ARTISTS' PROJECT: SABINE BITTER AND HELMUT WEBER

For their artists' project for More Milk Yvette, the Vancouver and Vienna based artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber provided images and texts related to three recent projects, along with an invitation to create a blog post presenting the individual projects by drawing connections between them. 

This is that project, and it is appropriate to the work of these artists that what is presented here both documents, continues, and transforms, becoming another layer of dialogue and exchange on top of both Bitter-Weber's original projects and the social situations they sought to articulate and contribute to. But dialogue and exchange of what kind?

This project is not about description.

The three projects were:

"WE DECLARE": SPACES OF HOUSING  (2008), based at Gallery Gachet in Vancouver. This engaged with the physical spaces where decisions about housing are made, on different scales from local communities to the United Nations. The project extended from images into debates and discussions under the auspices of The Flying University. If the images originate and resonate across diverse geographical situations, the project also had a local function, chronicling the impact on housing issues of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.  

PLUGGED IN, FENCED OUT (Site specific installation at the Fotohof Gallery, 2008) also sought to create dialogues between different visions and actualities of urban space. It juxtaposed Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67 - a residential compound designed for Montreal's 1967 Expo - with collages of images where the utopian modernist vision is upturned, becoming container villages and compounds. Fotohof Gallery provided a context where the artists' research could be presented large-scale as black and white wallpaper. 

NEW, Novi Beograd 1948 - 1986 - 2006 and Where Neither The Public Nor The Intimate Find Their Place, were a video and ASCII-print respectively that formed the artists' contribution to Differentiated Neighbourhoods of New Belgrade (2007). Here issues about space, agency, development, local and global, and the artists' own contribution to such debates, became focussed around the notion of neighbourhood. The following is Bitter and Weber's own writing on this subject: 

NOTES TOWARDS AN OPEN PROJECT 

IN OUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PROJECT Differentiated Neighbourhoods of New Belgrade we began with an understanding of "neighbourhood" not as a particular area or district of a city, but as a place where the local subjects are continually remaking their neighbourhood under and through a dynamic configuration of social relations. A neighbourhood is both a space and a process which must negotiate all of the pressures and possibilities coming from a range of scales (the local, the national, the global, etc.), but also a configuration that is ultimately mediated through the urban condition.

Neighbourhoods have an interesting double dynamic: they are places that are deeply experienced as local as well as being spaces that are necessary for social reproduction at the local scale and the production of the local. Simply put, neighbourhoods make and remake themselves in very localized ways at the same time as they produce the local in ways which draw on all of the spatial scales. As a result, neighbourhoods are also places that are contested internally and externally, from above and from below.

Affective connections to place make neighbourhoods a strong site of localized histories and textures of life, yet within the current global-urban nexus, neighbourhoods carry both a residual structure of a time when the nationstate had a very different hand in shaping daily life and an emergent structure that is brought on through neoliberalism as a globally migrating principle of commonsense and a regime of regulation. Neoliberalism pries open neighbourhoods in various ways, privatising common spaces, radically altering the rhythm of social reproduction, and emphasizing property rights of the very localized histories that have such a strong affective pull.

In particular, we are interested in the imperatives of a self-organisation and self-management that occur in neighbourhoods with the arrival of neoliberalism as apposed to the possibilities of forms of self-organisation that emerge "from below". Neoliberal policies, regulations, and pressures are pulled down, so to speak, by local and national institutions and governments, but they meet resistance and reshaping as they are applied or wedged into neighbourhoods and urban territories. 

Within this, perhaps a new understanding and mobilization of "autogestion" (in Lefebvre's terms, a collectively organized mode of self-management) is driving the production of urban space as the neoliberal moment begins to weaken. In terms of former Yugoslavia and New Belgrade, self-management has existed at the state, urban, and neighbourhood scales. Today, the particular urban dynamics of New Belgrade carry this history into the present complex global-urban nexus.

