<nettime> "The Without Response" Verbal 3, Call & Response

["cary peppermint" <ps1_newart@hotmail.com>]

"The Without Response" Verbal 3, Call & Response
The Kitchen NYC 09.26.00

Experimental Art is at its conception "restless art".  Notions that cannot 
be "fixed".  Work that falls apart and within that "falling apart" there is 
something of a reference or a "carrier" that at best and most successful 
exposes us as discontinuous beings.  Restless works cause a jarring in 
perception but not in exclusivity in the popular codified sense most nearly 
associated with the word "provocative" e.g., the "Sensation" show and what I 
would consider the conceptual equivalent to surface ornamentation relegated 
to a definitive value-sign or otherwise "shock".  I mean here by route of 
"jarring" and "restless" to reference a sudden interruption and possible 
subsequent or married understanding on behalf of the viewer /participant 
that prompts a stark "reckoning" of  most nearly what Emmanuel Levinas 
communicates as "the without response" the call for which there can and will 
never be a definitive response or even a non-response.  With this stated one 
can meditate on the convoluted route of my above statements and see that  
"Experimental Art" betrays itself under the capitalist system and under this 
system it will always turn inward onto itself, crushed  beneath the 
obstinate weight of the "more profitable future" for institutions of career 
fixated individuals or at best individuals seduced and ensnared by the 
glamour of an autonomous spectacle that contributes toward the harnessing 
the "new" and shaping it into a dependable, "quality" product.

Last night I witnessed and participated in "Verbal 3: Call & Response" at 
The Kitchen.  The event  was comprised of a group of artists who use utilize 
the net for some or most of their work.  Call & Response was a mini-series 
of numerous live performative artist interpretations of  the concept "Call & 
Response" originated by way of people and machines networking and 
communicating through data protocols.

There were moments of silence.  There were moments involving monotony of  
repetition. There were moments of boredom.  A key organizer was distressed 
some pieces went on too long.  A representative and director(?) of The 
Kitchen did not seemed pleased and hinted toward a lack of success on behalf 
of the artists to successfully append their approaches to a vehicle more 
friendly to performance and a live audience. Someone asked if  specifically 
two of the artists intended to "destroy the audience".  A participating 
artist said it was Dada in spirit, without any of the underlying or 
discernable political  tenants.

Against the better wishes of an administrator, an organizer, a mixed bag of 
audience responses from bedazzled to comatose and a few somewhat overly 
aggressive critiques from another artists present... Experimental art staged 
a brief, very "real" and quite non-glamorous interruption, an exposure in 
NYC 2000. At the end of the night aa Kitchen staff member asked me to invite 
her to more "stuff like this" because she is tired of "seeing the formalized 
offerings that pass through this place". I went home happy and thinking  
just maybe tonight some of us might have done John Cage real proud.

Cary Peppermint

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