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Dear Robin,
I rushed over the details and blush at my "surprising and exciting and
surprising and..".  No, the "discussion" with the scientist and artists of
various disciplines wasn't actually primarily verbal.  It was physical. 
The workshops, as I said, used performance as the means.  This probably
conjures mimetics, which is also quite opposite to the tenor.  Performance
is for me not a centre of activity but a frame of time and space within
which what happens is the performance.  If nothing happens, that's the
performance.  But there's no nuthin.  Even then the frame happens, and the
incidental.  The frame is up for grabs.  Both time and space can be defined
according to whoever.  Definitions will be understood multifariously and
accepted ditto.  Beyond this point I could only be anecdotal (verbal) about
on this discussion list, but basically it happens at all sensory levels and
as many aesthetic ones as you like.

There's discussion too, but the best points are made in the choice of
frames for the next session.  Missing each others' points happens too, but
then you have to learn to speak each others' languages.  Or talk about
something else.  Sometimes more fruitful.  As in the Theatre of Mistakes,
the clashes are where it starts, not stops.  Besides, communication in many
ways IS the point.

Science may seem discursive to a writer but actually it's a way of
approaching matter.  The anecdote about Madeleine in the workshop is that I
had been framing by having the observed and the observer, not necessarily
outside the observed.  She trounced my supposed thoroughness by having the
observer BEFORE the observed.

And re artists whose work resists being seen whole, Joel Fisher has done a
series of bronzes, of which the far side is unguessable from the one you're
looking at, not simply a matter of walking around it but, especially given
the series, almost hard to remember from the otther side.  Interestingly,
they were made by his imagining what 3-dimensional object an abstract
line-drawing was a drawing of.


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