Joy of Weaving - What remains
More about the project What Remains - on the sacred, the lost, and the forgotten relics of life art of Ieke Trinks and Joseph Raven | dfbrl8r
See also Joy of Weaving installation
On the day of the performance, I receive further donations from old clothes. Together with the audience I cut them into strips and show them how the strips can be woven into the installation. My assistant Sandra Meder then takes on this task while I weave myself, my costume and my hair into the installation so that I become completely immobile. I stand motionless and speak sentences like: I feel humiliated when people stare at me. I feel humiliated when nobody looks at me during my performance. I am ashamed of my name. I am ashamed to say my age. I am ashamed that I am from Germany. This continues until the audience is completely calm and listening.
Finally, Sandra hands out pieces of paper to the audience where they can read either: "Free the woman without humiliating her" or "Free the artist without destroying the artwork". The audience immediately pounced on me and in a very short time the installation is taken apart and I am carefully freed from my entanglements.
For me, the performance started with my first life contact with the relics of the two artists. Stephanie Black Daniels works in her performance "Extension" with the extension and femininity of the body. Therefore I want to weave myself deeply into my installation, as I do identify myself with my art, so that I become part of it. The artbody is equal to the artist body. Joshua McGarvey's blue children's sweatpants from the performance "Dressing the future in my humility" thematize shameful moments in his life.
The unfavorable and immobile presentation of my body and myself as a person and the unfinished and amateurish appearance of the woven fabric cause me feelings of shame and make me vulnerable presenting myself myself to the public.
The sentences that I say require a lot of courage from me, because I speak of really deep feelings of shame in my life that I have not worked through, such as identification with my name, which I neither like nor can pronounce. Involving and merging myself like this in my own history immobilizes me. Only when I say that I am embarrassed to ask for help finally I can ask for help. The audience responds without hesitation. The vulnerability that I have shown despite the thick textile layers around me causes the desire to protect and support me.
Since I am dealing with the question of what the actual work of art is and who is the author of a work of art in the entire procedure of the project, the circle closes here. The audience dismantles the entire installation, even if they are asked not to "destroy" the artwork. So is the work of art the purely performative act? Or what influence has the intervention of the audience? What remains(of other artworks) was the starting position for this project. Remnants of other performances become new works, which again leave relics behind.
How can the value and authorship of these relics be valued when the artists who have made them as part of their work in their performances are absent?
Dressing a piece of art makes it part of my body. Is this missing when the relic is on the shelf? Or can the spirit of the different performances, through which the relic was created, be felt in it? How should such a relic that has gone through several artists treatments be presented in the future? As an independent work? With or without the participating artists?