It’s been a busy week both on and off Bad at Sports. A number of our contributors were at CAA and I, for my part, took my hat (and new best friend) on the Carl Sandburg train to Macomb, Illinois for an overnight trip to Western Illinois University. I happened to give a talk there about (among other things) transcription and translation which no doubt has colored the way I’m thinking about the last week on Bad at Sports. In looking back and taking stock on what was posted, so we ready ourselves for the new week ahead with its ever lengthening days. My sense of this week is that it was about windows and frames and the transmission of ideas. It’s about education and the power that stories have over us, to affect change and muddy whatever assumptions might be otherwise taken for granted.

 

 
Tonight, I am excitedly headed to Every house has a door’s performance at Links Hall, They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway. I’ve seen an iteration of the piece once already, and am looking forward to seeing it again. Goulish posted an essay about it here last Sunday, including a couple of amazing youtube videos with some excellent dance moves.

In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails from Double Trouble on Vimeo.

The week began with Jesse Malmed’s interview with contemporary filmmaker Fern Silva. Among other highlights, Silva talks about teaching film. “Experimental films that were made 50 years ago can be as fresh as films being made now in a classroom setting. I like to show films that I found inspiring and share stories about the filmmakers who we’re watching. For example, when I show Meshes of the Afternoon, I’ll tell the story of when Maya Deren threw a fridge across the kitchen while she was possessed in her West Village apartment that Brakhage writes about in Film at Wit’s End.” (Reconfirming my perhaps over zealous love for Deren). There is also a lovely moment, so brief as to almost be missed where Fern states that structure, (non-)narrativity and collage are all the same to him. Monday went on with another description of class dynamics from Shane McAdams.  There was a subsequent dispatch from Gene Tanta on Tuesday, where he described a performance workshop with Irina Botea and 13 other performers. He asked each of them (and got five responses) “What does your work protest?” I reposted one response

“Our work focused on the impact of this replacement (of old windows with multiple-layer double-glazed windows) on the people who purchase them. In Romania, this transition is advertised and widely acclaimed as being more than just necessary – but the defaultupgrade, perfect for every house. While questioning this widespread idealistic belief that Termopane are the right (almost the only valid) choice, we pursued in deconstructing its “promises”. And since you referenced Adorno’s claim that art documents history, one of the key aspects this work documented is how the perfect isolation, the safety promised by the Termopane comes with an unexpected turn: isolation means protection, security, intimacy but it also raises questions regarding responsibility and anxiety. These new guidelines of the private space influence people’s social and psychological behaviors, by means of a rather unnoticeable slow process of adaptation.” Ioana Gheorghiu

The way that windows and cameras and frames tie in together always makes me happy.

Laurie Jo Reynolds, “Tamms Year Ten Campaign Office,” SAIC Sullivan Galleries

Mary Jane Jacobs covered a lot of ground, as she reflected on an a Grant Kester essay in Engagement Party: Social Practice at MOCA, 2008-2012, and interviewed Kyungwon Moon and Joonho Jeon. The biggest moment for me comes at the beginning of Jacobs’ post, when she announced that TAMMS Super Max Prison was officially closed on January 4th of this year, in no small part due to the hard work of artist Laurie Jo Reynolds who took up residence at the Sullivan Galleries this past fall. Abby Satinsky goes on to provide a bibliography for “Creative Placemaking,” while musing on the complicated scenario artists are faced with as they move into and revitalize depressed neighborhoods, a subject discussed at length in a recent conference,  The Art of Place-making.

Jeffrey Songco interviewed performance artist Renne Rhodesabout her background in dance (among other things) during which they discuss Rudolph Laban’s “Labnotation” — as a means to score dance moves — an image of which you’ll see above. As I have been thinking a lot about transcription lately, and since so many of this week posts focused on the transmission of knowledge or experience, this seemed like a particularly lovely moment. The image of those static, abstract footprints(?) have been in my head every since. That they would somehow convey movement in time and space is beyond me. Sam Davis follows suit with a suite of videos that try to articulate what FUNK really is — namely “it’s about juicing a feeling.”

I rounded out the week with a post about Sofie Calle’s Address Book (which is now available in English). She seems always to be providing windows into private worlds, activating the aura of an individual, in this case Pierre D. who has recently passed away (thereby enabling her to release her findings about him). It seems like a macabre kind of dictionary in a way, and reminds me of Graham Greene’s biographer who was allegedly hired by the author to follow in his rather debauched footsteps, at the expense of the biographer’s family. I ended the week with a post about a sound performance at LAMPO by Hong Chulki and Choi Joonyong, — which like so many of LAMPO’s events effectively blew my mind. Maybe even more than this little red comb which I purchased for a mere 5cents at a Macomb antique mall.

