The Precession: An 80-foot-long Internet Art Performance Poem

Above: Image from The Precession. Photograph by John W. Sisson Jr.

THE PRECESSION

February 17^th and 18^th, 2012 from 1 – 4pm (ASU Art Museum Top Gallery)

The Precession, a project of Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery with Claire Ashley, constructs a performance, installation and an 80-foot internet projection of visual poetics and movement combining writing, text-mining and processing, the real-time positions of celestial objects, and depictions of the laboring body.

The Precession: AN 80-FOOT-LONG INTERNET ART PERFORMANCE POEM is a 3-hour durational digital literary / visual performance art work in 10 parts. Each part lasts between 9–18 minutes. This durational event extends and activates The Precession, via a systematic orchestration of live elements within the Arizona State University Art Museum.

Performance components include choreographed readings of texts being generated on ASU Art Museum gallery walls, a Busby-Berkeley inspired movement sequence mixing gestures of labor with embodied formations based on the stars above the building, and live and screen-based responses to works by Sol LeWitt (the sun) and Rebecca Horn (the horned moon). A chorus will sing a song, an incoming stream of Twitter texts, and excerpts from the source code of The Precession.

Visitors may enter or leave at any point.

The Precession began with an accidental road trip to the Hoover Dam in Nevada in January of 2008 and the discovery of the Works Progress Administration sculpture The Winged Figures of the Republic. We began to look at this public sculpture in residence and presented a work in progress presentation at Firehouse 13, Providence, Rhode Island on the Spring Equinox in 2009. The work has since developed through a 6-month residency at Hyde Park Art Centre throughout 2010, a month long Residency in Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, UK in summer 2009, and two residencies at Catwalk Art Residency, NY. Additional exhibits and presentations have taken place at PSi 15 Zagreb, MCA Chicago, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, post_moot, poetry + performance convocation at Miami University in Ohio, ELO_ AI at Brown University, NOISE! 2010 at the Ontological Theatre NYC, and Radical Citizenship: The Tutorials organized by the Anhoek School on Governor’s Island in NYC and Southern Exposure in San Francisco.

Wings, Floor & Wall Installation by Claire Ashley

Finger Extensions (Rebecca Horn 1973) by Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap

Dancers

Justin Deschamps, Sam Hertz, Zihan Loo (performing his absence) Josh Rackliffe, Blake Russell

Thanks to Christopher Knowlton and Isaac Fosl–van Wyke for their contributions to the choreography in previous performances

On-screen Night Sky Workmen and Winged Men

Mark Beasley, Joseph Belknap, Chris Cuellar, Fred DeMarco, Ron Ewert

Charles Fogarty, Mike Fleming, The Lenox Twins, Nick Lowe, Anthony Romero

On-screen Night Sky Choir

David Arcade, Benjamin Chaffee, Walter Latimer, Abel Ortiz, Nick Williams

Video Wonderstars Daniele Wilmouth, Razvan Botea, Irina Botea

Video Editor WonderStar Steven Hudosh

Artist Bios
Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery have presented throughout the US, UK and Europe, with recent venues including Lincoln Cathedral Quarter (UK commissioned performance distributed throughout multiple outdoor sites), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Bergen Art Museum, House of World Cultures Berlin, Chicago Cultural Center and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in NYC. Both artists teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and were members of the seminal international performance collective Goat Island.
http://www.judisdaid.com/
http://www.markjefferyartist.org/

This visiting artist residency is supported by the School of Art, Intermedia, Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA), Live Art Club, and the ASU Art Museum, all within ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

Other events of interest with artists Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey include:

 Monday, February 13

2 – 5 pm: Performance Art workshop for graduate students. Please RSVP for this workshop to angela.ellsworth @asu.edu

6 – 7 pm: Performative lecture by Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey

For more on this lecture, please see: https://www.facebook.com/events/355371767819886/

7 pm: Live Art Platform. Pieces from performance workshop will also be presented at LAP.

Workshop, lecture, and Live Art Platform all take place at the ASU Performing and Media Arts Center, Suite 127 (University and Rural). The talk and workshop are free, and so is parking.

 

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All images by John W. Sisson Jr.

Magic Fridays, continued: Crowns!!!

Above: Visiting artist Matteo Rubbi and his crown in downtown Phoenix.

