Ocular-centric culture

Culture which favors the visual over the physical.

In which case calling myself a visual artist is misleading.

Darwin, Attenboruogh, Bauhaus

'The meaning of any structure is to found by inquiring what the forces are to which the creature possessing it is reacting so that it can maintain it's own existence.

Force must be met by force, and the structure evolves as the forces are balancing''

Mabel E Todd.

Jose Limon- another dance inspiration... started out as a painter.

there must be some sort of connection here .

Rudolf Laban

I have just read the story of Rudolf Laban and there are many similarities between his story and my own. He began his planless adventure in painting, was fascinated by circus and human interaction and most importantly he had no fixed plan. His nature and agendas are so close to mine from what I have read.. He embodied things and regurgitated them to understand, the Picasso of dance. We even appear to have the same hat.

I don't think I have identified with anything quite to this extent before.

Interestingly he was also involved in temporary anarchic communities such as Ascona, which put me in mind of the connections that I have been laterally making between Black Mountain College, and my own involvement with festivals. It strikes me that certain festivals are sustaining the arts through providing creative people a lawless playground, packed with stimulation, adventure and a like minded temporary community. Something every critique group aims to be and always fall short of.

Sculpture- a physical encounter between an object and an embodied being in an environment.

Sculpture must, occupy, interact with or enclose actual space.

common methods are; carving, modeling, construction, reproduction, ready-mades. 

Dance- Movement material derived from human movement and behaviour, developed and presented to give emphasis, in a time based structure, with a visual, sonic and dramatic element. Choreography being a scaffold for action.

Performance Art- a form involving the artists body, time, space and an audience, and/or derivatives of these things.

Live Art-  "Live Art should not be understood as a description of an art form but as a strategy to ‘include' a diversity of practices and artists that might otherwise find themselves ‘excluded' from all kinds of policy and provision and all kinds of curatorial contexts and critical debates." [Live Arts Development Agency] Temporal, time based.

Although I find definitions hugely uninteresting to discuss [ I prefer to discuss possibility and boundlessness, rather than limitations and edges], I am posting these definitions to indicate what I understand them to be. Now we are on the same page.

To get these out I put in to my brain machine the following;looking at rock structure, rep and contemporary class with Angela Praed & C-Scape.

www.youtube.com/alexiszeldastevens

Click on "Contact-Squash-Catch"

 

This is my first exploration of these objects along side movement, a sketch.

Compress-Squash-Flatten

Since late 2006 I have been researching the effect of these three things on materials and landscapes.
I am now turning my focus to how these things effect bodies and relationships, physically and psychologically.

The form of this next exploration will be a performance, loosely a duet performed by two dancers on the 4Th of July 2009 in London. The piece was made partially in response to '30 Pieces of Silver' by Cornelia Parker and various Paula Reago paintings as well as the exploration in materials that I have carried out over the past two years.

You can watch some footage here www.youtube.com/alexizeldastevens. the piece is called 'You Are A Lid to Me' .

Encounter as a project wants to collaborate, and is the foundation of a collective.

The next series of posts present the most significant findings of previous research, and opens up my working process to my audience, that includes you.. by the way.

compress
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: compact, condense
Synonyms: abbreviate, abridge, abstract, bind, boil down, coagulate, concentrate, consolidate, constrict, contract, cram, cramp, crowd, crush, decrease, dehydrate, densen, densify, epitomize, force into space, make brief, narrow, pack, press, press together, ram, reduce, restrict, shorten, shrink, shrivel, squash, squeeze, stuff, summarize, syncopate, telescope, tighten, wedge, wrap
Antonyms: blow up, expand, extend, fill, increase, loosen, stretch, uncompress, uncondense

squash
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: compress
Synonyms: annihilate, bear, bruise, crowd, crush, distort, extinguish, flatten, jam, kill, macerate, mash, pound, press, pulp, push, put down, quash, quell, scrunch, shut down, sit on, smash, squeeze, squish, stamp on, suppress, trample, triturate
Notes: quash means to crush or to subdue or to suppress or extinguish summarily and completely, while squash means to compress, crush, or squeeze
Antonyms: fan, open, uncompress

Main Entry: flatten
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: level out
Synonyms: abrade, beat down, compress, crush, debase, deflate, depress, even out, fell, floor, flush, grade, ground, iron out, knock down, lay, lay low, mow down, plane, plaster*, prostrate, raze, roll, smash, smooth, spread out, squash, straighten, subdue, trample
Antonyms: break, elevate, make uneven, raise, round
* = informal/non-formal usage