Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, El Rumor del Incendio. Photo: Anne Vijverman.

It’s natural that in any given cultural moment (local or global), certain ideas will percolate. You know how at certain moments it seems like Hollywood releases three asteroid blockbusters in a matter of weeks? Call it zeitgeist, call it coincidence, but we’ll come out and call it significant. This year, we were struck by the number of artists who are working at the borders of art and activism, exploring big political shifts in societies around the world. In 2011, the first inklings of these political leanings were already present in artistic practice, not least in our visual art program, entitled Evidence of Bricks. Following a year that spanned from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, it’s small wonder that so many artists are now unveiling projects that reflect revolution and protest and uprising and political renewal.

Perhaps central among these projects at TBA:12 will be a world-premiere dance piece by Keith Hennessy/Circo Zero Performance. Developed in-residence this spring at PICA , Turbulence (a dance about the economy) attempts to make sense of the global economic collapse through improvisation and deliberate failure. The performance references images as disparate (but eerily related) as circus performance and Abu Ghraib, while exploring the many ways that our language and ideas about economies are literally “embodied.” Through a June symposium hosted around their residency, the company explored the problematics of queer identity and performance, of alternative economies, and whether art can truly be political. Their questions and investigations will continue at the September TBA premiere.

Big Art Group also asked a lot of questions during their pre-TBA residency, some quite literally. Their time in Portland centered on a week of community interviews by Portland residents of their friends and neighbors. The questions they posed covered everything from census-style information to deep and challenging issues at the heart of democratic society. Can you wage a war on behalf of democracy? Is terrorism ever justified? What makes a community? Together, these videos form the digital “Greek chorus” of The People—Portland, a multi-city serial project that loosely examines the tragic Oresteia, often cited as a founding text of civic society. Big Art’s performance will span a monumental video projection on the facade of Washington High School and engage with some of the core values underlying our political system.

Seminal artist, musician, and storyteller Laurie Anderson has developed a new piece entitled Dirtday! to cap off her story cycle trilogy. Over a varied career spanning countless subjects and themes, Anderson has consistently tapped into the present and the echoes of our recent past. From the legacy of 9/11 to the impact of last year’s Occupy movement, Anderson is an astute chronicler of the American political consciousness.

Moving beyond American soils and concerns, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican company investigating the political heritage of their country and the society their generation has inherited. In two bold “documentary” plays at TBA, Lagartijas will expose two overlooked aspects of Mexico City’s history—the armed revolutionaries of the 60s (El Rumor del Incendio) and the destruction of its natural aquifers and water sources (Asalto al Agua Transparente). Through a mix of archival text and footage, video, and original theater,  the company will set out to, “document the truth within the fiction, not to interpret it.” A worthy goal for any politically-minded artist, to be sure.

All I can really think about is this very odd and now-distant sensation of luxury. LUXURY.

This symposium was ridiculous, in that it made my artist-self feel like I was on a tropical island, lying on a beach chair and drinking some blue frozen drink…or something. And I feel alot of things about how and why an experience like this should feel that way.

Just to get it out of the way, there is a very present part of me that feels really angry and sad EVERY SINGLE TIME I engage with a closely curated, funded, and organized event like this recent symposium. It reminds me, starkly, of just how dis-integrated this kind of critical focus is in my day-to-day.

All in one fucking week, I:

1. met wholly inspiring new people who lit me on fire with their ideas and contributions to our conversations and work processes,
2. strengthened my ties to certain friends/presenters/colleagues/muses who are generally just too sparse on my social and artistic radar, 
3. REALLY REALLY deepened and complexified my relationship to the project that I’m making with Keith and friends,
4. grew sick crushes on at least five people,
5. thought up 77 new projects that I want to make with said new muses, often inspired by their incredible brains and works,
6. ate everything in sight,
7. enjoyed the hell out of Portland (which included meditations on place and whiteness and class and getting older and community-beyond-capitalistically-driven-linkages-and-soulless-networking), and 
8. didn’t work one goddamned waiting tables shift.

