Category: Private Theatre

Joshua Sofaer

Joshua Sofaer (b. 1972 Cambridge, England) is an artist who is centrally concerned with modes of collaboration and participation.

From Perform Every Day:

In a world of natural look makeup where people spend hours putting on various different applications in an attempt to look like they are wearing none at all, is it any wonder that there is some confusion over what reality might really be?

Part of this confusion is to do with performance; how to discern ‘what is’ and ‘what is performance’? From the global ramifications of party and nation politics to the esoteric world of live art, from the tragic spectacular of international terrorism to the undergraduate drama student, from the stock-market to soap-opera, from high performance drugs to performance studies – ‘performance’ is the modus operandi of contemporary culture. It seems now that there is only performance.

Do not despair!

If we begin to understand the things we take for granted in our everyday lives as constructs of performance in and of themselves, if we relish these everyday performances for what they offer us, then there is hope. We become the audience of our very own private theatre.

Also: Any Questions; Seven Reasons Why Live Art Gives Better Value.

Harry Goldgar, Telepath

Googling on the phrase “telepathy project”, I found this. See also.

I think most people would call this psychosis, not art. But like many manifestations of delusional paranoia, it’s also recognisable as beautiful art, even if it wasn’t created with that intent.

We all live in our own dreamworld(s) – some people’s are just more divergent from the norm (and, for better or worse, a lot more interesting) than others’.

Sophie Calle

(via J & Freakley.)

Official site.

From the Tate Britain’s catalogue piece on 1998 show The Birthday Ceremony:

Sophie Calle is fascinated by the interface between our public lives and our private selves. This has led her to investigate patterns of behaviour using techniques akin to those of a private investigator, a psychologist, or a forensic scientist. It has also led her to investigate her own behaviour so that her life, as lived and as imagined, has informed many of her most interesting works.

…

The Birthday Ceremony draws our attention to the way in which we construct our identity around secret rituals (from forms of self-indulgence to forms of self-denial) and surround ourselves with objects and activities that give meaning and substance to both our private and our public lives.

Description of Maria Turner, from Paul Auster’s “Leviathan“:

I found her a little scary, perhaps even perverse (which lent a certain excitement to our initial contacts), but as time went on I understood that she was … an unorthodox person who lived her life according to a set of bizarre, private rituals. Every experience was systemized for her, a self-contained adventure that generated its own risks and limitations…

Maria was an artist, but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly described as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these descriptions was accurate, and in the end I don’t think she can be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any particular medium or discipline. Ideas would take hold of her, she would work on projects, there would be concrete results that would be shown in galleries, but this activity didn’t stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it. Living always came first, and a number of her most time consuming projects were done strictly for herself and never shown to anyone.

“Calle’s work is very much tied up with a process. Her art unfolds as she goes through each stage of preparation and execution. As she descibes (below), the form of the final product – the thing which the gallery viewer actually sees – is the least significant part.“

Interesting June 2007 Guardian article.

I think so.

I Feel Better After I Type To You

From Lot 49:

Within the third of the ten files of user search queries AOL mistakenly released, there’s a poem of sorts. Between May 7 and May 31 of this year, AOL user 23187425 submitted a series of more than 8,200 queries with no evident intention of finding anything – only a handful of the entries are paired with a search results URL. Rather, the author’s series of queries forms a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.

Whether it’s fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It’s a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL’s search engine?

AOL user 23187425’s “stream of consciousness soliloquy” has now been turned into a book by Superbunker (Superbunker being “a framework for conducting and disseminating cultural research… operating as a cross between a think tank and a decentralized federation of neo-alchemical laboratories..”).

I want one.