What Escapes Involuntarily From Artists/Writers Into Their Work
While in Vienna, Austria, I stumbled upon exhibitions I would normally have never epxlored. One such was at the Tansquartier Wien, one of the most important dance houses in Europe when it comes to thinking ahead and promoting contemporary dance and performance and the related theoretical discourses and standpoints.
I would like to share some information that I found very moving and illuminating from the November/December pamphlet.
Part of the message from the Artistic Director, Walter Heun:
What develops in the hairline cracks between artistic planning and the moments of the un-calculable? What breaks out and alone turns the palnned into the event? What exactly is “what escapes“? That is what our search together with Tim Etchells and the artistic researchers invited is about.
Making signs—in al their ambiguity–is the basis of human communication. In the real and in the virtual public world, pictograms, icons and emoticons apostrophise the word, the gesture, the mimic. But what coorelation—a next one–develops between lines and sings, between twittering Facebooks and presumed directness?
I would have liked to attend “Scores N 2: What Escapes” but I won’t be here.
“What Escapes brings together artists, writers and thinkers whose work approaches these ideas in diverse ways. It points to processes of involuntary expression: to the kinds of signs which escape involuntarily from artists and their work, or to the processes of slippage by which intentions and desires—of artists, institutions and audiences—are manifest.”
This subject is very close to my own writing process as I believe there is much that “escapes me” from a source I can’t quite articulate.
This poem is very much on point:
What Escapes? by Tim Etchells
What escapes—what fights its way
free, what struggles to get out, what
breaks from confinement, stricture,
prison, trap. What one struggles to
release.
under, seeps out, spills over. What
comes out un-noticed or unbidden.
Residue or unsought excess. What gets
released, without (or in spite) of one’s
struggles. What escapes notice.
What is overlooked. What escapes the
machinery of theater?
What escapes representation?
What escapes from representation?
What escapes the commodifying logics
of capitalism?
What escapes the system,
the situation?
What escapes the body?
What escapes the ego?
What escapes theater?
What escapes dance?
What escapes language?
What escapes the space of art? And once (or if) it has escaped—
then where to?
And to what end?
What a timely post, as only the other day Robin, Myriam and I were having a chat about this very subject.I made the observation I could hear my foot fall on the board walk in her recent salon photo. To which Robin said, what interested him is that which had fallen between the boards.It was interesting to hear him say, in his work he was always looking for that which fell between the cracks.For me this is almost your contribution to that which had taken place, an extension from another part of the worldI was astonished to read this, as on first read it felt as if you were in the room.
@Reckon