Getting Ready to "Treeblog"

 Okay, so I've been away from the blog.  I don't think I am alone in taking a holiday hiatus from blogging, but this time the cause was even more pernicious.  Let's just say my holiday visit home was fraught with more drama than usual.  Parents age and sometimes they need extra care...that they resist.  This was a holiday of intervention, which means it was no holiday at all.  I don't mean to be coy, but I honestly don't think I am ready to blog about it.  If ever.

So, instead, let me give you a heads-up for the upcoming week that will likely see a lot of activity on this blog and several of the others on which I participate.  As I've written about before, I am a member of an on-line performance/art collective, @Platea.  Next week, @Platea will be conducting another on-line event for which I am the primary architect.  The project is the eighth @Platea happening to date and is titled, "Treeblogging."  This hyperlink will take you to my write up of the protocol as well as to a little meditation on why folks interested in art and the internet might find the image of a tree interesting and resonant. 

The general idea of the project is a pun on "reblogging" (Tumblr) and "retweeting" (Twitter) while adding an element of "remixing."  On Monday (1/10), I will post to the @Platea blog some open source material (text, jpeg, sound file, etc.) that others may use to create their own art and post it on their blogs, Flickr accounts, YouTube accounts, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, etc.  As the tree of interconnected and mutually inspired artworks grows, folks may sample not only from the original material posted at @Platea but also from the works others make from that material. 

If you play along (and I hope you will!), be sure to follow the protocol for linking forward/linking back to your work.  I'll be tracking folks' contributions this way and building an interactive map of the happening, posted daily at the @Platea blog.  You can use that graphic to follow the works others are making and the links between them. 

The mapping may get beyond me...the territory always exceeds the map, after all.  But it is the effort that counts, right?  And I am looking forward to burying myself in this art project as the perfect tonic for a difficult holiday break.  At least this promises to be a more fun engagement with connections and reinterpreting what others have said...

Some Cartoons

In digging around for a blog topic this week, I thought it might be fun to share some cartooning from my sketchbooks.  These are scans without any real digital clean-up.  If they seem small on this page, click on the image for a larger view.

First, let me be perfectly clear: I am not a professional visual artist or cartoonist.  My professional training is in communication.  And while I have some undergraduate design courses under my belt and a long standing hobby of drawing and painting, this is not where I earn a living.  I starting teaching courses in Visual Rhetoric several years ago, and a favorite unit in that class is on cartoons (particularly political cartoons).  Part of my training is also in Performance Studies, which suggests that doing is one of the best ways of learning.  So, I took a hand at making cartoons.  They may look simple, but they are harder than they appear.  Kind of like haiku, that way. 

I also share a certain amount of frustration with the scholarly literature of visual rhetoric.  Many of these folks do not produce visual messages (of cartoons or other varieties).  Not that critics have to be practitioners, but I think there is a great value from actually doing work in the phenomenon you choose to theorize/criticize.  My admiration for editorial cartoonists went up exponentially when I tried to make a political cartoon.  In addition to the craft of line-art, there is an economy of expression in the one-liner.  It ain't easy, and I appreciate these artists' craft because, in part, they have to make it look easy.  In my own teaching and scholarship (as well as my performance work), I learn so much from the doing, and I have learned so much from doing cartoons.

So I admit, with some pride in the fact, that I am an amateur.  French cultural theorist Roland Barthes similarly claimed the status of amateur and defined it thus:  "The Amateur engages in painting, music, sport, science, without the spirit of mastery or competition[...] he establishes himself graciously (for nothing) in the signifier: in the immediately definitive substance of music, of painting[...] he is – he will be perhaps – the counter-bourgeois artist" [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 2].  My interest in comics and cartoons is, as the root of "amateur" suggests, in my love for them.  I am happy to make them as an act of exploration and appreciation.  I am happy to share them in a non-competitive, non-commercial spirit. 

The images on this page are from my sketchbooks.  Most are from the last two years.  They are some of the better pages where I think I hit on a message and an image with the cartoonist's economy of expression.  Believe me, they are surrounded by pages and pages of less successful attempts.

I am currently cartooning for the collaborative blog, Black Magpie Theory; you can find some of my attempts at political caricature and commentary over there.  And of course, I also create original art comics for this blog, experimental comics, poemicstrip, and occasionally Abstract Comics.

