Sunday, February 21, 2016

On Art Practice and Corporeal Reformation





The practice that is this work is not about criticizing colonialism,  it is a allegorical response.  A very personal response that I might sometimes consider a universal response.   The hope is to filter down not the philosophy but the intent, to get to that universalism.  A simple state of being that is efficient only in its holistics.   Free of biases and specialization, my hopes is to find a way to learn and observe, to live and exist, to breath and touch, to forget by remembering.  For now I see this universality as growth, be it cancer, population or regeneration.  Finding the precise balance to explore the external and the internal self is one of the challenges with this exploration of this growth.  Why the self?  It is the first sensor that we are given to understand this Growth.  I theorize then that this must be the best at understanding this Growth, holistically each part of the self canceling out the inherent biases.  

This exploration as it pertains to the physical and movement I have called Corporeal Reformation.  Corporeal Reformation is the act of remembering and learning.  It seems to me that performance work is the most radical thing I can do with art.  It sets no boundaries between active and passive.  We all become part of the community once again.  My question would be which community is this we are suddenly a part of when experiencing a performance.  The performer or the audience?  Are we invading or uniting?  Depending on approach a public performance can be a continuous state of colonizing.  I think the only way to remedy this is by the passive and the active both being in full effect, and transferring between the hosts (the colonized and the settler). 

So it seems that the act of decolonizing can be many messy deeds. In a post-colonial system the colonized and the settler becomes muddled and both become agents of each others restrictions.  They both share the initiation rituals of the colonized.  Both share symbols and stories in which the powers that be, the first settlers have establish.  The colonized start to assimilate the settlers approach,  find new land, growth credited partly from new places that one has never seen nor understood.  The settlers lost in empty promises lose their own heritage in hopes that assimilation and whitism will provide more than what came before, since it has made a few wealthy and untouchable.  Little do they know that the settlers are cattle just as the colonized are the human resource that is a staple of an industrialized nation. 

No comments: