From the winter residency until today, this is what has happened so far.
I’ve completed the registration at Plymouth, and am officially enrolled. Today, I had my first official conversation with my DoS, Laura Gonzalez, and my Second Supervisor, Deborah Robinson. We hammered out a plan for proceeding (beginning), and these are some of the outcomes:
I am going to be submitting my RDC1 at the early part of the deadline, at the beginning of April. In the next 10-12 days, I will be putting together a first draft. I will be uploading some of the versions of that here, particularly the prospectus. In that spirit, then, I have some revisions to the narration for my initial proposal, here:
Danowski/Thesis Proposal
I am proposing a project with the working title, “Thresholds: Desire and Sorcery in New Media Performance,” for my thesis work at Transart Institute in conjunction with Plymouth University for my PhD. I will be investigating the nature of subjectivity and objectivity in new media performance art, and asking questions about how these performances “perform.” Using a practice-led inquiry to find my way in to methodologies that are phenomenological, ethnographic, and psychoanalytical, I am seeking to define a new model for mediated performance art and theater. I want to look specifically at the site of the projected media image within multi-media performance works, and focus on performative moments where there are intersections between live and recorded images of the same performer, or places of thematic, visual, or auditory repetition. Theoretically, I will be drawing very generously on the theories of Jacques Lacan, attempting a Lacanian analysis of performance and perception, and drawing generously upon Judith Butler’s articulations of Lacan’s notion of desire in contexts of performativity. I will also be drawing upon theoretical notions of Narcissism in contemporary Body Art, and consider the mirror of Narcissus to be potentially analogous to Lacan’s mirror. Specifically utilizing the framework of Amelia Jones, I want to investigate the relationships between performer and spectator in terms of object and subject, and explore these relationships with an urge to complicate them. While the artists of the last generation were concerned with re-invoking the subjectivity of the performing body, I am looking to explore the same concerns and complicating them by asking questions about the space of media as the central site of desire. At the same time, because the body is still a formidable site of iteration, I will be looking at how the live performing body works in conjunction with its recorded image and text, and looking at their intersections. The site of the media, then, becomes a kind of crossroads between live and digital. In this regard, it becomes the mirror of Lacan, as well as the mirror of Narcissus.
I am also looking at the radical potential of performance to capture, enchant, and charm, and push moments to where performative desire becomes something like sorcery. I’m wondering about the ways in which African sorcery and the Western scientific tradition might overlap, mirror each other, and perhaps inform each other in unsuspected ways, particularly in terms of how a performance might work. The mirror of Lacan, and the mirror of Narcissus, are also present in Kongo and Yoruba cosmology, and I will argue that they are not mutually exclusive, and may actually contain a dialogical potential that would be useful for developing a theory of performance that can be best understood phenomenologically. I want to theorize about the projection screen, the media image, and the sorcerer’s mirror (metaphorical and sometimes literal) as the spaces that can potentially and radically re-configure the notion of subjectivity and objectivity. I want to articulate a theory of art in new media, and create a body of work from this same theory.
My studio work will involve the creation and presentation of several new works of performance. These works will vary between 5-70 minutes long, and each will be constructed over a period of four to six months. Each one will focus on a specific research question, and the questions will evolve from performance to performance, in order to allow for a flexibility of inquiry that will build on the research findings from the previous project(s). The content of the pieces will consist of different retellings of stories from classical mythology (underworld stories, enchantments and love spells, stories of death and rebirth), reconfigured for a radically contemporary speaking subjectivity. I will be working with a group of collaborators, developing the works based on obsessions, desires, ideas of narcissism, desires to perform enchantments, etc.. We will be presenting these works in intimate spaces, living rooms and small galleries, with the intention of performing them outside of Phoenix and outside of the United States.
