Art and Water

Running my jacket through the dryer for the second time (first time I finally broke down and washed the thing, since it was already soaked through) and happily finally able to remove my socks after they got soaked through four hours ago, apparently, my boots are in no way waterproof.  And I guess I'm probably not going to make it to a show I wanted to see.  Ugh.  Been very wet out today.

Went to the Henry to do an activation, but the other two people scheduled were late, and had to run off to a class at 2 pm, so I just facilitated them doing an activation, then waited around to see if one of the staff would work with me on one later on.  (We didn't.  Most of the pieces take four people to activate, a couple take two, and one takes nine.)  But in the intervening time, had a good talk about the architecture of the building with the same man that had handed me the dart on a previous outing ("Half the Air in the Given Space"), and joined a gallery talk about drawing.  Then talked briefly with two of the exhibit/curation staff about perception.  I mentioned the play "Molly Sweeney" by Brian Friel, which had recently played in town, about a woman who went blind very early in life, and then as an adult is convinced into having a surgery to regain sight, and the consequences/repercussions of that.  One of them mentioned hearing a similar story about someone who'd been deaf and had been given an operation to hear, and had then asked to have it reversed because they couldn't deal with all the stimuli.

Last week, we did the activations at the Chapel space in the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford.  (It used to be a home for "wayward" girls, and now is a community space, with offices, the chapel performance space, and a few apartments.)  There was a noticeable difference between the gallery opening and the chapel activations.  In the Henry, (well, there'd been alcohol, too) there was a lot of greeting and chatting going on between people, and while they might have been paying attention, they weren't focused on the activations.  (Although, when one of the pieces went from a wide distance between the activators, to just a few feet, the crowd grew in numbers, and they got closer, and quieter, even though in the latter, all you could see were the backs of the activators.)  In the Chapel space, there was almost complete silence and reverence for about half an hour; a certain sacredness in the way the activators handled the cloth and laid it out before putting it on; a stillness (mental, as well as physical) in the active time with the sculpture.  I was definitely more focused, though that was also in part that I knew what to expect.

In the panel discussion after, the artist mentioned that the activators are in a sense, their own audience, they don't need anyone else to witness the act.  He also talked about how no one knew what to do with his work in Europe back in the 60's, there wasn't a language to talk about it (which is an interesting concept in itself.)  It wasn't until he came to New York that his work was shown, and still today, he considers his contemporaries (in the type of sculpture he does) to be artists working today, and this is 50 years later.

My pen wasn't working too well at the time, so my notes are sketchy, but there was the idea that he has always drawn, and used drawings to document the activations rather than photographs.  That drawing could capture something of the inner workings of the participants in a way that photographs could not.  To catch the spirit of it.  Also, that the material/drawing are the bones of the work, but the activators are needed to be the flesh of it, to make them fully realized (though they exist in two forms: in storage, and activated.)

I want to write more about perception in relation to "Molly Sweeney," have wanted to since I saw it, but want to read it first.  So, not yet.