Renée Rhodes, Calibration Dances, (still), 2012. Single channel HD video. 8:30 mins.

Some time in the 1990’s, two children named Jeffrey and Renée were dancing ballet in separate productions of The Nutcracker.  Jeffrey was performing in New Jersey, while Renée was performing in Florida.  Years later, these two kids would grow up to be young adults and their stars would align in graduate school at San Francisco Art Institute.

When Renée Rhodes and I started our friendship, her hair was no longer than 2 inches in length.  She captivated my interest with her performance-based artwork, utilizing a familiar language of dance that I always assumed was separate from the discourse of fine art.  She exposed me to her interests in Yvonne Rainer, Pina Bausch, and Jonah Bokaer.  Today, Renée and I jokingly prance around the city of San Francisco, hoping to one day choreograph our own piece for the world to see.

At the start of this interview with Renée for Bad at Sports, we sat down and watched a YouTube clip of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle.   The clip reminded me of a ballet movement called croisé…

Renée: I think I’m losing my French ballet words.

Jeff: Uh oh.

R: Have you heard of Labanotation?

J: No!  What the hell is that?

R: It’s a method for movement notation created by Rudolf Laban.  It’s a way of noting dance moves as a graphic score.

Rudolf Laban

Labanotation

J: Have you used it before?

R: No, it’s very complicated.  You really have to study it and be trained to properly use it.  I’m more interested in the narrative and history of measuring the body in that way.

J: You’re so smart!

R: Are you mocking me?

J: No, but, before we started this interview, I thought I was going to open with, “Renée, your hair is so long”.

R: Oh God.  You know what else is long?  A Jacques Tati film.

Jacques Tati, Mon Oncle, (still), 1958.

J: Are they really long?

R: No, but there’s not very much dialogue, so it can feel really long, and kind of like a dance.  I like how he creates an alternative language out of gestures.

J: Have you taken a ballet class lately?

R: Nope, sure haven’t.

J: But ballet has been a huge part of your artistic practice, or at least, an influence, right?

R: Is this is a prompt?

J: Yes.

R: I was taking ballet classes mostly throughout childhood and high school life, and later started using that as creative material.  And back to Labanotation, the reason I brought that up was because ballet is another way of measuring how the body moves.  Ballet is a sort of geometry when you strip it of its fairytale narrative.  It’s about making shapes and forms in this sort of perfection.  So I guess I’m not really interested in perfecting my ability to make those shapes, but I’m interested in that sort of quest and narrative.  It’s very human to want to achieve formal perfection, and I see that in ballet and that’s interesting, and it’s something I’m critical of, too.

J:  I see formal perfection in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad.

R: Damn!  Anyway, I think that the idea of making forms and shapes with your body is a way of measuring your own body’s physical terrain.  But it’s also a way of measuring the space around your body, or the space that your body is in.  It’s a very abstract language, but I see it as a sort of cartography, which is itself an abstract representation of space.

Renée Rhodes, Maps for Moving Landscapes, (still), 2011. Installation with maps, books, and 2 channel video projection.

Renée Rhodes, Maps for Moving Landscapes, (map), 2011. Installation with maps, books, and 2 channel video projection.

Renée Rhodes, Muscle Map Hiking Club, 2012. Hike and movement workshop at the Headlands Center for the Arts that guided participants through a series of exercises for translating the landscape from visual data to embodied topological maps.

J: Do you mean like Google Maps?  Is that a stupid question?

R: No!  Yes!  I love Google Maps because they make me totally confused!

J: How are Google Maps and ballet related?

R: They both operate on a fixed number of axis points in their movement.  They’re both very frontal.  It’s more about the grid – working on a grid system, and fixity that appears to be fluid.  With projects that I’m working on now, that ballet influence is there in a critical way.  I’m more interested in rolling around on the floor.

J: Isn’t that how we met in grad school?  We rolled into each other on the floor?

R: Yeah – fun icebreakers.

J: So what project are you working on now?

R: It’s called Navigating In a Whiteout.  There’s a lot of rolling on the floor.

J: I’ve never seen a ballerina roll on the floor.

