Paying A Visit To Mary Part 2
With Guy de Cointet, Sarah Crowner, Elad Lassry, Willem Oorebeek, Alexandre Singh, Robert Wilhite.
11 December 2010 – 30 January 2011
In collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Alexandre Singhperforms on 9 December at 7.30 PM at the Stedelijk Museum and during the opening at Kunstverein on 10 December between 6-8 PM

Communication, visible and not, audible or unspoken, is transmitted through signs, through things, things we choose to have and wear, point to or buy, sit alongside or say. These things sociologist Erving Goffman in 1956 calls ‘fixed props’ or ‘sign equipment’.

Sign equipment is, of course, just as much a conduit as it is social baggage. In fact, the American visionary, designer, architect, author, and inventor, Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), stopped speaking for two years at the age of 32 because of his sign equipment. He said he didn’t want to go on simply repeating what he was taught. Instead of communicating by rote, depending on automatic responses, he stripped himself of his inherited ‘sign equipment’ or ‘fixed props’ and re-booted his system to say what was needed, when it was needed.

The exhibition Paying A Visit To Mary Part 2 takes as its cerebral anchor the 1977 play Iglu by Guy de Cointet and Robert Wilhite. Iglu contains invented languages, where sounds become words, gestures are sentences; where the actors (sometimes even switching gender) mostly understand one another not because they use words as we do, but because it seems they have agreed to agree. Agreed to agree on meaning; thereby shifting conventions and signs to a different communicative plain.

Paying A Visit To Mary Part 2 stages the question of how individual relations can be perceived and interpreted. How do we communicate? What forms can communication take? Do we understand one another, really? Is your blue mine? And if it is, or if it isn’t: how does this affect how we understand one another? The artists in Paying A Visit To Mary Part 2 contend with ‘sign equipment’ or ‘fixed props,’ with the shiftiness of communication, social conventions and visual representation. The show, which includes a play, a live storytelling, a lecture, a film and objects is an abstract conversation, amongst the participants and between them and the audience.

After co-presenting Iglu in Amsterdam at Frascati Theatre on 9 November, Paying A Visit To Mary Part 2 opens at Kunstverein 10 December with a performance by Alexandre Singh.

The question of the way the mass media broadcast the scientific discoveries to large audience became crucial in a society where progress is controlled by for-profit corporations and political interests.

The question on the cryptic language, which serves to promote science today, becomes the most vital in the society where govern in large scale a sort of scientific illiteracy. Art has all the tools to translate the scientific advances, to enable, in this way, people to evaluate directly the risks and benefits of the scientific proposals, without being conditioned by ideological and political-economic selections.

The Audiences’ habits, interactions and (tacit) indifference of the vast space which contains both modern science and contemporary art.

da PERSONA di Ingmar Bergman

Unitas Multiplex

OuUnPo avatars and imposters

(Original Roger Tichborne and Tichborne claimant) 

As you know, the OuUnPo members who will be unable to come to Amsterdam in December are strongly invited to find and send their avatars to attend the meeting. 

The presence of your avatars will not only allow you to keep an eye on the meeting and to be present despite your physical absence, but we believe that it will also open new creative possibilities for OuUnPo. 

This is why maybe we actually call the avatars with the name of "imposters".  While an avatar will act like you and pretend to be you, an imposter won't care to be faithfull to your aspect and behaviour. 

"Imposter" is a word that Borges used to describe himself. As a writer, he often felt the impossibility of original creation and used to describe himself as an involontary plagiarist cought in an infinite maze of repetition and quotations.

In the "Universal History of Infamy" by Borges, published in 1935, there is a short story titled "Tom Castro, the implausible imposter". The story revolves around the eponymous character's success as an impostor by virtue of being entirely dissimilar from the person he's impersonating.

In his preface to the 1954 edition of the "Universal History of Infamy", Borges distanced himself somewhat from the book; he wrote that the stories are "the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men" and that "under all the storm and lightning, there is nothing."

But perhaps we should praise the work of all the imposters who use creatively other's people works. Their work allows to make new links and relationships with the world and maybe to escape from the melancholic awarness that original creation DOES not exist.

The Mind is a Muscle is a multipart performance for 7 dancers who perform a routine of pared-down, ordinary or ‘everyday’ gestures on stage; the work also includes choreographed periods of silence, film and text. Fittingly for a whole book dedicated to one 95 minute performance, Wood’s analysis of The Mind is Muscle is detailed, specific and thorough. Importantly, Wood focuses on one particular performance of The Mind is a Muscle - 11, 14, and 15 April 1968- deliberately setting it apart from the many other instances of the same work. In this, Wood sets the specific socio-political, art historical and physical scene for the April 1968 version of The Mind is a Muscle - a scene set in the context of a 1960’s affluent America, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights protests and an exploding art scene but also inextricably linked to Rainer’s mental state, her health, her friends at the Judson Church and her own (stable) financial situation. In setting this specific scene in all its minutiae, Wood provides a close focus for her reader whilst giving weight to the idea that each performance, both of The Mind is a Muscle and of performance in general, has its own unique temporality; that even if repeated, performance is never the same twice.