Petit Jean Performance Festival

I'm just back from the annual ritual of taking students (graduate and undergraduate) to the Petit Jean Performance Festival at Petit Jean State Park outside Morrilton, Arkansas.  I've been attending this event off and on for the past 20+ years.  And it is always a good time.

Now, by "good time" I mean that this is a bunch of (mostly) college students on a mountain doing the work/play of performance by day and socializing by night, with the occasional hike to a waterfall thrown in for good measure.  And all of it somehow related.  It's a bit of a struggle to remind party-hearty students that this isn't a university-paid vacation but an educational experience and an opportunity to be ambassadors for the university.  But so far, we've kept our focus on the learning objectives all while making space for what should be a good time.

This year's theme was "Experimental Adaptations," and the workshop was facilitated by long-time festival attendee, Jason Hedrick of Sauk Valley Community College.  Jason is an alum of the SIUC Performance Studies graduate program, so seeing him run an excellent workshop was an extra joy.  He asked that we consider "distortion" a productive tool of interpretation.  He also asked that we not only consider traditional "literature" as an artifact for such distorted interpretation but also other media.  So, for example, he brought a show that involved live performance distortion of classic experimental short films that occurred in various relationships (in front of, behind, around, over, etc.) a screening of those films.  The result was something recognizable as performance art but arrived at by some pretty classic traditions of oral interpretation.  In the process, I thought he showed clear directions for the future even as he embraced traditions that many like to consider "retro" and without relevance today.

My students and I brought a show of our own.  We did a critical/ experimental adaptation of J.D. Salinger's short story, "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," from the collection Nine Stories.  In our adaptation, we created several interventions drawing attention to Salinger's use of the "unsaid" to both mark and erase difference along race, gender, and class lines.  We tried to show what aspects of this story from half a century ago were still relevant to modern audiences even while marking  mysteries in the oblique references and suggestive characterizations of Salinger's prose.  I think we too gave a reverential nod to the past (the recently deceased Salinger, Chamber Theatre, etc.) even while experimenting with the holy trinity of Cultural Studies.  And we did so in a way that remained both accessible and entertaining.  What else do you call a production that takes a pause to have elite New Yorkers square dance to Dwight Conquergood's moral map for ethnography?  As one character says, "How esoteric!"  Indeed.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Petit Jean Performance Festival is that, in addition to prepared solo and group performances that the schools bring, the workshop generates its own group performance.  Students (graduate and undergraduate) mingle in multi-school small groups and follow a prompt given by the festival facilitator.  This year there was even a faculty group.  At the end of the two day (!!) festival, we present the group work.  Jason did a great job creating a frame for these performances such that they hung together as a cohesive festival project.  Imagine a performance event where the audience and performer roles are constantly shifting, as do the aesthetics.  We move through a space with purpose and structure, audiencing and performing as we go.

So, I call this festival a ritual, mostly because it has a cyclical, repetitive structure that I think fits the broadest definition of "ritual."  We perform rites, from in situ group performances to contributed offerings, from libations to pilgrimages to nearby altars of natural beauty.  Each year, there are the converts, those students (and faculty) making their first trip to the mountain -- and there ARE initiation rites.  Each year, there is reverent talk of past festivals, from those recently converted and those of us who have been doing this ritual since we were new to the world of performance.  There may be no gods specifically named (except that shifty and ambiguous deity, "Performance"), but there is still something almost holy about the experience.  While some criticism can be made for the ways the rites change (poor additions, sad deletions), there is still a palpable sense of significance, the accumulation of time and regular practice in a space already magical but made more so by our work/play there.

It's hard to leave that space and its energy to return to the world of classes and end-of-term grading.  It's hard to let it go.  But we do as we must.  And I plan, against all odds and the ever decreasing university budget for such "luxuries," to return with a fresh contingent next year.  Or well, luckily for us, this is a strange calendar where the festival will move from spring to fall and so 2010 will have two Petit Jean Performance Festivals -- one in April and one in October.  Who can say what influence such a confluence of ritual energy will have on the universe?

Networked Performance

So, I am recently back from the Southern States Communication Association conference in Memphis where I presented a paper on my recent involvements with various art projects on social networking sites.  Principally, these include involvement with @Platea and Inter.Sect.  In the last year, I have participated in several "crowdsourced" happenings sponsored by these organizations.

My paper was on a panel about how folks are using iPhones and other smart phones in performance work.  My paper was mostly about my recent social networking performance work with a nod to how the iPhone makes that more possible, particularly because of its portability and the ways that it allows me to check in on and contribute to projects even when I am away from my desktop.

