SECOND DAY AT SELF/ VENICE ART HOUSE

THE SECOND NIGHT

By now, I’m more fully in my element. I’ve learned more and more each time I do this. This piece is for me and for others. In life we encounter things we don’t understand which can stick with us for years. When I did my piece REQUIEM FOR THE PAWNS OF WAR, the fuse had been lit forty years earlier reading TIME MAGAZINE articles covering bombers who were detonating themselves on buses and in crowds in Israel in the early seventies.

SPEAK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES, may have begun the first time I saw a woman in a Burqa or a Berber fighter in a movie or in the way a parent can control a child with a look. 

We all romanticize meeting someone with whom we lock eyes across a room and then roll off into the future. In my second night performing I connected with even more people, all strangers until we share that performance. I don’t think it really matters at this point at which side of the box we are on. This night I relax a bit more and resolve to interact a bit more particularly with the kids. Mimicry and empathy are an element of communication. With infants who lack the verbal skills to respond to us, we often see a parent or grandparent make faces or duplicate a hand gesture in a way the baby immediately responds to. The eye to eye dialogue is key and often priceless not only with infants but adults and even those with whom we dialogue who have lost speech capabilities from stroke or illness.

Some of the kids from the preceding night are here and they want to play. I’m amazed as I don’t know if I would have had the wherewithal to come eye to eye with a black robed figure with a box on his head and a sign hanging from his neck encouraging me to speak to him only with mine eyes. But they do and we do and add tilts and hand gestures which we both appreciate. 

Personally I have been at many times an introvert. The world does not at first glance appear to favor an introvert. To get by in life and to get what you want and go where you want and meet who you want , communication is vital. Even without people you have to communicate with things in order to build the things you need to live with. 

Tonight I engage with more people. Some of them are fellow artists and at the end of the night I have the opportunity to receive input and develop friendships with them. It is so much easier to make a deeper connection after you have already shared a silent nonverbal dialogue with someone. 

The box and robe is a metaphor for the body in some way only in this case the body is formless and you can’t be judged for your body in the way this society we live in is training us to do by way of media exposure in all its forms. In that way it can be empowering I suppose. If you are an introvert, It is as if one is trapped in the body and struggles to speak or find ways or things to say. One is on the inside always looking out and studying, not getting noticed, not in dialogue or observing others who are in dialogue but oftentimes not really saying anything. Speaking to an introvert can be disabling as well. How hard do you have to try to engage one who doesn’t speak or give you anything back in return. We give these problems names and these days we even medicate for them. These things I think about while I wait for someone to come up to me. 

I play. At times I take a position and inch closer and closer to someone I feel has been avoiding me. I wait till their back is to me and I shift my feet ever so slowly each time they turn away from me. It’s fun and now I feel that I’m more and more in the zone of a street performer as well as a performance artist. This gets better and better and I  find myself entertaining more and more people.

It’s been more days now and as I recall the people who have engaged me and spoken to me with their eyes, I feel incredibly connected to them all in a very beautiful way. Even the ones who hedged or avoided full contact. I’m blessed and onto something. Encouraged I plan for the Biennale itself.

I’ve visited quite a few exhibition already and seen some wonderful art. I’ve also seen some awkwardness in the explanation of the art. In the way one fills in a Blue Book for an essay exam where one attempts to spew out as much stuff as one can to try to get a passing mark when answering an exam question. There’s a point where one totally becomes a whore and tries to spew out nearly anything to get a passing mark when you are not sure what the teacher is looking for. I see this in some of the contextualization of the concept art. I find it rather funny. The public often doesn’t know better , they are here because it is something to do and will believe almost anything. I don’t know that the artist actually thinks any of the things they are writing until well after the creation of the piece and they have to explain themselves to people who don’t get whatever it is they are trying to do. there is a large divide between the art and the explanation and oftentimes the art doesn’t speak for itself and to my mind never will.

There are flags on the floor in front of some pieces that are clearly in the wrong pile for the event they are to represent. I find it embarrassing for the artist to be doing this at a world art event.

In some bizarre way I find it encourage as it teaches me anything goes and my work easily belongs here with these and perhaps even more so.

Opening night at SELF

Opening Night at SELF
VENEZIA, ITALY
SPEAK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES

Opening night was at Palazzo Z'anardi

The palace was beautiful, the coolness of the marble was welcome as the day was hot and wearing all black on a hot night can be stifling if I'm wanting to have my attention fully on all the people I'm to interact with.