In terms of the broader context, the roots of this work are in the historical avant-garde, particularly in Symbolism, Surrealism, and Dadaism. I use some of the basic tenets of these movements to create work that is entirely contemporary, reflective of pop culture and re-mix sensibility, but on a deep level contains traits of esotericism and mysticism (particularly drawing on Afro-Caribbean religious systems). This mix of strategies and aesthetic roots speaks of a muti-vocality and transcultural identity that seems particular to the Americas. In effect, then, the work finds its context in re-imagining historical forms, Body Art strategies of the 70s, and contemporary media technologies, to make a new form that has resonances in 19th century literary theory and 20th century post-structural identity theory, but has a distinctively 21st century grounding.
I will be creating each of these works utilizing the methodologies that Ana Mendieta found useful when she was a student at the University of Iowa. She took an approach that made work through a series of three phases: Planning, Execution, and Documentation.
For my work, the planning stage for these pieces will consist in first finding an appropriate chain of common obsessions and concerns among the collaborators. Through this, we will weave together a loose framework that will start to resemble a story that we want to tell. Once we have this in place, I will look for an appropriate underworld myth that can contain all of our concerns. At the same time, I’ll also be looking for extremes in pop culture references, to make a space where there are contemporary parallels, a performative present, as material for the live action. The space of myth will be the material that will become the content of the video. In the execution, we will be working together to make a theatrical performance where the digital and the live come together. The space in between the live and the mediated will be the site where I will create fissures between representations of gender and identity, and invoke and disturb desire (both desire of the performer, and the desire of the spectator to see themselves both reflected and hidden). This space is necessarily ephemeral, because it is that same space where a spell (or, in terms of Afro-Caribbean cosmology, a kanga, a work) becomes enacted.
In the documentation, I will be recording the performances as combinations of live and media art, so that there can be an archive of the work from which to formulate my final ideas toward developing a new theory of art-making. I will also have to include supplementary materials, specifically in the form of interviews from the spectators, so that I can gauge how their own subjective experiences engaged with the works. I will also include material from the collaborators, so that their own subjective experiences can enter into the equation. I suspect there will be surprising relations between the experiences of performers and spectators, and I am hoping that there will be moments where the subjective experience becomes something quite unusual, quite other, than the usual experience of performing or watching.
I’ve been discussing some of the theoretical concerns in the description above with the collaborators, outlining this as the first project toward this degree. The working title for the next performance is “Monsters of the Sea.” I’ve contacted all the potential participants*, they all said yes, so we met at a hookah bar to discuss the project in detail. We’ll be discussing and meeting occasionally for some preparatory ritual work, but the rehearsal process doesn’t begin in earnest until mid-April. So this means that writing the RDC1 will come just in time, and will be written with the intention of serving its administrative purpose, but also for outlining a methodology of working. Theory and practice going hand in hand. Lovely.
*I’m not sure if I should say “participants” or “collaborators,” and am almost tempted to call them “co-conspirators,” like I did a few years ago. I want to acknowledge their own subject positions within the work. There is some fluidity in terms of the authorship and construction of these texts for media and performance, and I want to allow for as much agency as possible. At the same time, it’s my vision, ultimately. I need to refine my discourse here. I have a knee-jerk reflex to talk about myself as a kind of Joseph Chaikin-like director, where the authority of my own position is destabilized, in good 60s hippie theater form. Except. In practice, it’s much closer to Kantor, leading the actors like a director in a traditional sense, only with the strings and the lights and the chords in full view, so that part of the process is to make visible this power relationship. I’m very much in favor of working toward that end, in the second example, and want to consider how to talk about a hierarchical relationship that questions itself but still retains its most useful functions. And, of course, reflects my own biases (I really get frustrated with work that is really devised and company-created, even though I pretend otherwise).
The last thing I want to mention is that I will be playing with voices in the documentation of this. This voice here, more or less coherent, the one that is trying to communicate discursively (sometimes a little playfully), and the one/s that are much more subjective, in order to work with the radical subjectivities that this project seems to demand, from the inside out. Those will be documented in other formats, some writing, lots of voice, video, scribbling, etc. More to come on that.
And a working bibliography is on the way very soon.
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