participation/artthings

EXTREME PARTICIPATION in Art Things, preparing talk for Seattle, might as well jot it down here...

Arakawa: how the body had to interact with the space – so place became space: de Certeau. The experience of the body in extremes: How uncomfortable things can be made to be, that is noticing too…expenditure of bodily energy, not just visit but interact with the discomfort of the house. My discomfort was intense in Tokyo, at house designed by Arakawa, even at sitting – bad knee was good --
, then, causing more discomfort, so more noticing

With Tino Seghal, at the Guggenheim last year, thinking about the ordinary…no objects, objectless -- conversation as the ultimate joiner, revealer – extreme of purity but of use of self
Risking the Banal – and using the body. Extreme exhaustion of conversation, and how to frame it: training and doing. .
Framing the conversation within limits: brusque meeting, and then cutoff in a more elegant fashion.
How to frame and remember the ordinary (MIT publication) – how to keep what went on (reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “how to keep…” )… notes, remindering… encounters - Surrealist encounters – at times, the everyday magic Annette Messager speaks of, at times, ultimate boredom: the ritual takes over. Sontag on Diane Arbus, p. 195, in Solomon=Godeau:, on the “Inside/out” experience: “for boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

So the whole thing was made of air, of breath, of talk.
Nothing on the walls – turned back to the self and the talk
Freespace: but no notebook…freedom from writing during the whole
Six-week thing…

I read it now, in the afterlight of the OWS experience, as the everyday of and as thisness… About noticing: what you wear, what you read in the paper …changing our level from place into space , as in Michel de Certeau : you change it into from a fixed Place to a Space as a “practiced place” – “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it” (quoted Renee Green, The Everyday,78)