[OAS Node #1 [July 13]
Saturday, July 14, 2012 at 08:46AM 
Technical
[Session 5]
Today we visited the St. James Theater and a tech rehearsal for the "Bring It On - The Musical," at the invitation of designer Jeff Sugg.
[CONSIDERATIONS, OBSERVATIONS + CONJECTURES]
- OWS has been characterized as an art medium, and analyzed relative to performance, performance art, relational art and other modalities of staged expression or exchange. Precursors to the Occupation like Zefrey Throwell's naked staged intervention on Wall Street ("Ocularpation: Wall Street") expand the set of considerations, as do the actions of the original Arts & Culture group/gamers and the Aaron Burr Society, suggesting that there is something to it. Many kinds and instances of performance, often involving professional performers, were and continue to be integrated into Occupational activities, such as "The Tax Dodgers," the Brecht performers and so on. One of the most compelling collective circle-discussions hosted by Hrag Vartanian during the Spatial Occupation @Hyperallergic centered on these phenomena. Where does performance (as situated in entertainment or artifice) stop and Occupation-as-performance begin and/or end? Does the conflation of performance and occupation diminish the latter and trivialize it, by compressing the redress of grievances into a modality of coded narrative for desire-satisfaction? Etc. Certainly this is fertile territory for analysis with tactical or strategic implications. [David Graeber has written on this subject relative to protest, police, puppets and media propaganda, which we also attempted to address in SO@H residency reading group. Graeber's text(s) indicated the anarchist's jaundiced and limited vision for art in conjunction with direct action, minimizing art into a protest utility functionary, and redefining it to the extent that art is a fungible creativity applicable to all activities human, an absurdist conjecture ultimately. Is falling down art (if an art does it)? And, if everyone is an artist, is all falling down artistic?
- The observation of the "Bring It On" tech rehearsal was profound for this viewer, who has been away from professional theater for the most part for the past decade, with some notable exceptions (Circle X at Ford Theater in LA, and other theatrical entertainments covered elsewhere). The opportunity to assess the evolving role of electronics in the medium led to the formation of some important seams of conjecture, mainly pertaining to the reformation of hierarchies in production, and the staged spaces in which artifacts from old, even ancient, models of dramatic transmission are being fundamentally redesigned, reoriented or constituted as ana-spaces for performance, due to the intervention of computer-sited processes in play-making and/or 4d presentation. Jeff and I briefly discussed these "advances" and related effects, and committed enthusiastically to further explore their significance. The power of theater in revolutionary change cannot be underestimated. These developments potentially point toward new theatrical practice that obviates the insipid corporatized "creative" economic content that passes often for top-shelf theater, now. Like similar spectacle-ism in sports, music, art, political races, war coverage, etc., the need for dimensional veracity for collective sharing of imaginary-real experience as vision is vital in reclaiming a democratic commons for us all. This is a key in expelling propaganda in all its insidious iterations from the field of dimensional perception.
[Session 6]
Art Gatherings, Community, Exchange
- SLAG Gallery, Bushwick
- Opening for Claudia Chaseling, "Infiltration"
This communique is a stub. The subject is the continuing progressive evolution of Bushwick, Brooklyn as a locus for an international art community and market, and much, much more. [Full disclosure: The author is represented by SLAG] OAS Node #1 will host Bushwick-focused study and celebration of the dimensional "art scene" materializing in the neighborhood, which is our neighborhood. Bushwick's emergence is THE art story of the moment, now. Chronicling its "happening" is vital, and must not be left to the 1% or corporate media. Each OAS Node will be encouraged to analyze and document the art topology(-ies) it inhabits. The accumulation of data drawn from this analysis and documentation we hope will eventually yield a database that in its totality will paint a very different picture than the one(s) that exists now about art, artists and especially art-/artists-in-community.
occupational art school, performance, theater, theory in THEATRE, media, performance, philosophy, technology, theory 