dreaming alphabets and other works
Dreaming Alphabets 1999
For two performers. One reads and the other enacts the letter forms of the alphabet spoken “judged by what the sole person takes over—from inherited language which “verses and thinks for him”—, whatever he adds by herself is marginal. No one is capable to abandon the “mental mass” and replace it by a new self-creation.”
How do words move our bodies and how do our bodies move words? And what are the many things our bodies do outside of language?
Plants, rocks, air, the sea, atmosphere, other animals, the sky, move as bodies, as intensivities. Words move through our bodies, we taste them, we sound them, their sounds shape us. Our worlds shapes us, has given us our shape. we live within it, along side it, through the eons of it.
The things that speak besides words. The things that just are and that we sense but can’t speak.
Balloon 1999
I run under a balloon that was a moment before a ball. The camera puts on the event. It is me and the ball becoming balloon staged in photography.
public art, mise-en-scène, 2000
To engage the public. Public art. Art as conversation. Art as mise-en-scène outside the institution of art.
Wherever I go I see a stage for an action, a chance to put on a moment of life, of reading this with that. Everything is an encounter. Everywhere is my studio. It’s not the action per se, but action in action. I want to stage an event for a recording.
Appearance, not of an image but the coming together of making an image. Something there that is not there. An image of appearance. The child to come, the birth of the image, the appearance of the event to come.
The Sounding of My Alphabet, 2003
I record every letterform, myself saying them in various places, sample them and play them back electronically in pitches and variations my body’s instrument can not. My voice captured inside the instrument, a double of me, cleaved from me is now the materiality of computation, giving the “samples” of my new voice, new body.
I live along me in recording. Recording is the double, the ghost of me, and, a thing unto itself, and for some the only thing, the real thing.
En Garde 2007
En Garde, as you may know, is a term used in fencing to warn your opponent to be on guard and to assume the position preparatory to a fencing match about to ensue. To humor my small child, I do many of these small moments of En Garde. Here, eating ice cream, I lunge my small plastic spoon forward and declaim En Garde.
And here in the pool with the plastic floating spaghetti string. It is humorous, silly, but infectious and immediately puts on the moment of the now. In doing this we would put on the moment, creating another relation to our environment and ourselves. We would create an event of art.
