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PPL Space Transition Document and Report 2012-2014

AS OF JANUARY 1, 2015, PANOPLY PERFORMANCE LABORATORY WILL BE TAKING ON A NEW STRUCTURE and RE-FRAMING ACTIVITIES.

 

QUESTION-CLUSTERS PROPOSING POTENTIAL FORMS-OF-ENGAGEMENT WITH THE SITE AS A LABORATORY CAN BE FOUND AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS DOCUMENT.

 

 

At this time PPL resident artists are ready to submit this first subjective report and analyses on findings regarding the project-state of PPL Space. This document has comment-boxes open and welcomes additions, arguments, corrections, and other commentary. We also urge any participating artists, organizers, witnesses, and others who have engaged with the space in the past two years, to culminate the past two years of operations by writing reports, responses, accounts, making diagrams, sending video, images, and audio from any performances/events/projects/experiences at PPL Space, to: panoplylab@gmail.com with the subject line PPL ARTSPACE.

 

TRANSITION DOCUMENT AND REPORT OF FIRST HALF OF FINDINGS FROM EXPERIMENTS AT 104 MESEROLE STREET, 2012-2014:

 

In 2012 when PPL inherited the lease of 104 Meserole from Spread Art, our agenda was simple: the space would be a dynamic conduit, a spigot onto the enormous melting pot of live performance, pouring out of as many different performative, public, social situations as possible. The many, the different, these two generalities became the only acceptable mediators of activity.

 

Within the many and the different, in support of multiplicity and difference themselves, we advocated inclusivity and transparency, playing out humanist characterizations of resistant agendas, towards sustainably sociality.  Following pathways of least resistance (literally and figuratively,) we “played at” being an artspace to give ourselves (as “curators” or organizers) aesthetic distance and anonymity, focused on daily tasks, and formed our behavior in interpersonal response to individuals, all as part of enacted, intended resistance to art markets and economies of attention, resistance to hierarchies of sense and disciplinary distinctions, challenges to academic grips on intellectuality, and in favor of performed scatterings of encoded and enculturated power paradigms.

 

In specific ways, which I will soon address, these particular intentions, conceived as resistances, have been often born instead as forms of passivity, which may not always maintain a sustainability of desirability, or desirable sustainability. Basically, through operation of this artspace, and perhaps more intensely through PPL’s other-yet-related operations as artists, we have come to the obvious conclusion that following paths of least resistance leads to construction of that which is already defined.

 

It is also worth noting that in “subjective historical” context, general modes of lack of closure, rejection of formality, and disregard for specification mark necessary commonsense modes of alternative/radical culture(s) of a recent time period, beginning in early 2011 (see Rodrigo Nunes) and now experiencing a shift out/away, which thereby makes that period’s “epistemic” attitudes increasingly visible and therefore increasingly problematic.

 

Positioning this document in retrospect by stating that the space will be reframed as of January 1, 2015, and outlines the recent (still raw) history of the site as an activated object of investigation; this perception arises from the space becoming known by and as itself, its gradual taking on of communicable, visible form. This is the way in which practices become projects, in which daily play becomes research.

 

This transition document and report thereby proposes a shift, from artspace to formal performance laboratory. This shift will hopefully occur in relationship with the emergence of a larger frame, projected by a loss of faith in the actionability of either inclusivity or transparency as core politics of aesthetics, socio-political agendas, or as prescriptive ideologies for performance as art, and performance “outside” of art.

 

Further, through experience with and in “playing out of” the space as an artspace, suspension of (dis)belief in these has been forcibly shattered by a need to recognize emergent, generated, sensed, and perceived exclusions and formal resistances.  It is the processes by which such “shatterings” have been performed by the goings-on here, and subsequently the positive reconstruction in analytic response, that are of interest, and perhaps relevance towards generation of significant states of performative query and construction.