R: (in theatrical voice) “It’s Modern Art, Jeffrey!”  Joking aside, it’s a more contemporary form of movement that starts with one simple movement phrase that is permutated along different axis points of the body.  It moves from the variation of the movement that’s just in the hands, to the version of the movement that happens through floor work, and then a version of the movement that’s for a body standing.

J: How did you arrive at this type of choreography?  Can I call it choreography?

R: Sure, you can.  I started the project by imagining myself as an explorer of Bouvet Island via Google Earth.  Bouvet Island is tiny and is the most remote island in the world.  It’s a place I’d never likely get to in any other way, but I spend a lot of time there!  I feel really familiar with the terrain and the topography on the island as if I have a memory of it.  That memory is now very visual and cerebral, and I am trying to figure out what my sense and physical memories are of that place.  The movement is a narrative about translating mediated landscape – about wandering through that terrain and transposing that topography onto my own body.

Renée Rhodes, Navigating In a Whiteout, (video backdrop still), 2013. Performance for 3 dancers, sound + video. 20 mins.

J: Whoa, so you’re like explorer and terrain all at once?

R: I think so!  When you navigate through a place, that terrain maps itself into your memory and onto your body.

J: How will this project manifest?

R: As a manifesto.

J: Are you serious?

R: No, but thanks for asking.  It’s actually a performance for three dancers with four different movement sections, sound, and video.  It’s being presented during Scrawl at the Center for Drawing, which has a new monthly performance series created by Mimi Moncier.  Mimi’s idea is to present movement and performance-based works that loosely explore the idea of drawing.

J: Are you one of the three dancers?

R: Yes I am.

Renée Rhodes, Navigating In a Whiteout, (performance still), 2013. Performance for 3 dancers, sound + video. 20 mins.

J: Can you share how you choreograph your work with the dancers?

R: I made all the choreography on my own, before meeting with them.  So that’s a lot of time alone in the studio, jumping around, rolling on the floor, and looking for movements that are compelling to me.  I’m also spending time with source material, which is the Google Earth footage through Bouvet Island.  I think it’s called making a tour in Google Earth.  You can save your movements in Google Earth as a data file and re-watch your expedition.  In terms of the dancers, I met Laurie Bramlage at a favorite dance class of ours, and Rosa Navarrete at a symposium at Z Lab UC Berkeley where I gave a presentation – or a “movement workshop,” if you want to be more specific.

J: I do not want to be more specific, thank you.

R: In this project, we had a really short amount of time to set the piece, so I wanted to make sure that I had all the movement ready.  There wasn’t a lot of time to experiment and change things.  It was a process of me demonstrating movement and them developing a memory of it.

J: Whoa, that was a beautiful way of explaining how any dancer probably learns how to dance.

R: (in kid voice) “I’m going to show you this move and you’re going to repeat it over and over until you remember it so we don’t have to use words anymore!”

Renée Rhodes, Navigating In a Whiteout, (performance still), 2013. Performance for 3 dancers, sound + video. 20 mins.

J: What is “a short amount of time”?

R: We met four times.  It really feels like the beginning stages of a project, like it’s in a sketch phase or something.  This is atypical for me because I usually spend more time on things.  On the other hand, I performed a solo excerpt of it last week in Portland at Worksound Gallery.  It felt really good to get it out there.

J: I think that fast paced, “no-time” sense of urgency is actually quite precious, and for me, makes me work really strangely in a super productive way.

R: Yeah, I agree with that.  Sometimes it’s good to have limitations so I just don’t go off on every tangent.  So now I feel like I have a pretty solid framework for this project that I’d like to develop more in the future.  One of the ways I want to develop it more is to collaborate with the dancers more and create a responsive movement with them.  Right now, there are some moments with partnering work, and in the future, I’d like there to be more improvisational exploration of what that movement could be.

J: Renée, do you feel like you ever finish anything?

R: No.

Renée Rhodes’s Navigating In a Whiteout was presented last week as a part of Scrawl at the Center for Drawing in San Francisco on February 8^th.  You can view her other artworks on her website: www.reneearhodes.com. 