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This project is not about documentation. I am interested in what happens when these projects appear on the More Milk Yvette blogspot. How does this space continue each project? Is it a way of disseminating ideas and continuing conversations more widely? Or is it, instead, closing down such debates, removing them of the specificity and context they need to be politically effective?

I explored these issues working with the jpegs Bitter and Weber supplied. The images came in a single zip file, and it was easy to slideshow through them, ignoring what project they originally came from. I arranged the images into two small exhibitions of seven images each.

EXHIBITION A

EXHIBITION B

CODA

Putting these sequences together, I worked quickly and intuitively, initially knowing little about these projects other than their jpeg incarnation. Initially, I thought my choreography would be principally aesthetic - making sequences with visually appealing through-lines in terms of shape patterns, eye lines, colour and light. 

But actually, rather than referring to specific projects, the images referenced certain categories of space: models, exhibitions, television; the spaces of governments, local community and activist politics; gallery discussions. It is the combination of these spaces in interaction with certain formal qualities that I felt I was choreographing. Sometimes vaguely, sometimes more definitively. It was the movement between these jpeg spaces that was the blogspot continuation of Bitter and Weber's original work. 

The end of each sequence felt particularly potent. How to forge a discussion, but leave open? How to be specific enough to let concrete ideas form, but how also to open up a broader space of discursive possibility? 

In their own writing about "We Declare": Spaces of Housing, Bitter and Weber observe: 

The exhibition is a platform, a mixing machine, and a declaration that begins with the notion of art practices as an imperfect yet necessary form of public research in a time when the spaces and ideas of what and where the public might be are under pressure.

STILL TO DO: Trace these sequences, each image, back into their original projects, highlighting what emerges, vanishes, transforms, deletes, dialogues, translates. Go back to the artists and original participants, see how their experiences feed into this new score, punctuate it,  create a further landscape that will once again need text, physical space, talks and discussions, other websites, blogs, too.

These sequences have no answers.

There are many other sequences.

This project is not about description.

This project is about a blog. 

This project is not about a blog.

SOURCES OF IMAGES: (FROM TOP:) (1) "WE DECLARE": SPACES OF HOUSING (2008); (2) PLUGGED IN, FENCED OUT (2008); (3) PLUGGED IN, FENCED OUT. EXHIBITION A: (1) "WE DECLARE": SPACES OF HOUSING, POSTER OUTSIDE; (2) "WE DECLARE": SPACES OF HOUSING; (3) NEW, NOVI BEOGRAD, 1948-1986-2006; (4) PLUGGED IN, FENCED OUT; (5-6) NEW, NOVI BEOGRAD, 1948-1086-2006; (7) PLUGGED IN, FENCED OUT. EXHIBITION B: (1) "WE DECLARE": SPACES OF HOUSING, PANEL; (2) "WE DECLARE": SPACES OF HOUSING, POSTER; (3) NEW, NOVI BEOGRAD, 1948-1986-2006; (4) PLUGGED IN, FENCED OUT; (5) WHERE NEITHER THE PUBLIC NOR THE INTIMATE FIND THEIR PLACE; (6-7) NEW, NOVI BEOGRAD 1948-1986-2006. 

THE NO-FILM FILM COLUMN IS BACK

Bernadette Corporation, Pedestrian Cinema (2005-current).

You might remember More Milk Yvette's introduction, in January, of The No-Film Film Column - re-live it here. This, if More Milk Yvette can remember that far back at all accurately, was the result of half an hour at the Sacred Cafe in Ganton Street, in London's Soho. It was what it said it was: a column about film that didn't discuss film at all, and yet...

A utopian gesture, it seemed, unconnected with the market, or the object, or the careers of artists, but also a column sure that artists' film had a presence in the incidents of everyday life a few feet from the bustle of Carnaby Street. The No Film Film Column was Above All That Yet Down Below, a lived not livid thing, yet also a focussed intellectual project taking shape in the latte foam swirl of its own ambition.

