FINAL SUMMATION

this is basically a stream of consciousness........so please excuse any confusing wording.......

i cant think of a final summation without thinking about this school year entirely. what a crazy CRAZY ass period of dismantling self made rules in my life and art practice and completely rewriting them for myself. i really truly feel so empowered and my desires are different or maybe not even different just far more clear (i almost wrote queer) for me. Me using my body, live and in space changed a lot of things for me. maybe not even changed things but sparked so many more opportunities and possibilities within my life, my practice and my work. It is sort of like that moment you melt two metals together when you are welding and you see it happen before your eyes. you see each metal slipping into one another until they both are dissolved and become homogenized. homogenizing is not what im after but i think im after the split second where the metals are racing around one another beginning that interaction and understanding and almost question-meant or confrontation. or even water into oil and how the water and oil confront one another until, with these materials there is another resolution- a final state oil over water.

also through performance my relationship to object making has shifted. or maybe not even shifted but become a tiny little bit more clear..transparent..it feels oddly right bringing these things into the world. it feels necessary for me, which is important. i also think another thing that i have begun to consider more is site whether through live performance on site or sites mediated through video or found material etc. i get really excited thinking about the way a site can be mediated through me and then transformed/transplanted into new materials, energies and stories. The dirt was such a move for me- something i would never have considered before hand but its a powerful medium for me. it begins dialogues with communities (neighborhoods) outside of my own personal one and begins to make larger pools where intergenerational experiences are unearthed and revealed. understanding the spectrum of oppression and marginalization for lgbt/queer bodies is vital in my own practice. I think that is maybe why my performance style is so bodily and degrading because i am trying to understand the past, present and future simultaneously. 

i do not consider myself a character when i perform. it is me. it is max. the costuming is no different then when i dress to go out for the night or dress to go to the studio. costuming or dressing for myself is a means of survival. i make my own rules of how i dress. what i dress. where i dress. when i dress. why i dress. i have that power. i have that restraint. i dont have to consider the binaries constructed for me. i can dismantle them. i can reevaluate them and how they situate within my life. i think this also begins, for me, conversations about queer beauty and its consumption by the heterosexual society (heteronormativity). how can our bodies not be consumed? how can our beauty not be consumed? we are always being consumed by the majority- by the status quo. thats why its about a confrontation for me. a dominant role rather then a submissive one. and urgent one rather then a passive one. thats also something i think i have began to flesh out this semester is the type of viewer i am after. i desire for an active participant in my work not someone who is passive (i think these ideas were sort of covered in my second piece). i want someone to invest themselves into it. i want people to question themselves in it. i want people to intervene themselves in it. i want people to confront themselves in it.

I think with the latest piece i did i was definitely thinking a lot about lineages of the "same" experience and how they can create dialogue between one another which insulates, informs and manifests off of one another. The lineages of past homosexual and queer men (lgbt in its entirety) and then implementing my body to become a submissive passive character (in my minds eye) to carry out these tasks. i have only received one crit response from isabel and i just got done talking with laurel but in both responses aggression was bought up but not necessarily in a confrontational way but in a way that i was manifesting aggression as a material and it was coming from me and through me thus creating a cycle of sorts.

wow i could honestly keep talking. but i do look forward to what you thought! with work after school i am just excited to inhabit a new space and time and place and people and environment and see how that shifts my practice. i know that the urgency to create will always be there. i hope the drive will but alas it is alright. i am so excited to see what the future holds. i think my practice will obviously have to get a lot more "smart" in terms of $ and space. time and locations are free...well sort of haha! good luck with grades and such i hope you can make it out to Black Iris on friday 7-9, irvin and the class are having a night of performances should be a lot of fun! 

THIRD PROMPT

WLAM Responses

The WLAM presentations, dialogue and discourse have been far more fruitful than anticipated. I think I especially felt this when basically the entire class voted for Mika Rottenberg and then during the group discussion completely ripped her apart about her consumption of labor with out a personal understanding of the value of her own labor. A sensitivity, awareness and accountability are all on the forefront of discussion these days which is refreshing because it means that ideas, morals, opinions, groups of marginalized people are not swept under the rug. I also enjoyed the conversation around Jacolby Satterwhite and the ways in which he is navigating the art world. We all were so critical of his art school write up of his own work but then noted (shed light on) his authorship and how its been erased from the beginning of time and by him putting his work into his own terms he was accessing his power and freedom and reclaiming it on his own time to give people only what he wants to give. He does not allow you to think about many other things because he is giving it to on a silver platter. Giuseppe Penone was interesting because of the Arte Povera movement that Penone was apart of, but i guess what blows me away about him is that his work now revolves around those trees which seems so far away from the ideology of Arte Povera but alas. All in all though the conversations have been far more richer then I anticipated. However, i do look forward to seeing what miranda and catherine bring in for all of us! 

