I've been planning to add something to the blog for some time but somewhat got bogged down trying get my head around 'negative spaces' , wanting to add something meaningful and clever but not getting very far!

One think that strikes me is that in our little world of thoughts, the different mediums of performance,sculpture, architecture and photography are colliding against each threading together the relationship to memory (or what's left behind) and how it applies to the different fields. To talk of the memorial and how we attempt to make a memory physical though sculpture or another architectural way, seems a path worth exploring. Hopefully all our thoughts are shaping our future sculpture in the very second we type our thoughts. Can one type up a scuplture?

I am probably repeating myself but for me:

the need to memorize, to write history, the urge to leave something behind. The marks and scratches on the walls that joc refers to. To state a comment. To take photographs. What does it mean. We didn't visually document our perfomance, we felt empty, perhaps much emptier ifwe had absulutely nothing. So are we memorializing because we all running from away from leading empty lives? Doe it lead back to existentialism, that we feel we need to create meaning and to leave thethe defined meaning behind when we are gone, especially because we will have no control in how they will remember us when we are gone (now we still do).

Why do so many people care what other people think when they die, even when they don't even believe in God.

I read an interesting article (in German) about a famous tattoo artist who went to Afganisthan and offered to tattoo soldiers which were part of a special squad, always at high risk in terms of loosing their lives. He said it was interesting to see what kind of tattos these soldiers wanted. Their choice of tattoo was often a memorial to an event or a person. For example they would have their mothers name inscribed, their children or their wives, people that really mean something to them. It's a living memorial in a way. And it's interesting because it dies with the person, it's one which lives in the now.

The interesting tattoos, are the ones which are linked to nan emotional connection. Some feel so strongly about someone or something that they can't keep it inside, it is not even enough to paint the event on a canvas, they feel they need literally need to embody it. The tattoo is not just a memory of an event but symbolizes what we are or what we want to be. By tattooing we are defining who we are and what we stand for, it's facing a truth in a way.

I am no fan of tattoos but there seems to be a correlation to our discussion, I've never really thought about them in that way.

It's also interesting how memory works and changes all the time, I wonder if the 'ego tunnel' also refers to this. There is so much we could remember but we choose to remember the bits that usually suit us best. Once we have a physical memorial, it defines to some extent what we memorize, it reminds us of a certain truth. It's also fascinating that on the other spectrum all of this you have Stalin who was actually trying to change history, by literally having parts of books ripped out in the thousands, or blackening some people portraits. From this we know that it is difficult to erase history once it has been made, or defined.

I feel there is a thread in all of this, perhaps it is the connection of the physical and the intangible, somewhere architecture creates a sculpture which is related to the memory of leaving something behind. The legacy. Perhaps the negative space of a sculpture is inside it, the place no one really knows or sees.

http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1481778996322778137

Ego Tunnel

Joc mentioned Tunnels today and conquered my mind. Tunnels are very interesting, psychically, psychology, metaphorically ...

Quite interesting:

THE EGO TUNNEL combines the findings of neuroscience with the philosophy of mind to
find a new and fascinating answer to that age-old question, "Who are we?" The "phenomenal
self," or Ego, according to Metzinger, is created by our conscious mind-brain in order to make
sense of the world around us. Drawing on a series of experiments in neuroscience, virtual reality
and robotics, and his own research into the phenomenon of the out-of-body experience,
Metzinger shows how the brain constructs our reality. What we see and hear, what we feel,
smell and taste, he argues, is only a tiny fraction of what actually exists; our conscious
perception of the world is just a shadow of the rich physical reality around us. Conscious
experience, then, is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality – Metzinger's
"Ego Tunnel."

Invisible spaces & What does it mean to make a sculpture?

I have been trying to get my head around our proposal for Italy and our discussion on sculpture and the space that forms (sometimes invisibly) sculpture.

It hits so many thoughts all over the place that I'm trying to make sense of it all. I find myself having to ask myself: why do we want to make a sculpture (of a performance or action) in the first place? I wonder what this means, this desire to memorialise an action or a moment, and I wonder what the meaning of this motivation to memorialise is.

