Give & Take @ Trash Salon

Here are some pictures documenting my raffle at the Trash Salon in October where we raffled away people's trashed ideas for performance pieces. We each have a year to complete the idea that we won. 

Presented by Performance Matters, a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton, and the Live Art
Development Agency financially assisted by AHRC. Documentation by Christa Holka.

Bin There Done That

A collection of quotes and paraphrased statements from Trashing Performance's public programme last week which regrettably may hold less meaning here as they are out of context, but perhaps they will remind me and the other participants/audience members about what we experienced: 

Be Cheesy! ... Hollow and synthetic fruit come hither!
-Owen Parry

Bin There, Done That 
- P A Skantze

In response to the name 'trash performance' I'd like to coin the term 'Light Art'.
-Scottee

"It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." - Dolly Parton
- Lois Weaver

... feeling world has no patience for your complexity

Sometimes crisis doesn't feel like crisis.

Without fantasy, how can you imagine a rich relation to the social?
- Lauren Berlant

I am one of those melodramatic women that make others shut off emotionally.
- Jennifer Doyle

"I've got a confession to make: Middle-class values make me sick" - Jo Spence
- Lisa Blackman and Bird la Bird

I am my own worst nightmare and I'm living the dream.
- David Hoyle

"...what we want to get rid of tells us who we are[...]but what we want to get rid of also makes us who we are" - Gay Hawkins
- Katerina Paramana

Spectacle should not be exclusive to Kylie Monogue.

cultivating your brand as an artist = repeat yourself
-Neil Bartlett

I'd like to take the feeling I have when I'm masturbating and put it on display. 

I'm romantic about perverse things in a teenage girl sort of way.

Good art is made by people who are motivated by pleasure. 
- Bruce Benderson

I really feel uncomfortable having a voice most of the time.
- Bean 

The commercial sector will always look to radical work because they want to sell more stuff.
-Keith Khan

When the going gets tough, the mainstream fucks off. 
- Lois Keidan

Gert Wilder's said "Art is just a Leftist hobby"
- Oreet Ashery

I suffer from A.D.D.D. (Attention Deficit Drag Disorder).

If you give a drag queen a piece of fabric, chances are she'll twirl.
- Joe E Jeffreys

Dive into the forbidden!

Life has me by the balls, performance lets me get back at life.
- Rocio Bolivar (La Congelada de Uva)

You know nothing if you don't know pleasure is  the pleasure of the other.

art = therapy

the present pathology = a problem of respiration; the sickening perception of the other's breath 

conspiration = ability to breathe together / reactivation of the collective breath

I am not a judge, I am a doctor; I want to heal, not to judge.

When people are suffering they are never guilty. 
- Franco 'Bifo' Berardi

For me performance is the best political tool.

Everyone is not an artist.

A new language is needed because political art and protest are inefficient.

Is it art? I don't even care anymore; I'm the happiest I've ever been.
- Tania Bruguera

Art, man it's fucking long... of course we like art, but we like a little of it.

People without education want comfort and simplicity; they don't want to see what's funded by the Arts Council.

It is my long term passion to reach those ordinary people.
- Simon Casson

Artists are part of the economic structure of power no matter how unsuccessfully. 
- Common Culture

We are all in transition.
- Ingo Cando

Give & Take

(This is the idea I won and that I will have to perform within a year.)

At yesterday's Trash Salon, as a response to the question of how to do things with waste, I orchestrated a raffle of ideas - an exchange of unfulfilled art aspirations. These were the instructions:

Have you had a great idea for a performance that for some reason or another you just couldn’t pull off?

Don’t let your live art ideas go to waste! Give them to a performance artist who needs them!

Feeling the pressure to come up with new ideas for live art? Do you have a show lined up, but no clue what to do?

Take a load off and use someone else’s idea! This show is going to make itself.

It’s easy, just follow these simple steps:

1.  Think of an art idea you had that you never acted on and write it down on a card.

2.  Sign over permission for another artist to use it. (This is a small price to pay, considering you now have the chance to win someone else’s idea – no strings attached!)

3.  Swap the idea for a sheet of tickets.

4.  To win someone else’s idea place as many tickets as you wish into the adjacent cup.

5.  Towards the end of today’s salon, we will raffle each idea off, so keep your ears pricked and listen for your number. This could be your lucky day.

The below signed artists understand that in offering an idea to Oriana Fox’s ‘Give & Take’ raffle, they no longer hold any rights over that idea or the work(s) produced from it, and therefore have no recourse to financial or copyright claims when it is used by the performer who has won it. In agreeing to participate in the raffle, and in exchange for forfeiting authorship of their idea donation, they have the chance to win an idea and therefore promise to perform it to the best of their ability within one year of today 25 October 2011. They promise to notify Oriana as to when this live art piece took place, supplying her with a piece of documentation for her archive and that of performance matters.

