caroline meyers scpt 311

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what is next for my practice

i see the format of the new sentimentality performance (theater-esque, supported by printed materials, 10+ performers) being something i continue as the core of my practice, but that i probably only have the energy to produce once a semester. recently i was standing in the etching studio after i had closed it up— it was dark, the fan was on, and i could smell the minty solvents— and i thought what a great space this would be to have a performance in. i think i’ll pursue this first thing next semester. i think the printmaking studio as a site of reproduction relates to my work.

aside from that, i want to invest more in writing, in making books, in printmaking, in designing (i’ve been thinking a lot of what i do could fall under the umbrella of “design” even though i’m not a trained designer) in sewing, and generally becoming more materially advanced. i often feel guilty that i don’t have a lot of technical fabrication skill and i think it is something that could serve my work. i am taking glass and sound studios next semester and i am excited for them.

despite this, i am also considering slowing down and devoting more work to fewer projects. it was really encouraging to see people utilize in-process crits and develop a single work over the course of the semester— in the past, i have been very focused on producing three full-fledged works for three deadlines, but given the complexity of the projects i am producing now, i could probably afford to gove them more time.

in general, i am proud of the work i made this semester :)

and apologies for not being as active as i could have been on this blog! i’d like to think i made up for it in our conversations / in the energy i gave to people during and after crits

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thanks for talking to me today (yesterday) and supporting me i’m very grateful

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WLAMs week of 11/12

Kurt Schwitters. I’m confused about the “Merz” title. I believe he meant it to refer to much of his work, but I don’t see many organizing principles that connect his works that would make a title like this useful.

Barbara T. Smith. I wonder what it means to aspire to make this type of work when you’re working from within an institution, when the conditions that made her work possible were so un-academic.

Matvei Yankelevich. It’s always nice to hear about creative people who also dedicate a lot of time to initiatives outside of their own work (Ugly Duckling Presse). I loved looking at “Emergency Index” and want to check it out for myself. It’s nice to be able to read about a lot of performance art in a condensed way— sometimes time-based work can take so long to view.

Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik. I had never thought about his work as something with the potential to make the viewer feel uncomfortable or assert dominance, and I still don’t really see it. To me, it seems like he represents ecosystems and cycles accurately— like things that can reach out and touch us and are involved with us. I thought his point about sense-making versus making sense was really helpful and applies to me currently I try to sense-make with this publishing grant project.

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i was a little frustrated with my critique because i feel like people weren’t as generous / talkative as they have been in other crits. maybe it had something to do with it being the first critique of the day. i was interested, though, in stefan’s observation that my “warehouse workers” felt like a revolutionized family, and that this linked back to the “family-based research” i referenced on the book belts. i hadn’t made that connection before.

one dichotomy i was interested in / thought i was representing but maybe not since it didn’t come up in conversation was the set being the area where the books are organized and where the workers are expected to perform. maybe it was my decision to include relatively few books on set that minimized the book-sorting function of the whole apparatus. i am interested in the humor in a group of warehouse workers expected to perform menial sorting tasks as well as perform in a more traditional sense by singing and dancing. i wonder if incorporating the books into the WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS performance / choreography more could have pushed that. maybe we were starting to talk about this when julea brought up labor and the idea of the group relieving each other of labor through working (?) / performing (?) as a group.

i do see myself continuing this project in other iterations, though maybe not this semester. i wonder if i would work with the same performers, or if it would always be united under queen: live at wembley stadium. i’m interested in a lot of other sentimental music as well. 

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crit #1 structure

hopefully, the performance will start as people are walking into the building. it will run for about 20 minutes, which leaves 25 minutes for discussion. in the past, i haven’t found cold readings of work helpful and prefer to facilitate discussion. some questions i am thinking about asking include:

~ how do you understand queer emotionality? what is the relationship between queer emotionality and queen: live at wembley stadium in this performance?

~ what do you think about the relationship between the nonprofit system and social justice? (i will potentially send out an article ahead of time relevant to this discussion, but maybe not).

~ what critiques are present in this work? how does the use of humor help or hinder the attempt at critique?

~ where do you think this work could grow from here?

i feel comfortable actively facilitating during critique, so i will probably ask these questions myself as opposed to sending them out ahead of time.

cheers!