[The glass piece I felt is somewhere not too distant, if not very close, to what we are discussing. With that piece we connected to a performance that had happened, so that the work's form in some way reflected or was open to this idea of change / movement. The work will change over time it will not always be the same; the form of the glass moves, the text may change, the text will be placed in a different position each time and then everyone's engagement through their breath on the glass provides a different experience. To try to capture something that is not designed to be captured, as we I know we have discussed many times, is an awkward process and I wonder why we even began thinking of it in the first place, why not just do the performance and leave it at that. I'm not criticising what we did, just thinking about what motivated us to do it as I think it's relevant to this.]

Jo retold an anecdote in her talk on Friday of when a curator who was putting on a Flanagan exhibition telephoned Barry Flanagan to ask if he could remake some pieces of a sculpture that had been lost. Flanagan's reply was, "The memory of the piece completes the work."

I thought this was really beautiful and something that I think is interesting. It's not just the memory of the work but perhaps also the engagement of the piece by anyone who sees it there and then that is exciting. It's as if the sculpture extends beyond the material exhibited and continues to develop in our heads.

I suppose a lot of art, not just sculpture, attempts to change the current state, or at least challenge it. I like the the possibilities that sculpture might allow us to do this; by setting something up or making something, like a sculpture, that generates doubt in the mind of whoever sees it, doubt that maybe they don't immediately understand quite what they are seeing because it doesn't make sense in the context of their normal day to day. But this doubt and subsequent thought has the possibility of leading to a new experience. There's a transformation, a leap from our object / sculpture / intervention to the expansion of the idea in the head.

I think one of the most interesting outcomes of Music In Offices is not the singing or playing the music but the subversion of office structures. It's kind of funny how something like the setting up of a choir in an office can mess up and undermine office divisions and structures. It's like new channels and connections are opened up, a new perspective of the same object, the office, is stimulated. But at the same time the vehicle that brings you to this experience is just singing, something completely normal that anyone can do.

When I begin to think about sculpture, I feel I need to understand why we want to make a sculpture. If it is even partly to do with memorialising (which I think it is) then I think the idea of how the sculpture develops in the invisible, inarticulate spaces of our heads (and the spaces between the sculpture and our heads) is fascinating.

The meaning behind the experiment.

I think our work tends to have quite a broad appeal, the ways that we find to present our ideas tend to be quite unusual and visually engaging but importantly they also spike interest with people like Jo Melvin, Charlotte Cotton and Gothard and that's probably because they have a different background to our other visitors / audience, they are more familiar with 'art' issues / practice and perhaps have more appreciation or awareness of the underlying concepts and / or processes (like documentation).

I think, like a lot of art, our work is finding a way to look at and confront human ideas. With Existere I feel that our decision not to photograph really contributed to the experience of the piece. One of the first things that visitors were instructed before entering the space was that they were not allowed to use photography or video. It is an interesting challenge to face and I think represents a human struggle between our instinct to hold on to moments versus certain change. There are lots of interesting questions that come out of this for instance: why we experience this compulsion to record and capture what can not be captured? Perhaps it adds to the meaning of what we are doing. I wonder what this meaning represents and what motivates it?

This is something I would be interested in looking at more closely: The questionable border where control ends and uncertainty begins and how that border is treated - sensitively or as a battleground. I found Barry Flannagan's work quite interesting in that respect, how he used certain malleable materials like hessian and sand that might be affected by external forces. He must have been very aware of his own control over the work and at which point he felt happy letting go.

Collaboration is a subject that we have looked at quite intensely and I wonder if it is something that we specifically want to focus on again. I think collaboration is a useful tool which is something that we employed on Existere, are we talking about it as a possible subject or a tool?

I'm not sure what aspect of 'chance' you are interested in. It is such a broad subject in a similar way that 'Failure and Success' were, it's so broad it's virtually meaningless. But I do think it has some kind of connection to what we have done in our work already, in dealing with uncertainty. Maybe this is where our thoughts have a connection? Perhaps it is in this grey, undefined area you call chance, where I wonder where control and uncertainty draw their border lines, how they tussle for parity and what that means.

I think it's a good idea to treat Brighton, if we do it, as an experimental opportunity but I guess we just need to agree on the idea behind the experiment.

