If we’re looking at ALY’s treatment of the audience, it’s erotic via deprivation and threat; it’s sadistic. I find this torturous, and I don’t like it. But some audiences, perhaps, are masochists, and therefore, ALY’s work is for them a match made in downtown heaven!

There’s also a kind of eroticism that is more generous, more inviting, which occurs in most other kinds of performance; where the imagination is engaged to fill in the gaps, to deduce, and to be rewarded with pleasure by participating. ALY doesn’t want the audience to participate; she just wants them.

Also, feel free to refer to me as “girl”, anytime…
;)

But the spiral continues, as I find my own preoccupation with analyzing this work never comes to a resting place: It is an erotic obsession also. And I even derive pleasure from going over it and over it and thinking about it from a hundred different angles and, even after coming to a conclusion, I can pick it up again and start from the beginning. So maybe I am more of a masochist than I like to think I am.

But now you’ve got erotic used in two different ways, and I’m getting all confused, cc. First you said that ALY’s repression of the audience had an erotic feel to it–and I was thinking that you were saying that her domination of us was precisely how people got hooked into it, and that the reason they would take the bait was b/c it had affinities with erotic domination, and the world is secretly (or not so secretly) stuffed with sadomasochists! And now you seem to be saying the opposite, that the erotic only happens when there’s a depth field: when there’s that play of here/gone, illusion and presence, or something. So which is it, boy?

Great questions. Especially this one: Is there anything, or are there things, art HAS to do?

Generally, I would say, no. But, for me, there is a thing that art always does: using aesthetics, art makes a play on the observer, leading them to believe that something is, or is happening, that actually is not, or is not happening.

It’s a paradox. And it’s erotic. And I LOVE it!

This is why when Apollinaire points out that ALY “obliterates the imagination,” she touches on the lack of artistic paradox innate in ALY’s work.

I happen to think that paradox is necessary for art to have happened (understanding “art” as “artifice”). But this is a debatable point, and, if I may say so, an excellent point to debate about!

xoxoCC

I love the nod to semiotics. (I actually spent the weekend reading a beautiful book by Sean Hall on the subject. So please forgive the ramble!!!)

I have many similar thoughts and questions about ALY’s performances. But I’m curious (more in a philosophical way than specifically about ALY) about the statement “Art, as a play of aesthetics and reference, necessarily points to other things.”

Most of my favorite (especially intellectual/ conceptual) art deliberately points to other things. But does art have to? It seems like art can bring us those rare and important moments when we’re not pointing to anything, but simply being the thing (in creating, in performing, in watching). Those moments of flow or presence can be the opposite of self-absorption, a kind of losing of self instead. Those moments don’t necessarily make for interesting or “good” art, but are they not art?

It seems like one aspect of an artist’s skill is the discipline and outward-looking (and maybe pre-pointing) it takes to get to a moment that simply is the thing—and to create a work and atmosphere where the audience is supported in letting go into one of those non-pointing moments.

And there’s the other issue of whether it is the art that points or the audience that points and, therefore, where the responsibility lies. I keep thinking about Cunningham and conversations I’ve overheard in audience members. Is a given Cunningham performance “pointing” to structure and timing? Is it boring and cold, not about anything? Is it full of human moments, infinitely personal because there is room for me to decide what I point to?