Date: Sat, 8 Aug 1998 08:47:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: Ah, to hell with it


LC, let me try to ask yesterday's question differently.  It really goes back
to what you called "the difficult first step in this dance" -- the problem
of the status, in relationship to one another, of "epic description" vs 
"lived experience".  Let's take a statement like: "the meaning of a public
gesture -- a performance -- is different when it is performed in the street
than when it is performed in a theater".  Or a statement like "Teching Hsieh's
clock-puching piece, which was called _Working_, was a piece of 
representational art; unlike, say, Vautier's sitting performance, which was
something else."  Now I am not interested in the "truth" of these statements.
But what I _am_ interested in is the status of the "is" and "was" in them.
See, when I talk about the "meaning" of a piece, I do _not_ mean "the meaning
_as experienced_ by the spectators", or "the meaning _as experienced_ (or 
intended) by the artist."  And neither do I really mean "the meaning
_as experienced_ by me, the analyzer of this piece", although it is of course
undeniable that what I am articulating is my own experience and that this
experience, moreover, could change. Instead,  I _am_, I believe, trying 
to make a claim about something that is _not_ locatable in any concrete 
person's actual lived experience.  Am I wrong in thinking that one cannot 
understand, or even cogently discuss, the politics of these pieces, or of 
the SI's activity, or of Cage's activity, unless one does establish for 
oneself these -- what should I call it?  "supra-experiential"? -- ways of 
talking?


-m


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