Thought this article about Duchamp was interesting. It's about chance, which I always found a fascinating topic, especially because of Dada. In a way Dada was so much about performance and collaboration, quite a good place for us to look...

http://attentionwithoutame.blogspot.com/2008/07/canned-chance-escape-from-taste.htm

In terms what Jon said about trying to find an idea to work on I realised I am interested in three topics.

collaboration/ connection

chance

the home

Brighton

I needed to remind myself what Guy wrote:

"I suggested an event (perhaps 2 events?) based around the idea of performance and photography and said I would begin to discuss this with you all."

The way you interacted with the theme in Exercises in Failure and with the place in Existere (Testbed1) was really effective, and I wonder if this can be brought to bear, if you make new work, in Brighton."

It's interesting that we have been talking about Hockney and also Richter and the relationships between photography and performance for some time now.

The trouble with Brighton is coming up with an idea quickly, we usually want to take our time. I think we feel under pressure to produce something spectacular but perhaps we need to get this out of our heads and use the opportunity as a further testing ground, or something which is we would simply enjoy doing.

The way people take photographs and also the waythey view them in galleries are in some ways both performative acts. It's interesting that we started producing work for the camera. And when we did this the way we have taken photographs has usually been completly ridiculous (think of the ice pic, the little plastic elephant, the white elephant etc). We forbid people taking photographs of our last perfromance. One thing we haven't done is observe how people look at photographs, or works of art.

There has been quite a lot of photographs of people looking at work, for example Thomas Struth work of people looking at painting in Museums. It could be interesting setting up a performance on people viewing work - based on observations and statistics. We could expand on this, for example manipulate the statistics and hence the way move around the work in the pefromance...

I enjoyed reading the interview with Hockney, thanks for passing it on.

The debates about photography and its relationship to truth, reality and representation are not new, a lot has been written. However, there is indeed a lot of theory but as far as I know there is not much practical work about it. Both Hockney and Richter's work seems to be an open debate about the relationship of these different mediums and in effect about human perception. They both have a very individual way of looking.

I thought it was interesting what he said about layering, that painting comes in forms of layers just like our own reality in which we are always learning and seeing things in different ways. To me a painting or a photograph often pin points something by means of extraction and simplification, collages can make aspects more complex than they are. But as Hockney says, in a sense collages are paintings.

Perhaps it is a clue for us: collages can become a collaboration of different mediums. Perhaps it is a medium we could explore in similar ways to painting. And we could ask people to send us pieces from around the world which we could add to our collages. Collaboration on collaboration with mediums which collaborate.

I think using the different mediums is also why we could be interesting for someone like the media centre and perhaps that is what we have to play on if we work on a proposal to Charlotte.

Hockney

The Many Layers of David Hockney

This is quite an interesting interview with Hockney. Relevance to our discussion. Another comparison between photography and painting, although I think it could also apply to photography and other art mediums too, like sculpture.

One good Idea that Guy had was doing something for the new media center/ Charlotte Cotton. Why did we not think of that.I think it would be worth talking to her and seeing if she would accept a proposal, if it is something that she would consider and what sort of proposal she would accept.

Then we could possibly combine the create idea with the one for the media center?
It would be worth catching up with her anyway and ask her about doing an interview.

I thought city scapes by Thomas Sacramento was interesting, listen to the interview, I think it has a relevance.

Perhaps we should make an effort to see more exhibitions together and talk about them. To exchange Ted talks and other inspiring material. All based around the kind of thing we are interested in or that we find interesting. Let's pate all the links on to this blog. Even if it is not directly relevant but inspiring. Maybe we will find a talking point.

I agree that the Richter exhibition was not well hung and felt sort of clumsy but listening to the audio guide book is worth while. There is this relationship between photography and painting which is relevant to some of our thoughts about performance and documentation.

It was difficult not to photograph the performance. From the viewpoint of a photographer, which I feel I am, there is obvious reasons for this. It was a real test, a real challenge. One that I did not enjoy much, but that is besides the point.

I had an inclination to photograph. I've lived for photography for a long time. Photography often gives a sense of purpose. As the world passes by, the camera marks time like a highlighter, it helps to remember different segments of life by braking them up. Furthermore, if we create something specifically to photograph it, one can use this process as a tool to step out of the every day, to explore paths which do not belong to logic, and for good or for worse, to escape these paths.