“Our work focused on the impact of this replacement (of old windows with multiple-layer double-glazed windows) on the people who purchase them. In Romania, this transition is advertised and widely acclaimed as being more than just necessary – but the default upgrade, perfect for every house. While questioning this widespread idealistic belief that Termopane are the right (almost the only valid) choice, we pursued in deconstructing its “promises”. And since you referenced Adorno’s claim that art documents history, one of the key aspects this work documented is how the perfect isolation, the safety promised by the Termopane comes with an unexpected turn: isolation means protection, security, intimacy but it also raises questions regarding responsibility and anxiety. These new guidelines of the private space influence people’s social and psychological behaviors, by means of a rather unnoticeable slow process of adaptation.” Ioana Gheorghiu

“Looking back at the way the project developed and evolved from the beginning up to the present time, I can relate to it only as a work in progress. I do not think that the aim of our work was to protests against something in particular. As far as I’m concerned, I consider it to be an attempt at understanding the current situation and its implications: types of isolation, comfort zones, relation between public and intimate space, social interactions etc. However, taking into consideration the historical aspect, it is clear that the replacement of old windows with termopane began after the fall of the communist regime, which might lead to new ways of interpreting the current situation. As political factors have direct implications in the social sphere, the phenomenon can also raise questions regarding the consequences of political changes taking place in time and the way in which they affect the social behavior of inhabitants.” Raluca Croitoru

Every house has a door,”They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway,” 2011. Performance. Photo: John W. Sisson, Jr.

This weekend, Every house has a door will be performing their original work, Mending the Great Forest Highway, on February 15 and 16 at 8pm, and then again on February 17 at 7 pm as part of the IN>TIME festival at Links Hall (3435 N. Sheffield Avenue) $15 general/$10 students. For information on this and other upcoming events, please visit IN>TIME’s website. You will find an interview between myself and Matthew about this same piece on the Art21 blog here. More recently, Matthew submitted the following piece of writing about MTGFH’s latest iteration. – B@S

Returning to They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway

by Matthew Goulish

When people ask about the name Every house has a door, I say it has to do with aesthetic hospitality. In a sense the name stands as an invitation, and the invitation takes two parallel courses. First, each performance as a project assembles a team of specialists in response to the specific demands of that performance’s set of ideas. In this way, the company remains open like a house, and collaborators come and go like visitors. Second, each finished performance demonstrates our ongoing interest in separating the elements of performance and weaving them in some configuration particular to that work. Different aspects of the work may appeal to different audience members. In this inflection, each mode offers a different door, standing open for a different audience member as an invitation into the house of the performance.

We made a performance called They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway. The Chicago Dancemakers’ Forum supported the original version, because choreography lent this work its core. We borrowed the title from a song by the twentieth-century composer Béla Bartók, but the choreography derived from his trio for clarinet, violin, and piano, Contrasts, composed in 1938 in response to a commission by Benny Goodman. We had the idea that three men would dance the parts of the three instruments, transposed from music to movement, adhering to the composition’s precise timing. Brian Torrey Scott danced the part of Benny Goodman’s clarinet, and John Rich that of Joseph Szigeti’s violin. We listened to the original recording by those great musicians, with Bartók himself on the piano. I claimed that part for myself. It was only fair. I had worn out the record through repeated listening in my undergraduate years, and already had it nearly memorized.

We presented the piece at the Holstein Park field house gymnasium in June 2011. Lin Hixson had guided the three of us in the first months of rehearsals, giving us directives for generating movement to retrofit to the score. The directives suggested a second degree of translation from the music; for the first movement: a dance in daylight, movements of labor, social/club movements, army recruiting song; for the second: sounds of a summer night in the country; the flitterings of nocturnal frogs, automatic insect chirping, a bird taps its beak on a hollow wooden tree trunk … concentric circles … restful … volcanic … human singing rises from far away in the darkness; for the third: the fast dance, furious, interrupted, side-slipping tri-tones reminiscent of the end of Berg’s Wozzek.

We invited Charissa Tolentino to compose a score that combined found sounds and samples with original sonic inventions, and to present this live, sharing the stage like a DJ with us dancers. This music, twice removed from Bartók’s composition, responded to the movement, largely free from the score’s constraints, but retaining its broad structure.

Finally, Lin and I collaborated on the writing of an extensive prose introduction. For this part, she, the director, would speak directly to the audience, detailing our intentions and processes, as well relating relevant, if somewhat fictional, autobiographical background from her director’s notes and journals. Lin would not deliver this herself, however. Instead we invited Hannah Geil-Neufeld, a young performer whom we had known since she was a child, to perform the part of the director Lin Hixson. We had in mind a contemplation of youth and aging, with which the introduction concerns itself, as well as that strange area in which the familiar becomes just unstable enough to appear unfamiliar. Hannah returned to conclude the piece, after the roughly 21-minute dance, with an epilogue that included all the performers in the staging of the last moment’s of Büchner’s Woyzeck, taking those liner notes literally. Guided by the tone of Hannah-as-Lin’s semi-autobiographical monologues, a tone lifted from the dual inspiration of J. M. Coetzee and Robert Bresson, the piece somewhat unexpectedly became an indirect meditation on the fraught and sometimes brutal relations between generations, the anxieties of production and reproduction.

