Performance Mini-Fest II
Boris Nieslony
_badpacket_
Paul Couillard
Pierre Beaudoi
April 15 – 18, 2003
Schedule
_badpacket_
8:00 pm Tuesday April 15
Pierre Beaudoin and Paul Couillard
8:00 pm Thursday April 17
Boris Nieslony
8:00 pm Friday April 18
Performances & Workshops in the gallery
11-5 Tuesday – Saturday
Essay
In their work, the artists in Performance Marks demonstrate a confrontation with the absurd, an interplay with the human will, a lapse in the face of epiphany and an encounter with art that expresses a philosophy that does not devise its own entropy by becoming political thought. Rather, as a thesis, this series of performance work submits art as the site of the experiment rather than as its solution, empiricism or antithesis of conventional wisdom, social organization and intersubjectivity. Performance mark making asks what sort of definition is left by the daydream, the preconscious mind, the bewildered experience of the viewer in the presence of the art action? Performance mark making asks, what constitutes the materiality of consciousness? what remains in history, in evidence? when are ideas enough? when does gradual and continuous action become noticed, shift from process to event? and, how are events collected?
Boris Nieslony’s work looks at consciousness as a mark, the self caught in a moment of horror, recognizing itself and its mortality. The streamed performance of _badpacket_ looks at telepresence as a mark, the thought without the body, the shock of not requiring a body. Pierre Beaudoin talks about psychic maintenance in his work, simple body presence, or the performative one gesture, and the relationship to meaning; Pierre looks at metamorphosis, pain as a mark. Paul Couillard’s action art gives and receives experience as a mark telling us that everything changes over time, against duration. On the notion of performance art and philosophy, it is no longer satisfying nor remarkable to pose an aesthetics of beauty and significance; engaging art poses a depth aesthetics, one that is more recombinant psychoanalysis, philosophy and social history. These performance artists evaluate the process of mark making, striking a language, exercising thought and tempting new behaviours. It is as though the real answer is actually and already known and that we need no further instruction but that the riddle is too intimate, too vulnerable, too smart to be revealed openly and candidly in a world of status seeking, conflict and atrocity.
Brenda Cleniuk
Thanks to: The Department of Canadian Heritage and Arts Presentation Canada.
