Talking Balking Out Badly http://www.alansondheim.org/thennight.jpg I was thinking of where my own work came from and who influenced me and how that influence worked . And one of the things I thought about was the work of Vito acconci who I've written on before. It was his voice and the resonance in his voice which was normal and intense and deep and straightforward then anyway created his work particularly his earlier work. Who is the voice connected to the body and I wrote about it in terms of second person art because he always used the pronoun quote you UN quote you. In other words the pieces were directed to the spectator who is no longer a spectator not even complicit but instead was part and parcel of the work and his or her body was part and parcel of to work and I thought this was amazing. It used almost no technology dash the earlier work dash almost none at all . It wasn't theater it was direct. (At one point I knew Vito and Laurie (see below) well.) At the same time I was influenced by Laurie Anderson. This was very different. Laurie used very simple technology lights and mirrors for very simple tricks that were immediately understood . For example she ran a projector facing the ceiling that was on her stomach and as she moved and breathed lying down the image moved I remember all of these early works so strongly. The audience would move out of a Vito Acconci performance as if there were nothing more to be said in the world. After one of Laurie Anderson's performances however the audience would stand up and clap and it would create a bond it kind of social network occasions by Laurie's performance in her loft . I couldn't do either of these. I was far too neurotic far too skittering from subject to subject far too unsure of myself. When I was surrounded by other artists I went silent or became awkward. I've been awkward like that most of my life. At one point as I mentioned Vito called me up on the phone I said I realize one thing Alan that you're not a real artist either the same day or the day after Laurie Anderson called me up and said I realized something Alan you're a real artist . I didn't belong anywhere except in and out of a hall of mirrors . I used every bit of technology I could to establish myself to make myself grounded in one thing or another. I remember all the time my father screaming at me and I always felt destitute of a family that my brother and sister were distant and far from me and in fact they still are. My mother was somewhat supportive but didn't understand anything I was doing and a great deal of the time wasn't even around. She was political and was working in Israel and in other countries around the world in relationship to Jewish issues. My parents sent me money from time to time to keep me going; this was my mother's idea. My own past, the path that I found was one of wandering . I would read a little bit of a book and think that I understood it well move on to another book I think I understood that I had some devastating social and emotional relationships with people I was no good with people I am now estranged from my family for the most part. I am out on my own along with Azure and I am working somehow to suture to bring together what I've done in the past . There's a huge amount of it and it goes in and out of archives . I keep thinking of my archives and in some of the collectivities I tried to do. I early on published the work of Vito and Laurie and Adrian piper and any number of other artists in a variety of magazines. In a variety of catalogs. I did one of the earlier collections called Being Online which was about people who are living one way or another online as part of their daily lives . This was about how the Internet was With bodies . There were more entanglements and nothing was as clear as it seemed between the real and the virtual. I go over and over all of this in my mind . I do this every night and every day with a sense of dread and sorrow awkwardness and guilt. I don't think I ever learned how to behave. I do think I learned how to manipulate equipment and to grasp concepts quickly . I began to feel more and more that the concepts and philosophy particularly ones dealing with ontology were faulty and just interfered in the appetition of the world. I began to look for diffusions . I began to look for scatterings for partial objects for things that were only adjacent near one another unconnected except for that nearness. I wrote about the difference between fissures and inscriptions. I still think that way . I think only mathematics can supply articulations and connections that matter, and I think mathematics only deeply connects perhaps on the quantum computing and annealing level, that the rest are structures within the same coherent ontology. O this is all wrong. When I go back to the clarity of Vito acconci's early work I am astonished. It makes no claims but it makes And demarcates fields of behavior. It's something about that I connect to the world and connects to the body in an incredibly deep way. Body art need not be involved with incisions or amputations it can mean something else entirely. How are we in the world? How are we in the world when we are in it in the lightest form of adjacency? How in the world with its life forms is over 3 billion years old can we possibly possibly have anything to say or understand in relationship to its being or to its inscription or description? I am speaking as simply as possible. It is late at night . It's four in the morning. I can't sleep. It's going that way. I keep going away as far as possible from artificial intelligence and meta verses and more and more towards the fundamentals of what being the world is maybe Schutz his relevance theory for example . It's a different way of approaching it's pushing epistemology and ontology to the background. It's no longer thinking of textimony but thinking of testimony, or the reverse. It's the testifying of creatures on this planet, all creatures on this planet. It the testimony of bodies past, bodies passing, genocides, birthings. It's clarity and cacophony. But there are always these inscriptions, these adjacencies, these proto-structures, these whispers, these coincidences and not so coincidences, these integrations of differential calculus, these differentiations of integrations, these breaks, these sutures, these moments, and among which, philosophy has failed, its generalities in the sense of similies or metaphors, its reifications and dissections, its operations upon operations, something soon generated by metaverse AI, flawless in its own way, always increasing the domain of autonomous speech, the narcissism of the society of the spectacle, o they are not on the streets, not on the streets we see here where we are now. Vito acconci brought all of this home for me . Vito acconci would work with this with the body and the space with his hand pointing epically direction saying I will kill you I will kill you I will kill the person I am facing well he was rotating slowly blindfolded and the audience would move out of the way . That's all there was to it there wasn't anything more Laurie Anderson took all of this all of the machinery of the real and the virtual all the way back and turned the image into something so intimate and personal that is the same thing with the mind that video did by means of by way of physical movement in an empty space in a second person . I think I learned whatever I've learned from both of them and obviously from any number of other people who are doing related things but it's just that tonight I was thinking more and more about this , trying to fall asleep , wondering how we relate to the war in Ukraine at the moment , how we relate to anything at the moment when everything between us and the world is a screen and the screen is everywhere. It's no longer an addiction. It's our way of being in the world . And Davidson even tonight I'd go elsewhere but I have no idea where that would be or why I would want to go there or what would happen when I was there if I were there at all . ___ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
[NetBehaviour] Talking Balking Out Badly
Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour Tue, 13 Sep 2022 14:40:41 -0700