Present-Performance
2008-09; dimensions variable
mixed media, performance based
In Present the artist read, typed immediate thoughts and gave away writings to viewers. The writings are now part of the global population as a floating poem, as well as bound together into an artist book, and also published in pocket-book format.
Present is a bridge between the left and right hemispheres, between the rational and the intuitive, between the past, the present and the future, between form as stasis and form as a floating, changing dimension.
During 9 months from the fall of ‘08 to the spring of ‘09 the artist sat for four hours at a time reading texts borrowed from libraries—a full list of titles may be found below—in search for the roots of the financial collapse of 2008-09 in our economic system: Greek philosophy, the Enlightenment; reason as pure thought; reason as only possibility for thought and knowledge; ethics and epistemology. Regular performance times were scheduled twice a week.
List of books consulted during performance:
-The Idea of Usury, B. Nelson
-The Rule of Mars, edited by C. Biaggi
-The world of Goods, M. Douglas and B Zaberwood
-La potencia del pensamiento, G. Agamben
-Evolution of the Social Contract, B. Skyrms
-On Certainty, L. Wittgenstein
-Un Coup de Des Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard, Mallarmé
-Le Bruissement de la Langue, R. Barthes
-Teoría poética y estética, P. Valéry
-The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, L. Hyde
-On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics, C. E. Scott
-Transcending Capitalism, H. Brick
-Lujo y Capitalismo, W. Sombart
-The Origins of the Economy, F. Pryor
-How to do Things with Words, J.L. Austin
-Endgame, S. Beckett
-A Short History of Ethics, A. MacIntyre
-La filosofía moral contemporánea, W. H. Hudson
-Agua Viva, C. Lispector
-Capital Profits and Prices, D. Hausman
-Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason, J. Copjec
-Citizen Thoreau, H.D. Thoreau
-Our Immoral Soul, N. Bonder
-Profit Over People, N. Chomsky
-La filosofía actual – Pensar sin certezas, D. Scavino
-Handbook of Inaesthetics, A. Badiou
-Gorgias, Plato
-Being and Event, A. Badiou
-Wittgenstein and the Problem of other Minds, H. Morick
-Hot Thought, Thagard
-A Derrida Dictionary, N. Lucy
-Wittgenstein: a Life, B. McGuiness
-World and Life as One, M. Stokhof
-Key Writings, L. Irigaray
-Spinoza and Other Heretics, Yovel
-Dialogues, Jakobson + Pomorska
-The Impossible Question, J. Krishnamurti
-The Mystery of Capital, H. de Soto
-Labyrinth, Wilson
-Exploring Complexity, Nicolis and I. Prigogine
-Order out of Chaos, I. Prigogine and Stengers
-Fear. The History of a Political Idea, C. Robin
-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. Kuhn
-Labyrinth of Time, K. Penderecky
-The Question of Value, J. Hans
-Nine Chains to the Moon, B. Fuller
-Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge, P. Muna
-And it Came to Pass, Not to Stay, B. Fuller
-Identity and Reality, E. Meyerson
-I Seem to be a Verb, B. Fuller
-The Theory of Absence, P. Fuery