Exhibition Catalogue

Between the Real and Utopia: Performing Text Performing Politics

Mev Luna, “Para-Academia and a Layer of Paint”

Michael Vincent Pusey, “Simultaneously on the Cusp and 228 Miles Away”

Marcela Torres, “Labels of Recording”

Michelle Murphy, “Gravity-Bound Explorer”

⊖ (Willy Smart, Misael Soto), “Congratulations!”

Edited by Jameson Paige

Performing Text, Performing Politics: Thinking Utopia

By Jameson Paige

I began this project pondering the usefulness of utopia-that slippery place we often seek when the here and now don’t quite cut it. Anyone paying attention these days could tell you they’ve seen better. They’d also tell you the worst ain’t over. I’ve inundated myself with texts picking apart systems or power, lexicons or normativity, the neoliberal meltdown, and so on. Diving deeper into theory only takes us so far though. How does utopia retain its luster? How might thinking utopia become an active position rather than one construed as escapist or the language of dreamers? The sad realitiy or utopia’s manifestation is that it is forever bevond the horizon. unattainable, not yet here. However, if we don’t let that unattainability stop us, we can leverage a temporal shirt that rethinks utopias capacities. Or if not utopia itself, the process of getting there-a certain cognition of in betweenness.

Being between might feel like we’re being inched. Yet endemic to positioning ourselves here is a latent movement, as constraints spark the impulse to get out of the confines of a seemingly solidified present. Where is the vantage point that allows us to not only see futurity but chart its course? It is from this position the artists contributing to this publication find themselves.

The written formulation of ideas is not often a primary medium for artists, vet this selection or texts sit beside (and within) an exhibition of the same title: Between the Real and Utopia. The exhibition, like this collection, stemmed from a conioined interest in the conditions and politics of performance practices in traditional gallery space and attempting to envision useful ways to move over. around. and through the emergent precarity now endemic to global politics. A situation marked by the faintest line between fact and fiction which an incredibly smart artist described as ‘groundlessness’. This metaphor taken further forms the contours of the exhibition. Though a group show, its format cycles through a series of smaller artist projects individual and collaborative-conjoining the temporally-bound nature of performance with a curatorial platform that performs in tandem with the artists. Each iterative project occurs over a week staging performances, programs, and activations in conjunction with its installation.

The artists included here are organized in order of their appearance in the exhibition. While an autonomous collection of writing its lasting will always point back to the show’s unfolding. To start Mev Luna flips through image and text allowing the two to bleed into one another. Their words present the layers of gentrification, directing us to bush displaced pieces back together. Marcela Torres gifts a formulaic score for bodies to feel the otherwise and unfamiliar, as well as different languages for that choreography to move in. Michael Vincent Pusey presents an individual account of the politics of poverty, and its subsequent confrontation with artistic practice and community building. Michelle Murphy records the experience of performing her work Gravity-Bound Exolorer. Her recollection points to the ease at which everyday normativity acts out and enforces constraints, both physical and affective. Reaching an end, © (Circled Minus) co-directors Willy Smart and Misael Soto ask us to focus on the buried politics in language itself, all the while inviting us to continue playing along. As you will see, this invitation has few limits, if any at all.

The conditions of performance and even the stagina of an exhibltion try their hardest to refute permanence. Though documentation survives, their meaning deals in ephemerality, the fleeting, and alimoses. Marked by temporality there is nevertheless a preoccupation with potentialitv in these aesthetic formulations-what will happen? What can happen? This collection is an effort to extend performance’s residues-retaining presence throuan the page. in language, and in material folded between covers. “Getting there” begs for everything we’ve got, and this anthology signals another step towards some not-yet-conscious possibilities.