In the excitement of its birthing - and an associative thrill ride amongst the large inflatable snowmen then hoisted above Ganton Street - I saw The No-Film Film Column as a weekly - hell, why not daily, why not hourly,  Twitter lovers -  manifestation. And then there was silence... this is its first appearance since. Even this, like much of the best contemporary artistic production, is slightly unsure if it is The No-Film Film Column itself or a column about The No- Film Film Column.

Not that I care, really. The No-Film Film Column was precisely about turning away from such navel gazing, to the broader world, always assuming that I could find it. My initial thoughts, for example, were that, given the current state of the world, I would write more about the economy. I had no idea what exactly I would say about the economy,  but I was inspired by Warhol's 1976 video Letter to Man Ray in the Hayward Galleries recent Other Voices, Other Rooms show.  

It is Christmas at The Factory. Warhol holds  a microphone and says it is a Man Ray film because he is saying Man Ray's name a lot. Then Warhol says: 

Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray Man Ray

Then, in another inspiring moment, Warhol recalls meeting Man Ray: 

and I took a picture of him and he took a picture of me and I took a picture of him and he took a picture of me and I took another picture of him and he took another picture of me and I took another picture of him and he took another picture of me and then I...

Bernadette Corporation, Get Rid of Yourself (2003).

INTERRUPTION: How can this be the No Film Film Column if you're going on and on about Warhol? Because Warhol points us to where film manifests as a broader cultural presence also known as No-Film. His films and no-one elses can be part of the No Film You Know What. Sure, as Warhol would say. Maybe I'm just pilfering his methodology for my own contemporary ends: 

This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war. This is some writing about war.

and, again:

I took a picture of your economy. And you took a picture of my economy. I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took another picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy then I took a picture of your economy. And you took a picture of my economy. I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took another picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy then I took a picture of your economy. And you took a picture of my economy. I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took another picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy then I took a picture of your economy. And you took a picture of my economy. I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took another picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy then I took a picture of your economy. And you took a picture of my economy. I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took another picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy then I took a picture of your economy. And you took a picture of my economy. I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took another picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy. Then I took a picture of your economy and you took a picture of my economy then

Thankyou, Andy. Many subject areas of important contemporary concern now feel available to my writing talents. 

Bernadette Corporation, Hell Frozen Over (2000).

So this essay has been about getting The No-Film Film Column back on track, less sure of itself than it was when it first appeared - Ganton Street's inflatable snowmen, too, have vanished. But I now realize: even when it wasn't here the No Film Film Column was there, although look for it there and it seems, sooner or later, to reappear here. As Gertrude Stein liked to say after reading the first No-Film Film Column: there's no there there there there there there there. How true, Gertrude.

In conclusion, I am proud to announce that The No-Film Film Column column will, henceforth, be as weekly as it is daily, if, that is, it is not hourly or bi-annual. Think of it, at its best, as a process of, at the same time, emptying and filling a box with tiny styrofoam bits, whilst attempting to cross-breed two paperback copies of Jacques Rancières The Future of the Image. 

Or, if there are simpler ways for responding to and writing about artists' film outside of an academic framework, do let me know.

MIRCEA CANTOR: BETWEEN A FILM INSTALLATION AND TWO LIVE PEACOCKS

Mircea Cantor, (TOP:) The Need for Uncertainty, 2008; (BOTTOM:) Airplanes and Angels, 2008. Both copyright Mircea Cantor, courtesy Yvon Lambert, Paris, New York.

Mircea Cantor, Camden Arts Centre, 20 Feb-19 April 2009.

Mircea Cantor has worked with film installations before but his new show at the Camden Arts Centre has no film but two live peacocks. It's a curious, thought-provoking substitution and this review is partly a working through of that act, to see if it's one more film makers could usefully follow.

 

Two peacocks sit inside a domed gold cage. Actually, it's a Russian doll nesting of three cages of decreasing size inside one another. The largest disappears into the wall before completing its circumference, the smaller two fit complete inside, each with their own cage door left invitingly open. Some conifer branches are placed on the wood chip covered floor, and the smell of the whole thing is very zoo. 

