[-empyre-] forgetting,oblivion

[maria at out-of-sync.com]

...inspired by G. H. Hovagimyan's prankster piece and his switching IP  
etc (wha a great story!) I thought maybe it might work for my lost 
posts.  I'm going to  try sending through web mail - from another 
computer and therefore IP...
here's the post I sent yesterday...

Every generation -since the 90s-  seems to need to re-do or re-visit  
the conceptual and performance artworks of the 60s and 70s. it's the  
mother lode.
Recently Eva and Marco Mentes, formerly, 0100101110101101.org have  been doing
'synthetic' performances on Second Life -- so far they  have re-enacted 
Joseph Beuy's 7000 Oaks, and Valie Export's Tapp and  Tastkino and vito 
Acconci's Seedbed. the latest is Chris Burden's  Shoot -- looking at 
the grainy photo of the original Shoot on their website took me back to 
Philip Auslander's essay, "The Performativity  of Performance 
Documentation" where he asks "whether performance  recreations based on 
documentation actually recreate the underlying  performances or perform 
the documentation."

In our recent work, performative encounters in public places, we've  
been fascinated with just this sort of thing. and playing around with  
the role of the document to the artwork. In Searching for rue Simon- 
Crubellier, the act of asking directions was documented on video, but  
there was no 'performance' as such, just the documenting. It's a  small 
difference, but it's the difference that makes the difference'  as 
Bates said.

For the Mentes', the performances are not a homage --- "Eva and me,  we 
hate performance art, we never quite got the point." but a re-enactment 
"to understand what made it so un-interesting to  us".. maybe you had 
to be there.  but it does raise the question of  which one will be 
remembered. Chris Burden or Eva and Marco's  synthetic performance?

maria

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