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losing earth notes PART ONE “It was “ironic,” the study’s authors noted, that politicians, regulators and environmentalists fixated on local incidents of air pollution that were immediately observable, while the climate crisis, whose damage would be of far greater severity and scale, went entir...

hi sorry this is late here are my losing earth notes

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literature processing center manifesto

New Sentimentality: Queen: Live at Wembley Stadium: Literature Processing Center is a nonprofit organization founded by John Meyers in September 2018. The mission of the processing center is to gather and disseminate a body of pre-theoretical and theoretical work that promotes a criticality foun...

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working timidly with performers

For my first work in this class, I am thinking about the ways popular and emotional music creates sentimentality and power and, with music’s power in mind, the potential for live performance to serve as postmodern critique of language and branding / product. More specifically, I will be working with historically significant live performances given by the band Queen, performances that have had a huge impact on my individual and my immediate family’s group identities. I plan to curate a selection of books that I believe fall under the umbrella of David Foster Wallace’s New Sentimentality theories and stage a warehouse (?) scene in which workers attempt to attach screenprinted book jackets (“New Sentimentality: Queen: Live at Wembley Stadium Collection” (or something)) to the books in the collection (pulled from Cabell library) while each listening to different Queen live performance albums on full blast through headphones and wearing microphone headsets. So communication will be limited. While this is going on, a hired musician-- hopefully this lesbian exercise instructor I had over the summer who also plays ukelele-- will be setting up a space to perform = some kind of stage in the middle of all the books. She will perform two songs from the Queen Wembley album (Love of My Life and Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart), two very sentimental songs) while the workers in the processing center continue to attempt to perform their jobs. As she begins performing, more workers will enter the space wearing headphones and headsets. Each will be listening to different live versions of the same two songs being performed and singing them at full volume without being able to hear themselves. All this while the musician is performing. I’m not sure how it will end yet. I’m interested in working with as many queer performers as possible, especially lesbians, given my interest in intersectional and lesbian feminisms. While this work doesn’t respond to a specific critique from the last year, the general sense I have gotten from critiques of my video works (namely Emily, the Lifelike Artist) is that the way I work with my performers feels a little timid in that their characters’ relationships to each other are unclear, and that this convolutes whatever narrative I am trying to advance. I am interested to see how this issue will affect a live performance, which I will not be able to influence with video editing, at least in the primary experience of the piece.

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here’s the writing i did to prepare for my presentation. it’s pretty accurate to the structure i followed when i gave the presentation.

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meyers artist talk 2

please let me know if you have any trouble accessing my presentation

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mind list

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caroline’s intro questions

1. What is the weirdest thing about you? What is your favorite joke?

Last week when I answered this question I was pretty worried because I was hyper-aware of my breathing all the time i.e. I could only breathe by consciously making myself take breaths and exhale. So, that was the weirdest thing about me at the time. Luckily it has subsided. / Q: What do you get when you cross an insomniac, a dyslexic, and an unwilling agnostic? A: You get someone who stays up all night wondering if there’s a dog.

2. What is something in your life you want to further empower and why?

I want to empower more women to be ugly. I’ve never liked spending much time on my appearance and for a long time tried to find a place for that within dominant beauty-empowerment languages, but I’ve found over the past couple years that, personally and politically, expanding the definition of beauty does less than rejecting beauty in the first place.

3. Who would you list as the five artists that interest you? Why?

Most recently, I have been thinking the most about Yvonne Rainer, David Foster Wallace, Renée Gladman, Ryan Trecartin, and Fawn Krieger. I engage directly with Trio A in one of my works, which I will discuss in my presentation, but beyond that, I am inspired by the way Yvonne Rainer has worked across dance and film throughout her career, often combining them. Foster Wallace and Gladman are both writers of postmodern (and likely post-postmodern) fiction, a genre that has been hugely influential on my work, namely in its tendency to reassert sentimentality and melodrama into literary minimalism and cynicism. I discovered Ryan Trecartin in high school and his way of writing while working with performers who constantly improvise informs my current video work. Finally, Fawn Krieger’s aesthetic inspires my built work, which is often handmade, lumpy, and multicolored.

4. How do you use social media in your life? Do you want more or less?

I use social media, namely Instagram, far too much. Often while eating or walking from one place to another. I like viewing artists’ lives through Instagram and I especially like that artist Instagrams tend not to follow corporate Insta aesthetics, though I feel like the artist-Insta subculture could develop its own genre of marketability. One thing that makes me uncomfortable is that sometime I’ll care more that I post about making work and that certain people see that I am making work, than about the work itself. That happened a lot this summer when it was often hard for me to find motivation to make work.