The presentation was generally well-received, although there was some skepticism from members of the audience less hospitable to virtual performance and social networking. In one case, an audience member had been pretty harsh about Twitter in a previous presentation, and I admit I took the opportunity to speak back to his suspicions.  I am hardly a Twitter-holic.  I think of myself as a "migratory Tweeter," flitting in and out of Twitter as projects, interests, or world events attract me to micro-blog.  But I don't think any of this work with new technology should be met only with disdain.  Moreovr, I grow weary of criticism made from the margins of experience; don't judge something if you haven't spent sufficient time trying and exploring it.

Mostly, the techno-suspicious asked two related questions:  (1) how do you find the time to do this work, and (2) isn't it somehow less authentic for not involving actual human contact?

In answer to the first, I responded that time is always a finite resource, and that all of our interests and activities take time.  We make choices about how to spend our time.  Work demands may limit our availability, but even work involves a certain amount of choice.  How we spend our time -- from reading to watching TV to making a family to participating in on-line communities -- is always a choice.  I find time to do this work (which is also play) because I choose to make time for it.  It engages me enough that I want to spend time at it.  I don't judge others for not making a similar choice; and I welcome those that do.

The second question is a little more difficult to respond to.  I am interested in the intersection of face-to-face encounters with computer mediated encounters.  I am interested in the sustainability issues addressed (and not addressed) by working in a digital, virtual medium rather than a material one.  So, for example, not having canvasses and photo prints cluttering up my studio has freed me to be more experimental in my art; much of my artwork now conveniently is made and stored in digital form. 

But given that we were presenting this work to Performance Studies scholars, this embodied authenticity question takes on additional heft.  Much of Performance Studies inquiry celebrates the body as an epistemological tool, performance as a mode of inquiry, etc.  How, some might ask, is all this social networking stuff an actual performance.  Sure, digital graphics and textual expression, but where is the body?

It's a good point, but I have never been comfortable making the body the ontological essence of performance.  Or, more accurately, making the body clearly on display the center of performance.  Is not this virtual performance an extension of puppetry or the clever mechanism, clear performance traditions predating the computer?  Does a performance stop if a performer works in a mediated environment and leaves the stage while some digital media "takes over"?  Moreover, just because you cannot see me working with these digital interfaces doesn't man that I am not here, making my gestures and leaving traces in a virtual world.  In some ways, doesn't the seemingly absent body of virtual performance more honestly point to the body as a social construct?  Perhaps the anxiety over presence in digital performance does more to reveal absence in so-called "real" physical performance.

By and large, though, my presentation (and others on the panel) were well received by most, in part because what we had to share made the case for us. That, in the end, is the best test for the value of something.  When you show folks what you are doing, do they at least find it interesting?  The work of performance is not a zero-sum game.  We need not force a choice between forms when a choice is not necessary.  There is room (some might even say need) for multiple forms of performance on multiple platforms of display.

For me, I think social networking and the Internet in general would be a dry and boring place if it didn't include and invite opportunities for performance. 

Discipline Slip 'n Slide in Chicago

My work took me to Chicago for Memorial Day Weekend. I was invited to perform my traveling solo show, "Trail Mix: A Sojourn on the Muddy Divide between Nature and Culture," at DePaul University. I've been doing this show for a while. In the fall of 2007 I performed the piece at the National Communication Association (NCA) Convention in the Hilton Towers in Chicago.

The performance investigates blurred "boundaries" between nature and culture, using personal narrative, persona monologues, and playful interrogation of backpacking practice and gear. At one point I do a monologue as a "bear," an ambiguously metaphorical creature who oscillates between being an actual grizzly bear and being a subcultural "type" in the queer community typified by the hyper-masculine, hirsute and large gay man. The monologue explores issues of celebrity, cultural exploitation, marginalization, and how dominant culture tends to designate and treat "Others," nonhuman or otherwise.

After the performance this past Thursday (well received, btw) I was taken out to dinner with DePaul faculty. An old friend and colleague pointed out that the International Mr. Leather (IML) contest was in town and that we should go. She pointed out that I already had the appropriate costume in my "bear" outfit.