This scares me. The power of living in such an engaged way scares me. The rarity of being able to live in such an engaged way scares me. My feeling of being misplaced in this little economy that the symposium built, the titillation of being in it anyway, and my desire for more, all really fucking scare me. Yup. ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY, GIRL!

That said, I think it was one hell of a queer-ass week…and an excellent week.

For example, I was moved in all directions by my second – and very richly contextualized – viewing of Steiner and Burns’ film Community Action Center. I can not and will not cover all the personal and theoretical ground of why that movie feels important to me, but I will say that thrusting sexual creativity to the foreground in that way feels like a really big fucking piece of the proverbial pie, people! Showing systemically marginalized OR just non-mainstream communities (or fuck, any community for that matter) utilizing their hot bodies to produce and love and create, all in contexts of sexuality, is basically one of the most inspiring and USEFUL projects I can think of. It’s like: “HEY! We’re taking all this fucked up and impossibly complicated bullshit that IS THE dominant narrative of sexuality/gender/pleasure/shame, and we’re making something active out of it for US to enjoy, talk about, jerk off to, remember, laugh with…” I think the film and its discourse are a great jumping off point for alot of thinking and making around issues of sex and sexuality as a glue of community, around how Foucault’s “incitement to discourse” is necessarily shifting (fading?) and how we might feel about that, and about what a project like this actually morphs into when the goddamned MOMA wants it! Institutions are so freaky and funny about curation! (to me)

I could go on and on, but…I don’t have time. I have to go to the airport very soon.

But I do want to say that, as for Turbulence, what happened for me in Portland was that I woke up to the possibility that the work, in this case, may really just be in doing the work. I know it’s very hip to resist capitalist language, but the more and more we, as an ensemble, tried to decide what images or happenings were best (or most potent OR WHATEVER), the more I feel like we lost the power of the interactions we had in the showings and open rehearsals…and that power is the work. And this is quite a consideration! Like, here we all are: there is a studio and there are programs and there is a presenting organization (PICA 4-EVA), there are paid artists everywhere you look, but there’s NO SHOW. It’s quite radical, I think. And maybe this is us inching toward some new model/notion of composition that I feel – so instinctively – is going to be the thing that saves us. Like SAVES. US. This is not marked by us necessarily being uppity (though that’s not such a bad thing), and it’s not because we aren’t working tooth and nail with every fiber of our brains and bodies, but instead, it’s maybe because we’re actually allowing ourselves to get what we need. And what it seems we need is to grab the “audience” (or if you’re “audience” then to BE grabbed) and implore eachother’s presence, action, and collaboration. I don’t think we can afford to put on a play for anyone. I just don’t.

And yes, it was probably the immersion in a non-resolution-based series of conversations that allowed for these kinds of thoughts in me.

I don’t actually care that it wasn’t the most diverse crowd. For me, this symposium became about pushing hard on process, and making very very few decisions about product. And the best part was doing it with a bunch of other pushers.

I also don’t really care that the conversations tended to be sprinkled with an awful lot of big words. Dealing with that is another project. Lastly, I can’t quite muster that much interest in the question of whether political art can be done (or ever NOT done) and if it matters. The presence of politics in the body is, to me, a wildly personal and NOT universal thing, and therefore I think that my intention in my art-making is to be thinking less about what meaning is going to be made from what I make, and more about the immediate hotness and importance of just making it. Because, FUCK, I have to live and feel good in order to be effective and take care of my self and my loved ones, right? It’s not like Hollywood or the Guggenheim or whothefuckever is knockin’ on my door…

Anyway…It was good. It was hard. I’m tired. And I really do need to go pack.

THANK YOU so much, PICA, for disorienting me almost completely at times, giving me bagels, and making me feel like I was a royal guest in some fucked up version of a Puerto Vallarta faggy intellectual art heaven…but windier. I sincerely promise to go forward and really make the very best of it all.