The photographic print acts as a marker within the marked, a place to know where to continue, to develop an idea further, to push all these boundaries. As for the Existere performance we didn't want to push or emphasis the 'nakedness' and decided not to use visual documentation. In that sense it made sense not to photograph. I am glad we have a piece of writing about it. As well as having created the glass installation. It is a beautiful piece with a life of its own. It’s an art work that has come out of thinking about documenting something in an alternative way. Whether it really conveys a true sense of performance is a question. I never thought of the performance when I blew on the glass or even as I read the text. But as the performance becomes about something a bit different than the actual concept of it, so does the documentation in itself

To an extent I feel at a loss for not having seen the performance. It is in some way a shame. But I have totally accepted this fact. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really feel like thinking about it anymore. And this is interesting: I think documenting is about archiving which is also about letting go and moving on. Photography acts as a paradox because in one way it tries to freeze moments and hold on to a past, but in another, it also acts as a bridge in helping to detach oneself from a certain happening.. Like war or death memorials; they are there to remember but at the same time they help us to let go. Perhaps it is the same when we note something into our calendars: It allows us to forget without forgetting.

It is not as if we didn’t document the performance, on the contrary. We made an installation to commemorate it and there are verbal memories floating around. And of course Rye wrote a meaningful text which I almost understand. I like the fact that I don’t fully understand it, because If we are debating the documentation of performance, I still don’t fully comprehend what one should have documented, which part? Was it the naked people after all, was it the comments of the audience and the participants, the sounds, the original ideas, the atmosphere? I ask myself whether it is more important to place emphasis of the documentation on what the idea is about or about what is becomes.

In the case of Existere, I felt that the audience enjoyed the work as a joint effort of a massive, delicate collaboration. Only very little of the original thought sickered were apparent to them. To the audience the work became about something different than we may have anticipated. If I want to make a statement through art or if it is an act of expression, this matters. In this regards it is interesting to reflect on what the piece became about and perhaps even to build on this in our future project, rather than building on our original ideas.

Existere was a huge collaborative effort (in which I probably collaborated the least because I am a space cadet and ironically don’t like performance art). I think we created a sense of community. I think each individual felt safe and challenged a the same time and this perhaps gave a sense of belonging. Which in turn gave a purpose, a meaning. To create a sense of purpose and meaning was incorporated in our thoughts of the existential struggle. And it is positive that this particular concept was born, perhaps not to the audience but the matter that made up the actual work – the participants. Art is surely a form of communication. I think we created a work which does not only attempt to communicate an idea to the outside but interestingly the work itself communicates with itself 9by this I mean the participants and the way they are with each other, during and after the performance. One could almost say that we created the work for the work itself.

It is interesting that we mainly used digital technology (Facebook, email etc) to gather participants and convince people to take part in our performance. We gathered them in a virtual space and brought them to the physical surroundings of an eerie dairy. The space in which we choose to create our work is also an aspect we could take further. We can celebrate that it no longer is essential to have a gallery to test grounds of planted ideas. An exhibition could remain entirely virtual. Or it could manifest itself in different physical spaces and only come together in a virtual world.

These are thoughts which were born out of the God of Existere and the paths of possibilities which are possibly worth perusing.

I have mixed feeling about our performance, and it seems very difficult to reflect on the final performances.

When I think back, it triggers many memories and experiences of the summer. The more I try to focus professionally on to the art subject and documentation of it, I feel pressure, uncertainness rising.

The endless discussions, finding models, handling models, testbed , no money and the risk that it may not happen for whatever reason left traces. The process experiences clearly dominate the actual performance memories.

Concerns and breezes of anxiety became daily companions. The Awareness that everything may rumble down in an instant sits deep in me.

It seems like on the 16th 17th 23rd of July we invited visitors to have a glance at our poetic sensitive world; in which we revealed deeply personal feeling. The performances should remain in my memories as the highlight or result of hard work, but it isn’t. It feels like we just opened a door.

Perhaps it is because these expressed emotion, thoughts revealed in the performance are still present on daily bases. It‘s difficult to think about documenting a project, which is still quit deeply emotionally embedded.

Consciously documenting it’s to hold on to it for the future, in a way you expect it being part of the past.

In this case, our concepts is very much present on daily bases. Perhaps we would need a form of the documentation that shows the longevity of the subject.

The comments on the glass could be different ones, each time another fades over a longer period of time.

