THE HOLD!
The body as point of departure, point of reference, inviolate basis for that thing what one is. It is not that the body becomes redundant, irrelevant or obsolete; the body is essential. It’s just that the body gets bigger, and not just via sloth and ineptitude. My body contains all the books I have or have read, the torrents of data I can access, the minds I can empathise with. I don’t know where I stop. But there is a core that remains, the body is the thing in the middle, as its relevance fades it wants to hit back, more diseases for more cures, RSI and damaged senses. When we fail to appreciate and respect this thing, treating it as the irrelevant homonculous behind our eyes, it will let us know. We fail to respect the preimage of our decentralised self, the pools of hormones and fluttering electrical pulses, interactions of muscle fibre, digested proteins and synaptic flow, we act as though we were a gnostic point of light in direct communion with the one true essence, and we lose the gamble.
Investigating the relations of the exterior manifestations of internal systems, the next ten months will lead to environments and situations in which visitors can watch as their bodies get pulled inside out by the same forces that hold them together. Tools to exteriorise the functions of the body, implemented for an everyone, situated in environments that encourage a seriously playful attitude, the manifestations that we will reach will allow an investigation, even encourage it.
Spectacular works that present a particular body as the point of departure do not achieve these goals. Regardless of Stelarc’s statement that the use of the words ‘the body’ in his event descriptions is intended to lead to the application of the ideas to general bodies, to anyone, it remains the fact that he is the performer, and his body is viewed as fundamental to the discussion. This cannot be the result of our work. The body that is being discussed is the body of the visitor, the visitor must come to realise that she too is a body that is spectacular. The role of the spectator is to be abolished, or the project has failed.
tb nov 96
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THE HOLD! |
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