 Signature                                    Name                          Email                     

 

Dance Theatre Journal - Trashy students get their grubby mits all over it


Cover: Penny Arcade, Photo by Christa Holka                               

Trashing Dance Theatre Journal

We are thrilled to announce the forthcoming issue of Trashing Dance Theatre Journal co-edited by João Florêncio and Owen Parry.

This special issue of Dance Theatre Journal is a dedicated and rigorous exploration of Trash in art, performance, work, and club culture. It features interviews with performance star and living-legend Penny Arcade, club performer Mouse, sex worker and activist Thierry Schaffauser, plus articles exploring the work of John Sex, Danish collective dunst, Club Wotever and the 'lowest form of performance' - living street sculptures, wasted works, and contaminated performances. Forms of trashy articulation including soap box articles, TV Chat Shows and Tabloid Newspapers interrupt and compliment more formal essays and interviews in this special issue!

Contributors include:

Augusto Corrieri
Bryony Kimmings
Eirini Kartsaki
Johanna Linsley
Lisa Wesley
Lorena Rivero de Beer
Marcia Farquhar
Marianne Mulvey
Mathias Danbolt
Oriana Fox
R. Justin Hunt
Rachel Lois Clapham
Season Butler
Tero Nahua
The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein
Vikki Chalklin

Trashing Dance Theatre Journal will be available to purchase through the Unbound stall at the Trashing Performance Public Programme.

See www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk for details

How To Do Things With Waste

Trash Salon: How to do things with waste?

2–6pm

25 October
Toynbee Studios, Court room


Tickets for the Salon are FREE on a first-come-first-served basis on the day


A Salon with Performance Matters Researchers

 

 

Join PhD researchers and artists (including me!) from Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Roehampton as they kick-start the week’s events by sharing their ‘wasted works.' At the Trash Salon, presentations, papers and performances and various show-and-tell formats will centre around those ideas, works, and projects that for various reasons were unfinished, refused, rejected, thrown out, and interrupted: the sketch in the notebook, the unsuccessful project proposal, the unaccomplished element, the event that was cancelled. What happens to these wasted works and ideas, and what are their potentials, if any?

Does showing wasted work imply salvaging it from the trash heap? Is recuperating and transforming waste enough? Or might we think about the ways we reflect upon, present and perform these wasted works? These are some of its questions.

To trash or not to trash, that is the question

    


I was talking about my tendency to choose trashy role models yesterday at the Trashing Performance Seminar & Workshop. For example, let's look at the fact that when presented with the history of feminist art at university, the woman I admired most was Judy Chicago, a woman predominantly 'trashed' by academia and art criticism. I could have chosen someone super-intellectual like Mary Kelly. She does have great hair. 

How To Be Sexy - academic proposal

Just submitted this proposal to my colleagues in the Performance Matters research project who will be editing a special issue of Dance Theatre Journal. Hope I get selected and that I can make this happen...

How To Be Sexy: Cosey Fanni Tutti and Mouse on The O Show

My research explores the relationship between different generations of women who I would define as ‘feminist performance artists’, looking to their work as examples for how to be a happy woman. This entails grappling with the ways in which both feminist art and self-help respectively (and perhaps in collaboration) can create a “sense of belonging” and “refusal[s] or creative contravention[s] to feminine normativity”.[1] Following on from theorist Lauren Berlant’s statement that “the woman who was adequate to [women’s culture industry’s] version of normal femininity was as powerful as a feminist would aspire to be”, my question is: What relationship to power and/or happiness can I achieve by simultaneously embodying avant-garde and popular models for female agency?[2]

            One outlet for this practice-based research is my new web-TV series The O Show which mimics the tropes of daytime television by incorporating interviews, how-to advice and makeovers, combining genuine storytelling with comical send-ups of the self-help industry. The chat-show format provides a framework in which to genuinely investigate questions at the heart of my doctoral research as well as to both critique and champion popular modes of knowledge dissemination and the confessional. For one episode I plan to interview performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti and club performer Mouse, focusing on their respective experiences in the sex industry. The transcript and stills from the episode will form my contribution to the journal. Having these two artists on the show is an opportunity to explore the complexity of sex-positive feminism, specifically in light of the phenomenon of the prostitute-performance artist as well as to celebrate the legacy of historical figures such as Tutti and their impact on a contemporary generation of performers.

 


[1] Berlant, Lauren, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, p.4.

[2] Berlant, Lauren, The Female Complaint, p.178.