 

ONE: context

 

In accordance with ideals of inclusivity and transparency, a lack of mission or branding outside of anti-capitalism (let’s say), was enough for PPL as an artspace, the “open source” of it fit the moment as a mode of institutional and cultural critique.

 

PPL as an “artspace” was not reduced in definition as a community space, a queer space, a startup, a DIY or punk space, an anarchist space, a visual arts gallery, an experimental music venue, a co-op, a collective, nor even a stylish reimagining of any of these, it has performed as ALL of these, simultaneously, and none of these, operating in relationship with conceptions of these, and with any and all expectations held by creative communities and individuals.  We thought that to focus the space on any certain kind of existence made by any smaller, singular community would be to commercialize, to objectify, even to colonize a neighborhood that (at that time) retained a strong identity as a working-class neighborhood, nestled between two periods of housing projects. It was politically and geographically necessary for PPL to argue that it was being produced by its context, rather than productive of a particular context.
 

The apparent context, however, was defined subjectively, of course, and limited to art-historic and art-theoretical contexts, as well as influenced by resident artist biases, experiences, and conceptions, visible in essays like these and dominantly expressive the very décor, abilities, and so on, of the site itself. Despite any idealistic arguments to the contrary, PPL Space’s dominant context is co-produced in relationship with performance-as-art practices.

 

In retrospect, this context might have been defined fairly exclusively as a focus on “Performance Art,” as an area of forms, all forms of performance which resists commodification and rides lines between “art” and “non-art.” For us, these two considerations for performance-as-art foregrounded aesthetics and the socio-political systems that we saw operating in production of art and artists. It seemed that deconstruction of artistic discipline, or dissolution of industrial performance forms like theater, music, and dance into “performance art” would cause speculative performance practices to emerge, practices with intentions outside and resistant to cultural imperialism. Whether or not this has happened is debatable, but we are currently feeling quite pessimistic about it due to the radical metabolization of “Performance Art” as a legitimized form of High Art (“visual arts performance”), replacing it squarely within those same systems and structures its definitions have historically resisted.

 

What has become apparent however, is that performance art practices are not autonomous from other forms of art, across all areas of life. This assertion is less an aesthetic echo of Kaprow than it is an acknowledgement of how systemic racism, gender politics, class-based systems like elitism and production value, etc, are co-constructed with and by performance-as-art, even those forms that might be termed “performance art.”

 

Overall, and in alignment with the rhetoric of “performance art” and its cousin “social arts practices,” the space has been conceived as a performance in and of itself, an investigation of existing forms of non-profit artspaces, investigating art markets, gentrification, alternative ways of housing and living, and other social and political institutionalities. These investigative, performative activities were largely conducted via paths of least resistance promising “equity,” following through on small, autonomous goals through performances such as experimentation with different phrasings on the donation box at the door towards the goal of paying artists to perform.

 

The consequences of reducing context to Performance Art, focusing on modes of production which “de-hierarchize” and promise “equity,” can now be perceived as a narrowing (ironically) of potential for true expressions and formalizations of marginalized and alternative senses and perceptions, theories and “realities,” those agendas with which performance (not necessarily as “art”) deals.

 

If we are to truly create a platform that is constructed by situation and context, we must open further the terms by which performance is situated and contextualized. As a laboratory, the site will continue to be framed as a performance project, but it will use that frame to model laboratory-based performance forms.

 

TWO: post-gentrification

 

It is also fair to state that PPL turns to consider more deeply the forms suggested briefly above as our performance of being a “small nonprofit artspace” becomes less of an interesting line of inquiry for us. There are many others who are taking on examination of economy and art-as-labor. We have become unsure of where neo-liberal grasping for sustainability meets hard capitalism-as-a-form-of-consciousness. The idea that we are resisting hegemonic economic, political, and social systems by being a small nonprofit artspace seems like an attempt to legitimize alternative practices which are, in fact, no longer alternative once they fit into the legal and economic structures pertaining to the definitions and categories.