Crit 2 Response

it has taken me a while to even want to write this response because the piece took so much out of me and is still so fresh and new in my eyes. there is so much room to continue to play with that/those pieces and fine tune each of them even further. i was so happy to finally bridge my video work with my body in real time. the cherry on top was my ability to bring objects into the world and not feel like they are a bastard. also, audio is really scary but also really exciting. i loved how i was able to give each object a sound which then controlled my movements and actions. I do agree that the timing of the piece was either too short or too long ( i think it was too short ) for me, when i am performing i want as much time as possible so i can really get into the mental space i go to when i perform. I want to dislocate my self, dissociate my self, distance my self from myself. it is not a character. it is me. it is me. it is always me. 
i want to keep re-performing this piece. I want to see and understand how it manifests in different times and spaces. in different head spaces and mental states. in front of different groups of people. the audio still needs work and for me needs to be more understood by myself. i think its an important material to the work but i need to more appropriately utilize its effects and pacing abilities. I think the sounds need more space and less clutter well maybe the clutter was working because then it forces this object, body, action relationship that interests me as a performer. Another thing about this piece that is important to me is that all of it was made by hand without the use of power tools (except the wood cube structure) but for the most part everything was made with small tools which is something that i have been trying to get into the habit of doing because i will not have all this machinery once i am out of school. this is not a necessity to the work but i am definitely thinking about it while i am making. 

PROCESS

                

SECOND PROMPT

Crit 1 response

My last first critique...how bittersweet. I was/am energized by the discourse surrounding the work I presented yesterday. I get excited and enriched when the conversation goes right into ideology, concept or perspective towards the constructs of the world. The stock videos offered up a lot of room for me to maneuver and play while simultaneously reinforcing a lot of the ideas I am concerned with. The saturation and inundation of imagery is something I am constantly investing in because it creates a magnetic energy that consumes the viewer. The stock videos also made me think much more about layers and how they interact or fail to interact, the boundaries between planes, space and visibility. Stock videos are the 'status quo' the 'normal life' and maybe its not that they ARE but that they are SIMULATING the 'status quo' silently reinforcing structures of expectations. I think the funny part about utilizing the stock videos was that I was in turn SIMULATING an event or experience surrounding my personal pedagogy. I was using the user.
Malcolm wrote 'the ambiguous, confused queer body being used as a puppet, object, a prize that is not desired....simply an object to be laughed at then forgotten. While trying to find its skin and its presence it is struggling without a community and this is powerful I think' Malcolm talks with such clarity and eloquence. Even when Miranda began talking about armature in relation to gender constructs and the limiting effects it has on all of us they were activating the discourse. I think about a lot of the things said yesterday on a daily basis. I am constantly checking in with myself and editing myself which in turn begins to dissolve these limiting placeholders that are stressed upon.
I was interested in how people  began to only talk about the one on the far wall (taking off clothes). It definitely had the most going on (the final video had 196 layers) visually but I also think conceptually. At the same time most everyone stated or wrote that the pieces work best together and not as separates which HOLLA I am all about multi channel projections. I also am into video to video relationship (imagery, action, color palette, etc).
Overall though I was pleased with the dialogue and left the critique really energized to keep making. I will say..this was the first critique in awhile where I went into it completely in love with what I was showing. That sounds really vain or narcissistic while I am typing it out and even thinking about it in my head but whatever.
In my process pictures you will see that I made objects (screens) to project on but I just was not attached or in love with them. The objects were not in service of the videos and visa versa so that is why I knixed them. I also felt (After having a conversation with Kotone definitely helped) that the videos had so much content that adding another layer would detract and convolute EVERYTHING and make it muddy when it does not have to be.
Moving forward I want to incorporate my live performances with my video work and see what happens then. I have been thinking about the body a lot and you wrote down 'I wonder about a fourth wall that could be just a projection of light that makes images out of the viewer' which I found interesting but I began thinking about extending my body in space too. Also adding silhouettes (you mentioned also) to the video to simulate/play with viewer interaction and relationship to space and the video(s)/performance. I am very excited to see what unfolds. I feel liberated. Which you mentioned a lot throughout the critiques specifically Zach, Sang and I.