A dissident encounter

Having spent the last two years as a student on the Master of Fine Art programme at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam he has taken valuable initial steps in developing a practice that integrates the making of performance with the negotiating of archives. He was applying to the Fieldwork: Marfa International research programme because he was extremely keen to build upon the strong and salient threads of these ideas in a supportive research context.

Informed by the radical vision of the archive proposed by such thinkers as Norman Klein, Patricia Zimmerman and Arjun Appadurai he has found the archive a dynamic and creative context to produce projects where, rather than
simply being the inert and utilitarian site of the past, it becomes a resonating chamber that remains active and contingent while profoundly and inextricably interconnected with the world surrounding it. As the dissident archivist envisaged for this project it is the porous fringe of the material gathered within the Chinati foundation that he’s excited about working with.

The work and life of Donald Judd, the surrounding intellectual discourses and very architecture within which it is housed seem to all present a site into which landscape, narrative, fiction and the social inescapably bleeds. Recognising this and exploring the cracks and fissures through and across which information flows he sees an exciting potential for the re-imagining of the practice of fieldwork and in so doing developing a number of performance works that would reflect and communicate a thoughtful, open, subjective and playful mode of engaging with the material of the past - “a continuous and conscious work of the imagination” as Appadurai would put it.
With the Chinati foundation as an anchor point he would hope to pursue lines of enquiry that lead me out, both physically and intellectually, into the context of Marfa, Texas. He believes the unexpected and diverse products of these outward endeavours would result in a productive friction when put in operation alongside the conventional content of the Chinati foundation. This dynamic to and fro between orthodoxy, preservation, creativity and performance invites unexpected collisions and illuminating counterpoints which will open out an understanding of the possible sites for the past and collection and negotiation of raw data.

Just from the most tentative research in preparing this application a great number of potential threads to investigate present themselves. From Charles Peabod’s reconnoissance trip in Western Texas published in the American Anthropologist in 1909 to Haldeen Braddy 1941 article on the Folklore of the Texas Big Bend to Patricia Vigderman’s 2004 review of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz - in which the site of its reading (a Starbucks franchise in Marfa) becomes in extricable from the text itself - countless oblique models for re-imagining the contemporary archive seem available. The performances he has made over the last year have dealt largely with the constructions of new and deviant narratives that are the results of encounters with the documentary strategies of history of theatre and performance but he’s eager to push this practice and expand its scope in order that the potential for this mode of working might be tested and explore new territory. Experimenting with the role of the speaking performer and status of the document has been central to this body of work. By re-ordering, participating with and inflecting documents that are already in existence he’s working with the promise of an additional set of inter-relationships and by extending this to the traditions of Minimalism, the very particular context of Marfa Texas and the Chinati foundation it strikes me that elements of all four proposed research topics could be touched upon and brought fruitfully together.