 

We turn to the extremely local and the extremely global. In 2014, any battle against gentrification in our neighborhood is lost, with over half of the buildings on our block now shiny-crappy condo buildings full of much wealthier, predominately white, predominately European (as in, recently moved from a European country) millennials.  The location of this space is clearly threatened, the building is old and will no doubt soon be razed and replaced overnight. If we continue to allow this space to be produced directly by mid-level geographic-cultural-economic context, PPL will become an expensive café bar, or at best, a city-funded non-profit tourist artifact of an older, now extinct, Bushwick, catering to cultural voyeurship and modes of cultural consumption.

 

Performance-as-art has the potential to be an art that deals with performance, socially at large, but in many ways, as the discipline becomes a discipline, as a small non-profit puts it in their mission statement, something else, the something else, where art IS culture, is let go again, undefined and uncodified, not as art, only as a sensation of failure.

 

We find that the failure we have experienced here is two-pronged: first, there are productive failures that are generative, exciting, and moving, for example, the time a group of academic, mostly white with varying gender identities Feminist artists performing a roundtable discussion confronted a cis-male, employed in retail, Latino “non-artist” neighbor who asked how many ladies in the room had been raped. This situation became an emotional and psychological performance that performed abilities to communicate. The situation also became a confrontation between a local sensibility and a global academic sphere, the former considered by external analytic forces to be exclusive and subjective, the latter considering itself inclusive and transparent, while, in fact both parties (the man, and the Feminists) shared uniquely co-constructive interests and abilities in the analyses being collectively performed in the room.

 

The second prong of failure pertains to the fact that the gentrification of this neighborhood is our fault (PPL resident artists) not just because we are white american immigrants to Brooklyn and thus semiotically and culturally operative, despite our bodega habits, worse, as artists in the shape of the 21st century American artist, we are disengaged from deeper political performances in protest of whatever masquerades as democracy, both in that we do not currently attend city council meetings with any regularity and in that we do not formally assert our lives in constructive relationship with dominant culture in any formalized (i.e. political) way.  As too little bodies, we fail to leverage what is stupidly called a “stake” in our neighborhood, seeking conscientious effectivity perhaps within autonomous floating spheres of art and communities of artists and our too little too friends and neighbors, but never, out of fear, shame, and inability to communicate, turning our agency as organizers and artists researching social performance, as tools for and/or by, resistance to the cultural death-by-commercial-imperialism that we are all now sharing.  Being a “small nonprofit artspace” seems meaningless, especially compared to the vast numbers of things we might productively perform when gathered here.

In some ways, this shift in framing PPL space, is a continuation of deconstructive daily performativity as artists, but some goals require the making of new paths, and a veering away from engagement in even the most radical of organizational performances between and as artspace(s). Formal detachment from Art is, in some ways necessary if artists and art itself is to constructively participate in culture which is resistant to existing paradigmatics.

 

The re-framing of PPL space thus requires BOTH formal engagement with “big picture” structures, and formal engagement with “little picture” structures, and all engagements researching social performance and performance-as-art simultaneously. And not just as research with no results or consequences, rather as research that can be practically applied (if never empirically) and used directly by individuals present, perhaps a local community, or perhaps even as research into performance, performed as performance, as aligned with theoretical considerations of the largest of socio-political paradigms and contexts.

 

THREE: Exclusions and fitness for purpose
 

While the formal opening of PPL into something “beyond artspace” seems to be an extension of earlier aims at inclusivity and transparency, it actually requires a more rigorous focus on exclusivity and subjectivity.

 

Inclusivity is often performed as an aim to “appeal” to or be “understandable by” an “everyman,” thus the consequences of actions theoretically unified with inclusivity actually demand universalizing and homogenizing the performanceforms (modes of production, structures of presentation, staging, etc), by which performance makes and shares itself.