It was whilst considering this vaguely Esche-evoking peacock house that I first realised some of the short comings of live peacock-based installations. I went on a Sunday so maybe the peacocks were having some down time, but they largely hid behind the conifer branches.  Eventually, one came out for a bit of a strut, but there was no tail fanning or extravagant courtship of any kind, which was a shame. Contemporary art gets you accustomed to a expect a spectacle, not the psychological problems of the ornate but performance shy. 

The peacocks also seemed unaware of the labyrinthine Borges-like possibilities of their environment, preferring just to wonder around a small area of woodchip, in a manner that, if they keep it up, will get the RSPCA interested. Had they not been listening to their keeper when he read aloud those chapters from Relational Aesthetics?

But what kind of space results from a peacock in a gallery? Once you've seen the pictures,  Joseph Beuys Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) becomes the ur- reference point for these kinds of gallery based animal-encounters. The relationship to - or between - wild otherness within the gallery. Whether the Beuys piece was like that outside the photos is another question altogether. From the description (I haven't seen it), Cantor's own Departure (2005), where a deer and a wolf meet in a white cube, would also seem to be occupying this territory. 

Differences of coyote and peacock are perhaps one way to think through the precise tone of Cantor's piece. The peacock is not there to evoke wildness. It speaks of a certain formal elegance, garden history, aristocracy. Or, rather, its wildness also comes through these things. Which perhaps gives the peacock a  strange closeness to the history and experience of the gallery; itself able on whim to unfold into a kind of a self-styled Sir Joan Soames museum. Which isn't bad, as self-revelatory party tricks go, but it wasn't happening on Sunday.

Actually, far from evoking wild otherness, the installation becomes very relaxed and unassuming. Most gallery goers when I visited were carrying very small children, and holding them up to the gold bars, whilst willing the peacocks to be less work-shy. Indeed, to come back to the film-versus-peacock debate, peacocks win hands down over a film installation when it comes to participation and interest amongst those under two years old. 

I left the room somewhat anxious that I might be missing penguin feeding time in the Camden Arts Centre garden. I also think the peacocks, despite their worst intentions, do have some art-theoretical points they want to make, however indirectly. Cantor's piece is a pointed dialogue about a setting and its objects; controlled and uncontrolled; the still and the moving; male and female; baroque and everyday; the mediation of all this through architecture that is both real and hypothetical.  

Beuys and the coyote explored these issues in sharp relief. In Cantor's piece it is much more ephemeral, less dramatic, in some ways deliberately more pointless, and it maybe sticks in the memory all the more for that reason, if it sticks at all. It certainly makes a large gold cage and a couple of peacocks feel very contemporary, almost to the point of being part of the space, like the fire extinguisher.  When this show closes, the peacocks are going to Paris to collaborate with Bernard Tschumi.

In the corridor outside there is a photo by Cantor of a still-standing tree in a forest, with a section of trunk that seems to have been carved into an elaborate wood sculpture. It's a startling sight, as if nature is having its own joke with the photographer, who only noticed this  constructivist trunk fungus when the image was processed. It's good to have that image in the corridor because it's like a planet orbiting the peacocks. I am art critical too! the tree says, a little shrilly.

Mircea Cantor, Airplanes and Angels, 2008. Copyright Mircea Cantor, courtesy Yvon Lambert, Paris , New York.

There's also a second installation, Airplanes and Angels (2008), involving some wall markings and a suspended flying carpet. The flying carpet, woven with airoplanes and angels, is a witty object, but, suspended in the air, it seemed to fall comically short of the magic it was illustrating.  If this gap was the subject, then it was an aspect missing from the shows accompanying mini-catalogue which was less about pratfalls and more to do with resonance, meditation, quiet splendour and the human condition. 

In contrast, I couldn't shake myself of the thought that it was like waking up in the bath to find your flannel all stiff and levitating above the taps. But that's the wonder of art for you, with or without either film or peacocks.    

