Performing event in the everyday: regeneration as art

• Main Author: Curham, Sean (Author)
• Other Authors: O'Connor, Maria (Contributor), Gallagher, Sue (Contributor)
• Format: Others
• Published: Auckland University of Technology, 2011-02-27T21:29:04Z.
• Subjects: Performance; Event; Regeneration; Art; Thesis
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 The project asks 'is it through the everyday, the seemingly banal and inconsequential that change can be engaged with?' This research question is formed through a consideration of my performance practice in relation (primarily) to the work of Gilles Deleuze and in particular his notion of Event. I am intrigued by the concept that the world is a situation of continuous regenerative creativity (Deleuze) that is intimately linked to a notion of becoming (Deleuze) . A becoming in which all human and non human entities are immersed. It is a speculative project. The introduction of the (minor) tactic of bathos, meaning to make ridiculous or mundane serves the tone of the project. The work is an experiment involving performance. Two contrasting works host the process. Four Legs Better Than Two introduces the everyday while Ghosting becomes the arena for performance art. Through these a dialogue emerges between performance, the everyday and the regenerative forces of creative becoming. The suggestion here is that through constant regeneration the represented world is composed of event effects, productive forces to which all are connected. From this, can the everyday then be conceived as a performance of this connection and as such a site of radical activity? The methodologies supporting the project are employed in the attempt to stage representing activity as entertainment and to offer 'process lines' as the means by which the effects of event might be encountered. The question of change underpins the work. Following Deleuze, change is understood as being the production of absolute difference and as such a connection to the creative forces of the yet-to-be, the becoming of new compositions, new actualities and potentially the politically new. The issues of aesthetics, art making and research begin to slip away as the activity of event immerses my performance practice in an encounter with creative becoming.