metropolis m

‘This title seemed to be the best to describe both my role as choreographer of people on a stage, where I’m more interested in behaviour than in dance, and my role as a creator of situations where people are meant to behave in specific ways with each other.’

‘I have a deep ambivalence between wanting to play with everyone, a kind of ludic evangelism which wants to convert the whole world into players, playing with everyone in order to find the people who can really play, or just wanting to play with the people I already suspect can play. In Session, a roving project space for strangers, I have a database of people who’ve signed up to come alone to be in a room with strangers and do something which they don’t know beforehand. They’ve agreed to try to follow the rules, and if they don’t like it, they can always go into the bathroom and eat a sandwich. The difference between Session and the abstract gambling games you’ve mentioned is that in Session, the rules might be hard or impossible to follow, but they still make sense. In the gambling games, not only are the rules always changing, but they are obscured or hidden, communicated only partially through riddle, gesture, and code. They’re abstractions. Most of the game is figuring out what the hell you are supposed to do. Both methods, call them constraint vs. vertigo, aim to activate the creative faculties, the first by narrowing the attention on an absurd premise, the second by dangling a protoverbal model, in a bright haze on an unsteady ground, that encourages slippage into the intuitive.’

‘I usually avoid answering these sorts of questions, but, since I trust you, I’ll make an exception. I was first attracted to her when I was around seven. Or perhaps it was longer ago. It took longer than you’d think to collect enough particles of her to make an impression. She’s actually quite dowsy, in the centre, that is, I mean most of her is chalked over-aggressively around her, making a kind of bronchospastic dust tunnel of a gal. But fucking hot. The hot dust of woman. As you might imagine, I’d jump right in the centre and land with half my tongue scraped on the sidewalk, and she’d already be a block down the street, which, as a budding trenggiling, or scaly spine-eater, sorry, spiny scale-eater, was a calculable detriment to my practice, although I did have a touch over 20 cm of tongue to spare. But to answer your question, no, I did not have relational asthmatics with that woman, although I did cough in her lemongrass soup.’

‘Ha ha!’

‘I could have answered but thought it was more fun this way.’

‘It’s actually quite a hard question to answer; it’s like asking what attracts you to funny things. But if we really want to get into it, the Absurd is some heavy duty stuff, I mean this is no place for me to go making a mess of Kierkegaard.’

‘Yes. No, actually no. But I think I did actually answer the question by saying it is an essentially a bunch of chalk dust around a void…that keeps one lurching forward.’

‘Oh boy. I hadn’t really planned to give you a proper answer on that one either. I feel like I’ve already talked about it years ago and it’s much more interesting, in relation to that “piece”, to keep the meaning and intention unstable.’

‘My usual answer is that it was a two-word poem written by myself and artist Marianne Vitale that was danced in the form of a rupture. But that’s boring. In truth, I was hired to stand behind Bob Dylan, while he sang live during the Grammy’s, and to give him a “good vibe”. The nature of this vibe was not further specified. So, I wrote a two-word poem with Marianne who drew it on my chest in permanent marker. I leapt next to Dylan, peeling off my shirt, and presented the poem by moving my body in such a way as to create maximal good vibrations. These vibrations were transferred to their most useful home, in the diaphragms of the viewing audience, causing warm air to be catapulted in laughter to the sensory soul which, thus heated and disturbed, created a recognizable movement in the intelligence, per Aristotle.’

‘I moved more towards visual arts around 2006, even though I still make the occasional dance now. A lot of my recent work has a strong movement component, certainly the High Action Drama Paintings. The abstract gambling games are very dancey too, in the way the players are taught to move, and in the way the game pieces move around the little stage of the tables.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong. The first one started like this: A guy walks into a bar. The bar was run by a consortium of rabbis who’d just been indicted in a muffin-laundering scheme implicating prominent members of the New Jersey legislature, the Greater Methodist Ministry and several guys with bibs. The guys with bibs were huddled in the corner doing a couple of highly significant things with the nose of one of the rabbis, the least of which involved bibbing and re-bibbing the rigid knuckle in the second focal periphery from the nose, which the rabbi had used to pound down the assess of blue and raz berry muffins. The muffins were then stuffed, of course, ass full with specialized detergents capable of cleaning out the fucksuck left by weasels and bran-mites. So, you understand, these were Jewish muffins voided of all the good good fucksuck left by nature, but sold as proper muffins! At full price! From the back of the bar! At just that moment, 70 hookers come in from the right, and 70 from below! And the flugelhorns go, PA PRAPATA PRATA PATA…. No turtles.’

‘Okay, look. I’ve done lots of things to jokes. You can do as much to jokes as you can to canvas. Much more, actually. You can have relationals with them and you can use them to proceed from a sequential realization of operations to parallel or simultaneous ones, to replace a stretching or compression by a bending, or to move from the continuous flow of energy or substance to a periodic or pulsating one, end quote. I made an opera about jokes, the sound and beat of jokes or joke jokes, danced by professors and morons [The K Sound – ed.]. I built wood shoes like jokes, that rise off the toe and into the mouth, so I can sing ideas back into them, ideas that sound like jokes but behave like full-blooded biathletes, in the water and shooting themselves in the root, at the same time.’

‘Damn good question. I need a good place to store ideas, and pretty things sometimes have trap doors that’ll do the trick. You can also break up a language or two and stuff it in a pretty thing’s muffin, as I explained earlier. But seriously, beauty, craft and touchability function in the gambling tables as a lure which helps ease the players’ descent into cuckoo land. They’re also games, and so they should look and feel like games, a bit. The object assemblages in The Dudion Levers serve a more complex function. Their beauty is a lure to the ideas which, literally, created them. Each group of three objects was used to inspire an idea for an art project, in which those three objects play a role. This idea was sung into ‘The Instrument’, which transform the instructions into a majestic instrumental anthem that was simultaneously inscribed in mother-of-pearl graphic notation into the objects. The High Action Drama Paintings are imprecise recordings of the very circuitous and dramatic routes the paint took to reach the painting surface. Only if one watched the video would one see the ridiculousness that led up to that little grouping of dots.’

‘My dream circumstances are just to be able to produce what I dream. I like working with Swiss technical staff. At the moment, I’m hooked on the idea of wanting to hitch a laser beam to my voice that rips through matter as I sing. It’s coming along nicely and will be an attachment to ‘The Instrument’. I’m into exuberant art these days. And an idea of objections: an objection is when an object becomes a force, or when a force is so hard as to become object. Actual art.’