NewWorLdLog: Fire Escape Prfmnc Rsrch UPDATE

Wednesday 27 October 2010

Fire Escape Prfmnc Rsrch UPDATE

Spent a few hours being 'in-the-space', or the site rather, experimenting with the few wool/thread/string materials I have/had brought with me to NYC on the CEP.

Began writing material shopping lists, some other snippets, bare threads of text for the performance, scheduled for mid-November.
The texts will be and are being written on Duplicate Sales Receipts- thereby continuing my usage and reserach into Derrida and the Mystic Writing Pad, postmodern notions of the 'origin' and the 'copy'.
This time, borne out of my mistake to use a soft ball pen insteda of a pencil, when first writing on the duplicate receipts, that the audience should re-write over the text I write, thereby placing both my handwritten text 'under erasure' but also allowing for their text to be impressed firmer onto the duplicates beneath. A double gesture still nacent but could prove fruitful as a means of re-defining the notion of 're-writing'- not as a deliberate, readable change to the a work from the text [remember Barthes] but rather how repetition can be deconstructive and subervsive to its apparent, illusiory intentionality through erasure...

My biggest convern so far is the 'clothes-shelter' I envisage constructing. Need to figure out exactly how it will be supported about how much 'washing line' I will need.

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CEP Proposal

Deleuze & Guattari once wrote that “New York is virtually a city without a language...” [from Postulates of Linguistics in A Thousand Plateaus, 1923, pp. 103]. How provocative a statement to make about a city brimming with so many languages, dialects, slang etc. I thought. New York for me has always been, as for so many before me, a city of such artistic prestige and accomplishment, vitality and possibility. It has drawn young artists to its bright lights and wide streets for decades now, and it will continue to. Surely New York is a city without any ‘without’: a city of infinite possibility and opportunity, offering itself to all whom arrive, making them never want to leave, offering everything they need.

But I was too hasty; my argumentative cry against with their provocations would have been quickly silenced, had I read a little further on: “There is no language that does not have intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities...” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1923, pp103). But my silence was brought with a smile, with a sense of relief, of assurance. Just as I believe[d], and have argued, New York is a city without a language- without a set, solid and all-conforming ‘language’, but rather a multiplicity of tongue, of variations of the tongue, the lingua franca, of English. New York for me is a prime example of how all languages, exchanged by so many different people from such different places is continually being shaped, changed and modified, mutating every day through common shared discourse and people trying to make sense to each other.

Having been born in one country but then being raised between two countries has brought difficulty when pledging allegiance to either. I have felt neither here nor there, not this nor that. What happens to those who don't feel a part, or feel apart, from their surroundings? They start something new; they seek out new places to live and to start again, afresh. The historical implication of New York City having been built ex nihilo by such a wide group of people(s) having travelled from their Old World in search of the New, ready to build themselves a New life in new contexts has always inspired me to travel and work there, to also become a part of the engagement with the 'new' moving away from the old, the traditional, the conventional, the usual, the obvious. I can see a direct link between this state of mind, towards progression through experimentation, in my journey to art and performance College and my future journey to New York and the USA, to frame my questions around the 'New' within city whose very name and ethos is just that.