Overall Readings
Reed Arts Week
April 2011
In Overall Readings, Wiseman and Flores infiltrated the social landscape of Reed College. Their site-specific performance consisted of private conversations between artists and participants transcribed in public space. Overall Readings negotiates the boundaries and prescriptions of social contracts while revealing the pitfalls of interpretation. Gary and Gabe's interactions were based on their version of tarot or numerology, but more sociologically based. The performance will took place in the Reed College Commons during selected hours throughout the week.
Gabe often plays the role of a talk show host/interviewer/psychologist/reader. As the questions become more intimate and difficult because they are tapping into fears and frustration of their past and/or of their future goals, Gabe listens intently guiding through means of comfort to show in the reading that they always possessed the answers within themselves.
Gary is usually the role of the subconscious of the individual sitting with Gabe. He sits behind the interviewee and writes down fragments of the answers to Gabe's probing questions. The unknowingness creates a very personal tension of not knowing how their thoughts are being interpreted because they are sharing something they never would otherwise. Gabe reads out loud the jumbled narrative of their subconscious and then they realize that their secrets are still concealed.
In this version of overall readings for one day Gary becomes the interviewer and Gabe becomes the subconscious.
Overall Readings was also performed at Share (7) Anniversary, PNCA, and again at PNCA imposing on a classroom's project critiques.
Collaboration with Gary Wiseman
Week long performance for Reed Art Week (RAW) April 2011
1st Overall Readings at Share Anniversary Event
Essay by Gary Wiseman:
It was a fluke. Pure chance. These performances were spawned by the convergence of disparate elements in an arbitrary moment of time. Donning masks. Laughing. Asking pointed questions to total strangers. The intimate and violent dance of conversation - the most important moment of history was five minutes ago. How does one explain the complex invisibility of an interaction? Can we really understand an intimate exchange that we do not experience directly? Where does trust begin? Where does it disappear? We are exposed through our language and made vulnerable by the shadowy apparition of our subconscious mind. How then can we trust ourselves to speak? Is it because we trust that no one is actually listening?
We tell safe versions of our story, one that is rehearsed and revised and rehearsed again. We play at this masquerade of vulnerability, sincerity, and self-assurance, sometimes we even believe it ourselves. Our families and friends have agreed to these rules: don’t ask don’t tell. A consentual game of silence unfolds. A game that unravels our attachments to the people who are most dear to us. Overall Readings offers participants an insight into that which we are most afraid to acknowledge; our desires, doubts, fears, expectations, and ideals.
Overall readings is an interactive, conceptual performance examining language, translation, simulation, landscape, and trust. Through brief engagements with the protagonists, participants begin to question their own relationship to the collective presuppositions inherent in the prescriptive nature of the social contract.
Amplified by a pseudo-intimate facade and mimicking the aesthetics of the psychoanalytical client-therapist relationship, Overall Readings simulates private conversations in public space thereby obscuring the clarity of social order and exposing the power relationships underlying the constant negotiations of interpersonal communication. Overall Readings is a flexible structure that can expand and contract according to any external time, space or situation. It is both site responsive and person specific. It is improvisational within a scripted meta-space. Each performance is directed by the language exchanged within it and the space within which it occurs. Overall Readings operates outside of time and has no beginning or end. Each Participant enters into a direct, mutual collaboration with the artists.
It was a fluke. Pure chance. These performances were spawned by the convergence of disparate elements in an arbitrary moment of time. Donning masks. Laughing. Asking pointed questions to total strangers. The intimate and violent dance of conversation - the most important moment of history was five minutes ago. How does one explain the complex invisibility of an interaction? Can we really understand an intimate exchange that we do not experience directly? Where does trust begin? Where does it disappear? We are exposed through our language and made vulnerable by the shadowy apparition of our subconscious mind. How then can we trust ourselves to speak? Is it because we trust that no one is actually listening?
We tell safe versions of our story, one that is rehearsed and revised and rehearsed again. We play at this masquerade of vulnerability, sincerity, and self-assurance, sometimes we even believe it ourselves. Our families and friends have agreed to these rules: don’t ask don’t tell. A consentual game of silence unfolds. A game that unravels our attachments to the people who are most dear to us. Overall Readings offers participants an insight into that which we are most afraid to acknowledge; our desires, doubts, fears, expectations, and ideals.
Overall readings is an interactive, conceptual performance examining language, translation, simulation, landscape, and trust. Through brief engagements with the protagonists, participants begin to question their own relationship to the collective presuppositions inherent in the prescriptive nature of the social contract.
Amplified by a pseudo-intimate facade and mimicking the aesthetics of the psychoanalytical client-therapist relationship, Overall Readings simulates private conversations in public space thereby obscuring the clarity of social order and exposing the power relationships underlying the constant negotiations of interpersonal communication. Overall Readings is a flexible structure that can expand and contract according to any external time, space or situation. It is both site responsive and person specific. It is improvisational within a scripted meta-space. Each performance is directed by the language exchanged within it and the space within which it occurs. Overall Readings operates outside of time and has no beginning or end. Each Participant enters into a direct, mutual collaboration with the artists.