 

As a case study, we can look at Performance Art Open Space (which began as an “open mic” MC’ed by Matthew Silver). After initial open space events, with Matthew Silver (who is the king of appealing to everyone) we began to formalize structure via two major rules: each performance would be 10 minutes (by darkroom timer), the sign-up chalkboard would be “first come, first serve.” The first rule would allot time so that anyone who wanted to perform would get a chance. The second rule would privilege timeliness and time in relationship with publicity, so that the event could get started on time and allow the general public more accurate information that could be more broadly disseminated by flier, Facebook Event, etc, each served to define “a performance” as a 10-minute timeslot with the lights on brighter, during which (a) performer(s) present to a dichotomized audience. A few artists played with this form, involving audience (“participation”) or following tasks for manipulation of the situation. But overall, the inclusive ideology of the event, reduced potential for more diverse performanceforms, and limited-by-definition that which occurred in the space.

 

Similarly, transparency homogenizes and universalizes information, privileging “masterforms” of documentation, marketing, framing, and event production as sole forms of index and consequentiality. These consequences are, to reference other discussions here, also operative primarily within ‘mid-sizes’ between the local and the global, the field of social activity which is most commercialized, via forms of nonprofit functioning, art markets and arts communities, and the master-slave relationships performed between ‘working’ artists and institutions. 

 

 Almost all projects comprised by PPL as an artspace, following paths of investigative “critical” least resistance in processes like the Open Mic formulation described above, allowed “show”forms dominance. Showforms for the documenting, marketing, and production of artworks in particular (an artwork being often a self-contained performance object) lubricate existing mechanisms of audience expectation and ability to “attend an event” (within larger lifestyles and social structures, around 8pm Thurs-Sun, usually). Showforms indicate and generate certain types of seating/situating/specialization of bodies in the room, and determine a schedule for interfacing the “needs” of performanceworks with the “abilities” of the space (technological systems available, and other conditions) and then smoothly presenting an ideal performance object to a consuming audience, both in the room and as readers of reviews, viewers of documentation, and anyone else related to that performance object.

 

Our intentions towards transparencies of operation and budgeting for the space as a performance will continue, as we do aim to document and frame the practices of PPL space as a site for modes of performance as it is itself a mode of performance, but there is another segue here, regarding methods towards being “inclusive” and “transparent” in these regards, which drags in Aesthetics.

 

FOUR: Aesthetics and Quality
 

Aesthetics is theories of sensation and perception, often asking which of these are “pleasurable”, (or “appealing”). Politics and Poetics of Aesthetics are used across academic discourse fields (everyone else uses it to mean “prettiness”), to design artworks (especially within content-form dichotomies), define trends in attention and interest, show relationships between cultures and its perceived artistic products, evaluate and price artistic products, discuss artistic practices through various disciplinary and dialectic lenses, and to define art and its disciplines, styles, identifications, and operations within existing structures across spheres.
 

Academic resistances to the objectifying, reifying implications of use of aesthetics theories initially formed PPL Space’s conception of itself as a “non-aesthetic” space, primarily to avoid any questions of quality. Quality, as aesthetically defined, would mean valuable, authorized, imperialized.  And who’s to say? Not us, certainly, as we mistrust our own cultural influence on locality as situation.

 

But “aesthetic” methodologies can also be used to research construction of culture, framing constructivities as performance. Aesthetics are then seen as performances by individuals and groups as formal iterations of attractions, desires, concerns, interests, compulsions, auto-researching that which is sensed and perceived. The evaluative processes of poetics and politics of aesthetics are not inherent to or directly caused by these performances of sense and perception-based states of knowing together.

 

This shift in thinking about aesthetics is here written to avoid community accusations that PPL Space is “qualifying” itself, rather it is asking about qualification: not only the qualifications of any of us to make or interpret artworks, but also about “quality,” which semantically means fitness for purpose. If the purpose, hypothesis, or theoretical practice of a performance intentionally situated, it fits with itself, it is of quality: it is of purpose to itself.

