theLost&Found: August 2010

In May, I performed with Heather Jones in a durational piece at the monthly live art showcase ArtEvict:

Check it out on her blog

She's got some writing about it there, but this is what it made me think:

"Heather's box performance asks us to examine where one person ends and another begins. For those in the know, the performers' relationship brings this question into the romantic realm of intimacy. But it speaks to a much wider audience. The initial questions of "whose finger" start us on a course of inquiry that encompasses not only the spatial existence of two people and thus the physical boundaries of which we are so aware, but the metaphysical also; boundaries formed by emotion, personality, convention, expectations, all come under scrutiny. The question of who I am divided from or choosing to be-at-odds with or to cooperate with, and in what way? Pertains not only to my existence in space and time with one other, but the existence of all of us simultaneously in one world. To maintain the illusion of an impossible single entity in the box, the performers' movements need to be steady and coordinated, flowing round each other like a dance. We are in this together, we cannot afford to be-at-odds with each other."

I wrote this in my notebook on the day of the performance. Thinking about this today in the light of social justice and anti-capitalism issues (I recently watched the first Yes Men film) I wonder: Are we all in the same box?

I've also been reading Undergoing God by James Alison and he has a lot to say about the need to not view yourself as worthy or good or valuable or powerful over-against an "evil" other who is none of these things according to your system of goodness. I won't go into that now, you'll have to read it yourself. Anyway, what it got me thinking about, and this relates to the box, was the way we relate to each other everyday. For instance, I'm waiting to get on a tube, and I'm in the front of the cluster by the door and as I wait to let passengers off the train some guy barges past me and takes the last seat - I'm annoyed, but only because his selfishness has trumped my own. A similar annoyance overtook me in a local independent supermarket the other day when a lady barged past me and again when I got stuck behind a pushchair clogging the narrow aisles (this supermarket is not for wheel chair users). The problem was, of course, not really that these people hindered my ability to go about my business, but that my attitude to them was of resentment because I felt they had hindered my going about my business. The truth is, we were all going about the same business together, and here I must return to the dance analogy above, as I realised that this is not just about running errands and traveling home on the underground, it's about far larger social structures and boundaries between people that cause friction because we refuse to compromise or cooperate, seeking first our own way - but I wonder if we shouldn't be aiming at one single, graceful, flowing world wide... dance... eurgh my god that's a horrible thing to write. It could look like corporations co-operating with manufacturers for the benefit of humanity, rather than corporations exploiting manufacturers for the good of their own bank accounts. Something like that. Anyway, I think we probably are all in the same box, in a way, and humanity will struggle to advance if we remain in our current state of being-at-odds with each other and refusing to cooperate. I for one would like to be less greedy and selfish, and easier going in situations of everyday friction. So that's that.

Here's a new video, for an old song, using old footage that was meant to be for this video but never got made until now, and I think it might be bad, but it might make up for the previous rant: