One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be more diligent about regularly writing in here (and responding to other people’s blogs), so it’s another day and another post. So far so good.
My whole program went down to see Aernout Mik’s contribution to Do Me!, a spin-off on the famous Do It catalogue of art recipes published by Independent Curators Inc back in 1998. (Maybe it’s not as famous as I think it is. Over the past few days when I’ve mentioned it, people give me a blank stare. It’s definitely famous in the Oakville Galleries education department).
In any case, Do It brought together a bunch of instructional art projects from contemporary artists around the world that anyone could theoretically carry out in order to create their own art work. Things like making your own tiny art gallery or making a grid on the floor in any way you see fit and then placing one red object from the room in each square.
Do Me! was a series of instructional performance pieces commissioned by the 7a*11d programming committee in 2006 and Two Clouds was Dutch artist Aernout Mik’s contribution which was finally carried out and recorded at York earlier this year. Now the video documentation of the piece is up at the Special Projects Gallery in the Goldfarb Building at York as a projection with sound.
It’s really entrancing to watch. I got really caught up in what was happening and found myself imagining what it would be like to be standing in the cold, trying to mimic a group of people whose actions seemed totally unaccountable and a little insane.
The dance students in the performance made it really believable and, at times, beautiful. It reminded me of contact dance, this activity one of my hippie co-workers at camp used to always try and make us do where you are in constant physical contact with your dancing partner(s). It always seemed to me like a strangely intimate and awkward practice, but given that Mik is interested in human group behaviour and social interactions it completely makes sense. Aren’t most human relationships at some point strangely intimate and awkward?
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