 

Performance being of purpose to itself demands formal attention to exclusions, and to subjectivities. Quality is not then used as an adjective, rather qualification is not necessarily performance which is made to “appeal” to everyone by limiting its forms, nor is quality necessarily a performance made to reveal its own qualities-to-society using the mechanisms of political and poetic aesthetics. It may not then be “fit for purpose” within “normative” society, it designs its own fitness for itself, and all of those selves who are present, who act in exclusion of that which is not of quality to them.

 

FIVE: Exclusions

 

Just to perform some semblance of clarity, let me say that I am using the term “exclusion” to mean the feeling of resisting, excluding and/or being excluded, to mean exclusion of a person, an ingredient, or an idea, any forcible leaving out, any unconscious forgetting of, that which is “excluded” is “left out,” it is on the outside of a defined site and/or sight.  Let me also show a Case Study that reveals a very simple, unpacked version of all of this philosophy: My very first organization of this site as an artspace, co-curation of the Bushwick Open Studios exhibition with Spread Art, contains a basic, representative example of concrete exclusion in active conflict with inclusion; the festival is organized geographically, in identification of an area of Brooklyn defined as “Bushwick.” Any artist, collective, artspace, or art-related activity can participate (it cost $35 or donation of labor in 2012) if they get their shit together in advance. Spread Art wanted to do a show that involved artists they had worked with over their past years in the space, combined with new people met that year, including PPL artists. A “new” artist was Miles Pflanz, someone PPL met at Surreal Estate in 2009, then just beginning his own space project, Fitness Center for Arts in Tactics. The show’s underlying desire was to build “community,” an inclusive collection of individuals across class, race, gender, age, exclusively selected by their personal interface with Thomas Bell, Christina deRoos, Valerie Kuehne, and Esther Neff. The disciplinary focus was “performance art,” the conditions of the space involved visual art objects on the walls, beer, and a diverse gathered audience. Miles brought in a small bird in a cage and proceeded to sonically torture it by yelling at it, pounding his fists, and recording and playing back fragments of its desperate flutterings and peeps on a cassette device. It was emotionally disturbing to many. His actions made sure that our neighbors to the back of the building never again entered this space as an artspace. Though we tried to discuss the performance with one particularly upset individual, the performance assured her exclusion. This example can be compounded with many other examples of occurrences which intentionally or consequentially excluded individuals, and even groups, across vast, multi-dimensional spectrums between the sense-based, the situational, the generative, and the linguistic, political, or otherwise culturally systemic. Most basically, performances-as-art create situations of exclusion by their very definition as art performance; artists make decisions or act as expressions of exclusions, simply by doing this instead of that, witnesses are here or not here, this space is open or closed.

            Perhaps in desperation to make conversations such as this absurdly general discussion of exclusion possible, the past phase of PPL as an artspace limited its forms of open-ness to ‘shows,’ (with some exceptions) usually inviting artists working in some performative way to “show” their work to audiences as participants in conceptually-framed multiple-artist shows and solo shows.  This creates a situation in which social behavior is framed as a particular, shared activity (as in “we are all here, at this show.”) This basic exclusivity leads to other exclusivities, in context (for example, you are not here to see a show that exploits animals, this is not Seaworld) which produce performance-as-art (expectations for dryness make experiments with large amounts of water possible as art).  For Miles’ performance, the total openness of the situation replaced the artist’s exclusions with general, unconsidered exclusions, i.e. rather than the assembled people being able to use the artist’s performance as research into offense and exclusion (let’s say), the performance simply offended and excluded.

 

In addition to these literal practices of contextualization (all of which are exclusions), emergent forms of exclusion can be seen as cultural fielding, or backgrounding, allowing us to consider why certain groups of people might choose to sit in 90 degree heat inside a garage and watch a video that is almost entirely shots of mown grass, and why some individuals might detest jazz.

 

The re-framing of PPL space involves generation of forms which intentionally exclude; if exclusion is a constant byproduct, it is possible to make it an intentional aspect, and focus on what we want, not on not wanting anything. PPL will not dictate what must be excluded or how exclusion should be performed, but use of the site will require “artists” and other engaged researchers to considerations of what is here and what is not here, and why or why not.