PERFORMANCE LECTURES GO PLOUF! BEING AN UNRELIABLE GUIDE TO CHARACTERS, FIGURES & SIGNS

Julien Bismuth and Jean Pascal- Flavien, Plouf! Rio de Janeiro, 2006. Photo copyright the artists.

The following is an attempt to outline some qualities of the performance-lecture, based on the numerous examples of the form presented as part of last weeks Characters, Figures, Signs festival at Tate Modern (20-21 Feb, 2009). 

It approaches these examples from a personal perspective: trying to unpack something of the qualities and role of The Performance-Lecture within a critical writing practice,  whether it be framed as "criticism" or as a "creative" project. 

The following thus downplays the weekends other key theme - which was the relationship to contemporary dance and how it has come to include lectures and demonstrations within its own panoply of performance forms. 

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It's ten days after the event and I still haven't come up with a good reason why Xavier Le Roy's Products of Circumstances (1999) should have been given a two late-night run in the Turbine Hall. This was the Lecture-Demonstration at its most conventional and dance-based, alternating personal narrative delivered from a lectern with short extracts of movement.

But my problems were not to do with this basic form. Instead, I think my antipathy was because such a presentation depends on a sense of urgency to the moment of delivery. Le Roy's story may have had value in 1999 as an artists own coming to terms - constructing- a narrative of his own career. But 10 years later it was hard to justify giving it such continued prominence.

Such narratives, whether personal or historical, must also avoid treating history and the audience as idiots. Science bad, dance good, statistics potentially unreliable, seemed the gist here. But then why does Le Roy hark on so much about being a molecular biologist? Why is it always the first line of his bio? Why does he follow such a conventional form for a story about the revelation of new forms? 

More specifically there are questions about the status of information in the performance-lecture. Le Roy went into great detail about his PhD research on breast cancer. But the point of such an event is not to convey actual information. It's more about a presence or status that can't be so painstakingly defined. That's why, presumably, Le Roy makes dances.

INTERLUDE: Tino Sehgal in conversation with Catherine Wood wasn't really a performance lecture, but I mention it here for its own contribution to this topic. Firstly, about the fetishising of academic knowledge. Please, Tate interviewers, stop the awe struck questions about artists who "studied dance and political economy at the same time" as if Karl Marx and Isadora Duncan had fused into one Tino-shaped entity. It's called a modular undergraduate degree program and many non-famous artists have done one. 

That said, Sehgal offers this hyper-confident intellectual model, whose substance seemed a professional necessity, justifying the more conceptual, oral, picture-free elements of his practice. It's intoxicating to hear, but it so absorbs into itself any critical response, and I had the uncomfortable sensation that the only thing left to do was believe or not. 

Indeed, from my own experience of Seghal's work in The World as Stage exhibition, I would say the most interesting element of Sehgals model is the embarrassing crisis that results when his work is shaken out of its own self-justifying discourse. 

The performance lecture, however, should relish Seghal's sense of craftsmanship that goes into the preparation, collection, performance, and archiving of such immaterial works; as, too, his sense of the art work as having a primarily oral existence that leads from the event itself into its numerous re-tellings.  Both beautiful ideas that made me briefly regret the ungenerous comments I'd been writing in my notebook.

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After such disgruntlements, there was an enormous pleasure to Guillame Désanges Signs and Wonders. Désanges stood at the Starr Auditorium lectern and read a thesis about the squares, lines, circles, and triangles of modernism and the spiritual, mystical beliefs that went along with their rational, modern forms. It was a clear, articulate piece, that fluidly positioned itself where academic discourse and research seeks a more creative, ever present applicability.

Guillaume Désanges with Frédéric Cherboeuf, A History of Performance in 20 minutes, Performance, Gasworks, 2007 

Such pleasure mainly came from the shadow play that accompanied Désanges lecture. As he spoke, Alexandra Delage created illustrations on an overhead projector that were projected on a large white screen. This involved shadow plays for the lectures arguments and gestures, as well as instant, witty reproductions of all the art works mentioned. 