What ensued was something like the literalization of the metaphoric practice of my show. That is, in "Trail Mix" I play a lot with metaphor and analogy, but I do so in a way that often oscillates. By oscillation, I mean the comparison goes both ways. In some analysis of metaphors, critics refer to the object being explored as the "tenor" and the object of comparison used as a lens to examine the tenor as the "vehicle." In "Trail Mix," I frequently switch the role of tenor and vehicle, sometimes mid-sentence. So, in "Bear" I am not just using the queer bear as a lens to examine the grizzly bear or vice versa, but both simultaneously. I find this sort of oscillation destabilizes the performance and does much to explore the paradoxes of the culture/nature blend.

And so, I find myself entering the Hilton Towers in my bear costume, walking past the ballroom where I performed "Trail Mix" for NCA a year and a half before -- only now, I am surrounded by mostly gay, predominantly male, leather fetishists, many of whom would claim the identity of "bear." My personal relationship to such an identity claim is tenuous at best. First, I lack the "fur" and body mass to really qualify as a bear. Second, while I tend to prefer hanging out in leather and bear bars to, say, twink-filled discos, I don't do either very often and am hardly an active member of "the scene." In "Trail Mix," I acknowledge my partial and insufficient representation of myself as a "bear" -- whether as non-human Other or queer Other. Even so, I felt among my kind as much as I ever do at GLBT/Q events -- caught in the familiar dialectic tension between identification/celebration and feeling like an outsider who's queer experience doesn't quite fit in such spectacles of excess.

My friend from DePaul came with me, of course. We enjoyed comparisons of this particular conference with our more traditional experience of a professional conference in the Chicago Hilton Towers. But where she tended to emphasize contrast between NCA and IML, I saw similarities -- the attention to professional dress (different outfits, surely, but there were still rules that very much mattered), assessing hierarchical status of others, the focus on discipline, public spanking, etc. The lobby was crowded with just as much milling about and contrived conversations. The elevators were always a wait.

In my new show, "Cross/Walking," one of the themes I explore is how theater practices (and even the conference practices at hotels) emphasize the idea that the space is blank and waiting for the performers and technical staff to transform it into something new for the audience. I challenge this practice as a problematic and seek to explore and acknowledge what has happened in the space before as something present, something we should attend to. I make metaphorical connections to territory-marking behaviors and tracking.

Certainly as a I walked through the Chicago Hilton in my "Trail Mix" bear costume, these themes resonated with me. I knew that I experienced the IML event in relation to so many NCA conferences that had been held there before. I knew that any future NCA conferences held in the Hilton Towers (there's one there this November) would forever resonate with those milling and groping leather men.

My head is still reeling a bit from the collapse of boundaries -- on so many levels! Bear was released from the cage of the "Trail Mix" performance, given a night out on the town. The oscillations I set in motion in "Trail Mix" swirled outward in an excess of conventioneering and the pulse of house music. Ballrooms and performance spaces hummed with significations and markings, the insistence of the present mixed with the persistence of the past. And if overt concern for the environment was lost in the liquor, leather and smoke, attention to the process of space-taking and place-making was not.

In 2007, the Conference on Communication and the Environment (COCE) was hosted by DePaul University on the theme of "Urban Wilderness." I attended that conference too and enjoyed that it coincided with the Gay Pride festivities and was so close to "Boystown" on North Halsted. I don't think Pride or IML was exactly what the COCE planners had in mind with the theme of "Urban Wilderness" -- but it could have been and perhaps should have been.

Rowr!

Co-Modification

Every Blog has its origin story. This one begins with an invitation to play.

My friends Janet Donoghue and Alison Fisher (a.k.a. Glenda Greenhouse and Mary Mercury, The Composters) turned me on to an on-line artists collective, @Platea, and their on-line community art project, "Co-Modify II," set to run May 3-9, 2009. I joined in. Because I just had so much time during finals week, what with all the grading and dissertation defenses. But I joined in anyway, because I needed to do some art.

I selected Adobe as my company to shill for, or be my personal sponsor, or celebrate, or criticize...Actually, my ambivalence about Adobe is what drove my selection. Can the master's tools tear down the master's house? Would I really want to, even if they could?

And so this week has been about finding the moments around the tedious chores of the end of the semester to inspire myself with art, with heady thought about art, and with dialogue with other artists as they do their amazing work. And whatever may have been said about the conundrums of art in a consumerist society or the efficacy of artist activism, I feel so much more alive this week as I do this work, this serious play.

If nothing else, it has driven me to finally set up a blog on my Google account. I've been meaning to do that for a while now. Hey. Whatever motivates us, right? Whatever moves us forward...