Attention to details are important. Last minute preparation required making a new headdress for the show. Fortunately this version was even better than my last. I had taken some precautions by bringing extra materials with me and taken "just in case items" in the even of a mishap. Extra tape, Gaff tape, sewing materials, glue, cardboard to cut on top of, etc...  I could not foresee however that an overzealous application  of Gorilla glue I brought along would bubble out of the seams as it cured. Two hours of cutting bevels and careful measuring were saved by shaving the frothy thick glue off by shaving with a razor and painting the pasty yellow residue with a last minute application of Mascara which was the only black paint to be found. I felt like I was in an art Survivor Episode and so glad for my field improvising capabilities developed over the years and also by observing how others learn to make do in other countries.

This is such an old and beautiful city I can not but help feel spirits still hanging around their beloved Venice. The other night I would have sworn I felt one above me when I went to bed. They are welcome to me. I feel very at home here, I know I've lived here before. I felt it the instant we got off the train and looked at the buildings across the Grand Canal. My skin at the back of my neck tingled and I could feel myself thinking "you are home". You wouldn't think it by the way I get lost walking around here. GPS is nice but there's nothing like stopping to ask  a hundred times for directions and interacting with people. I think that's nice and it develops a very fine sense of knowing when someone doesn't know what they are talking about yet they still offer you directions which would take you not only on a thirty minute detour but in the exact opposite direction of where you need to go. This is another side effect of SPEAK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES.

At this point in my work I know there's very little I need to do to prepare for performing other than clear my head and be open to anyone.  I don't really want to call what I wear a costume as it's much more than that. In some way it's a metaphor for body or nothing or furniture as some people treat it that way. I have a profound appreciation for the Burqa now. I can sense that now in these robes and head dress, to some I don't exist. I have in common what the homeless feel and women and the unseen or not looked at. Being a "normal" human is really no different, We are all active inside our heads and the level of interaction we have with others can be some what determined by others and mostly by ourselves, it is our responsibility as always if we wish to be and interact with the world.

Although people will come up to me most of the night or me to them and they have what ever what they have on and their hair and makeup looks however, what I remember through the night and for days and months after is their eyes. Yet something more than that remains with me. I am connected now.


They have communicated their things to me and I have listened and communicated back in the thought world and whether I have understood or duplicated exactly what has come across or not  it stays there. I feel blessed to have seen so many shiny eyes in a night. they are so beautiful. As my Italian language skills are abysmal even with 4 years of Latin under my belt, wordless communication is beautiful, all I need is the eyes.

In the course of the evening I interacted with some children. There was a little girl there with my friend Andrea. He told me at the end of the night that she said "I looked at him and communicated to him with my brain." I loved that.

When I think of what I want to communicate to others, I suppose I could communicate things like, "I'm here for you" or "Thank you for visiting" or "You have incredible eyes" but most often  I'm thinking "We are stardust and the galaxy or universe is so big and You are it with me and perhaps if we all see that the world would be better.".

Most often what I'm getting from others is that words are not necessary in the totality of things. If I were to position myself out in space someplace and see how big the universe really is and how small our planet really is , there is nothing but awe and we are connected by that with our eyes.

Really it is amazing, if you look at a rock or a building and you think of how small that is in comparison to the sun or Ceres or Orion's Belt. It shows to me how small and insignificant daily words are, though we need them or think we do. So here we are with this small insignificant rock yet someone picks it up to throw at a building or another human.

I could say that Venice for all its history is the most incredible place in the world, the city of Masks, to do this piece but in truth I feel the same when looking into someone's eyes here as I do in some abandoned building in a run down part of St Louis. The eyes and people I interact with there and here leave me the same, blessed to have had the experience and resolved to continue this piece as it is important and I can see it has impacted others there and here and anywhere I perform it.

Tomorrow I start street performance.

Speak to Me Only with Thine Eyes

As the diversities in the world are now more exposed by enhanced media intrusion, cultures are clashing with one world wishing homogenization and the the other, retention of its cultures and values with violent means being resorted to by both.

Where do I begin and does someone else start? By removing words and by limiting physical cues such as smiles and other facial expressions it can be somewhat intimidating to approach others whether they are known to us or not.

The concept of this piece involves a small stage set converted into a headdress. All other elements are a stark black allowing for a creation of an archetype which is a conglomerate of world religions and culture whether cassock, burqa, academic or judicial robes, Saturnian High Priest, ascetic and others.

Black has come to represent intervention, portal or messenger to God, religious ritual, shielding, mourning, protection, isolation and disconnection. The chest placard: SPEAK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES, sets the boundaries for engagement within a reasonably intimate distance.

At whatever level there is an element of absorption of something from each other. Perhaps this can be a step towards questioning to what degree we interact with others and to what degree we protect or must protect ourselves and to what degree we allow our anonymity to prevail.

My intent as the artist and performer is to encourage this type of silent communication and that we will leave small silent pieces of our selves in others to help bridge this gap between our worlds.

Acknowledgement to Dylan Cooper for facilitating and photographing this project.