Now that we are engaged, we have the opportunity to relate. Dear lover, I want you to need me for this ICE HOLE but, who are WE? In our present time of increasing “self-likeness” — that is, perceiving ourselves as being digitally affirmed by one another — our self seems to multiply into oblivion. Although I know that it is possible to lose one’s self, the human survival instinct typically only strives for the continuance of the self, the prolonging of an individual life. Maybe LOVE is such an instinctual excuse to keep going; to sustain engagement, even when all systemic justifications and rhetoric have failed. LOVE is the word we use to explain our unreasonable and illogical loyalties, unfounded respect, and the assigning of value to acts which have no apparent support. To me, this sounds like freedom; petitioning you to undo my self — releasing myself from being the centre. LOVE is the answer!
Every day people say that they LOVE each other again and again, and believe – or want to believe – this means they feel the same about one another. Individual LOVE, that which everyone either gives or demands for themself, is not measurable: we will never feel the same for each other. Our additional problem as artists is that we have too much LOVE. We LOVE things that don’t exist. With every new video, a new composite of bodies is generated, always in a perpetual state of being either not yet consolidated, or no longer complete. In other words, in a permanent state of contingency. In the believe that the relations emerging from our “being engaged” (which also sustain the engagement) are multiple as opposed to being reducible to one ultimate form, are we as performance artists merely preventing the “ultimate” from emerging and in so doing, keeping our work within the safe structures of the process, validating recursion? LOVE is an energy!
However blurred its boundaries might be, performance art presents itself as a phenomenon of singularity; a practice of that which by definition cannot be pigeonholed in universal terms. As an act of LOVE, this ICE HOLE edition is defined by its property of being self-referential, constructing a reality that delineates its own extent. To me, this means that LOVE just functions as a generator of affirmative belief structures: transforming a shed into a boat and then rebuilding the shed. But, in applying the principle of LOVE as a tool or resource for moulding our work relations, we fail to recognize that rather than being the shed, LOVE is the soil in which we dig the grave to inter our values of life, and then we refill the hole with shovelfulls of LOVE. When we treat art as a resource, it is abused into efficiency. We must secure our unproductive madness in order to stay sane. LOVE is the question!
All artistic outcome is part of a common heritage, an undeniable resource for the production of intersecting transformations. This ICE HOLE edition is compiled from such moments of LOVE-making that do not follow in a straight line. A conglomeration of episodes unfolds – repeated again and again with minor variations – out of which emerges a partially-realized story, one that is never fully consummate. The very event this story relates can be either felicitous or infelicitous, where the value of potentiality replaces that of finality. LOVE – this third-person-accomplice – thrusts us into the ‘HOLE’ and/or ‘grave’ that we occupy in our video conversation. The result of such submissive relationship is that the self always comes as reflux and the performance, an sich, is nothing but a self-gratifying delusion. At the end of the day, nothing else matters: only the ensemble as a possible trigger for publicness – the notion of making public for the sole reason of “becoming public”. LOVE is a joy!
Special thanks to Carl Whetham