Hi folks. With great thanks to all those who follow my sporatic posting on all things performance, please go to michellelynch.org for further such creations!
I will no longer be posting here, so michellelynch.org is the place to go.
How to be a Successful Artist
TO QUOTE B.I.G. “I BEEN IN THIS GAME FOR YEARS/ IT MADE ME AN ANIMAL/ THERE’S RULES TO THIS SHIT/ I WROTE ME A MANUAL/ A STEP BY STEP BOOK TO GET YOUR GAME ON TRACK” IMA HELP YA’LL MAKE IT IN THE ART WORLD WITH MY SIMPLE INSTRUCTION YA’LL!
On Relational Aesthetics
Turbulent, by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat
“In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called ‘metaphorai.’ To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor”– [....] Stories should also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.” (Michel de Certeau, PEL)
For the past couple of months, I have been in discussion with a few artists about dramaturgy in the Bay Area. The group was loosely formed as a brain child of Tessa Wills. As a group I am the only American, and together our experience is based largely outside of …here. And so we wonder collectively why it is that the (literal) language of performance is so different here on the west coast than it is elsewhere. i.e. Where is the dramaturgy? Is there space for a SF-specific dramaturgical practice should it emerge directly from the cultural context of the region/city?
As our first foray out of our kitchens and into the public (!), we are hitting up the Too Much Festival, a queer performance festival curated by Keith Hennessy and Julie Phelps. We are there to talk queer, in a sort of panel meets discussion, meets uncomfortable first date. 
Hello there.
Since I do not consider myself the foremost expert on queer performance in the Bay Area, I ponder some of the broader questions…I wonder how queer performance is curated. Whether it is through collecting artists that queer is identified and defined, or rather through careful selection a pre-existing notion is brought to light, to visibility.
Speaking of visibility.
Naturally, the first thing I did when preparing for this event was enter “queer performance” into google. The first link was to a word document – a syllabus for a course offered at the University of Texas, of all places. The intro was benign enough, but one question stood out. What keeps other kinds of queer performance “subcultural” or “marginal” to some presumptive dominant? Or is visibility itself a kind of trap that precludes an “outlaw” stance? (discussing the increasingly mainstream queer or gay identity).
Perhaps queer performance is liminal, an artistic stage between being hidden out of view and being fully seen (read: made mainstream, less controversial). It is an state of being, then, rather than a formalized genre.
If you can, you should come to the festival on Sunday. 10 hours of queer performance. Talks. Spectacle. Dinner.
Meridian Dance is proud to present the fantastically smart, original and witty Catherine (Kat) Galasso as the latest choreographer creating world premiere work at the Meridian Gallery. Lindsay Levesque and I curated this evening, and will participate in a Q&A after the show. We began curating and producing the gallery’s latest performance program, Meridian Dance, early last year and have since presented three site-specific premiere dance works.
January 28 & 29
7:30pm
Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street, SF
$10-20
Tickets/Info (this is a limited capacity event, so get your tickets early!)
Kat has choreographed a dance event where audience mingles with performer in a provocative and humorous performance that spans the three-floor Victorian mansion of the Meridian Gallery. Memorandum of Understanding: Your Butt is Covered is an evening of site-specific dance that responds to the current exhibition Speak Memory. The Meridian Gallery has a long reputation of programming cutting-edge music, film, and dance events.
While considering group memory as memorandums, Kat artfully juxtaposes the formal with the vernacular. A master of humor, Memorandum of Understanding takes on the accountability and self-protection in a world where relationships often remain undefined. The work draws inspiration from Speak, Memory – from large-scale drawings of gigantic monads, to abstracted video narratives, to a melancholic video meditation on empty, haunted spaces. Speak, Memory is an exhibition of drawings, film, and projection by Bay Area artists Ruth Eckland, Heike Liss, and Vera Kachouh. Through their work, the three artists explore the ability of art to contain or construct personal or collective memory.
The Meridian Gallery is a non-profit performance and exhibition space committed to increasing social, philosophical and spiritual change among previously isolated individuals and communities. The gallery assumes a tangible responsibility to explore issues and make spaces where youth and adults can access experientially a widening of the possible. The Meridian Gallery has been curating and hosting visual art, music, film, poetry, and dance events since 1989.
Also!, Kat is keeping a blog for the piece’s development.
Oh, and if you are interested in volunteering, or getting more information, contact dance@meridiangallery.org.
“If that means that it’s not for everybody, then yes. “Elitist” doesn’t need to mean wealthy and conservative; it can also mean specialised and rarefied, and that’s no bad thing.”
-Mark Morris, choreographer
I read this in an interview with Mark in the Guardian from 2009. One of the more thoughtful, concise, and honest responses to the all-familiar accessibility question I have encountered.
