grp crt 2dyy: prime prime

Today we talked about the space and how it functions as created environment that hovers between the playroom and a strange stage for a purposeless event. The idea of play resonates through the familiarity of color and basic textures. The Astroturf acts as a stage, representing outdoor spaces brought inside. The space was understood as a sort of disturbed child's mindfield. We talked about children’s television shows and animations, the fact that they are made by adults and include adult humor often unbeknown to young audiences.

People brought up suggestions for possible alterations on the installation including: play equipment, painting the walls, re-instituting the plastic television, showing video on a screen versus displaying prints of the distorted video still screen shots on the wall.

Although I am definitely invested in the space of children’s play, I am uninterested in providing functional play items for my audience. Maintaining the appearance of an inviting space with texture, color, and the familiarity of surface and items in my installation allows for the unsettling discoveries when the elements are examined at a closer glance.

It was also seen to be a location for primal activity, a space for animals (wolf puppies… like wild, adolescent creatures) to play. This is a successful point of the post-installation mock-up. I will explain: The version of the piece I installed last week in the project space was titled pre-prime, suggesting the anteceding historical era. I hosted a performance that had no audience; there is only video footage of the event. Only rules included each participant wearing a mono-hued costume and no verbal communication during the ‘event’. Actions resulted in primal behavior since the only available tools for play were the balloons and the stuffed burlap forms. Some actions were infantile while others were absurdly sexual because of the use of latex balloons.

SO, the space does exist as a post-event scene. In the way that Claire Bishop discusses Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work in Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, as sometimes only presenting a space that is a result of his Pad Thai meals, I am entertaining the notion of a space that has hosted an event. However, the specificity of the event is unimportant for me to reveal as a concrete intelligible occurrence.