We finished the dance today.

It’s called They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway.

I didn’t think it was about mending when we started. I just liked the title.

Now think that thinking that – that the dance was in fact about mending after all – was what stopped me there on the sidewalk in the rain.

So says Hannah-as-Lin near the end. Each element – words, dance, music – had their own life, their own independence on the stage, no one of them as  accompaniment to another, and often not even happening at the same time. Each performer, or set of performers, had been delegated to one of these modes. I hope the house/door metaphor is clear now. To divide the finished performance from the process of its creation is largely an artificial exercise, but one that helps clarify our intentions and the work’s meanings and energy. The introductory speech makes some audience members impatient for the dance to begin. Others concentrate on the music as central, and still others need the words as their anchor. The piece asks everybody to assemble the parts into a coherent whole after the 65-minute structured sequence of their presentation.

Now we return to the piece for three performances at Link’s Hall on February 15, 16, and 17, as part of the IN>TIME Festival, and with the support of an Illinois Arts Council fellowship. Brian Torrey Scott has moved to Providence, Rhode Island. Jeff Harms has taken over the violin part. Charissa Tolentino has also departed the piece. Now Liz Payne performs the DJ role, with her own original sound composition. In this series of rehearsals, Lin has asked us to revisit the third movement’s choreography. She put it this way in an email from January 2^nd:

Dear Jeff, John, and Matthew,

At our next rehearsals, I would like to work on new choreography. Below are YouTube sources for these new movements, divided between Lower Body and Upper Body. I used the Mending video from Holstein as a reference to locate the choreography I’d like you to change, embellish, or hybridize. Many, many thanks, Lin

Jeff
30:57 – 31:35
Embellish the repetition of this movement using the Lower Body sources.

John and Jeff
31:56 – 32:24
This is after the shaving bowl move and around 28 seconds of material. Keep all your timings and positions in the space but consider using a different vocabulary from the Upper Body sources. So, for example, if you are doing something together this would remain. What you are doing would change.

32:24 – 32:35
Matthew – replace somersault
Jeff – replace head movement

Both using Upper Body sources

Jeff
32:36 – 32:49
Embellish leg slapping using Lower Body sources

Matthew, Jeff, and John
37:43 to end
Keep positions in space and timings but change the vocabulary using Lower Body/Upper Body sources

Lower Body Sources
Hungarian Folk Dance
 

Arms/Upper Body Sources
William Forsythe
 

Solo – William Forsythe from Tom Balogh on Vimeo.

See a longer version of Forsythe’s Solo here. 

Lin sent three links for each source, but I have only included one of each type here. I asked the performers about their thoughts on returning to They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway. John responded with this paragraph:

I counted my jumps one day. There are several hundred – not big jumps, mostly hops. I did not realize this in making the piece, did not realize it even until well after we finished and someone pointed it out. The dance acts as an accumulation that way. It is a complex field, but it is built by simple acts.

Jeff Harms wrote this:

The way in which I am finding the meaning of the piece is a physical process, born of patience and repetition. It seems that the art world often replaces meaning with “intention”, as if we were all in art school, or as if we all agreed on the path or even method art should use. The methods of Every house seem to be humble in this regard, and I think it’s for that reason, if we do succeed here, it will be a rich and meaningful experience for the audience.

In the years since we began working on this piece until our February performances, Hannah will have nearly earned her entire undergraduate degree from Macalester College. She answered this way:

What is exciting to me about They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway is the realization that one can mend something without being entirely sure of what one is mending.

We have been working for almost three years now to mend something that was not one thing to begin with.  This is like darning a sock that does not exist before one begins to darn.

Bodies engaged in speaking the thoughts and dancing the labors of other bodies is, I think, necessarily an act of mending, regardless of the thing being mended.

We prepare for February by rehearsing, I imagine the way musicians would, our collected movements, playing and replaying them alongside Liz’s composition, to fix in the mind and body these odd new aggregates. In his book Music and the Ineffable, the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote of how a musical work does not exist except in the time of its playing. Can one say the same about a work of performance? He further distinguished that one does not think about music as much as according to music. With that in mind, please click the link below to hear a sample of Liz’s composition, from the second movement of They’re Mending the Great Forest Highway.

