File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1997/97-03-30.002, message 22


Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 21:43:55 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Practice


Yes, yes!  Let's talk about what kind of art we do.  People seem to
absolutely never do that on art lists.

So I basically do tabletop theatre with objects, and everything I do emerges
in cycles, or sub-genres.  With my partner in Boston (from whence I recently 
moved to NY), the excellent puppeteer Sara Peattie, I do short two-person 
shows always called "News of the Week".  We have an incredible
amount of junk -- pieces of cloth, bubble wrap, plastic toys/fruit/plants,
old hardware, household junk, etc., and we use this to create tabletop 
tableaux while reciting bizarre tales, supposedly representing the week's news. 
Another genre is "Circus of Thought", in which I think aloud on various
grandly pre-announced topics, such as pliers or gloves, using various objects
as thinking-tools and thinking-accessories.  I also do object-aided cycles 
of epic recountings such as "From the Annals of Art" and "From the Annals 
of Politics".  Lately I've been obsessed with doing shadow puppetry with
an overhead projector.  For this, I've been using found images, which 
I get xeroxed onto transparencies and make into either backgrounds or moving 
pieces -- some articulated, some not; and also found and doctored-up texts --
for instance, folktales which I rewrite slightly so as to make them into 
epic "Annals of one thing or another" pieces.  

Something that's been in the back of my mind for a long time, but hasn't
taken a materializable shape yet, is a cycle called "Museum of the Intellect".
This would take the form of a series of talks describing the exhibits of
a vast museum dedicated to the workings of the intellect.  It would involve
miniature "reconstructions" of the exhibits, overhead-projector stuff, and
all kinds of other what not.  

I think of everything I do as street performance, even though lately I've
been performing only inddors and even though the overhead projector stuff
couldn't possibly be done in any place inhabited by wind. 

-m 


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