As you know, I think this could be ‘re’performed, in the right place on the right time…

Existere in Reflection

Guys, these are thoughts that I began noting down after the performances and whilst I was in America. I've tried to expand these thoughts since then but this entry just represents my initial reflection. I'll work on adding those other thoughts.

Existere in Reflection

Working towards the performance led us into a debate of how we best represent the events as well as the problems of documenting performance art in general. Our decision not to document the performance sculptures had a profound effect on how I, and I think we, experienced the work, how I reflect on it and how I engage with it now that the events have passed.

In preparing the project I had not appreciated how certain decisions would impact my experience of the performance, notably our choices to perform in the work ourselves and to not document the performance sculpture photographically. From the moment of the first performance until the last I found myself feeling somehow unfulfilled. It was a difficult sensation to digest and make sense of at a time when I expected to feel satisfaction.

The process was very different to anything I have encountered. Working with largely non professional performers we were challenged to construct and plan a physical and durational performance that would be flexible enough for people of all physical and artistic sensibilities to be involved with. It was also important for us to convey a feeling of the concept to the performers. As we, JocJonJosch, were all performing in the piece it was vital that this was all achieved during the rehearsals and preparation. Once the performances began we took up our role as performers, and were forced to let go of the control that we had held in our position as 'directors' and 'artists', accepting an unpredictable and uncontrollable course.

We became locked in the work, almost as if we were the oil strokes on a painting, the steel in a sculpture or a pixel in a photograph or video. Unlike a typical gallery or even theatre experience, we surrendered any further control of how the piece might be understood by the visitors; each performance sculpture was different in form, sometimes numbers of participants, always amount of audience, duration, sound, light etc…

Initially I felt frustrated at not being able to step outside of the performance and experience the piece as, and amongst, the audience. By taking part in the performance we were restrained from talking with visitors and explaining and discussing the work further, we were not able to hear their thoughts and appreciate their affirmation of the work's quality and value.

This compulsion to control the piece and its understanding (to visitors) as well as the desire for recognition and respect was poignant. The project had developed into a far more meaningful experience through this particular performance process; I had unexpectedly experienced the observations of the psychological state of our subject matter and the form that represented those ideas through the process of the project and participation in the performance.

As an experience and process, the form of the performance no longer held any value to me, it was the process and experience that had become significant.

I think we each have our own take on what the symbol of a house represents. Both in terms of the performance and on a more general level.

I’ve been reading a book called the poetics of space.

‘In the house, Bachelard discovers a metaphor for humanness’.

I thought there is a lot of relevant material relating the house in a broader context and our own thinking. I’ve randomly copy pasted a few below.

The poetics of space/ Caston Bachelar

From the Introduction by J.Stilgoe:

Talking about the house …

“…Always container and sometimes contained, the house serves Bachelard as the portal to metaphors of imagination”

“Out of the house spin worlds within worlds, the personal cosmos Bachelard describes…”

" if the house is the first universe for its young children, the first cosmos, how does its space shape all subseqent knowledge of other space, of any larger cosmos?”

The poetics of space/ Caston Bachelar

“the house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagination”

“….the impact of the house on the human, what is the impact of the human on the house.”

Page 6 from the book

“The house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transported into human virtues. The house aquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself again in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats. Such a house as this invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions. It is an instrument with which to confront cosmos…”

“Much is to be said about the psychologist of the imagination if to ‘social’ he adds ‘cosmic’ reading. He comes to realize that cosmos molds mankind, that it can transform a man of the hills into a man of islands and rivers, and that the house remodels man.”

“A house constitutes a body of images that mankind proofs illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.”

Can the contained be contained?

I guess you may remember that I had this idea on doing a piece on Sol Lewitt in Spoleto. It was about documenting his wall drawings but in a way that it becomes a work in itself. Sol was in some way fascinated with mathematical equations. One of his famous pieces is a cube without a cube. (have a look on net)

Somewhere in Spoleto there are these towers in whch there is a rectangular room where he wrote, scribbled and drew lines on all four walls.

I had wanted to make a piece which would be named ‘a room in a box’; to photograph every part of all the walls and making a box which would enable someone to replicated the rectangular room anywhere in the world.

Sol Lewitt was was all about idea and concept. If you buy his artwork you may simply end up with a set of instructions on how to make one of his artworks. The instructions were often quite simple and could be used to produce the piece anywhere in the world.