A few weeks ago I stopped by the newly opened Marina Abramovic Institute West – a big, raw storefront space on Sutter Street whose dated image on Google Maps had a heap of trash and a homeless man sleeping in front. Now, if there is ever someone sleeping in front of it you can be sure that they are being funded by some forward-thinking European government.
The work I saw at MAI was a project called The Glasshouse by Israeli artists Lital Dotan and Eyal Perry. The Institute/gallery/room was made to be the two artists’ living space for two months. And that day, when I walked through, was a day where the doors would be unlocked for 24 hours. Since the gallery is essentially one giant room, they divided the space into “zones”: the kitchen corner with a large table and refrigerator; the bedroom with two double mattresses; the living room, with a few couches and bookshelves brimming with oversized coffee table arts books; the closet, a vast area in the center of the space where each piece of clothing they had was hanging individually from hangers suspended from the high ceilings. There was a single couch facing out to the sidewalk in the front of the gallery where a woman sat, staring blankly, wearing a white bathrobe.
Throughout their makeshift home were video works, photographs and other scultpural pieces that were marked with prices. The formal “art” in the midst of the larger, more conceptual “art” that was the entire room. In the midst of the films that cost thousands were well-placed reminders that this space is being lived in. A shelf near the kitchen had a mug filled with mismatched spoons and a box of store-brand Whole Foods cereal. Near a sink were toothbrushes and a razor. Signs of the artists’ mundane humanity.
As I was walking around, slowly inspecting all of this, I began to be pretty disappointed. None of it rang true. It was neither polished nor honest. It was well-designed mess, a mess that can only come with extraordinary effort, like distressed jeans you buy for $100 from the Gap. Where, in the midst of the intellectual paperbacks, was the travel guide or the dated pop science book you were given to as a gift but will never read? In the closet, where were the ill-fitting pants or the old, ratty t-shirt?
I found them eventually. Or, rather, I found the real mess. In the far back corner of the gallery stood a small, chipped, Ikea-made shelf. Next to it were their empty rolling suitcases. On it was the small, glossy box for their external hard drive, the cardboard box filled with spare postcards advertising their work, and other metaphorical ill-fitting pants and unglamorous reading material. The shit we all have, that we collect for one reason or another, but that doesn’t quite fit our aesthetics. It was then that I realized, that while I found this work dishonest and contrived, I had to admit that this corner hit a nerve. I carefully craft my mess, I think we all do. Piles of books visible on my dresser is fine, but the box that my cell phone came in must be hidden in a drawer. Shoes lying around – yes; boxy red suitcase – no.
Dotan and Perry constructed a temporary home that would communicate a clear message: We are artists. That was their identity and they were sticking to it. None of this complicated “being a human in the 21st century” business, with all of its unsightly consumerism and flashy graphic design.
As I left, I couldn’t quite figure out if they were aware of this complexity, the negotiation between identity, reality and the stage. That pile of shiny packaging I found in the corner of their big, earth-toned, shabby-chic gallery was striking to me, but perhaps not because of anything they did as artists, but rather what they did as people. What we all do as we strive to make our homes reflective of what we hope visitors will think of us – constructing elaborate living stages just in case someone stops by.
I recently re-discovered this video of a performance in 2007 of Swan Song – Choreography by Kelly Kemp. I continue to find Kelly’s work engaging, smart, and remarkably thoughtful movement. My years performing with her were incredibly artistically fulfilling. I believe she has a performance of new work coming up – keep your eyes peeled, San Francisco!
(currently youtube has muted the audio because of some pesky copyright nonsense…more to come)
I have just begun working on a site-specific piece at the Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, in collaboration with Leah Rybolt, and have been thinking about sites, our site, the woods, and how create something in such a strong visual environment. On Everybody’s Toolbox I found this, written by Mette Ingvartsen, as part of their “10 Statements” exercise.
1. Site-specific performance insists on using preexisting environments as the starting point for its creation, thus using the environment as a backdrop, stage-set or even as a performer.
2. Site-specific performance let’s the artistic idea emerge out of an actual, social and/or political situation however not reducing the expression to the reproduction of this situation.
3. Site-specific performance reactivates its location and offers a new ”sight” on the specific.
4. Site-specific performance is conditioned and influenced by a particular space and should condition and influence this space in return.
5. Site-specific performance let’s go of the autonomy of art and the neutrality of the theater space.
6. Site-specific performance creates a fiction within the reality of the place, suggesting the spectator to rethink her/his “natural” perceptions.
7. Site-specific performance melts into the environment where it is performed, becoming indistinguishable from the reality of the place.
8. Site-specific performance produces doubt about what belongs to the situation that is performed, versus what belonged to the situation already beforehand.
9. Site-specific performance cannot be toured, as it is integral to the place it has been made in. However the strategies used can be reinstated or readapted to other contexts and produce new site-specificities.
10. Site-specific performance addresses and treats formats, conventions and expectations of performed expressions, as well as it questions logics of reproduction, circulation and commodification of performance works.