So a series of paper lines and squares were rapidly reconfigured to represent a mini-retrospective of Barnett Newman's career. Vertical color strips evoking Ellsworth Kelly were quickly turned horizontal to illustrate a point about Liam Gillick.

Abstracting this into more general principles, what does this contribute to our tentative poetics of the lecture-demonstration? One key thing: when such a lecture points to something, or makes a reference to an art work or a personal biography, that detail must have both the fixity and arbitrariness of the shadow play.   

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Two final examples offer a closing set of concerns. In Black Flags Ian White sat in front of a wind machine that noisily blew strong currents of air in his face. He held a sheaf of A4 papers, that it was hard hold on to in the wind. Sometimes, too, he had to turn aside to breathe. 

White shouted the words - poignant phrases from his interview with Tate's head of captioning and wall texts. There was much humour and poignancy of obsessive detail - fonts, typesizes, layout - and the insight of particular phrases that explored the wall texts need for clarity and invisibility: "Looking is bound walking... what's not to be noticed has physical dimensions..."

This was accompanied by continual, looping trumpet blasts, and a film projection. For maybe two thirds of the talk this involved a hand fingering the pages of an artists' book. For the last third it was sort of homoerotic stuff of a guy in a balaclava crawling around the floor of what seemed to be White's flat. Lots of close ups of his buttocks and his groin through his tight trousers. The cameras looking extended to the cameraman trying to pick the man's wallet from the back pocket of his trousers.  For a finale, White threw away the A4 papers, recited song lyrics about finding the love of his life, whilst performing a series of semaphore signaling movements.

Having seen White quite a lot recently - mostly presenting the discussions at Lux 28 - I read Black Flags as about finding a performative metaphor for dramatising the tensions of that practice. The finding of such an image or metaphor seemed to require parallel movements into the discourse of the museum and private realms of the domestic and desire. The performance-lecture form both connects such areas in the moment of performance, but also keep them distinct (as here there was a distinct sense of a number of different component mediums). 

Finally, Pablo Bronstein's Intermezzo could also be read like this. Bronstein said he was interesting in critiquing the authority of historical narratives, but his performance too found a metaphor for an artistic practice, seeming to be strung quite consciously between rigour and ridiculousness.   

Bronstein, dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts, told a story of Renaissance gentlemen for whom ballet was a source of ideas and practice of posture and deportment. It seemed quite plausible to me, but in the Q&A afterwards, Bronstein stated that it had all been a cobbled together google-a-thon. But, actually, in my somewhat  self-willed gullibility, I'm also rusing, trying to avoid getting sucked into some daft game of true or false, as if the art work is a new Agatha Christie mini-series. 

If a performance lecture like this is worth anything, its because it offers a convincing surface: a contemporary moment in which facts and details and gesture are forever acquiring new meanings in their new contexts, without any felt need for authenticating. All of which, of course, is frighteningly amnesiac, but maybe the advantages override this. One final insight for future performance-lecture makers: 

For most of the weekend I felt like Gertrude Stein was on the guest list. But there was no guest list.

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So this is a rough taxonomy of the performance lecture. I'm being quick, casual, implausibly hunch-led about this, because that seems part of the reason for employing such a form. I want to avoid what seemed to happen in the closing Q&A where it seemed to be impossible to return from each of these individual investigations to some kind of shared, public space where they could be compared and developed or, even, recognized.  

Or, rather, people seemed to emerge disorientated, and closed. I'm also suggesting here that the discussion of the performance lecture has to have a similar broadness of tone and styles as the performance themselves. Otherwise we can't possibly unfold our understanding and practice of the form in a manner that recognises what is at stake.

It above all requires a certain impunity and scepticism about claims to knowledge. And I should know. At the beginning of my career I studied both The Polish Avant Garde 1945-70 and Manufacturing Weapons of Mass Destruction For Beginners in the same semester. It was wonderful, but I won't go on and on about it, because that is not what this non-performance essay is all about...