Open rehearsal for Turbulence (a dance about the economy). Photo: Patrick Leonard.

As coordinator of the recent PICA symposium, Bodies, Identities, & Alternative Economies, as well as a guest artist in Keith Hennessy’s Turbulence (a dance about the economy), the primary point of departure for the symposium’s questions and themes, I have a richly complicated and unresolved relationship to the intersections between Turbulence as a political performance project and the symposium as an exercise in artistic and political discourse.

PICA presents contemporary art—“the art of our time,” as we often say. It is, in many ways, not only captivated by, but obsessed with, what artists are doing with and about the present. Angela Mattox, PICA’s Artistic Director, recognized the political potency of Turbulence, and that Keith Hennessy and his group of collaborative dancers and choreographers are grappling, on both aesthetic and conceptual levels, with the most timely of concerns—the sociopolitical dimensions of our economic moment.

I could use this space to reflect on so many aspects of the symposium experience and the audiences and artists who came together to build it as it happened. For now, I sense the most urgency in a question that both frames and emerges from Turbulence and the symposium—how do we make political art now, and how do we create moments to talk about it? In retrospect, this feels like a question of structure extracted from architecture, sustainability without popularity, and support systems that make a gift of discomfort; and like dances and symposia, it is rendered by bodies in time and space.

In one sense, we can locate the politics in any work of art, which puts “political art” at risk of banality. But if we decide that our cultural moment demands more attention to the violence of financial capitalism than ever before, and we want to make performance art about it, then we have to ask ourselves some serious questions while contending with their unanswerability in the face of very high, and very real, stakes.

During the Turbulence residency in Portland, we asked ourselves everyday, alone and in group process, what we are doing and how we are doing it. We avoided asking why, because why leads to dead ends, and because if there is anything we know about this project, it’s that it matters. What we do know is that we are sourcing a range of texts and visual images to inform the work; using tools of improvisation to unpack queer as practice and failure as tactic; purposefully introducing turbulence as a physical and emotional element in the piece; and collectively creating a bodily response to the economic crisis that is contingent upon public engagement. Some of us are hurt, some of us hopeful, and most of us angry. Now we’re making something unnamable out of it.

Happy hour reading group at Green Dragon. Photo: Patrick Leonard.

In many ways, PICA approached our symposium planning similarly. We knew that making space for generative public dialogue about economy, queerness, and the politics of bodies carried weight, but we didn’t know what that would look or feel like or how it would all come together. In this way, we reimagined the concept of symposium as an arts-based community experience rather than a strictly academic one, thus queering the symposium space to privilege inclusivity, pleasure, and open dialogue that doesn’t shy away from difficulty.

We also aimed to cultivate place-based connections, putting people in contact with each other and artistic processes, in many ways defying the friction between isolation and intimacy engendered by new media. We were curious about what would happen if artists, activists, academics, and community workers encountered each other with loose intentions and zero promises, occupying space for the purposes of sharing, learning, exploring, and doing in real time.

So, how do we make political theatre, political dances, or political symposia of and about today? How do we make a dance about the economy? What happens when we try to center marginalized bodies (in presentation, in performance, in conversation, in film)? If queer always already fails, than can a symposium about queer and failure fail? Can it succeed? Are we breaking down central tenets and problematic dichotomies of capitalism simply by staging a platform for intentional failure and imagining typologies of risk that have nothing to do with the precariousness of markets or the loss of homes? Do we feel alone when we choose violence, when we give up on pacifism in the face of oppression, when we use our bodies—in public, private, and liminal spaces—not just as commentary or riposte, but as response? In what ways are we responsible for the structures we build and the systems we tear down?

Among many other things, the symposium and Turbulence–and Turbulence in the context of the symposium—reinforced for me the imperativeness of unanswerable questions and served as a reminder that we mustn’t stop making space for the act of asking to unfold.