 

Further, with regards to the previous section, the forms of public situation, and forms of performance themselves must be fit for their own purpose.

 

SIX: cultural backgrounding and subjectivity

 

Autopoetic, exclusive consequences of performance-as-art (or art-as-performance) are usually swallowed by the “acceptable” art concepts, like aesthetics, technique, and “culture.” Here however, casual conversations and the expressions on faces give primacy to reactive and minutive recursions: when we speak colloquially about what is going on, instead of observing how exclusions emerge as cultural constructivities, we make use of a prevelant blackboxing conceptual metaphor, that of an individual (or collective) “cultural background,” a prescriptive or proscriptive conditioning which allows 1.) an audience member to value, enjoy, be interested in, be offended by, etc, certain performance 2.) an artist to do, be, search, etc, certain performance 3.) a public situation to be constructed with certain performance as its object 4.) discourse which defines certain actions as performance and/or as art, 5.) schemas which consider performance as art, or as culture.  

            These models for relationships and identification of fields of “backgrounding” are presumably pre-existing and outlast individual situations, giving primacy to empiricist theoretics over experimentation, to knowledge objects rather than performance of knowing, and again to generalizing/inclusive conceptualizations over formally respective analyses, wherein forms of analyses might relate with that which is analyzed.

 

Related to identitarianism and processes by which cultural groups self-declaim as part of bids for power within existing, inherently inequitable, capitalist, and otherwise hegemonic structures, “backgrounding” poses itself as a way of unifying in resistance, but instead becomes a micro-cosm of the same systemic values, obstructing performative experiments into those elements of embodied sociality which may have some hope of resisting the systemizations by which many individuals and groups are currently oppressed.

 

It is not enough to “support multiple cultural backgrounds” as an agenda, removal of this conception of “backgrounding” itself must be a major aspect of the shift from artspace to laboratory that we are discussing here.  It is not that the site must seek a state of neutrality from which non-normative situational, form-to-content analyses can be performed (that would make this place a scientific laboratory, where ‘controls’ are crucial and impossible), rather this site must support the deliberate acts of cultural constructivity, during which the situation itself is backgrounded by exclusions performed intentionally and mutually navigated via cultural forms designed by diverse artists and present participants.

 

SEVEN: artspace vs. laboratory

 

It is further our observation that the definitive modes of operation as artspace (variously described throughout this document) are currently hindering the practices of artists.

 

There can be no concrete example here (too many to mention), but many projects which foreshadow the operation of PPL as a laboratory have been a part of the first two years as an artspace, especially ongoing, overarching series-forms, exchange-forms, collaborative action forms, rehearsal forms, as well as carry-over/socially metaphorical forms such as potlucks, an office, and meta-framed versions of gallery, workspace, venue, etc. While many of these projects, performances, processes, and platforms have been deeply satisfying, informative, influential, and pleasurable, some “nonshow” attempts have been too often been left “incomplete,” contextually unable to continue processes of complexification and self-definition. Discursive support, time-based support, and modes of interpersonal interpretation and collective framing are needed.

Now from a moment of attempted projection into the future, some consequences of this shift seem to be emphasis on consideration of a whole public situation as performance, non-mimetic (unrepeatable) performance, context art (relational, aleatoric, situational), performance of “non-art” activities, social performances, durational projects, and performance of research that results in another form of index, document, altercation, trace, or other formulated conclusivity. Some examples come to mind from the space’s history, and directly from the practices of artists and non-artists with whom we have come to contact at PPL Space. 

 

How and why “abilities” and “inabilities” to perform deep processes of becoming are supported by a concrete location (a site, specifically a whitebox garage, here for the next two years) will now form the analytic frame for our scheduling.

 

Through the blindness of this new beginning, we do see other forms of support emerging from this site that may be more beneficial than presentation or performance space, as artspace. We are curious to know how new incarnations of this space as a laboratory might support, for example, people who have children, or people who need to spread something out on a large floor for an afternoon.

 

OVERALL, PPL space is shifting responsibility onto the shoulders of those who situate performance as performance. It is not our authority to frame all actions within the PPL Space as being “performance” or “art.” These categorizations and definitions must be considered a part of cultural practice. Authorizations, reflections, and modes of support will emerge, identified by those who have investment in performance.

 

EIGHT: In conclusion

 

In the course of PPL Space, we are about halfway through experiments: as of January 1, PPL Space will re-evaluate and be re-formed by the first half of experiments, which, as I mention above, have caused a shift in conceptual, socio-political, and actionable advocacies and agendas. This first half of PPL Space’s existence has objectified the space and its interrelational activities as a project-object. For the second half of its existence, PPL Space will realize its own name: Panoply Performance Laboratory, operating as a laboratory.

 

We will attempt to basically pre-define what is meant by “laboratory” as: First of all, a laboratory does not make transparent a sense of “playing house,” the suspension of disbelief is maintained by absolute certainly on the part of the practitioners that the research performed is valuable, even mandatory. Second, a laboratory considers the consequences of forms of practices. Third (as a “further” to the second), forms of research must be in accordance with that which is being researched.

 

Functionally, these three considerations produce a sort of “question guidelines” for individuals and groups interested in working through and at Panoply Performance Laboratory. Performance here can engage with, in the form of the work itself, one or more of these question-clusters, and/or propose its own.

 

Direct response to one or more of these questions, or proposal of a specific question would be a welcome form for any proposed engagements. These can be e-mailed to: panoplylab@gmail.com at any time after January 1, 2015

 

We also welcome argumentations against the questions, and we welcome suggested revisions and additions to the questions.

 

QUESTION-CLUSTERS:

 

SITUATOR (s)

From whence does this performance emerge, and who is making it, and why?

Who is the situator of the defined performance, or who are the artists and what how is their operation as artist(s) performed?

How do the situator’s class, race, gender, and other constructed signifiers inform practices and forms of performance as art and social research?

How will this work be culturally situated and/or activated by participants (included constructors of the situations)?

How is this situation defined, what are its parameters, and what are the elements of its contextual relationships?

 

CONTEXT (s)
How does money and/or exchange operate, how is it included or excluded as part of this performance?
Is relevance the same as value? How and what is performance of this of relevance, and to whom?
How is valuation, and evaluation (peer review) performed?

How does the situator/artist contextualize themselves in relationship with “audience” or public situation?

 

FORM (s)
How does this performance form?
How is this performance socially situated?
How is this performance culturally generative?

From whence does this performance emerge, and who is making it, and why?

What modes of performance and/or performanceforms are designed and/or utilized?

How is this performance public and/or private?
How is this performance inclusive and/or exclusive?

CONSEQUENCE (s)

How will the work produce results or analyze its own consequences?
How will anything be different after the performance’s bracketed time has passed?

How will any persons, situations, or elements of site be changed by this performance, defined as such?
What is research, as performed by individuals and groups, what is this performance advocating methodologically, aesthetically, and ideologically?

 

Thank you all very much for reading all of these words, and for being involved. TO PERFORMANCE!

 

-PPL

 

PS:

PPL do not deny the exclusivity of language used in this document is an interrelated issue. If you don’t want to read all of this, if English is your second or third or fourth language, if you just don’t understand for any of many reasons, please email us a request to meet in person, to skype, or just to discuss over email more casually. We can build our own way of communicating in the situation and figure it out.

 

PPL maintains openness in some areas, mostly in areas of personal disinterest, such as disciplinary distinctions. This space is bounded conditionally by its size and other spatial and situational aspects. It has a low to medium potentiality, and what is possible here should be discovered through site visits and ideally participating in activities here. When in doubt, email us, or come over, we remain open, in a formal way.