Them and Us

The artists didn’t turn up to the salon last night in the interests of continuing their own work. This heightened the sense of them and us, which added to the week’s constant contradiction of the term collaboration. They may not turn up for tonight’s exhibition, but we should accept that, right?

I’m not going. Is that acceptable? Why can’t I help but feel that I should go after being so involved in the week’s events?

Darian Leader says that 'what one sees with one’s own eyes is mixed up with the question of what someone else sees.’ (Stealing the Mona Lisa, 2002, pg 15) My ‘someone else’ would be disappointed in me not going tonight, but that ‘someone else’ has been the person I’ve been performing for all week as I’ve participated in, A cut. A scratch. A score. My ‘someone else’ has forced me to push past an initial personal reaction and cause me to be critical, resulting in me to having to connect with something I would perhaps not have chosen to engage with. When are we completely experiencing something for ourselves?

To me, this whole week has been a performance, the very thing the artists seem to be trying to avoid, in the sense that everyone seems to have been playing a role and mixing up what they see with the question of what their ‘someone else’ sees.

It was interested in last night’s salon dialogue between those who had been to the rehearsals and the individual who hadn’t. She was experiencing the rehearsals only through what was talked about as she attended the salon discussions. I feel the barrier she presented herself with by not seeing the rehearsals were not dissimilar to the barriers viewer’s faced who did attend. Boundaries, that I thought would be broken through performance in a public place, were present in each location.

Tonight’s culminating performance is not to be seen as a conclusion yet we have been viewing events called rehearsals, which suggest the anticipation of a finished outcome. I am not going tonight because I didn’t book a ticket. Surely the booking system contradicts the intent of tonight not being final performance.