[-empyre-] more and the question about performance

[Alan Sondheim]

I think it was the work; there was a lot of art based on everyday 
activites.

There's always what Smylie called the "work of the audience," but there is 
also audience, for beheading, unfortunately. -

- Alan

On Sat, 15 Nov 2014, Erik Ehn wrote:

> represented by other means in the sense that the floor didn't need to be
> swept or if it did that wasn't the point - what was being represented was
> the labor, above the activity, or specifically spectatorship... so the work
> of sweeping transferred to the work of watching sweeping?
> 
> 
> 
> On Saturday, November 15, 2014 9:38 AM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com>
> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Hi Erik,
> 
> I do want to reply, briefly, to you here.
> You state (the quote didn't work):
> 
> a thing, to be art, must represent a thing by other means. so, the life in
> a flower (a feature of time) is re-presented in arrangement (a feature of
> space). [barba, dictionary of theatre anthropology]
> 
> - and it seems to me, that "to be art" - in order to be art - is
> problematic; certainly there has been a lot of writing on the iconic (in
> Peirce's sense) to claim otherwise - a thing can represent itself. This
> was fundamental to a lot of West Coast feminist art from the 60s and 70s -
> where sweeping a floor for example wasn't representing sweeping "by other
> means" but was exactly what it seemed - work. Chris Burden played off this
> a number of times as well.
> 
> So when you state
> 
> to represent killing by killing is anti-performance.
> 
> 
> - for me it's performance, a horrifying one, but performance nonetheless.
> 
> (I'm always suspicious as well about anti-anything, such as "anti-poems,"
> "anti-art" etc.; these exist within the same fold.)
> 
> Thanks, Alan
> 
> 
> 
>

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