I have been fascinated with boxes for a long time. A flat in a house is also a set of boxes. Obviously it is more, each flat is a universe in itself, one that transcends geometrical space. Each Universe seems to be contained by another one. And I was interested in the inversion of these Universes. A larger room being part of a smaller one.

I thought of the process of inverting containment and un-containment. Through photography we constantly try to capture and contain something. A camera is essentially a box too. That box contains millions of potential images, each produced at a click of the shutter. Not only does light become dark matter on the negative but the image is inverted twice, printed on its head and mirrored at the same time. I wonder if in years to come most people will have forgotten that photography had gone through this process as the physical negative is rapidly disappearing.

In relation to this inversion process I thought of a funny idea. To make a camera which physically becomes its own picture and its own frame by literally turning it inside out. In other words, to construct a wooden pinhole camera, use liquid light (instead of photographic paper), expose onto the back of the camera, develop, take the camera apart to make: A portrait of a photograph presenting its true self.

A New Day

I guess we all know that nothing lasts forever.

We witnessed yet another testimony of this in the current crisis in Japan. When I pictured earthquakes as a child, I always imagined looking at the ground whilst you see it cracking, being drawn apart. Have to choose which side to run along. The unstable ground symbolized uncertainty and the anxiety that comes along with it. In order to overcome the anxiety we would have to start again. Even though subconsciously we all know that by building we are constructing the 'shadows of their own destruction' (Sebald…)

When does a house become ones home? You could claim it is the moment you move in but I think a home increases in its ‘homeness’ the longer we reside in it. My house in Greenwich has slowly become more of a home as I did it up and started growing on it. And perhaps it grew on me in reverse. I feel slightly anxious as it will be demolished. From the moment I moved in, I always wanted to do a project based in this house, I felt it was a last temporary stop to something that I would bring to a finish. Is this the illusion that the symbol of a house gives us? It stands for the end of a day journey, a place for rest, stability. And yet we have to walk out of it to make the cliches around it fall apart.

What is left of all this? We sometimes have memories and pictures of all these things. As for our performance we may not even have pictures but simply voices retelling the story of what has been.

I know I have been going on a bit and I would have loved to have edited my text, not much times left.

So here a short proposal or idea what we could do for the exhibition in Basel if we don’t simply want to use current work. It references some of the iedas above and one we’ve had together or some issues I’ve tried to explain:

To use the floorboards (referencing what the house is built upon: the ground) as a type of photographic canvas (using liquid light).

Using this canvas to show the house it was built upon. Questioning the stability of the house, whilst keeping part of the real house.

Making a box/ frame out of the floorboards, hence the house will be in a box made by a part of itself. The memory and part of a house has shrunk into a smaller part of a universe.

Realization: we could use my house (there are lots of floorboards we could use) As it will be demolished.

Alternatively for Basel I thought it would be interesting to use the little huts next to the gallery to realize this idea. I have the floorboards for one of them.

Another idea would be to use contemporary images from Japan, referencing current issues.

Marina Abramovic, Documenting Performance

I found this short interview with Marina Abramovic after thinking about performance, it's quite interesting and relevant.

Performance re-described.

I've been thinking of the performance (and with Son in mind) in terms of an extended art piece, wondering how the piece will exist after the initial performance(s). This seems to force considerations of documentation, interpretation and re-presentation of the piece. I guess performance is different to photography, video, sculpture and painting because it of its temporariness and because of its power to engage all the senses (as Jon mentioned).

I think another significant difference is that in the other disciplines you are left with a physical object that more or less remains the same as time passes, allowing for the piece to be referred to physically and exhibited in galleries etc… With performance what you're left with is your memory and impression of the event which I think is really interesting, this is where the art work continues to reside, in the heads of the audience.

Performance is riddled with problems of re-presentation and longevity but maybe that's partly because we try to arrest something (physical) that is not meant to be arrested. However, maybe we could give the performance longevity by accepting its physical temporariness and engaging with the audience's memory of the performance where the work does continue to live. By exploring these ideas in terms of retelling and re-describing, the performance may continue to hold currency through the language of performance and memory. There would not be any notable physical art piece (such as the human House) but rather a perpetual performance of re-describing that puts the emphasis on the memory of an individual and their interpretation of the original work.

Seebald

"For somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins."

From the novel Austerlitz, by W.G.Seebald.