I had always been interested in making work that was redressive to social and political issues, primarily about my personal experience with American cultural assumptions. I was using a technique of re-mixing found images with various materials after looking at writings about the Situationists, primarily their concept of "detournement". Initially I had been focused on television and advertising imagery while using household consumer items as materials.
As I delved deeper in to the theory reading and media criticism I was drawn more towards Situationist literature due to its political aspects and the ideas of governments and corporations’ use of mass media as a form of control, referred to as "the Spectacle". I realize that at this point I’m just skating over this now by leaving out the related "state apparatuses" proposed by Marx and expanded on later by Althusser. I can clearly see many of the theories are well under way here in the U.S. With all the current bullshit going on, all I want to do is scream, but for now I’m just trying to briefly retell what I had been doing to get this blog going.
I wanted to relate what I was reading to my own experience of growing up in the American homeland. I had witnessed conspicuous consumerism, rampant narcissism, distortions of history, unattainable notions of masculinity, ideologies of American exceptionalism, racial bias and had seen family members’ struggle with substance abuse. I was interested in doing performances examining the whether these ideas and activities were side effects of long term exposure to the media spectacle and that performance would be a great medium to address a range of these issues.
Some were more successful than others were. The way each performance took shape seemed to be more dictated by the particular issue I happened to be looking at and they varied from body art to theatrical multimedia, or just performing outdoors while people followed my activity for as long as they were interested. I made soundtracks in addition to various film and computer media clips that were projected as part of the space where the performance would occur. I had intended on bringing more sculptural work into the pieces, mostly in the form of props such as altered toys or action figures.
What I would like to do at this point is find a cohesive way to bring the performances together so each one has comparable implementation, look and style yet still be diverse enough to cover a large number of these issues.