Thanks, and see you soon.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg
 

Matthew Goulish co-founded Every house has a door with Lin Hixson in 2008. His books include 39 Microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2000), The Brightest Thing in the World – 3 lectures from The Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), and Work from Memory: in response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, a collaboration with the poet Dan Beachy-Quick (Ahsahta, 2012). He teaches writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

We just had our first Bad at Sports blog meeting a few nights ago and aside from the fact that I got WAY TOO MUCH PIZZA (and have been eating pizza pretty much every day, twice a day ever since) we had a great conversation. A conversation that, among other things, prompted this new column — my WEEK IN REVIEW.

So, now that we all know our former president can paint, I’d like to appoint him as a new advocate for arts funding. Bush’s return to the humanities may be as good an indicator as any, that art might serve a valuable purpose — if only to ease the heart and mind from a deluge of ghosts and existential crises. (Someone pointed out that, as both self portraits — hacked out of his email account earlier this week — involve bathing, there might be some psychological message at work. Personally I get a kick out of seeing the dude’s bare feet.)

First of all —  ORANGE, SIBLINGS, & CHAINS are IN. Even if you can’t play guitar, you can still go ELECTRIC, because e-cigarettes also made the T list. And they’re healthy (?).

Otherwise, this week on Bad at Sports has been very much ABOUT THE BODY lately — abstract painting was compared to  human waste; dance and movement was discussed as a mode for learning — which led to a great meditation, later on in Romero’s same post, about  the way we organize space. As he puts it, “Space as it exists conceptually promotes an occupation of itself by a certain kind of body. A body that is best represented by the athletic body.” Countertops, door frames and tables are built to certain standardized, ideal bodies.  There is a post about other bodies, specifically foreigners and the kitsch of foreign identity as it is present in the 70s Chicano Arts Collective, ASCO. Goransson ties that kitsch to nausea: “In Julia Kristeva’s famous definition of ‘abjecting’ as vomiting out the abject in order to maintain the self. ‘The abject’ is that which troubles boundaries.” In a later post by Friel, Tarantino was called out for “giving history a wedgie” in Django Unchained. In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, Daniel Orendorff reflects on internet hookups, and the attraction of sadness. Indulge me as I repost one of Orendorff’s Friday passages:

All of this is to say that isolation and promiscuity may be natural bedfellows. In his 1999 essay “Sex and Isolation,” ex-hustler and American chronicler of all things sexually subterranean, Bruce Benderson, laments the migration of cruising or chance encounter off the streets and onto the internet, saying; “The abandonment of the body is isolation, the triumph of pure fantasy.” Yet, fantasy wants to be recognized, and we depend on others for that. Dating or hooking up online is never really about getting to know someone, it’s about the desire to be known. Furthermore, it’s about the desire to be known as the person we’re writing and editing and framing and Photoshopping and staging for others; about the fantasy we believe ourselves to be and depend on others to corroborate. For Benderson, wary of how American entrepreneurialism and the Protestant ethic (myth?) of self-reliance has led to the shrinking of the public sphere and the routinization of social encounters, the internet represents some vague final stage; “Our minds spit our longings and obscenities into the atmosphere. And media have ensured that these ejaculations are everywhere. The self is now nowhere in particular, and, depending upon how you look at it, we have everywhere, or nowhere, to go.”

Lastly, Terri Griffith points out, the Chicago Filmmakers upcoming screening of Wonder Women: The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2012). A  documentary that uses the superheroine Wonder Woman to address “media representations of strong women and what these representations mean to our society as a whole.” See? A whole lot of BODY convos.

ASCO

There was a whole lot of Midwest love  with dispatches from the Kansas City Bureau (“KANSAS CITY INSIDE OUT”) that involved the work of a couple artists re-thinking architectural spaces (I feel like Vorhees work might present a kind of non-normative space)

“Lean-To” by Cincinnati-based Chris Vorhees for “Composite Structures”. www.chrisvorhees.com

and St. Louis’ “Identity Crisis: Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts,” that captures a great non-commercial, idiosyncratic art space that’s been around for 10 years. It once took advantage of abandoned buildings on the block for art happenings and is now transitioning into a new stage of professionalism and sustainability.

Gondo Gothic: Jessica Baran and Galen Gondolfi of Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts

In other news, I finally painted my toes after a three-month hiatus.

And memes can now be embodied principles: the HARLEM SHAKE has stormed the internet. Perhaps the movement, literally, offers additional insight into what can be learned from dance.