Bron Fionnachd-Fein has brought to the Thinker's attention a video'd performance, Exit Strategy, by Kanarinka (Catherine d'Ignazio, of the 'Fluxus-inspired', Boston-based group iKatun. She suggests very plausibly that it appears to be a performance of George Brecht's 1961 score, Word Event . Exit .
You can view the performance at: http://www.ikatun.org/kanarinka/exit-strategy/
Links between this and some of the sources mentioned in the previous post should be immediately apparent -- particularly when you see the location of the performance.
The performance I find nightmarish and references the notion of the inside and outside blurring to create the psychotic - which I really like.
ReplyDeleteIt also plays with the ridiculous - which in itself can be frightening, even maddening, and sometimes the sort of thing that makes us laugh inappropriately. I recall -- from many years ago -- a one-para newspaper report in a Sydney paper, about a person attempting to get through a security screen at an airport in Florida. Security staff saw that he was carrying a pistol, but he denied this, and kept insisting on going through the security screen, time and time again: but, of course, each time he went through, the alarms went off. Finally, in disgust and still denying he was actually carrying a pistol, he took it out of his jacket pocket and shot himself in the head. The image I have of this simultaneous moment of denial and finality, and the earlier, almost Pythonesque, performance at the security screen is something that I occasionally recall, as much for questioning my own variable reactions to the report, as much as for the entire event being removed of almost all emotion and thus made even more ridiculous, by its pragmatic reporting.
ReplyDeleteThat is actually hilarious! - what a fantastic reaction. That is a stunning anecdote and agreed that it taps into some kind of symbolic/material/ontological strategy.
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