Well, it was one of the more painful decisions I’ve made in my life, but this morning I dropped out of school in order to complete Disembody.

For a couple months I’ve been concerned that trying to complete my Visual and Critical Studies MA thesis while trying to create Disembody was harming both. And this morning I just had to make the choice.

Disembody is a full time job. It’s more than that. It is what absorbs me all day, every day. It needs and deserves that time. And between now and August, it will be the sole focus and only purpose of my life. It is a big work. It is intended to draw in many people. To that end, I need to demonstrate a willingness to commit myself without reservations or distractions. I want to put everything I can imagine into this work.

so i bother lee all the time on google chat and we end up having these super long, back and forth theoretical, philosophical and gossipy conversations. since i am always bringing stuff up he suggested i post some of the references.

to me one of the most interesting aspects of disembody is the possibilities of interaction provided by an architectural gesture. and although i am not sure that authorship in art can be shared without parsimony i am pretty sure human experience can be, to a certain extent, communitarian. and creating a space that frames and contextualizes this could be a really great experiment. i have been reading up a lot on the significance of architecture as a state of mind. you know the “home is in the head” thing, so obviously that involves a lot of matta-clark. a couple of his projects can be looked as parallel to disembody: the anarchitecture collaboration project that he developed with many other artists and the food restaurant he opened.

food was the restaurant he opened in soho for the then nascent, loft dwelling art community. it literally and metaphorically nourished its patrons.

anarchitecture consisted of a collaboration between “a dozen of well known young artists, coming from a range of disciplines, (whom) began meetings to produce a series of collaborative proposals. (…) as an attempt at clarifying ideas about space which are personal insights and reactions rather than formal sociopolitical statements.”

here is a pretty good article about it:

anarchitecture

some of my matta-clark favorites:

slivers

conical

next time: more stuff.

Early this evening Skye bowed out of directing Disembody. He has asked to step back into his original role as an editor.

In his stead I will be the director of the film. Which, as Skye pointed out, is the role I have been fulfilling since Susan asked me to submit a proposal to Fringe, anyway.

This saddens me a little. For I believe the film we were going to get with someone else directing would have been much more interesting to me than the film we will get with me directing. I don’t think it will be a bad film with me helming. But it won’t be a film as exciting and thrilling for me to watch.

Just as the theater we are building now looks nothing like the space I initially proposed to Susan (for instance I would never have dreamt up using Penrose tiles and Dee and Kircher as the inspirations for the interior design), I think the film we could have ended up with would have been equally unrecognizable from the film I originally proposed.

However, the film may not have the flexibility the theater does. The film, unlike the theater, is more than an art work, it is also the focus of the more commercial side of the project. It is the film investors are putting money into. It is the film distributors will be looking at. It was always intended to be a trinity of sorts - an art work, an art film and a document of our process. In this, the film is, perhaps, not the right place for me to be carrying out my Utopian twist on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Because what attracts me to Utopian thinking is its inevitable collapse.

So, now, we’ll probably get a pretty normal documentary. Because that’s the documentary style I’ve been attracted to since I started working in video in the late 80s.

Skye’s post as to why he’s leaving asks one question I think I should answer, in case it’s not apparent from the above. He wonders why I was playing hot potato with the film.

The reason for that is the same reason I brought in Ted to design the architecture with me; and Carol and Keturah to design the interior; and Erin to design the logos, graphics and visual feel. The same reason I assembled a crew of thirty people to contribute to the project: I honestly believe that Disembody will be a far more powerful, beautiful, compelling, engaging, confusing, mysterious, nonsensical, political, difficult work if it channels the sensibilities of many rather than one. Like the tag line for the film says:

Contemporary Art Is A Shared Work.

“A symbol is a layer of concrete we paste onto a thing when we’re bored with the thing itself. I’m satisfied that the rusty horseshoe in my dream is a beautiful creature of iron and oxygen.” - Paul McCurdy

So I have finally come to terms with this beautiful project and have finally gotten someone to realize that they are the only person to really fulfill the role of the director. I have to admit it was a little strange coming into a project that had already had weeks of planning and effort nurturing the foundation. I thought I was aligned and that if I wasn’t, I could find a nice middle ground. But the truth is, the deeper I got into this Disembody project, the more I knew that I could never really flesh it out the way it should be. This project is in Lee’s head, and I’m sure he has been sending me psychic messages all Svengali-like, but my mind is impenetrable. And he is no Svengali. lol - Although that would excite me if that were the case and like the recent news of the hypnotist running around Italy hypnotizing cashiers and stealing their money, that Lee was secretly hypnotizing us to go against our own impulses to follow his demented grand scheme.

I kid! No, this is Lee’s baby, and he has been playing hot potato with it. I’m not sure why, maybe he was hoping that this gallery space would be more entertaining if he followed MTV’s Real World sensibilities and created pressure cooker environments and filled it with pure chaos. Or maybe he was hoping to secretly re-create Peter Watkin’s “Punishment Park” . (You have no idea how demented this guy is! I’m talking about Lee not Peter Watkins. haha!). I can’t imagine this thing not being run by Lee. In fact, technically, Lee is already running things. He as assembled a super talented group of people that want to fully and maybe even blindly support him and assemble his idea. So I plan on taking a backseat and will be co-editing the film with Elise as originally planned. I hope she has enough room on her Hawaii chair for me? I mean since the editors will be working in the dungeon (I’m sure I heard Lee refer to it as that once), we should at least get the Hawaii chair!

P.S. Lee! don’t worry! If you are looking for chaos - you have no idea what me and Elise will potentially do to the final scene - think last episode of Twin Peaks!