Fenner Merlick, Dominique Nigro, Andrew Rose, and Katarina Countiss produced a happening with David Jones on documentation.
We met a few times to work on the ideas for this and it was a short development process with some distractions, but we gained some valuable experience for understanding a little bit more about how to put on happenings at our local greenway.
This took place at Mandela Parkway (near Kilovolt) August 22, from 6-7pm.
Costuming elements were collaborative. Andrew Rose had a merchandise offering of an expensive shirt that went unsold. Sounds of maracas, wind chimes, bells, and a clarinet could be heard if one strained against the automotive noises on either side.
I really appreciated the canopy role. We all took turns to be in the canopy, the pace car of the procession. We reflected that it would have been great to have one more crew member to help with our prop cart.
We also thought that the next time we endeavored to do a piece like this that we would make more of an intention to avoid the walkways.
I thought it was an interesting feeling, more like a meeting than a performance. We didn’t tell anyone that we were going to do this and it felt nice to have no pressure from other people expecting something and then seeing what they saw.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance By Robert Pirsig
I thought I was going to care more about reviewing this book thoughtfully and maybe that’s still the case, but I realize that I want to do this in my way of rambling, which goes against the ideals of quality, but also perhaps in allowing this to be an initial way that one writes just to scrape off stuff that might never be revealed otherwise, it’s an approach.
Maybe, it’s the downfall of linearity that I can’t review the book at the midway point, even though that’s when I think authors shine. They are liberated to covering their most treasured messages without having to stick the landing. I think for the most part because there are three parts to the structure of the book, there might be a way to make peace with it more than once, so there’s not a lot of pressure on any part having to be carrying it the whole way.
I suppose I compare this book to the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once because I loved it and I recoiled from its relevance to my life. Maybe like the way that you can despise someone because there are qualities that you both share and it’s an eerie mirror into yourself to spend time with that person.
I’m still missing the simple pleasure of the middle where Robert Pirsig flips the order and states that the revelation is that Quality is what enables us to have a subject and predicate of our world. The idea of how the facts we perceive stem from a kind of undefinable “just what we like” kind of lens.
Later, the author reveals more about how the unhinging of the mythos is the precipice of insanity. It hit me in a way that I’m working on processing out. The theme of insanity is close to home and I have yet to really find grace with it.
Last night, my dear Justin and I saw an experimental documentary written by a woman about her brother and the effect of his suicide at a local indie cinema. Nisha Platzer was touring her film and it was her late brother’s 40th birthday. He died when he was 15. He wrote in his journal about how he’d want part of his ashes inserted in a cheeseburger and thrown over the Golden Gate Bridge. He was from Vancouver, Canada, but always romanticized San Francisco. Nisha shared that in the Q+A that it was that great serendipity that before the showing, she did this ritual.
I guess, I want to compare a beautiful experimental documentary to the experience of pursuing the answer to a question to the end of the line, to the part where it seems like nothing else is important and one is achieving the best work of their lives, the crystallization of thought– to the Q+A portion that sometimes comes after works of art that in an ideal world maybe shouldn’t, though it isn’t a total waste, it just feels awkward.
The takeaway for me from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is that I want everyone to read it and appreciate the idea of care and quality. The idea that you can be hasty and ruin a screw and therefore forfeit any opportunity at further repair. The idea that you can take your time and do a delicate weld with a light touch and charge little money for it and be genuinely puzzled when someone admires what you did and says something.
I think that there’s another part of redefining selves that I’m intrigued and still interested in mulling over. The idea that the author deems Phaedrus, a nickname he gives to the person he once was as he was developing his ideas on Quality, a metaphysical philosophical journey that may be the lubrication to a flight from one reality to another.
The last bit that I thought was curious was the nature of “gumption.” I like the word, hearty. I think about that feeling of honoring some kind of dharma that fuels us from the inside. Related to motivation (agency, competency, and connection), the juice that propels actions. Actions guided by a vision and tempered by care. The way of acting where it might be harder, but it’s type 2 fun, the idea of testing one’s limits and growing.
I watched a video essay about this book before reading it and I agree with the statement that the story elements help the heady stuff simmer. I also appreciate that it’s intertwined.
June 3, 2023, Kismet Arts Tangent had a show at the 2727 Gallery in Berkeley. Performers: Katarina Countiss, Kevin Corcoran, Dominique Nigro, and Andrew Rose. It wasn’t documented. I figured with all of the concessions and authenticity, it would feel stifled. Here’s a video from the rehearsal that we had a couple of days prior in the space, June 1. I normally document shows and it felt challenging in a good way to create a container for an ephemeral experience.
It was pretty interesting thinking about how I ran concessions through the kitchen and greeted every audience member and asked them about how they wanted their tea. It was something that I hadn’t seen done at a show before. The team also wanted to experiment with a show that doesn’t have formal announcements saying when the show begins and ends and I think that matches our intention of experimenting with how we want to treat our audiences and relate to them during our time together and when is it “performance.” I enjoyed the audience interaction and I think without that initial rolesetting as showrunner and audience, our guests felt a bit more at ease in interacting with us and the environment.
One of the features of the show was the amount of props. I would say that this show had the most props of any of our shows. We established the concept of “authentic bringing” and it was the idea that we could bring different things to play with that we might have brought or not to rehearsals. Bells, twine, a typewriter, a hundred of gold felt petals, tape, paper, gum, pens, pinecone, fabric, overhead projector, colored cellophane, a wig, a basket of percussion instruments, paper bags, a hundred of bar soaps, fennel… Next time, I’ll definitely be doing more documentation.
During the show and after, I felt that things happened that I didn’t like and that I liked that. It was interesting to think about because the way the experiment was designed to be whatever it was, I think that the pros outweigh the cons and it’s all learning and interesting. I know that the first time doing something is always quite special and then trying to recreate it feels a bit canned. The new wonder of what could happen with a couple of hours and some really curious people.
It was interesting feeling people make choices that made me feel self-conscious– I’m not a big fan of art wanting to call attention to the question of is what the audience is watching “art.” I feel like I’ve gone through a lot of phases in metabolizing this question and I much rather avoid it now, but I can appreciate that an inquiry that came up during our rehearsals was “would people want to watch this?” I think it’s an interesting thing because I much rather be a part of it and understand more about what we are doing then to look at it from the outside in a limited slice. I think that for something this gooey and unpredictable, we felt like we were making promises that were not a guarantee.
A thing to also note is that one of our number wasn’t able to make the show due to illness, so in some ways, the event couldn’t be what we hoped. The format is amorphous, readjusting to the space, time, and people present. That’s one thing that I really enjoy about these kinds of shows is that it was what it was and it celebrates that there’s no wrong way to approach the task of engagement.
Over drinks, my friend Justin suggested that we take a roll of mylar that he found in his apartment dumpsters and make a tiktok video with what we make.
Saturday, we accomplished this task.
I appreciated going to Treasure Island for the first time (other than just to turn around). The overpass area that we occupied was near some old military housing. Justin described how General Nimitz lived in the building closest to us. There was also an old swing attached to a cherry blossom tree that looked very picturesque.
We did not coordinate what to bring except for him asking me if I had a stapler and I did not, but I said I have some brads and a hole punch and some twine.
It would have been a fun idea to take inventory of everything we decided to bring. I brought a few fabrics that I thought would be good supplementary material, my voice recorder, scissors, a blue marker and some paper, scissors, a picnic blanket, hole puncher, brads, two combs, a paintbrush, twine and my sunhat, sunglasses, sunscreen– it was a perfectly sunny Saturday afternoon.
He brought some cheap beers and individually wrapped mochi snacks, some special chocolate, a small stapler gifted to him by his grandmother decades ago, scissors, and a big ol’ roll of mylar.
It was fun to sketch out some designs before having at with the materials. His approach was different than my approach. I think he enjoyed just playing with the material and seeing what it did without too much intervention, while I really enjoyed sketching and also I had some excitement in making my pod-cowl-hat that I don’t really think went with the outfit but it was pretty fun to see this pattern in a different material. I was very impressed with his steady hands and how skilled he was at pulling the twine through the small hole the hole punch made.
After we made the outfits, we had a short photoshoot/video shoot. We did not come with a plan, though in my mind’s eye of the event, we were in the bowels of the overpass which would have had a different sonic scape. I imagined part of the video efforts would be to create an unusual sequence of noises which I still think would be a good idea to do at some point.
I really enjoyed Justin’s sense of the dramatic in his fabrications, the curvilinear scarf-thing that kind of looked like praying mantis appendages. I appreciated having a simple vision of an outfit of cone-shapes and felt satisfied in creating it.
I really like this mylar material and it was cool not having so much of a plan ahead of time. It was an exercise in making something happen in situ. I am looking forward to trying this fabrication method again with more people and perhaps in a controlled environment like a yoga studio. It was interesting weighing down pieces we weren’t using because otherwise they would float away. Also, the mylar when you wore it felt like a sail and would catch the wind. I enjoyed the strange constriction of being in an armholeless outfit made of stiff shiny material. The act of walking around in an odd outfit with a friend is something I highly recommend.
March 17th, 2023. New mission yoga. San Francisco. Pet the Tiger featuring music by David Samas, Dan Gottwald, and Kevin Corcoran. Movement by Andrew Rose, Dominique Nigro, and Annika Peabody. Live overhead projection lighting by Katarina Countiss.
The return to this show after a long pandemic time was very meaningful for me and other members on the team. It was also very interesting having some former collaborators drop away and new collaborators take to the stage. For me there’s something reassuring about the idea that it is unpredictable, changing, mutable. I think it’s accessible to new people to enjoy because of the huge element of improvisation, it feels like everything relates to the moment and to the feeling of taking a leap and flying. This iteration was interesting because it was in a yoga studio. The flooring was a bright blue soft mat and I think that might have encouraged different styles of movement. A different relationship to the floor.
For this, I have a lot of beautiful things that worked. On an administrative note it felt really nice to get paid in cash by the producer of the event And then be able to ask for change from the venue and immediately pay people the stipend that we had agreed to. I am usually one to do Venmo payments. Being contracted versus self-producing an event is a little different. There was some back and forth with logistics and working out some details about where the green room is, but I think all in all it was a successful event. And especially in the way that I define success in that the people working with me felt like they had what they needed to create their art. I wasn’t planning on doing a show like this so soon in the year and it felt really good to have a different timeline where I think we all pulled it off in terms of getting costumes and props and having a couple of rehearsals in our schedules.
I really do appreciate the invented instruments, the improvised music and movement and lighting all coming together. It always feels like a wholesome ritual. Someone said it felt like artistic prayer. I’m looking forward to finding another opportunity to do it again. It is a curiosity of how many times a year should this kind of show be produced? Would we do a variation?
I really appreciated the way that David communicated to the audience that we were starting at 9pm and ending at 9:45 no matter if the audience was seated. I really like determined time tables like this and I would like to make this my mode of operations. I love the feeling of being predictable and especially for a piece like this where if you miss the beginning, there’s no consequence to understanding the story. I like theatre that has no opening (or closing) statements actually. This is pretty rare. David thought there might be a curtain call or even a mention of the performers names, but the performers were in a different way.
I do think there’s a way to communicate that style of event production so we are all on the same page ahead of time and there were a couple of things like that that I overlooked. I was really proud of myself for anticipating covering the window with a scrim I sewed myself. It really helped feeling the coziness when a studio becomes a theatre.
The idea of posting a single piece of art almost seems redundant given I have an Instagram account. However, this piece was asking me to give it a special story. In March of last year I started working at a non-profit organization created to provide enriching art experiences for adults with developmental disabilities. As an art instructor I feel like I’m fairly liberal with the instruction. Sometimes I feel glad to ” model ” how to participate in the program mostly in the way of creating art in the studio. It might just be a perk. Either way, I have been making more art with different materials than I have in a very long time. I attempted and in my opinion successfully charcoaled. I used a reference photo I took on one of my many walks around Lake Merritt. I really appreciate the reflection from the building in this composition. It really had some extra dimension to the water texture. I also really appreciated printing out a picture in black and white. I feel like this makes a lot of sense if your materials are black and white that your reference photo need not have any color. I was also appreciative of making this pretty big. I’ll have to take down the measurements when I get back to the studio. I really enjoy big paper. Makes it a little hard to take home from the studio given that I use public transportation and I don’t have a folder this big. I suppose this is a question I will figure out the answer for soon enough. The other day I was teaching a lesson about portfolios and I was wondering what is the job or opportunity am I creating a portfolio for? Is there a way to conceive of my portfolio as something for me and my art journey? I have certainly been asking questions about how and what and when to archive work.
I attended a surreal food event put on by Appetite Obscure called Lettuce Fest. Vincent Woo was running a stock photo operation where guests of the event could fill out some paperwork and become models for shutterstock photography. I have a saran wrapped lettuce leaf on my head from a previous lettuce-related activity. I had so much fun laughing at salad and I feel really grateful to see photos of me that I have such a laugh about!
I was reflecting on what I’ve been doing since summer. Among other things I’ve been thinking about my room, the way I dress, at Thanksgiving I thought about this outfit that I bought and how I wanted to become a dream interpreter. This led me on a bit of a ride thinking about how I would want to do intake for my clients. I had thought on off about the 100 wants card exercise that I read about in Barbara shares book wishcraft. So I decided to facilitate it for myself. I enjoyed it so much that I offered to do it for my friends some of them. It was a lot of fun I learned a lot I really enjoyed having a process. It was nice to refocus so I felt like I had my priorities in order after generating a lot and then calling them down. I hope to do something like this again next year. It was a great way to spend some time with other people and also get to do really optimistic and joyful exercise.
Kismet Arts Tangent 