Mike Kartje's Three Performance-Videos

Mike’s three short performance videos from the week before last provided a couple of really interesting intersections for me, in terms of some of the things that I’ve been thinking about in my own practice.

Although they were not specifically identified as such, I think it is possible to read all three of Mike’s pieces as scores, of a sort. This reading is based on the fact that the performances are specific, pre-determined, and somewhat absurd. A reading like this gravitates away from what I’ve previously understood scores to be defined (as pieces in which the directives are explicit). In the case of Mike’s recent work, the motivation behind the content was not always easy to ascertain. In all three videos, however, it was clear that the content was pre-planned and not coincidental. A lot of early scored performances, including Fluxus work, relied heavily on the use of titles—and sometimes existed in text-form alone  (I’m thinking of Yoko Ono’s instructional paintings, but there are plenty of other examples).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the experience of watching someone else perform a score—a very different thing than reading a score. And I’ve been thinking about what Dwight Conquergood writes in his foundational essay, “Rethinking Ethography”:

Ethnography’s distinctive research method, participant-observation fieldwork, privileges the body as a site of knowing. In contrast, most academic disciplines, following Augustine and the Church Fathers, have constructed a Mind/Body hierarchy of knowledge corresponding to the Spirit/Flesh opposition so that mental abstractions and rational thought are taken as both epistemologically and morally superior to sensual experience, bodily sensations, and the passions.

I think that the viewer gains a distinct kind of knowledge from performance—an awareness of others, and of other experiences that isn’t accessible from reading a title alone (which is not to say that one approach is better than the other, but that they are different.)

When Mike performs, I see him as an individual performing scores that Mike Kartje wrote, whether he is silently riding a bicycle (as in the first video), or when he admonishes an unknown person (in the second video). By this I mean to say that Mike’s presence seems implicit in all of these pieces (including the third one, in which a bag billows against the wall in an empty hall.)

The second video felt particularly successful and compelling to me perhaps because the performance seemed to allude significantly to “otherness”— but also, of course, because this kind of performance is perhaps the toughest kind to pull off, and Mike seems to be particularly adept at this. I do, however, feel that a bit more direction would have allowed me to better appreciate this piece.

The first and third video also would have benefited from a bit more indication of intent. In the first piece, I was unsure how to read the content of the piece within the information that Mike had offered prior to the critique (including Derek’s work as an example of inspiration, and the desire to work with modern male identity—which I think is a fascinating subject, well-suited to video performance/ scores because of their emphasis on performance in communication and perhaps the absurdity/ futility of such performances.) At any rate—I’m not sure what the bike ride back and forth or the bag blowing on the wall elicits from me, in terms of asking me to think about how I experience the world. This isn’t to say that both weren’t enjoyable to watch—they were—or that I felt that they needed to function as a metaphor, or that they didn’t illict a variety of associations—but that some sort of direction would have rounded out my reading.

I’d definitely recommend the Fluxus Workbook http://www.deluxxe.com/beat/fluxusworkbook.pdf and The Theater of the Absurd http://www.amazon.com/Theatre-Absurd-Martin-Esslin/dp/1400075238 (or something like it) to pretty much anyone, but these were two texts that came to mind immediately during this critique.

I really like the direction that this work is going and look forward to seeing more of it.