Good news, dear reader. You too can learn to be a performance artist and thereby make the world tremble. You could, for instance, attend Sandrine Schaefer’s course in Durational Performance Art, which is run by the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art. The ripened fruits of this intense and demanding study can be witnessed in the video below. Among its gems are the vigorous crayoning works of Nicole Dube, complete with off-camera grunting and sounds of exertion; a 90-minute display of marker pen misuse and poorly choreographed wrestling by Ambar Janual and Luke Ryba; and Darien Stankowski’s haphazard scraping of a wooden door, the purpose of which remains stubbornly unobvious and hard to care about.

However, the video begins with the colossal radicalism of Elaine Thap, a woman who refers to herself as “they,” “their” and “them,” and whose talents are described thusly, if only by herself – sorry, themself:

Elaine Thap uses identity in their work to convey layers of being and relationships… Taking the form of social constructs and the irony of it, they are asking for critical communication and concocting the politics of identity. Performance allows them to fabricate situations of childhood trauma and adult responsibility. They seek intersectional meaning and memory in others by the act of othering.

Ah yes, the politics of identity, intersectional meaning and of course othering. How terribly non-conformist. Now brace yourselves, people. I don’t want anyone fainting from the daring of it all: 

Polly Toynbee, that is:

There is an instinctive bond between Guardian readers – we almost nod to one another as we read the paper on a train.

Yes, I bet you do, Polly. I bet you do.

Update:

In the comments we’re also discussing this, spotted by Robert. Apparently, artists and writers are being “ignored to death”:

The artist in America is being starved, systemically and without shame. In this land of untold bounty… the American creative class has been forced to brook a historic economic burden while also being sunk into sunless irrelevancy.

You see, it’s simply ghastly that craftsmen and labourers can have nicer cars than “the makers and chroniclers of our culture.”

A Western Screech-Owl. One of these. Photographed by Brad Wilson. Via PootBlog. 

Franklin Einspruch on art, censorship and impossibly delicate feelings: 

On December 8, in response to a conversation with the artist in which he expressed contrition but not enough for her liking, [third-year doctoral student, Kayla] Wheeler cried out, “The artist triggered me again. I’m hyperventilating. I literally can’t breathe right now… I’m being verbally attacked by this man. I’m shaking and crying. Please make it stop.” 

Kevin Williamson on private life versus pseudo-moral grandstanding: 

The profoundly stupid “black brunch” protests, during which racial-grievance entrepreneurs disrupted meals at places that seemed to them offensively Caucasian (“white spaces”) are a different species of undertaking… The message these protests send is that there is no private space — and, therefore, no private life — so far as this particular rabble is concerned… That the people at brunch have no real direct connection to the events motivating the protesters is beside the point. They were targeted on racial grounds: These were detestable “white spaces,” and the people there were to be punished for being white — even if they were not, in fact, white, their presence in “white spaces” makes them guilty by association. That the protesters were themselves largely white goes without saying: Protests of this sort are a prestige performance for stupid white college kids, mainly. 

Peter Wood on leftist academics who find violence titillating: 

Eric Linsker, an adjunct professor of English composition at [the City University of New York], was arrested on December 13, after he had carried a large garbage can onto a walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge, apparently in an effort to drop it on the heads of police officers below. Linsker was ordered by the police to put it down but fled the scene, dropping his backpack, with two hammers inside, and, among others things, his CUNY ID. Cindy Gorn and Zachary Campbell were among the academics arrested for assaulting police on the Brooklyn Bridge in an effort to help Linsker escape. Gorn is a graduate student at Columbia University… Her “areas of work” are “geography from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, social movements, autonomous labour movements, health, and the environment.” 

Somewhat related, Jim Treacher notes the lively goings-on at a concert for non-violence. 

And further to this, Robert Tracinski on dishonest narratives and apologies not forthcoming: 

But it’s clearly time to apologise — for every activist and journalist (but I repeat myself) who bought into the simplistic, self-serving “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative and broadcast it far and wide based on false testimony; who reflexively dismissed [police officer, Darren] Wilson’s side of the story as preposterous and unbelievable; who doggedly upheld a wider narrative that slanders police officers across the country as murderous racists. Don’t apologise because I shamed you into it, or because I’m trying to sell you on my advice for how to avoid debacles like this in the future. Do it because if you want to hold others accountable for their action, you need to first make sure you are accountable for your own.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Or, Another Packed House. Or, The Hours, They Flew By.

Strap yourselves in and crack open the booze because, yes, once again, I bring you jewels from the world of performance art. Specifically, the deeply melodious, mind-shattering creations of Ms Eames Armstrong, whose collaboration with Matthew Ryan Rossetti and a being named Kunj was happily captured on film for all of future time. Said performance, titled Through Bush, Through Briar, was recorded at the Atlantis Gallery, Richmond, VA., in November 2014. Regarding Ms Armstrong’s piece and her aesthetic practice in general, we’re told, 

I am not an entertainer.

Instead,

I perform actions that reflect and complicate everyday life… I challenge preconceptions of performance, destabilising visibility and invisibility. 

Naturally, Ms Armstrong is also,

Transgressing conventions.

You see, she’s

shifting our perception of the world.

This feat is achieved by means of,

Oral fruit play… binding breasts in tape… kissing with black lipstick… spitting in your mouth… having visions of the underworld.

And if further intellectual heft is needed,

Through Bush, Through Briar is loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

As will no doubt become clear in the following video of highlights from the hour-long performance: