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.
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