICS)

I want the invisibility of domestic (usually women's) work
to be validated (like Tanya Lukin-Linklater's
performance WOMAN AND WATER) both in our real/daily
(read "economic") world and in the Art World.
Yes, Gorilla Grrrlz, still needed, thanks!

I crave my pressured/fragmented life to have intimacy
and connection with people/community as I feel similarly
desired/needed in the performances DOMNIPORTA and RELOCATION.

VISUALEYEZ is an oasis for me.
An escape from the domestic as we
ironically
pursue what is domestic.

Respectfully yours,
La Dragu (the scribe)

ps: I've just caught up with your posted comments.
Thanks to everyone whose written in!
Write more!
Luv,
md xoxoxoox

THURSDAY AFTERNOON May 25th Part B

photos: DOMIPORTA by Saradis Rauch

PART 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.

THURSDAY MORNING May 25th Part A

photo: Suzanne Caines in RELOCATION

Part A: Chat with Suzanne Caines

RELOCATION is a very touching work that,
in fact, cannot be touched.
This is why discussing RELOCATION easily seguays
into the role of documentation (esp. video)
in performance art.

When I watched the performance, my automatic response
was that I was disturbed the general public didn't know
they were being videotaped.
But almost immediately this thought was re-informed by
the mall architecture and the pervasive amount of surveillance
in all malls and in most urban space.
If Big Corporations can watch and listen to us talking
in front of Birk's Jewellery and La Senza Lingerie,
then why not Suzanne or you or me?

Watching Suzanne in the mall is to see a professional-looking
survey worker engage with the general public.
In reality, she is asking them questions that may or may not
engage them in a discussion about home
along with their feelings/values around the idea of home/community.
It is stunning how many people are eager to enter a moment of
intimacy with Suzanne while surrounded by mall-people traffic
and cues for commerce. Individuals often tell her deeply touching stories.
Her performance testifies to our need for social contact
and connection.

Suzanne made her first performance THE BLUE HAMMER
in a hardware store in London, England, in response to living
there for a year in relative isolation with only shopkeepers to chat with.
It is her experience and understanding of being the lonely outsider
that resonates in BLUE HAMMER (asking hardware store shoppers
to test 3 hammers in exchange for a blue plastic one she made herself)
and in MEATLOAF EXCHANGE (giving homemade Canadian meatloaf
slices to rural French seniors wwhile traveling with a local vendor).

Suzanne's work is both relational and intervention performance.
In RELOCATION she is moving farther from object-making and references
to commerce. She is plunging deeply into human exchange.
The exchange with the public is touching to hear/watch
on video documentation but is even more powerful to hear
these stories re-told by Suzanne.
The power of this work lies inside the artist herself.