You may have seen the earlier post on this blog about “Magic Fridays” at the Museum. They are the brainchild of visiting artist-in-residence Matteo Rubbi, from Bergamo, Italy, and his girlfriend, French artist Béatrice Bailet, both of whom have shared their fine cooking and their insights with the Museum staff and lucky visitors at several congenial potlucks served in the Museum lobby.

Earlier this month, “Magic Friday” coincided Epiphany (Jan. 6), and for the occasion, Béatrice made a galette des rois, or “king cake.” This delicious confection — thin layers of pastry with a frangipane center — contained two dried beans, and the finders of those beans each received a paper crown, and became king for the day.

That evening, which was also First Friday on downtown Phoenix’s Roosevelt Row, Matteo and Béatrice took the tradition to the streets, making paper crowns with passersby outside the house in which the two artists had been staying.

Béatrice wrote a blog post about the event, which is on her blog:

http://beatricebailet.over-blog.com/article-c-r-o-w-n-96645968.html

And here is our own rough translation of Beatrice’s post, which was originally in French. Merci, Béatrice!

Every First Friday of the month, the center of Phoenix is swarmed by people.

Phoenix is the capital of Arizona, in the United States. It’s a city of extraordinary dimensions, with a density of 1,084 inhabitants/km2, and an overall surface area of 1334,1 km2 (Paris: 21,196 inhabitants/km2 for 105,4 km2!) It’s built in the Sonoran Desert, which allows it to expand without limits. This fact means there’s a good quality of life, with a private garden for everyone, but prevents those moments of meeting that occur in a city built on a human scale. In Phoenix, you don’t walk or borrow the rare shared mode of transportation. You have to take your car, even for short trips.

That’s why First Fridays are such a big success: In the arts neighborhood in downtown Phoenix, a kind of art market takes place in the evening, allowing the art galleries to stay open, the food trucks to gather, and musicians to play in the street.

It’s within this context that I suggested a crown-making workshop. Everybody was free to stop and make a crown with the salvaged materials we had available (paper, stickers, images, pens…)

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Looking for miracles at the ASU Art Museum

Julianne Swartz and Ken Landauer are looking for miracles at the ASU Art Museum this January. As the Social Studies artists for the spring, they will be in residence much of January exploring the miraculous through people’s perceptions of it in their lives. Julianne and Ken will interview school children, ASU students and community members of all ages and backgrounds to gather a range of definitions and life experiences. Their findings will be combined in an installation of fleeting vignettes in video and sound playing on all of the Museum’s available equipment.

Andrea Feller, Nicole Herden and I have been doing advance work talking to teachers, faculty and community members about the project. We just received more than 100 student projects back from Tesseract School and ACP (Academy with Community Partners) High School, grades 5 through 12. The written stories, guided by questions from the artists, are heart wrenching and compelling. They include a child telling the story of his great grandmother dancing with the ghost of her late husband in his wedding suit to a child’s story of the miracle of her own birth to teenagers with siblings surviving near-fatal war injuries.

An incredible start to Miracle Report, the eighth Social Studies project at the ASU Art Museum.

–Heather Sealy Lineberry, Senior Curator and Associate Director

For more information, or if you would like to schedule a session with the artists to retell your own miracle, contact Nicole Herden at Nicole.herden @asu.edu.

Here are the dates of the project and the artists’ mission statement:

Artist Residency: December 26, 2011 – January 20, 2012

Exhibition: January 21 – June 2, 2012

Reception: Friday, January 20, 5-7pm; Julianne Swartz will speak at the opening.

Mission Statement:

-We will spend our Social Studies Residency looking for miracles.

-We will locate the miraculous through other people’s perception of it in their lives.

-We will interview many local residents and ask them to “describe a miracle you have experienced”.

- Interviewees will be of varied ages and backgrounds. We will gratefully record anyone who wishes to retell his or her own miracle.

-We will record audio and video from these interviews, but identities will be obscured.

-The recordings will be edited into fleeting vignettes that attempt to establish “the miraculous” through many entirely subjective perspectives.

-We will seek to use all of the available audio and visual equipment in the museum’s possession to display the recordings.

-Our installation will strive to embody some beauty, some hocus-pocus, and some unexplainable magic.