Imaginary Companion

In response to August 30th Performance Event my friend SD and I contributed an unobservable performance. SD has been a performance artist but recently discontinued this aspect of his work. In preparation for the event we discussed how artists who do not perform could take part in a performance event. SD gave me texts to explain his position as resistant to performance. These texts are about invisibility and camouflage. We also considered Clare Bishop's argument against participation in her anthology Participation.

Together we non-performed or didn't perform. If I had explained or drawn attention to the non-performance at the event, the explanation would have served as an adjacent or alternative performance, and the non-performance would have no longer been invisible. SD also wasn't present at the event or had any knowledge of the non-performance taking place. The event may have been changed by the non-performance, by some kind of transfiguration, but more likely not, as no thing was added and no thing was taken away.

The immateriality of the non-performance lends itself to Romanticism (Scheonberg the Late Romantic composed Transfigured Night, the compositional structure based on poem that tells of the night being transfigured by the revelaton of a secret), the history of Identity Politics, insanity and delusions.

“It came as the third instalment of a series of political movements that grew out of the increasingly radical politics of the 1960’s. It was the third of, in retrospect to what we now know as Identity Politics…that is politics based on who you are and making that the centre of your political commitment and political action. Obviously the first of these movements, and the historically most important, was the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960’s in which African-Americans made this issue the centrepiece of their political endeavours. The second manifestation was the Women’s Liberation movement… in which the issue of gender was made the principle of unity in political action. You know, Gay liberation came along as an obvious extension, logical extension, of this Identity Politics to a group that felt equally or comparably oppressed and in need of political action …I think it’s fair to say the centrepiece of this movement, and what distinguished it from the preceding Identity Movements… was that Gayness unlike African-Americaness or femaleness was, or at least was perceived to be, invisible. This was not a population that you could identify visually in most respects. It is more complicated than that but this was the common perception. Indeed the issue of invisibility became the central issue from the point of view of the people leading [intellectually] this movement because they came to the conclusion that the foremost problem, the central problem, of the Gay population in this country [America] was precisely that it was invisible, which was theorised in it being in the closet. The closet is a metaphor to indicate this invisibility and it also suggests that the invisibility from the point of these figures was largely self-imposed…”
Paul Robinson, Historian, Stanford University

The imaginary companion or friend is arguably a dramatic idea but even if it is only known to the creator existing in fantasy it can contribute socially. The unobservable companion effects some kind of change to the atmosphere or events, although it requires language to be revealed beyond that of the creator's imagination. The Lemur, who's name is taken from "spirit of the dead" in Roman mythology, appears to the alcoholic, a mischevious ghostly companion. Franz West's Lemur Head contains a rubbish bin, in Henry Koster's film Harvey (1950) the Lemur takes the form of a big white rabbit. "And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed."

This text is here given as the language form of the Imaginary Companion performance, with the aim of it functioning as a map or diagram.

One version of Franz west's Lemur Head was included in the exhibition Pre-semblence and the Everyday. The following quote is taken from his essay for his exhibition poster:

"It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or "window shopping". that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. they allow us to grasp only a relic set on a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. these fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. the trace left behind is substituted for the practice."
Author: Franz West
http://www.renaissancesociety.org

The clip below is given as an example.

Jess

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBvpxzl54D8&feature=related