Whenever I am in early stages of making work, I fall back into old habits. Read, write, and watch a lot. Ignore text messages but answer important emails. Clear the physical and mental space of distraction. Enter into a communion with an inner or higher self. Live in service of the work. Live through the work. Let the work live through you. Exercise. Buy expensive materials that will possibly never be touched again. Talk to yourself. Write a play. Turn the attention inward. Say “I don’t know how to make work,” or “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” or both.
I am not someone for whom the making of performance comes easy. Despite any wishes I may have for my process to be clear-cut and simple, it never exists or arrives as such. I usually do not enter into creation or practice with a particular idea, but instead with a particular desire. The desire is often simple enough: the desire to make a phrase that makes me sweat, the desire to make something that demonstrates skill, the desire… etc. Said desire is not the same as an idea. The origins of desire are obscure, and often–if I appropriately consider the realm of the psychoanalytic–symptomatic, which is to say they are manifestations of the repressed. Working from a place of desire is an opportunity to refuse the currency of ideas. I work from ideas too, but I do not let them function as the textural or logical fabric of performance. Ideas are in a perpetual state of transit, and cannot be adequately captured. Ideas engage a certain choice-making, and most artists will fail to make the difficult choice. Desires do not ask the subject, or in this instance the artist, to make a choice. Desire is not a matter of if, but a matter of when. Desire, in its sheer absence, is strictly present, and will always be satisfied.
I notice that the ruling ideology of the contemporary artistic landscape is devoid of desire, but flooded with ideas. Few artists actually care about the answers to the questions that they write in their grants. This is not because the answer is an exemplary form of structural models of oppression to which the contemporary artist is refusing, but because in our current era-which has produced the necessary circumstances for producing and presenting institutions to thrive–the artist is entered into the competitive arena of ideas. Subsequently, language and creativity are neutered, and the artist becomes a mere representation of that which it wishes to address. Illegibility, complexity, and difficulty are irrelevant to the institution’s bitch. An idea which has received funding, has already succeeding.
Then, there is the conflation of image with idea. Jeffrey tells me that most artists are actually just curators. Rather than working to interrogate or examine a deeper relationship to self and the world, they rely on the efficacy of pre- and re- produced images packaged neatly in online content. Unable to language their desires, these curators propose a certain pastiche of images whose proximity to one another is a metonym for substance and meaning. This is not an insult to the role of the actual curator, who in fact functions to enliven or deepen meanings of the un- or pre-determined. This is rather, a reflection on the “curatorial” practice, which allows artists to effectively obscure their position, image, status, and opinion. This conceit of the “curatorial” is far superior to the role of the actual artist in as much as it requires far less humiliation, and the images put forth are generally so ubiquitous, that the form is completely legible, and thereby rendered completely impervious to critique or misunderstanding. Most “artists” in Philadelphia fit this description.
I write the former because I cannot enter into performance or process at all without considering the social, material, and economic conditions that are condensed in the very labor of making work itself. The making of performance feels particularly impossible given the current state of the world. Amidst the prevailing market and institutional trends that fetishize queer bodies and social collectivity, a slow burning, private individuation and artistic practice is experiencing an early resurgence (if this model ever went out of style). While the larger collective models that attempt to hold institutions accountable were born out of good faith and half-hearted socialization attempts, their failure to program, curate, and execute has been prolific. These failures are especially evident in some of Philadelphia’s local and leading contemporary institutions including Icebox, but go beyond to affirm themselves in the recent fiasco at Documenta, where the 15-member curatorial collective, ruangrupa, all failed to spot anti-semitic imagery in Indonesian collective, Tarang Padi’s, mural, titled People’s Justice. Having failed to appropriately articulate the complexity of the situation in any of their subsequent media appearances, it is perhaps revealed that the artist collective model was not built, nor is it suitable for the institution, and the encounter between the two is not radical.
I have had to take a tremendous amount of time allowing myself to encounter and play with ideas that feel individual as opposed to popular. When I decided that I was going develop Scoring the End into an evening-length solo work, I wrote, “do not dismiss complexity” in my journal, over and over and over and over again. When I enter into my rehearsals, I have to remind myself that labor is not sacred, and that making a work with a complex fabric and logic requires skill and craft as opposed luck or connections. I am also considering my audience now more than ever. I notice in late postmodern and early contemporary dance, a trend which asks the audience to produce the meaning themselves, offering nothing more than a lexicon of seemingly disparate signs, gestures, and signifiers. The issue here is that one cannot read a language which they do not understand, and often, these performers were less interested in teaching the audience their language in a skillfully conducted way, but far more interested in vilifying a group of people who had nothing do with their economic uncertainty. Projection in this context is just satire without craft. So, I am learning ways that allow me to bring my audience along with me. To teach them my language, or if nothing else, attempt to teach them my language and fail with pride.
I am also trying to make this work without the input of others. I am refusing the idea that anyone is an effective dramaturg for your work, and as a result, only those who are guaranteed invitations to rehearsals because of funding agreements will be welcome. Feedback, however, will not be welcome, because I am of the belief that one does not know this piece better than it knows itself. This is not because the making of the work is sacred, but because the very structure of which we believe “working” must occur is a crutch, and is, I argue, symptomatic of a larger, more structural insecurity within our practice. No one will talk for this work until it has talked for itself.
This structuring of my process has been difficult. It is easier to proceed in a direction that is familiar and well-rehearsed. I am not, however, interested in this direction. I am instead convening with myself to create a work that can effectively host myself and my body. I am learning about the very phenomenon of creation itself. I suppose one always learns about this, but here I am trying to remain attentive, sensitive, and open.
I write this to you all from a place of excitement, rigor, and determined attention.
Twenty-Seventh PIG